Getting forty three people ready to move was like trying to organize water.

Tobi had expected resistance. He hadn’t expected it to come from every direction simultaneously. The man with the oxygen tank couldn’t move fast enough and his son refused to leave him. Two of the women with young children wanted to wait another day, just one more day, maybe it would be better by then. Vincent wanted to leave within twenty minutes and kept checking his watch like somewhere had somewhere to be.

Festus handled most of it. He had a way of talking that wasn’t loud but landed with weight, and people listened to him the way they listened to someone who’d clearly been tested before and hadn’t broken. By six fifteen they were assembled near the gate in rough groups.

Tobi’s mother was staying with Folake and the baby.

He’d tried to argue. She’d looked at him with the specific expression that meant the argument was already over and he just didn’t know it yet.

"She can’t walk two kilometers an hour after delivery," his mother said. "And the baby needs monitoring. We’ll follow when she can move."

"That could be hours." 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

"Yes."

"Mom—"

"Tobi." She put both hands on his shoulders. "I am a grown woman and a trained nurse and this is my job. You know I’m right."

He did know. He hated it with everything he had.

"Festus stays with you," he said.

She started to object.

"That’s not a negotiation," he said.

She looked at him for a long moment with something in her expression he couldn’t quite read. Then she nodded.

Festus didn’t argue either. He handed Tobi the security baton and kept his machete and took up his post near the back wall without a word.

Chike appeared at Tobi’s shoulder with the fire extinguisher. "Still bringing this," he said.

"It saved your life last night."

"It did." He paused. "I also figured out my ability."

Tobi looked at him.

Chike held up his hand. The air around his fingers shimmered faintly, a distortion, like heat haze in a very small concentrated area. "I have no idea what it does yet. It appeared when I was cleaning the cut on my arm. Scared me so badly I bit my own tongue."

"Can you control it?"

"I can make it appear and disappear. Beyond that." He lowered his hand. "No."

"Keep it available," Tobi said. "Don’t use it unless you have to."

"Wasn’t planning a demonstration."

They went through the gate.

The street looked different in early light. Less like a warzone and more like the aftermath of one, which in some ways was harder to look at. Overturned vehicles. A shop front completely collapsed inward. Things on the ground that Tobi directed people’s eyes away from when he could.

The sky was still open. In daylight the crack looked different. Less dramatic, more permanent. Like a scar that had healed wrong. The light coming through it was not sunlight exactly. It had a quality to it that made colors look slightly wrong, slightly shifted, the way the world looks through tinted glass.

Nobody mentioned it. They’d all seen it for hours. It had already become the new sky.

They moved northeast in a loose group. Tobi at the front, two of the larger men from the hall flanking the sides, Chike at the rear. Vincent had produced a collapsible baton from somewhere and positioned himself in the middle, which was either self-preservation or an attempt at appearing useful.

The first kilometer was quiet.

Too quiet in some stretches. They passed an entire block with no movement, no sound, no bodies even, just empty road and open doors, and that absence felt wrong in a way that Tobi’s new instincts kept flagging without being able to explain.

The system was running something in his peripheral vision. Not prompts. Just data, scrolling faintly at the edge. He’d noticed it starting after the absorption last night. Like it was continuously cataloguing his environment.

He let it run.

The second stretch of road had people in it.

A group of maybe fifteen, moving in the opposite direction. They saw each other from about fifty meters and both groups slowed and nobody did anything for a long moment, the specific frozen calculation of strangers in a dangerous place.

An older man at the front of the other group raised one hand. Not aggressive. Just visible.

Tobi raised his.

They passed each other on opposite sides of the road with the careful distance of people who wanted to communicate that they weren’t a threat without getting close enough to be one. Nobody spoke. Near the end a young woman in the other group looked directly at Tobi as she passed and he could see that she’d been crying recently and had stopped and was not going to start again.

He nodded at her.

She looked away.

They kept moving.

At the one kilometer mark Tobi stopped the group.

He’d heard something. Not the clicking. Something new. A wet, rhythmic sound from inside a building on the left, a pharmacy with its security gate half raised. He stood still and listened and tried to identify it and couldn’t.

"What?" Chike said quietly behind him.

Tobi shook his head slightly. He looked at the pharmacy. The sound was consistent. Not aggressive. Not moving.

He crouched and looked under the half-raised gate.

Inside, in the far corner, was a creature he hadn’t seen before. Roughly the size of a large dog but with a shape that suggested something aquatic, wide and flat across the body, with too many limbs folded underneath it. It was doing something to the wall, those folded limbs working steadily, and the wet rhythmic sound was it pulling something out of the plaster and consuming it.

It hadn’t noticed him.

He backed away slowly. Stood up. Moved the group past without stopping.

"What was it doing?" Chike asked when they were clear.

"Eating the building," Tobi said.

Chike absorbed that. "The building."

"Move faster," Tobi said.

They moved faster.

The university gates were visible at the end of the next road. Metal, tall, and from here Tobi could see people behind them. Multiple people. Lights that suggested a working generator. The sight of it moved through the group like a physical thing, shoulders dropping, pace increasing, someone behind him making a sound that was almost a laugh.

