Gabriel, an ordinary college student who possessed nothing out of the ordinary, was sitting at his desk, studying for the final exams of his semester at college. Sometimes thinking about his parents who were far away.
Even though his parents were city hall employees in city C, they didn't have much money, so the most they could do was send their son to a good university in a different city, but they couldn't follow him, which made Gabriel feel lonely and miss his parents from time to time.
But even with such an ordinary and simple background, Gabriel's future seemed anything but ordinary at the moment.
If the world had stayed the same, his future would probably be ordinary, but now? Impossible!
The dead who were walking and attacking people in the streets, biting off their organs, and the strange words floating in front of him at that moment were telling him it was impossible.
[Your world has entered the next stage of evolution. Mana is now available on planet earth. Good luck everyone and welcome to the beginning of the end]
There is no way his future will be ordinary.
"What the fuck is happening to the world?" Gabriel sighed, pale and shaky, watching from his dorm the chaos that was happening below and hearing the explosions coming from the city center in the distance.
The familiar faces he used to see walking around the college and dorm were now covered in blood, lifeless on the floor or running for their lives with all their might.
Contemplating that hellish sight, Gabriel was confused, afraid and his legs were almost giving way under his own weight. But even in his current state, he still managed to notice something when looking at the situation below. The dead, or rather, the undead that ran after people did not seem to be students or employees of the college. They wore strange, period clothing, as if they had just come from some kind of medieval event or cosplay convention. However, slowly, people killed by these undead began to rise up.
"No! Let me go!"
As he watched, Gabriel heard a girl screaming and instinctively turned to the source of the scream, only to see three undead creatures grab the screaming girl, who he immediately recognized as a classmate, and began biting her, tearing off chunks of flesh with their rotten teeth, making the girl scream even more desperately trying to get rid of the creatures without success, until her screams stopped.
His face turned pale, and he felt his stomach turning, forcing him to move away from the window to escape the horrendous sight, causing his legs to finally give out and him to fall to his knees on the floor, covered in cold sweat.
Gabriel's ordeal didn't end there, however, as soon as he looked away from the chaos below, a terrible headache struck him, forcing him to lie on the floor in agony. The pain was so great that at some point he couldn't tell if he was hearing the screams of people dying outside or his own screams.
A storm of information was forcing itself into Gabriel's head, and it was frying his brain. He had never felt anything like it. It looked like he would drop dead at any moment with his head on fire.
However, Gabriel had to endure it. And he endured that torture without knowing how much time had passed, the pain didn't allow him to even notice the passage of time.
To him, it seemed like an eternity, but it could very well have only been a few seconds when all hell seemed to have finally ended. He remained limp and covered in sweat on the floor, breathing heavily.
"…Status?" Gabriel whispered, remembering information that appeared in his head out of nowhere.
[Gabriel Angelus]
Race: Human
Title: None
Class: None
Skills: None
Gabriel looked at the words floating in front of his eyes, and in a moment of lucidity, he managed to confirm that the strange information that appeared in his mind was true.
The world had entered a state of evolution where magic had become part of it. Monsters came to earth to help in the evolution of humans, and a strange system came into action to help those who managed to survive the change of mana entering their bodies.
All of this seemed to be true, and Gabriel knew it. That explained the undead with strange clothes that looked like they were from somewhere else. The words floating in front of him and the pain he felt while receiving all that information seemed to have been a mixture of the pain of the strange knowledge infiltrating his brain and his body undergoing a great change due to the mana now present in earth.
But even knowing all this, it was still difficult for Gabriel to accept what was happening to the world. Well. The information in his head told him that only 50% of the people in the world would survive the changes provided by mana. What would happen to his family then? His girlfriend? His friends? Were they killed by these monsters? Couldn't they survive the change? He wanted to just scream and run after them, but he couldn't right now. The things he was starting to hear at this point were telling him that it would be something virtually impossible to do now. Leave the dorm.
Perhaps due to the mana changing his body, Gabriel was able to hear sounds in the dormitory that he wasn't able to hear before. Sounds of flesh being torn apart and chewed, sounds of footsteps shuffling through the hallways and sounds of people crying and hiding inside their rooms.
The dorm seemed to be infested with the undead and these damn creatures were attacking everyone who caught their attention, and the wooden doors of the rooms didn't seem to offer much resistance against two or three of these things trying hard to get in.
Luckily, Gabriel's room was on the top floor and at the end of the hall, and he knew that his girlfriend and his friends were not in the dorm at this time of day, but in the main college building. He didn't know what the situation was like there, but he could only hope that it was better than in the dorm and that they were safe.
As for his parents, they lived in the neighboring city, so as much as Gabriel wanted to confirm his parents' safety, there wasn't much he could do about it. Mainly because his cell phone had no signal. He could only pray that they were both safe and that he could get out of here, so he could find them later.
However, first Gabriel would have to find a way to get rid of five floors of undead, so he could go to the college and look for his girlfriend and friends.
He took a deep breath and did his best to calm his breathing and mind. Being agitated and acting impulsively was nothing more than a death wish. Impulsive people do stupid things without thinking about the consequences, and those consequences are usually their own lives and those around them.
