Russell didn’t expect the lobby could get any darker. And emptier.
Leaning against a column, he watched random people lumber past, carrying whatever they could carry—chairs, lounge seats, sofas, couches, wooden tables, even throw pillows. They brought them all to the front, feeding the makeshift wall barricading the glass doors and windows from one end of the lobby all the way to the other.
“They boarded up the place pretty quickly,” he said, partly amazed, watching wood and metal replace fragile glass. He grunted, thinking they might just make this work. If only everyone was this cooperative earlier.
“People will do anything when their life is on the line,” Justin muttered.
Russell shot him a sideways glance. Justin hadn’t stopped shaking ever since they had decided to stay. The decorative vase in his hands looked more of a danger to himself than to any monster. Then again, Clayton hadn’t stopped fidgeting with his hammer either as he slouched next to Justin.
Maybe it was Russell who was too relaxed in the middle of their crisis.
He watched the progress developing around him as his mind concentrated on the song. With all the noise going on in the background, he couldn’t tell for sure if the intensity of the heartbeats had increased. So he relied on his ears instead of his senses. Even with the ongoing racket, the continuous roars bellowing outside made it certain. The monsters were coming.
Relaxed, my ass.
He leaned away from the pillar and examined the back half of the lobby. Manager Harrington gathered the non-combatants, organizing them into groups, delegating tasks to help secure the hall, tallying anyone missing—and seeing to the dead.
But the more the old man rambled, the more it became obvious that he was only trying to keep everyone occupied, to prevent anyone from dwelling on more depressing thoughts. Russell wished the manager luck.
Serena broke away from the staff and headed for the front. Russell gave her a small wave, and she took a small detour toward his pillar, Harper walking beside her as they were locked in a hushed argument.
“Problem?” Russell asked seeing the disapproval on Serena’s face.
“No, the volunteers did well.” Serena rubbed the dark bags under her eyes and took in the barricade nearing its completion. “But wouldn’t it be a safer choice for everyone if we evacuated the lobby?” The woman had been busy for only a few minutes, yet others might think she had been working for days without a wink of sleep.
“You can’t save everyone, Serena,” Harper said, letting out an exasperated sigh before leaving Serena behind. “Only madness await you down that road.”
As Harper angled toward the small army of fighters near the front, she snapped the collapsable baton in her hand to its full length. Serena furrowed her brows, shook her head, and slipped away to resume with her never-ending responsibilities when Russell grabbed her arm, remembering the bag of supplies on his back.
“Do you have a moment—” Serena winced, and Russell jerked his hand back from her left sleeve, a spike of fear shooting through him. “Did I…Did I hurt you?” Wary of the jump in his strength, he had been making the conscious effort not to use excess force. Or he had been trying to. Had his control slipped?
“No, no, it’s alright. I’m fine.” Serena said, crossing her arms a little too quickly. She inclined her head toward a handful of people standing nearby. “It’s just…we’re looking for an old friend from the drama club.”
Russell planned to ask her for a favor, but the unexpected topic caught him off guard. “You were in the drama club?”
Serena flashed him a weary smile. “Let’s catch up later,” she said, squeezing his hand before she approached the group waiting for her.
“I can’t believe you don’t remember,” Justin whispered as they watched her go. “She was such a wonderful lead in Romeo and Juliet.”
“The lead role?” Russell asked. “I don’t even remember. Which year did she act as Juliet?”
Justin shot him a quizzical look. “Who said anything about her playing Juliet?”
“You mean she—” Russell ran a hand down his face. “Did we even go to the same high school?”
Justin shrugged. Clayton, on the other hand, had kept his head down, remaining quiet.
Russell nudged the big guy on the shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
Clayton’s shoulders slumped. “Dude, we shouldn’t have voted to stay.”
“I concur,” Justin said.
“Well, I don’t plan on dying just yet,” Russell said. “Do you?”
His friends exchanged uncertain looks. Aside from staying together, there was nothing else he could do for them. Clayton had found out his love for video games hadn’t prepared him for the cruelty of their new reality, while Justin was…Justin.
“We’re gonna be fine,” Russell said, more to himself than to his friends. And with no small amount of dread, he took the opportunity to turn his mind inward.
Your soul has leveled up.
Your attributes have increased.
Strength +1
Agility +1
…
Endurance +1
He finally reviewed the prompt he had disregarded earlier. This time he made sure not to let his thoughts wander. His eyes scanned the number of changed attributes to make sure, but he already knew even before he counted them. His level up had given him a +1 increase across the board.
[Attributes]
Strength: 11
Agility: 10
Dexterity: 9
Perception: 10
Intelligence: 7
Vitality: 12
Constitution: 8
Endurance: 9
He pinched the bridge of his nose, unsure if he should be excited or terrified. No wonder he had felt off. Everything about him had been upgraded, all at once, all out of his control.
