[POV Orión]

  The roar that shook the cssroom was not a mere noise. It was a viotion. A vibration that not only shook the building but resonated in my bones, in the very air, and in the depths of my being. An ancestral, primal fear seized me, a fear that my usual apathy could not stifle. I had tried to return to life, to reach out for hope, and life answered me with the choked scream of the world's end.

  The Applied Economics professor, the same man who moments before was tediously expining the complexities of supply and demand, was now pale, his face contorted by terror. His eyes, fixed on the window, widened excessively. "Maintain calm! Nobody leave the cssroom!" his voice was sharp, tinged with a panic that contradicted his own words, breaking the fa?ade of authority.

  We had all stood up, a wave of frightened and confused faces. My eyes were glued to the window, to the impossible spectacle of the sky. The Celestial Object, which moments before had been a dark, distant speck, now dominated everything. It was an immense, grotesque sb of shadow, an aberration that defied all logic, all natural w. It seemed to absorb the sunlight, the blue of the sky, the very promise of the day, leaving only a dark, menacing void.

  The professor continued shouting, "It's a drill! Do not leave! It could be an attack... a chemical attack! Remain in your seats!" His voice cracked. His eyes rolled back, and an expression of extreme confusion spread across his face, as if his mind was being erased in real-time. He staggered, his knees gave way with a dry sound, and he slumped against the desk. His inert body fell like a ragdoll, without a whimper, without an audible st breath. Only a dull thud that echoed in the silence that followed.

  The cssroom erupted in screams of pure terror. The hysteria, previously contained, took hold of everyone. The students in the front rows, those closest to the fallen professor, began to scream even louder. Then, the effect spread. A girl by the bckboard clutched her head, her eyes rolling back with terrifying speed, and she fell to the floor, her body convulsing briefly before going still. A boy beside her. Another. One by one, with chilling speed, they began to colpse, as if an invisible scythe were silently mowing them down. There was no pain, no struggle. Just an inert fall.

  "Run! My God, run!" someone shouted from the back, and the mass of students moved like a wounded animal, frantically pushing towards the door in a desperate attempt to escape. The chaos became absolute. Books flew through the air, chairs crashed to the floor, screams of panic filled the air, a chorus of desperation.

  My eyes, however, were fixed only on one person. Sora.

  She was motionless, standing, paralyzed by horror, her eyes wide and gssy, watching her cssmates fall. Her hands were trembling uncontrolbly. That pure panic on her face... it was something I had never seen, not even when pressed by the most difficult exams. My brain, which had been steeped in apathy for weeks, in a self-imposed slumber, reacted purely instinctively, with an impulse I didn't recognize. It wasn't logical thought, nor reason. It was something more primitive, deeper. Protect her. I had to protect her. She was the st vestige of what I cared about in a crumbling world.

  I pushed my way through the whirlwind of bodies trying to exit the door. People shoved me, screamed, elbowed their way out, but I only had one goal.

  "Sora!" I yelled, my voice lost in the roar of the crowd and the shouts of panic. The air vibrated with the energy of the Celestial Object, closer, more present.

  I managed to reach her, grabbing her arm with a strength I didn't know I possessed. Her skin was cold, her body rigid. "We have to get out of here!" I dragged her with all my might toward the door, which was now a bottleneck of desperate bodies, some of them already unconscious, blocking the passage.

  She was in a state of deep shock. She barely reacted to my touch, letting herself be pulled by my strength, a ragdoll in the whirlwind. Her eyes looked lost, fixed on a point beyond the wall, beyond the Object.

  "Orion! The sky! It's falling!"

  A voice in my head screamed, but it wasn't mine. It was a voice I barely recognized, an echo of my own consciousness, starting to blur. My peripheral vision was filled with fshes of purple light, or was it just my mind failing.

  As we pushed and struggled our way out, a new kind of pain began to set in. It wasn't a physical pain, it wasn't a wound. It was an insidious pressure in my skull, as if something was trying to reorganize my thoughts, my memories, my very identity. It wasn't a sharp pain; it was a pain of restructuring, of undoing and redoing. The sharpness of my vision began to blur. The vibrant colors of the world became less vivid, the sounds duller, distant, as if water had entered my ears.

  The people around us continued to fall. Students running through the hallway colpsed without warning, their bodies hitting the floor with a dull thud. It was a silent, invisible epidemic, and it was closing in, it was reaching me. I felt the edge of that mental fog, that wave I had seen on the news, creeping toward me.

  "My head... it hurts...!" Sora whimpered, her voice a ment I could barely hear. She fell to her knees, her face pale as wax, her eyes struggling to stay open. It was the end. I knew it.

  I grabbed her with both hands, trying to lift her, but I felt my own legs falter. The pressure in my mind became unbearable, as if thousands of needles were trying to pierce my thoughts, rewrite my history. The fog spread, covering my mind, erasing the details, the names, the faces. My name. My own identity. Everything.

  What is happening? The question was a faint whimper in my fading consciousness. It was a question that would never be answered, at least not by me.

  I felt a surge of cold energy, like an electric discharge that didn't burn, but reorganized, run through my body. It wasn't the pain of apathy, nor the pain of rejection that had kept me anchored to my miserable existence. It was a different pain, a pain of reconfiguration. Of forced change. Of annihition of who I was.

  "Sora," I murmured, my voice was going, my throat closing. My hands, now clumsy, clung to her like a st lifeline. My eyes struggled to stay open, to see her one st time. Her face, once so clear in my memory, was now an indistinct blur. Her name... her name was becoming hard to recall, slipping from my mind like sand between my fingers.

  The fog became a wall. The world was turning bck, not just the sky. My vision closed into a dark tunnel. The st thing I saw was the Celestial Object, that dark, impossible mass, filling the horizon, casting a shadow of death over everything I knew, over everything I was. And I felt my mind, my very essence, dissolving.

  My knees gave way. I fell, dragging Sora with me, our bodies hitting the cold floor of the hallway. The hallway, which seconds before had been a whirlwind of life, was now filled with inert bodies. We were just two more.

  The sound of screams faded, repced by a distant humming that vibrated in my ears. A hum that grew louder, more resonant, until it became the only sensation that existed. The cold. The fear. The confusion.

  Then, only the void. A void different from the one I had known. Not that of apathy, nor that of loneliness. It was the void of absolute nothingness. An endless darkness, where my mind dissolved, where I, Orion Winst, ceased to exist completely.