"...When did I fall asleep? Huh?"
When Mei woke up, she felt sluggish, but managed to sit up and survey her surroundings. Her eyes visibly widened. The once-bright blue sky had turned dim and dull, and occasional bolts of lightning crackled across the ground, leaving scorched earth in their wake.
What greeted her wasn't Haru's teasing face, nor the familiar interior of her bedroom. Reality was a thousand times worse than anything she could have imagined. What she was looking at right now was a scene straight out of the apocalypse.
What should have been a pristine, beautiful academy campus had been reduced to a wasteland of scattered rubble.
And then, there was the blood. Pools of it littered the ground, especially beneath massive chunks of fallen concrete. Some of it looked nearly dried, while other patches appeared disturbingly fresh.
"Haru... kun?"
Mei looked down at her hands absentmindedly and immediately noticed strange, purplish lines running across her wrists. They glowed ominously, though they didn't physically hurt. Yet, something about them filled her with a profound sense of dread.
"What... is this? Did I... cause all of this?"
Suddenly, she clutched her head as the memories of what had happened inside the classroom right before she passed out flashed violently through her mind.
The strange wave of internal heat flooding her body. Then, the blinding light.
She also remembered Haru reaching out to her just before a mysterious, destructive force erupted from within her, sending him flying.
"No. No, no... No! This can't be happening!"
Just this morning, she had managed to claw back a shred of hope by talking to Haru after waking up from that terrifyingly realistic nightmare. She had convinced herself that as long as Haru was there, the dream would never manifest in reality.
Yet the tragic destruction surrounding her, combined with the heavy stench of rust and copper, couldn't be dismissed as a bad dream.
No matter how desperately she wanted to refuse and deny the brutal truth staring her in the face, reality refused to bend to her wishes, nor to anyone else's for that matter.
Mei slowly rose to her feet amidst the debris, her face draining of color as her heart dropped into her stomach. She spotted the disfigured body of a student half-buried beneath a slab of concrete. Pulling her sleeves down to instinctively hide the strange glowing lines on her wrists, she took a few tentative, trembling steps forward.
"Haru-kun?"
She knew the odds of him surviving this catastrophe were slim, but somewhere deep in her heart, she desperately wanted to believe he was still alive. So she began calling out his name while wandering through the ruins of the campus.
However, she didn't realize that her voice had just attracted unwanted attention.
A moment later, Mei caught sight of a figure shuffling out from behind a collapsed building. She was elated at first, assuming it was another survivor. Or perhaps, part of her simply hoped against hope that it was Haru.
Her instinct to approach the figure flared up, and she took a few steps forward.
"Ha...ru?"
She hadn't gone far before she ground to a halt. A low, guttural growl echoed from the figure — a sound no living human could possibly make. Following right behind it was the sickening stench of rotting flesh, which finally shattered any remaining illusions.
It wasn't a survivor. In fact, it wasn't even alive.
"Hiek!"
A sharp shriek escaped her throat when she finally laid eyes on the zombie. Its face was hideously mutilated, with one eyeball dangling loosely from its socket by a shred of optic nerve. It was a sight straight out of a horror film.
Her first instinct was to run, but her limbs suddenly felt like lead. Her feet wouldn't budge an inch, as if they had been welded solid to the concrete. She was completely trapped in place as the zombie slowly, inevitably shuffled toward her like a grim reaper.
"Ah..."
Even when the creature stood right in front of her, Mei remained frozen, paralyzed not just by fear, but by an overwhelming wave of guilt that threatened to drag her down into a bottomless abyss.
Deep in the back of her mind, a dark part of her wondered if this was simply her long-overdue karma for the devastation she had unleashed.
As the zombie lunged forward with its jaws unhinged, she squeezed her eyes shut and braced herself to accept her fate.
"Rikuo - Rib!"
Suddenly, a familiar voice cut through the air from behind. Mei felt a sudden rush of displaced air sweep across the ground, followed immediately by a sickening crunch of shattering bone as the creature's growling abruptly died away.
She didn't dare open her eyes, terrified she might still be greeted by that dangling, lifeless eyeball. But the agonizing bite she had anticipated never came.
"Mei! Are you okay? Did it bite you anywhere?"
Instead, firm hands gripped her shoulders, turning her around to face him. Even though her vision was still blocked by her tightly shut eyelids, Mei didn't flinch. Her body instinctively recognized that the danger had passed.
She desperately wanted to open her eyes and confirm that her frantic prayer had been answered, yet... at the same time, a paralyzing fear held her back. What if she opened her eyes and found out it was all a cruel hallucination? What if the voice and the warmth on her shoulders vanished into thin air?
She felt hands gently inspecting her arms and checking her posture, though the touch carried no malice. A moment later, the hands stopped, resting gently against her wrists.
"I don't see any visible bite marks, so you should be fine. Don't worry, you don't have to open your eyes if it's too much right now. I'll be your guide."
The exact same voice. The exact same steady, unconditional kindness she had leaned on this morning. At that moment, the truth settled over her like a warm blanket.
Even amidst this impossible nightmare, he was still worried about her, still rushing to her rescue. Her grip tightened instinctively around his hands, and the icy terror constricting her heart finally began to melt away.
"...Haru-kun?"
Gathering a fraction of her courage, Mei slowly fluttered her eyelids open and whispered his name. Just as she had prayed, he was standing right there before her. Aside from a mess of red hair coated in a fine layer of gray dust, Haru looked completely unharmed.
"Yeah, it's me. I'm just glad to see you're safe, Mei."
Tears instantly welled up in her eyes, and before she even realized what she was doing, she lunged forward, burying her face into his chest and wrapping her arms tightly around him.
The terror, the crushing loneliness, and the suffocating guilt all broke loose at once, spilling out in a rush of uncontrollable sobs.