Five minutes passed in silence. Nobody spoke. Jack sat with his back against the stairwell wall, eyes closed. His ribs still ached beneath the partial healing, and his gravitokinetic reserves were dangerously low — a shallow pool where there had once been a well. But his mother was above them, and rest was a luxury measured in heartbeats.
"Time," Marcus said.
They rose together and climbed. The third-floor landing came quickly, and just as before, Marcus pressed forward toward the next flight — and stopped. His palm flattened against empty air as though he'd walked into a window.
"Another wall," he muttered.
Jack reached past him and touched it. The gravity barrier was identical to the one below, invisible and absolute. It hummed against his fingertips with a signature that wasn't his own. The Zombie King's architecture, locking them into another arena.
The third-floor door was already open. Beyond it, darkness.
Dex peered through the gap. His headlamp caught rows of low-walled cubicles stretching into a wide open-plan office. This floor had been some kind of call center — banks of phones and monitors filled every station, most overturned, their cables dangling like dead vines. Heavy executive desks lined the far wall beneath windows that had been blacked out with what looked like dried blood. The smell was different here. Not the sweet rot of common zombies but something musky and animal, like a cage at a zoo that hadn't been cleaned in weeks.
"I don't like it," Dex said.
"None of us like it," Marcus replied, but this time he didn't charge through. He rolled his healed shoulder once, checked his shotgun, and advanced with deliberate care, placing each boot toe-first to minimize sound. He swept his headlamp in controlled arcs, clearing corners before he committed to them. The recklessness of the second floor had been beaten out of him by a creature that moved like liquid. He wasn't making the same mistake twice.
Jack followed two paces behind, bat raised. Lily came next, her palms dimly luminous as she nursed what little divine energy she'd recovered. Dex brought up the rear, a pistol in one hand and the other open, fingers tingling with the promise of detonation.
They moved through the first row of cubicles in tight formation. Nothing stirred. The headlamps painted bright ovals across stained carpet and scattered paperwork. Somewhere deep in the floor, a ceiling tile shifted with a faint scrape.
Then the voice came — not aloud, but inside.
We are being watched. The swordsman's tone was flat, certain, stripped of emotion. A predator. It has been tracking us since we entered.
Jack's pulse spiked. He raised a closed fist, the universal sign to halt. Everyone froze.
"Something's here," he whispered. "It's watching us. Stay tight."
Marcus adjusted his grip on the shotgun. Dex's open hand began to glow faintly orange at the fingertips. Lily pressed closer to Jack's back.
The silence stretched.
Then the shadows moved.
A massive executive desk — solid oak, easily two hundred pounds — launched from the darkness to their left. It tumbled end over end, aimed directly at Lily. Jack didn't think. He threw his hand out and caught it with gravity, halting it three feet from his sister's face. The desk hung in the air, trembling, papers sliding off its surface and fluttering to the ground. Jack's temples throbbed with the effort. He shoved it sideways and it crashed into a row of monitors, shattering them.
"Move!" Marcus barked.
Something enormous hit the formation from the right.
Jack caught only a flash: a shape that was wrong in every way a zombie shouldn't be. Not the stretched, angular frame of the last general. This was thick — hunched shoulders rippling with striped muscle, arms that ended in hands bearing claws the length of steak knives, a face that was half-human and half-something feline. Orange and black fur patched across gray zombie skin in uneven streaks, and its eyes were amber slits that caught the headlamp light and threw it back like a cat's.
It barreled through the group like a bowling ball through pins. Marcus was knocked left, crashing through a cubicle wall. Lily stumbled right. Jack was shoved backward, and Dex was sent sprawling into a printer stand that collapsed beneath him. By the time Jack regained his footing and swung his headlamp around, the creature was gone. Vanished into the dark without a sound.
"It split us up," Jack hissed. "Everyone regroup on me! Now!"
Dex scrambled to his feet. "I'll give us some light."
