I stepped off the elevator on the 6th floor of Southfield General.

  I reached the double doors at the end of the hall: Office of the Chief of Medicine.

  I pushed them open.

  It was a penthouse. Floor-to-ceiling glass overlooked the city of Southfield. The streets below were orderly, the bioluminescent streetlights glowing softly in the evening haze. It was a picture of the civilization I had built.

  Siegfried was sitting behind a mahogany desk, typing on a computer. He wore a pristine white coat, his silver glasses reflecting the blue light of the screen.

  He didn't look up as I entered.

  "Mr. President," he said, his voice calm. "To what do I owe the pleasure? I assume you aren't here for a checkup."

  I walked up to the desk.

  "Your service is needed," I said. "On the battlefield."

  Siegfried stopped typing and looked at me, then at the dirt I was tracking onto his floor.

  He stood up and unbuttoned his coat. Then, he took off his glasses.

  He pressed a button on his intercom. "Nurse Joy. Come in, please."

  A moment later, a woman in scrubs walked in. She saw me—a battered man standing in her boss's office—and her eyes widened slightly, but she remained professional.

  "Sir?"

  Siegfried folded his coat neatly and handed it to her.

  "I will be gone for an unforeseen amount of time," Siegfried said. "You are now Chief in Charge. Handle the schedule. If anyone dies who shouldn't have, I will be disappointed."

  Nurse Joy nodded and put on the coat. It was three sizes too big for her, but she sat down at the desk and immediately picked up the ringing phone.

  "Chief of Medicine's office," she said.

  I watched the exchange, impressed. Competence really was the most valuable currency in the apocalypse.

  Siegfried rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt and walked over to a glass cabinet, punched in a code, and removed a small, leather satchel.

  "Let's go," he said.

  I was momentarily stunned by the ease of it. I had expected to have to persuade him, or offer him a bonus, or at least explain that we were fighting a beast man with a ray gun that can wipe out 100,000 peopled divisions.

  "Right," I said.

  We walked out of the hospital to the small patch of Verdant Jade Loam I kept in the decorative planter near the entrance.

  I grabbed Siegfried’s arm.

  "Brace yourself," I said.

  "Teleport."

  We slammed back into reality.

  We appeared behind the bamboo shield wall I had erected at the edge of the zoo. Or what was left of it.

  The situation had collapsed.

  While I was gone, the railgun had fired twice more.

  The 8th and 9th Cloud Divisions were gone. Vaporized. The trench in the forest was now a canyon.

  I looked down.

  Qolius was on the ground.

  The High Priest, the man who claimed to speak for the Divine, was curled into a ball in the dirt. He was rocking back and forth, clutching his smiling mask with white-knuckled hands.

  "The light..." Qolius whimpered. "It erases us. There is no soul left. Just... gone."

  I looked at him, and the illusion broke.

  For a week, I had treated him as a peer. A rival. A threat. I had danced around him, wary of his intellect and his power.

  But looking at him now, shivering in the mud because his enemy had a bigger gun than he did, I realized the truth.

  He was a Paper Tiger.

  He was a god in Grand Rapids because he had spent years saturating the city with his Qi. He was powerful in his own domain. But out here? In the neutral ground of the Wilds? He was just a man with a gimmick.

  He hadn't stalled at Houghton Lake for reconnaissance. He had stalled because he was terrified. He knew that without his territorial advantage, he was vulnerable. He knew Amoto was stronger.

  He wasn't plotting a masterstroke. No. He was just trying to survive.

  "Get up," I said.

  Qolius didn't move. "We must flee and scatter. The shadows lengthen..."

  I kicked his boot.

  "Get. Up."

  Qolius looked up at me. "My Lord... the weapon... it is the judgment of—"

  "Shut up," I snapped. "I don't want to hear your poetry. I want you to do your job."

  I leaned down, grabbing the collar of his pink robes and hauling him to his feet.

  "You are an employee, Qolius. And right now, your performance is lacking."

  I pointed at the carnage.

  "Get your head in the game," I ordered. "Or I will replace you with someone who will. Do you understand?"

  The dance was over. There was no more subtext.

  Qolius stared at me and saw the coldness in my eyes. He realized that I was more dangerous than the railgun.

