Five minutes became ten. Ten became fifteen. Nobody suggested moving.
Jack lay flat on the marble floor of Hargrove Tower's lobby, staring at the emergency lights bleeding their dull red glow across water-stained ceiling tiles. His arms felt hollow. His gravitokinetic reserves were scraped down to fumes, and the faint golden warmth Lily had described as divine energy was nothing but a memory lodged somewhere behind his sternum. Every breath tasted like copper and ash.
"Lily," he said quietly. "When we start climbing, I need you to hang back and recharge. Don't spend a drop of energy on us unless absolutely necessary."
She opened her mouth to argue.
"Please." He turned his head to look at her. Her veins no longer carried that honeyed glow. Her face was pale beneath the emergency lights, and her hands trembled in her lap. "We'll need you at full strength before the top. Whatever's waiting up there, we can't face it if you're empty."
Lily pressed her lips together, then nodded.
Marcus rose first, rolling his newly healed shoulder in slow circles. He picked up the tactical shotgun Dex had loaded for him and racked the slide. The sound was enormous in the silent lobby. "Eighteen floors. Stairwell's our only option. Single file, tight formation. I take point."
Dex checked his pistol, then a second one. Both magazines were full of sanctified rounds that shimmered faintly in the red half-light. "I've got rear."
Jack grabbed his baseball bat from where he'd leaned it against the reception desk. The metal felt warm, still carrying a residual blessing from Lily's earlier work. He pushed himself upright, ignoring the protest of muscles that had been through hours of enhanced-gravity training and a small war in the street outside. "Let's go."
The stairwell door groaned when Marcus pushed it open. Concrete steps spiraled upward into darkness. Their headlamps carved pale tunnels through the black. The air was different here, colder, and it carried a faint vibration, as if the building itself had a pulse.
They climbed the first flight without incident. The second-floor landing was clear. Marcus swept left while Dex covered right, and Jack kept his bat raised, scanning the shadows. Nothing.
Upon attempting to move up further, Marcus stopped. It was as if there was an unbreakable glass wall, stopping him from moving forward.
"A gravity wall," Jack said before reaching out towards it.
The door to the second floor hung open on one hinge.
"He must want us to go in there," said Dex, while motioning to the entrance of the second floor.
Marcus took the lead and stepped through first. The floor beyond was a maze of cubicles, their fabric walls stained dark with old blood. Overturned monitors and keyboards littered the carpet. Paper was everywhere, scattered like dead leaves after a storm.
Something moved.
It was fast. Not zombie-fast, the lurching, stumbling gait they'd grown used to. This was fluid. A blur of gray skin that crossed from one cubicle row to another in absolute silence. No moan. No growl. No dragging footsteps. Just a whisper of displaced air and the faintest impression of a shape, gone before Jack's headlamp could pin it down.
"Contact," Marcus breathed. He raised the shotgun and pivoted slowly, tracking the shadows.
Nothing. The floor had gone still.
Then it hit Marcus from behind.
The thing materialized out of the darkness like smoke given form. It was humanoid, but something was off, its proportions stretched, limbs too long, joints bending at angles that defied anatomy. Its skin was the color of wet cement, pulled tight over corded muscle. Its eyes were not the milky white of a common zombie but a vivid, burning red, bright as embers. And it moved without a single sound.
Marcus spun and fired. The sanctified slug caught the creature in the chest and blew a hole the size of a grapefruit through its torso. Golden fire licked the edges of the wound. The creature staggered back two steps.
Then the hole closed.
Flesh knitted together like zipper teeth interlocking. In less than two seconds, the wound was gone, replaced by smooth gray skin without even a scar. The creature tilted its head, those blood red eyes studying Marcus with an intelligence that made Jack's stomach drop.
A general. Like the giant in the street, but built for a different purpose. Not strength. Speed.
"It heals," Dex said, voice tight. "It heals like it's nothing."
Marcus didn't wait for analysis. He charged, swinging the shotgun's stock like a club. The general flowed around the blow like water parting for a stone. Marcus reversed, threw a devastating left hook that would have shattered a cinderblock. The general ducked beneath it, and Marcus's fist whistled through empty air. He pressed forward with combination after combination, each strike carrying the weight of a man who could bench-press a car under six times gravity, and the creature evaded every single one. It didn't block. It simply wasn't where the fist arrived.
"I can't tag this thing!" Marcus roared.
Dex raised both pistols and fired. The blessed rounds punched into the general's back, five, six, seven impacts in rapid succession. Each one tore flesh and ignited with golden fire. The creature's body jerked with the impacts, and it whirled toward Dex, red eyes flaring.
