I watched Nora and Leo, gun up and ready, until they cleared the soccer field fence and vanished into the darkness at the base of the hill.

Then I let some of the tension leave my shoulders.

"Okay..." I said to nobody in particular. "Time to get to work."

The shattered third-floor window, which they climbed out of, was the perfect starting point.

Pulling out a C4 brick from Inventory, I weighed it in my palm for exactly one second, and threw it upward.

Telekinesis caught it at the apex of the arc and curved it straight through the window.

[Telekinesis is still the best thing I got out of the System... Right beside the legacy guns.]

I fired the Grappling Gun next, aimed straight at the edge of the roof and-

-THUNK-!

The hook hit the bullseye and began the climb up.

And my wounds screeched through every single meter of the three floors like a pack of cheerleaders, and thanks to that, I reached the roof faster than I would’ve otherwise.

The stairwell access door at the right-most corner of the roof greeted me immediately with some very enthusiastic-

-BANG-!-BANG-!-BANG-!...

A bunch of infected were throwing themselves against the metal door, screeching their throats out.

"Ease up, fellas, you’ll get your autographs..." I told them cheerfully.

But they still kept banging. Truly, the worst audience I have ever performed for.

-Ding!

{

Item: Battery-Powered PA Speaker

Maximum Output: 120 dB

USB Playback Compatible

Battery Life: 10 Hours

Cost: 120 Credits

8 GB USB Drive: 5 Credits

USB-C OTG Adapter: 10 Credits

}

And two minutes later, Highway to Hell had been downloaded onto a USB drive for the second time in a single evening.

Copyright law had already stopped mattering several hours ago.

"Never change a winning strategy," I murmured, setting the speaker at the center of the roof and turning toward the courtyard edge.

Now came the genuinely fun part.

Three C4 bricks came out of the inventory. I tossed the first over the edge, caught it in Telekinesis before it could build any real speed, and settled it against the main building entrance below, right between the horde. The second brick went ten meters left. The third went ten meters right.

[Entrance... done...]

Then I started rigging the entire building, which was where things became enjoyable in a way I could not adequately explain to a mental health professional.

The process was simple. Throw a brick from the roof, catch it in the air, guide it through whatever opening was in range, and release.

Telekinesis held the grip as long as the charge stayed within fifteen meters. Beyond that, the grip cut entirely.

Attempt four confirmed this when I tried to float a charge into a far-right corridor of the top floor and felt the connection simply stop.

The brick dropped two floors and bounced off a window ledge with a sound that sent a brand new kind of shiver down my spine.

[Okay... it didn’t detonate...] I exhaled very slowly. [ Fifteen meters means fifteen meters. Noted...]

I started walking the roof perimeter instead, repositioning with each charge so the range always covered the target. Throw, redirect, release, move a few steps along the edge, repeat.

Second-floor corridor: ten charges, spaced along the length.

Third-floor corridor: ten charges in the same pattern.

Far right staircase: four bricks distributed across the landings.

East-end lecture hall cluster: six charges through the windows.

"Congratulations, Electrical and Civil Engineering Department... Your structural renovation budget has finally arrived."

I bought more C4 when the stock ran out. Then bought more again when the second ran out.

And throughout all this, The System remained cheerfully willing to facilitate the ’renovations’.

Surrounding courtyard walkways got five charges each.

The roof itself received ten, positioned around the stairwell door and the perimeter edges.

And by the time I was done, close to 50 military-grade explosive charges had been distributed across three floors, the stairwell, the building entrance, the courtyard, and the roof itself.

[Alright... now for the anus clenching part...]

I walked back to the speaker at the center of the roof, inserted the drive, and hit play.

And every infected on university grounds stopped moving at the exact same instant, the opening guitar riff rolled across the entire campus at full volume.

One full second of complete campus-wide silence.

Then-

-GHRRRAAA-!!

Thousands of blood-curdling screams drowned everything.

Doors burst open across every visible building as the Infected poured from lecture halls, dormitories, and study rooms, every single one of them surging toward the building like a tsunami of screeching hell.

"Right... That is absolutely my cue to fuck off."

I fired the grappling launcher straight down at the roof edge beside my feet, and rappelled off the building faster than I ever rappelled in my entire life, damn near looking the grip more than once, all the while my ribs sent emergency communications up the chain of command.

The ground arrived faster than expected and I reeled it the hook in the moment my boots found grass, turned, and ran without looking back even once, because not even I was that insane.

Clearing the soccer field at full sprint, I climbed over the mesh without slowling, and didn’t stop until I was at the foot of the hill, one hundred and fifty meters later

The heart was pounding, but I was grinning like a complete idiot the entire way.

Hands on my knees, I looked over to my handiwork and saw the entire building disappear under bodies that looked like a singular slithering mass of flesh from this distance.

Every window, every surface was packed with Infected climbing over each other trying to reach the roof. The whole structure looked like a single continuous organism made of several thousand screaming things.

"Time for the fireworks~" I grinned wider as I pulled the detonator from Inventory and-

-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!...

For a fraction of a heartbeat, the entire three-story building simply glowed, fifty charges of C4 igniting in a synchronized pulse of expanding plasma, illuminating the swarming masses just before obliterating them.

The Infected, forming the outer layer of that slithering mass, were straight up sent flying across the sky, most of them in bits and pieces already.

Every remaining window detonated outward in a unified glittering storm of glass.

And then came the shockwave.

It crossed the hundred-and-fifty-meter gap instantly, an almost solid wall of force that forced me a full step backward as the sheer kinetic pressure punched straight through my chest plate.

The sound arrived a split-second later like an overlapping, continuous roar that tore the night wide open.

Caught in the violence of that blast, the building’s exterior rumbled and ruptured in brutal, heavy slabs.

The roof physically lifted at the far-right corner, hanging suspended for a single impossible second before gravity remembered its job.

Floor by floor, the building collapsed as the charges triggered a cascading, fluid failure that buried the horde under thousands of tons of pulverized stone.

From the cratered wreckage, a roiling, absolute cloud of dust surged upward, almost covering the entire campus within moments.

And then-

-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!-Ding!...

The notifications stacked faster than I could process them, credits arriving in quantities that even the System appeared genuinely unprepared to handle.

And I stood there with butterflies dancing in my stomach as I imagined the things I’ll buy from the Shop.