  "Yes," he whispered. "Yes, my Lord."

  I turned away from him.

  Frank was standing by the remains of a bamboo wall. He was frantically drawing glowing arrays in the air, his hands moving quickly, sweat pouring down his face.

  "I can't lock it down!" Frank yelled, his voice cracking. "The frequency shifts every time it fires! I can't build a shield that holds!"

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  He saw Siegfried standing next to me and stiffened.

  Siegfried didn't even look at him nor did he seem to remember him at all. He was looking past the wall, toward the white glint of the railgun in the distance.

  "I brought a specialist," I told Frank.

  "Him?" Frank pointed a shaking finger at the doctor. "Kaz, are you crazy? He's a physician! He punches people and fixes bones! He can't stop a siege weapon of this magnitude!"

  "Can you?" I asked.

  Frank flinched. "I'm trying! But the Qi signature... it's alien logic! It doesn't follow the laws of geometry! It bypasses standard defensive theory! It's impossible!"

  Siegfried adjusted his glasses.

  "Alien logic?" Siegfried repeated, his tone mild. "Or just logic you haven't studied?"

  Frank opened his mouth to retort, but no sound came out. It was a polite yet devastating evisceration.

  A high pitched sound filled the air.

  "Incoming!" Bells screamed from the flank.

  The railgun was charged.

  Amoto stood by the weapon, laughing. "Say cheese!"

  He fired.

  The beam of white light shot across the zoo.

  Siegfried stepped out from behind the bamboo wall.

  He took a scalpel from his satchel and as the beam—moving at Mach speeds—approached, Siegfried moved.

  He tapped it.

  He flicked his wrist, striking the side of the energy beam with the flat of his scalpel.

  It was a tiny sound, lost in the roar of the weapon.

  But the effect was massive. The beam deflected. Just a fraction of a degree. A millimeter at the source became a hundred feet at the destination.

  The beam missed the core of the 7th Division. It sheared through the trees to the left, clipping the edge of the formation.

  50,000 men died instantly.

  But 50,000 lived.

  Frank’s jaw hit his chest. "He... he parried it? He parried a railgun?"

  Amoto, in the distance, stopped laughing and raised an eyebrow.

  "Reload," Amoto ordered.

  "Trajectory corrected," Siegfried muttered. "Density is fluctuating."

  The gun fired again.

  This time, Siegfried didn't tap it.

  He raised his hand and wove his fingers in a complex pattern. Orange light flared, forming a hexagonal prism directly in the path of the beam.

  The white light hit the prism.

  Usually, a shield would shatter. But this wasn't a shield; it was a trap. The energy entered the hexagon and began to spin. It swirled like water going down a drain, the prism containing the force, bleeding off the momentum.

  The prism cracked.

  The beam dissipated and a stray spark escaped the bottom, arcing down and incinerating a squad of 15,000 soldiers.

  Casualties: 15,000.

  "Better," Siegfried noted.

  "What kind of Array Cultivator are you?" Amoto shouted.

  Siegfried wiped his scalpel on a cloth.

  "I am no Array Cultivator," he responded.

  "Again!" Amoto roared.

  The gun charged for a third shot but this time, the noise was louder. Amoto was overcharging it. He wanted to brute force through the doctor's tricks.

  Siegfried sighed.

  "Crude," he said.

  He took his scalpel and did something that made my stomach turn.

  He stabbed it into his own jaw, right below the ear.

  "Doctor?" I asked.

  Siegfried twisted the blade and his neck muscles bulged. He was stimulating his own vocal cords, overclocking the biological mechanism to produce a sound that shouldn't be possible for a human.

  The railgun fired and Siegfried opened his mouth.

  He screamed a sound. It wasn't a human sound. It was a frequency. A high-pitched wail that drilled into my brain.

  Soldiers around us fell to their knees, clutching their bleeding ears as the glass windows of the reptile house shattered.

  I closed my eyes, the pain blinding.

  When I opened them, the projectile was gone.

  There was no explosion or impact. I had no idea what happened but could see from the look on Amoto’s face that the attack had been stopped.

  Casualties: 0.

  I looked at Siegfried as he pulled the scalpel from his jaw. The wound healed instantly.

