Jack came back to himself like a man surfacing from a deep dive — pressure releasing, sound returning, the world reassembling around him in fragments. He was standing on the concrete landing of the stairwell, soaked to the bone, blood running freely from the puncture wounds in his left forearm. The aura blade in his right hand guttered and died. His legs buckled, and he caught himself against the wall.
The swordsman retreated like a tide pulling back from shore, but Jack caught him before he vanished entirely. He held on with everything he had, pinning that other consciousness in place through sheer stubborn will.
'What's on the eighteenth floor?'
Silence. Then, reluctantly, a response — not words exactly, but impressions. A silhouette. Broad shoulders. A presence that had once meant safety and authority and home. Wrapped in something wrong. Something rotten.
'Tell me.'
The swordsman's answer came as a feeling: a door closing. Not yet. The impression that followed was clearer — Jack's own body, his depleted reserves, the hairline fractures in his ribs that Lily's earlier healing hadn't fully mended. An image of a candle flame guttering the wind.
'You need to get stronger. Much stronger.'
Then the swordsman was gone, settled back into whatever quiet place he occupied when he wasn't carving monsters apart, and Jack was alone in his own head with salt water dripping from his hair and too many questions.
"Jack." Lily's voice. She was kneeling beside Marcus, golden light flowing from her palms into the deep puncture wound on his thigh. Her face was drawn and pale, but steady. "You're back."
"Yeah." He flexed his left hand. The puncture wounds screamed. "I'm back."
Dex sat against the opposite wall, wringing black water from the hem of his military jacket. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his headlamp. Water poured from the battery compartment. The bulb housing was cracked, the reflector bent inward. He stared at it for a long, disgusted moment, then dropped it on the concrete.
"Saltwater," he said flatly. "Completely fried."
Lily didn't look up from Marcus's leg. "I told you."
Dex opened his mouth, closed it, and leaned his head back against the wall. "Yeah. You did."
Jack lowered himself to the floor beside his sister. His gravitokinetic reserves were beyond empty — they felt wider somehow, as if the desperate inversion he'd pulled underwater had stretched the well itself. The container was larger now, but still bone dry. He needed time.
"We're not rushing anymore," Jack said.
Marcus looked up sharply. "Your mother —"
"Is alive. The King wants me at the top. He wouldn't take a hostage just to let her die before I get there." Jack heard how cold it sounded and forced himself to continue. "If we charge up there half-dead and out of power, we die on the sixth floor. Or the seventh. And then nobody saves her."
Marcus held his gaze. The older man's jaw worked, but after a moment, he gave a slow nod.
"One hour," Jack said. "We rest. We recover. Then we move."
Nobody argued.
Lily finished with Marcus's leg and moved to Jack's forearm. The golden warmth sank into the puncture wounds, and he felt the torn muscle fibers knitting together, the damaged blood vessels sealing. It hurt more than he expected — healing always did when the damage went deep.
While she worked, Jack pulled his father's journal from the inner pocket of his jacket. The leather cover was damp, but the pages inside were dry — something about the binding, maybe, or something about what the journal was. He'd noticed before that it resisted damage in ways ordinary paper shouldn't.
He opened it past the entries he'd already read — the supply lists, the survival notes, the descriptions of the seven worlds his father had visited — and found pages he hadn't reached yet. The handwriting changed here. It was smaller, more cramped, as if his father had been writing faster. Or more urgently.
'Entry 34. I've confirmed what Marcus Coleman suspected. The worlds I've been visiting aren't random. They are echoes — dying reverberations of realities that something already consumed. I've been walking through the bones of dead universes and calling them dreams.'
Jack's stomach tightened.
'Entry 37. The entity has a name among the Traversers who've encountered it and survived. They call it the Hollow. It doesn't invade worlds the way an army does. It erodes them. It finds the cracks — isolation, despair, fractured connections between people — and it widens them until the foundation gives way. By the time a world collapses, its people have already been hollowed out from within.'
