Chapter 530. Midnight Sprint in Half-Buttoned Clothes

Chapter 530: 530. Midnight Sprint in Half-Buttoned Clothes

William stared at the flickering words for what felt like an eternity, his pulse hammering against his ribs. He waited desperately for the system to elaborate.

Usually, the interface was almost annoyingly thorough, offering analysis, potential threat levels, or even wry commentary, eager to prove its own omniscience. But tonight, there was only silence.

The notification simply hung there in the darkness, pale and sickly, before dissolving into nothingness without offering a single shred of additional detail.

No explanation... No solution... Just a cold, digital void where answers should have been.

He closed his eyes and let out a breath that felt like ice in his lungs. The uneasy suspicion that had been gnawing at him for days finally solidified.

It had taken on a shape that was jagged, dark, and undeniable. This wasn’t fatigue.

This wasn’t stress. Whatever was happening to Ellie was something invasive, something predatory.

He tried to force himself back into sleep, but the darkness now felt like a predator waiting for him to blink.

The silence of the academy was shattered sometime well past midnight.

It wasn’t a scream of pain; it was not exactly something worse. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated terror, sharp and raw, tearing through the dormitory wing like a blade through silk.

It lasted only a heartbeat before it was violently cut short, as though the air itself had been choked out of the lungs of whoever had made it.

In the room directly adjacent, Clara was airborne before her conscious mind could even process the sound.

She didn’t fumble for a candle or reach for her robes; she moved with the panicked instinct of someone who knew exactly what that specific pitch of terror sounded like. She burst through the connecting door, her breath catching audibly.

"Ellie?" Clara’s voice was a strangled whisper.

She found her there, slumped at the edge of the bed. Ellie wasn’t crying; she was convulsing in slow, rhythmic shudders, her arms wrapped around herself so tightly that her knuckles showed bone white through her skin.

Her breathing came in wet, ragged gasps, as if she were drowning in thin air.

Clara didn’t hesitate. She didn’t try to comfort her; there was no time for comfort when the air itself felt poisoned.

She spun on her heel and sprinted back into the corridor, her bare feet slapping against the stone floor with desperate urgency.

She tore down the long hallway toward the instructor’s quarters, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.

Thud, thud, thud, thud!

She reached William’s door and threw her entire weight against it, pounding with fists that shook uncontrollably. "Instructor! William!"

"Open the door!" Her voice cracked, rising to a panicked pitch that echoed off the vaulted ceilings. "Something happened! Something’s wrong with Ellie!"

Inside his room, William was already in motion. The scream had triggered something primal in him, a soldier’s instinct that bypassed sleep entirely.

He was halfway through buttoning a shirt, his movements mechanical and precise despite the adrenaline flooding his system. He didn’t ask questions; he didn’t need to.

The raw desperation in Clara’s voice told him everything.

He threw open his door just as Clara was about to strike again. "Lead the way."

They ran. The corridor seemed impossibly long, the shadows stretching out like grasping claws in the torchlight.

William’s mind was racing ahead of his feet, calculating, bracing for a threat he couldn’t see but could feel pressing against the back of his neck. ’Was it an attack? An assassin? Or something worse, something from within?’

When they reached Ellie’s room, William didn’t knock.

He shoved the door open with enough force to send it slamming against the stone wall.

The scene inside was frozen in horror.

Ellie was exactly as Clara had left her, but the atmosphere in the room had shifted. The temperature had dropped noticeably, and the faint smell of something metallic, something like old blood and burnt ozone, hung heavy in the air.

She remained huddled at the edge of her bed, arms locked around her knees in a defensive cocoon, her whole body vibrating with a tremor she couldn’t control.

But it was her eyes that stopped William’s heart. When she lifted her head, her amber irises weren’t focused on them; they were wide, glassy, and unfocused, reflecting a terror so profound it seemed to come from somewhere beyond the walls of the room.

She looked less like a girl who had had a nightmare and more like someone who had just witnessed the end of the world.

"Instructor Wade," Ellie whispered.

The name came out broken, fractured by the tremors wracking her frame. Her voice was so unsteady that the syllable barely held together before dissolving into another ragged gasp.

"I don’t know why... I just feel like..."

"Slow down, Ellie... Just breathe." William dropped to one knee in front of her, forcing himself to become an anchor in her storm.

He ignored the way his own pulse was drumming a frantic rhythm against his throat. He needed to be the calm before the storm she was already drowning in.

"Look at me... Just focus on my voice."

"Tell me what you’re feeling... Take your time."

Ellie’s amber eyes finally found his, but they were hollow, as if something had hollowed them out from the inside.

"It feels like—" She choked on the words, a wet, desperate sound.

She swallowed hard, her throat working convulsively, before the confession finally escaped in a breath so faint it was almost a ghost of a sound. "Like something is trying to get out... From inside me."

The silence that followed was not empty; it was heavy. It was a physical presence that pressed down on them from every corner of the room, suffocating and absolute.

In the doorway, Clara remained frozen, a statue of pale terror. Her knuckles were white as bone where she gripped her journal, the leather creaking audibly in the stillness.

For a fleeting second, William caught her gaze; there was something in her expression that went beyond grief or worry.

It was something closer to dreadful recognition, as if she had been waiting for this exact horror to manifest.

He didn’t have time to parse it; his entire world had narrowed down to the girl trembling at his knees.

"It’s okay, you’re not alone now," William said, his voice rough but steady. "We’re here... I’m here."

Ellie’s breathing began to slow, the violent convulsions subsiding into smaller, weaker shudders. The immediate peak of the panic was ebbing, leaving behind a raw, exhausted vulnerability.

As William reached forward, his hands steady as he moved to grasp hers to ground her, something impossible happened.

Flicker.

A faint pulse of white light, not the warm glow of a candle, but something colder, sharper, and more ancient, rippled across the fabric covering the small of Ellie’s back.

It was gone in the space of a heartbeat, a spectral distortion that seemed to bend the very air around her spine.

It was so brief, so subtle, that any other man would have dismissed it as a trick of the shadows or the flickering hearthlight. But William had been watching, his eyes trained on her with the intensity of a predator sensing a change in the wind.

The air in the room suddenly felt charged and ionized, like the moments before lightning strikes.

No one moved. No one breathed.

The silence became unbearable, stretched taut like a wire about to snap. William slowly lifted his head from where the glow had vanished, his eyes locking onto Clara’s.

She hadn’t moved an inch, but her face was a mask of horror. Her eyes were fixed on the exact same spot: the small of Ellie’s back.

In that moment, the unspoken question hung between them, more terrifying than any scream: ’What is living inside her?’

And more importantly, ’What happens when it finally breaks free?’