The school was no longer a school.
Midtown High's corridors had become a slaughter pen. Lockers peeled open like tin cans, glass from shattered windows glittering on the floor, emergency lights strobing crimson. The screams had thinned to distant echoes, replaced by the wet scrape of scales on tile.
Jake Harlan ran until his lungs bled air.
A single nagini hunted him, sleek and relentless, obsidian claws clicking, forked tongue tasting his panic. Every obstacle he threw behind him, a rolling cart, a slammed door, a toppled bookshelf, was brushed aside like tissue paper.
He burst into the art wing, slammed the heavy fire door, and wedged a sculpture pedestal against it. The door shuddered once, twice. Claws punched through the reinforced glass window, inches from his face.
Jake slid down the wall and finally broke.
Sobs tore out of him, ugly and loud, the kind he'd never let anyone hear.
"I'm going to die," he whispered. "I'm going to die because I'm nothing. Because I never awakened. Because I'm weak."
Tears blurred everything.
He'd spent years gathering people around him like armor. Jokes, group chats, parties, anything to drown out the quiet terror that he didn't matter. Friends? They were curtains. Bright, noisy curtains he hung up so no one would see how hollow he felt inside.
Were any of them real?
He couldn't name one he'd trust with the truth.
Except one.
Austin.
Austin, who never laughed too loud or tried too hard. Austin, who sat with him on the roof at lunch when Jake needed silence more than company. Austin, who once said, "You don't have to perform for me, man," and meant it.
The door splintered. The nagini's face appeared in the jagged hole, eyes glowing, tongue flicking.
Jake stared at it and felt something inside him fracture, not into despair, but into a raw, furious refusal.
He thought of Max Morgan again.
Max, who sat alone in every class, earbuds in, face calm like the world couldn't touch him. Max, who turned down every invitation with a shrug that somehow never looked weak.
Jake had always envied that quiet certainty.
He'd never had it.
But Austin was still somewhere in this building.
Jake stood.
The nagini tore the door apart and lunged.
Jake screamed, not away from it, but straight at it, and charged.
The world exploded into black fire.
A ring of dark flame ignited above his head. Six broken wings of shadow burst from his back. A translucent angel in cracked, blood-stained armor materialized around him, eyes burning cold starlight.
**[Awakening Complete]**
**[Unique Skill: Halo of the Fallen Angel]**
Every stat rocketed from single digits into the mid-fifties in a single violent heartbeat.
Jake's fist, wrapped in black flame, punched clean through the nagini's guard and kept going, through scale, through bone, out the other side in a geyser of dark blood. The halo-wings swept down like guillotines, carving the creature into six steaming chunks that slapped wetly to the floor.
Silence.
Jake swayed, blood pouring from deep gashes across his chest, arms, and thigh. The black flames guttered around the halo like dying embers.
His knees buckled.
No.
He slapped himself hard enough to rattle teeth.
"No," he rasped. "I have to find Austin."
He staggered forward, leaving crimson footprints behind him, the faint silhouette of the fallen angel still flickering at his back like a promise he refused to break.
Austin… please be safe.