The domain replacement hadn't happened.
Or at least, that was what it looked like. I was still in the library. The dust was still on the shelves, the same cobwebs occupied the same corners, and the countdown that had been ticking toward zero had apparently deposited me nowhere different from where I'd been sitting.
The girl — Seraphine— was gone. She'd been there for the three seconds before the counter hit zero and then simply wasn't anymore. Which meant either she'd left very fast, or something about the domain had taken her out of the picture.
I stayed where I was and tried to think through it.
Seraphine Reese. Queen of Silvic High. She had walked into the one room in school that nobody visited, at the exact moment I was about to be pulled into a tournament domain, and had seen my face lit up by system screens and a countdown.
Nothing got past the Order when they were paying attention. I'd managed to hold the cripple identity through everything— Tyler, the arena, Julian, the whole accumulating weight of the last several weeks — specifically because the people with the power to look closely hadn't looked closely. Seraphine had been standing in this room with her eyes open.
The negotiation option felt embarrassing before it was even fully formed. But the alternative was worse. She could report me. And if the Bureau ran a rank assessment on me for confirmation, the S-rank that had been quietly sitting in my ability section would do all the talking.
Faking identity was a violation. I hadn't technically faked anything, I'd just never corrected anyone, but that was the kind of distinction that didn't survive official scrutiny.
So. Negotiate. Figure out what she wanted and work from there to convince her to keep it between us.
[TIMER: 1 HOUR]
[DOMAIN RANK: 100]
[TASK: SURVIVE]
I looked at the screen.
The counter had hit zero. The domain replacement was supposed to have happened. And yet I was looking at a task notification sitting in what appeared to be the same library, with no visible indication that anything around me had changed.
Is this a glitch?
Then something outside made a sound.
A growl. Low, guttural, the kind of sound that comes from something that is fundamentally hungry and not particularly concerned about what it eats. Silvic High students were many things, but growling in the hallway wasn't one of them.
I stood up slowly. Moved to the door. Held my hand on the handle for a moment, that thin-line feeling between before and after — then opened it a crack and looked through.
The hallway appeared empty. Quiet in the way that wasn't comfortable quiet. And then, without warning, a face shoved itself into the gap.
Humanoid. School uniform still on it, which was the detail that took a second too long to process. The face beneath the uniform collar was disfigured— bloodshot eyes opened too wide, mouth stretched past its proportions and drooling with something dark and red. Blood. It had been a student once. Currently it was not.
I slammed the door.
Pressed my back against it. Held my chest while my heart finished its announcement.
"Why are there zombies in the school."
I said it to the room. Amelia was somewhere in the system, presumably watching this unfold with her usual editorial patience, waiting for me to arrive at the conclusion she'd already reached.
Okay. Breathe. Slowly.
The counter had completed. The domain replacement had triggered. But the library still looked like the library. The hallway outside still looked like the school hallway. Which meant the replacement hadn't failed— it had produced a replicated domain. One that looked exactly like Silvic High, built to the same floor plan, same furniture, same dust.
And inside this replicated school, the students were the monsters.
First phase. The tournament had started and hadn't bothered announcing the setting change because the setting was the same building.
SCREECH. Then banging. Hard, rhythmic, the door absorbing it in increments. The zombie from earlier had apparently invited people. The growling had chorused, multiple sources now, overlapping, each one carrying the specific pitch of something that had found what it was looking for and was confirming the location to the others.
I went to the window. Stared out. I was two floors up. The ground below had zombies on it, they were just walking slow circuits across the field, the security-patrol pattern of things that were looking without urgency because they had time and patience was built into what they were now.
No exit there. Jumping was suicidal. A successful landing into the territory of monsters was pointless.
BANG. The door again. The bolt was loosening. I could hear the mechanism degrading with each impact, the wood around it beginning to give up its structural ambitions. The crack near the frame was widening in real time.
There was fifty-eight minutes left on the timer. I checked, confirmed it, and spent a brief moment having strong feelings about that number.
Then the door came off its hinges. The sound it made landing on the floor was substantial, and the dust it threw up obscured the doorway for a moment, long enough for my brain to finish cataloguing how much trouble I was in.