It closed the distance in a heartbeat.
Dex tried to sidestep. The general hit him center-mass with a shoulder charge that lifted him off his feet and drove him backward into a concrete support column. The column cracked. Dex hit the floor in a shower of plaster dust, gasping, his pistols clattering away.
Jack was already moving. He brought the blessed bat around in a two-handed swing aimed at the creature's skull. The general bent backward at the waist, spine curving at an impossible angle, and the bat whistled over its face by inches. Before Jack could recover, a gray hand shot up and caught the bat's barrel.
The creature's palm sizzled where it gripped the blessed wood. Smoke curled between its fingers. The smell of burning meat filled the air. But it didn't let go. It squeezed, ripped the bat from his grip, stepped in close, and drove its forehead into his face.
White exploded through Jack's vision.
He staggered, heard Lily cry out from somewhere far away, and then the creature used his own bat like it had known exactly what it was meant for. It swung from the hip and smashed the aluminum into Jack's ribs.
Pain detonated through his side. He felt the break before he felt the impact finish, a hard, sickening crack that folded the air out of him. Jack flew sideways into a copier, crushed it beneath him, and then the floor rose up and struck the back of his skull.
The room smeared.
Marcus caught the general's wrist as it turned back for another swing. The big man's fingers locked like a vise, divine energy flaring gold along his forearm. He pivoted, planted his feet, and hurled the creature straight up. The general hit the ceiling tiles so hard it punched through the aluminum framework and embedded in the concrete slab above. Debris rained down.
Before it could recover, Marcus timed its fall and drove a devastating front kick into its midsection. The general rocketed sideways across the entire floor, smashing through cubicle walls, a filing cabinet, and finally a plaster partition, disappearing into the next room in a cascade of rubble.
Marcus turned to check on Jack. "Kid! You al—"
Jack was already standing.
He didn't remember getting up. His broken ribs screamed, but the pain felt distant now, muffled, as if someone had wrapped it in thick cloth and set it aside. His body moved without his conscious direction, crossing the debris field in measured strides, bending to pick up the baseball bat where the general had dropped it.
His eyes were different.
Lily saw it first. The green was still there but overlaid with something harder, colder, an authority that didn't belong to the eighteen-year-old brother she'd healed on a Friday evening in their living room. His posture had changed, spine straight, shoulders squared, weight distributed with the precision of someone who'd spent years learning exactly how to carry a weapon.
Jack held the bat in his right hand and closed his eyes. Something stirred in his chest, not the golden warmth of divine energy and not the iron pull of gravity. This was something else entirely, a current that ran along his bones like voltage through a wire, sharp, singing, and eager. It was aura. Sword aura, specifically, a discipline he'd spent what felt like years perfecting in a world of castles and blade masters, where he'd been the son of a Duke and trained by the finest swordsman he could possibly hope to learn from.
One month there for every day here. Months upon months of drills, sparring, meditation, the slow forging of will into something that could cut.
The aura flowed down his arm and into the bat. A thin silver-white light crawled over the aluminum, not like fire and not like electricity. It wrapped the rounded metal in a sheath so dense it changed the shape of it. The blunt end narrowed. The length straightened. Edges formed where no edges had been. By the time the light settled, the bat was no longer a bat at all but a lean, ugly blade with a faint hum in the air around it.
Dex stared. "What the hell?"
Something moved in the hole in the wall.
The general came back through in a blur, aiming straight for Jack's throat.
Jack met it without flinching.
His free hand shot out and closed around the creature's neck in mid-lunge. The impact that should have bowled him backward stopped dead in his arm. For one suspended second man and monster hung there together.
Then Jack drew the blade across and down.
It was one clean diagonal slash.
The general hit the carpet in two pieces.
Not a chop. Not a hack. A perfect division, from shoulder to hip, so precise that for a heartbeat neither half seemed to understand it had been separated.
Marcus lowered his glowing fists by an inch. Dex said nothing at all.
Jack turned his head toward them, eyes hard and unfamiliar. "Who are you?"
No one answered immediately.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
Dex stared. Marcus lowered his fists slowly.
Lily stepped forward, hands raised. "Jack. It's me. It's Lily."
"You're not my Lily."
The words landed like a slap. Lily flinched but held her ground, her chin lifted. Jack recognized the stubbornness even if he knew that she wasn't his sister.
"No," she said carefully. "I'm not. But I am a Lily. Our mother, Elena, was kidnapped by a creature called the Zombie King. He brought her to the top of this tower. Jack— the one whose body you're standing in, mounted a rescue party. We're climbing to get her back."
