"The magic didn’t touch them," Damien finally whispered, his voice a low, soothing hiss meant to calm the room as much as the near-awakening sleeping fox.
Ivan let out a ragged, trembling breath, his massive shoulders finally dropping an inch as he slumped against the doorframe, his golden eyes fixed entirely on her face. Her small fox ears gave another soft, rhythmic twitch, not from pain, but from the familiar, safe scents of her mates finally pushing out the lingering stink of lavender and cold iron.
They had the manor surrounded. The team was a fortress of muscle, scale, and iron, and down in the valley, the cleanup crew was already painting the cobblestones red.
—- back in town —-
It began exactly as Maddie’s desperate pockets of resistance were being completely stamped out near the north.
A heavy, unnatural temperature drop rolled across the ridges of Bowral. It wasn’t the crisp morning chill of the mountains; it was a damp, rotting frost that carried the thick stench of stagnant water and old grave dirt. From the outer valley, a dense, yellow-white mist began to crawl over the hillsides, moving with a terrifying speed that defied the natural wind.
Up on the slate roof of the manor, Tommy’s leopard ears shot forward. His nostrils flared, his tail whipping behind him as he looked down toward the outer walls of the settlement.
"Dako," Tommy called out, his voice dropping into a tense, rigid register. "Look at the western gatehouse. The light’s gone out, that’s hella creepy, I’m not into that at all."
Dako leaned over the stone parapet, his shadows rippling nervously along his arms. "It’s not just the western gate. Look at the south outposts. There’s no guard fire. No torches. Nothing."
The realisation hit them like a physical blow. The internal coup had completely stripped Bowral’s outer defences. Maddie had pulled the unmated tiger guards from their permanent stations to reinforce her strike teams at the greenhouse, leaving the three main entrances to the settlement entirely unmonitored and completely unmanned. There was nobody at the gates to sound the alarm. There was nobody to drop the heavy iron gates.
The mist spilled through those three empty entrances like milk pouring into water.
Within minutes, the lower market square was swallowed by the vapour, the pale cloud rising until it touched the second-story windows of the sandstone buildings. And inside that roiling fog, the sound began. It wasn’t the distant, mindless howling they were used to. It was a massive, synchronised scraping, the dragging footsteps of over a thousand zombies, their numbers compacted into a massive, choking horde that had drifted toward the scent of chaos and fresh blood.
"Dawn!" Tommy yelled down into the courtyard via his comm-link, his fingers gripping the roof tiles until the stone cracked. "We’ve got a massive breach at the perimeter! The outposts are empty, the horde is inside the settlement walls! They’re moving up the ridge paths toward the manor! AHH FUCK THIS I hate zombies the most, drown pleaseee" Tommy unleashed waves and waves of his water magic.
Down on the terrace, Dawn’s head snapped toward the valley. His tracking senses instantly flared as he focused on the approaching mist. The sheer volume of hostile lifeforces entering the lower districts was staggering, a sea of zombies, ravenous entities filling the empty streets below.
"Marx, Shadow, defensive positions now!" Dawn roared, his deep voice carrying over the stone walls. "Jolt, get to the east gatehouse! Rowan, hold that post with your life!"
But as the front edge of the thousand-strong horde began to spill into the garden paths below the manor grounds, the nature of the threat changed entirely.
The mist parted at the base of the house steps, revealing three figures that didn’t move with the staggering, brainless gait of the standard infected. They stood tall, their skin a deep, leathery crimson, their eyes burning with a sharp, calculated intelligence that sent a chill down the spines of the watching scouts.
It was clear to the men that it was three zombie generals with strong intelligence.
—- Lucans pov ——
Three generals. Three intelligent, coordinated threats stood between Lucan and the manor, and the manor was where she was.
The thought hit him like a physical blade, splitting through the cold, measured precision that had carried him through the last forty minutes of systematic elimination. Maddie’s final husband—some lynx with a hydrokinetic scream that had shattered the windows of the greenhouse—lay in a crumpled heap at his feet, throat torn open, the wet, gurgling sound of his last breath already fading into nothing. Lucan didn’t look down. He didn’t register the kill. His molten gold eyes were already tracking north, up the ridge toward the sandstone walls, toward the bedroom where her small body lay curled beneath blankets that smelled like him, like all of them, like safety.
Felicity.
The name rewired every synapse in his skull. His teleportation flickered at the edges of his vision—a shimmering, unstable fracture in the air around his forearms where the space wanted to fold and carry him to her side. He clenched his jaw until the bone ached. Not yet. Not while the valley between him and the manor was flooding with the dead.
The horde stretched from the lower market square all the way up the cobblestone switchbacks, a river of rotting flesh and glazed eyes, their collective moan rising into a frequency that made the rosette markings along his neck pulse with heat. Thousands. Maybe more. The mist had brought them in like a tide, and now they were climbing.
She’s unconscious. She doesn’t know they’re coming. She doesn’t know the horde is inside the walls. She’s alone in that room with Damien and Ivan, and if those walls fail...
The thought didn’t complete. It didn’t need to. His vision sharpened until the world narrowed to a single, burning point: the manor, visible through the thinning fog at the top of the ridge. Every tactical calculation he’d ever made—every ambush, every extraction, every precision strike—collapsed into one raw, screaming imperative.
Get to her.
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