  "Treatment complete," Siegfried said.

  I started to laugh. I couldn't help it. The relief was overwhelming.

  "You're getting a raise, Doctor," I said, clapping him on the back. "A massive raise. And Wolfen is footing the bill."

  The morale of the army returned in a rush. The soldiers, who had been ready to die, realized they were protected by a monster of their own.

  "Reform the line!" Bells shouted, his voice cracking with renewed vigor. "Push them!"

  Across the field, Amoto stepped back from the railgun and kicked the weapon over.

  "This stage prop is now obsolete," he spat.

  He looked at his five remaining generals—the Direct Disciples.

  "Put on a good show," Amoto ordered.

  The generals charged. The Lion, the Lizard, the Wolf, the Hawk, and the Falcon. They rushed our lines with the desperation of the damned.

  I prepared to issue orders to Bells, but a flash of yellow movement caught my eye.

  It was Qolius.

  He had removed his pink robes and stood shirtless, his skin now yellow, glowing with activated runes.

  He wasn't the broken man who had been crying in the dirt five minutes ago. He was a man who had lost nearly 400,000 followers and was looking to balance the score.

  "Thieves," Qolius hissed. "You stole my flock."

  He met the Lion General in the center of the field and he swung a massive axe.

  Qolius ducked under the swing and struck the general’s neck, his stiffened hand chopping into the pressure point that governed Qi flow.

  He then stabbed him in his head with his fingers.

  The general fell, paralyzed and dying, his connection to his beast severed.

  Qolius moved to the next one. The Lizard General.

  He chanted a single word, a syllable that made the Lizard buck and throw its rider. Qolius caught the general in mid air and snapped his spine.

  It was a slaughter.

  Within minutes, the leadership of Black Hand was dead. Their bodies lay broken in the mud.

  Qolius stood over them, his chest heaving, his yellow skin steaming in the cold air.

  He turned his gaze to the remaining Black Hand army. 100,000 elite soldiers who were now leaderless.

  They leveled their rifles at him.

  Qolius spread his arms.

  "Atonement," he whispered.

  He began to chant seductively. It seeped into the minds of the soldiers.

  "You have sinned," Qolius intoned. "You have raised hands against the Divine. You are broken. But you can be fixed."

  The soldiers hesitated and their aim wavered.

  "Surrender your will," Qolius commanded. "Pay your debt."

  The corruption took hold.

  I watched as 100,000 men dropped their weapons while their eyes rolled back into their heads, turning white. They turned, not to run, but to face Amoto.

  "Your army is now my army," Qolius hissed, looking at Amoto. "They will work off the debt you have incurred."

  Amoto sat alone on his Griffin.

  His generals were dead, his superweapon was neutralized, and his army had turned against him. He was one man against two empires.

  Most men would beg. Some would run.

  Amoto clapped.

  "Bravo!" he shouted. "What a plot twist! The audience is on the ropes!"

  "The big cat is now backed into a corner," Amoto announced.

  He grabbed the reins of his Griffin.

  "He is forced to show his claws," he roared.

  He kick started the beast and the Griffin screeched and launched itself into the air.

  Amoto dove.

  He dive-bombed the mass of his former soldiers, crashing into the center of the corrupted army, killing dozens of them on impact and clearing a circle in the sea of bodies.

  He stood up in the crater.

  "The final act is now upon us," Amoto growled.

  His body began to spasm.

  Bones cracked and lengthened. Claws, six inches long and black as the night, grew from his fingers and toes. His jaw unhinged, extending into a muzzle filled with great white fangs and a long snake-like tongue.

  Fur—thick, matted, and grey—sprouted from his pores, covering his body in seconds. His muscles expanded and turned into crocodile armor, tearing his skin. Wings lashed behind him.

  He was no longer a man. He was a hybrid of every apex predator he had ever bonded with.

  "Let’s give the people a climax to remember!"

  I watched from the back line.

  "He's insane," I whispered.

  "He's committed," Goros corrected. "Even in defeat, he refuses to break character. You have to admire the dedication."

  "I don't admire it," I said. "I just want it to end."

  I looked at Qolius, then at Siegfried, and finally Bells.

  "Kill him," I ordered.