When it cleared, there was seven. Maybe eight zombies. All in uniform, moving with the bent, off-centre posture of bodies that had been repurposed into living french curves. Their clothes were stained dark. Their mouths open, teeth visible. The growling at close range had a texture to it that was difficult to not have opinions about.
They came immediately. No hesitation, no circling — just a coordinated surge of arms reaching in my direction. I grabbed the nearest locker, put all of my arm into it, and shoved it toward the group. It bought me a handful of seconds. I went behind the bookshelves.
[Inventory: Avenger]
[Equip?]
The question about preferences had been resolved by current events.
"Equip."
Something materialised in my hands. Solid. Heavy in a way that felt engineered rather than accidental. I lifted it. It was three feet of blade, metal surface clean and bright, edges running a faint blue glow that pulsed slowly.
The Avenger. It was the only thing in my inventory. It looked like a weapon from something I would have read in a webnovel and thought was cool at a safe distance. Up close, with zombies four metres away, it was considerably more relevant.
[Attack Power increased by 518]
I wasn't doing the mathematics on that right now. What mattered was the distance between me and the nearest zombie mouth.
One of them found my hiding spot. It came around the shelf end with a growl that communicated victory over the finding part. I yelled, an involuntary, short, embarrassing sound, then just swung the blade at it. No technique or form. Just a horizontal arc in the direction of the noise.
The blade connected. The zombie kept moving until I dragged it along the collarbone and it dropped. Something dark and thicker than blood should be spread across the floor. It didn't move after that.
Okay. That works.
The next one came with more momentum, like the first one's death hadn't registered as information. It charged with a sound significantly louder than anything the first one had produced. I stepped back, grabbed a textbook off the shelf and threw it at the thing's face. The volume of its growling increased — the textbook had definitely not impressed it — and it came faster.
I went around the other side of the shelf. It followed. The moment it came around the corner I drew the blade across its side without aiming properly, and it went down.
I planted my shoulder against the bookshelf and pushed. The whole structure went over with everything on it, landed across the remaining cluster of zombies and pinned them in place. Not permanently. But enough.
The hallway outside the library was not an improvement. Zombies were everywhere, a full population of them. They were moving in formation toward the library from both ends of the corridor, with the pacing of things that had received information about my location and were now treating the retrieval as mandatory.
One broke from the formation and came at me fast, bare hands bloody, eyes fixed on my face with the particular intensity of something that had decided I was its specific concern.
I sidestepped. Let it carry through.
It stopped, then turned. The bloodshot eyes found me again and the expression, to the extent that it had one, communicated that it was done with the preliminary approach.
It came again. This time, I brought the blade up, not an attack, just a positioned defence, and it grabbed the blade with its hands. Freaking bare hands. On the actual blade. Its eyes stayed on my face, completely unbothered by what its palms were doing.
The others were closing from both sides.
I stopped thinking. Kicked it off the blade, spun toward the metal door at the end of the hallway, the one that led to the stairway up to the rooftop, and grabbed the handle.
Locked. Of course.
My brain registered this, filed it and continued pulling anyway, because apparently, the alternative was accepting the situation, and offering myself as lunch to a menagerie of hungry zombies. I pulled again, this time harder, the panic translating directly into grip pressure and refusing to accept reality.
"Open. Please." The shake in my voice was genuine. "Goddamn please, open!"
The lock clicked.
I didn't examine why. Something twisted inside the mechanism and the door gave way. A hand came through the gap and grabbed my collar and pulled me in.
My back hit the door as it closed behind me. The lock twisted from the inside. Pain moved through my spine and I was about to groan on that when a hand came over my mouth.
"Quiet." A girl's voice, low and urgent in my ear. "Don't make a sound."
I stayed still.
Red hair. Brown eyes. She was pressed me tightly against the door, reading the sounds from the hallway outside with the practiced attention of someone who had already been in this building long enough to know what the sounds meant.
Her uniform was soaked through with blood on the left side, a shoulder wound, apparently, bad enough that the fabric had gone dark — but she was standing on both feet and her eyes were clear.
Human. Definitely human.
But she looked familiar. In an unsettling way.