Chapter 4: Move To Safety
They could hear movement outside when they moved the desk from the doorway, footsteps getting louder by the second, along with a lot of shouting and panic.
Students, not whatever else was out there.
"That’s our cue. Time to go."
That instruction was not nearly as well received as when she tried to get them to barricade the door, and Kalli found herself standing with just Reggie and three others.
"The classroom is safe enough, right? There’s a lot of screaming and panic out there. What if it attracts whatever was coming for us earlier?" One of the boys asked.
"But what if they’re dragging the danger behind them? It might be clearing the classrooms one by one, now that the timer is over. It’s a long way to the dorms, and there is no guarantee that we can make it all the way there," one of the others countered.
The reluctance of everyone to move was enough to make Kalli begin to question herself. What if the System was just leading them into more danger?
What if no matter where else they went, it wasn’t any safer?
What if these quest options she was getting were actually causing the disasters, not saving them from them?
Self-doubt began to creep in, the same as it was for everyone else. But what she really wanted was to be home, in her bed, with the door locked and the shutters closed. And that was where she intended to go.
Even if home for the day was some strange dorm room assigned to her in an Academy she had never attended in her past life.
Kalli ducked out into the hallway, followed by most of her classmates.
Most of the students were running in random directions, either confused and panicking, or just trying to go the opposite way of where they heard the monsters last.
Only her class was moving with any sort of organization, headed straight for the dorms faster than Kalli could run.
Faster than anyone should be able to run, really.
Some of the students must have received a bonus to their physical abilities when this all started.
As they made their way through the hallways and out into the compound, Kalli realized that she didn’t actually know what dorm room belonged to her. Presumably, something was arranged when she was dumped into this world, but there were no guarantees.
Reggie ran past her and pointed to the left. "This way. It’s the shortcut to the first year University dorms. We’re all in the same building, I don’t know why they’re going the long way."
The route took them under a walkway that was dripping blood on the sidewalk, then through a dark and narrow alley that had Reggie visibly regretting his choice. But it was the short route, and the dorm building looked abandoned when they arrived.
There were other students in the open, but they were all running away from the Academy, not toward the dorms.
Kalli followed the faster runners into the building, and then searched the lobby for some sort of directory. If she didn’t have a room here, it was going to be incredibly awkward.
She found the resident listing near the elevator, and it listed her room as 201, right at the top of the first landing on the wide staircase that led up to the residential levels.
"Should we barricade this place too? What if something comes for us here." One of the boys asked desperately.
"Calm down, Derek, all the first years live here. Someone else is bound to come back to their dorm. We can’t lock them out," another boy replied.
"I’m still closing all the storm shutters. We will just leave the main door for now." Derek insisted.
That wasn’t a bad plan.
The shutters were rolled shut and locked, plunging the room into darkness before someone turned the lights on.
{Mission Complete} Find Shelter
{Quest Reward} Beginner equipment pack
{Perfect completion of Coordinator Class introductory quests} 50 Bonus System Points awarded
The students began to cheer as they realized that they had received something for doing the smart thing and going somewhere safe.
Kalli opened the small box that it had given her, only to be immediately bombarded with messages.
{Received Beginner Equipment Pack} Unpacking
{Received Item} short sword.
{Received item} cloth armour (Uncommon Grade)
{Received item} backpack
{Received item} travel rations
The items appeared on her body as soon as the message appeared, and the same was happening to the rest of her classmates.
"We have weapons! This is so much better. The next time those monsters come, we will have magic and weapons to defend ourselves," someone behind Kalli shouted.
"You say that like you weren’t terrified just five minutes ago."
"Shut up. I didn’t have a weapon then. Now that I do, there’s nothing to fear. Don’t you know? I was regional fencing champion three years in a row."
"Doesn’t matter if you run away at the first sign of trouble."
A girl’s voice cut through the argument. "Shut up. Listen. It’s gone silent outside. I can still hear movement, but there are no sounds of those things attacking."
Kalli moved to the main door and looked out.
Everything looked normal enough, but that didn’t mean much.
Only, the System said that they had twenty-four hours before the trials started, right?
"I think that the monsters vanished after the fifteen minutes to defend the classroom were up. I didn’t hear any more attacks after that, only people running. I think that whatever is happening, it was testing us before things get really bad tomorrow." Kalli offered.
"It’s going to get worse? But... where is everyone else? We all got these System Classes, so shouldn’t everyone have them? We’re just freshmen. Someone in the government, or the staff, or something should be coming to help us, right?" Derek asked.
The girl who had told everyone to shut up a moment earlier gave him a grim smile.
"Do you really think that will be better? What if it’s just us? They’ll put us in a lab to study us. But worse, what if they knew? What if they knew this was coming, and they didn’t tell anyone?"
The students of Class 1A went silent.
They didn’t have a lot of faith in the teachers, but that lack of faith was part of the reason that they were certain someone would have let the news slip. There was no way they could all keep a secret like that.
That didn’t mean that nobody knew, just that it couldn’t be all of them.
Their teacher had panicked and ran off to find someone when the first message appeared, and they hadn’t seen her since. If she was caught in the halls when everything started, she might have been one of the first victims.
