Nate left at dawn.

  The camp was still waking up—fires being stoked, rations being distributed, the quiet murmur of hundreds of people adjusting to their new reality. He'd said his goodbyes the night before. Frank, Chen, Tyler, Mira. They all knew where he was going and why.

  Four towers remained. Four sources of monsters pouring into the city, feeding the chaos, feeding the necromancer's army. Every day they stayed open was another day the situation got worse.

  Time to start closing them.

  He'd chosen the nearest tower first—about eight miles south of the camp, in what had once been the financial district. Tall buildings, narrow streets, plenty of cover for things that wanted to hide. Not ideal terrain, but the tower needed to fall regardless.

  Nate checked his gear one last time. The Enforcer's Mantle, cleaned of ichor and blood. The Spatial Ring, empty now except for rations and water. No more healing potions. No more safety nets.

  Just him and whatever was waiting.

  He started walking.

  The first few miles were quiet.

  The route took him through residential areas that had already been picked clean—by survivors, by monsters, by time. Empty houses stood with their doors hanging open, their windows shattered, their contents scattered across overgrown lawns. Cars sat where they'd died, rusting slowly in the morning damp.

  No monsters. No movement. Just silence and decay.

  Nate kept his senses sharp anyway. The quiet ones were often the most dangerous.

  Around mile four, the terrain shifted. Residential gave way to commercial—strip malls and office parks, the kind of places that had been busy before the integration. Now they were tombs. Glass storefronts stared out like empty eye sockets. Parking lots stretched wide and barren, their painted lines fading under weeks of neglect.

  He was cutting through an abandoned shopping center when he heard the screams.

  Human screams. Multiple voices. Coming from somewhere to his left, maybe a quarter mile away.

  Nate changed direction and started running.

  The screams led him to a small plaza—a cluster of shops arranged around a central courtyard. A fountain stood in the middle, dry and cracked, its decorative tiles scattered across the ground.

  The scene in the courtyard made his blood run cold.

  A group of survivors—maybe a dozen of them—had been backed against the fountain. They were ragged, starving, armed with nothing but sticks and kitchen knives. Women, mostly. A few children. One old man who could barely stand.

  Surrounding them were raiders.

  Twenty of them, at least. Armed with real weapons—machetes, axes, a few crude spears. They moved with the confidence of predators who'd done this before, spreading out to cut off any escape.

  "Last chance," one of them called out. A woman, tall and lean, with a shaved head and a scar running down her cheek. She held a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, tapping it against her palm. "Come quietly, and maybe we let some of you live. Keep making noise..."

  She gestured with the bat.

  "And we stop being nice."

  Nate didn't announce himself.

  He simply appeared behind the nearest raider and drove his fist through the back of the man's skull.

  The raider dropped without a sound. The one beside him turned, eyes wide, mouth opening to shout a warning. Nate grabbed his face and slammed his head into the pavement. Once. Twice. The skull cracked on the second impact.

  Now they saw him.

  "What the—"

  "Behind us!"

  "Kill him!"

  Three raiders charged, weapons raised. Nate met them without slowing.

  The first swung a machete at his neck. He caught the man's wrist, twisted until the bone snapped, and drove his palm into his nose. The impact sent bone fragments into the brain. Dead before he hit the ground.

  The second came with a spear. Nate stepped inside the thrust, too close for the weapon to matter, and drove an elbow into the man's throat. The windpipe collapsed. The raider staggered back, choking on nothing.

  The third tried to run.

  Nate caught him by the back of the neck and squeezed until the vertebrae cracked.

  Five dead. Maybe eight seconds.

  The scarred woman had stopped smiling.

  She stared at Nate across the courtyard, her barbed-wire bat hanging forgotten at her side. Around her, the remaining raiders were frozen—caught between the instinct to fight and the instinct to flee.

  "Who the fuck are you?" she demanded.

  Nate didn't answer. He walked toward her, steady and unhurried, stepping over the bodies of the men he'd just killed.

  "Stay back!" She raised the bat, her voice cracking. "I'll bash your fucking skull in, I swear to—"

  [Killing Intent].

  He let it loose.

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  The effect was immediate. Raiders stumbled, gasped, dropped to their knees. Weapons clattered to the ground as hands went slack. One man vomited. Another simply collapsed, unconscious before he hit the pavement.

  The scarred woman held on longer than the others. Her face went gray, sweat pouring down her forehead, her whole body shaking. But she didn't fall. Didn't run.

  Willpower. Or maybe just stubbornness.

  Nate stopped in front of her.

  "Drop the bat."

  Her hands were shaking so badly the bat was rattling. But she didn't let go.

  "You think... you think you scare me?" Her voice was barely a whisper. "I've seen worse than you. I've done worse than—"

  Nate grabbed the bat and ripped it from her grip. The barbed wire tore her palms open, drawing blood, but she barely seemed to notice. She was staring at him with something that wasn't quite fear.

  Recognition.

  "You're him," she said. "The one from the western tower. The one who cleared it alone."

  "You've heard of me."

  "Everyone's heard of you. The monster who kills monsters." She laughed—a harsh, broken sound. "We thought you were a story. Something people made up to feel better about dying."

  "I'm not a story."

  "No. You're not." She met his eyes. "So what now? You going to kill me too?"

  Nate looked at her. At the blood on her hands, the fear in her eyes, the defiance that was already crumbling.

  Then he looked at the survivors by the fountain. The women, the children, the old man. They were staring at him with expressions he'd seen before—that mix of terror and hope that meant they didn't know if he was their savior or just a different kind of monster.

