It was almost 3 a.m., and the two girls had been asleep for a long time. The three of them had talked for a while, but since both girls were tired from walking too much earlier, they went to bed ahead of time.
Keneric was the only one awake—well, aside from the guards roaming the building on watch duty.
The window in Rune's room stood open, the door locked. Keneric had been sitting on the frame for a long while. The deep moonlight soothed him. Watching the swamp shift with the wind had become a habit for someone like him who no longer felt like sleeping.
But the calm didn't last long. Keneric had a few things planned before sunrise.
He stood on the window frame, leaned out slightly, and when the time was right, he jumped—but not down. He jumped up. That wasn't something a human should be able to do. He grabbed the edge of the fourth-floor hallway and held on.
The whole thing didn't even take a second. Keneric waited—he could hear footsteps ahead. A figure walked out from the corner of the fourth floor, holding a metal makeshift sphere in hand, and passed directly over where Keneric was hanging.
Once the person was gone, Keneric sighed and pulled himself up, careful not to make a sound. He crept through the hallway, first checking on the student guard. He spotted him on the far side of the building, yawning through his rounds. Keneric backed away quietly.
Now he had about forty minutes before the guard would loopback—well, probably—if he went according to Joy's information.
He didn't waste any time and started checking rooms one by one. Just like Joy had said, most of the important people stayed on this floor. Some rooms he could peek into through the windows; others had doors left wide open, letting him walk inside.
"You guys are eating pretty well here," he muttered as he stepped into what looked like Mellisa's room. Some clothes were draped over a chair—ones she had worn yesterday—but Mellisa herself was nowhere to be seen. That was concerning. Keneric took a mental note and quietly stepped out.
Almost all these people were eating ordinary meals, as if there wasn't an apocalypse going on. Meanwhile, students from floors three to one received barely edible rations—some watery soup, bread, or a dry snack at best.
Not that Keneric minded. He already knew leadership was always selfish. The professor clearly used food as a tool—to buy loyalty and obedience. Letting the elites have more was just one of his tactics.
Eventually, Keneric found the previous dean's room in the arts building and stepped inside. How did he know it was the dean's? A clear label above the doors told him so. He shut the big doors behind him quietly.
One more thing Keneric had to thank was his eyesight—he could partially see in the dark. But in this case, he didn't need to. The room was lit by candles. And in one corner, the professor slept.
Keneric walked with slow steps, trying not to wake him. He examined the room until he noticed a door in one corner. With care, he approached and opened it. A soft click echoed.
He stepped inside and smiled in the dark.
"Damn," he whispered.
The sub-room was filled with boxes with stacks of food, soda, cakes, noodles, and all kinds of delicacies. Enough to feed everyone in the shelter for at least a month. The professor was hoarding it all.
What made Keneric smirk wasn't the hoard itself. It was that some of it would spoil soon, meaning the professor preferred wasting it over letting it reach the students.
Well, typical of Nawatt. Not that it was Keneric's place to judge.
He had long stopped eating and now survived on emerald essence. Still, it reminded him what a controlling hypocrite the professor was—even before the apocalypse. They'd both come from the same engineering building, so they'd seen each other before, but never interacted much.
Just as Keneric was about to leave and backtrack to Rune's room, a flush startled him. He dropped into a crouch beside the door and peeked through the narrow opening.
Apparently, the dean's room had an attached bathroom. That wasn't surprising. What was surprising was that the water still worked.
Soon, the bathroom door opened—and a naked Mellisa stepped out, her blonde hair hanging down, covering her back. She walked back to the bed, climbed in beside the sleeping professor, and wrapped herself in his arms.
"Well… that was something," Keneric grimaced.
He waited a solid twenty minutes in the side room until he was sure both were fully asleep. Then, he slipped out quietly and closed the door behind him.
It had already been more than forty minutes, so the guard had likely passed by again. That gave Keneric another thirty-ish minutes to look around.
During that time, he found where they were actually storing food meant for the rest of the students. The stash was much smaller—but he had already expected that.
Once he was done, he returned to the open hallway, climbed out the boundary, and let go. On the way down, he grabbed onto the third-floor ledge, swung sideways, and re-entered the girls' room like a monkey on steroids.
But Joy was already up, sitting beside the window, staring at him with a look that asked exactly what he had done this time around.
Keneric smiled.
"Well, at least your new friend Mellisa can't be trusted," he said, then recounted the entire night to her.
Rune woke up midway through the retelling and joined them by the window, just as the pinkish sun began creeping over the horizon.