[The skill "Mana Manipulation" has been selected!]
The metallic sound of the notification didn't echo through the room, but straight inside his head. Nathan blinked, the shock numbing any other reaction for a full second.
Half a meter from his face, a card with golden edges and an incandescent texture spun slowly in the air.
He tore his gaze from that ghostly glow and swallowed hard. Where the hell was he?
A classroom. But something was deeply wrong. The teacher's chalk was millimeters from the blackboard, suspended in a vacuum.
A drop of sweat ran down the temple of the boy in the row beside him, but it was completely frozen halfway down.
Dozens of students in their desks, statues of flesh and bone trapped in an instant stolen from time.
"Transmigration...?" The whisper escaped his lips, sounding loud and intrusive in the absolute silence.
As an avid reader of webnovels and manhwas, the terrifying familiarity of the scene hit hard. Nathan shot up from his chair and waved his hand in front of the open eyes of the boy behind him.
No reaction. Not even the twitch of a pupil.
He turned his head in every direction, scanning the room like a radar. Colored hair? Stylish scars? A physique impossible for a student? Someone sitting in the back, near the window, with a mysterious aura? Nothing.
Just ordinary teenagers with terrifyingly normal faces.
'If nobody stands out... could the protagonist be me?'
Nathan turned his attention to the floating card. The engraving at its center glowed in a pure white, as if sculpted from light itself: "Mana Manipulation."
Before he could even extend his hand to touch it, the card flared brilliantly and shattered. Thousands of golden particles exploded and shot straight into his chest.
He gasped, staggering a step back. The impact didn't cause pain, but it was suffocating. It was as if liquid nitrogen had been injected into his veins. The frigid density crawled through his arms, descended down his spine, and took root somewhere deep in his stomach.
It lasted only a few agonizing seconds, diluting gradually until it became a subtle, almost imperceptible current, flowing alive beneath his skin.
And then, the world started turning again. The sharp sound of chalk hitting the board exploded like a gunshot. Chairs creaked. The drop of sweat on the boy beside him finally finished falling. The cacophony of thirty people breathing, moving, and existing struck him all at once.
"Huh? Why are you standing up out of nowhere, dude?" the voice came from behind him. Like a domino effect, the others began to notice. Faces that had seemed dead moments ago now turned in his direction, staring at him with confusion and judgment.
"What's gotten into him?" someone muttered.
The teacher stopped writing, turned slowly, and adjusted her glasses on the bridge of her nose. "Nathan Salt, sit down right now, please. It's not break time."
Nathan opened his mouth to try to formulate any excuse, but the air suddenly left his lungs.
Gravity seemed to multiply. A deafening buzz erupted in his ears and the air in the room became thick, too dense to breathe. Several students groaned in panic, clutching their own heads. The teacher dropped the marker, which shattered on the floor, and leaned heavily on the desk to keep from collapsing.
It wasn't just for him. The veil of reality had been torn. A translucent screen of colossal proportions projected itself in front of every pair of eyes in the room. White letters, cold and relentless, burned against the system's dark background.
[The veil has been broken. Mana has descended upon Earth.]
[The Genesis System will judge the survivors. Good luck.]
The silence that swallowed the room lasted three seconds at most, but the pressure in the air made it feel like an eternity. Over thirty pairs of wide eyes reflected the pale glow of the screen, minds struggling to process a concept that tore reality in half.
But Nathan was no longer reading. His eyes had locked onto the first line.
Genesis System.
His blood lost its warmth. Not from the panic of the unknown that paralyzed the rest of the class, but from the pure and absolute terror of recognition.
'Genesis System... The veil... The Mana...'
Each word was a gear turning, unlocking recent memories. The manhwa he read religiously in bed. The panels he reread during work breaks, the endless theories he typed in forums at dawn.
"The Strongest Survivor."
The title escaped his lips in a broken whisper. No one heard. The murmur of panic was already beginning to bubble around him.
