The first wave hit like a tsunami.
Eight thousand zombies—maybe more—surged forward from Pioneer Square, pouring through the streets in a wall of rotting flesh and gnashing teeth. They moved with coordination that no ordinary horde possessed, their limbs syncing to some unseen rhythm, their empty eyes all focused on a single target.
Me.
"Hold the line!" I roared, and my own army answered.
Six thousand three hundred zombies rushed to meet the tide. The collision was apocalyptic—bodies crashing into bodies, limbs tearing at limbs, the wet crunch of bones breaking and flesh rending filling the night air.
I felt every impact through my network. Every zombie that fell. Every connection that strained under the assault.
The Hive King's forces were stronger. Not individually—my zombies were just as fast, just as vicious—but collectively. They moved as one organism, each unit supporting the others, filling gaps the instant they appeared.
My army was an army.
The Hive King's was a single creature with ten thousand hands.
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"Vanguard!"
My Elite appeared at the front line, wading through the chaos like a shark through minnows. His tattered business suit was already slick with black ichor.
"Create a wedge! Split their formation!"
"Vanguard obeys."
He gathered fifty of my strongest zombies—former construction workers, warehouse staff, anyone with bulk and muscle—and formed them into a spearhead. They drove into the enemy ranks, carving a path toward the Hive King itself.
For a moment, it worked. The enemy formation buckled. A gap opened in their lines.
Then the Hive King pulsed.
I felt it in my bones—a wave of cold will that rippled across the battlefield. Where it touched, my zombies hesitated. Faltered.
Three of them stopped responding entirely.
"No—"
I reached for the severed connections, trying to reclaim them—but there was nothing to reclaim. The void I'd filled with my will was empty again.
The Hive King had ripped them away from me.
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"It can steal your zombies?" Drake's voice cut through the chaos. He stood at the edge of the compound roof, fire blazing around both fists, watching the battle with narrowed eyes.
"Not steal. Reclaim." I clenched my jaw. "Any zombie that originally belonged to its horde—it can take them back."
"That's a problem."
"I noticed."
The pulse came again. Five more connections went dark.
Eight more.
Twelve.
The Hive King was picking apart my army one thread at a time, and I couldn't stop it.
"How many were originally its?" Drake asked.
I ran the numbers in my head. The industrial district. Downtown. The areas closest to the emergence point...
"Maybe a thousand. Maybe more."
"So it can chip away a sixth of your force just by existing."
"Yes."
Drake's fire flared brighter.
"Then we need to take the fight to it. Directly."
------------------------------
I turned to look at the fire awakened.
In my original timeline, Drake Morrison had been a monster. A tyrant who'd burned his way through survivor camps, who'd treated the apocalypse as an opportunity for personal power.
But this Drake—five days awakened, still figuring out what he was—looked at the Hive King with something other than hunger.
He looked at it with hate.
"You want to fight a Tier 4 creature directly?" I asked.
"I want to stop it from cheating." His jaw tightened. "You handle the army. I'll distract the big ugly."
"You'll die."
"Probably." Drake shrugged. "But I didn't come here to watch from the sidelines. I came here because that thing killed my sister."
The words hit like a punch.
"What?"
"Three days ago. She was infected. Turned. And then something called her—some voice in the dark that pulled her underground." Drake's fire was almost white-hot now. "By the time I tracked her down, she was part of that thing. I saw her face in its chest. Screaming."
I remembered the faces trapped in the Hive King's body. The screaming mouths. The eyes filled with horror.
"Drake—"
"Don't." He stepped off the roof.
Fire erupted beneath his feet, cushioning his fall, propelling him toward the battlefield below.
"I'm going to burn that thing until there's nothing left. You just make sure I have an opening."
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"Sarah. Marcus." I turned to the other two awakened. "Can you fight?"
Sarah Kim flickered—for a moment, her outline blurred, almost invisible.
"I can move through their lines unseen. Disrupt. Distract."
"Do it. Target their coordination points—wherever they seem most organized. Break them up."
She nodded and vanished.
Marcus Chen—the seventeen-year-old with superhuman strength—looked less confident.
"I've never... I mean, in football, hitting someone is—"
"This isn't football." I grabbed his shoulder. "Those things will kill everyone in this compound if we don't stop them. Your friends. Your family. Everyone."
"I don't have family here."
"Then fight for the people who do."
He stared at me for a long moment. Then something hardened in his eyes.
"Where do you need me?"
"The east flank. They're trying to circle around. Stop them."
Marcus jumped.
He didn't take the stairs. He just jumped, launching himself off the three-story roof and landing on the street below with a crack of breaking asphalt.
Then he started swinging.
------------------------------
The battle raged.
I commanded from the rooftop, my consciousness stretched across six thousand connections—fewer now, the Hive King's pulses claiming more every minute—directing the flow of combat like a conductor orchestrating chaos.
"Third squad, reinforce the west!" I sent the command through my network, and two hundred zombies shifted position.
"Vanguard, pull back! Their elite are flanking!"
My Elite sent confirmation through our bond—a wordless understanding.
The problem was numbers. Even with my mental limit broken, even with perfect coordination, I couldn't match the Hive King's forces one-to-one. And every pulse stripped away more of my army.
Six thousand became five thousand five hundred.
Five thousand five hundred became five thousand.
I was losing.
