Tap, tap, tap.

Sen sat on one of the classroom chairs, his hands rubbing at his face. Behind him, the girl with piercings paced around the room in frantic silence, muttering to herself and cursing every time she glanced at the windows. Sen released a quivering breath that almost sounded like a laugh.

He leaned back on his chair and looked up at the dark ceiling, barely lit up by the glare of his phone’s flashlight. Glancing at it, Sen turned it off and shadows swallowed the room again. The blocked windows shielded them from the outside, but…

The possibility of being found again was enough of a reason to keep things dark.

Sen glanced at the girl, still pacing by the window, her silhouette only visible thanks to the faint moonlight outside. The glow traced the outline of her platinum blonde hair, and along with her pale skin, it made her look ghostly in the shadows. Sen looked at his bag and the cigarettes inside. For a moment, the urge was there. Just one stick. One stick; just enough for him to relax.

But no—he stopped himself. Not when the nicotine would just make his nerves worse after. Sen glanced at the hallway outside, beyond the barricaded door.

Desperate to end the silence, Sen pursed his lips.

“So…” he started, glancing at the girl. “Vampire zombies.”

She stopped her pacing, frowned, then started again, nibbling on the tip of her thumb. “And not The Walking Dead kind,” she muttered, “but the scary shit-your-pants kind that can run, jump, and climb like Olympic athletes.”

“Like World War Z.”

“Yeah, but it says they’re vampires. So they drink blood, too. Because of fucking course they do.”

“And they don’t sparkle, either.”

“Right. None of them even look like Robert Pattinson!”

The girl whipped around, stomping her foot, before wincing at the slight echo her enraged whispers had caused. She huffed and sat down, burying her head in her arms against the chair’s backrest.

“I always thought the world would end because of some nuclear war. Not zombies. Man, that’s so… lame.”

A moment of silence dragged by, and she looked up towards him. The girl frowned.

“Zombies, or nuclear fallout?”

“What?”

“Choose. What’s your preferred end of the world scenario?”

“…An AI revolution.”

She paused, then nodded. “Yeah, okay. That’s fine,” she muttered. “What’s your name?”

Sen sighed, relaxing against his chair. He was glad for the girl’s repeated attempts at conversation—it filled the deafening silence. It made the terror feel like less of a physical threat. He reached into his bag and pulled out a short band, tying his dark hair up in a knot behind his head.

“Sen Salazar,” he replied. “Third year in Mechanical Engineering. Football club.”

“Everyone’s in the damn football club in this country,” she sighed. “I’m Em. Freshman in Multimedia Arts.”

“Em? Short for—”

“—Don’t,” she glared, cutting him off. “Don’t you bloody say it.”

“…What’s wrong with Emily?”

She glowered at him, seemingly deep in thought, before nodding faintly. “Nothing,” she muttered. Em glanced at something in the corner of her vision for a moment, then let out a tired sigh. She turned her eyes to him. “Do you see it too?”

Sen glanced to the side, and sure enough, they were there. The letters. Waiting to spring up the moment he gave them his attention. He sighed.

“The golden letters? I thought I was hallucinating, at first.”

“Me too, but we aren’t, are we? It’s a zombie—”

“Vampire.”

“—It’s a zombie vampire apocalypse and suddenly there’s this countdown for when the sun’s going to explode again, and this interface, and all these stupid RPG words taking up my peripherals. It’s finally happened. We’re in a simulation, and someone broke the goddamn game.”

Sen listened to her rant, but all he could think about were the vampires. Or vampire zombies. The ones that had been chasing him, and how he had suddenly gained a burst of speed during the chase. He glanced at his interface.

‘Tier 0 Body – Rank II [0/100],’ it said, and underneath, the number next to Essence continued to tick up. Sen chewed on his knuckles, “More like someone drastically raised the difficulty,” he said. “And ended up giving us access to new game plus along the way.”

“Well, woo-fucking-hoo for us, I guess. We’re stuck in some apocalypse nerd’s wet dream. And I don’t even play RPGs in this genre. I usually only play monster battler games, for god’s sake. I’m not seeing any capture balls, Sen. Are you?”

He shook his head, “I don’t play those games.”

“The hell do you play, then?”

“Football.”

Em sighed and let her arms droop over the backrest, her fingers fiddling with some unseen interface in the air. Sensing the end of the conversation, Sen stood up from his seat and moved to the window, where he peeked out of the curtains again. More of the corpses outside were standing up, roaming the school grounds on all fours. The Desiccated Vampires moved with a predatory litheness, slinking forward between the palm trees and disappearing into the shadows.

