Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up! Chapter 90: The Ones I’d Miss

[Mission in 00:55:59]

Less than an hour.

I sat on my bed and looked at the number and thought about the plain. The place I had spent twenty years learning to survive. The place I had crossed bleeding and half dead. The place the system had pulled through on two percent charge with infected teeth in my neck.

And now I was going back. With a governnt escort and a team of students who thought adventure was a personality.

Vapour sat on his bed across the room, quiet. No endless chatter, no jokes. Just the soft rustle of him pretending to organize his things. The silence felt heavier than his usual noise—like respect, or maybe the first ti he’d realized so things couldn’t be talked away.

I looked around the room. I had nothing to pack. I had arrived inside these walls with one torn set of clothes and nothing else. Everything I had accumulated since the life layer lived in other people.

Sherry. Daphne. Azure. May. Annabelle. Mary Stam. Mable. And now Vapour, who had talked at for days and sohow beco soone I would miss.

They had changed sothing in that the plain had not been able to reach. The plain had taught to survive. These people had taught to live, which turned out to be a larger and more complicated subject.

I had entered the walls looking for refuge. I had found sothing I didn’t have a word for yet.

And now the walls are sending back, I thought. Life sends you back to the places you ran from. That’s apparently how it works.

"Abram."

Azure’s voice through the door.

Vapour stood without a word, crossed the room, and opened the door for her. He gave one last look—quiet, serious—then stepped into the corridor and pulled the door gently shut behind him, granting us the space without needing to announce it.

Azure was in a tall dress, which was different from her usual. She ca to where I was sitting, sat beside , rested her head on my shoulder. Her arms wrapped around my torso, holding on as if she could anchor here. I felt the faint warmth of her body.

We stayed like that. Breathing. The countdown ticking between us.

"You rember what you said in the library?" she whispered, breaking the silence. "After Toddy."

"I said a lot of things. Remind ."

She tightened her grip. "You asked when was the last ti soone fought for ."

"Yeah. I rember."

"Do you rember what I said?"

"That you weren’t used to it."

"And you told to get used to it." A pause. The kind that carries weight. "I’m used to it now, Abram. I’m used to you. And I don’t want this to end."

"It’s not ending, Zoe," I said, giving her the new na.

She was quiet for a long mont, face pressed against my shoulder.

"The last ti soone fought for ," she said, "they died. Vince killed them. All of them." Her voice stayed level, the specific level of soone who has processed grief so many tis it has beco structural. "I was afraid to open my heart again. To make space for soone. But you’ve taken all of it." She pulled closer. "Promise you’re coming back."

I sat with it properly. Not the reflex answer. The real one.

"I’m not dying outside those walls, Zoe," I said.

She held on tighter, as if trying to morize the shape of .

[Mission in 00:34:57]

"I need to head to the gate," I said.

We stood. She hugged for a full minute, her arms around my back, the red stripes faintly visible even through the fabric of her dress. Then we went out.

Vapour was in the corridor. He ca forward and put his hand out. I took it.

"Best of luck, bro," he said.

"Yeah. Thank you."

He held my hand a beat longer than the handshake required.

"You’re the first roommate I’ve had in years." His voice had sothing in it he was fighting. He lost the fight. Tears, actually running, which was either the most embarrassing or the most honest thing I had seen at School Central. "Don’t die out there, bro."

I let go of his hand and tapped his shoulder and walked with Azure toward the campus.

"I won’t go to the gate with you," she said, when we reached the point where the paths split. "I’m not good at goodbyes."

I held her hand for a mont without saying anything. Then I let go and she went her way and I went mine.

****

The campus was packed. Students gathered in dense clusters along the main avenue, drawn by the rumor of sothing important. They watched like spectators at the edge of a coliseum—excited, nervous, safe.

At the administration block entrance, Daphne was standing. We found each other across the distance. Her eyes said what she couldn’t say in front of three hundred students. I nodded once and kept walking.

Through the crowd. Toward the main gate. The armored vehicles visible at the end of the path, most of the team already assembled around them.

"Abram."

I turned. Annabelle hit at a run, arms around my neck, the impact of soone who had not calculated the approach and didn’t care. She was panting. She had run from sowhere. I held her.

Behind her, further back, Mable stood at the edge of the gathered students. Not coming closer. Not able to say goodbye in public the way Annabelle said things, openly and without apology. But present. Watching. Her eyes doing what her feet couldn’t.

Annabelle pulled back just enough to look at , hands still gripping my shoulders.

"Promise you’re coming back."

I had been asked this three tis now. I had learned the answer. Not a promise I couldn’t guarantee. Not false certainty. Just the truth of what I intended.

"I’m not dying outside those walls," I said. "Not today."

She held my face for one second. Then she stepped back. Behind the team was waiting. The vehicles were running. The gate was open.

Let’s go, I thought, and walked toward the School Central main gate.