Temp whimpered low, the muscles under his fur twitching with nervous energy.
Eli didn't move.
Not at first.
His heart thudded against his ribs, trying to match the sirens now wailing overhead. The alert still glowed on his phone, stark and sterile in contrast to the chaos outside. The words "FULL SYSTEMIC FAILURE" blurred slightly with the shaking of his hands.
A scream cut through the air—a real one. Not digital. Not distant.
It snapped him into motion.
He pulled up his hood, adjusted the knife's position against his side, and started moving. Down the steps. One by one. Temp followed without needing to be told, staying close to his heel like instinct had taken over.
The street was worse up close.
Cars had crashed into light poles, mana-infused glass sprayed in all directions. One vehicle had flipped completely, its undercarriage still steaming. A man staggered from the wreckage, bleeding and disoriented, only to vanish in a crackling burst of fire as another figure—half-rotted, hair scorched—collapsed atop him with claws alight.
Eli recoiled, pressing against a building's wall, dragging Temp with him. The heat from the sudden combustion warmed his cheek.
They moved fast. Always forward. Stay low, stay moving. That was the rule, right?
He darted down a side street, narrowly avoiding a group of civilians frantically conjuring shields, elemental blasts, anything to hold off a wave of infected lurching toward them. One of the infected screeched—a sound somewhere between a rattle and a whine—as it was struck with a spike of earth. It didn't stop. Just slowed. Its chest had been torn open but it kept going, veins pulsing with dim, corrupted mana.
Temp growled again.
"Quiet," Eli whispered. "Stay with me.
The university was six blocks away. Uphill. He remembered counting them freshman year.
He ducked through a shattered storefront, stepping over twisted displays and broken ceramic. A faint line of dried blood streaked across the tiles. The lights inside flickered, some still drawing power, but most drowned by the red outside glow. He passed through and emerged on the other side, back onto the avenue.
He paused at an intersection. That's when he saw it.
A girl—barely more than fifteen—ran barefoot down the middle of the road. Her shirt was torn. Her hands glowed faintly with sparks. Behind her, a zombie lunged forward, snarling with decayed lips and melted skin. Eli's eyes locked onto it. This one had heat shimmer around its body. It wasn't just running—it was burning from the inside out.
The girl turned, shrieked, and threw a bolt of lightning behind her. It struck the creature, arcing through its ribs, but did nothing to slow it.
Eli's legs twitched. He almost ran forward.
Almost.
The zombie raised its hands—hands that still pulsed with dying mana—and conjured a bloom of fire.
Not thrown. Not like a bomb.
The flames ignited directly around the girl.
Her body jerked mid-step as the fire bloomed outward in a perfect sphere. Her skin blistered instantly, hair vaporized, and she dropped to her knees with a sound Eli would never forget. It wasn't a scream. It was too dry. Too hollow. Her body thudded forward, still smoldering.
Temp barked, loud and sharp. Eli grabbed his scruff and yanked him back.
"Don't look," he muttered. "Just go."
They moved again, faster now, cutting between buildings, sidestepping the dead and barely-dodged collisions. The closer they got to the university district, the thicker the crowds became. More students, more civilians, more stragglers with panicked eyes and trembling hands.
And more infected.
Some still slow and dumb.
Others not.
They ran, they climbed, they cast spells that left trails of rot or bursts of gravity behind them. Some used brute force. Others moved like trained mages.
Every single one of them was wrong.
But they were still users.
A shout drew Eli's attention as he crested the final hill. The gates of the university came into view—bent open but still standing. One of the mana shields above the main building flickered uncertainly, like it had been forced into emergency mode. Someone inside was trying to hold it up.
Eli ducked beneath a fallen signpost, his lungs burning now, the knife still slick in his hand.
He didn't feel brave.
He felt late.
But he was here.
Temp bolted past him through the gate, barking once as if to announce them.
Eli followed.
Vellwyn University still stood.
The courtyard was warped with heat.
Cracked stone tiles steamed underfoot, scattered with debris—shattered lanterns, scorched bags, a few broken tablets still blinking with emergency notifications. The grand clocktower above Vellwyn University's main building loomed silent, its hands frozen mid-tick, one of them bent. The sky behind it flickered orange through the haze, casting long, jerking shadows on the front lawn.
Eli slowed his pace.
Temp did too, paws quiet on the stone. His ears perked, eyes scanning.
