Chapter 197
At the peak of that tension, when the student's fist clenched and the muscles in his arm tightened, ready to deliver a punch meant either to snap someone back to awareness or to punish, another, unexpected sound tore through the air.
A siren.
Not an ordinary sound, but a long, piercing wail—shrill and authoritative—that severed every emotion in the room.
It was so loud and so alien in the context of a library that it instantly transformed the atmosphere from a place of study into a vulnerable space.
The sound was not merely an announcement.
It was a command wrapped in urgency, a warning siren usually associated only with danger coming from outside the building.
The wail froze the student's movement in place.
His fist, already primed to strike, halted midair, his blazing anger suddenly overpowered by a more ancient, primal instinct.
Confusion.
Every head, including that of the teacher standing there with a baffled expression, turned simultaneously toward the source of the sound—the loudspeakers on the ceiling—or toward the small windows revealing a gray sky, as if hoping for a visual explanation.
The verbal message that followed the siren was even clearer and more chilling.
The broadcast voice was flat, yet rushed and heavy with pressure, ordering everyone to immediately take cover from an incoming attack.
The word "attack" lingered in the air, cold, ambiguous, and far more terrifying than the student conflict that had been unfolding moments before.
The threat was no longer about pride, mockery, or a failed presentation.
It became something larger, darker, and unknown.
"Everyone stay still! This is not a drill—you hear the siren, don't you?!"
"Hahaha."
"Let go."
Thud!
The siren continued to wail, reaching its eighth count with the same monotonous urgency, yet its effect in the room had split reality into two opposing sides.
On one side, the teacher—whose responsibility was bound to the safety of dozens of lives before her—began to show cracks in her composure.
Her usually controlled face faded, her eyes darting rapidly as they assessed doors, windows, and rows of students.
Her movements grew slightly stiff and hurried as she struggled to process emergency protocols that were likely rarely rehearsed.
Her anxiety was the anxiety of an adult, concrete and grounded, filled with images of real danger.
On the other side, the sea of students fell silent in a confusion that slowly turned into doubt.
That eighth siren, unaccompanied by any visual change beyond the windows or on the ceiling, began to lose its initial authority.
A nervous laugh burst out from one corner, quickly stifled, yet the seed of doubt had already been planted.
Expressions on their faces shifted from fear to confusion, then to disbelief.
To them, this was beginning to feel like an awkward emergency drill—or even a strange systemic joke.
The threat of an "attack" felt abstract and distant within the calm belly of the library.
And at the very center of this divide, Ilux's body moved.
His instinctive drive did not come from a sudden surge of physical strength, but from an explosion of desperation triggered by the contrast he perceived.
He saw genuine panic in his teacher's eyes, and he saw doubt—and even mocking smiles—beginning to surface on the faces of his classmates, including the student still gripping him.
That contrast, between the danger that felt terrifyingly real within him and the indifference surrounding him, triggered a violent physical reaction.
With the last strength gathered from the ends of his strained nerves, he shoved the student in front of him.
The push was forceful and sudden, enough to break the grip on his collar and send the student stumbling back several steps, his face shifting from anger to shock and then to utter confusion.
Ilux stood there, breathing hard, his collar rumpled.
His gaze, still carrying the remnants of terror from his own vision, now swept across the room.
What he saw confirmed an even more bitter reality.
The confusion on the student's face was not confusion over the warning siren, but confusion over Ilux's "overreaction."
Around him, he caught exchanged glances, shoulders shaking slightly as laughter was held back, and relaxed postures that showed no preparation to seek shelter.
The screaming siren, to them, was nothing more than a nuisance—a failed audio system joke or a poorly scheduled drill.
They did not feel what their teacher felt, let alone what Ilux felt.
"Don't tell me this is because you're afraid of failing your presentation, Ilux.
Is that how far you'd go to pull off a cheap joke like this?"
Huuuufh!
"Get down!!"
Dooofh!!
The woman's sharp words hung in the air, saturated with sarcasm and a certainty of her own social superiority.
The accusation was a final attempt to shove Ilux back into the framework of normalcy they understood, to assert that all of this—his strange behavior, the disruptive siren—was merely the farce of a loner afraid of failure.
Thin smiles and sidelong glances from several other students seemed to endorse that narrative, reinforcing the wall that separated them from "the other."
But before the mocking tone could settle or provoke another reaction, the world stopped.
Or rather, the world exploded.
It was not a sound that arrived gradually, but a sudden and absolute detonation.
It did not resemble thunder, but a colossal roar born directly beneath their feet, a blast so immense that the air inside the room itself seemed to turn solid and strike them.
The shockwave arrived before conscious thought, slamming into walls, windows, and every body in the room with blind, collapsing force.
Its roar was not only heard, but felt—in bones, in teeth, deep within the chest cavity—shaking everything down to its foundation.
'Pain.'
The shockwave was like a giant, invisible hand that slapped and tore him from where he stood.
Ilux did not fall.
He was flung, his body reduced to a helpless projectile struck by a force far beyond gravity.
The air he had been breathing turned into a rigid wall, hurling him across a room that suddenly felt far too small.
First, his back slammed into the edge of a thick bookshelf filled with law texts and ancient history.
The sound of splintering wood and tearing paper accompanied the initial impact, but it was swallowed by the roar of the explosion.
The bookshelf, long a guardian of the room's silence, could not stop him.
Instead of halting him, the tremendous momentum deflected his trajectory, sending his body spinning uncontrollably.
He rolled.
Not a simple fall, but a brutal, forced tumble across a dusty floor now littered with debris.
One roll, his right shoulder crashed into the twisted leg of a table.
Two rolls, his cheek scraped against sharp shards of broken ceramic.
Three rolls, his ribs absorbed the impact of a hard book cover scattered across the floor.
Four rolls, the entire world became a vortex of darkness, dust, and spreading pain.
The fifth and final roll gave him one last burst of momentum before it ended.
The stop was final and violent.
The back of his head, carrying all the remaining force from being thrown and rolled, slammed into the solid wall of the room.
The impact produced a dull, low sound, like overripe fruit hitting the ground.
But the effect was more than just sound.
The wall responded in an unnatural way.
From the exact point of impact behind Ilux's head, a network of cracks spread with terrifying speed.
They were not fine hairline fractures, but five main fissures, each as wide as a finger, branching outward like furious rivers bursting in spring, violently tearing across the surface.
To be continued…