"MY FACE!!"
The shriek hit him from behind like a physical blow as Zhao Wei slammed into the stairwell door at full speed and threw himself through it.
He took the first flight in four steps, grabbed the railing at the landing, swung himself around it, and kept moving. Below him was the street exit—one more floor, maybe twenty steps away.
Hurry. Hurry. Gotta hurry.
"DAMNED ZOMBIE, HOW DARE YOU—"
She came through the door above him without opening it.
Her hair came first—long black tendrils shooting down the stairwell like thrown ropes, faster than gravity—finding him before his next step landed. They caught his ankles and yanked. The stairwell tilted sideways as he fell, his shoulder hitting the wall and his elbow cracking against the railing. The rest of him followed in a graceless tumble down the remaining steps until he hit the landing hard enough to bounce.
"ACK—"
He tried to get up immediately. His body had other ideas.
She descended the stairwell the way she had crossed the café—without urgency. Her hair trailed behind and below her like the train of something enormous. Her expression had reconstructed itself into the dangerous pleasantness it had worn before he smashed a monitor into it. Except now there was a red mark across her cheekbone that she was very deliberately not acknowledging.
She reached the landing and looked down at him.
"Worthless," she said.
Her heel came down on his chest. He felt it through whatever now served as his ribs—a blunt, deliberate pressure, grinding slowly. Her hair coiled around him again, tighter this time, pinning his arms.
"A demon's servant is this pathetic?" She pressed harder. The mechanical tick in his chest stuttered slightly under the pressure. "Does it hurt?" Her voice carried genuine curiosity beneath the contempt. "Strange… a pathetic undead like you feeling pain?!"
"UGGGGHH—"
It did hurt. That was the thing he had not fully processed yet: being undead had not made him numb to pain. It had simply changed what pain meant. He could feel every point of contact, every pound of pressure, with a clarity that was almost worse than ordinary pain. There was no shock response, no flood of adrenaline to dull it—just pure information arriving complete and unfiltered.
She stepped back, pulled a small compact mirror from somewhere, and looked at her reflection. Her expression shifted into something that would have been comedic in any other context.
"Look at this," she said. "My beautiful face. Ruined because of you." She closed the mirror with a sharp click. Her eyes returned to him with an intensity that was no longer playful. "How will you compensate for it? HUH? HUH?!"
The attacks that followed were no longer about Semani.
She hit him with her hair the way someone hits something they are angry at—not strategically, just repeatedly. Each impact drove him further into the floor and against the wall. Debris from the landing scattered around him. He stopped trying to block. He stopped trying to move. He lay still, absorbed the blows, and waited—the way he had waited for the coin-shaking in the pencil case—for the right gap.
"GAAH!! EEEAAAAAAK—"
She paused. Drew back slightly. Readjusted.
There.
Zhao Wei came off the floor.
He had never thrown a punch in a proper fight in his life. He had thrown plenty in schoolyard altercations and exactly once at a wall when the medical bill numbers got very bad. He put all of that accumulated knowledge into the punch he threw now—turning his shoulder into it, driving up from the ground, aiming for the existing red mark on her cheekbone. He was a person who always maximised the return on available information.
It connected.
"MAKE ME DON'T LAUGH—!!"
She stumbled backward, one hand flying to her face, the other arm windmilling. Her hair lost its grip on him entirely as her concentration broke.
Zhao Wei did not wait to see her expression. He turned and ran.
Down the last flight. Door. Street.
Hurry. Gotta hurry. I've got to escape right now—
He hit the street at full speed—or tried to. He kept running down the last flight. The steps blurred beneath him. The stairwell's concrete throat narrowed as he descended, the bottom landing rushing up to meet him. The exit door loomed ahead at the base—heavy metal, marked with an emergency exit sign. But he didn't reach it. His feet hit the final steps, and thirty paces after the punch, his legs simply stopped working.
Not gradually. Not from the burn of exhaustion or the ache of overuse. They simply stopped, mid-stride, as if the signal between his brain and his body had been cut. He pitched forward, caught himself with his hands, and skidded across the floor. He lay there with his cheek against the cold concrete and his legs trailing behind him, completely still, completely unresponsive.
"…Legs."
He stared at the steps six inches from his face.
"My legs aren't moving?!"
He pushed against the floor. His arms worked. His upper body worked. Below the hips, nothing. He twisted to look behind him. His legs lay flat against the floor like things that no longer belonged to him—still and unmoving in the dark.
The stairwell was quiet. In the distance, from the direction of the building's other levels, he could still hear her—muffled through the walls—the sound of something very angry moving toward the stairs.
Zhao Wei pressed his forehead against the cold floor and thought, very clearly, that he needed Xue Lian right now. He had absolutely no way to reach her. His legs were not moving. And the woman with the hair was going to come through that door in approximately thirty seconds.
Think, he told himself. Think. You always think of something.
The floor offered no suggestions.