Everything happened so quickly that Tom would have been unable to follow the events even in real life, let alone while stuck in his system room with its time dilation. One second the native with a sword drawn had been on the wall, then it disappeared, there was a spray of red. A glimpse of Kang diving under the bed, and then his own body collapsing to the floor. Tom suspected someone had knocked into him. Then, on the heels of all that, there was a cacophony of noise from the hallway outside the dormitory, complete with flashes of light and a brief flare of heat.

Within the system room, it was over within three seconds.

Then, before he could fully centre himself, he was picked up under one arm by an adult in a heavy plate armour who moved him and others into the smaller, defendable cleaning loop area. There were shouts, screams, and tears. His body functioned while he watched almost in shock. It found Kang and Bir, and both of their faces were streaked with water lines. In fact, everywhere he looked he saw the same distraught, confused looks.

There was no Ba, and the kids’ friends were howling the hardest. Red wet cheeks and bulging veins were everywhere as they yelled imploringly at the ceiling, while others had their heads tucked away as they collapsed into balls, slowly rocking back and forth.

Ba was gone.

Tom hadn’t known the boy beyond the vague sense that he had always been slightly weird, which in hindsight should have triggered more suspicion. Both over the last nine months and before that he had barely interacted with the boy. Ba was a stranger to him, but strategically speaking, the loss was far more significant. A powerful future asset to humanity was dead.

And Tom was sure he was dead. At the thought, the brief glimpse of the red spray was displayed.

There were no body parts visible, as his body hadn’t looked at those the right time to capture that. But what he had observed was enough. That amount of blood didn’t come from a paper cut, and there had only been two people in that area. The other, Kang, was alive and currently huddled up next to him.

Tom replayed the scene over and over again, trying to get his head around what had happened over those two seconds of real time.

He paused at the image of the creature on the wall, marvelling at how clear it was in his vision, while, judging by the timing of everyone’s else’s reactions, no one else had seen it. He had almost certainly received a title that had let him pierce through its illusions.

Dimitri was in the cleaning loop with them. His face was grim, and through the gap into the main dormitory Tom could see that he was not alone. A mass of armoured legs was filling the sleeping area.

The chief volunteer ignored the adults and knelt down in the middle of them all to comfort the traumatised children. They trusted him and clambered over the kneeling man, trying to get close. Tom’s body was amongst them. Tom briefly considered taking control to tug on the man’s ear to send an emergency signal, then abandoned the idea. Even if he thought he could get away with it, what would dragging him to the secure office look like? And how could it help? If his danger sense was aware of how many of the monsters were out there, then he was sure that adults with fifty years of throwing themselves into this arms race would have counters.

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Was his information on the number of assassins even valuable? Tom was sure people with higher-tier skills than him would have to be to be around. It was logical that the adults by now knew how many were out there.

The opportunity passed as the large man stood up and cleared his throat.

Tom moved to view everything first hand through his avatar.

“I have some very sad news. Ba didn’t make it.” There were shocked screams and sobs from all around Tom. His own body was reacting similarly. “We’ve killed two Cotalda assassins, including the murderer. However, more enemies most likely remain undiscovered. Reincarnators must not leave their system room, and they are the only ones in danger.” That was as good as confirmation that Ba had been a reincarnator. “Everyone else is perfectly safe, but I understand trauma. I’ll stay here tonight for extra security, along with two high-levelled adventuring teams. The danger has passed.” He hesitated, clearly weighing what to say. “Ba was their only target. Everyone is safe.” What was left unsaid was if the assassin had wanted to kill more children, then it could have. If the rules the GODs had put in place had not held, that single individual could have slaughtered them all before help arrived.

Dimitri stood aside. Tom released the delayed memory and returned to experiencing everything in real time. He was on a mattress, his Danger Sense grumbling at him. An enemy was still present. Dimitri and two adventuring teams might be camping in the room, but that didn’t mean shit if they couldn’t see the enemy.

His body was huddled under the covers and was not alone. There were at least five others in the same bed. He wasn’t sure who else was there. That was excluding Bir. She was definitely present, because her clinging had meant he had ended up here with others instead of alone in his own bed.

The Danger Sense, that crawling sense of impending death, remained an annoying distraction.

Tom, to distract himself, threw himself into studying what had happened.

Why did he have this feeling?

He had missed the trip from the cleaning loop to the beds, because he had chosen to listen to Dimitri’s speech with full avatar senses. Now he wanted more information, so he replayed the relevant pieces.

Immediately after finishing his speech, Dimitri had gotten them moving quickly and encouraged them to sleep in larger groups. Tom’s body had done as instructed and hurried across the open space, trying not to look at where it had seen the spray of red. Such caution proved unnecessary, for, when he paused for the few frames and his eyes had checked the relevant area, he saw that everything had been left spotless. Furtive glances searched dark corners, then his body checked the lights on the ceiling, assessing how long until they went to night mode

A chill went through Tom, and he rewound the memory, then froze it.

His body had glanced up briefly. But that quick moment, thanks to the power of the pseudo-system room, had been enough.

That, right there, was the cause of his Danger Sense continuing to go haywire.

In the frozen frame, on the roof above them, there was a creature.

A monster clinging to the ceiling in wait.

Six thick furry legs with brown, white and black banding, each one longer than Ta was tall. The pattern on the leg was distinctive to the one from the isolation room, but there, he had only seen one of the legs, while here, everything was visible: a condensed body with a single soccer ball-sized eye embedded in the centre of its torso. It was of the compound variety like you would find in an insect, having different facets that allowed the creature to look simultaneously in every direction.

It looked like the stuff of nightmares, and it was on the roof, watching and waiting.

Tom was very glad of the presence of the system room, because if something else wasn’t piloting his body, he would have drawn the covers tighter around him, despite how ridiculous such an attempt would have been.

It was above them, spying and looking forward to a moment of weakness, and he was helpless to escape its gaze.