Something flickered behind those cold eyes. A crack in the ice.
"My mother," he repeated softly.
On the floor, the two halves of the general twitched.
Black cords lashed from one side to the other. Bone clicked. Flesh dragged itself across the carpet in wet jerks, trying to zipper shut.
Jack looked down at it with open disdain. "Regeneration," he said, as if naming a disappointing student.
It finished sealing and sprang upward again, faster this time, rage replacing caution.
The fight that followed was too quick for Jack—the real Jack, buried deep and watching through shattered fragments—to understand in one piece.
The swordsman moved like he had been born in rooms where death traveled at that speed. His feet barely seemed to touch the ground. The blade flashed once, twice, six times, each stroke small and exact. The general whipped around cubicles, off walls, over desks, but it no longer had an advantage. Every time it tried to angle in on his blind side, he was already there, turning, parrying, forcing it wider.
It clawed for his face. He slipped left and took off three fingers.
It dove low for his knee. He stepped over it and opened its back from spine to hip.
It tried the ceiling again. He looked up, made one short cut, and an entire arm spun away trailing black blood.
Marcus and Dex stayed out of reach now, stunned into spectators. Once, when the general ricocheted toward Lily's corner, Dex raised his pistol, but Jack barked, "No," so sharply that Dex actually obeyed..
The general grew sloppier with every wound. It healed, but healing cost it seconds, and Jack took each second like a tax collector. Flesh came back crooked. Muscles reknit weaker than before. Its speed remained terrifying, but its precision bled away under the relentless cuts..
At last it misjudged the distance by half a foot.
That was enough.
Jack caught its forearm, turned with it, and unleashed a flurry so fast the blade seemed to disappear entirely. Thin silver arcs stitched the air. By the time he stopped, the general had been reduced from a creature into pieces no bigger than fists, raining wetly across the carpet and desks and shattered glass.
Nothing living could have survived it.
Nothing dead, apparently, should have either.
Yet the chunks still twitched.
"Lily," Jack said without turning. "The one with the light. Can you burn dead things?"
Lily stepped forward. During the fight, she'd been still, eyes closed, palms pressed together, drawing energy back into her depleted reserves. She wasn't full. She wasn't even half. But she had enough.
She knelt and pressed both hands to the carpet. Golden light erupted from her palms and raced across the floor in branching veins. Every fragment of the general ignited simultaneously, sacred fire consuming dead flesh with a sound like a hundred candles being snuffed at once.
For the first time, the general made a sound.
It was not a scream exactly. More like steam forced through a broken pipe. Then the light consumed it whole. Every fragment blackened, curled, and collapsed into fine gray ash that drifted across the office carpet.
Silence came back.
Real silence this time.
Jack swayed.
The silver aura around the blade flickered once and went out. He blinked, and the cold intelligence in his face cracked like ice thawing in sunlight. He looked down at the weapon in his hand as if he had never seen it before.
"What..."
His knees buckled.
Marcus caught him before he hit the floor. Even through the haze of returning pain, Jack felt how careful the big man was trying to be.
"Easy, kid."
Pain rushed back into him all at once—his face, his skull, the broken cage of his ribs. Jack sucked in a breath and nearly blacked out again.
Lily dropped beside him. Her hands, still smoking faintly with divine warmth, pressed against his side. "Don't move. Don't talk. Both are bad ideas right now."
"Who was that?" Dex asked, voice rough.
Jack shut his eyes.
He could still feel the other self inside him, not gone, only deeper. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that somewhere in him a door had opened.
"Me," Jack said finally. "I think. Another me."
Marcus looked at the ash, then toward the dark hall beyond the cubicles, then toward the stairwell leading higher. "If the first thing waiting upstairs was that, this tower's not just a building."
"It's a gauntlet," Lily said quietly.
Nobody argued.
She fed a little more light into Jack's ribs until he could breathe without seeing stars, then sat back hard against a desk, drained again. Dex collected fresh magazines with shaking hands. Marcus stood guard at the doorway with his ruined shirt hanging open and his fists still faintly glowing.
Jack looked at the weapon lying across his lap.
The aura had vanished, but the bat had not returned to what it had been. Its metal remained lengthened and flattened, edge held in a shape aluminum should never have kept. It looked crude, improvised, but sturdier than before. Like something reforged by a fire no forge on earth could make.
He wrapped his fingers around the grip.
Above them, the stairwell climbed through sixteen more floors of darkness.
Somewhere near the top, his mother waited.