The darkness wasn’t black.

That was one of the things the plain had given me that I never asked for and could never return. Twenty years of moving through nights without electricity had recalibrated something behind my eyes.

Even now, in total darkness, I could still make out the faint shapes in the room — the outline of the bed, the slow rise and fall of Azure’s chest, the gentle pulsing of the red stripes across her blue skin that gave off their own soft, living light.

She was deeply asleep.

I could tell by the heavy, trusting weight of her fingers resting on my chest and the complete looseness of her body, the kind that only comes when someone has given everything the day demanded and has nothing left to offer the night.

She looked so innocent like this.

Her pink hair spilled across the pillow like silk, her face completely relaxed, the sharp little canines hidden behind soft lips. The red stripes glowed faintly across her collarbone and shoulders, casting delicate rosy light over her blue skin. For the first time since I’d met her, there was no guarded tension in her shoulders, no careful distance in her eyes.

She looked like someone who should never have known what it meant to be owned.

I’m going to make sure you’re free from whoever your master is, I thought, the vow settling deep in my chest like cold steel. No matter what it costs.

[Prime Charger: Level 17]

[Azure: Shapeshifting, Current Level 7]

Three levels, I thought, staring at the glowing notification. From just one night.

I moved carefully, lifting her hand and placing it gently on the sheets beside her. She stirred slightly, let out a soft sigh, and settled again without waking. I dressed in silence— shirt, jacket, shoe— moving with the quiet efficiency the plain had drilled into me. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

Before leaving, I stood over the bed for one last moment, memorizing the peaceful image of her sleeping form.

Then I slipped out of the room.

***

The corridor outside hit me immediately with a different kind of pressure. The air was noticeably cooler and drier, carrying a stale, heavy stillness that settled against my eardrums and made the skin on my arms prickle.

All the lights were off. Not dimmed, completely extinguished. The specific, heavy silence of a building that had gone to sleep and meant it.

This was supposed to be a school full of wealthy, powerful young people. It should have carried the low hum of late-night conversations, laughter, or at least the faint glow of someone studying. Instead, there was nothing. Just thick, unnatural silence.

This is wrong.

I walked carefully, each step placed exactly as the plain had taught me, heel to toe, weight distributed, testing the floor before committing. Not because I had consciously decided to be cautious. My body had already made that decision, and I was simply obeying it.

I reached the stairs and started descending. Then I heard it. Outside, footsteps.

Not normal walking. The frantic, uneven rhythm of someone being chased. Fast breathing. Desperate movement.

Then the sickening thud of a body being slammed violently into the wall, the same wall I was standing behind on the inside. The impact vibrated through the stone and into my bones.

A single, short shout. The wet, unmistakable sound of something sharp piercing flesh. Then silence.

A moment later came a sound I had never heard before and immediately hoped I would never hear again, wet, rhythmic, greedy sucking. The unmistakable sound of something feeding.

I froze mid-step. Twenty years on the plain had taught me one unbreakable rule when dealing with things that hunted in the dark: stillness was sometimes the only weapon you had left.

The infected were sensitive to movement the way predators are sensitive to motion, not because they thought, but because motion was information.

So I stood completely still. The feeding continued for what felt like forever. Wet. Rhythmic. Then it stopped.

Something heavy dropped to the ground.

I counted five full minutes in my head, the way you count when your life depends on perfect accuracy. Only then did I continue down the stairs and step outside.

The entire campus was dark. Not a single light was on. Not the security lamps along the paths, not the building lights, not even the faint glow from hostel windows.

The sky itself seemed unnaturally black, and a thick, low fog clung to the ground, the kind of fog that had no business existing on a clear night.

Something made this, I thought. Someone killed the lights and created this fog. This isn’t an accident.

My eyes moved through the darkness, cataloguing everything they could see.

Against the outer wall of Vale 2, a shape.

A boy, sitting slumped with his legs stretched out in front of him, the careless posture of someone who had sat down and would never stand up again.

I approached slowly. As I got closer, the details became sickeningly clear.

Two clean puncture wounds in his neck. Deep. Precise. The blood on his collar had already darkened and stopped flowing, meaning his heart had given out several minutes ago.

His face was slack, eyes open and vacant, skin carrying that particular ashen-grey tone that only comes when someone has been thoroughly drained.

Not infected, I thought immediately. Infected tear and rip. They don’t leave two neat puncture marks. Infected don’t turn off every light on campus and manufacture fog either.

I looked up at the dark, fog-shrouded campus.

[LEWD LEVELING SYSTEM]

[Unknown entity in proximity.]

[Do not move.]

I stopped breathing. The fog shifted. Just slightly. The way thick fog moves when something large and silent passes through it.

There’s something on this campus, I thought, standing perfectly still in the darkness outside Vale 2, with a dead boy slumped against the wall and every light in the school extinguished.

I glanced at the corner of my vision, where the system’s warning still glowed

Something had just fed.

And it was still close.