'Entry 41. I fought it. Or fought something serving it — I'm still not sure. Across three worlds now, I've encountered versions of the same enemy: a Dream Traverser who lost everything and was consumed by the Hollow's influence. What's left is something like a king of the dead. It spreads destruction from world to world, and the champions of those fallen worlds become its generals, twisted into weapons.'
Jack stopped reading. His throat felt thick.
"What is it?" Lily asked quietly. She'd finished healing his arm and was watching his face.
"Dad fought the same thing we're fighting." He turned the page.
'Entry 43. I understand now what the Zombie King is. Every Dream Traverser carries echoes — fragments of alternate selves forged in the worlds we visit. The swordsman. The soldier. The scholar. They live inside us like tools in a belt. But if the echoes grow too strong — if the original self breaks under the weight of loss and grief — the echoes consume the host. The alternate selves devour the prime. What remains is no longer human. It is a vessel wearing a person's face, driven by the collective hunger of every life it absorbed.'
'That is the Zombie King. A version of someone who was broken. And whatever broke him used the pieces.'
Jack closed the journal.
The stairwell was quiet except for the distant lapping of the dead sea beyond the fourth-floor doorway. Dex had been listening, his eyes open, his expression unreadable.
"A version of you," Dex said.
Jack nodded slowly.
"A version of you that lost his mom and his sister and everything else, and the thing that broke him is the same thing that's coming for our world."
"Yeah."
Dex was quiet for a while. Then: "We're not gonna let that happen."
Jack looked at him. Dex's face was hard — not with bravado, but with something more honest. Something that had teeth.
"No," Jack agreed. "We're not."
He spent the remaining time doing what the swordsman had shown him through fragments of memory — not pushing gravity outward, but shaping it. Drawing the force into a line, a plane, an edge. His reserves were still refilling, each passing minute adding a thin layer of water to the expanded well. He shaped what little he had into a narrow crescent between his fingers, compressing it until the air between his index and middle finger hummed.
It wasn't sword aura. He'd never have the swordsman's technique — that was a lifetime of training compressed into someone else's bones. But he could mimic the principle. A blade was just force concentrated along an edge. Gravity could be concentrated. If he pushed hard enough along a thin enough line, space itself would give.
He slashed his hand through the air. A faint ripple — barely visible — cut through the space in front of him and scored a thin line across the concrete wall. Not deep. An inch, maybe less. But the cut was clean, and the concrete hadn't crumbled — it had been separated, molecule from molecule.
"Did you just cut the wall?" Dex asked.
Jack looked at his hand. "I think I just cut space."
The hour ended. They climbed.
The fifth-floor landing held the same steel door, the same narrow window. But through the glass, something green pressed against the surface like a living curtain. Marcus pushed the door open, and it yielded reluctantly, shoving back against a thick mat of vegetation.
Vines.
They covered everything. The floor, the walls, the ceiling — every surface was wrapped in dark green tendrils as thick as Jack's wrist, covered in thorns the size of thumbnails. They wove through overturned desks, threaded through broken monitors, carpeted the tile in a dense, rustling mat that pulsed faintly with something that wasn't quite a heartbeat.
Zombies hung in the vines like flies in a web. Dozens of them, suspended at odd angles throughout the office floor, their arms pinned, their legs wrapped, their heads lolling. Some still moved — jaws working soundlessly, milky eyes tracking the newcomers as they stepped through the doorway.
"Don't touch anything," Marcus murmured.
They moved single file through a narrow gap between two vine-choked cubicle walls. The air was thick and sweet, like rotting flowers and fresh soil mixed together. Jack kept his hands close to his body and watched where he stepped.
A sound from above. A wet, organic ratcheting.
Jack looked up.
A rosebud the size of a basketball descended from the ceiling on a thick green stalk. It was crimson red, its petals furled tight. It hung over one of the suspended zombies — a man in a torn business suit — and for a moment, nothing happened.
Then the petals opened.
