We took the stairs three at a time, our lungs burning with the effort and the stale, ozone-heavy air of the stairwell. Aurora led the charge, her sword casting rhythmic pulses of metallic light that danced across the concrete walls like a frantic strobe. The scratching sound grew louder with each flight we conquered, vibrating through the handrails and into the soles of my boots.
Second floor. Third floor.
The noise was fundamentally wrong. It was not the simple sound of nails on metal, it was something more organic and far more disturbing. It sounded like bone scraping against stone, amplified by the hollow shaft of the stairwell until it became a physical pressure in my ears. By the time we reached the fourth-floor landing, my enhanced perception was screaming. My Cosmic Insight flickered at the edges of my vision, presenting a chaotic overlay of warnings that I did not yet have the vocabulary to translate.
Aurora pressed herself against the heavy steel door of the landing, her head tilted as she listened to the world beyond. The scratching stopped abruptly.
Silence stretched for several heartbeats, thick and suffocating. Then came a sound that made my blood freeze in my veins. It was a wet, sliding noise, the sound of something massive and slick dragging itself across the linoleum. But underneath that was a rhythmic, controlled breathing. It was too deliberate for a mindless husk. It was the sound of a predator waiting for its prey to make the first mistake.
"It is in the hallway," Aurora whispered, her voice barely a breath. "It is between us and the survivors."
I closed my eyes and reached for the code. The crystalline quill materialized between my fingers, and the reality of the stairwell fractured around me. What I saw through the thickness of the steel door made no sense to my rational mind.
The creature's energy signature defied categorization. My brain kept trying to process the input as human before rejecting it as an impossibility. It looked like something caught in the middle of a violent, forced transformation. It was at least eight feet long, its form elongated and twisted in ways that violated every law of anatomy. What had once been a human torso was now stretched into a serpentine length, the spine curved at angles that should have shattered bone. Translucent skin pulsed with veins of phosphorescent silver light that branched across its body like frozen lightning.
But it was the limbs that turned my stomach.
The arms and legs had multiplied, splitting at the joints like the branches of a diseased tree. Some retained human hands with elongated, needle-like fingers, while others had fused into jagged, claw-like appendages. They moved with a disturbing, fluid coordination, each one testing the surfaces of the walls and floor as if probing for structural weaknesses.
The head was still recognizably human, and that was the true horror. I recognized the features of Professor Hendricks from the Chemistry department. The skull had elongated, and the jaw was dislocated to accommodate rows of translucent, shark-like teeth. His eyes glowed with that familiar lunar light, but there was a flicker of something behind them. It was not intelligence in the way we understood it, but a sharp, predatory cunning.
This was not just an infection. This was a rapid, forced adaptation.
"Nate?" Aurora's voice felt distant, as if she were calling to me from across a great void. "What do you see?"
I tried to speak, but my throat had closed up. The thing on the other side of the door was a scout, a more efficient version of the slaughterers we had seen in the lecture hall. The breathing pattern changed suddenly, becoming more rapid and excited.
It knew we were there.
"Oh, shit," I whispered.
The door did not just open, it exploded inward. The heavy steel buckled and tore like wet paper as something with far too much kinetic force smashed through the frame. Aurora and I scrambled backward as the creature flowed into the stairwell.
Flowed was the only word for it. Despite its massive size and the tangle of its limbs, it moved like liquid. Its appendages rippled in waves that carried it forward with an impossible, sickening grace.
"What the hell is that thing?" Aurora's sword blazed to its full, blinding brightness.
The creature paused, its head tilting at a ninety-degree angle. Its phosphorescent eyes focused on us with a disturbing level of awareness. It did not charge blindly. It stayed on the ceiling, its many limbs anchoring it to the concrete as it studied us. It was learning. It was observing our stances, our weapons, and our reactions.
It opened its mouth, revealing those rows of serrated teeth, and made a sound that was somewhere between a guttural growl and a high-pitched hiss. Looking into those silver eyes, I realized it recognized us as something different from the panicked prey it had been hunting. It knew we were the anomalies in its system.
"It is studying us," Aurora breathed, her grip tightening on the hilt of her blade.
The creature's multiple limbs rearranged themselves in a pattern that suggested a calculated preparation for a strike. It moved with a terrifying deliberation, testing our reach. One elongated appendage reached toward Aurora's sword, stopping just short of the glowing edge. The silver light from its own skin seemed to react to the sword's energy, pulsing in a rhythmic, sympathetic vibration.