But he heard it. And with those three words, the entire puzzle assembled itself before him with sickening clarity.
The classroom. The university. The Genesis System. Mana Manipulation, the exact skill of Stella, the protagonist's sister. The same skill she received on the day of her awakening, thought was useless garbage, and that dozens of chapters later he watched her transform into a weapon of mass destruction.
The protagonist wasn't him. If it were, the system would have given him his skill.
He was Nathan Salt. A name that never, in over two hundred chapters, had been mentioned in a single speech bubble.
An extra.
'No... less than that. A background NPC.'
The realization weighed on his shoulders, but he didn't have the luxury of processing the despair.
"AAAAAAARGH!"
A ragged, inhuman sound shattered the room's murmur. It came from the right row. A skinny boy with glasses grabbed his own skull so hard his knuckles turned white. He began convulsing in his chair, the metal legs of the desk screeching against the floor. The veins in his neck bulged thick and dark, throbbing with a sickly purple hue that climbed toward his forehead.
"Hey, what's wrong!? Are you okay!?" The girl beside him jumped up, hands reaching out to hold her classmate's shoulders.
He threw her back with a brutal jolt, a physical strength that scrawny body should not have possessed.
"GET IT OUT OF ME! IT'S BURNING! IT'S MELTING ME FROM THE INSIDE!"
A crash from the other side of the room. A girl near the window toppled from her chair, her shoulder slamming hard against the floor. She began thrashing in violent spasms. A thin, whitish foam bubbled at the corners of her lips, her eyes rolling back until only the white sclera remained.
"TEACHER! SHE'S HAVING A SEIZURE!"
"Call an ambulance, quick!"
"There's no signal! The phone screen is dead!"
The dam burst. Chairs were knocked over. Students tripped over each other, screaming, running to the corners of the room or pounding on the screens of useless phones. The teacher screamed for order, but her voice was swallowed by the collective panic.
Nathan remained motionless, feet nailed to the floor. His eyes alternated between the two bodies in agony. In the middle of that isolated hell, he was the only one aware of the death sentence unfolding.
'Mana Rejection.'
The primordial energy had invaded Earth and penetrated every living organism. But the forced evolution demanded a toll.
Incompatible organisms, bodies that treated mana like a radioactive parasite, didn't die immediately. They suffered a mutation. Violent, accelerated, and irreversible.
In the manhwa, the double-page panel in chapter two showed the process in grotesque detail. He remembered it perfectly.
The art was so disturbing that he had taken a screenshot to send to the discussion group.
The boy with glasses stopped screaming. The cut in sound was abrupt, unnatural. His body went limp, his head hanging loosely to the side as if his neck had snapped.
The girl who had tried to help him let out a trembling sigh, taking a cautious step forward.
"Thank God, I think he faint..."
The boy raised his head. The movement was rigid, mechanical. The eyes behind the cracked lenses had lost their irises. They were two purely milky globes. The skin of his face was drained, taking on a wet cement tone, and a thread of dark, viscous drool ran down his chin, staining the collar of his uniform.
The girl froze. Her hands hesitated in the air, centimeters from his shoulder. Relief still fought to remain on her features, refusing to accept what her eyes were seeing.
"Hey... Logan, are you oka..."
His jaw jutted forward.
The teeth tore through the sleeve and sank deep into the flesh of her forearm. The wet sound of skin tearing and muscle being wrenched was nauseating. The scream that erupted from the girl's throat hit a note so sharp and raw it made his eardrums vibrate.
On the other side of the room, the girl on the floor also ceased her spasms. The student kneeling beside her, who had been trying to turn her face to clear her airway, scrambled backward on all fours when he noticed the change. Her eyes were open. White and empty.
The bitten girl fell to her knees, clutching her forearm as blood gushed between her fingers, staining the linoleum floor. She was still screaming at the top of her lungs when her eyes rolled to pure white and her body toppled forward with a dull thud.