Inside the rose was a mouth. Concentric rings of backward-curving teeth lined the interior, glistening with a clear fluid that dripped onto the zombie's upturned face. The rose descended with deliberate patience and closed over the zombie's head like a hand closing over a fist.
The crunching sound was indescribable.
When the rose lifted, the zombie's head was gone. In its place, the rosebud had attached itself to the neck stump, its base fusing with the gray flesh, thorny tendrils threading through the spinal column. The vines holding the body relaxed and released it. The headless zombie stood upright on the floor, the rose swiveling atop its neck like a grotesque periscope. New vines burst from its torso — thin, thorned, whipping the air like seeking antennae.
The zombie walked.
"Flower controls the body," Jack whispered. "The rose is the brain."
Dex raised his palm. "I got this."
He detonated the rose-zombie with a focused blast. The body blew apart. The rosebud shattered into pulp and petals.
The floor woke up.
Every vine on every surface convulsed simultaneously. The rustling became a roar. Across the entire office floor, the vine network contracted like a fist, and the things caught inside it screamed.
Not just zombies. People.
Human voices — raw, terrified, alive — erupted from deeper in the floor. Jack counted at least a dozen separate screams. The vines were squeezing, thorns puncturing flesh, and among the dangling zombies, Jack could now see them: office workers in business casual clothes, their faces contorted, their skin lacerated by thorns, still breathing, still conscious, wrapped in the vine network like living prey.
"They're alive," Lily breathed. "Oh God, they're alive."
Roses began falling from the ceiling.
They dropped in clusters — five, ten, fifteen at once — plummeting on thick stalks toward every suspended figure on the floor, zombie and human alike. The nearest one landed on a zombie thirty feet away with a wet crunch. Another targeted a woman in a pencil skirt who screamed and thrashed as the bud descended toward her face.
"MOVE!" Jack roared.
They charged. Dex blasted a path through the thickest vines, detonating them in bursts of green pulp and sap. Marcus waded in with his bare hands, ripping vines from the nearest survivor — a young man in a blue dress shirt whose legs were wrapped from ankle to hip. Lily's divine light flared, searing the vines closest to her, and she burned a survivor free of the thorned cocoon.
A rose fell toward a woman on their left. Jack heard her scream cut short as the petals closed. The sound that followed — the grinding, the wet tearing — stopped Lily dead.
She froze. Her hands dropped to her sides, her eyes wide, her face bloodless. The golden light flickered and nearly died.
"Lily!" Jack grabbed her shoulder. "Stay with me. We save who we can."
She stared at him. Her lips moved without sound. Then she swallowed hard, clenched her fists, and the light blazed back.
Marcus had freed the young man in the blue shirt and was reaching for an older woman wrapped in the adjacent cubicle when a shadow fell over them both. He looked up. A rose the size of a beach ball descended toward the woman's head, its petals already opening, its teeth gleaming.
Marcus lunged. He got his hands on the stalk and shoved, but the rose was anchored to a vine as thick as his arm. It pushed down with mechanical force, inching closer to the woman's screaming face. Marcus braced his feet and pushed harder, veins standing out on his neck. The rose strained against him, teeth clicking inches from the woman's skull.
Dex was thirty feet away, both palms blazing, detonating roses and vine clusters in rapid succession. He was screaming something Jack couldn't hear over the chaos. Explosions rocked the floor. Green matter and black blood sprayed in every direction.
Jack spotted a survivor — a young man Marcus's age, maybe younger, with dark hair and a name badge reading ZACH — trapped in vines near an overturned water cooler. A rose plummeted toward him from above, its petals spreading wide.
Jack extended his hand and pushed. The gravity slash he'd practiced — raw, unrefined, but real — caught the rose mid-descent and sent it tumbling sideways. It hit the floor with a wet smack, rolled once, and then did something that made Jack's blood go cold.
It grew legs.