He raised both hands and fired. Small explosions bloomed across the office floor — not destructive, just bright, popping like flashbulbs among the cubicle rows. Orange-white detonations lit the space in rapid bursts, throwing wild shadows across the ceiling, illuminating every corner for a fraction of a second before darkness reclaimed it.
In one of those flashes, Jack saw it.
The general was behind Marcus. Its massive clawed hand raked down his back in a savage diagonal slash. Three lines of red opened across Marcus's jacket, and the big man roared in pain, spinning to face his attacker. But the general was already gone, dissolved into shadow between one flash and the next.
Dex lost it.
"Get away from him!" He charged toward Marcus, both palms blazing. He thrust his hands forward and detonated the space between his father and where the general had stood. The explosion was real this time — a concussive blast that shattered cubicle walls and sent debris flying. The shockwave rocked the floor and left Jack's ears ringing.
But there was nothing there. The general's image had already faded.
Dex spun wildly, firing more explosions into the dark. Each one lit the room for a heartbeat. Each one revealed nothing.
"Dex!" Jack shouted over the ringing. "Stop! You're wasting your energy!"
Dex's hands were shaking. Smoke curled from his palms. "Where is it? Where is it?"
"It has some kind of stealth ability. It's not just fast — it disappears. Completely."
Dex's face was tight with fury and fear. Blood ran down Marcus's back in dark rivulets. The older man pressed a hand to the wall, breathing hard, but he stayed on his feet. Lily was already moving toward him, golden light building in her palms.
"How do we beat something we can't see or hear?" Dex demanded.
Jack didn't have an answer. But the voice inside him did.
'Feel its presence,' the swordsman said.
'I don't know what that means,' Jack thought back.
'Reach outward. You have senses beyond sight and sound. Use them.'
Before Jack could respond, Dex screamed.
The general materialized from nothing directly beneath Dex — or seemed to — its jaws closing around his left calf with a sickening crunch. Dex's divine energy flared instinctively, golden light pulsing through his skin. Where the creature's teeth punctured flesh, the infection tried to take hold, and the golden fire met it and burned it away in real time. But the bite itself was savage, tearing muscle. The general shook its head like a big cat with prey and hurled Dex across the room. He hit a support column and crumpled.
Jack yelled and grabbed a keyboard from the nearest desk, whipping it with gravitokinetic force at the spot where Dex had been standing. The keyboard whistled through empty air and exploded against a filing cabinet. The general was already somewhere else.
'Nothing can hide from gravity,' the swordsman said, and this time there was an edge of urgency.
Gravity.
Jack stopped moving. He closed his eyes. The swordsman's words clicked into place like a key finding its lock.
Gravity touched everything. Every object with mass bent the field around it. He'd been using his power like a hammer, pushing and pulling with brute force. But gravity wasn't just force. It was information. Every body, every mass, every footstep on this floor created a tiny distortion in the gravitational field. If he could spread his awareness thin enough, he wouldn't need eyes.
He exhaled and let go.
His remaining gravitokinetic reserves — already dangerously low — poured outward in a thin, diffuse layer, spreading across the entire third floor like an invisible net. It was weak, far too weak to move anything, but it didn't need to move anything. It just needed to feel.
The floor bloomed into clarity.
He felt Marcus by the far wall, heavy and solid, 240 pounds of muscle and bone pressing into cheap carpet. Lily beside him, lighter, her mass bright with divine warmth. Dex against the pillar, slumped, his leg radiating heat from the wound. The desks, the columns, the debris.
And there. Moving between two cubicle rows twelve feet to his left. A dense, heavy mass — at least three hundred pounds — padding on silent feet, circling toward Dex's position. It was invisible to every sense Jack possessed except this one. The gravity net felt its weight pressing against the floor with each prowling step.
"Got you," Jack whispered.
He clenched.