And the change in his attributes hadn’t been the end of it.
Your assimilation limit has increased.
Your [Soul Records] have been updated.
Assimilition limit? His brows furrowed, and he brought up his Status.
[Status]
Name: Russell Flynn
Race: Human (Earth Human)
Level: 2
Assimilation: 1/11 (Untiered)
So leveling not only gave a flat increase to all his attributes, the number of shards he could absorb had increased as well. Which sounds like a good thing. For now. Guess that was one mystery solved.
A part of him thought of sharing his discovery to the geeks beside him but decided against it. He doubted either of them were in the mood.
Harper had reached the volunteers gathered near the barricade. Former jocks made up half their numbers—most of them still in shape, all of them accustomed to physical confrontations from playing football and other sports. They all stood tall and proud.
Only time would tell if they would fare better with their numbers now closing to a hundred, or if they would crumble once they realize what was on the line wasn’t some meaningless trophy, but their actual life.
In the dismal atmosphere of the lobby, the team captains’ leadership styles shone in stark contrast. Bradford had all the charisma and charm, an iconic commander, and he knew the right words to say to get his men pumped up, always loud and borderline obnoxious. Rook led with an economy of effort, his words few but impactful, his orders focused on delegation instead of control, a moderator who embodied respect. Those who hadn’t been inundiated by jock culture flocked to him—especially the women.
Harper wasn’t the only female who had volunteered to fight. A dozen other women stood around her, carrying their own weapons, listening to the two former captains shout on top of each other.
The offense and defense of a football team played with two different mindsets. But they didn’t have two teams right now. Their assembled militia could only be led by one captain, and the cracks in their teamwork was beginning to show.
“Where the hell is Coach Sanders when we need him?” Russell clicked his tongue seeing Bradford and Rook get into another argument. Their disorganized group of volunteers might simply do the monsters a favor by ending up killing each other.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
A howl reverberated from the parking lot, and soon, the roars morphed into howling cries, answering the initial call.
“Knox!” Bradford called out.
Clayton jumped, fumbling with his sledgehammer in surprise.
“What are you doing?” Bradford asked, staring back at Russell and his friends. “Get your big ass over here!”
“Nah, man. I’m good.” Clayton shook his head to Bradford’s annoyance, but the douchebag didn’t push the issue.
“You could join them, you know?” Russell said. ”You’ll fight better with a group.”
“They were your teammates,” Clayton said. “Why don’t you join them?”
Russell shrugged. “Everyone knows by now I fight better alone.”
“Well, I trust you over any of them,” Clayton said, squeezed the handle of his weapon in a trembling grip. “I’d rather plunk this big ass of mine by your side if you don’t mind.”
Russell gave Justin sidelong glance.
“No one bothered to invite me…” Justin mumbled.
Russell rubbed his eyes. So much for fighting alone.
Another aftershock sent the ground trembling under their feet, strong enough to silence the captains’ shouting match. The next moment, they came to an agreement and ordered the fighters to form a loose arc facing the partially-covered glass doors, double file.
A quiet pause enveloped not only the volunteers but the entire lobby, leaving the song in Russell’s head and the refrain of monstrous howls beyond the boarded-up windows.
One of the guys manning the human wall stepped away from his position. “Flynn!” a large man called out, his deep voice echoing in the silence, his features silhouetted by the light coming from the glass doors. “You mentioned something about having super hearing?”
“What are you talking about?” Russell asked, recognizing Rook’s voice.
“You said you could hear them coming, right?”
Russell tilted his head. “You could say that.”
“Well?” one of the volunteers asked in a gruff tone. “How many are them bastards?”
Taking a deep breath, Russell closed his eyes and let the world around him fade away…until only the song remained.
“Can you tell if they’re heading here?” yelled a different voice.
Russell pursed his lips. The song in his head was more noise than anything else, the overlapping heartbeats like threads intertwined together in a mess.
Someone shook him on the shoulder, causing his eyebrow to twitch. “H-How many did you say were out there?” Justin's quivering voice whispered beside him.
Russell tilted his head in concentration. He turned a deaf ear to anything else, and his senses homed in on the alien heartbeats.
“Flynn!” Bradford’s voice echoed in his head, letting the beastial roars and panicked voices come flooding back in.
“Shut up and let me think!” Russell shouted. He untangled the threads, pulling them apart, counting the individual heartbeats in a slow, painstaking process.
One. Two. Five…A dozen…Two…Dozen…THREE—
His eyes flew open.
“Fuck.”
“I don’t like it when you actually curse,” Clayton said.
“We need to go,” Russell said, his heart racing.
“W-What?” Justin asked.
“Collins! Williams!” Russell yelled. ”We need to leave!”
“What the hell is the matter with you?” Bradford shouted back as his fighters exchanged tense murmurs. ”Why are you changing your mind now?”