Vines erupted from the rosebud's base, six of them, each tipped with a thorn like a spear point. They planted themselves on the tile, and the rose stood up, orienting its open maw toward Zach. Then it ran — skittering across the floor on its vine-legs with insectile speed, thorns clicking against tile.
Jack had enough.
He straightened his fingers, drew them together into a blade-hand, and gathered every ounce of gravity he could manage, into the narrowest edge he could form. The air between his fingers split. He slashed downward.
The gravity blade crossed twenty feet of open space and hit the running rose like a scalpel. The cut went through the rosebud, through the vine-legs, and through the tile beneath — a thin, perfect line of severed reality. The two halves of the rose fell apart and twitched once before going still.
Zach stared at him with wild eyes. Jack was already moving, cutting vines, pulling the young man free.
They formed a circle. Jack, Dex, Lily, and Marcus ringed the freed survivors — twelve people, shaking, bleeding, clutching each other. Roses descended, and vine tendrils struck from every direction. Dex detonated them at range. Marcus crushed anything that got close with fists and boots. Lily burned the remains with divine fire. Jack stood at the circle's edge and cut — gravity slashes arcing outward in controlled crescents, severing stalks, splitting roses, carving the vine network into twitching segments.
It was a siege. The roses kept coming. The vines kept growing.
A man at the back of the survivor group — thin, middle-aged, eyes darting — saw an opening. The stairwell door was fifteen feet away. The vines between here and there had been cleared by one of Dex's blasts.
He bolted.
"NO!" Marcus shouted.
The man reached the stairwell in three seconds flat. He hit the invisible gravity wall and bounced off it like he'd run into glass. He stumbled backward, hands scrabbling at nothing, panic turning to incomprehension.
The vines found him.
They came from the walls, from the floor, from the ceiling — converging on the isolated figure with coordinated precision. He screamed. Three roses descended simultaneously. The sounds that followed echoed through the entire floor — wet, rhythmic, unrelenting — and every survivor in the circle pressed closer together and stopped breathing.
Jack carved the last vine cluster apart with a gravity slash that scored the far wall. Lily burned the final rose. The floor went still.
Eleven survivors remained.
They huddled in silence, shaking, staring at the stairwell door. The thin man was gone. There was nothing left to recover.
Marcus wiped sap and blood from his face. "How do we keep them safe? We can't take eleven civilians up seventeen more floors of this."
As if something had heard him, the air beside the stairwell shimmered. A vertical tear opened — not violent like the King's kidnapping portal, but controlled, deliberate. Through it, Jack could see the interior of Coleman's Firearms: the reinforced shelves, the sandbagged windows, the faint golden glow of sanctified ground.
Marcus stepped toward it and extended his hand. His fingers stopped flat against the portal's surface. He pushed. Nothing gave.
"One way," Jack said quietly. "He's letting them through. Not us."
Marcus stared at the portal, then at Jack.
"He doesn't want us to hesitate," Jack continued. "If we're worrying about protecting them, we're slower. He wants us climbing."
Lily knelt beside the survivors, her voice gentle despite the exhaustion hollowing her face. "Listen to me. Through that portal is a place we sanctified. Holy ground. Nothing dead can enter it. You'll be safe there. There are supplies, food, water."
A woman in a torn blazer shook her head. "How do we know it's real?"
Zach stood up. His legs were shaking, and thorn-marks covered his arms, but his jaw was set. He walked to the portal, looked back at Jack once — a look that carried the entire weight of a debt he had no way to repay — and stepped through.
He vanished. Through the shimmer, they saw him stumble into the gun shop, catch himself on a display case, and turn back with wide eyes.
One by one, the others followed. The woman in the blazer went last, clutching her own arms, tears cutting tracks through the grime on her face.
The portal closed.
Jack stood in the ruined office, surrounded by severed vines and shattered roses and the silence of the dead. His reserves were half spent again. His forearm ached where the anglerfish had bitten him. The swordsman's presence stirred once in the back of his mind, then settled.
Thirteen more floors to go.
He picked up his bat from where it had fallen and started toward the stairs.