Every scrap of gravitokinetic force he had left contracted around that three-hundred-pound mass. The general roared — a sound that was half-human scream and half-tiger snarl — as invisible weight slammed it to the floor. The carpet cratered beneath it. The creature pinned on its stomach, claws gouging furrows in the floor as it thrashed against the crushing pressure.
"There!" Jack screamed, pointing. "It's in the indent of the floor — shoot it! Blow it! Everything you've got, now!"
Marcus didn't hesitate. He raised the shotgun and fired, racked, fired again. Sanctified slugs punched into the pinned creature's back, golden fire eating into striped flesh. Lily thrust both hands forward and unleashed a lance of divine light that struck the general's shoulder and seared through fur and muscle. Dex, still crumpled against the pillar, raised one trembling hand and detonated the space directly above the creature. The combined assault — bullets, sacred fire, explosive force — hammered the general into the cratered floor.
It screamed. The sound shook dust from the ceiling tiles and resonated in Jack's teeth. The creature's body convulsed, burning and bleeding and broken.
But it didn't die.
Jack felt his reserves hit zero. The gravitokinetic net disintegrated. The crushing force vanished. And the general peeled itself off the ruined carpet with a wet, sucking sound, bleeding freely from a dozen wounds but still moving, still alive.
It flickered.
The creature vanishing from the spot it had previously been pinned, leaving only the faintest disturbance in the air. Jack tried to reach for his gravity sense and found nothing — an empty well, bone dry.
The floor went silent.
Dex sat against the pillar, breathing hard through clenched teeth. His left calf was a mess of torn fabric and blood, though the golden pulse beneath his skin had cauterized the worst of it and purged the infection. He stared into the dark, chest heaving, pistol raised in one hand.
A sound. Soft. Directly in front of him.
He looked down.
Black blood was dripping onto the carpet. Fat drops, falling from roughly four feet up, forming a small puddle that grew in real time. More drops appeared to the left, tracing a line across the floor like an invisible faucet moving toward him. The creature was rightthere, standing over him, and it thought he couldn't see it.
Dex watched the drops fall. He tracked them upward with his eyes and saw where they thickened — a concentration of black ichor streaming from what had to be chest wounds, curving inward toward what had to be a center of mass.
A jaw. He could almost see it. The faintest outline of teeth slicked with dark blood, opening wide.
Dex rammed his open palm straight into that invisible mouth.
His fingers found teeth, tongue, the back of a throat. He felt fur against his wrist and hot, fetid breath on his skin.
He detonated.
The explosion was contained entirely within the creature's skull. A muffled whump and then a shockwave of gore. The general's head ceased to exist. What was left of the body materialized in death: a massive torso covered in matted orange-and-black fur, arms ending in retractable claws, legs built for pouncing. It collapsed on top of Dex in a heap of dead weight.
Dex shoved the headless corpse off him with a grunt. He stared at his hand. It was covered in black blood to the elbow, smoking faintly where divine energy burned the corruption away.
"That," he said, his voice shaking, "was disgusting."
Marcus laughed. It was a short, pained bark — his back was still bleeding freely — but it was real. Jack slumped to his knees, completely spent, and even Lily managed a tired, disbelieving smile.
She knelt beside Dex first, pressing glowing palms to his shredded calf. The golden light sank into torn muscle and ravaged skin, knitting fibers together, erasing the infection's last traces. Dex hissed through his teeth as the healing took hold.
"Your back, Marcus. Don't argue."
Marcus turned and let her work. Three deep claw marks, each a quarter-inch deep, ran from his right shoulder blade to his left kidney. Lily's light sealed them slowly, layer by layer, the glow dimming as her reserves drained.
Jack sat on the floor and breathed. His gravity was gone. His aura was a whisper. He had nothing left but a blade and the stubborn refusal to stop climbing.
Fifteen more floors. And his mother somewhere above, waiting.
"Five minutes," he said.
Nobody argued.