He caught a zombie by the jaw, his fingers digging into the bone before he twisted, snapping the neck with an abrupt, wet crack. He didn’t summon a single spatial rift to do the work for him. He wanted to feel the resistance. He wanted to destroy everything that stood between him and his female with his own two hands.
The final twenty zombies in the stable courtyard tried to swarm him, their decayed hands reaching for his shoulders, but Lucan’s momentum was unstoppable. He phased through the front two, reappeared in the centre of the group, and exploded outward in a feral blur of claws and teeth. The sheer kinetic energy of his acceleration sent severed limbs and broken torsos flying into the sandstone walls.
When the courtyard finally went still, Lucan stood in the centre of the meat market he had created, his chest heaving, his claws dripping with black fluid. He didn’t look back at the bodies. He didn’t wait for Sarge or the rest of Snow Team Beta.
His eyes, completely golden and blown wide with predatory fixation, locked onto the high balcony of the master suite. With a final, silent fracture of space, he vanished from the yard, leaving only the scent of metal and raw terror behind.
The spatial distortion collapsed behind him as Lucan materialised on the lower terrace steps, but he didn’t find the quiet sanctuary of the manor. The dense mist had pooled here, thick as clotted milk, and standing in the centre of the crushed rose garden was the level eighty-two Zombie General.
The creature was an aberration of flesh and bone, its leathery grey skin stretched tight over a massive, skeletal frame. Unlike the mindless zombies trailing in its wake, its hollow eyes burned with a cold, calculated intelligence. As Lucan appeared, the General didn’t lunge. It simply tilted its head, a slow, sickening smirk peeling back its rotting lips to reveal jagged rows of blackened teeth.
Lucan’s panther tail lashed behind him, his claws extending an inch further into the stone railings. Mine. The word vibrated in his skull like a struck bell. Mine, mine, mine. Every breath the creature took was a theft of the oxygen that belonged to Felicity. Every second it stood on this terrace was a vandalisation of the ground beneath her bedroom.
He didn’t speak. A cold CEO doesn’t negotiate with a virus.
Lucan vanished, his predatory acceleration turning him into an invisible bullet of kinetic force. He reappeared directly in front of the General, his obsidian claws driving straight for the monster’s throat to rip the vocal cords from its neck.
But his claws met nothing but freezing air.
The space fractured, and the scent of rotting vegetation vanished, replaced instantly by the suffocatingly sweet aroma of lavender and cold iron. The yellow fog turned a blinding, pristine white. Lucan stumbled, his boots losing their grip on the stone as the courtyard dissolved around him.
Lucan was standing in the master bedroom.
The fur-lined nest bed was right in front of him. Felicity was sitting up against the headboard, her honey-blonde hair falling perfectly over her shoulders, her small fox ears perked wide. But she wasn’t looking at him with the soft, sleepy warmth that usually anchored his fractured mind. Her amber eyes were cold. Disgusted.
"Why are you here, Lucan?" her voice echoed, but it didn’t sound like her usual gentle purr. It was flat, echoing from everywhere at once. "You couldn’t even protect me. You let him put me to sleep."
Lucan’s chest heaved, his black panther instincts screaming at him that something was wrong, but the sheer sight of her rejection made his knees weak. "Felicity," he rasped, his voice breaking through his cold facade. "I came back. I destroyed them all. I’m here to take you away. Where no one can touch you."
A cruel, mocking laugh cut through the room, but it didn’t come from her lips. It came from the shadows behind the bed.
Exile slithered out of the dark, his massive black scales gleaming, his pale eyes burning with absolute dominance. Behind him stood Voss, his broad chest unblemished, his wolf ears pinned back in a triumphant snarl.
Felicity didn’t flinch. She leaned back against Exile’s chest, her hand resting on her heavy, swollen belly, the belly that carried their cubs.
"Take me away?" Felicity laughed, a sharp, cutting sound that sliced straight through Lucan’s soul. "To live in a hole in the dirt with a broken ghost? Look at you, Lucan. Your teleportation is erratic. You’re bleeding. You’re weak." She looked up at Exile, then at Voss, her fingers tracing the line of their shoulders. "They saved me. Voss carried me through the fire while you were missing your hits. Exile broke the zombies. I don’t need a mate who flickers out when the world gets heavy."
"No..." Lucan choked out, his hands flying to his head, his claws digging into his own scalp as he violently shook his head. "No, she wouldn’t say that. She loves the static. She told me... she told me I anchor her."
"You don’t anchor anyone," Felicity’s voice hissed, directly into his ear now, though she was still across the room. "You’re a parasite, Lucan. You don’t do half measures, do you? That’s the problem. Your obsession is pathetic. You don’t get replaced because you’re too weak to matter in the first place."
"If you break, I break worse," his own voice echoed back to him from the dark corners of his mind, distorted and mocking.
A heavy, physical blow shattered the illusion. The level eighty-two General’s massive, bone-plated fist slammed directly into Lucan’s ribs, the sheer force of the level metrics sending him crashing through the sandstone balustrade and down onto the lower gravel path. The hallucination snapped, but the voices didn’t leave his head. They stayed, coiled tightly around his cognitive centre like venomous snakes.
The General walked down the shattered steps, its foul, wet laughter rattling in its throat. It was using hallucination magic, a psychic rot that fed directly on the deepest, most insecure fractures of a predator’s mind. It could see the terrifying, stalker-level possessiveness Lucan harboured, and it was turning that very obsession into a knife.
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