A week ago, the most important thing in Mav’s life had been her pace.

  She’d been out on her usual morning run, counting breath and stride, cataloging the familiar aches in her knees and calves, deciding whether she’d pushed hard enough to justify an extra mile. That had been the scale of her worries then, physical, contained, solvable.

  Weeks later, game time, she sat near a low campfire behind a barricaded school, hands wrapped around a tin cup that no longer smelled like coffee, listening to the distant groans of the dead drift across the dark. She hadn’t chosen this place. She hadn’t chosen this world. But here she was.

  The first stretch of training had been about cohesion, learning how not to get someone killed by accident. Movement drills. Callouts. How to hold a line, when to fall back, when to trust that someone else had your blind spot covered. Every member of the guild she'd connected too worked with her one on one at some point, grinding fundamentals into her until they stopped feeling like instructions and started feeling like instinct.

  After that came the funnels. Controlled lanes with managed pressure. Zombies redirected, slowed, shaped, never safe, but predictable enough to push her without breaking her. They pressed her again and again, not for speed or efficiency, but for consistency, this was the guilds style in its truest form. Umbra watched repetition more than effort.

  The weapon came last. A hand assembled, single-shot implement that felt more like a placeholder than a solution, crude, slow, firing tiny steel bearings that rattled softly when she moved. It wasn’t impressive, and it certainly wasn’t something she would have chosen.

  Jag took it from her once, turned it over in his hands, then gave a small shake of his head before passing it back with the comment that it would do as a decent stand in. Mav didn’t know why the actual weapon had locked to her profile, only that it had, and that somewhere along the way, the system had decided to see what she would do with that decision

  ~ ~ ~

  On the ninth morning, Mavis woke to a quiet that felt deliberate. The campfire was cold, the perimeter already thinned, most of the team gone before she’d fully come to herself. Gear was missing from racks. Footprints led away from the school in practiced lines. Jag was waiting near the gate, weapon strapped to his chest rig, Bear a silent presence beside him, already squared away.

  “Grab your kit,” Jag said. That was it. No briefing, no explanation. He nodded once toward Bear, then turned and started walking. As she fell in behind them, she caught Kamehameha’s eye from across the yard. He didn’t smile. He didn’t speak. He just inclined his head once, like this had been decided long before she’d woken up.

  They moved past the school grounds and out toward the broken edge of the territory, where the streets thinned and the buildings sagged into long neglect. Mav’s unease grew with every block. This wasn’t one of the controlled lanes. No barricades, markers or clean exits. The rhythm was wrong. She adjusted her grip on the single shot implement held awkwardly across her chest, suddenly very aware of how slow it felt, how little room for error it allowed. This wasn’t another drill. This was a question.

  Jag slowed without turning. “We’ll be with you the whole time,” he said. “Just far enough back to make it real.”

  Bear grunted agreement. “You screw up, you’ll know it.” He pointed at the little drone hovering just over Mav’s shoulder and added, “no help from you.” A single finger salute peeked into his HUD but the drone settled down on his shoulder, somehow making the tiny bump feel like a personal assault.

  They stopped at the edge of a wide intersection choked with debris and old vehicles. Something moved on the far side, too fast and very purposeful. The figure broke into the open, gait aggressive. It didn’t shamble, it hunted. Mav felt her breath hitch as it turned its head, locking onto them with a speed she hadn’t seen in any of the funnels.

  Jag glanced at her then, eyes calm, unreadable. “Your lead,” he said.

  Mav let the presence of Jag and TheBear fade, pushing their weight and their silence to the back of her mind. If she thought about them too much, she’d start listening for reassurance and this didn’t feel like the kind of day where reassurance was on offer.

  She scanned the intersection instead, eyes tracking lines and angles the way she’d been taught. Broken asphalt. A delivery truck jackknifed against a light pole. A partial collapse along the right hand building where an entire section of exterior wall had sloughed off into the street.

  ‘Elevation.’ She thought and moved without asking, boots crunching softly as she climbed the rubble pile and hauled herself up onto the fallen slab. It gave her a clean line down the street and just enough height to change the math. She crouched, tested her balance, then settled in, breathing slow and deliberate. The world narrowed. Everything that wasn’t in front of her stopped mattering.

  The zombie came into full view. It was female, judging by the frame and the remnants of clothing, a torn cardigan, jeans stiff with dried black blood. Fresh but not too fresh. The wound that had killed her yawned open along her lower ribs, a jagged puncture that had split fabric and flesh alike, the surrounding tissue darkened and slick. Whatever had put her down had done it fast.

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  It moved rapidly. Not fast enough to blur, not slow enough to predict. Its gait stuttered and surged, weight shifting in abrupt, violent adjustments, head snapping side to side as if pulled by invisible strings. Every few steps the zombie paused, teeth gnashing, jaw working around a soundless snarl, then lurched forward again with renewed intent. The eyes, flat, glossy, and utterly feral locked onto movement and refused to let go.

