I'd forgotten what it felt like to be in the thick of battle.
Ten thousand years of commanding from the back had made me soft. Made me think of combat as something that happened to other people—my zombies, my minions, my disposable army.
But now, dropping into the chaos with Vanguard at my side, I remembered.
The smell. Rotting meat and burning flesh and something else, something electric. The sound. Screaming faces, tearing bodies, the wet crack of bones. The feel of enemy hands reaching for me, trying to tear, to bite, to consume.
I remembered why I'd stopped fighting in person.
And I remembered why I'd been good at it.
------------------------------
"Vanguard, clear a path!"
My Elite moved like a force of nature.
He'd been a businessman once—some middle manager, judging by the suit—but death had stripped away everything soft. What remained was muscle and bone and the remnants of evolution that had made him Tier 2.
Now he was mine.
His fists shattered zombie skulls. His shoulders drove through packed bodies. Wherever he stepped, enemy zombies fell back or fell down.
I followed in his wake, my own contribution less physical but equally vital.
Claim.
Every zombie that touched me became mine. The Hive King could reclaim its own, but it couldn't prevent me from taking new ones. Each kill on this battlefield was a potential soldier.
Claim. Claim. Claim.
Four thousand seven hundred became four thousand eight hundred.
Four thousand nine hundred.
Five thousand again.
I was turning the tide one body at a time.
------------------------------
The Hive King noticed.
"You fight like a scavenger." Its voice echoed across the battlefield. "Picking at scraps while the feast passes you by."
I didn't answer. Didn't need to. My actions spoke loudly enough.
Claim.
Another hundred zombies shifted allegiance.
"Do you think numbers will save you?" The Hive King's many eyes tracked my progress through its forces. "I have claimed more dead than you can imagine. The tunnels beneath this city are filled with my servants. You could claim all night and never match what I can summon."
"Then I won't try to match you."
I reached the edge of the Hive King's personal space—the zone where its elite guard clustered thickest—and stopped.
It towered above me. Thirty feet of assembled nightmare. Faces screaming silently in its flesh. Eyes watching from every surface.
Among those faces, I saw one I recognized.
Asian features. Young. Female.
Drake's sister? The hair was wrong—but the shape of her face, the expression of frozen terror... it could have been her. Or someone's sister. Someone's daughter. Someone's friend.
Someone trapped forever in a monster's body.
"You can't save them," the Hive King said, reading my expression. "They're part of me now. Their souls, their memories, their hopes—all of it, absorbed. Digested."
"Can they feel it?"
"Every moment." The creature smiled—somehow, horrifyingly, smiled—with a dozen mouths simultaneously. "They feel everything. The endless hunger. The crushing weight of collective consciousness. The knowledge that they will never, ever be free."
I felt rage building in my chest.
Cold, dead rage.
"Then I'll set them free."
------------------------------
Vanguard hit the Hive King first.
My Elite launched himself at the creature's base, his enhanced strength driving him into the mass of corpses like a battering ram. Bodies scattered. Limbs tore free. For a moment, the Hive King actually staggered.
Then a limb swept down and caught Vanguard in the chest.
He went flying—not unconscious like Drake, but damaged. I felt his pain through our bond, felt something crack inside him.
"Vanguard!"
"Vanguard... still... fights." His voice in my mind was strained. "Master... continue."
He was already getting up. Already returning to the battle.
But I was alone against the Hive King.
No.
Not alone.
------------------------------
Fire exploded against the creature's side.
Drake Morrison came screaming out of the darkness, wreathed in flames so intense they turned the air itself into a weapon. He struck the Hive King's left flank and didn't stop—kept burning, kept pressing, kept trying to reach the faces trapped in its flesh.
"My sister!" he roared. "You're going to give her back!"
"She's gone," the Hive King replied, almost gently. "There's nothing left to give."
"LIAR!"
Drake's fire flared white.
For a moment, I saw it—the shape of a woman in the flames. Dark hair. Asian features. Reaching toward her brother with hands made of light.
Then the Hive King's arm swept through the vision, and Drake was sent tumbling again.
But he'd given me an opening.
------------------------------
I moved.
Not as a human moves—I'd stopped being fully human the moment I'd broken my mental limit. I moved as something else. Something that existed partially in the physical world and partially in the network of dead minds that served me.
The Hive King's guard zombies reached for me.
I was already past them.
Its limbs tried to strike me.
I wasn't where they aimed.
Its eyes followed my progress.
I kept moving, slipping through impossible gaps, dodging attacks that should have killed me, racing toward the heart of the nightmare.
Maya's voice echoed in my memory.
At the center. Where the faces are most concentrated. That's the core.
I could see it now.