He almost didn’t believe what he was seeing. But all the proof he needed was there, stalking around the trees, lurking in the shadows, and climbing up the sides of—

Sen shoved himself away from the window. He staggered back, barely avoiding a chair, before frantically turning to Em. “Get down!” he whispered, ducking, hiding behind one of the lockers next to the wall. He clutched the shattered mop handle close as Em panicked and fell from her chair, scrambling off to the side, under the shadow of the professor’s desk.

The two of them pressed themselves into the shade as a dark blur moved across the window curtains.

Tak, tak, tak.

It was the sound of bony claws, clicking against the roof tiles lined up along the window outside. The vampire stalked across the length of the ledge outside and Sen saw its mouth open. He watched its tongue leave its mouth to taste the air.

It stopped. Right next to where the locker he hid behind was.

The window slid open with a dry rasp.

The curtains shifted, ever so slightly, and something soft landed on the floor, just out sight. He looked at Em across the room. She was pale, her eyes wide, staring out from behind the table at something close. Close to him.

He glanced down at the floor, where the shadow was. An outline, bathed in moonlight, on the other side of the locker. The shadow of its tongue writhed and… stopped.

Tak, tak.

The vampire growled and drew closer, its shadow nearing. Sen felt his breath go still and his thoughts blurred, flashing past his brain in a flurry of panic and fear. His eyes whipped to the corner of his awareness, where his interface was.

Essence: 463

Tak!

His fingers flew towards the screen. The monster’s head appeared out from the side of the locker and turned to him. Power like liquid fire flooded through his body. Sen tensed, the vampire snarled, lunged, and—

Blood splattered across his face.

Silence.

And then… two dings.

Body [Tier 0] increased! Rank II -> Rank IV

Mind [Tier 0] increased! Rank II -> Rank III

Essence: 13

Even with his eyes closed, Sen saw the golden letters. He was pinned against the wall, a weight pressing against him, and something wet and cold and slimy dripped from his fingers and tap-tapped against the floor. He felt the wetness spread across his shirt and his knees folded, bringing him down.

It was blood, he knew. He could smell it. The foul copper, filling the air. The monster had killed him. He kept his eyes squeezed tight, expecting the pain to lance through him at any second, until—

The weight over him disappeared.

Thud.

“Hey, hey!” a voice called, and hands grabbed his shoulders. They shook him. “Are you—hey, senior guy! Are you alive?”

Sen opened his eyes and found Em kneeling in front of him, looking concerned. She was pale, her hands covered in dark blood. And behind her was a body—the vampire’s—lying on the floor in a puddle of its own black ichor. The tar leaked out of a wound under its jaw, where it had been impaled with a mop’s handle.

He stared at it, frozen as a notification appeared in front of him again.

Absorbing Essence [9/23] – Desiccated Vampire [Tier 0] x1

Em shook him again. “Sen! Look at me!” she spoke in a harsh whisper, relaxing only when his eyes moved to meet hers. Sen leaned back against the wall, breathing long breaths, feeling the blood stick his shirt against his chest. He stared at her.

“I killed it,” he said, dazed. “I increased my attributes and I stabbed it through the neck. And… and I killed it. It’s dead.”

She stared at him, then nodded slowly.

“…Yeah, it is.”

Sen nodded back.

And then he puked in her face.

“They can taste us in the air,” Sen said, shirtless, pacing around the room with his arms around his body to stave off the cold. Even as he spoke, his voice trembled from the aftershocks of the adrenaline coursing through him, his fingers shaking and every step feeling like he was bouncing on his feet. “They can find us if—if they’re close enough.”

He looked up from the floor and found Em glaring daggers at him, sections of her hair matted from his…

Sen looked away.

“You puked on me,” she said, accusingly. “I… I was worried about you, and you puked on me. On my face.”

“I couldn’t control it. And I already told you I was sorry.”

“I tasted it,” she said, hugging herself, in her vomit-stained undershirt. “It got in my mouth. And then because it was disgusting, I puked on you, and then you puked on me again.”

He gave her a reproachful look.

“Okay, now you’re just being gross.”

She glared and threw her shoe at him and Sen’s hand moved. He caught it. Perfectly. She stared at him, and he stared at her, and then he stared at the shoe in his hand. After a moment, Sen lowered the shoe back down onto a desk. Then he sat on the floor—still dazed from the encounter.

