Graves had seen a lot of things since the integration.

  He'd seen the towers appear, black spires punching through reality like God's own middle fingers. He'd seen the monsters pour out when the deadlines hit—scavenger hounds and crawlers and things that didn't have names yet. He'd seen people die in ways he hadn't imagined possible.

  But he'd never seen anything like this.

  "Holy shit," Reyes whispered beside him. "Holy fucking shit."

  They were crouched on the roof of an old train car, maybe two hundred yards from the Tower of the Iron Rot. Far enough to stay hidden. Close enough to watch.

  Close enough to see the massacre.

  The man in the black coat moved through the horde like a force of nature.

  Rust Stalkers lunged at him—metal bodies screeching, claws extended—and he simply destroyed them. One punch, and they flew apart. Pieces of corroded iron scattered across the rail yard like shrapnel. The creatures didn't even slow him down.

  "That's him," Graves said. His voice was steadier than he felt. "That's the one from the western tower. The one who scattered my crew."

  "The one who almost made you piss yourself, you mean."

  Graves shot Reyes a look, but he couldn't argue. Two months ago, he'd led thirty raiders against a survivor camp. Easy pickings, he'd thought. Desperate people with nothing to fight back with.

  Then he had appeared.

  Graves still remembered the feeling—that wave of pressure that had hit him like a physical force. His body had stopped working. His mind had screamed at him to run, to flee, to get as far away as possible from whatever the fuck was looking at him.

  He'd pushed through it. Barely. Promised to come back with more men, more weapons, more everything.

  He never went back. Instead, he'd gone looking for someone stronger. Someone who could protect him from things like that.

  He'd found the Pale Lady.

  The man in the black coat reached the Iron Crawlers.

  These were tougher than the stalkers—bigger, more heavily armored, their bodies made of layered metal plates that should have been nearly impenetrable. Graves had watched one of them shrug off a truck hitting it at full speed.

  The man punched through its chest like it was made of paper.

  "That's not possible," Reyes said. "That's not fucking possible. Those things are like tanks."

  Graves didn't respond. He was too busy watching.

  The man's fist came out the other side of the crawler, dripping with whatever fluid passed for blood in the metal creatures. He pulled his arm free, grabbed another crawler by its head, and twisted. The metal shrieked as it bent, then tore.

  Two more crawlers lunged at him from behind. He spun, caught one by the claw, and used it as a weapon against the other. Both collapsed in a heap of twisted metal and sparking joints.

  He wasn't even breathing hard.

  "We need to go," Reyes said. "We need to go right fucking now."

  "We have orders. Watch and report."

  "Watch what? Him killing everything in that tower? Because that's what's happening, Graves. He's going to kill every single monster down there, and then what? What happens when he decides to come after us?"

  Graves didn't answer. He was asking himself the same question.

  The Pale Lady had sent them to observe. Keep an eye on the tower clearer, she'd said. Track his movements. Report back on his capabilities.

  His capabilities. Like she needed a report to know what they were looking at.

  A monster. That's what he was. A monster in human skin, walking through an army of metal creatures like they were nothing more than obstacles to be removed.

  The Corroded Beasts attacked next.

  There were a dozen of them—massive things, built like gorillas, their bodies covered in rusted armor that had fused with their flesh. They were the heaviest hitters in the Iron Rot's arsenal, the creatures that had torn apart survivor groups and raider parties alike.

  The man met them head-on.

  He ducked under the first beast's swing and drove his fist into its knee. The joint exploded—metal and flesh and something darker spraying outward. The beast toppled, and he was already moving, already hitting the next one.

  Graves watched him fight and tried to understand what he was seeing.

  It wasn't just strength, though there was plenty of that. It wasn't just speed, though he moved faster than anything human had a right to move. It was... efficiency. Every motion served a purpose. Every strike landed exactly where it needed to. There was no wasted movement, no hesitation, no uncertainty.

  This wasn't a man fighting for his life. This was a predator culling prey.

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  "He's enjoying it," Graves realized.

  "What?"

  "Look at him. Look at his face."

  Reyes squinted through the binoculars they'd scavenged. His face went pale.

  "He's smiling," Reyes whispered. "The crazy bastard is actually smiling."

  The last of the Corroded Beasts fell.

  Its body crashed to the ground, twitching, sparking, already starting to dissolve. The man stood over it, covered in the fluids of a dozen metal creatures, his black coat somehow still intact despite everything.

  He looked toward the center of the rail yard.

  Toward the boss.

  The Iron Titan was the biggest thing Graves had ever seen.

  It had emerged from somewhere deep in the tower—forty feet of fused metal and corroded machinery, its body assembled from the remains of train cars and industrial equipment. Pistons served as muscles. Smokestacks jutted from its back like spines. Its head was a twisted mass of gears and cables, with eyes that glowed furnace-orange.

  [Iron Titan — Level 24]

  Level 24. Two levels higher than anything Graves had heard of. The Pale Lady had warned them about it—told them to stay far away, to observe from a distance, to never engage.

  The man in the black coat walked straight toward it.

  "He's insane," Reyes said. "He's actually insane. That thing will crush him."

  "Maybe," Graves said. But he wasn't sure anymore.

  The Titan moved first.

