The road toward the center of the battle ran downhill and was no longer a road in any functional sense — it was a channel through which things that had once been people descended with the patient, unstoppable quality of water finding its level. Ghoul and Janus moved against the current of them, cutting forward with the sole intention of reaching the main engagement, no longer stopping to assess what they were putting down. Assessment cost time. Time, here, cost everything else.

  The town plaza opened ahead of them and it was worse than the approach had suggested.

  What had been a market square — stalls, benches, a fountain at the center that someone had maintained for decades — had been compressed into a slaughter ground. The stalls were kindling and splinters. The statues that had lined the square's perimeter had been knocked from their plinths and lay in pieces across the flagstones, faces and hands distributed separately from the bodies they had belonged to. And through all of it, the undead moved in the slow, dragging, utterly indifferent way they moved everywhere, pulled toward anything alive by whatever had been installed in them in place of instinct.

  Janus and Ghoul shifted simultaneously into speed enhancement — not a spoken decision, just the shared recognition that the open ground required it. Their bodies pushed past the baseline, the enhancement sharpening the world into something faster and more defined, and they crossed the plaza without engaging the dead that turned toward them, letting the gap grow behind them rather than spending themselves closing it.

  "I'll meet you there!"

  Ghoul was already moving — three strides toward the market stalls, a vault onto the tilted frame of one, using the angled wood like a ramp as she launched herself onto the nearest rooftop. She landed clean, barely slowing, and was across the first roof and onto the second before Janus had finished processing that she had left.

  He turned back to the street.

  The corpse was already in his path.

  That was the first wrong thing — not that it was there, but the quality of its presence. The others had been reactive, drawn by proximity and motion, their trajectories the simple geometry of things moving toward heat. This one was in front of him. Not arriving. Not turning. Already there, already oriented, as though it had identified the gap in the crowd and filled it specifically.

  It was tall and slender, the original person's frame still visible underneath whatever had been done to it, the proportions intact in a way most of the others weren't. It didn't stagger. It didn't reach. It simply stood in the middle of the street with its arms slightly away from its body and its head oriented directly toward him, and the stillness of it was worse than the movement of the others had been.

  Janus made the decision Grim had drilled into him — weight low, strength enhancement loaded into the legs and shoulders, momentum as the primary tool. He hit the corpse at full speed with the intention of going through it the way he'd gone through a dozen others in the last hour.

  He went nowhere.

  The impact was total and immediate — not the give of a body absorbing force, not even the resistance of something braced against him, but the absolute, wall-like refusal of something that had not registered his momentum as relevant. The force rebounded back through him and the reversal was violent enough to lift his feet from the ground before he landed badly, already off-balance, already in the wrong position for what came next.

  The corpse's arm came out.

  The grip on his right arm was not the clumsy, grasping grip of the others — it was specific, targeted, locking around the limb with a force that communicated clearly and immediately that it knew exactly where the leverage was and intended to use it. The other hand, three fingers missing from the palm, closed around his neck.

  The pain in his shoulder arrived before he could process the grip — a tearing, radiating agony that bypassed the body's instinct to buffer sensation and delivered itself directly and completely. His arm was being pulled from its socket and his neck was being compressed and the compacted mass of the dead town was moving around them and none of it had anything to do with his ability to get free.

  He stopped trying to get free physically.

  He shut his left eye.

  The ache built immediately behind the right — familiar now, the pain of it a known quantity, the language his core had developed over two weeks of being forced to produce on demand. He directed it forward, not into the open air but through a single compressed point, a blade-thin wave with nowhere to go but straight.

  It went through the corpse's skull and out the back.

  The grip on his neck released.

  He hit the ground and rolled, coughing, putting distance between himself and the thing before he came up on one knee and looked back.

  It was still standing.

  No head. Arms moving. Reaching in his general direction with the blind, mechanical persistence of something that had been told to do this and had not been told to stop.

  Emmanuel's briefing surfaced from somewhere in the compressed memory of the last forty-eight hours — some of them required core destruction, the core being the only thing running the animation, the body itself irrelevant once the core was identified and ended.

  He was still breathing too fast. Ghoul's voice was somewhere in his head: most of us got dragged into this and had to figure out how to survive it afterward.

  He steadied himself.

  He grabbed the corpse's remaining arm — using the limb as a reference line, a physical vector to guide the focus along rather than projecting into open space — and fired again. The compressed air blade followed the line of the arm inward, sliced through the joint, and continued its path down through the torso. Rotting organs distributed themselves across the pavement with a sound he was going to have to learn to not hear quite so specifically.

  The corpse folded sideways. Its remaining structures worked against each other without coordination, the animation trying to maintain itself in a body that no longer had the architecture to support it.

  Janus kicked it clear and ran.

  His shoulder ached with the specific, deep ache of something that had been wrenched and would not let him forget it. He ran through it. The plaza was ahead. The sounds of the main engagement were ahead.

