The sun was actually nice for once, catching the dead leaves and throwing gold light across the concrete. Adil didn't see any of it. He was too busy trying to outrun his own ruined GPA, sneakers slapping the pavement, lungs burning, the back of his neck already sweating through his collar. Late. Late. Late. The word hammered in his chest with every stride. One more tardy mark and the dean was going to hand him his suspension papers. The warm air tasted like copper and panic
He threw himself through the classroom doorway just as the morning bell tolled, skidding to a halt on hands and knees.
"Oh, thank God," he rasped, staring at the floor tiles.
A sharp smack landed square on the back of his head.
Adil winced, rubbing the spot as he pushed himself upright. Leaning against the doorframe was Jake, arms crossed, wearing a grin that suggested he'd been standing there for twenty minutes waiting for that exact moment. Broad-shouldered, tall, with a mop of messy blue hair, Jake possessed the physical presence of someone built to break things. He cracked his knuckles.
"Still dragging your feet?" Jake snorted. "Don't tell me you're running your mouth all week just to duck our rematch."
Adil dragged a hand back over his cropped, sweat-damp buzz, a smirk tugging at his lips. "Duck you? Please, Jake. I need a warm-up before fourth period anyway."
"Let's see if you're talking that trash on the floor."
"Gladly."
From a nearby desk came a heavy, long-suffering sigh—the sound of a teenager who possessed the spirit of an exhausted eighty-year-old. Garu didn't bother looking up from his notebook. Lean and unhurried, chin in his palm, he stared at the ceiling with the posture of someone long since resigned to being surrounded by lunatics.
"Do you two ever turn your brains on, or is it just white noise and fistfights in there?" Garu muttered.
Adil offered a cheerful wave. "Morning to you too, Garu."
Garu slowly dragged his eyes toward them. "Have either of your brilliant minds remembered there's a mid-term Math test in thirty seconds?"
A collective, horrified gasp rippled across the room.
"WHAT—"
"I'm dead," Jake barked, his cocky posture vanishing instantly, face draining of color. "My mom will straight-up execute me in the backyard if I fail another exam."
Adil reached over and patted his shoulder with dramatic sympathy. "Relax, big guy. I'll make sure your eulogy mentions you tried."
"Shut it!" Jake shoved him back hard.
"Make me!" Adil snapped, shoving right back—
And then the banter stopped.
Jake's front kick launched without warning. Adil barely got his forearms up before the blow slammed through his guard and swept him off his feet. Jake was a biological anomaly—a natural heavyweight who trained like a demon. The collision threw Adil back into an empty wooden desk, splintering the old varnish and shaking the floorboards.
Students scrambled out of their chairs, clearing a ring as shouts erupted across the room.
"Kyokushin style!" someone yelled. "Five bucks on Jake!"
"No way, Adil's got the footwork!"
Garu dragged a palm down his face, though his eyes never left the fight. He remembered their first match—Adil had won by a hair, and Jake hadn't forgotten it for a single day since. Garu glanced out the window, noticing for the first time that the sky had turned strange. Thick, leaden clouds rolled in fast along the horizon, heavy and motionless, blotting out the morning gold.
Adil pulled himself out of the ruined desk, shaking out his arms with a breathy laugh. "Guess we're skipping the formal greeting. Fine."
Jake charged, slinging a heavy left jab toward his jaw. Adil slipped left, dipped right, his shoulders rolling as the wind of Jake's knuckles whipped past his ears. "Too slow, big guy—"
Jake's roundhouse kick caught him clean across the cheek.
Adil's head snapped sideways. He dropped to one knee, the metallic taste of blood bursting over his tongue as his vision flashed white. The grin on his face never wavered.
"Okay, now I'm awake," Adil murmured. He exploded upward, driving a sharp cross punch into Jake's solar plexus.
Jake folded, gasping. Adil drove the advantage home, unleashing a rapid flurry of jabs against Jake's raised guard. Roaring, Jake lunged low, tackling Adil into the dust of the floorboards and raining punches toward his face. Adil covered up, absorbing the strikes, waiting for the split-second gap. The moment Jake overextended a right hook, Adil trapped the wrist, pivoted his hips, and snapped his legs around Jake's shoulder.
The joint lock snapped into place.
Jake roared, thrashing, but every twist only tightened the lock. Adil held him pinned while the classroom cheered and pounded on their desks, the air thick with chalk dust.
Then the classroom door slammed open with a crack like thunder.
Their teacher stood on the threshold, a stack of printed test papers clutched in his hand, face red, eyes burning. The room went dead silent.
"You absolute animals," the teacher said, voice dangerously low. "Destroying school property on exam day?"
Adil released the hold and scrambled up, raising his hand. "My fault! I started it."
"I started it," Jake growled simultaneously from the floor. He stayed down one lingering second, staring up at the fluorescent light as an old, bitter question surfaced—Why am I always the one on the floor?—before pushing himself up and slinging his broad smirk back into place.
The teacher's eye twitched. He slammed the stack of math tests onto his desk. "Discipline office. Both of you. Right now. You'll retake this exam after school, and you're cleaning every square inch of this floor before you leave!"
Garu slowly raised his head from his desk. "With all due respect, sir, I literally didn't move."
"Detention for you too, Garu. Guilt by association."
Six grueling hours of lectures, a blistering earful from the vice-principal, and a ruined afternoon later, 5:00 PM finally rolled around.