  Its arm—a massive piston-driven limb that had probably been part of a crane in a previous life—swung toward the man with enough force to flatten a building. The impact crater alone would have killed a normal person.

  The man dodged.

  Not barely. Not desperately. He just... stepped aside, letting the arm pass within inches of his body, and then he was inside the Titan's reach.

  His fist hit the Titan's leg.

  The metal crumpled. Graves didn't understand how—that was industrial steel, reinforced and fused by whatever power the tower had used to create the thing. It should have been impenetrable.

  The man hit it again. And again. Each blow landed in the same spot, driving deeper, tearing through metal that should have been impossible to damage.

  The Titan staggered.

  The fight lasted less than five minutes.

  Five minutes of the Titan swinging and missing, of the man dodging and striking, of metal screaming as it was torn apart piece by piece. The man climbed the Titan's body like he was scaling a cliff, finding handholds in the twisted machinery, pulling himself higher even as the creature thrashed.

  He reached the head.

  His fists rose and fell, punching through the Titan's skull, through the gears and cables and whatever passed for a brain in the thing. Orange light flickered and died. The furnace eyes went dark.

  The Iron Titan collapsed.

  The impact shook the ground hard enough that Graves felt it two hundred yards away. Dust and debris rose in a cloud, obscuring the rail yard for a long moment.

  When it cleared, the man was standing on the Titan's corpse.

  Alone.

  Victorious.

  "We need to report this," Graves said. His voice sounded hollow, even to himself. "The Lady needs to know."

  "Know what? That we're all going to die?" Reyes laughed—a thin, hysterical sound. "She sent us to watch a man fight a tower's worth of monsters. He won. What the hell is she going to do about that?"

  "That's not our problem. Our job is to report. Let her figure out the rest."

  Graves started climbing down from the train car, careful to keep low, to stay out of sight. The man in the black coat was entering the tower now, disappearing through the entrance. Probably looking for whatever reward waited inside.

  Let him have it. Graves wanted nothing to do with that tower, or the man, or any of this.

  He just wanted to survive.

  The journey back took most of the day.

  The Pale Lady's base was in the eastern part of the city—an old meatpacking plant that she'd converted into a fortress. Corpse guards patrolled the perimeter, their dead eyes watching everything and nothing. Living raiders manned the walls, but everyone knew who really controlled this place.

  The dead. And the woman who commanded them.

  Graves and Reyes were escorted through the outer defenses, past rows of shambling corpses standing at attention, into the main building. The smell of death was everywhere here—sweet and rotten, underlaid with something chemical, something wrong.

  The Pale Lady received them in what had once been the plant's main processing floor.

  She was young—younger than Graves had expected when he'd first met her. Mid-twenties, maybe, with skin so pale it was almost translucent and hair so dark it seemed to drink the light. She sat on a chair made of fused bones—human bones, Graves knew, though he tried not to think about it—surrounded by corpses that watched with empty eyes.

  "Report," she said. Her voice was calm. It was always calm.

  Graves told her everything. The tower, the horde, the man in the black coat. The way he'd torn through Rust Stalkers and Iron Crawlers and Corroded Beasts like they were nothing. The way he'd killed an Iron Titan in under five minutes.

  When he finished, the Pale Lady smiled.

  "Good," she said. "This is good."

  Graves blinked. "Good? My Lady, he's—"

  "A monster. Yes. I'm aware." She stood, moving with that unnatural stillness that always made Graves's skin crawl. "I met him, you know. At the hospital. He fought through my guards, killed dozens of my soldiers. I let him go."

  "You... let him go?"

  "I needed him alive. Needed him doing exactly what he's doing now." She walked to the window—or what had been a window, now just a hole in the wall looking out over the corpse-filled courtyard. "There are six towers in this city. I cleared one. He cleared one. Four remained."

  "And he's clearing them," Reyes said. His voice was barely a whisper. "He just cleared another one. Three left."

  "Yes. Three left." The Pale Lady turned back to them, and her smile widened. "Do you understand what happens when all six towers are cleared?"

  Graves shook his head.

  "A portal opens. A doorway to other worlds—worlds that have been part of the System for millennia. Worlds with resources, with power, with armies that make anything on Earth look like children playing with sticks." She spread her arms, gesturing at the corpses around her. "My army is growing. Every day, more bodies. More soldiers. But it's not enough. It will never be enough—not if we stay here."

  "So you're going to... leave?" Graves asked. "Through the portal?"

  "I'm going to conquer. Other worlds. Other civilizations. With an army that grows with every battle, that turns every casualty into a new recruit." Her eyes glittered with something that might have been madness or might have been vision. "But first, the portal must open. And for that, I need the towers cleared."

  "But he's too strong. If he comes for you—"

  "He will come for me. Eventually. When the towers are cleared and the portal is open and my army is complete." The Pale Lady laughed—a soft, musical sound that was somehow more terrifying than anything Graves had heard today. "Let him come. By then, it won't matter. By then, I'll have what I need."

  She dismissed them with a wave.

  Graves left the meatpacking plant with Reyes at his side, neither of them speaking. The corpse guards watched them go with dead eyes.

  Behind them, the Pale Lady returned to her throne of bones.

  Everything was going according to plan.