Ryan's gaze shifted downward.
"Are you two comfortable like that?"
Both Ethan and Lucas paused. Only then did they seem to realize what he was looking at.
Their bags. Bulging, overstuffed, hanging awkwardly off their shoulders with no order to what had been packed inside.
Lucas shifted slightly under the weight. "I mean… yeah?" he said, though even he didn't sound convinced.
Ryan raised an eyebrow.
Ethan tried to stand properly, but adjusting his footing sent the weight pulling him off balance.
Ryan watched them for a second. His own bag sat differently on his back. He had taken what he needed from the floors. These two had taken everything.
"You're going to slow yourselves down," he said plainly.
Lucas frowned. "We just grabbed what we could. We don't know what's out there."
"I know," Ryan said. "That's why you shouldn't carry more than you can actually move with. What happens if you need to run?"
Lucas opened his mouth to argue, then stopped. He was already feeling it. Even standing still was starting to take effort.
Ethan shifted again, breathing slightly uneven. He hadn't noticed it before. The fear and tension had masked it. Now it was obvious.
"I get it," Ryan said. "You don't want to run out of supplies." Neither of them spoke. "But if something shows up and you can't move fast enough, none of that will matter."
The words settled in the room.
Lucas looked down at his bag. Then at Ethan's. Then back at Ryan. "So what do we do?"
"Keep water. Keep food. Drop everything else."
Lucas winced.
Ethan reached slowly for the strap of his bag. His fingers tightened around it, then loosened. "Alright," he said quietly.
Lucas let out a long breath. "Yeah. Okay."
They started moving. The room filled with soft sounds as zippers opened and items came out. Extra clothes, books, things grabbed in a panic. Most of it ended up back on the bed or the floor. Ryan noticed they had both packed "skincare" products, which he chose not to comment on.
When they finished, only water and food remained.
Lucas adjusted his bag and straightened up properly for the first time since Ryan had walked in. "That's better," he muttered.
Ethan rolled his shoulders, testing the weight with a faint nod.
Ryan looked them over one last time. The bags were lighter now.
Ethan looked tense but steadier. Lucas still looked nervous, though no longer on the verge of buckling under his own pack.
Then his gaze dropped to their hands.
Lucas had a knife. Ethan had one too. Strapped to Ryan's side was the axe he had pulled from the fire compartment on the second floor.
For a brief moment Ryan's eyes twitched.
He had half a mind to hand it over. Compared to the two of them he was already far stronger, and the knives they were holding looked pitiful by comparison. But the thought lasted only a second before he dismissed it. His own survival still came first. The axe gave him an advantage in close combat, and right now that mattered more than generosity.
The three of them stepped out into the corridor.
Ryan took the lead. Ethan followed behind him, and Lucas brought up the rear, glancing over his shoulder every few seconds as though expecting something to come charging down the hall at any moment.
Their expressions told different stories. Ryan looked calm. Ethan looked pale and tense, his fear obvious but held in check by sheer effort. Lucas was the least composed of the three, eyes moving too fast, breathing a little too quick, shoulders locked too tight.
They moved carefully down the corridor, steps measured, no one speaking. The silence around them felt stretched and unnatural, broken only by the distant tap of rain and the soft scrape of their shoes against the floor.
As they neared the staircase, Lucas finally broke.
"So," he whispered, voice dry. "What's the plan?"
Ryan didn't look back. "Leave the campus."
Ethan frowned slightly. "How?"
That made Ryan pause for the first time.
Honestly, he hadn't thought that far ahead. The plan in his mind had always been simple: get out of the dorm, get off campus, find his sister. Each step existed more as a direction than a real route. Until now, brute force had been enough. Kill what was in front of him, survive, move forward.
But leaving the campus was different.
The university grounds were large. If what had happened in the dorms had played out across the rest of campus as well, the place could be crawling with mutated humans. Open courtyards, lecture halls, parking lots, the gates themselves — any of it could be a death trap.
Ryan's jaw tightened slightly. "I'll figure it out," he said.
Ethan was quiet for a moment, his gaze fixed on the stairwell below. Then he said, "I might have an idea. If you're willing to hear it."
Ryan looked back at him properly.
Ethan still wasn't meeting either of their eyes. His face was pale but more focused than before.
"Talk," Ryan said.
Ethan nodded slowly. "The male dorm isn't far from the maintenance road behind the engineering block. Most students never use it. It loops around the back of campus and connects to the service gate instead of the main entrance."
Ryan said nothing.
"The main gate will probably be bad," Ethan continued, voice low. "Too many people, too much open ground. But the service road is quieter. If we can get behind the engineering block, we might avoid most of the central campus entirely."
Lucas frowned. "You think the service gate will be open?"
"I don't know," Ethan admitted. "But even if it's locked, that route should be less crowded than the main road. The campus walls are high. If the gate doesn't work, we move along the wall until we find another way out."
Ryan's eyes narrowed slightly as he turned it over.
It wasn't a perfect plan. But it was a plan, and that alone made it better than what he'd had a minute ago.
"Do you know the path well?" Ryan asked.
"Better than most people," Ethan said. "I used to cut through there to avoid crowds."
That was enough.
Ryan turned back toward the stairs. "Then we use your route."
Ethan let out a breath that sounded close to relief.
For his part, Ethan was still trying to understand his own decision. There was no rational explanation for why he had stepped forward earlier. Something had simply pushed at him, a feeling he couldn't name, insisting that if he let this moment pass he would regret it. Possibly for the rest of his life, however long that turned out to be.
And there was no denying what he had seen. Whoever this person was, he had killed dozens of those creatures and walked out of it without a scratch. That wasn't normal.
Maybe some people adapted faster than others. Maybe this was what that looked like.
They reached the stairs and began descending.
The second-floor silence gave way to the dim openness of the stairwell. Blood smears marked the walls in places. A broken slipper lay near the landing between floors. Lower down, something dark had dried into the concrete in a shape none of them looked at for long.
Lucas turned away first. Ethan kept his eyes forward. Ryan's grip tightened slightly on the axe.
The first floor came into view.
Ryan stopped at the bottom and raised one hand. The other two froze instantly.
He listened. His senses had sharpened noticeably since the Awakening, enough that he had known Ethan and Lucas were alive in that room before he ever knocked. Now he swept the first floor carefully, reading the silence.
There were no sounds.
It wasn't surprising. The noise he had made clearing the upper floors had drawn everything that could be drawn.
Ryan glanced at Ethan. "Which way?"
Ethan pointed left, toward the rear corridor leading to the side exit and the path behind the engineering block.
Ryan nodded.
Then, axe in hand, backpack on his shoulders, and two frightened students at his back, he led them toward the first real step out.