[The skill "Mana Manipulation" has been selected!]
The metallic sound of the notification didn't echo through the room, but straight inside my head. I blinked, the shock numbing any other reaction for a full second.
Half a meter from my face, a card with golden edges and an incandescent texture spun slowly in the air.
I tore my gaze from that ghostly glow and swallowed hard. Where the hell was I?
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 me, 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 my 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. I shot up from my chair and waved my hand in front of the open eyes of the boy behind me.
No reaction. Not even the twitch of a pupil.
I turned my 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?'
I turned my attention to the floating card. The engraving at its center glowed in a pure white, as if sculpted from light itself: "Mana Manipulation."
Before I could even extend my hand to touch it, the card flared brilliantly and shattered. Thousands of golden particles exploded and shot straight into my chest.
I 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 my veins. The frigid density crawled through my arms, descended down my spine, and took root somewhere deep in my stomach.
It lasted only a few agonizing seconds, diluting gradually until it became a subtle, almost imperceptible current, flowing alive beneath my 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 me finally finished falling. The cacophony of thirty people breathing, moving, and existing struck me all at once.
"Huh? Why are you standing up out of nowhere, dude?" the voice came from behind me. Like a domino effect, the others began to notice. Faces that had seemed dead moments ago now turned in my direction, staring at me 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."
I opened my mouth to try to formulate any excuse, but the air suddenly left my lungs.
Gravity seemed to multiply. A deafening buzz erupted in my 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 me. 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 I was no longer reading. My eyes had locked onto the first line.
Genesis System.
My 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 I read religiously in bed. The panels I reread during work breaks, the endless theories I typed in forums at dawn.
"The Strongest Survivor."
The title escaped my lips in a broken whisper. No one heard. The murmur of panic was already beginning to bubble around me.
But I heard it. And with those three words, the entire puzzle assembled itself before me 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 I watched her transform into a weapon of mass destruction.
The protagonist wasn't me. If it were, the system would have given me his skill.
I 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 my shoulders, but I 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.
I remained motionless, feet nailed to the floor. My eyes alternated between the two bodies in agony. In the middle of that isolated hell, I 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. I remembered it perfectly.
The art was so disturbing that I 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 my 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.'
My body acted before rationality finished the sentence. I grabbed the backrest of the desk beside me 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 I had.
The boy with glasses, the first to turn, had his back to me, dragging his feet toward a group of students cornered by the blackboard. I closed the distance and swung the chair in a full arc, using every ounce of strength I could extract from that untrained body.
The metal legs collided against the side of his skull.
CRACK!
The impact traveled up my arms like an electric shock. He staggered, his neck cracking at a crooked angle, but didn't fall. The gray face turned in my direction. Milky eyes, jaw gaping wide, teeth already stained red. He lunged at me.
"DIE!"
I raised the chair above my head and brought it down with everything I had. The blow landed squarely on the top of his skull. I 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 my vision and vanished, but I 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.
I charged at the teacher before she could steady herself. I twisted my torso and landed a horizontal blow to her ribs, launching her frail body against the masonry wall. Before she could slide to the floor, I 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. I didn't try to pull it out. Instead, I 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. I kicked the zombie's temple with my 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.
My knees buckled. All the oxygen in the world seemed insufficient. My arms burned and my hands were incredibly sticky with sweat and blood that weren't mine. The dense, coppery smell of fresh rust mixed with rot invaded my nostrils, making me hold my breath to keep from vomiting.
But I couldn't stop. Time wouldn't forgive those who couldn't endure.
I 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. I charged diagonally and struck the back of her neck with the improvised pipe.
CLANG! The metallic sound buzzed against bone, reverberating through my wrists.
She staggered sideways and turned toward me. I dodged the bite by dragging my foot back, lowered my 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. I vaulted over a toppled desk and slammed the base of his skull with every bit of stamina I had left. The dry impact hurt my bones, but he collapsed forward, motionless.
[You have eliminated a Mana Zombie (Gray). +4 Mana.]
My legs gave out. I dropped to my knees on the sticky tile. The dented pipe slipped from my bloodied palm and bounced on the floor with a dull clang that echoed in the deathly silence of the room.
Silent.
I raised my 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 me. No gratitude. Just pallid faces that averted their gaze when I met theirs. But in the eyes of those who crossed mine by accident, what screamed was fear. Terror. And no longer of the dead bodies scattered on the floor, but of me. Of the ordinary boy who ten seconds ago had cracked five skulls without hesitation and with surgical precision.
And, being brutally honest with myself, I couldn't blame them.
I braced myself against the cold edge of a desk, forcing my 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 my classroom alone.
I dragged my 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.
I clenched my fist against the handle, pulled the door, and slammed it shut with an aggressive yank.
BANG!
I slid with my back against the solid wood until I hit the floor. The adrenaline was beginning to fade, replaced by short, painful breathing and the uncontrollable tremor of my fingers. I looked at the palms of my hands, soaked in death, and my stomach convulsed.
'I just killed five... five things. That three minutes ago sat beside me listening to a chemistry lecture.'
I swallowed dry, feeling the bile scratch my throat, and squeezed my eyes shut, crushing the image.
I've read hundreds of novels. I 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 your fingers, and no speech bubble mentioned that your hands simply refuse to stop shaking afterward.
I opened my tired eyes and fixed my 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? My mind locked up just trying to decide.
Luck for the mental library I possessed of a world spanning two hundred chapters. I know the maps, the exact respawn points of items, and where the high-level horrors will emerge. I received a golden card that the readers themselves took months to take seriously, already knowing its terrifying potential.
But the catastrophe crushed the theory. I 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 me pity myself even more.
"What a... formidable start."
I filled my 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 I didn't come this far just to be a trampled extra again.
I rubbed my stained hands on the uniform, using the wet hem to try to scrub off the worst of that horrible grime, and forced myself to my feet in a single push. Before taking the first step into that hellish corridor, the priority was obvious.
"Status."