I leaned against the desk, cradling my arm. Blood oozed between my fingers where the scalpel had gone in. The cuts were shallow, but clean. It had punched straight through my bracer. I was hurting like hell.
I flicked my wrist and activated a healing potion from my hotlist. The faint glow of the effect spread across the wound, warm and familiar.
Shawn was lying flat on his back, wheezing like he’d just finished a sprint. A bottle of water materialized from his inventory, and he took slow sips without sitting up.
Siva sat slumped in a chair nearby with his head back and eyes closed, another drink in hand.
We were alive. We were all alive.
The woman staggered forward a few unsteady steps before collapsing to her knees in the middle of the room.
Her white coat was stained red with my blood.
She still had her scalpel clutched tight in one trembling fist.
Her breathing came fast and shallow. She didn’t look at us but just stared at the floor like it might open up and swallow her whole.
Shawn let out a low whistle. “Well… that went to shit fast.”
“Ya think?” I hissed, flexing my arm. The dull ache was still there despite the potion’s glow. I triggered another healing charge just to be sure.
The woman finally looked up. Her eyes met mine and I saw confusion, horror and defiance all rolled into one.
“You’re not infected,” she said.
“Not yet,” I muttered. “Thanks for the stabby welcome, by the way.”
“You were invisible,” she shot back. “You grabbed me out of nowhere, what the hell was I supposed to think?”
Siva raised both hands, palms out, stepping between us. “Alright, let’s all take a breath. Everyone here’s still breathing, right?”
No one answered. But none of us were dead. Yet.
She lowered the scalpel a fraction. “I thought you were one of them. Some kind of… intelligent variant.”
She’s scared, I realized. Terrified. And honestly, I couldn’t blame her. In her shoes, I probably would’ve done the same thing.
I took a cautious step closer, keeping my tone calm. “Hey. It’s okay. You’re safe now.”
She didn't respond, her eyes were glassing over.
I crouched to her level. “Hey, what's your name?”
She finally focused on me.
“Jessica,” she said quietly. “Jessica Tu.”
Shawn snorted weakly from the floor.
“Jessica Tu? Really?”
Siva shot him a look. “What are you even talking about?”
“Never mind. I’ll explain some other time.”
I sighed. “You were here the whole time?”
She nodded slowly. “I think so. Time’s… weird in here. Since the checkpoint lockdown. I tried to stay out of sight. My party was with me, but…” She swallowed hard. “They didn’t make it.”
“One of my friends… She was taken right in front of me. I… I couldn’t help her. She screamed for me to help her, and I… couldn’t cast anything fast enough” she said quietly.
We fell silent.
She pointed weakly toward the bank of monitors. “I think some of them are still down there.”
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I followed her gaze. The screens showed the same endless sea of moving corpses.
Shawn frowned, finally getting to his feet. “Wait. You’re saying some of those things used to be your teammates? How were they turned?”
Before she could answer, a wave of dizziness hit me as I felt the room tilt.
“Uh, guys…” My voice came out thin, far away. “Not feeling so good.”
The floor rushed up to meet me. The last thing I saw were their faces. Shawn, Siva and Jessica, crowding over me as her voice echoed, distant but urgent.
“Does anyone have a mana potion?”
---
When I came to, Shawn was grinning down at me like an idiot, while Jessica knelt beside me, her hands glowing faintly gold.
I blinked against the light. My throat was dry and my head was pounding. For a moment, I thought I was back in the elevator until Jessica’s glowing hands came into view.
“What happened? How long was I out?” I croaked, my arm throbbing with a strange, clean heat.
“You passed out, it’s barely been a minute” Shawn said. “She did… something.”
Jessica met my eyes, guilt written all over her face. “I’m sorry. That was me. My scalpel’s enchanted with a Bleed effect. It keeps the wound open until healed by divine magic. Regular potions don’t work once it’s active. It’s ermm… dangerous.”
She lifted the weapon slightly, the blade glinting with faint runes.
I stared at it, then at her. “You’re telling me… I could’ve bled out from a doctor’s knife?”
She winced. “I’m a healer. Not a fighter.”
A healer. Thank God.
But Divine magic? In games I’ve played, that usually meant worshipping a deity or channeling some higher power. Wasn’t one of Shawn’s friends a Cleric? I hadn’t paid much attention then — but now, it suddenly mattered. I filed that thought away for later.
Shawn chuckled under his breath. “Hell of a bedside manner, though.”
Jessica ignored him, her voice barely above a whisper. “I… didn’t choose this. When the world turned to shit, I already had the scalpel in my hand. The system just… changed it. Gave it these runes.”
That made me sit up straighter, the golden light still pulsing around my arm.
“The system gave you a weapon?”
“Not exactly.” Her gaze flicked to the scalpel again. “It didn’t give me anything new. It converted what I already had. "I’m," she hesitated “I was a doctor. Now my class is Seraph Surgeon. I need to choose a specialization at level five.”
That was new.
We had to buy our weapons at the 7-Eleven or get them as loot drops. But if hers came directly from the system, it meant something else, the system was intervening.
I thought of the lightsaber hilt still sitting in my inventory. I still needed a blacksmith, and still had no clue where to find one.
“Alright,” I said finally, pushing myself into a chair. “Let’s regroup. Start from the top. Tell us what happened.”
I gestured for her to sit. She hesitated, then fell into a chair. Siva dragged a chair close, while Shawn leaned against a table, arms folded. There was something off about his expression , there was a tension to him. He’d reacted strangely when Jessica mentioned her friends were part of the horde. I kept that in mind as she began.
They’d started as a big party of thirty-five people, mostly doctors, nurses and admin staff from Woodlands General Hospital when the switchover hit. Jessica had been assisting in surgery when everything went to hell.
The patient on her table was the first to turn.
They fought their way out, patching up whoever they could. Like us, they’d seen Crimson Zones appear on their maps and tried to clear them to progress out of the north. But their zones didn’t match ours.
When I asked about the Zoo, Bird Paradise, and the nature reserve, she shook her head.
“Our Crimson Zones were Northpoint Shopping Centre, Upper Seletar Reservoir, and an army camp,” she said quietly.
They had the same objective, clear five zones to escape the North, but different maps. Different paths. Till now.
It didn’t make sense. It sounded like we were playing the same game on different boards.
I leaned forward. “Tell me about the zombies below.”
Her voice flattened. “We entered the checkpoint thinking it'll be like any other zone. But once we crossed the hall, the exits sealed. Then they came. Hundreds of them. They were fast and coordinated. They shouldn’t have been, but they were.”
She looked down at her hands. “We fought back, but we couldn’t hold them. They just kept coming.”
“Wait.” Shawn straightened, his tone sharper now. “You said you entered through the departure hall?”
Jessica blinked. “Yes… why?”
He glanced at me. We both knew what that meant. The trigger point was different. Our lock-in threshold was the side door. Someone, no, something… changed it.
Jessica continued, her voice small but steady. “I hid. I was supposed to heal from the backline, but everyone was dying too fast. I… I didn’t know what else to do.”
I studied her, trying to read what she wasn’t saying. The guilt, the exhaustion, all of it was real. But survival stories in this world always came with missing pieces. That’s ok. Just the fact she was alive hiding under a counter already provided us the missing pieces.
