He turned, and there, slithering through the shattered remains of the greenhouse’s eastern wall, massive coils of dark olive and black scales catching the pale morning light, was Exile. The anaconda was already moving with that fluid, ground-devouring speed that masked the true lethality beneath. His eyes were blazing, fixed on the same ridge, the same destination. He didn’t need to speak. Lucan could read the coiled tension in every inch of that massive body the way he could read a battlefield, the way Exile’s muscles contracted, the way his thick tail lashed once against the broken stone, the absolute, wordless focus that meant only one thing.
She’s in danger. Move.
"Exile!" Lucan’s voice came out rougher than he intended, the measured composure cracking at the edges like thin ice. "The zombies are incoming, thousands of them. They’re already inside the bowral’s walls. The manor will easily be the next target"
Exile didn’t respond with words. He never did. His massive head turned, those amber eyes locking onto Lucan’s with an intensity that communicated everything: the shared obsession, the shared terror, the shared, singular purpose. His coils tightened visibly, the scales along his shoulders shifting as the muscles beneath bunched and released. He was already orienting his body toward the ridge path, toward the horde, toward the thing standing between him and the small, sleeping fox who had rewired the architecture of his entire existence.
Lucan felt the teleportation ripple again, stronger this time, the air around his claws distorting like heat haze. He forced it down through sheer will. If he jumped now—if he let the desperation override the precision—he’d materialise in the middle of the horde with no exit strategy, and that would not get him to her faster. That would get him torn apart, and then she would have one less wall between her and the dark.
Think. Move. Kill everything in the way.
He didn’t see the numbers or the horde as a tactical problem. He saw them as nothing more than an irritation—chaff standing between his claws and the master bedroom where his female lay.
His black panther attributes had completely stripped away his usual aristocratic restraint. The heavy weight of his jaw, the deadly bunching of his shoulders, and his hyper-attuned predatory instincts took over. He didn’t reach for a blade. He didn’t need steel. His fingers had curved into long, obsidian talons, his level ninety-eight metrics translating his raw fury into pure physical carnage.
He didn’t just teleport; he used his predatory acceleration, combining his spatial jumps with a terrifying, continuous buildup of forward momentum. He vanished from the stable doorway and reappeared mid-stride inside the front ranks of the regular zombies, his speed so volatile that the sonic boom of his displacement tore through the air before he even touched them.
He struck out with a backhand, his panther claws shearing through three decaying necks at once. Heads rolled into the dirt, but he was already gone before the bodies hit the gravel.
’She’s in the bed. Her ears are twitching. Is she cold? Is the shirt too thin?’
The thoughts were a violent, repetitive loop in his brain, matching the rhythm of his strikes.
He materialised directly above a cluster of five zombies, dropping with the full, heavy mass of an apex predator. His boots crushed the skull of the first, and with a fluid, blinding swipe, his left hand tore the chest cavity out of the second. Lucan didn’t feel the rot on his skin. He didn’t care about the black blood spraying across his face, staining his wet black hair. It was just clutter. It was just garbage he had to move out of the way before he could get back to her.
’I would let the world burn if it meant you stayed where I could reach you,’ he murmured into the fog, his voice low, steady, and utterly devoid of doubt. It was the tone he used when finalising an absolute decree, cold to the rest of the universe but entirely consuming when directed at her.
"You think I’m joking, but I’ve already decided how far I’d go. I’ve measured the distance to the ends of the earth, Felicity, and I would drag you down into the dark with me before I ever let a single scratch touch your skin again. You are my only home. If this settlement falls, I am not saving it. I am saving you."
A zombie lunged from his blind spot, its jaws snapping close to his neck. Lucan didn’t even look. His panther tail whipped around, the heavy muscle slamming into the creature’s throat with enough force to shatter its windpipe, while his right hand pinned another infected to the stone wall, his talons sinking deep into its skull until it gave way.
He knew the spatial coordinates to places where the sun never reached, where the air was filtered and safe, where she would have nothing to look at but him, where her only horizon would be his chest. The terrifying, possessive sickness in his chest grew tighter with every second he spent away from her. The fact that she was currently vulnerable, knocked out cold by a mind trick while he was out here dealing with the leftovers of Maddie’s failure, made his blood feel like boiling oil.
He became a localised hurricane of black fur, gold eyes, and tearing claws. He was jumping every three seconds, his acceleration allowing him to blitz through forty zombies in the span of a single breath. He tore limbs from sockets with his bare hands. He dug his claws into spines and ripped them free, utilising the sheer, unadulterated strength of his panther form to bulldoze a path toward the ridge.
"You don’t get replaced. That’s the problem," he whispered as he tore through another line of the dead, his heart aching with a fierce, quiet worship that made everything else irrelevant.
"There is no version of this world where I exist without the sound of your breath. I don’t do half measures. Not with you. Every piece of my soul belongs to you, and if you break, I will break so much worse that there won’t be enough of me left to bury. I will hold the sky up myself if it keeps you safe, little fox."
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