Athanasia: My Hacker System

"This..."

Hearing what the stranger said, his firm tone that spoke volumes about his hard belief in what he just claimed, made even Ricky had a moment of pause and change in face.

"Whoever is orchestrating this annoying prank, stop it! I’m not falling for this shitshow." He shouted at the air beyond the five youths in front of him, looking for hidden cameras or snickering accomplices at either end of the long corridor.

John watched the youth’s reaction, his mind spinning fast, thinking about what if what that stranger said was true. He ignored the current tension and weird situation, jumped to the point he had been doubting since the moment he saw the new face in Ricky’s room.

"Can you tell me something then?" John interrupted, his voice cutting through the boy’s frantic scanning of the hallway. "Is there a higher year that suffered a misfortune, an accident, back when they were in year one? Specifically, a class that lost five of their classmates on the eve of winning the competition against the second year?"

The student stopped looking for pranksters. He froze, his eyes widening as he looked at John. "Oh, you are talking about the Class of Year Three," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper.

Then, as the realisation of who he was standing in front of hit him like a lightning strike, his entire frame began to tremble with fear and pure disbelief. "That... That’s impossible! That’s impossible!!"

He let out a weird shout before suddenly darting across John and the others. He shoved past John, his shoulder hitting the latter with enough force that a normal student would have been knocked back.

But John didn’t feel any harm or discomfort; he didn’t even sway. He simply stood in place, a silent monument, while the youth started running down the corridor, his shaky voice echoing through the building until it began to fade.

"Zombies! We have the third-year missing students zombies walking in our department! They’re zombies at my doorstep! Zombies, we have zombies in our department!!"

The hallway lapsed into a heavy, suffocating silence.

"John... You can’t believe what that lunatic said." Ricky turned to John, his face pale. The rest of the team looked just as shaken. They had prepared themselves for a slightly longer duration for their absence than the almost half-year spent at the pocket trial. But the weight of two years was a different beast entirely.

John couldn’t help but inwardly sigh. "We already expected our absence to be long..."

"But not for over two years," Cissel whispered, her voice trembling. "Still... Will our plan work? The excuse we prepared..."

"It’ll work perfectly fine," John cut her short. He glanced toward the high corners of the hallway where the hidden monitor was. These devices recorded audio and video; it was far too dangerous to speak of such stuff in the open.

He had told them before they stepped through the portal about the presence of hidden monitors. Even in the safety of their dorms, they needed to be extra vigilant until he could sweep their rooms for any newly added surveillance devices.

"Let’s wait then," Elena said, her eyes scanning the darkness at the end of the hall. Already, early batches of curious students were starting to appear from the shadows of distant stairwells. "Something tells me it won’t be a peaceful night for many."

She was right. As the student they had met kept running and screaming in genuine fear, the dormitory building roared to life. Lights flickered on in room after room. Doors slammed open. Soon, the news travelled like wildfire to distant buildings. Students began to pour out into the night, running toward the corridor where the five zombies stood.

"Ricky... It’s you... It’s really you. This... This is quite unbelievable!"

Half an hour hadn’t even passed before the five friends were surrounded by hundreds of students. John realised beforehand that the narrow corridor was becoming a choke point.

If they were going to make their return official, they needed a grander stage. He led the group toward the wide hall at the edge of the building, a grand space overlooking the expansive garden.

As the students flooded the area, creating a wall of staring eyes and frantic whispers, John motioned to his friends to maintain their silence. They stood as a unit, changed by everything they lived through back at the pocket trial or the new world.

They were looking less like new cubs joining the academy and more like veteran warriors among a crowd of children.

Finally, the crowd parted. Alfred, Bernard, and the rest of Ricky’s old gang pushed through to the front, leading their classmates to witness what many were calling a miracle.

"How come... You were dead... All of you were dead..." Bernard followed Alfred’s lead, his hands visibly shaking as he reached out, trying to touch Ricky’s shoulder to confirm he was flesh and bone and not a spectral illusion.

"Hey, it’s me," Ricky retorted. He took an instinctive step back, a reflex born from months of living under constant threats, but a faint, genuine smile appeared on his face. "Stop acting as if I just crawled out of a grave."

"But..." Alfred gulped, his eyes watery. "You really just did so! You’ve been gone for more than two years! We held a big funeral for all of you..."

"Did you ever see our bodies?" John asked, finally stepping forward, taking control of the situation. He knew he had to take the lead immediately, or their return would devolve into a freak show.

His words silenced the entire hall. The collective breathing of hundreds of people seemed to stop in an instant. Yet, while their tongues were tied, their eyes screamed the confusion of their minds.

No one truly believed what they saw; it felt like a master level of hallucination. At first, the look of sheer bewilderment on their old classmates’ faces was amusing, but as the minutes ticked by and the staring intensified, the five of them began to feel the prickle of annoyance.

"Make way! It’s Teacher Nikolas!"

The shout came from the rear of the crowd, cutting through the heavy silence like a blade. John, who had been about to speak again to break the tension, closed his mouth and waited.

A familiar face pushed through the sea of students: Nikolas, the head of their class. He looked older, his face more lined than John remembered, but the sharp, fierce look in his eyes remained the same.

He wasn’t alone. A formidable group flanked him, their presence radiating a level of authority that made the students instinctively shrink back.

It was a fierce-looking assembly of teachers, many of whom John and his friends didn’t recognise. However, a few faces stood out, including the scarred teacher John had met on his very first day at the academy, and many he met and even talked to after winning their competition on the eve of their departure.