“Great discovery requires chaos, bursts of half-accidental probing into the unknown, and I invite you all to consider this to be a law of nature.”

Arthur Scott Drake, 21, bit his lip as he held his breath. It was difficult to take it all in. That it was real. That Ond Kertész truly stood there right in front of him in the flesh.

With dismay he noted that his fellow classmates were chatting idly, playing games on their phones, and none besides himself seemed to realize what a momentous occasion this was. The semi-circular lecture hall might as well have been a university-themed café.

Kertész had proven the Collatz conjecture in a dazzling display of brilliance that made the proof of Fermat’s last theorem look like a mere trifle. The bushy-bearded Hungarian with intense, hypnotic eyes had entered the world of mathematics like some cerebral Rasputin risen from an otherworldly swamp—or possibly a different planet altogether.

“The mind which cannot entertain paradoxes is not a mind fit for glory; the furious longing for certainty that I recognize in most of my colleagues is the same longing a toddler has for their mother’s teat. It’s a disgusting, pathetic thing.”

Behind Kertész on stage sat their mathematics professor with his hands folded as if in prayer. The contrast between them was palpable. Kertész wore denims and a dirty flannel shirt. Their professor donned the conventional attire of khakis and a blazer—the uniform of a tenured servant.

“I can’t believe Jessica posted that last night. Why would you do belly shots off a pregnant girl?”

Arthur turned, astonished. These imbeciles clucked like chickens while one of the greatest intellects in human history stood before them dropping pearls of wisdom? How could people like that exist?

“Hush,” he said.

The red-haired interrupter stared at Arthur, blinking her fake lashes. “Excuse me?” she said.

He shot a finger toward Kertész and raised his brows with a touch of menace. She opened her fly-catcher of a mouth, apparently offended beyond belief that a fellow student listening to a lecture might want to hear the lecture rather than her gossip.

The words of the genius set his spirit ablaze. He imagined himself on stage, speaking with confidence and passion about his revolutionary work.

“Are you okay?” said a girl slouched next to the interrupter. “You’re … sweating.”

Arthur wiped his forehead. It was wet to the touch. Whenever he got intellectually excited that would happen. His heart pumped like mad and his adrenal glands filled his veins with liquid intensity the equivalent of a quadruple espresso. A sure sign of his latent genius, he believed.

“—which is why I have no interest in wasting my time mentoring the young. I’m no gardener. The thought of nurturing orchids and occasional weeds, passing on the torch and such … I leave that to you dilettantes.”

Kertész said it while giving their professor a once-over, who laughed in an awkward fashion and rubbed his knees slowly.

A process like osmosis takes place when you surround yourself with greatness, Arthur believed. That was the reason why he read biographies of scientists, inventors, and various illuminaries. Simple-minded people always end up becoming the average of those they spend the most time with. That is how the push and pull of social dynamics operates, how groups organize themselves like the organs of your body with every cell becoming similar to their neighbors—if you don’t take charge of this process of osmosis you will be little more than an unwitting victim of its influence.

He closed his eyes and breathed in the atmosphere. Sweat and half-dissipated farts. Perfume with overtones of apricot and hibiscus. Body spray with names like Glacial Rush and Flaming Phoenix. It was the smell of a crowd doomed to mediocrity.

Kertész spoke. Arthur listened, soaking up his words. “I am currently working on something important. Something which will no doubt change the course of history. I won’t tell you what it involves as I’m sure you’re bored with hearing of modular forms, the van Kremst function, nilmanifolds and so on—all I will tell you is that it is bound to leave an imprint like a boot stomped on the face of humanity itself.”

Their professor jolted in his seat, looking strangely up at Kertész from his chair behind him. Arthur too felt for a moment confused by the Hungarian titan’s choice of metaphor, but he shook his head free of any concerns. A boot? That’s power. And power will always feel oppressive to those deprived of it.

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“He said he couldn’t get it up because he’d eaten, like, seven pancakes but I don’t think that was why.”

The girl with the red hair would not stay quiet. Arthur let out a deep sigh.

The other girl, mousy with a black ponytail, patted her friend on her back. “Maybe you should tell him to get off wheat? It really messes with your tantric energy. My aunt told me all about it.”

“Where do you guys think you are? In some hair salon?” Arthur said.

They went quiet, immediately, and the red-haired girl stared at him as if he were some hideous beast. The mousy girl said, “Your nose. It’s bleeding.”

