The ceiling shattered. But instead of debris falling, something else happened. Plants.
Vines erupted from the cracks, thick and green and alive. They spread across the ballroom ceiling like veins, pulsing with unnatural vitality.
Trees began to grow — not slowly, but rapidly, branches extending from the walls, roots tearing through the marble floor. Bushes sprouted between the scattered vampire corpses.
Flowers bloomed in impossible colors. Moss covered the chandeliers within seconds. The entire ballroom was transforming into a jungle.
Jade stared. "What—"
Through the shattered ceiling, he could see it now. The spacecraft. It wasn't like anything from human design — organic and mechanical at once, chitinous plates overlapping like an insect's carapace, lights pulsing beneath the surface like a heartbeat. Massive.
Easily the size of a city block. It floated there, defying physics, its presence warping the space around it. The ship positioned itself directly above Two Fangs.
A beam of light — not white, but something darker, purple-black and writhing — descended from the ship's underbelly, bathing Two Fangs in its glow. Two Fangs looked up at it, then back at Jade and Axe. He spread his hands.
"Wait." His voice carried over the sound of growing vegetation. "We can't leave yet. We can beat them."
A voice responded from the ship. Not through speakers. Not through any technology Jade could identify. The voice just was — everywhere and nowhere, reverberating through the air itself.
And it sounded scared.
"No. Not yet." Deep, layered with harmonics that hurt to hear. But underneath all that power, all that alien wrongness, there was unmistakable fear. "He says so."
Two Fangs stiffened. Even through the mask, the body language shifted — tension, frustration, something close to desperation.
"They're right here," he argued, gesturing at Jade and Axe. "We may never get another shot like this. We can—"
"HE. SAYS. SO." The ship's lights pulsed in agitation. "We retreat. Now."
The plants grew faster, thicker. Trees fully formed, canopies spreading across what used to be a ballroom ceiling. The floor disappeared beneath undergrowth — ferns, moss, strange luminescent flowers.
Axe's Herbert Hotel was being overwritten. Roots cracked through the mirrors. The walls were disappearing behind green.
Jade grabbed Axe's arm and pulled him toward where the exit should have been. The jungle was too thick. He couldn't find it.
The beam of dark light intensified around Two Fangs, lifting him from the ground.
"This isn't over," he called down to them as he rose. "He'll want you eventually. All of you."
"Enough." The scared voice had gone quiet again — almost gentle, which was worse. "Extraction complete in three seconds."
The ship's lights flared impossibly bright.
And then it moved. Not flew. Not accelerated. It just was somewhere else — one moment hovering above them, the next a distant speck, then gone completely.
The shockwave hit a second later.
Sound first — a CRACK like reality splitting open. Then the pressure wave, a wall of displaced air that knocked Jade and Axe flat. The jungle whipped violently, trees bending nearly horizontal, leaves and debris tearing through the air.
The entire Herbert Hotel shuddered. Then silence. The plants stopped growing. The jungle was still, except for settling leaves and the slow creak of stressed branches.
Jade pushed himself up, ears ringing, suit systems flickering from the electromagnetic pulse of whatever had just left.
Axe sat up beside him, staring at the empty sky above the ruined ceiling. Neither of them spoke for a moment.
"Jade." Axe's voice came out quieter than usual. "Who's 'he'?"
Jade didn't answer. He was still looking at the space where the ship had been — the nothing it left behind. Something that large, that powerful, running from a name it wouldn't even say out loud. He wasn't sure he wanted to know.
"Can we please leave now?"
Jade nodded. "Yeah. Let's go."
Axe slammed his axe into the ground. The jungle dissolved. They were back in the burning stairwell of The Stack, sirens wailing, the building groaning as it collapsed around them.
At least it was just a building.