The bus door groaned in protest, a sharp, metallic shriek that cut through the cold air. David shoved it open, his body a silhouette against the dying grey light of the afternoon. He stood there for a moment on the top step, framed in the doorway, and twenty pairs of eyes flinched away from him.
He was a nightmare made flesh. Dried, flaking goblin blood painted his jacket and jeans in rusty brown splatters. Fresh, darker blood seeped from the gash on his ribs and the deep cut on his forearm, staining the fabric. A smear of crimson marked his chin where he'd wiped his mouth. He carried the stench of the fight with him—sweat, iron, and that faint, foul odor of the creatures.
In his hands, he clutched his grim harvest: four more rusty daggers and a crude short bow with a few arrows.
The silence inside the bus was absolute, thicker and more suffocating than the one outside. It was the silence of pure, undiluted terror. These weren't the screams of a crash or the panic of a sudden attack. This was the deep, chilling fear of the unknown, made manifest in the blood-smeared boy who had been their classmate.
David's hollow gaze swept over them. He saw the way they huddled together, as if their collective warmth could ward him off. He saw the tears tracking clean lines through the dirt on their faces. He saw the raw, bleeding terror in their eyes, all directed at him.
Without a word, he turned and descended the steps. He crouched beside the bus, scraping a shallow hole in the frozen earth with one of the new daggers. He placed the bow, the arrows, and the four additional daggers into the hole, covering them with dirt and snow, patting it down into an unremarkable mound. He kept only his original, notched blade. One weapon was enough. For now, it was a tool. A reminder. The rest were a contingency, hidden from desperate, foolish hands.
He re-boarded the bus, the single dagger looking no less menacing in his grip. The students shrank back as he passed. He didn't look at them. His movements were slow, deliberate, heavy with an exhaustion that went far beyond the physical. Each step seemed to cost him dearly.
He reached the row where Lena sat, curled in on herself, her injured arm cradled close. She looked up as his shadow fell over her, her eyes wide, her breath catching in her throat. He didn't speak. He simply slid into the seat beside her, the vinyl sighing under his weight. He laid the dagger on his lap, his hand resting on the grip.
A tremor went through him, a fine, uncontrollable shaking that spoke of adrenaline crash, mana depletion, and sheer, utter fatigue. He let out a long, ragged sigh that seemed to come from the very depths of his soul. His head lolled back against the seat, his eyes closing. For a few minutes, he just sat there, breathing, the only sound his harsh, ragged inhalations amidst the silent fear of the others.
Then, as if a string had been cut, his body slumped. His head tilted sideways, coming to rest on Lena's shoulder, his temple pressing against the cold window just behind her.
He was asleep in an instant. Not a peaceful sleep, but a dead, comatose collapse into oblivion. His breathing evened out, becoming deep and slow, but his brow remained furrowed, and his fingers never loosened their grip on the dagger.
Lena sat frozen, a statue of conflict and fear. The weight of his head on her shoulder was familiar, a ghost of a hundred bus rides home. But the feel of his jacket, stiff with blood, was a horrifying new reality. The scent of violence clinging to him was wrong. This wasn't the boy who bought her ice cream, who laughed too loud at stupid movies, who had looked at her like she was the only person in the world.
A single tear escaped and traced a path down her cheek. She didn't dare move.
"He changed so much," she whispered, the words so quiet they were almost stolen by the howl of the wind outside. "What happened to you, David?"
No one answered. The bus remained a tomb of quiet despair.
As the last vestiges of light bled from the sky, plunging the forest into an inky, absolute blackness, the temperature plummeted. The wind picked up, moaning through the broken windows, carrying flurries of snow inside. The students, shivering and terrified, began to use backpacks, torn pieces of seat fabric, and their own bodies to block the worst of the gaps. They worked in a frantic, silent panic, their movements jerky with cold and fear.
It was Chris who saw it first.
He was pressing a math textbook against a cracked windowpane when he went perfectly still. His eyes widened, his jaw slackened.
"Do you… do you see that?" he breathed, his voice trembling.
Others crept closer, peering out into the oppressive dark. At first, there was nothing. Just the swirling snow and the black shapes of trees.
Then, a shape resolved itself from the gloom. It was tall. Impossibly tall. A solid, vertical slash of deeper blackness against the forest backdrop. It stood at the very edge of the tree line, maybe fifty feet from the bus.
It was a humanoid figure, at least two meters tall, but its proportions were all wrong. It was painfully thin, limbs elongated and spindly, yet it radiated a sense of immense, dense weight. Its skin wasn't just dark; it was the utter absence of light, a void that seemed to drink the scant reflections from the snow. It had no discernible face, no features, just a smooth, obsidian oval where a head should be.
It didn't move. It didn't approach. It simply stood. A silent, monstrous sentinel in the night.
A choked sob escaped from a girl in the back. Someone else began to hyperventilate, the sound loud and panicked in the silence.
The creature did not react.
For what felt like an eternity, it just stood there. Watching.
Then, the sounds began. Not from the figure, but from the forest around it.
A high, chittering skitter that multiplied, moving through the treetops. The guttural, arguing snarls of something larger rooting through the undergrowth. A distant, mournful howl that was answered by another, much closer. The thick, heavy drag of something scaly over frozen ground. The air itself seemed to thicken with alien sounds, a symphony of nightmares tuning its instruments just beyond the veil of darkness.
The black figure remained, the conductor of this horrific orchestra.
The students huddled on the floor, away from the windows, clutching each other, too terrified to even cry. They prayed for daylight. They prayed for the sounds to stop. They prayed for the unmoving watcher to leave.
All through the cacophony of the damned night, David slept on. His sleep was not restful. He twitched, his fingers tightening on the dagger, a low groan sometimes escaping his lips. He was fighting his own battles in the landscape of his dreams, reliving a hell they could not even imagine.
He was their only protector, and he was utterly, completely gone.
When the first faint, grey light of dawn finally began to dilute the absolute blackness, the sounds gradually receded, fading back into the depths of the woods. The tall, black figure was simply gone, as if it had never been there.
The bus was silent again, save for the ragged breathing of twenty traumatized survivors.
David's eyes snapped open.
There was no grogginess, no slow return to consciousness. One moment he was dead to the world, the next he was fully, acutely aware. His body was still a canvas of pain, but the deep, soul-crushing exhaustion had abated, replaced by a grim, focused energy. The orbs had done their work, knitting him back together just enough to function.
He sat up, his neck stiff, his movements economical. He looked at Lena, who had finally succumbed to an exhausted, fitful sleep, her head now resting against his bloodstained shoulder. He carefully extracted himself, letting her slump against the window.
He stood, ignoring the fresh wave of pain from his wounds, and scanned the bus. He saw their pale, sleepless faces, their eyes hollow with a terror that had aged them a decade in one night.
He didn't ask if they were okay. The question was an insult.
He picked up his dagger. "It's morning,".