Chapter 46: The Outside

The heavy glass-and-steel doors of the university's main exit hissed shut behind Michael, cutting off the rhythmic, echoing roars of the mutilated variants he had just left trailing through the university department's corridors. The cool spring air of Vienna hit his face. The blooming cherry blossoms along the university perimeter stood in stark, grotesque contrast to the dark, widening stains of blood on the concrete below. The world was awakening into spring, but it was a spring born of systemic slaughter.

As he stepped out onto the wide concrete plaza overlooking the main street, Michael intentionally refrained from utilizing his newly acquired spatial displacement skill. He checked his status window with a short thought. His mana reserves were extremely low, hovering precariously close to the absolute baseline. His act of savior inside—systematically fracturing the limbs of the lower-tier variants to allow the wounded, left-behind students to trigger their own Level Ups—had demanded a steep price. He had spent an immense amount of energy executing consecutive teleportations to strike and cripple monsters on his way.

His mind started operating and calculating the costs of his skill and determining his bounderies.

*With my current maximum mana pool,* Michael analyzed, his eyes tracking the glowing blue numerical figures floating at the edge of his peripheral vision, *I can barely manage five consecutive short-range spatial blinks before nearly draining most of my mana. Five jumps. That is an incredibly narrow margin of safety. In a monster filled environment, five teleportations mean nothing. I must become infinitely more conservative with my usage of Teleportation until I can increase my mana.*

He slowed his pace slightly as he crossed the threshold of the university perimeter, monitoring the passive replenishment rate of his energy.

*Based on my calculations, it appears I recovered approximately five points of mana over the last five minutes,* he noted, his analytical gaze narrowing. *That means one point per minute. Hmm… I wonder if this fixed and never changing or if I can do something to increase the ratio? In games, active mana recovery rises when you remain stationary or enter a state of rest. If the System goes the same way as those games, moving now might be slowing my regeneration.*

He shook his head slightly, pushing the theory aside. *These thoughts are just a waste of time. I will have to test it later under safer conditions. Right now, I cannot afford to lose another single second. My family is out there in the chaos.*

When Michael finally reached the open asphalt of the main street, the scene that appeared before him was entirely different from the historical reality of the Austrian capital. There was no bustling mid-day crowd, no orderly columns of public transportation, and no ambient hum of urban civilization. Instead, an absolute, suffocating silence gripped the concrete canyons, broken only at irregular intervals by distant, echoic sounds of high-pitched, desperate shrieks of humans on one side, and the guttural, predatory roars of monsters on the other.

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*If phones remain fully operational, and the internet is still running, it implies the apocalypse did not effect the technology of Earth,* Michael deduced. *The System also did not alter the fundamental laws of physic. It seems like it merely integrated itself into the existing laws. If the electrical networks and mechanical components are intact, it means all technology such as engines and modern vehicles will function as well.*

His eyes swept the immediate multi-lane street, identifying several abandoned vehicles left erratically across the lanes.

*I need a car to speed up across the city sectors,* he reasoned. *Finding a working vehicle with the key on it should theoretically be possible. The drivers in this sector were caught completely unaware during the initial outbreak. Many were likely attacked or killed before they could even switch off their engines.*

While he was analysing the situation and his possiblities there was no room for mourning or grief. The corpses scattered across the asphalt were strangers and already dead.

Michael stepped off the curb and onto the open asphalt. He avoided the neatly aligned, parked vehicles along the sidewalk; individuals who had parked their cars before the apocalypse would have naturally taken their keys with them. Instead, his focus locked onto the vehicles stranded directly in the middle of the driving lanes—cars that had been halted mid-transit when the world shattered.

As he walked past a crushed silver sedan, his eyes registered the true scale of the initial slaughter on the open street. Between the tangled metal frames of the abandoned vehicles lay countless human bodies. They were torn apart, their clothes soaked in dark, drying blood. Michael felt a sudden, unfamiliar surge of heat beneath his skin. His grip tightened around the textured hilt of his Level 5 shortsword until his knuckles turned stark white.

The sight of dead children, of mothers frozen in defensive postures over their offspring under the pale spring sun, sent a wave of pure, unadulterated fury through his calculated composure. It was a deep, burning rage against the monstrous anomalies that treated human life as mere food to be consumed.

He forced his emotions back down into a dark chamber of his mind, locking it away behind rationality. Getting emotional would only induce mistakes and wrong choices, and mistakes led to death. He redirected his focus toward a black SUV a few meters ahead, its driver-side door flung wide open, its hazard lights still blinking a rhythmic, amber warning.

Before he could reach the vehicle's frame, a sharp, wet tearing sound echoed from behind the rear bumper of a nearby delivery van.

Michael halted his advance, his senses instantly snapping into high alert. A creature slinked out from the shadow of the van, its muzzle dripping with fresh crimson as it fed on a dead pedestrian. It was a four-legged anomaly—a hound-like variant with hairless, matte-black skin, elongated limbs that ended in hooked claws, and an extra pair of sensory eyes glowing with a malicious, low-tier intelligence.

At the sight of the beast casually defiling the human remains, the tightly locked fury inside Michael briefly ruptured his behavioral constraints. The rationality vanished, replaced by a lethal predator driven by an intense desire to erase the target.

Without thinking, Michael triggered his one and only skill.