  He ran toward them because Ghoul was there and because there was nowhere else to go and because he had not dropped the gun.

  * * *

  "Push."

  The chunk of debris left Kalizo's hand and stopped being a chunk of debris.

  Gravitational force seized it mid-air — amplifying its velocity, compressing its effective mass, converting a piece of broken concrete into something that a structural engineer would not have wanted aimed at anything they had built. It covered the distance to the two enhanced corpses in the time it takes to blink and hit them with the flat, total sound of a problem being resolved by force.

  They went backward. Not gracefully — end over end, bones registering the impact in the specific way bones register impacts they were not designed to survive, the animation in them trying to compensate for physics it couldn't negotiate with.

  Digma had already moved.

  His heavy automatic rifle was up and speaking before the debris had finished its arc — the barrel tracking the third corpse with the economy of someone for whom this motion has been performed enough times that the body does it and the mind does something else. The rounds hammered into the figure in a relentless, deliberate stream, each impact driving it back a fraction, the cumulative force of them building into something the corpse's animation had to account for.

  It accounted for it.

  The flesh across its torso hardened in stages — not instantly, but fast, the tissue densifying and layering into a crude barrier that caught the rounds and held them. Each bullet bit deep and stopped, embedded in the wall of compacted flesh, and the corpse held its arms raised and absorbed the stream with the patient indifference of something that does not register pain and has been given an adequate tool for exactly this situation.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Then the payloads inside the rounds detonated.

  The cluster explosions tore through the flesh barrier from the inside — not the clean penetration of a bullet exiting cleanly but the messier, more comprehensive damage of charges going off in close succession within confined space. The corpse's guard dropped under the unexpected internal violence, its arms falling as the barrier it had formed was destroyed from within rather than without.

  Kalizo was already inside its reach.

  "Push."

  Gravitational force concentrated into his fist and the blow that landed on the corpse's chest was not a punch in any conventional sense — it was a compression event, the force of it delivering itself inward rather than through, the chest cavity folding under pressure that had no interest in the structural resistance of bone and rebuilt muscle. He followed it with his left, then his right, alternating with the methodical intensity of someone dismantling something that needs to be fully dismantled and has learned that stopping early is more expensive than finishing.

  The upper half of the body became something that could no longer be described as an upper half.

  Kalizo stepped back.

  The lightning arrived before he finished the step.

  It came from above — not from the sky the way natural lightning comes, but from a specific point directly overhead, targeted, the discharge of something that had identified him and was responding. He activated Repel across his torso in the fraction of a second between registration and impact, and the dampening was enough to keep him alive and not enough to keep him comfortable. The strike still moved through him — current finding the path of least resistance through his nervous system with the intimate, total quality of electricity in a body, his muscles locking and releasing in rapid involuntary sequence before he found his footing again on the smoking asphalt.

  He stood.

  Breathing hard. Left leg not entirely cooperative.

  He stood anyway.

  Digma had been watching the remaining two corpses and had noticed something that made the back of his neck go cold.

  They were coordinating.

  Not in the way the others had been coordinated — the broad, command-embedded coordination of an army following a shared instruction. This was responsive. One moved and the other adjusted. One drew attention and the other repositioned. The gap between stimulus and response was too short for anything running on embedded commands. Something was making decisions.

  He ejected his empty magazine.

  From his vest he pulled a blood pack — a flat, sealed pouch that he bit open and poured across the fresh magazine with the practiced ease of someone who has done this enough times that it has its own rhythm. The blood soaked through the casing immediately, reaching the rounds inside, and dried across the surface in the span of three seconds. His ability was not located in a single organ or a single transformed element — his entire bloodstream served as the vessel for it, the whole circulatory system functioning as the core, which meant his ability was everywhere his blood was. The Empire had developed the specialized rounds specifically for this: casings designed to accept vessel integration, to carry his blood into the target before the charge ignited.

  Every shot, a controlled combustion charge delivered from the inside.

  He slapped the magazine home.

  The Maintenance corpse moved toward Kalizo.

  It wore the high-visibility vest of a utility worker — the letters barely legible under the burns and the blood and the general condition of something that had been through several things since it last looked like a person. The electricity crawling across its body had not dissipated. It was building — arcing between the seams of the vest, crawling up the exposed musculature of its arms, concentrating in the raised left hand with the deliberate patience of something that has done this before and knows how much charge it needs.

  Thunder cracked without sky.

  The lightning drove itself into the ground where Kalizo had been standing — the crater it left was deep enough that the asphalt on its edges curled upward, the force of the discharge compressing the substrate below into a brief, violent reshaping of the street. He had already moved, rolling toward a chunk of broken concrete that offered the particular comfort of being between him and the thing trying to kill him, his left leg dragging slightly as he found his position.

  "I have the core location!"

  Sander's voice came from cover — positioned beside Digma, the monocular scanner clipped to his mask turned toward the Maintenance corpse, its lens doing the work the naked eye couldn't. The Empire-issued device was built for exactly this: mapping core positions in entities that didn't carry them where anatomy suggested they should be.

