The light came first.
It tore through the cafeteria windows without warning--a white so total it swallowed the room whole. Students threw their arms up. Some cried out. Others just froze, blinking into nothing.
Then the heat arrived.
It came like a wall, like standing too close to a furnace with the door kicked wide open. The air went sharp and stinging, pressing against skin like a thousand hot needles at once.
People gasped. Some choked.
The room had become an oven, and there was nowhere to go.
And then...
The sound came..
BOOOOOOOMMMMMM!!!!!!!!..
The shockwave hit the university like a physical thing. Windows didn't just crack, they exploded inward, becoming millions of tiny blades tearing through the room and into anyone in their path.
Heads. Necks. Eyes.
Some students didn't have time to understand what was happening before it was already over.
Doors were ripped from their hinges. Weaker walls buckled and gave out. Students who'd been laughing seconds ago were hurled across the room, hitting the walls with a dull, thud. Chairs and tables spun through the air. In the hallways, teachers were crushed under falling beams before they could take a single step.
Outside, the campus was already coming apart.
The sky was full of burning streaks, dozens of them, cutting downward, growing larger every second. One had already hit the far side of the grounds.
As another screamed toward the faculty wing, there was barely time to register it before the meteorite punched straight through the roof. The building folded inward like a book snapping shut. Professors who'd been grading papers, sipping coffee, buried instantly under concrete and twisted steel.
In the library next door, students studying in silence didn't even get the chance to look up before the ceiling came down.
Offices crumbled. Computers and loose papers scattered into the rising fire. In the corridors, the ground shook again and pieces of ceiling rained down. Lights flickered once, then died. Dust filled the air so fast it became hard to breathe, thick, gritty, coating the throat.
People ran. No direction, no plan, just movement, the pure animal need to be somewhere else. Some tried to pull others to their feet. Others shoved past without looking. Fear had taken over everything else.
Near the stairwell, a group scrambled down together when another tremor rolled through the building. They went down in a heap, tangled and yelling.
Outside the main block, the courtyard was frozen chaos. Students who'd made it out stood in clusters, staring at the sky, too stunned to move. The burning objects were getting bigger. Closer.
Then another one came.
This time, toward the hostels.
The flash was brighter than before, white consuming everything for one full second. Then the impact. The hostel lurched as one entire side collapsed inward. Walls cracked open. Windows burst. Rooms were obliterated in moments, furniture crushed flat, beds folded under fallen ceilings, the students inside buried under what remained.
In the academic block, the air kept thickening- dust and char coating the tongue with every breath. Some students had stopped moving entirely, not injured, just done. A few sat against the wall with blank eyes. Others cried quietly, or called out names over and over, voices going hoarse, getting no answer back.
More streaks fell. Each one brought another flash, another wave of pressure, another impact that shook whatever was still standing. Fire spread from building to building. Smoke climbed from everywhere at once. Part of the campus was simply gone.
The sky burned orange and red, and it didn't slow.
Ashford University- full of noise and life that same morning, was a ruin. Buildings broken open, teachers buried, students dying in hallways, hostels torn apart, offices gutted by fire. Everything that made it recognizable had been stripped away in minutes.
And still it continued.
No pause and No sign of stopping.
In one of the dark hallways, everything was wreckage.
The floor had split open along deep, jagged cracks. The lights overhead buzzed and flickered weakly. Broken concrete lay in piles across every surface. The air was heavy with dust and the smell of something burning nearby.
A hand shot out from beneath a slab.
Rix's hand.
He was alive. Not okay, but just alive. He'd been unconscious through all of it, buried under the ceiling that had come down on top of him. Dust coated his skin. Blood streaked one arm.
His fingers trembled as they clawed at the cracked floor, finding purchase slowly, dragging the rest of him free centimeter by centimeter.
He surfaced into the dark hallway with no idea what had happened to the world outside.
The last thing he remembered clearly was running, sprinting down the corridor with his lungs on fire, swearing loudly at nothing in particular, and then the meteorite had hit the hallway entrance maybe a hundred meters ahead of him.
Even from that distance, the shockwave was monstrous.
Light first. Blinding, instant, total. Then heat surging through the air like a tide.
And then the wave itself hit him, a punch to the chest that picked him up and threw him. He flew backward several meters before slamming into the wall hard enough to crack it. The wall came down on top of him a second later.
Adrenaline was still screaming through his system, but it didn't matter. He was human. Bones and organs had limits, and he'd just found them.
His vision cut out before he finished falling.
He came back to himself with blood running into one eye, soaking through his collar, dripping onto the floor beneath him. His head was the loudest thing in the world.
"AHH — shit!" His voice cracked. He grabbed his head and rolled across the debris, the sound echoing off the broken walls around him. His body was shaking and wouldn't stop.
For a few seconds he genuinely couldn't tell which way was up. His vision swam. Blood was coming from his nose too, he realized, he could taste it. His legs felt wrong. Everything felt wrong.
But he moved anyway.
He got his arms under him and pushed. His muscles protested hard. Debris shifted and scraped beneath him. He made it to his feet and stood there swaying, waiting for the hallway to stop spinning.
It took a while.
As his balance slowly returned, he noticed the sound-or rather, the rhythm beneath all the other sounds.
THUD..
THUD...
THUD!!
Heavy. Regular. Like the ground itself was being struck over and over, each impact traveling up through the floor into the soles of his feet.
He needed to move. Standing still meant dying if another one landed close. He pushed himself forward, one step at a time, dragging his way through the debris. Slower than he wanted. Much slower than before. The adrenaline was draining out of him fast, leaving exhaustion and pain in its place.
He made it to the entrance.
It was completely blocked. A collapse of wall and ceiling chunks had piled up from floor to near the top, sealing the way through.
He started pulling at it with his bare hands.
It was slow, grinding work. His fingernails tore on concrete. His arms burned with every piece he shifted. But he kept going, clearing chunk after chunk until he'd opened a gap, small, barely enough and forced his shoulder into it. Sharp edges scraped across his back and side. He grunted, pushed harder, and shoved himself through.
He straightened up on the other side.
And stopped...
The campus he knew was gone. In its place was smoke and fire as far as he could see, stretching in every direction under a sky stained a deep, bruised orange, bleeding color into the air above the ruins.