I'm Alone In This Apocalypse Vault With 14 Girls?

"That's not human," I muttered under my breath, but she was already—ugh, so stubborn—moving toward the door, completely ignoring my warning.

"AOI, NO!"

Her hand lunged for the emergency release, and in that moment, she unleashed whatever horror lurked just beyond that threshold.

With a hiss, the lock clicked open, and the door creaked ajar, just enough for something to slither through.

And then it crawled into view.

What stood before me had once been human. I could still make out fragments of a school uniform, drenched in blood, and its hair—possibly blonde—was matted with the remnants of a grotesque nightmare. But that was just the beginning...

Its left arm grotesquely bent backward at the elbow, the joint shattered, leaving the forearm dangling behind like some twisted mockery of anatomy. Bone jutted out through the skin like jagged shards. The right leg dragged uselessly, the foot turned completely around, forcing it to stumble along on what used to be its ankle.

But the face—oh, the face—was the true terror that shattered whatever remained of my sanity.

The lower jaw had been torn open, it teeth hung loose on strings of meat and gristle. Its tongue was black and swollen, hanging out of the ruined mouth. The eyes were milky white, but they tracked movements.

The creature's head swiveled toward the nearest student. Yuuto Kurota, debate team captain, supposed to study law at Waseda. Its ruined mouth opened wider, impossibly wide, showing rows of broken teeth and something that might've been its own jaw bone turned into extra fangs.

Time slowed down the moment I saw everything. Yuuto's eyes going wide, his hand reaching out trying to push away the monster.

I opened my mouth to scream a warning, but the sound died as the thing launched forward faster than any human being.

It hit Yuuto like a truck, slamming him to the floor with a wet impact that echoed through the hallway. Its claws, raked across his chest shredding the uniform and flesh. Blood sprayed across the white walls.

Yuuto's scream was terrifying as he desperately struggled around, as the creature's broken jaw clamped on his throat. I heard the crunch of his bones and the wet tearing his flesh.

I felt sick. I saw Yuuto's eyes dim as his body continued to twitch as the monster throat make a sound of gulping as it swallowed.

Panic exploded the room

Students screamed shoving one another, and ran everywhere with terror. Someone tripped over a chair and went down hard, skull cracking on the floor. Others slipped in the spreading blood.

I dhould've done something bring order to this chaos.

But I couldn't move my body from terror.

I just watched... frozen and paralyzed... as the thing hunched over Yuuto's twitching body and slowly raised its head.

There was a wet, slurping noise, followed by a squelch as a torn muscle gave way beneath its shifting weight. Then came the crack of something dislocating, its spine, bending at an unnatural angle as it turned toward me.

Its mouth was a ruin of shredded lips and broken teeth, smeared in a thick paste of flesh and blood. Innards dripped from its chin in slow, heavy drops of blood, pat-pat-pat, staining the floor beneath.

Its skin was gray and blotchy, stretched too tight in some places. One cheek had been torn open entirely, exposing muscle and tendons that twitched independently of the rest of its face.

The monster locked onto my eyes across the ruined room. I froze my breathing stop, i tried hard to not blink fearing if I did the monster will lunged at me.

Then it smiled.

The expression was horrific on that destroyed face.

"Sera!" Aoi's voice cut through my paralyzed mind. She stood frozen by the door, hand still on the handle and her face white with terror. "Oh God, Sera, what did I—"

The creature's attention snapped to her. It rose from Yuuto's corpse, blood still dripping from its claws and it's head cocked at an angle that would've snapped a human neck.

"Aoi, RUN!" I finally found my voice, but it was too late.

The thing moved like a blur, flowing across the blood-slicked floor impossibly fast. Aoi turned to flee, but her feet slipped and she went down hard, her cry cut short as the creature landed on her.

Its claws punched through her ribs like paper. Her blood fountained up in a perfect arc, spattering my face and white blouse. Sher stared at me from that split second before the creature's teeth closed around her face.

The sound she made wasn't quite a scream. More like a sigh, the last breath that her lungs made.

I watched Aoi Fujita die.

I watched her die and did nothing.

My hands shook as I raised them to my face, and I realized I was screaming, a sound I didn't recognize as my own voice, raw and broken.

The creature finished with Aoi and turned to me again, its ruined face now painted with my friend's blood.

I backed up, legs trembling.

Then...my heel hit something solid. I looked down.

A glint of black and steel stuck out from beneath a fallen storage locker, half-buried under papers and shattered safety glass. Emergency gear. Someone must've tried to reach it when the chaos broke out... and never made it.

I dropped to my knees my fingers fumbling to reach it. The casing slid free with a magnetic click, revealing something sleek and heavy.

A Stun-Tonfa.

Carbon-alloy body. The kind they gave to on-site security for riot defense.

I gripped the handle and twisted. The shaft extended with a low fzzzzk, blue arcs of plasma crawling along the conductive edge as the weapon hummed to life.

My heart pounded louder than the growls of the monster. I stepped forward, and swung.

The arc of the tonfa met the side of its head with a crack of thunder, light exploding from the point of contact. The thing jerked mid-motion as the electricity dancing across its jaw and eye socket.

It crashed into the wall hard enough to leave a dent but it didn't stay down for long just a second as it rise up again.

It turned to me with that same horrible smile.

I swung again, and again, and again.

Each hit rattled my bones, but the creatures kept coming back up as it kept smiling with that twisted face. Kept reaching with claws that dripped with the blood.

The tonfa slipped in my bloody grip as I dragged myself backward, leaving a gore trail across the polished floor. My designer sneakers squelched in fluids I didn't want to think about.