The moment I saw Arnold's silhouette gliding through the pack of monsters, my body froze for a brief, terrifying second. In that heartbeat, the fragmented pieces of the puzzle slammed together into a picture of absolute horror.
I recalled the old man's raspy, dying warnings; I remembered the cold, predatory eyes of the traitors we had encountered at the park's edge; and now, I saw the truth of the "ally" I had allowed into our midst.
"Dammit!" I hissed, the word a jagged edge in my throat.
The next instant, my instincts—sharper than my unenhanced muscles—took control. I surged forward, pushing through the lethargy of my exhausted frame.
Why the hell is someone like him here?! The question screamed in my mind, but I didn't need a logical deduction to find the answer. It was written in the sudden, shaky vibrato of Isabella's voice.
"Hye? What's going on? Why is he heading toward the generator room?"
I cast a fleeting, grim glance back at her. Her face was pale, illuminated by the very lights that were about to be extinguished. In that moment, a realisation struck me that shifted the very foundation of my mission.
I had admired Arnold for his quick wits, but I had misread the nature of his "volunteering." He hadn't climbed that light tower to be a lookout; he had climbed it to stay out of the fray, to keep his eyes adjusted to the dimness, and to wait for the perfect moment to cripple us.
He was a Traitor. A "Seed" planted by the enemy before the sky had even turned purple. But more importantly, I realised he was here specifically for Isabella.
In my previous life, she was a ghost, a name missing from the annals of the Great War. I had assumed she was just another casualty of the first day's chaos. But looking at her now—seeing her natural leadership, her fierce spirit—I understood. She hadn't died by accident. She had been assassinated.
The enemy knew she was a threat. They knew her potential surpassed almost everyone else of this era. This entire scenario wasn't just a random survival trial; it was a targeted hit.
Even with all the knowledge of the future, I was still played, I admitted to myself, the taste of bile rising in my throat. The enemy wasn't just a force of nature; they were a force of intellect.
While I was struggling to survive as a level-zero human without a single stat point to my name, my adversary was already commanding legions of monsters and an invisible army of human turncoats.
The old man's last, unbelievable story about an enemy with the power to manipulate time itself now felt like a cold, hard fact. But I couldn't dwell on cosmic conspiracies. If I failed to stop Arnold in the next sixty seconds, everything I had worked for—every life I had saved—would be snuffed out in a heartbeat.
I could see Arnold's plan with terrifying clarity. Traitors were humans at their core, but they were humans who had accepted a "dark pact" before the system integration.
Their stats were already augmented, their bodies "refined" by the dark energy of the Void. They were hybrids—stronger and faster than any civilian, but burdened by the same sensitivity to light as the monsters they served.
Arnold had chosen the tower closest to the generator specifically for this reason. He was currently half a field away from me, and even with my veteran experience, I knew I couldn't outrun the man in my exhausted state.
"Listen up!" I roared, my voice carrying over the screams and the gnashing of teeth. "Everyone! Form a tight circle! Put Isabella at the centre and hold your ground! Do not move, no matter what happens to the lights!"
"Hye! What are you doing?!" Isabella screamed, her voice cracking with panic as she saw me veer away from the group and sprint directly toward a massive, lunging hyena.
Stop screaming, I know exactly what I'm doing! I wasn't heading toward the monster to kill it. That would be a waste of time and stamina I didn't have. I was heading toward it because it was the only thing in this field faster than me.
"Woosh!"
The air whistled as the beast's massive head swung toward me. By the standards of my past life, this was a pathetic creature, but to my current, fragile body, it was a mountain of death. I didn't aim for its neck. Instead, I bypassed its head and dove toward its powerful, coiling rear legs.
"I'll borrow your help for a second!" I grunted.
I didn't dodge the kick. I leaned into it.
Tuck!
The impact was like being hit by a freight train. The air was violently expelled from my lungs as the hyena's leg connected with my side.
The pain was immense, a white-hot flash that threatened to black out my vision. But the physics worked. Like a cannonball launched from a mortar, my body was thrown into the air, hurtling across the field at a velocity no human could achieve on foot.
"HYE!"
Isabella's scream faded into the howling wind in my ears. I soared over the heads of the fighting students and the prowling monsters, a blurred streak of desperate intent.
BANG!
I slammed into the side of the generator shed, my body bouncing off the corrugated metal before I hit the dirt. I rolled, the world spinning in a nauseating whirl of grey and white, before I forcibly jammed my aluminium bat into the ground to arrest my motion.
I used the club like a crutch, dragging myself to my feet. Every rib felt like it had been turned into splinters, and blood was beginning to trickle from the corner of my mouth, but I was where I needed to be.
I was at the door. But I wasn't alone.
"Roar!" "Roar!" "Roar!"
"Dammit... he was even prepared for this," I hissed through clenched teeth.
Arnold hadn't just sauntered to the room; he had signalled a detachment of his "pets" to guard the entrance.
Ten Void-Hyenas stood in a semi-circle around the shed, their ivory tusks gleaming in the spotlight. They weren't blinded like the ones in the centre of the field; they were standing in the shadows of the shed, their eyes adjusted and hungry.