Ten seconds. That was the exact time it took for her to stop thrashing, rise with that same rigid and unnatural movement, and advance toward the nearest student.
Three.
The panic overflowed into absolute hysteria. Students crushed against the locked door, tripping over desks and trampling each other. The teacher tried to run, but the girl who had fallen near the window was already on her feet. Pale hands grabbed the woman's ankle, violently pulling her to the ground.
The teacher's scream was suffocated almost instantly.
Four.
'If I don't move now, I die here.'
His body acted before rationality finished the sentence. He grabbed the backrest of the desk beside him and ripped it from the floor with a desperate pull. It was light. Cheap plastic and hollow metal legs, but it was the only weapon he had.
The boy with glasses, the first to turn, had his back to him, dragging his feet toward a group of students cornered by the blackboard. Nathan closed the distance and swung the chair in a full arc, using every ounce of strength he could extract from that untrained body.
The metal legs collided against the side of his skull.
CRACK!
The impact traveled up his arms like an electric shock. The boy staggered, his neck cracking at a crooked angle, but didn't fall. The gray face turned in his direction. Milky eyes, jaw gaping wide, teeth already stained red. He lunged at him.
"DIE!"
He raised the chair above his head and brought it down with everything he had. The blow landed squarely on the top of his skull. He felt the resistance of bone give way under the dented aluminum, and the body collapsed heavily against the floor, inert.
[You have eliminated a Mana Zombie (Gray). +1 Agility.]
The translucent screen flashed right in the center of his vision and vanished, but he didn't have the luxury of blinking. The teacher was already rising. The skin of her face pulled taut, gray, her eyes empty.
Five zombies. With each bite, the plague multiplied.
Nathan charged at the teacher before she could steady herself. He twisted his torso and landed a horizontal blow to her ribs, launching her frail body against the masonry wall. Before she could slide to the floor, he brought the base of the chair down twice on her head.
BANG! BANG!
[You have eliminated a Mana Zombie (Gray). +2 Strength.]
The chair couldn't take it. The plastic shattered and the rivets gave way. The object lodged itself in the disfigured skull. He didn't try to pull it out. Instead, he stepped on the corpse's chest and wrenched free one of the bent metal legs that had come loose. An aluminum pipe with an irregular, sharp tip. Lighter. More lethal.
The girl who had fallen by the window advanced like a centipede across the cold tile floor, crawling on scraped knees to reach the student crying under the front desk. Nathan kicked the zombie's temple with his boot, snapping her head to the side, gripped the metal leg with both hands, and drove it into her dead ear.
[You have eliminated a Mana Zombie (Gray). +6 Stamina.]
Three down. Two left. No, three. Another student had been torn apart during the initial chaos. His shirt was soaked in dark blood and he was already growling.
His knees buckled. All the oxygen in the world seemed insufficient. His arms burned and his hands were incredibly sticky with sweat and blood that weren't his. The dense, coppery smell of fresh rust mixed with rot invaded his nostrils, making him hold his breath to keep from vomiting.
But he couldn't stop. Time wouldn't forgive those who couldn't endure.
He ran to the next one, gripping the metal harder. The body of the first bitten girl, the one with the shredded arm, had a student pinned against the blackboard. He charged diagonally and struck the back of her neck with the improvised pipe.
CLANG! The metallic sound buzzed against bone, reverberating through his wrists.
She staggered sideways and turned toward him. He dodged the bite by dragging his foot back, lowered his torso, and drove the irregular tip of the metal under her soft chin until the skull stopped the blow.
[You have eliminated a Mana Zombie (Gray). +1 Health.]
The last zombie, the freshly turned boy, was already reaching the main door, where three sobbing students slapped their own trembling hands, desperate to turn the handle. Nathan vaulted over a toppled desk and slammed the base of his skull with every bit of stamina he had left. The dry impact hurt his bones, but the zombie collapsed forward, motionless.