“We really need to get away from here,” he said.

“I need to get away from you.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

They stared at each other for a moment, before Em broke the silence with a snort. She smiled and shook her head, but the tension in her was evident. She was afraid, glancing at the windows, ready to jump at the nearest shadow. Sen was too. He sighed as she went back to wiping her shirt, sniffing it, and then exaggerating a frown again, forcing calm in a situation that wanted them to feel the opposite.

She jerked her chin to the side. “Turn around,” she said. “I’m changing.”

Sen acquiesced.

He waited a moment, facing the wall, trying to calm his trembling hands. He looked down at them, where the dried blood flaked and crumbled away from his fingers like dirt. He shuddered. Took a breath. Sen leaned forward and rested his head against the wall, feeling the cold spread across his forehead.

Thud.

Sen thumped himself against it. Thud. Again. It stung—but the pain cleared his head. It forced him to stay in the moment, instead of sinking into worry. His brain turned quiet. Very much unlike how it had been the last morning, before the exam.

It was odd, how the finals now seemed so far away in his mind despite being only hours before. Now, the crushing expectation of passing the test was gone.

And now he was here. Killing vampire zombies by accident with a mop.

“We need to leave as soon as you finish changing,” he said, his eyes closed as he enjoyed the coldness of the wall. “If that one found us, the ones chasing me before probably will too. They passed us a while ago, but once they’re back…”

He shook his head and sighed.

“God, I want to go home. Or whatever’s left of my apartment in Dubai, anyway. But we need to figure things out here first. Or at least go somewhere safer. Any ideas, Em?”

Silence.

“Em? You okay?”

It took a long, agonizing second for her to reply.

“Y-Yeah,” she said, and Sen heard her clear her throat. The catch in her voice vanished. “I’m listening, man. Calm down. I’m just… thinking. See, if all the dead people outside are standing up again, then we want to go to a place that doesn’t see a lot of foot traffic, right?”

“Right.”

“Yep. Yeah. Right. So, I’m thinking we can make our way to the sixth floor. It’s been under renovation since two weeks ago, right? We’ll be safe there. And then—”

Sen blinked, finally realizing what she was getting at. He nodded.

“—And then we can get down the fire escape from the back of the building,” he said. “It leads straight out towards the road to Academic City. We can walk under the overpass from there.”

“You used it to skip class too?”

“Yeah.”

“You can turn around now, by the way. I’m done.”

With a nod, Sen turned back towards her. Em wore a spare undershirt and jeans, which he assumed she’d brought with her to school. She had her hair tied into a ponytail, exposing the many piercings she had around her ears. When he looked down, however, Sen raised an eyebrow.

“What’s up with the bare feet?” he asked.

“Our shoes make too much noise, I think,” she said, shrugging, slinging her bag over her shoulder. “You should take yours off, too. And put a shirt on. Your nipples are staring at me and it’s weird.”

Sen snorted and stood up, throwing his stained shirt to the side and donning his blazer instead. Sen put it on and shuddered. The sleeves were stained with blood, but it was better than being topless. He thought about it for a moment, then took his laptop out from his bag. He ditched it on the table, next to his physics textbook, along with anything else he didn’t need.

By the time he was done, he looked… homeless. Stained with blood, with an open blazer and his chest underneath, with only his bag’s strap cutting across the line of bare skin. Then there were his uniform’s dress pants, tattered and ripped along the side. They ended on his bare feet against the cold floor.

Em whistled.

“You look like someone who just walked out of a mugging,” she said. “It makes me feel a little better about myself, to be honest.”

“You’re just jealous because you don’t have my abdominals. I’m an Adonis.”

“Whatever you say, vomit man.”

Sen rolled his eyes and smiled despite himself, the humor temporarily winning out over the sight of the dead vampire in the corner of the room. He turned towards the door.

“You ready to go?”

She nodded, “Yeah, let’s—”

Her words were cut short as shattered glass sprayed across the room. It rained over them, gleaming shards under the moonlight, bouncing off the walls and the ground and settling on the floor. Frozen, the two of them stared at the rock that had landed in the middle of the room, settling in the middle of the broken glass.

They turned their eyes towards the shattered window as the screams of a horde of alarmed vampires echoed outside. The sound of claws and feet against concrete came immediately, the vampires skittering up the walls like ants.

Someone had thrown a rock through the window, and it was going to get them killed.

Em turned her frantic eyes to Sen.

“Run!”