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Drake's fire painted the night in orange and gold.
He'd reached the Hive King—or gotten close, at least. His flames roared against the creature's massive form, blackening flesh, igniting the corpses that made up its body.
For a moment, hope flared.
Then the Hive King laughed.
"Fire." Its voice was that terrible chorus of screaming voices. "You bring fire against death?"
It reached for Drake with one misshapen limb.
He dodged—barely—rolling under the strike and coming up with both hands blazing.
"Fire beats everything!" he roared.
"Fire destroys." The Hive King's many eyes focused on him. "But I am destruction. I am the end of all things. And you..."
The limb came again, faster this time.
Drake's fire shield held for half a second.
Then he was flying, hurled across the battlefield by a blow that would have pulped a normal human.
He hit a building and went through the wall.
"Drake!" I shouted.
No response.
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"Wei." Maya's voice came from behind me. "Something's wrong."
"I can see that."
"No. Not the battle." She moved to stand beside me, her silver eyes distant. "The Hive King. It's not... it's not fighting to win."
"What do you mean?"
"Look at its movements. Look at the pattern."
I studied the creature.
She was right. The Hive King wasn't pressing its advantage. It had the numbers, the power, the momentum—but it was holding back. Testing. Probing.
"It's analyzing me."
"Yes." Maya's voice was barely a whisper. "It's learning how you command. How your network functions. Once it understands..."
"It'll tear my army apart from the inside."
"Yes."
I felt cold.
The Hive King wasn't just trying to kill me. It was trying to understand me. To learn my weaknesses. To find the exact frequency that would shatter my control.
And I'd been giving it a masterclass.
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Below, the battle continued.
Marcus Chen was a one-man wrecking ball on the east flank, his enhanced strength sending enemy zombies flying with every punch. Sarah Kim flickered in and out of visibility, appearing behind coordination points and disrupting them before vanishing again.
But it wasn't enough.
My army had dropped to four thousand eight hundred. The Hive King's forces seemed endless—for every zombie that fell, another emerged from the crater at Pioneer Square.
"It's not just using the zombies it already controls," I realized. "It's claiming more. From underground."
"The tunnels." Maya nodded. "There were bodies down there. Thousands of bodies. People who died in the initial outbreak and fell into the drainage system."
"It's been farming them."
"Yes."
The Hive King had an infinite supply. I didn't.
This wasn't a battle I could win through attrition.
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A crash drew my attention to the building where Drake had landed.
Fire.
Orange light blazed from the hole in the wall, and then Drake came flying out—not thrown this time, but launching himself, wreathed in flames so hot they turned the air around him into shimmering waves.
"I'm not dead yet!" he roared.
He crashed into the Hive King's chest, and for a moment, the creature was completely engulfed. Fire roared around it, consuming the corpses that made up its body, turning them to ash.
The Hive King screamed—a sound of genuine pain, of surprise.
Drake was hurting it.
Not badly. Not fatally. But he was hurting it.
"HOLD IT!" I shouted. "Keep it distracted!"
I gathered my will—all of it, every thread of power I could muster—and reached for something I'd never tried before.
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In my original timeline, I'd never commanded more than a thousand zombies at once.
I'd never needed to.
But Maya had said my limits were self-imposed. I'd broken through the wall, shattered the barrier that said this is your maximum.
What else was possible?
I reached into my network—four thousand seven hundred connections, each one a thread of cold will—and I pulled.
Not claiming. Not commanding.
Connecting.
I wove the threads together, layering consciousness on consciousness, building something greater than the sum of its parts.
Four thousand became one.
One voice. One mind. One purpose.
And through that unified will, I spoke.
"Kill the Hive King."
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My army stopped being an army.
It became a storm.
Four thousand seven hundred zombies moved as a single organism, their coordination suddenly matching—no, surpassing—the Hive King's own. They flowed around obstacles like water, struck at weak points with surgical precision, covered each other's flanks with mechanical efficiency.
The Hive King noticed.
Its countless eyes widened—all of them, simultaneously—as my unified force crashed against its ranks like a tidal wave.
"Interesting." The creature's voice held something new.
Respect.
Maybe fear.
"You've learned something, little king. But can you hold it?"
The pulse came.
Not a gentle reclaiming this time. A hammer. A wave of raw will that hit my unified consciousness like a physical blow.
I felt the connections strain. Felt the unity starting to crack.
And I pushed back.
------------------------------
The battle became a war of wills.
The Hive King's ancient, consuming hunger against my desperate, human determination.
I felt my consciousness expand to fill the gaps—felt myself spreading thinner and thinner across thousands of connections, trying to hold them together through sheer force of will.
It wasn't enough.
The cracks were spreading.
My army was going to shatter.
Unless—
"Maya." My voice came out strained. "Can you see a weakness? Anything?"
"It's..." She concentrated, her silver eyes blazing. "There. At the center. Where the faces are most concentrated. That's the core. The original being. Everything else is just... armor."
"The core."
"If you can reach it—"
"I can kill it."
I looked at the Hive King.
Thirty feet of assembled corpses. Thousands of zombies defending it. An ancient consciousness that had survived for centuries.
And somewhere inside, a beating heart.
"Vanguard."
My Elite responded instantly.
"Master?"
"Get me to the core."
"Vanguard obeys."
I jumped from the roof.