Only ten or so people remained in the courtyard, huddled near the front steps or positioned along the railings like makeshift guards. Some were older students—faces vaguely familiar from his lectures. Others looked like professors, coats torn and spells hovering around their fingers like half-formed thoughts.
Eli's gaze scanned them quickly.
He spotted Professor Halden immediately. The older man stood near the base of the main doors, both arms raised, his face locked in concentration. Sweat ran down his forehead, but it evaporated before reaching his chin. The air around him shimmered—dense, pressurized, pulsing with barely-contained force.
Above them, a shield of compressed atmosphere hung like an inverted glass bowl. It wasn't glowing, not visibly magical in the usual sense—but it hummed, distorted the light, turned flame and debris into sluggish, swirling particles the moment they hit it. A dome of hyper-dense, rotating air, microscopically calibrated to deflect mass and heat.
It was weather magic.
Real weather magic. Not a student's breeze trick. Not some low-level fog spell.
This was storm-tier manipulation. The kind of atmospheric control only a seasoned caster could achieve. The pressure shift alone made Eli's eardrums throb.
Bria stood beside Halden, hands pressed forward, fingers dripping condensation. She was feeding moisture into the barrier, fine-tuning the dome's inner balance. Small arcs of mist slithered around her wrists, tethering to the swirling barrier like living ropes.
"You're over-saturating the inner shell," she warned, voice taut. "If you spike the density any higher, you'll trigger condensation collapse—"
"I am the storm physicist here," Halden snapped, eyes still shut. "Trust me, I know where the boiling point is."
He looked like hell. Eyes bloodshot. A vein on his forehead pulsed violently.
"Even you can't maintain a full-dome cyclone weave indefinitely," Bria hissed. "You're pulling from your core too fast."
"You think I don't know that?"
He gestured sharply with his left hand. Above them, the dome twisted. Pressure equalized. The heatwave pressing in from the city edge broke like a tide against it.
"Then let me help," she said, already adjusting her posture, moisture curling around her palms.
Eli reached the base of the steps, Temp close behind. The air near the barrier was dense—he could feel his magic reacting to it, like his own pressure-aligned core wanted to harmonize.
Halden finally opened his eyes, squinting. "Well. Look who made it."
Bria glanced over and raised a brow. "Seriously? You brought the dog?"
"Not a good time," Eli muttered, keeping Temp close as they stepped into the shaded entry.
Someone near the corner turned—Mitchel Donovan. The nervous kid from the back row. His sleeves were still too long, one of them scorched at the cuff. He nodded weakly at Eli, face pale, but alive.
"Hey," Mitchel said. His voice cracked. "Glad you made it."
Eli gave a small nod. "You too."
He looked around again. No more than ten survivor's total. A campus that usually housed thousands, now eerily quiet.
"What is this?" Eli asked, eyes lifting to the sky dome again. "This… shield. That's not a spell you just cast."
Halden exhaled, finally lowering his hands. The dome held, spinning on its own now, self-sustaining for the moment. "It's a spiral barrier," he said. "I tuned the local air mass into a toroidal cyclone, anchored to my mana output. It bends anything solid or high-temp around the campus. Like… a jet stream made of glass."
"That's possible?"
"With thirty years of experience and a mana core hardened by relentless training, and full knowledge of the weather?" He gave a dry, exhausted smile. "Barely."
Eli blinked. Halden didn't just teach atmospheric science and magic. He was atmospheric magic.
Bria shot him a look. "It'll only hold as long as his mana-core doesn't give out."
"And assuming the infected don't start hurling buildings at us," Halden muttered. "Which… is not out of the question."
Temp gave a soft growl.
Eli looked back toward the gate.
Outside, something moved.
The dome wavered slightly. The air grew heavier again.
One of the students that Eli did not recognise, previously silent and withdrawn, begins to shake violently. At first, the others think it's fear or shock—but then the signs become unmistakable: skin greying, eyes glossing, breath gurgling. Someone shouts. Another backs away too slowly. Then it lunges.
It grabs a nearby student—maybe another professor's assistant—and bites deep into the shoulder. Blood sprays across the shielded ground. Screams erupt. Bria is the first to react, yanking the victim back with a sudden burst of condensed mist while shouting for help. Halden's voice booms, summoning a gust of air to hurl the infected back. But it's too late. The infection is already spreading.
Chaos threatens to unravel the fragile safety of the university.