Chapter 543. I Broke Her Door Politely and Bandaged Her Back Badly

Chapter 543: 543. I Broke Her Door Politely and Bandaged Her Back Badly

William stepped back one pace, his mind working with the cold, mechanical efficiency of a soldier assessing a breach. His pulse was a hammer against his ribs, but he forced it down.

He glanced at the corridor around him; the dormitory was teeming with eighty students, some sleeping, some hunched over books in nearby rooms, all within shouting distance.

If he simply threw his shoulder against the door, the crash would wake the entire wing, sending panicked students rushing into what might be a massacre.

The reinforced door was built to withstand force, but it wasn’t built to withstand precision.

He raised his hand, fingers splayed like claws. He didn’t call for a gust; he called for something far more dangerous.

He summoned the wind to the tips of his fingers, compressing the air until it screamed in a frequency too high for the human ear to detect.

He narrowed the pressure until it became a thin, invisible blade of razor-sharp air. With two lightning-fast strokes, he drew the air across the door’s hinges.

The screech of parting metal was muffled by the wind itself.

He caught the door with one hand before it could crash down, lowering it to the floor with agonizing care. The silence of the hallway remained intact, but the silence inside the room was shattered by something far worse.

Then he looked in, and the world seemed to freeze. Every instinct he possessed screamed at him to run, to flee from the impossibility of what his eyes were witnessing.

Ellie was on her knees in the center of the room, but she wasn’t just kneeling; she was convulsing. Her entire body was locked in a violent, rhythmic tremor that made her bones audibly click and grind against one another.

Her fingers were buried in the carpet, claws extended, tearing through the fabric and ripping at the floorboards beneath with enough strength to splinter wood.

And then there was the light.

It wasn’t coming from the lamps. It was erupting from her. Thick, violent pulses of light poured from the base of her spine, a blinding white shot through with veins of molten gold.

The radiance was so intense it threw her shadow across the walls and ceiling in a flickering, frantic dance, making the room appear to breathe in time with her agony.

The back of her shirt had been shredded, torn apart by the sheer force of whatever was emerging.

In the raw, exposed gap between her shoulder blades, two small shapes were pushing up through her skin.

They weren’t flesh. They weren’t bone.

They were translucent, glowing from within like hand-blown glass lit by an internal furnace. They moved with a slow, inexorable pressure, stretching the skin of her back until it turned translucent and blood streaked it.

They looked like the roots of some celestial plant, something ancient and alien that had been waiting centuries to finally break through the soil of her body.

Ellie’s head snapped toward him. Her face was a mask of pure, unadulterated torment.

Her cheeks were streaked with tears and sweat, her lower lip was split crimson where she had bitten through it to stifle her screams, and her eyes those familiar, warm eyes were wide, glassy, and unfocused with pain.

"Instructor Wade..." she gasped.

The word was barely a sound, a broken exhale that carried more terror than any scream could.

For one heartbeat, William was paralyzed.

His mind reeled: ’This isn’t possible... This isn’t magic.’

’This is something else... This is the end.’ The horror threatened to swallow him whole, to send him stumbling backward into the hall.

But then, something shifted deep inside his psyche. Something older and steadier than fear took hold.

A fragment of a past life, a memory of standing in blood-soaked field tents under the thunder of artillery fire, kneeling over dying strangers in the dead of night, surged to the surface. His breathing slowed.

The frantic pounding in his chest steadied into a grim, rhythmic beat. His shoulders loosened, dropping into a stance of controlled readiness.

His voice, when it finally came, was terrifyingly calm. It was the voice of a man who had seen the abyss and refused to blink.

It was the voice of someone who knew that in the face of a god or a monster, panic was the first thing that would kill you.

"Ellie, look at me," he commanded, his voice cutting through the supernatural hum of the room like a blade. "Not behind you."

"Look at me... Eyes on me, Ellie."

William crossed the room in three thunderous strides, his boots silent on the carpet despite his urgency. He dropped to his knees in front of her, the impact jarring his joints, but he didn’t feel it.