“Because there’s too many of them!”
“You don’t say?” Bradford drawled, his voice dripping with sarcasm. ”Why do you think we’ve gathered large group this time?”
“And I’m saying that’s not enough!” Why wouldn’t the bastard listen? ”I’m serious, Brad. There’s no time. We need to evacuate now.”
“Damn coward!” Tommy said aloud. “The pressure must’ve gotten to him. Now the runt wants to run away.”
“Russ? What’s wrong?” Serena asked, appearing from behind the pillar.
Russell clenched his flashlight as he forced out his next words through clenched teeth. “We need to evacuate everyone.”
“But you said—”
“I know what I said!” Russell snapped, then blew out a frustrated sigh. “I was wrong, okay? There’s too many of them. We’ll only get slaughtered if we stay here.”
The song rose in pitch, the beats drumming in wild anticipation.
Outside, the howls themselves reached a fever pitch.
“Serena!” Russell said, his pulse skyrocketing.
Her lips pressed together before she gave him a somber nod. “Hallie! Martin! Change of plans,” Serena called out as she spun on her heels. “Gather the other staff and let Mr. Harrington know. Jen, Kim, you’re with me.”
She and two of her staff jogged back to the crowd of non-combatants waiting at the farside of the cleared-out lobby. Russell watched the dominoes fall. The news was soon passed around, throwing the tense atmoshere into even more chaos.
Mr. Harrington returned to the rear and led the staff in shepherding the crowd into the hallway, but this wasn’t the kind of emergency a regular crowd control could manage. Everyone went into action, panicking, lacking all coordination and order they needed to evacuate without any issue or delay. Their panic inadvertently caused a bottleneck at the mouth of the hallway, and the bottleneck brought on even more panic.
Clayton cursed seeing how the disorderly retreat had caused a human traffic jam. “That’s gonna take some time.”
“We don’t have the time,” Russell said.
“What’s going on?” Bradford asked as he and a few others jogged down to Russell’s position. “What the hell did you do?”
“Are we evacuating?” Rook asked.
Russell nodded. “It was a mistake to even stay.”
“Are you kidding me right now?” Bradford groaned in exasperation. “First you agree to stay, then you suddenly changed your mind. Now you’ve chosen to send everyone into panic?!”
Justin hugged the white vase to his chest. “C-Circumstances have changed. We need to—”
“Shut the fuck up, twerp,” Tommy said, shoving Justin back against the column. ”Brad wasn’t talking to you.”
“Don’t take it out on him.” Russell stepped in front of Justin, shooting Tommy a frown. “No one asked for this to happen. We just need to leave. Change locations.” He eyed Bradford and Rook, the ones whose decisions mattered. “Think of it as an audible. Serena and Mr. Harrington already came up with the exit routes and alternate plans anyway. So we called it.”
“No,” Bradford said.
“No?” Russell asked.
“No,” Bradford repeated with a glare. “Be honest, Flynn. Is this because you don’t want anyone else to get a shard?”
“Get a…shard?” Russell blinked disbelieving eyes at Bradford. “There’s a real chance everyone here may die at any second, and you’re thinking about freakin’ shards?!”
Bradford’s only reply was a scoff before he jogged back to the guys waiting before the barricade.
“Hey! Where are you—”
Rook grabbed Russell’s shoulder, getting his attention. “How many?”
“Too many,” Russell said with a shake of his head.
“How. Many.”
Russell recalled the songs in his head, the overwhelming numbers. The futility. He swallowed, shoving the dread back down his throat.
“Dozens.”
Rook’s expression went slack for a few seconds. Then his eyes widened, and he shot after Bradford. “Collins! Stop! This is suicide!”
“I’m the captain here!” Bradford shouted over his shoulder. “And I say my boys will be making a stand here. We’re going to stay and fight.”
“That lunatic,” Clayton said, watching Tommy and the others scramble to return to the front.
“You were just like him earlier,” Russell said, rolling the flashlight in his hand, nervous energy coursing through him. “You were so eager to fight and kill your first monster.”
“Well, I already learned my lesson. I’m not planning on relearning it again.”
The song was so strong now Russell didn’t need to concentrate to hear it. The heartbeats drowned his mind in noise as he stared at the backs of the volunteers, fools standing their ground, so small and insignificant compared to the whole facade of the lobby, to what was coming.
Did they not hear how many the monsters were? Or did they choose to hold their position knowing anyway?
“Mr. Collins! Everyone! Stop this madness right now!” Manager Harrington marched past Russell’s group, stopping a short distance behind the volunteers to address their entire line. “Please, I implore you to leave at once! Head to the rear! Join the evacuation while there is still time!”
The song reached a plateau.
Russell kept his head on a swivel. Where are you? He eyed the windows to their left, their right, the front entrance, back to the windows again, his attention never resting on a single area. Where will you come from?