  "The people you were trying to take," he said. "What were you going to do with them?"

  The scarred woman's jaw tightened. She didn't answer.

  "I asked you a question."

  "Same thing everyone does," she spat. "Labor. Service. Whatever keeps our group alive."

  "Slavery."

  "Survival. You think we wanted this? Think any of us planned to become—" She stopped, shook her head. "It doesn't matter. You wouldn't understand."

  "You're right. I don't understand." Nate's voice was flat. "I don't understand how someone looks at a group of starving women and children and decides to make their lives worse."

  "Because the alternative is dying! You think morality matters when there's nothing to eat? When the monsters are everywhere and the dead are walking and nobody's coming to save you?" Her voice cracked. "We did what we had to do."

  "No." Nate stepped closer, and she flinched back. "You did what was easy. There's a difference."

  He turned away from her, toward the survivors by the fountain.

  "There's a camp," he said. "About eight miles north of here. They have walls, food, protection. Tell them Nate sent you. They'll take you in."

  The old man spoke first, his voice trembling. "You're... you're letting us go?"

  "I'm telling you where to find safety. What you do with that information is up to you."

  "What about them?" One of the women nodded toward the raiders—most of them still on the ground, some starting to recover, all of them watching Nate with terrified eyes.

  Nate looked at the raiders. At the scarred woman, still standing, still bleeding, still defiant.

  "The ones who can walk can leave. Go back to wherever you came from. Tell your people what happened here." He let a trickle of [Killing Intent] bleed out, just enough to make his point. "And tell them that if I ever find raiders preying on survivors again, I won't be as merciful."

  The scarred woman stared at him. "Merciful? You killed five of my people."

  "Five of your people tried to kill me. The rest of you are still breathing." Nate turned and started walking toward the south. "Don't make me regret that."

  He left them there—the survivors heading north, the raiders scattering in every direction. The scarred woman watched him go, her expression unreadable.

  Maybe she'd learn something from this. Maybe she'd go right back to raiding the moment he was out of sight.

  It wasn't his problem. He had a tower to clear.

  The financial district rose ahead of him like a forest of glass and steel.

  Skyscrapers stretched toward the gray sky, their windows shattered, their facades scarred by the chaos of the integration. Some of them had collapsed entirely, spilling concrete and rebar across the streets below. Others stood intact but empty, monuments to a world that no longer existed.

  And in the center of it all, visible from miles away, the tower.

  It looked different from the one Nate had cleared. That tower had been black stone, seamless and ancient. This one was made of something that looked like bone—pale white ribs curving upward, interlocking into a spire that seemed to twist against the sky. It pulsed with a faint light, like a heartbeat, like something alive.

  [Tower of the Bone Spiral]

  [Status: Open]

  [Warning: Tower deadline exceeded. All restrictions lifted.]

  All restrictions lifted. That explained why the monsters had poured out instead of staying inside.

  Nate picked up his pace, moving through the ruined streets toward the tower. He was maybe half a mile away now, close enough to see the entrance—a massive archway at the base of the spire, carved with symbols that hurt to look at directly.

  Close enough to see what was waiting for him.

  He stopped.

  The tower wasn't empty.

  The area around its base—a plaza that had once been a corporate courtyard, all manicured lawns and decorative fountains—was filled with monsters.

  Hundreds of them.

  They clustered around the entrance like pilgrims at a shrine, packed so tightly that Nate couldn't see the ground beneath them. Scavenger hounds, dozens of them. Ironshell crawlers, more than he could count. Urban stalkers clinging to the walls of surrounding buildings. And larger things—shapes he didn't recognize, creatures that defied easy description.

  [Bone Stalker — Level 14]

  [Bone Stalker — Level 15]

  [Ossuary Crawler — Level 16]

  [Marrow Beast — Level 17]

  [Bone Stalker — Level 13]

  The notifications flickered as his gaze moved across the horde. Different monsters than he'd faced before—bone-white chitin, skeletal frames, bodies that looked like they'd been assembled from the remains of other creatures. The tower's native population, adapted to its environment.

  And at the center of the horde, directly in front of the entrance, something massive.

  It rose above the others like a king among subjects. Thirty feet tall, at least, built from what looked like the fused skeletons of a dozen different creatures. Multiple skulls formed its head, their jaws clicking and grinding in constant motion. Arms—too many arms—ended in claws made of sharpened bone. Its body was a nightmare of fused ribcages and spinal columns, held together by sinew that pulsed with the same light as the tower.

  [Bone Colossus — Level 22]

  Level 22. Two levels above him.

  Nate stared at the horde. At the Colossus. At the tower rising behind them, its entrance blocked by a wall of monsters that would have overwhelmed any army.

  He'd expected to climb the tower. Fight through its floors one by one, clear its challenges, face its Guardian. The same process he'd gone through before.

  But the tower was already open. Its monsters had poured out, gathered here, waiting for... what? Prey? Commands? Something else entirely?

  It didn't matter.

  He didn't need to climb the tower. He just needed to kill what had come out of it.

  Nate looked at the horde—hundreds of monsters, dozens of powerful ones, a boss creature two levels above him—and felt something he hadn't felt in a long time.

  Anticipation.

  This was going to be a fight.

  A real fight.

  He rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck, and started walking toward the horde.

  The monsters saw him coming. The smaller ones shifted nervously, recognizing a predator. The larger ones turned to face him, bone-white bodies tensing for combat.

  The Colossus raised its many arms and roared—a sound like a thousand bones breaking at once.

  Nate smiled.

  "Let's see what you've got."