The mops dragged across the floorboards, leaving dull streaks of damp water behind them.
"You only caught me with that garbage lock because my foot slipped," Jake grumbled, wringing his mop out hard.
"Right. Your foot slipped, your guard dropped, and you tapped out," Adil replied, leaning on his mop handle with a smirk. "Sounds like a win to me."
Garu was slouched against a back-row desk, eyes half-closed, leaning on a broom. "Wake me up when you two finish crying. We lost two hours of our lives and still have to retake that math test tomorrow."
The atmosphere in the room shifted. The high ceilings felt lower, shadowed by the faded oil portraits of past headmasters hanging along the walls. Above the blackboard, the cracked wooden plaque carrying the school's motto—Founded 1899: Knowledge Is Power—seemed to lean forward out of the plaster.
Adil dipped his mop into the bucket, but paused before the head touched the water.
The grey water wasn't grey anymore. Dark red bled up from the bottom, threading through the water in slow coils—rising thick and warm from somewhere underneath, steam curling off the surface into the chilling room.
"Guys..." Adil muttered.
"What's the problem now, Adil?" Jake grumbled, wringing his mop out without looking over. "You tired already?"
He stepped toward Adil, glanced into the bucket, and froze. His brow furrowed. "Very funny. You smuggled food dye in your pocket just to waste my time?"
"I didn't touch anything!" Adil snapped, stepping back from the bucket.
"Right, because school buckets just naturally spout fresh blood—"
Across the room, Garu didn't look at the bucket at all. His gaze was fixed on the high windows.
The strange clouds from earlier had swallowed the sky entirely. The evening sun was gone, replaced by a bruise of purple and black. Outside, the wind had stopped. The trees in the courtyard didn't sway, and the distant hum of city traffic had cut out like someone pulled a plug. The glass rattled once under a sudden drop in pressure.
Garu drifted toward the back of the classroom and grabbed the brass door handle. He pulled. He twisted.
Nothing.
Garu locked eyes with Jake. "Jake. Door. Now."
His voice was deathly quiet. No laziness, no sarcasm—just cold, immediate authority.
Jake didn't ask questions. When Garu dropped the act, you moved.
Pivoting on his heel, Jake abandoned the bucket and lunged across the aisle, planting his lead boot and throwing his full weight into the door.
THUD.
The impact rattled Jake's teeth. The door didn't groan, shake, or give a single millimeter. Jake stumbled back, clutching his shoulder, his cocky smirk wiped clean.
"It's... locked," Jake rasped, staring at the handle.
Garu said nothing. He just looked at the walls.
Jake backed away, snatching up his mop handle like a makeshift club.
Then the scratching started.
Not a frantic scramble, but a deliberate, agonized rasp against the wall beneath the portraits. Invisible claws gouged deep, dragging marks into the concrete plaster. Plaster dust snowed onto the floorboards as a geometric pattern took shape: a long, narrow eye with a vertical slit pupil, framed by jagged rays extending outward like a blackened sun.
"Look," Garu whispered, pointing upward.
High above the blackboard, the wooden plaque split down the middle. From deep within the fracture, a gold light ignited. A slit-pupil eye materialized in the wood, its iris expanding slowly, adjusting to the dim room until it locked onto the three boys.
The carved symbol beneath the portraits ignited with the same gold light.
The floorboards vibrated beneath Adil's sneakers. Plaster dust sifted down through the glare. Above them, the plaque shuddered against its iron mounts—clack, clack, clack—pulsing in time with a deep, subterranean rhythm.
"Jake," Adil said, eyes fixed on the walls. "Grab the mop bucket. We're smashing the window."
Silence answered him.
Then came a single, sharp clatter—wood striking hard floorboards.
Adil snapped his head around.
Jake was gone.
His mop handle was still rolling across the wet wood, splashing dirty water over a pair of damp footprints that simply stopped mid-stride. No burst of light, no cry for help, no sound of a struggle. Just absence.
"Jake?" Adil's voice cracked.
He spun toward the back corner. Garu was still standing beside the desks, but his broom was slipping from his fingers. His eyes were locked wide on the gold light above the blackboard, chest heaving, mouth open as if trying to force out a breath that wouldn't come.
"Garu, run!" Adil lunged across the aisle, reaching for the shoulder of Garu's jacket—
A stray flake of ceiling dust caught Adil's eyes. He blinked. Once.
His fingers snapped shut around cold, empty air.
Garu's broom hit the floorboards.
Adil stumbled backward until his spine slammed against a desk, breath hitching in his throat. The air reeked of copper and old earth. Across the room, the painted faces of the headmasters began to warp. Canvas tore with a dry scritch as their painted lips stretched past the frames, opening into wide, silent laughter as dark red liquid ran down their painted chins.
High on the wall, the golden eye narrowed its pupil, its full attention on Adil.
Adil swallowed hard, hands trembling. "Okay... that's not funny anymore."
The floor didn't break underneath him; it ceased to exist.
Then the light came, and there was nothing left to shield his eyes from.
Silence returned to the room.
The dust settled onto the dark floorboards. Above the blackboard, the eye had vanished, leaving only a cracked piece of wood. But on the concrete wall below, the carved symbol remained—deep, deliberate, and waiting.
Outside the windows, the city lights flickered on against the dark, utterly indifferent.