Glass cracked. His gaze snapped to the left. The barricades there held. No sign of entry. But there had been a break-in somewhere, and the wall of furniture simply covered any—
A lounge seat stacked atop an overturned table fell to the floor, revealing fractured glass, as silence fell in the lobby.
“Oh, dear God…” Mr. Harrington whispered, making the Sign of the Cross.
More glass shattered as something large forced itself through the window. A monster’s eyeless head peered inside.
“We need to…We need to get out of here,” the old manager said, turning back around, and he shot past Russell, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Everyone, run away!”
“R-Russ?” Justin asked as the screams returned with newfound intensity.
The monster crammed its head through the tight opening.
[Scaletooth Savage]
The name appeared above the its head, superimposed on the broken window.
Then the rest of the alien heartbeats surrounded the lobby, and Russell bit back a curse. “What are you waiting for? Go!”
The vase fell and shattered on the floor. Justin scurried around the pillar, dashing to the other end of the emptied hall, Clayton a step behind him, Russell bringing up the rear.
“It’s trying to get in!” a voice screamed behind them.
Clayton glanced back and winced. “Crazy bastards.”
“Keep going!” Russell barked. He took a look as well and stopped dead in his tracks.
The table standing in the monster’s way crashed to the floor, leaving the window even more open.
And the fighters stood by, watching, doing nothing.
“Dude! What’re you doing?” Clayton shouted. He had come to a halt before reaching the hallway, while Justin never stopped running, disappearing into the darkness.
“Keep going!” Russell repeated. “I’ll find you guys later!”
At the front of the lobby, the volunteers finally saw reason and retreated.
“Collins! Williams!” Russell called out but realized only a few were running toward him—all of them women.
Harper wasn’t one of them.
“Harper!” he shouted, not knowing if he should charge ahead or fall back. Where the hell was that woman? ”Harper! You guys need to leave! We can’t win!”
A small figure at the center of the line looked over their shoulder. “Russ?” Harper’s voice rolled across the large room. “I…I can’t leave Brad behind…”
Russell grated his teeth. Why? Why are you always so hardheaded?
“Russ!” Serena asked, panting beside him. ”Why haven’t they left yet?”
“Why are you asking me?” he asked in exasperation. “Fudge, why are you still here? You need to go!”
“But I—“
“Go! I’ll take care of it,” he said, making sure Serena cleared the exit before turning back to the simmering chaos. A small portion of the barricade had crumbled, making the monster on the other side of the shattered window visible.
And the whole lobby “visible” to it.
The monster let out a resounding howl.
“Bradford! Rook!” Russell shouted through the noise, but none of them heard.
Silence returned, yet the monster kept its maw open.
“Collins! Williams! Listen to me!” he called out again, running forward, his bag bouncing on his back.
But none of them turned.
An ember flickered to life behind the monster’s throat, blossoming into a small flame.
“It’s gonna fire something!” he yelled, charging ahead, his legs driving him onward, his thoughts on Harper who refused to leave to save herself, on Bradford’s obvious greed for his own shard from the start, on everyone Russell had doomed by convincing them earlier to stay and fight—all because of his longing to be home.
None of them moved.
The flame grew into a blaze, flooding the monster’s maw with a churning, swirling, roiling ball of fire.
Then there was screaming. Weapons dropping. Backpedalling. Fleeing. But it was too late.
None of them would make it.
Russell wouldn’t make it.
Yet he refused to give up without trying.
“Get down!” he screamed. Having no other option, using all his strength, he flung his own bag at the monster.
Fire blasted from the Scaletooth’s maw, tearing through the air in a fiery shriek.
His bag, his supplies, his way to get home—hurtled across the lobby, shooting past the human wall.
Colliding with the orb of flame.
A blast rocked the lobby.
Light flooded the vast hall. A wave of heat swept above the ground, slamming into Russell and throwing him off his feet.
His ears rang, his eyes blinded momentarily by the explosion. Then the lobby plunged back into darkness. Ahead of him, around a large scorched mark on the carpeted floor, people lay collapsed on the floor—all of them alive.
Bradford lifted his head from the ground, his right cheek singed, his rattled eyes staring at Russell. “F-Flynn…?”
Even now, the fire-breathing monster lurked outside the window, its sharp teeth glinting, its maw trailing smoke.
[Scaletooth Savage - 7th Shard / Level 2]
Such damage. And all from a single attack. How arrogant were they, thinking they could fight back?
With parts of the barricade blown away from the windows, more monsters peered inside the lobby. Their names flashed in his vision, appearing one by one like a silent countdown to everyone’s demise.
[Scaletooth Savage]
[Scaletooth Savage]
[Scaletooth Savage]
…
[Scaletooth Savage]
A dozen names and counting. And these were only the ones he could see.
Russell’s hopeless gaze returned to Bradford.
“RUN!”