Transmigrated as an Extra: Awakening of The Ex‐Class'-Chapter 65 : Haunted building part 3

Erwing’s Perspective

Before I could take a single step towards him, Armand vanished before my eyes as if the wind had sucked him away. It wasn’t gradual but instantaneous, as if time had spat him out of reality. A blink was enough to lose sight of him. I stopped dead in my tracks, my feet rooted to the ground as my heart pounded so hard I felt like I could break my ribs.

The air around me turned cold and a chill ran down my spine, as if an intangible force was meant to warn me. What had that been? An illusion? A trick of the mind? But the chill in the air, that chill that didn’t belong in this place where Armand had vanished.

My eyes locked on the spot where he had been standing, as if I expected him to somehow reappear. But instead of that, from the back, a door slowly opened with a creaking sound that echoed loudly in the halls of this building. It was a sound that was not discordant, as if the wood of the door was alive and suffering. A faint reddish glow emerged from within. The light spread across the floor, illuminating specks of dust floating in the air, and somehow, that glow made me feel a deep unease, as if something was watching me from the shadows.

I looked around, fortunately the four young first-years were still with me. They were there, but their faces reflected the same confusion and fear that I felt. Their eyes were fixed on the door, and their hands trembled slightly as they held their flashlights. At that instant, the air around us began to fill with murmurs, low and dragged, as if hundreds of voices were whispering in a language I could not understand. I tried to cover my ears but the sounds filtered through my mind, not through my eardrums, but directly into my thoughts, like a forgotten melody that brought with it a strange nostalgia, a sense of loss that I couldn’t explain. It was as if those voices were trying to tell me something, something important, but I couldn’t figure it out.

I breathed deeply trying to calm myself but the air was heavy as if the environment was conspiring to envelop me. I adjusted the flashlight in my hand, feeling the coldness of the metal against my skin, and with hesitant steps, I forced myself to move towards the classroom. The first years hesitated for a moment, exchanging glances with each other, but finally followed me, their steps echoing in the silence that now seemed to surround us at any moment. The wood of the floor creaked under our boots, each sound heard loudly in the stillness of the place, as if the building itself was reacting to our presence. The door closed behind us with a thud, and the sound echoed in my bones like an omen. We were trapped.

The air inside the room was heavier, permeated with a strange stench that I couldn’t identify. It wasn’t nauseating, but it was definitely unusual. The reddish light grew more intense, illuminating every corner of the room, and for a moment, it blinded me. I closed my eyes instinctively, and when I opened them, I was no longer in the room. I was in a completely black space, a void that stretched in all directions. There were no walls, no floor, no sky. Only blackness. The most disturbing thing about all of this. I wasn’t sure if I was alone or if the first years were still by my side, everything was dark, but somehow the illusory silhouette of my hands calmed me.

The same black void seemed to have no end. It was as if the entire world had fallen into nothingness and I was floating in the middle of it, anchorless, without reference. At first I tried to rationalize it. "This is an illusion," I told myself, "it has to be." But as the seconds turned into minutes, and the minutes into what felt like hours, that certainty began to crumble. Anguish took hold of me, an oppressive feeling coiling around my chest like a snake wrapping around its prey, squeezing ever tighter. My footsteps echoed in the void, even though there was no ground beneath my feet. How was this possible? How could I walk if there was nothing? But I did, and each step led me nowhere.

Tired, staring into the blackness that stretched out infinitely, minutes passed? Hours? Days? Maybe years, I didn’t know. At some point, time stopped making sense. There was no sun, no clock, nothing to tell me how much time had passed. My mind began to play games with me. Desperation grew in me like a flame that fed on my fear. I tried to scream, but my voice produced no sound. Or if it did, I couldn’t hear it. The silence was absolute, so thick I could feel it in my ears, as if emptiness itself was trying to get inside me.

Little by little the few senses I perceived began to fail, one by one. First it was the direction. I no longer knew if I was walking forward, backward, or just in circles. There were no landmarks, nothing to tell me if I was moving or standing still. Then it was touch. My hands, which had once sensed the cold in the air, now felt nothing. I touched my face, but I couldn’t feel the texture of my skin. It was as if my fingers were passing through me, as if I no longer had a physical form. Panic came back stronger and took hold of me, I tried hard to calm myself, to remember that this was an illusion, but how could I be sure? How could I know that I had become nothing more than a thought floating in nothingness?

Vision was the next to fail. My once barely visible hands were losing shape in my eyes, beginning to fade away, into the darkness. I tried to close my eyes, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t feel my eyelids. I couldn’t feel anything. The world faded away completely, and I was left floating in a darkness that was not darkness, in a void that was not emptiness. I could no longer hear, I could no longer see, I could no longer feel. Did I still exist? Was I still me? The question echoed in my mind, over and over, with no answer.