  "It's in the brain. Aim for it!"

  Digma fired.

  The round crossed the distance and hit — and detonated. The combustion charge went off inside the Maintenance corpse's skull with the force of something that had been designed to destroy the specific kind of reinforced tissue that develops around a vessel core.

  The corpse remained standing.

  Behind it, the third undead — the one in the torn office suit, the polished pin of a prestigious Imperial construction company still attached to its lapel with the small, absurd dignity of a detail that had survived everything else — lowered the wall it had raised just before impact. The barrier had absorbed the blast entirely, its surface showing nothing.

  "Why," Digma said, with the specific exhaustion of someone who had been operating at maximum capacity for too long and had just received information that extended the timeline further, "does it have to be a floor bender."

  He was not asking. He was expressing something for which there was no adequate response.

  He turned to Sander. "Grab the lieutenant — go north, last position I had before the radio fried."

  He was already moving before the sentence finished — rifle swinging back into position, speed enhancement loading into his legs as he broke into a sprint in the direction opposite Kalizo. The Maintenance corpse tracked him immediately, the electricity cycling down from its raised hand and redistributing into its legs as it followed.

  Drawing it away. Giving Kalizo room.

  Behind the retreating Maintenance corpse, the suited figure adjusted its posture. Its head twitched — a single, sharp movement with the quality of a sensor recalibrating. Something had changed in its field. Something new.

  From distance, a beam of compressed light arrived.

  Seven walls of compacted stone erupted from the ground in sequential succession — one, two, three, four, five, the beam punching through each with decreasing force, weakening at the sixth, expiring against the seventh with a sound like something being extinguished. The walls had gone up faster than the beam had traveled. The corpse had not reacted to the shot. It had anticipated the shot.

  It began raising more walls around itself — a thickening fortress of compressed stone enclosing its position while Digma's blood rounds detonated across the outer surfaces, the explosions tearing chunks from the defensive structure and the structure rebuilding itself before the smoke cleared.

  Undead vessels had no core burnout to manage. No ceiling. No cost that their minds were capable of registering as a reason to stop. What they lacked was creativity — the ability to adapt, to problem-solve, to use their power in ways that hadn't been embedded into them. They were mindless and they were terrifyingly efficient and the combination of those two things made them a specific kind of problem that brute force addressed only partially.

  Ghoul dropped from the rooftop beside Digma.

  She landed clean — one hand touching the ground briefly for balance, rifle already moving to assess the field before she was fully upright.

  "Situation," she said.

  "Grim and the Roses pushed ahead — Jeyu's their problem now." Digma was checking his remaining blood packs with quick, practiced touches, counting by feel. "I've got enough for these two but the undead status makes everything take three times as long. Floor bender over there has been walling itself every time we get close to a clean shot, and the lightning one is—"

  A discharge cracked somewhere north of them.

  "—that," he finished.

  Ghoul studied the walls rising and falling across the battlefield with the focused attention of someone reading a language she has partial familiarity with.

  "We ran into something like this before," she said quietly. More to herself than to him.

  "Like what?"

  A pause. Short. Closing over something.

  "Nothing," she said. "Can you reach Kalizo on the radio?"

  Digma pressed the transmitter. Static. He held it for three seconds and released it.

  "Lightning strike fried it. Last I had him he was north before we split to pull the Maintenance one away." He slung the rifle over his back and looked at the wall she was already climbing with the expression of a man doing a private cost-benefit analysis. "Where's your partner? The thirteenth. He was with you earlier." He started climbing, considerably less efficiently. "I'll be honest — he doesn't look like a fighter."

  "He'll be here," Ghoul said, already at the top.

  She paused.

  "You're right that he broke down earlier."

  Both of them scanned the ruined plaza from the elevated position — the smoke, the moving shapes in it, the erratic walls still erupting and collapsing in unpredictable patterns as the suited corpse responded to threats that were no longer arriving from the angles it had mapped.

  Neither of them said what they were both calculating: that the battlefield had been reshaping itself for the last three minutes and the places that had been navigable were becoming places that weren't.

  The lightning began striking in a pattern.

  Clockwise. Consistent spacing. Closing inward with every bolt like something tightening a fist around the plaza.

  Ghoul clocked it on the third strike. "Against the sweep — move!"

  They dropped and ran. The fourth bolt hit behind them. The fifth hit closer. The sixth closer still, the shockwave shoving them forward, the smoke swallowing each crater before the next one formed.

  The seventh hit fifteen meters ahead.

  They stopped hard.

  "It's herding us," Digma said.

  He was right. Walls on one side, the sweep closing from the other, the corridor between them gone in one more rotation.

  Ghoul felt the air shift above her — pressure dropping, the metallic bite of charge building fast — and looked up.

  The eighth strike was already coming down.

  Directly at them.