[You have eliminated a Mana Zombie (Gray). +4 Mana.]
His legs gave out. He dropped to his knees on the sticky tile. The dented pipe slipped from his bloodied palm and bounced on the floor with a dull clang that echoed in the deathly silence of the room.
Silent.
He raised his heavy head. Of the thirty-some students who had filled the place, less than half were still standing. Some cried in fetal positions under desks, trembling. Others were paralyzed, their gazes lost in the void. The group squeezed against the door finally broke the lock, and the three ran outside without looking back.
Nobody spoke to him. No gratitude. Just pallid faces that averted their gaze when he met theirs. But in the eyes of those who crossed his by accident, what screamed was fear. Terror. And no longer of the dead bodies scattered on the floor, but of him. Of the ordinary boy who ten seconds ago had cracked five skulls without hesitation and with surgical precision.
And, being brutally honest with himself, he couldn't blame them.
He braced himself against the cold edge of a desk, forcing his weak legs to work, and stood up in lurches. Through the still-open door, the deranged screams of students spread through the wide corridor of the pavilion. Footsteps crushing bone, guttural roars, blind stampedes. The end of the world wasn't contained to his classroom alone.
He dragged his boots across the dirty floor to the door and cast a glance down the corridor. A dark puddle seeped from beneath a cabinet, bodies piled at the end of the hall. More shambling shadows were beginning to crawl from a laboratory.
He clenched his fist against the handle, pulled the door, and slammed it shut with an aggressive yank.
BANG!
He slid with his back against the solid wood until he hit the floor. The adrenaline was beginning to fade, replaced by short, painful breathing and the uncontrollable tremor of his fingers. He looked at the palms of his hands, soaked in death, and his stomach convulsed.
'I just killed five... five things. That three minutes ago sat beside me listening to a chemistry lecture.'
He swallowed dry, feeling the bile scratch his throat, and squeezed his eyes shut, crushing the image.
He had read hundreds of novels. He had memorized tropes, archetypes, and world-building where unsuspecting protagonists wake up in other dimensions overflowing with heroic charisma and a smile on their face as they reap lives. But not a single line from those hundreds of chapters captured the indescribable terror of the acrid smell of blood. Nobody described the nauseating vibration of a skull breaking beneath his fingers, and no speech bubble mentioned that his hands would simply refuse to stop shaking afterward.
He opened his tired eyes and fixed his gaze on the white ceiling, already speckled with dark red.
'I woke up in "The Strongest Survivor." My first and only skill belongs to the protagonist's sister, classified as garbage right now, but an apocalyptic weapon of war dozens of chapters from now. And I reincarnated into the body of an extra so random he didn't even make it into the author's draft.'
Absurd luck or absolute catastrophe? His mind locked up just trying to decide.
Luck for the mental library he possessed of a world spanning two hundred chapters. He knew the maps, the exact respawn points of items, and where the high-level horrors would emerge. He received a golden card that the readers themselves took months to take seriously, already knowing its terrifying potential.
But the catastrophe crushed the theory. He was in a real hell, sunken in a body with useless muscles.
A raw, weak laugh full of bitterness echoed in the silent room. It sounded so pathetic it made him pity himself even more.
"What a... formidable start."
He filled his lungs with air one more time and swallowed the metallic taste. Whimpering in a corner wouldn't pay the bills in this new world. If the plot flowed at the same sadistic pace as the manhwa, the next two hours would determine who'd be alive for the coming years. The rare artifacts, the monsters with generous drops, the shelters, everything would be devoured by those who moved first.
And he didn't come this far just to be a trampled extra again.
He rubbed his stained hands on the uniform, using the wet hem to try to scrub off the worst of that horrible grime, and forced himself to his feet in a single push. Before taking the first step into that hellish corridor, the priority was obvious.
"Status."