His entire world had narrowed down to the girl convulsing before him. He reached out and took her by the shoulders; his grip was gentle enough to avoid causing fresh agony but firm enough to anchor her to reality.

With deliberate motion, he maneuvered her so her back was pressed against the solid stone wall, forcing her gaze upward, forcing her to meet his eyes.

She was burning. When his palms met her skin, it felt like touching sun-baked metal.

Her breath came in wet, ragged gasps that sounded like someone drowning on dry land, and her pupils had dilated so violently that the amber iris was reduced to a thin, terrified ring around a black void.

"Listen to my voice, Ellie."

"Only my voice," he commanded, his tone dropping into that gravelly, hypnotic register he used when adrenaline threatened to overwhelm his own senses. "I need you to breathe with me."

"Don’t think about the pain; don’t think about what’s happening behind you."

"Just the air... In through your nose, one, two, three, four."

"Hold it... Now out through your mouth six counts."

"Can you do that? Can you do it for me?"

"It hurts," she sobbed, the sound breaking into a wet cough. "Instructor Wade... it hurts so much!"

"I can’t... I can’t feel my legs... I can’t—" A fresh spasm wracked her frame, her spine arching so violently that William had to brace his own weight against her to keep her from slamming into the wall. "Make it stop!"

"Please, please make it stop!"

"I know it does... God, Ellie, I know." His heart was screaming at him to break something, to fight something, to tear the universe apart to save her, but he forced his hands to remain steady. "I’m right here."

"I’m not going anywhere... I’ve got you. Again."

"In through your nose... One, two, three, four."

She tried. Her first attempt was a disaster: a shuddering, choking inhale that broke halfway through as another pulse of light erupted from her back.

But she fought for the second breath. And the third.

William kept counting aloud, a steady, metronomic rhythm that acted as a lifeline in the chaos. Slowly, painfully, her breathing began to sync with his, her gasps smoothing out like a boat finally finding its keel in a storm.

While he counted, his mind trained by two lifetimes of trauma performed a cold, clinical assessment. The sight was nauseating.

Blood was seeping from the jagged edges where the skin had been forced apart, dark and viscous, soaking into the ruined fabric of her shirt.

The two glassy protrusions had broken through only a few finger widths, but they were still advancing, grinding through muscle and connective tissue with the inexorable force of growing crystal.

Every time they shifted, a fresh wave of that sickly gold light rolled out, accompanied by the wet, grinding sound of something displacing her internal anatomy.

From his position, William could see the terrifying proximity: the tips of these translucent growths were inches from her vertebrae.

In his old world, a wound to the spinal column meant paralysis at best and death at worst. But this wasn’t a blade or a bullet; this was something fundamental rewriting her biology.

’What kind of hell is this?’ he thought, a flash of genuine terror flickering behind his eyes before he crushed it. ’This isn’t magic.’

’This is evolution.’

’This is something breaking out of its cocoon.’

He needed to control the bleeding. He couldn’t stop the growth, but he could manage the damage.

Reaching for the nearest bedsheet with one hand while keeping his other firmly on her shoulder, he gripped the fabric and tore.

The sound of ripping linen was loud in the charged air. He folded the strip into a thick, improvised pad, his movements precise despite the sweat stinging his eyes.

He leaned in, pressing the pad carefully around the base of the protrusions. He applied even pressure to the bleeding edges, careful not to touch the glass like surfaces themselves.

Ellie let out a sound that wasn’t human, a high, keening hiss as her body instinctively recoiled from the pressure. Her back arched again, her muscles corded like steel cables.

"Easy, easy!" William gritted out, leaning his weight into her to keep her still. "That’s the worst part, Ellie..."

"Just hold on. It’ll ease off in a second... Stay with me."

"You’re lying," she gasped, her head lolling back against the wall, her eyes unfocused and bloodshot. "You’re... you’re lying to me..."

"Maybe a little," William admitted, his voice rough as he tightened the makeshift bandage, his own knuckles white. "But breathe anyway..."

"Just breathe."