They were three hundred meters away when the gate on the right side of the road opened.

Not a building gate. A monster gate. The tearing sound of it was something Tobi recognized now, it had been burned into his memory last night, and he spun toward it before it finished opening.

This one was larger than the one from last night. The light at its edges was a different color, more red than the electrical white of the first one, and the creatures coming through it were different too.

Three of them. Bipedal. Roughly humanoid in shape, which was somehow the most disturbing thing yet. Two legs, two arms, but the proportions were wrong, arms too long, heads too small, and they moved with a jerking mechanical quality like puppets operated by someone learning as they went.

They saw the group immediately.

"Run," Tobi said.

The group ran.

He didn’t run. He moved sideways, away from the group, putting distance between himself and them. The creatures’ heads tracked him. He’d gambled on that, gambled that movement would pull their attention, and it did, all three orientating toward him as the group streamed toward the university gates.

He had the machete and the baton.

The first one covered the distance between them faster than the proportions should have allowed and he ducked under the arm swing and came up hitting, machete connecting with the torso, baton cracking across the joint of the arm. It staggered. Not much. Enough.

The second one grabbed him.

Its hand went around his left forearm and the grip was extraordinary, the kind of grip that meant the bone was making decisions about whether to stay in one piece, and Tobi drove his elbow into the side of its too-small head twice before it released.

He could hear shouting from the university gates. The group was there. People were getting through.

The third one was circling.

His left arm was radiating pain from the grip. He switched the machete to his left hand, ignored what his arm said about that, and kept moving.

The system was blazing.

[THREAT LEVEL: ELEVATED]

[MULTIPLE HOSTILE ENTITIES]

[RECOMMENDATION: DEVOUR POST-ENGAGEMENT]

[ADAPTIVE PROCESS MONITORING: GRIP RESISTANCE — THRESHOLD NOT YET MET]

[EVOLUTION POINTS: 15/100]

Grip resistance. So it was watching that too.

The circling one lunged and he let it come and used its momentum, redirecting, machete finding the back of the neck, the creature going down hard. He was already turning when the first one hit him from behind and he went face first into the road and the pavement came up to meet him at speed.

He tasted blood immediately. Road rash across his cheek. He rolled before the foot came down and it cracked the pavement where his head had been.

He came up.

The remaining two were both oriented toward him.

From the university gate someone was shouting his name. He didn’t look.

He breathed in. Out.

Then something happened that he hadn’t planned for.

The shimmer appeared around both creatures simultaneously. The same heat haze distortion he’d seen around Chike’s fingers. But larger. Much larger.

Both creatures stopped moving.

Not paused. Stopped. Completely. Like something had pressed pause on them specifically.

Tobi stared.

Chike was standing fifteen meters away, both hands raised, the shimmer pouring off him in waves, his face the color of old concrete and his legs shaking visibly from where Tobi was standing.

The creatures stayed frozen.

Tobi didn’t wait to find out how long it lasted.

Two seconds for the first one. Three for the second. He was moving toward the gate before the second one hit the ground and Chike was already stumbling and Tobi grabbed his arm and they ran the last fifty meters together and someone pulled them through the gate and the metal slammed shut behind them.

Chike sat down on the ground immediately. Or his legs sat down for him. His hands were still shaking, the shimmer fading in and out around his fingers like a signal losing strength.

"What was that?" Tobi said.

Chike looked up at him. He looked like he’d just sprinted twenty kilometers. "I told you I didn’t know what it did."

"You froze them."

"Yes."

"Both of them."

"Yes." He paused. "I also can’t feel my hands."

Tobi crouched in front of him and checked his eyes, checked his breathing. His mother’s habits bleeding through.

Around them the university grounds were full of people. Survivors. Hundreds. Makeshift camps across the grass, people with injuries being treated, arguments, children, smoke from cooking fires. A whole compressed surviving world inside these walls.

Above all of it, the sky stayed broken.

Tobi looked back at the gate.

The two creatures were gone. Not dead. Just gone, back through their gate or into the city. He didn’t know which.

He looked at his left arm. The bruising from the grip was already visible, dark and spreading. He flexed his fingers. Everything worked. Nothing broken.

The system updated quietly.

[COMBAT ENGAGEMENT RECORDED]

[EVOLUTION POINTS EARNED: 18]

[TOTAL: 33/100]

[GRIP RESISTANCE THRESHOLD: MONITORING CONTINUED]

[NEW ENTITY TYPE RECORDED: BIPEDAL CLASS]

[RECOMMENDATION: CONSUME NEXT KILL. DATA INSUFFICIENT.]

Thirty three out of a hundred.

He thought about his mother back at the hall. About Festus. About Folake and the baby born into the worst possible night.

He stood up.

He needed to find whoever was in charge of this place, get them to send people back for the ones left behind, and figure out what this campus actually had in terms of supplies, walls, and weapons.

The world had been ending for approximately eight hours.

He had a feeling the pace wasn’t about to slow down.