  Mav’s stomach tightened. ‘Okay,’ she thought, forcing the word into place. ‘Okay. That’s… different.’

  She eased the single shot implement up, feeling its awkward balance settle into her hands. One round. One chance before she’d have to cycle it again. ‘A pea shooter and a knife,’ she thought grimly. ‘Great planning, everyone.’ Her palms were slick inside her gloves now, heart thudding hard enough that she could feel it in her throat.

  She lined up the shot anyway. Jag didn’t speak. TheBear didn’t shift. The silence behind her stretched, heavy and absolute. Mav exhaled, found the zombie through the crude sights, waited for the zombie’s head to steady, just for a fraction of a second and squeezed the trigger.

  The zombie lurched sideways at the last instant, movement sharp and ugly. The shot popped lightly, the steel bearing snapping past her target and shattering a window behind it.

  Miss. The zombie froze, head snapping toward the shattered window where the steel bearing had struck. It stood there for half a second, listening, then its gaze tracked backward, slow and deliberate, following the invisible line of the shot until it found Mav crouched on the broken wall.

  It stared straight at her. Then it moved. The thing dropped low, body folding into a crouching run that was almost simian in its efficiency. It didn’t charge in a straight line. It cut angles, leaping over a fallen mailbox, planting one hand on the hood of an abandoned sedan to vault the rest of the way through. Each movement was sharp and economical, driven by intent rather than hunger. The distance between them collapsed in ugly, uneven bursts.

  Mav’s breath hitched. She worked the lever by reflex, clack and brought the sights back up and fired. The small steel projectile soared past the zombie’s head, close enough that she saw wild hair flutter.

  “Shit!” She mumbled, ratcheting the lever and fired again. This one skimmed its shoulder, bouncing off the cardigan without slowing down. Working the lever she loaded another ball bearing and fired from instinct, letting the weeks of training guide her hands.

  It missed by inches as the zombie juked sideways mid-stride, momentum never breaking. Mav’s chest tightened, panic threatening to override training as the weapon felt impossibly slow in her hands, every motion suddenly too big, too loud.

  Behind her, she heard movement. Jag and Bear exchanged a quick, wordless look. Concern flashed across Bear’s face as both men brought their assault rifles up in practiced unison, muzzles tracking the oncoming threat. Close quarters now, no more distance. No more time.

  The zombie was almost at the base of the wall. Mav dragged the barrel down, hands shaking now, and racked the lever again. Her vision tunneled, the world collapsing inward and focusing all at once. All that was left for her to sight into was the single point of white, the zombie’s eye, milked over and feral, locked on her with an intelligence that made her skin crawl.

  Time stretched thin, elastic, every heartbeat suddenly distinct. She was aware of everything at once: the grit under her boots, the weight of the weapon in her hands, the way the zombie’s muscles coiled as it gathered itself for the leap.

  Behind Mav, TheBear’s rifle snapped up fully, finger tightening on the trigger, tracking the zombie as it gathered itself. Jag held his hand shot out in a sharp, instinctive signal, watching Mav carefully. Bear held his shot as she squeezed the trigger.

  The ball bearing left the barrel in perfect silence, the moment unfolding with surreal clarity. She watched it spin, watched it cross the shrinking gap, watched it slip cleanly through the cloudy orb of the zombie’s eye. There was no resistance. No hesitation,. just a neat puncture and then violence beneath the surface, orb breached, tissue torn, something vital lacerated deep inside the skull.

  The zombie screamed. Not pain, in rage. It staggered, momentum hitching for a fraction of a second, then it surged forward anyway, body hurling itself into the leap, fingers clawing for the edge of the wall.

  Jag’s hand snapped down and the other man didn’t hesitate. Bear’s rifle coughed, the sound caught by the silencer. The round tore into the zombie’s skull just as it launched itself upward, snapping bone and spraying dark gore, but momentum didn’t care about dead things. The body arced towards Mavis, head lolling and starting to tilt to the side.

  Mav scrambled backward, boots slipping on broken stone as she fell hard onto her backside. The zombie arced over the edge of the wall and slammed into her legs with crushing force, the weight driving the breath from her lungs. Rotting flesh and clothes fragments tangled as it collapsed fully, lifeless now, its ruined head lolling against her as cold blood poured down her thighs and soaked into the fabric of her pants.

  Pinned beneath the dead weight, Mav stared up at the washed-out sky, breath coming in short, uneven pulls. She shoved uselessly at the corpse, but her legs refused to answer, sensation distant and unreal. A quiet, humorless laugh slipped out of her before she could stop it.

  “Yep,” she murmured to no one at all. “That tracks.”

  A week. One goddamn week. She turned her head just enough to see the lifeless thing that had almost killed her, then the men who’d pulled her free, and finally the broken world stretching out beyond them.

  Who the fuck thought designing a place like this was a good idea?

  Eclipse Umbra begins Saturday, 2/28 at 8:00 a.m., with 25 chapters available immediately and daily releases after that.