I reached back.
Not toward the entity. Through it.
Through the connection it had established when it sent me back in time. Through the channel it had opened without fully understanding. Through ten thousand years of accumulated death and resurrection.
And I found him.
------------------------------
The first Zombie King was waiting for me.
He existed in a space between timelines—a pocket of consciousness carved out of the entity's own power and turned against it. A final defiance that had outlasted civilizations.
You finally understand, he said.
He looked like me. Or I looked like him. The distinction had long since ceased to matter.
You are what I became, he continued. What I chose to become, rather than surrender to the thing in the pit. I split my soul across time. Shattered my consciousness into a thousand fragments. And each time I died, I was reborn—a little different, a little stronger, a little closer to breaking free.
"Ten thousand years," I said. "Ten thousand years of dying."
Yes. But also ten thousand years of learning. Of growing. Of understanding the entity's weaknesses. His form solidified slightly. You have done well, Wei. Better than any of my previous iterations. You built the army faster. Claimed the Elites earlier. And most importantly—you kept your humanity longer.
"I'm not sure that's true anymore."
You still love. You still protect. You still fight for others, not just yourself. The first Zombie King smiled—a familiar expression on a familiar face. That is what makes you different. That is what the entity cannot control. Love is the one thing its power cannot corrupt.
The battle raged around us—frozen in the instant between heartbeats.
Take my power, the first Zombie King said. All of it. Everything I've gathered across a hundred lifetimes. It won't be enough to destroy the entity—nothing in this world has that power. But it will be enough to push it back. To buy time. To prepare for the true confrontation.
"The true confrontation?"
When the entity fully manifests, there will be one chance. One moment when it is vulnerable. You'll know it when you see it. He began to fade. But be warned: my power comes with my memories. Everything I experienced. Every death. Every failure. Every time I watched the world burn.
"I can handle it."
Can you? His eyes—my eyes—held ten thousand years of sorrow. We'll see.
He reached out.
Touched my forehead.
------------------------------
The memories hit like a tidal wave.
I was a hunter in a tribe that had no name, finding a pit in the mountains and feeling something call to me.
I was a priest in a civilization lost to history, offering sacrifices to the god in the darkness and receiving dark gifts in return.
I was a king who discovered that the dead obeyed him, who built an empire on the backs of corpses, who fought the entity for the first time and lost.
I was a thousand different people across a thousand different ages, each one touched by the entity's influence, each one eventually realizing the truth, each one dying in a desperate attempt to break free.
And I was all of them.
Every death. Every failure. Every moment of hope crushed by ancient, inevitable power.
It should have broken me.
It almost did.
But there was something else in the memories too. Something the first Zombie King hadn't mentioned.
Love.
A woman in the first age who had believed in me even when I was becoming a monster.
A friend in the middle centuries who had fought beside me until the very end.
A family in a more recent loop who had died protecting me from the entity's servants.
I wasn't alone.
I had never been alone.
And neither was I now.
------------------------------
I opened my eyes.
Power flooded through me—not just the familiar chill of necromancy, but something deeper. Something that resonated with every dead thing within miles. Something that had been building for ten thousand years and was finally complete.
NO, the entity roared. THIS WAS NOT PERMITTED. THIS WAS NOT THE PLAN.
"Your plan failed."
I raised my hand.
The world answered.
------------------------------
Every zombie in my army—all eight thousand of them—lit up with power.
Not just control. Connection. A network of death that extended through me, through them, through the fabric of reality itself. I could feel each one as clearly as I felt my own heartbeat. Could direct them with the precision of thought.
But that wasn't all.
The entity's servants—the corrupted humans and animals that had been immune to my control—began to shake.
The armor of entity-power that protected them cracked.
You cannot, the entity said, but there was uncertainty now. They are MINE.
"They're dead."
I pulled.
------------------------------
Claiming the entity's servants was nothing like claiming regular zombies.
It was war.
Every one of them contained a fragment of the entity's consciousness—a piece of its ancient will that fought back with desperate fury. But I had something it didn't.
I had ten thousand years of practice.
The first servant—the one with empty eyes—collapsed as my power ripped through its defenses. Then the second. The third.
STOP, the entity commanded. I FORBID THIS.
"You don't control me anymore."
More servants fell. Twenty. Fifty. A hundred.
The entity's presence recoiled from the facility—pulling back toward the pit, toward its true body, toward whatever realm it had come from.
THIS IS NOT OVER, it screamed. I WILL RETURN. I WILL CLAIM WHAT IS MINE. THE CYCLE HAS NEVER BEEN BROKEN—NOT ONCE IN ALL THE AGES OF THIS WORLD.
"Watch me."
I pushed harder.
And for the first time in ten thousand years, the entity retreated.
------------------------------
The silence that followed was deafening.
Drake's fire sputtered out. Sarah materialized fully, her invisibility dropping with exhaustion. Vanguard stood frozen, staring at me with something that might have been awe.
Or fear.
"Wei?" Drake's voice was hoarse. "What... what did you do?"
"I remembered."
I looked at my hands. They were glowing—not with amber light like before, but with something darker. Something that pulsed with the accumulated power of a hundred lifetimes.
Different, Ghost sent, her consciousness brushing against mine. Stronger. But also... older.
"I know."
Morgan limped toward me, supported by two of his soldiers.
"The entity withdrew. I've never seen it do that before." He stared at the pit, where the massive form had sunk back into darkness. "What happened?"
"I found the first Zombie King." I turned to face him. "I found the part of me that's been fighting this thing since the beginning. And I took everything he had to give."
"That's... that's not possible."
"A lot of things are impossible." I looked at my army—eight thousand zombies standing in perfect, silent formation. The entity's former servants now knelt among them, their empty eyes filled with my will instead. "I've learned to stop being surprised."
------------------------------
We regrouped in what remained of the briefing room.
Half the facility was destroyed. Walls had collapsed. Equipment had been crushed. Bodies—human and otherwise—littered the corridors.
But we had won.
For now, the first Zombie King's voice whispered in my memory. The entity retreated because you surprised it. Because it didn't expect you to access my power so quickly. But it will adapt. It always adapts.
"How long do we have?" I asked aloud.
Morgan understood my question.
"Before it tries again? Days. Maybe hours." He pulled up data on a surviving terminal. "Its physical form is still manifesting. The process can't be stopped. In approximately five days, it will complete its transition into our reality."
"And then?"
"Then it won't need a vessel anymore. It will simply... take."
I nodded slowly.
Five days.
Five days to build an army capable of fighting an elder god.
Five days to prepare for a confrontation that the first Zombie King had failed a hundred times.
"It's not enough time," Drake said quietly.
"It never is." I turned to the door. "But it's what we have. And I'm done wasting it."
------------------------------
The entity's voice echoed from the pit as we prepared to leave.
You think you've won, it said. You think you've changed the pattern. But you haven't. You can't. Every loop, every lifetime, every version of you has failed. And so will this one.
I stopped at the threshold.
"Maybe. But there's something different about this time."
And what is that?
I thought about Min-Tong, waiting at the compound. About Maya and her silver eyes. About Drake and Sarah and Vanguard and all the others who had chosen to follow me into hell.
"This time, I'm not alone."
I walked out into the corrupted dawn.
Behind me, the entity's laughter followed—cold and ancient and terribly patient.
But underneath that laughter, I heard something else.
Uncertainty.
Good, I thought. Let it fear. Let it doubt. Let it wonder what the Zombie King will do next.
Because I wasn't just fighting for survival anymore.
I was fighting to end this.
Forever.