"We can't let it escape," I said, the realization hitting me like a physical blow. "If it is a scout, if it can communicate what it learns about our abilities to the rest of the system..."
Aurora's eyes widened. This was the Darwinian nightmare of the Moonfall. It wasn't just killing us, it was iterating on our deaths.
The creature sensed the shift in our intent. It let out a louder, more aggressive hiss and then it moved. I had thought the basic husks were fast, but this was beyond human perception. One moment it was on the ceiling ten feet away, and the next it was a blur of silver and grey flowing down the wall. It used its multiple limbs to move in three dimensions, cutting off our retreat and our advance simultaneously.
Aurora swung her sword in a wide, defensive arc. The blade passed through empty air as the creature twisted its elongated spine around the strike with liquid grace. Three appendages lashed out at once from different angles. Aurora barely managed to bring her blade up in time to block two of them, and the sheer force of the third caught her in the ribs, sending her stumbling back against the railing.
I acted on pure instinct. I raised the quill and reached for the gravitational constants around the creature's center of mass. The resistance was immediate and shocking. It was not the immunity I had feared, but the creature's internal energy pattern was denser and more organized than the husks. My gravity manipulation took hold, but it felt sluggish, like trying to pull a heavy chain through deep mud.
The creature slammed into the floor as I increased the localized pressure, but it immediately began pushing back. Its multiple limbs strained against the invisible weight, the muscles bulging beneath its translucent skin as it fought my rewrite through sheer physical power.
"It is adapting!" Aurora shouted, darting back in with a thrust of her blade.
She was right. Through my enhanced perception, I could see the creature's energy pattern shifting in real-time. It was finding ways to distribute the gravitational stress across its elongated form, recalibrating its own internal balance to work with the changed physics rather than fighting them head-on. It was a biological counter-program to my class.
Aurora's blade connected, carving a deep furrow through two of its secondary appendages. Phosphorescent silver blood sprayed across the stairs, but the creature barely seemed to register the pain. The severed limbs were already beginning to knit back together, new, raw tissue sprouting from the stumps with a speed that defied every biological law I knew.
The creature lashed out with its primary claw, catching Aurora across the shoulder and throwing her into the concrete wall. She hit the stone with a sickening thud, her sword clattering from her grip.
I poured every ounce of my focus into the quill. I didn't just increase the gravity, I inverted the vector. I slammed the creature toward the ceiling with everything I had, the concrete cracking under the sudden, violent impact. But even as it was pinned to the roof, it kept moving. Its limbs were already finding new purchase, learning how to function in the inverted field.
Aurora's sword rematerialized in her hand as she pushed herself off the wall. A thin trail of blood ran from a gash on her forehead, but her eyes were burning with a cold, lunar fire.
"We end this now," she said.
She moved with a desperate, blurring speed, her sword trailing arcs of silver light as she targeted the creature's elongated neck. At that exact moment, I shifted my rewrite. I didn't just drop the gravity, I multiplied it downward, timing the collapse perfectly with her strike.
The coordination was flawless. The creature was caught between the sudden, crushing weight from above and the ascending arc of Aurora's blade. Her sword met the creature's neck at the precise moment my ability slammed it into the floor. The phosphorescent head of Professor Hendricks separated from the body with a wet, heavy sound.
Even then, the thing did not die instantly. The headless torso thrashed wildly, its appendages reaching blindly for Aurora's throat. The severed head landed on the landing, its eyes still glowing and its dislocated jaw working silently as if trying to finish a lecture. Finally, after a minute that felt like an hour, both pieces began to dissolve into silver motes. It happened much more slowly than with the husks, as if the system was reluctant to let go of such a successful iteration.
[Experience gained: 300]
The notification flickered, but I barely looked at it. My mind was spinning with the implications of what we had just fought.
"It was learning," Aurora said, wiping the silver gore from her cheek before dismissing her blade. "It was actually adapting to the way we fight."
"And it was only a few hours into the event," I added, staring at the empty space where Hendricks had been. "If the system is already producing things like that, then the baseline for survival just moved a mile out of our reach."
"Then we just have to move two miles," Aurora replied, though her voice lacked its usual certainty.
Before I could respond, voices echoed from the hallway beyond the buckled door. They were human voices, trembling and heavy with a terror I knew all too well.
"Hello? Is someone out there? We heard the fighting!"
Aurora and I exchanged a look. The survivors. We moved toward the ruined doorway, stepping carefully over the fading stains of silver blood. Three figures appeared in the threshold, staying well back from the carnage.