He waited until two in the morning.

The campus had settled into its nighttime rhythm by then. Guards rotating. Generator off. Cooking fires banked down to orange coals. Somewhere in the main hall a child was crying and someone was shushing them with the specific exhausted patience of a person running on nothing.

Tobi had spent three hours figuring out the blind spot.

Behind the engineering block. Eastern edge. Forty meters of dead ground between the back wall and the repaired fence that nobody walked through between two and three in the morning unless the perimeter alarms went off.

He went there quietly.

Told nobody.

Sat down with his back against the wall, concrete rough through his shirt, ground cold under him, and looked up at the broken sky for a moment. The crack was still there. Still open. Whatever was behind it had gone quiet.

He opened the system.

[FIRST EVOLUTION READY]

[CURRENT POINTS: 108/100]

[ABSORBED MATERIAL ANALYSIS COMPLETE]

[PRIMARY TRAIT: PREDATOR CLASS SENSORY ENHANCEMENT]

[SECONDARY TRAIT: STRUCTURAL DENSITY INCREASE — MINOR]

[TERTIARY TRAIT: ACCELERATED CELLULAR REPAIR — MINOR]

[WARNING: PROCESS INVOLUNTARY ONCE INITIATED]

[WARNING: ESTIMATED DURATION 8-14 MINUTES]

[WARNING: PAIN LEVEL — SIGNIFICANT]

[INITIATE: YES / NO]

Significant.

His mother used that word sometimes on the phone with patients’ families. He knew exactly what it meant.

He thought about it for maybe four seconds.

Then he hit yes.

Nothing happened for about four seconds and he almost thought something had gone wrong and then it felt like God reached inside his body and grabbed a fistful of everything.

He slammed his fist into his mouth.

The sound that came out of him anyway was muffled and desperate and he bit down harder on his knuckle and pressed his back into the wall and his eyes went completely wet without his permission. Not crying. Just his body responding to something that had bypassed every layer of control he had and gone straight to the source.

It wasn’t pain. Not exactly. It was worse than pain because pain you can locate. This was everywhere simultaneously. Every nerve lit up at full volume like someone had found the master switch and just held it down. His muscles. His bones. The inside of his chest. The back of his skull.

He breathed through his nose. In. Out. In.

His legs were shaking.

"Okay," he whispered to himself. "Okay okay okay."

It didn’t help but he kept doing it anyway.

At the four minute mark his hearing exploded.

That was the only word for it. One moment the world was the normal nighttime quiet of the campus and the next it was everything, every sound, every layer, no distance, no filter, just a wall of noise that hit him like a physical thing. A guard eating something crunchy on the north rotation. A woman sobbing softly in the far corner of the main hall. Two men arguing in whispers about water rations. A baby. Ada. Breathing in small rapid pulls, alive and warm and forty meters away and somehow the clearest sound in all of it.

He grabbed his own head with both hands.

"What the f—" he started and cut himself off because sound, because guards, because he could not be found like this.

The volume kept rising.

He pressed his palms harder against his ears and it did absolutely nothing because it wasn’t in the air anymore it was in him and he genuinely thought for about ten seconds that it was going to split his head open from the inside. His vision was blurring. His nose was running. His eyes were streaming now, not from emotion, just pressure, his whole face leaking because his body had run out of other options.

Then it calibrated.

Pulled back. Sorted itself. Like a hand turning down a dial, slow and careful, until everything was at the right distance and the right volume and the right layer. The guard’s chewing faded to background noise. The sobbing woman became something he could locate but didn’t have to hear. Ada’s breathing settled into something small and warm and constant at the edge of everything.

He lowered his hands.

Sat there for a moment.

"Holy shit," he whispered.

He could hear the wind moving around the corner of the engineering block. He could hear the difference between the concrete cooling around him and the metal of the fence contracting in the night air. He could hear a creature somewhere outside the campus perimeter, two hundred meters at least, moving through abandoned street debris, and he could tell from the gait it was one of the small clicking ones and that it was alone.

Then the bones started.

He had absolutely no frame of reference for what the next four minutes felt like and he didn’t want one.

It felt like his skeleton decided it needed to be somewhere slightly different than where it currently was and was making the journey while he was still occupying the space. His forearms first. Then his shoulders. Then his spine, vertebra by vertebra, each one a separate specific agony, and he was biting his knuckle so hard he was going to have a bruise there tomorrow on top of everything else.

"Bastard," he hissed at nothing. At the system. At the sky. At whatever cosmic nonsense had decided he was the right person to devour things and evolve in a back alley at two in the morning while his ribs felt like someone was tightening bolts inside them. "You absolute bastard."

The system did not respond.

His spine finished whatever it was doing.

He slumped against the wall and breathed and his whole body was shaking, not violently, just a fine continuous tremor like a car engine at idle, and his shirt was soaked through with sweat and his face was a mess and he was genuinely angrier than he’d been since the sky broke open.

Not scared. Angry. Which was probably better.

The cellular repair came last and it was almost gentle by comparison, warmth spreading from his chest outward, and as it moved the burning in his ribs softened from screaming to aching, and the road rash on his cheek knitted itself together in a way that felt deeply strange and deeply good simultaneously.

Then it was over.

He sat against the wall for a long moment.

His first coherent thought was: that was the first evolution.

His second thought was: three hundred points until the next one.

His third thought was: absolutely not. Not like that. Never again like that.

He stood up.

The difference was immediate and subtle at the same time. His feet found the ground differently, more certain, like the earth was offering more information than it used to and his body was now capable of receiving it. He took three steps and stopped. The cold air carried the smell of smoke from the distant burning city and underneath it something else, something he had no name for yet, a layered biological complexity that hadn’t existed in his nose twelve minutes ago.

He looked at his hands. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

Same hands.

He pressed two fingers into his forearm where the grip bruise was and found it still there but the flesh under it was different. Denser. More convinced of itself.

The system came back quietly.

[FIRST EVOLUTION COMPLETE]

[PREDATOR STAGE: INITIATED]

[SENSORY ENHANCEMENT ACTIVE: HEARING, SMELL, SPATIAL AWARENESS]

[STRUCTURAL DENSITY: MINOR INCREASE]

[CELLULAR REPAIR: MINOR — ACCELERATED HEALING ACTIVE]

[NEW THRESHOLD: 0/300 EVOLUTION POINTS]

[NOTE: PREDATOR INSTINCTS NOW PARTIALLY ACTIVE]

[NOTE: HOST MAY EXPERIENCE INVOLUNTARY PREDATORY RESPONSES UNDER STRESS]

[NOTE: THIS WILL NOT BE FULLY CONTROLLABLE AT CURRENT STAGE]

He stared at that last line.

Not fully controllable.

He closed the prompt and started walking back toward the library steps and was halfway across the dark grounds when he heard Chike.

Not saw. Heard. Running footsteps, the specific urgent rhythm of someone with somewhere terrible to be, coming from the direction of the medical building, and Tobi was already turning toward the sound before he’d consciously decided to.

Chike came around the corner of the science block and nearly walked directly into him and grabbed both of Tobi’s arms.

His face.

Tobi’s stomach dropped before Chike opened his mouth.

"It’s Ada," Chike said. "She stopped breathing."