THUND.
The sound was wrong — wet, heavy, final. Meat and bone slamming into concrete with sickening permanence.
The cleaner turned... the sound had been so wrong that it belonged in a slaughterhouse, not an academy courtyard at night he was cleaning.
The cleaner turned, mop slipping from his fingers as his legs buckled instantly beneath him. He crashed down hard, but the pain of his tailbone cracking against the tile never registered through the ice flooding his veins and the roaring static devouring his mind. His eyes locked onto the impossible horror sprawled before him.
A girl's body lay shattered on the concrete like a marionette whose strings had been viciously severed. Limbs twisted at grotesque, unnatural angles. Dark hair fanned out in a halo already drinking deep crimson from the spreading pool beneath her. Thick, dark blood poured relentlessly from under her ruined form, crawling in a hungry tide across the cold stone straight toward him.