She was right. Blood dripped steadily down Arthur’s shirt. He hadn’t noticed.

Missing the end of Kertész’ guest lecture was a bitter pill to swallow, but it would have been strange for him to just sit there covered in blood. He quietly went to the bathroom and washed his face as well as his shirt.

He got so excited his nose bled. Arthur laughed. His future biographers would surely consider that to be an interesting anecdote.

In the mirror he could see that the sweat had made his dark hair extra curly and there were bags under his eyes. He looked like he’d just woken up from a bad hangover. The fluorescent lighting, he figured. Even so, he was pleased to see that his patchy beard was really coming into its element.

Returning to the lecture hall, he was struck by a strange sound. Or rather: the absence of any sound whatsoever. A comatose silence. Had Kertész left already? Before he got the chance to ask him to sign his TI-84 Plus?

When he opened the door, a mind-numbing, metallic smell assaulted him. It was a scent of rust and copper like someone had grated an old coin directly into his nose. Blood. Tons and tons of blood.

It was a semi-circular scene of horror.

Arthur felt a primal panic take hold of him: his amygdala screamed like a wounded animal and woke up every single part of his brain, neurotransmitters raging throughout his neocortex like a horde of Mongols. Adrenaline coursed through his blood and as he stared at the bloodbath before him he wondered whether it, too, was filled with epinephrine; the thought disturbed him almost more than the sight itself.

In the upper section the body of the redhead sat in a slouched position, but she was missing something. Her head. The mousy girl had half of hers intact. “N-No,” said Arthur. “This can’t be happening.”

Ond Kertész.

He had forgotten all about him. Arthur suppressed his urge to flee and he stepped up on the podium. There was no sign of him. Their professor lay belly down on the stage, slashed in half. His khakis. His blazer. Separated.

“M-Mr. Kertész?”

He looked around. Maybe he was alive. Hurt.

“Are you here?”

There was no response. Just a steady drip, as if from a serene cave wall. And then Arthur heard a faint growl.

He turned to see a nightmarish creature, like a swamp come alive, with a singular, skull-sized eye aimed straight at him. The creature groaned.

Razor-sharp tentacles shot from it, and Arthur had no time to react. There seemed to be hundreds of them. Hopeless. That was how he felt about his predicament. It was utterly hopeless.

Strangely, he thought that it was a shame that Kertész was not there. If he were, Arthur could have offered himself up as bait to save his life. There would be meaning in his demise, and glory.

He closed his eyes and prepared for a meaningless death. That was when he heard the sound of something swooshing through the air.

When he opened his eyes, the beast’s tendrils were squirming about on the floor.

“Found it.”

Before him stood a man, with his finger to his ear.

“It’s a big boy. Think it’s about a 12. Maybe 13.”

He wore a silver suit and held a long blade. From his mouth hung a cigarette.

“Bunch of bodies. Students.” He looked over his shoulder at Arthur. “Got a live one as well.”

“W-Who are you?”

The creature snarled and charged at the stranger. He let out a sigh. “I reached level 21 yesterday, buddy,” he said. “It’s not even a fair fight, no matter how you slice it.”

With that, the stranger split the swamp-like beast in half and it dissipated into a cloud of gray. Arthur jolted back and let out a half-choked cry.

“No sweat,” said the man and flicked away his cigarette. He stared at Arthur. “What’s cooking, good-looking?”

The man was tall and handsome in a gritty kind of way, his blonde hair cut short. A scar ran down his right cheek.

Before he had time to respond, two more men and a woman entered the lecture hall.

“Jesus! It’s a massacre.”

“Guess the cat’s out of the bag. No way they’ll be able to cover this up.”

The woman had long dark hair and lifted her purple dress as she walked across the pools of blood on the floor. “This is a real mess, Sylvian. Let’s just finish this guy off and get out of here.”

One of the men, skinny and wearing a hoodie, nodded his head. “Yeah, this is shaping up to be a real circus. No need for us to get dragged into whatever’s going to come of this.”

The man in the silver suit laughed. “We’re already in it pretty deep, aren’t we? Look, this was bound to happen sooner or later. The Org messed up. They failed to detect the portal. It’s not like it’s our fault.”

It felt as if his heart might make a run for it. The strangers were talking so casually. As if they weren’t standing in the midst of a hellscape.

“Either way …” The man in the hoodie stepped forward and raised his hands. Blue light emanated from them. Arthur felt a chill sweep across the room.

And then he froze.