A cluster of faces—dozens of them—pressed together at the very center of the creature's chest. They weren't screaming like the others. They were... praying. Chanting. Their lips moving in unison, forming words in a language that predated human civilization.
The original being.
The consciousness that had slept beneath Seattle for centuries.
The heart of the Hive King.
------------------------------
I reached for it.
Not with my hands—with my power. With the same force I used to claim zombies, to fill voids with my will, to bend the dead to my purpose.
The Hive King's core was not a void.
It was a presence.
Ancient. Massive. Hungry.
It met my power with its own, and suddenly I was falling—not physically, but mentally. Plummeting through layers of consciousness, through memories that weren't mine, through experiences that spanned centuries.
I saw Seattle before the city existed. A native village. A sacred burial ground. Something sleeping beneath the earth, fed by generations of honored dead.
I saw the fire of 1889. Buildings burning. People dying. The thing beneath the ground stirring, absorbing the sudden feast of death.
I saw the underground city being built—streets raised, old buildings buried—and the thing growing stronger in the darkness, waiting.
I saw the virus hitting. The sudden tsunami of death. The awakening.
And I saw something else.
A thread.
A golden thread stretching from the sleeping thing, reaching across time and space, touching something far away.
Touching me.
------------------------------
"You see it now."
The Hive King's voice wasn't external anymore. It was inside my head, echoing through the shared space of our psychic battle.
"The thread that pulled you back. The hand that reached across ten thousand years."
"What is it?"
"Something older than me. Older than this city. Older than the continent itself." The Hive King's presence pressed against mine, trying to crush me, trying to absorb me. "Something that saw potential in you. Potential to build what it needs."
"What does it need?"
"An army. A champion. A vessel."
The pressure increased.
"It chose you, little king. Shaped you across millennia. Guided you to this moment."
"Why?"
"Because you're the only one who can kill me."
------------------------------
I snapped back to physical awareness with a gasp.
The Hive King's core was inches from my face. The praying mouths, the ancient consciousness, the heart of the nightmare—all of it within reach.
But I hesitated.
You're the only one who can kill me.
Why would something that powerful tell me how to defeat it? Why reveal its own weakness?
Unless...
Unless killing it was part of the plan.
Unless I was supposed to destroy the Hive King.
Unless whatever had sent me back wanted this creature dead.
------------------------------
The choice lasted a heartbeat.
I could kill the Hive King here. Now. End the threat to the compound, to the survivors, to everyone I'd sworn to protect.
But doing so might mean serving whatever had pulled me through time. Becoming a piece on someone else's board.
Or I could spare it.
Let it live. Let it continue threatening everything I cared about.
And maybe, just maybe, find out what was really going on.
Not a choice.
Not really.
I reached for the core—
------------------------------
And then Min-Tong Lin screamed.
The sound cut through the battle like a blade, high and pure and filled with something that wasn't quite pain.
Power.
Raw, unfiltered power.
I spun toward the compound.
Min-Tong was standing on the roof—the same roof I'd jumped from—and she was glowing. White light poured from her hands, her eyes, her mouth. It spread across the battlefield like dawn breaking early, touching everything in its path.
Where it touched my zombies, nothing happened.
Where it touched the Hive King's...
They screamed.
------------------------------
"The Saint awakens."
The Hive King's voice was thick with something I'd never heard from it before.
Fear.
"The thread didn't account for this. She shouldn't exist—not here, not now."
Min-Tong's light was spreading. Enemy zombies caught in its glow convulsed, collapsed, stopped moving entirely. She was doing what I couldn't—attacking the Hive King's army at a fundamental level, destroying them not with force but with something else.
Healing, I realized.
Her power was healing.
And for something that was fundamentally wrong—something that existed through corruption and death and violation of natural law—healing was poison.
"No." The Hive King's attention shifted from me to Min-Tong. "No, this cannot—"
It started to move toward her.
Away from me.
Toward the woman I loved.
I didn't hesitate.
------------------------------
I hit the core.
Not with my hands. Not with my claiming power.
With everything.
Every ounce of will I possessed, every thread of consciousness I'd spread across five thousand zombies, every piece of my psyche that had survived ten thousand years of apocalypse.
I poured it all into the Hive King's heart and pushed.
The creature screamed.
Not with its many mouths—with its soul. Its ancient, hungry, terrible soul, suddenly finding itself not the predator but the prey.
"You think you can destroy me?" It fought back, crushing pressure against my consciousness. "I am older than your civilization! I have consumed millions! You are nothing!"
"I'm the one who was sent to kill you."
I pushed harder.
"I'm the army's builder. The champion. The vessel."
Harder still.
"And I choose to protect her."
The core cracked.