Taming his breathing and mind as much as he could, Gabriel began looking around the dorm for something he could use to defend himself from the undead. Similar to the series and movies he watched, his new knowledge told him that these creatures were practically immortal and would only die from attacks on their heads, so the best choice would be a sharp object that could kill these monsters with a single attack.
With that in mind, Gabriel ran over to the things of one of the two roommates he knew used to go camping and hunting with his father and grabbed a hunting knife from his backpack, which his friend had received as a gift a few months ago from his father.
The knife was the size of his forearm, was camouflaged and had a mini-compass in the sheath. On its handle, hanging from a rope, was a half-used flint that would definitely come in handy if the world went completely to hell.
The only lingering problem would be the danger of getting too close to these creatures. The people killed by them were already getting up and going after the living below, so assuming that a single bite was the same as dying wasn't wrong. Gabriel only had a knife and needed to get close to be able to attack these monsters, but so far the smallest group he had seen or heard was a trio that was climbing the stairs towards the fifth floor.
Killing something like that in Gabriel's mind already seemed almost impossible. What if there were three, then? It goes without saying.
But he knew he had to at least try. Otherwise, he might as well jump out the window and give up once and for all. Something he would never do, under any circumstances. So his only option would be to fight somehow.
He took another look around the dorm and started to pick up several things and place them on one of the beds. He took leather jackets, duct tape, wood from under beds and even ripped the door off the mini-fridge they had in the dorm.
Soon after placing everything on the bed, Gabriel heard the three undead arriving at the fifth floor.
Now knowing that he had to hurry, Gabriel began wrapping a shirt around each forearm and wrapping them with duct tape and then made another layer with the leather jackets, being careful not to limit his movements, leaving space for his wrist and elbow.
Gabriel still wanted to break the woods and create a better defense, but the noise would make the undead run directly to where he was, so he gave up on the idea. Instead, he contented himself with taping the mini-fridge door to his left arm like a shield.
The moment Gabriel finished preparing himself, as if it was a warning that he should act, the sound of the three undead stopped in front of his dormitory door and began to crash into it.
Maybe they smelled him, or he made some noise. Gabriel had no idea how these things knew he was there, but it didn't matter. The only thing that matters is that he was prepared, and there were only two choices left for him. Move forward, survive, or…
Survive.
The undead were slamming into the door so hard that the hinges were starting to come off the wall and the door was cracking.
If things continued like this, the door would break, these things would come in, and only death would be available to Gabriel.
So he decided to act first.
Gabriel ran to the door with his heart feeling like it was going to explode, he took a deep breath and opened the door quickly, moving to the side.
What followed was the sound of three bodies falling to the wooden floor, making much more noise than Gabriel expected, but that didn't distract him from what he had to do now.
Taking advantage of the fact that the three creatures were on the ground, Gabriel approached and stabbed one of them in the head with all his strength.
"Shit!?" Gabriel shouted, surprised.
The spurt of blood Gabriel expected didn't happen, instead his knife got stuck in the undead's skull.
Gabriel's surprise made him momentarily careless and he didn't notice the undead with the knife stuck in his head grab his leg and pull it, knocking him down on top of the other undead.
Now there was Gabriel and the three undead fighting on top of each other. The creatures were trying to bite him, but they got in front of each other and he desperately fought to push them away.
Gabriel tried to pull out the knife stuck in the undead's skull a few times, but it was stuck tighter than he initially thought. His despair began to grow more and more and he began to scream in fear, struggling to free himself from the three undead that were now grabbing him.
He hit their heads with the mini-fridge door wildly, even hitting his own body a few times, but without feeling anything. The adrenaline and fear numbed his body, he couldn't think anymore, he just wanted to get out of the grip of these creatures.
Wounds and cuts appeared on the undead's heads with each blow they received, but they didn't let go, they didn't seem to feel pain. They seemed to just want to taste the meat that was fighting in their hands.
Luckily, two of the undead could only reach Gabriel's arms, which were covered with layers of clothing and tape, and the last one was underneath the two others and couldn't free himself.
Gabriel's desperate situation continued for a few more minutes of pure terror until after a sharp blow to the temple of one of the undead, his situation began to improve.
The creature that received the blow stopped moving and one of the pairs of hands holding Gabriel lost strength and released him. Now, instead of having two undead fighting for his flesh, holding him and chewing on his arm trying to get through the layer of protection he made, there was only one holding him and another immobilized beneath them.
Feeling the improvement of his situation in his desperate fight to survive, Gabriel began to struggle using the last of his energy.
"Go! Fuck! Yourself! Shitty! World!" Gabriel screamed, crying, punching the arm of the remaining undead that was still holding him.
Just when his energy seemed like it would run out did Gabriel miraculously manage to break free and move away from the undead on the ground. He wanted to feel relieved, but he still needed to do something more.
Since Gabriel was no longer on top of them, the undead would be able to get up. If they stood up, that would be the end of him. He knew that.
His only option was to strengthen his courage again and gather the energy he didn't have to be able to kill these monsters. If Gabriel couldn't do that, then it was over. He would become food for the dead and return as one of them, a creature without conscience who only thinks about eating and consuming human flesh.