The seventeenth-floor door opened on a burst of blue-white light.
Jack threw an arm across his face and stepped through into a world made of storm. The tower floor had become a power station the size of a stadium, all steel catwalks, hanging cables, shattered transformer banks, and pools of black water flashing with reflected lightning. There was no ceiling. Above them, clouds churned in a tight, circular sky, low enough to feel close, as if the storm had been trapped here.
The stairwell door stood on a grated platform bolted to one end of the station. Far across the maze of pylons and broken machinery, another door glowed a dull emergency green.
Between the two, something moved through the cables.
Jack felt it before he saw it: not just mass, but charge so dense it made his gravity sense quiver around the edges. The thing threaded through the hanging lines with impossible speed, making every dead bulb in the station flicker at once.
"Spread out, not far," he said. "Metal's going to be a problem."
"Good place for that," Dex muttered.
The first roar came from directly overhead.
A shape uncoiled from the girders and dropped through a web of sparking wires. It was long as a bus and built like a fossilized lightning bolt: a dragon with a rib cage half bare, scales blackened and cracked, wings made of torn hide laced with cable, and a skull whose empty sockets burned white-blue. Each beat of its wings snapped thunder across the station. Electricity crawled through its spine in stuttering veins.
It opened its jaws.
"Down!"
Jack slammed gravity sideways. All four of them were ripped off their feet an instant before a lance of lightning punched through the catwalk where they'd been standing. A support beam burst. The smell of ozone and hot iron hit so hard it could be tasted in the air.
They crashed against a bank of dead control cabinets. The dragon whipped past, hurling itself with magnetic force from one cluster of metal to the next. Its tail sheared through railing behind Dex and showered the platform with sparks.
Lily hit the floor on one knee and thrust both hands outward. A thin gold veil flashed over them just as lesser arcs jumped from nearby conduits. The lightning struck the veil and skipped aside into the grating.
"This won't hold forever," she said.
Marcus answered by pumping a shell into his shotgun and firing at the creature's chest as it banked around a transformer tower. The blessed blast struck home. For a split second gold burned through the dragon's exposed ribs.
Then the current inside it surged, and the wound stitched itself with white fire.
Dex swore and flung two compact holy charges into its path. The explosions met the dragon in mid-turn and rocked its whole body sideways, but instead of falling, it burst apart into a river of crackling light, ran through a set of hanging cables, and re-formed atop a pylon three stories above them.
Jack stared. "It can travel through the grid."
"Great," Dex said. "So can the storm."
The dragon dove again.
This time it came low, sweeping the catwalk with one skeletal wing. Marcus met it head-on, gold packed deep in both arms. He caught the wing-strut with a grunt that sounded torn out of his ribs and actually stopped the thing for half a heartbeat. Jack felt the whole platform bow under the strain.
Then the dragon's chest flashed.
Lightning blew out from under its scales in a pulse that threw Marcus backward, flung Dex into a railing post, and sent Jack skidding through black water that lit up around him in branching blue veins. Pain hit a second later, sharp and total, every muscle clamping at once.
Lily's light cut through it. One hard pulse. Enough to free their bodies from the lock.
The dragon landed on the far catwalk with claws screaming across metal. It lowered its skull and watched them with that dead, white glare, almost thoughtful, as if measuring how much current it would need to stop their hearts.
Jack pushed himself up, smoking at the sleeves. He had fought things harder to kill.. Nothing had ever felt this relentless. The floor itself was the dragon's weapon. Steel, water, wire, storm; everything here wanted to end their lives.
He reached inward for the swordsman.
"I need you."
Only the storm had answered his call.
The dragon lunged. Jack met it with a black-gold gravity slash that carved from shoulder to sternum and blasted scales into the dark. It should have been a crippling hit.
Instead the monster screamed, and drew a whole curtain of lightning from the clouds above. The wound filled with white, burning threads. Bone flashed beneath. It was whole again except for a glowing crack down the center of its chest.
Jack staggered. That strike had cost him.
"Help me," he demanded inwardly, more desperate this time.
The reply came cold, and annoyed.
"Training."
Then nothing.
For one hot second, anger hit Jack harder than fear. They were dying, Elena was still above them, and the only answer he got was that.
The dragon tore up the catwalk between them with both foreclaws.
Jack moved anyway.
He yanked Lily clear as the grating split. Dex rolled under a spray of sparks and slapped a charge against a broken support. Marcus came up from a crouch with blood running from one ear and drove a gold-lit shoulder into the dragon's ribs hard enough to knock its front half over the edge.
"Move!" Marcus roared.
The support Dex had tagged detonated. Half the platform dropped out from under the dragon. It fell through steel and cable, into the flooded machinery below.
For two breaths there was only hissing steam.
The whole lower level lit up.
It exploded out of the water, clothed in a column of blue current so bright it painted the sky. Its ruined wings spread wider. Lightning lashed from one pylon to another, chaining through the room. One strike caught Dex in the side and hurled him spinning into a breaker housing. Another cracked across Lily's shoulder and nearly drove her off the narrow beam she had jumped to.
Jack seized gravity under all three of them at once, anchoring them in place before the next blast could throw them into the dark.
His vision blurred with effort. Fighting everything at once, the weight of the storm against the weight of their bodies.
Hardest yet. By far.
The dragon reared back on the top of a transformer tower, current wreathing its skull like a crown.
Lily pressed a shaking hand to her scorched shoulder and looked at the station around them. "It's feeding off differences in charge," she said fast. "Every time we flare, it knows where to strike."
Dex coughed, pushed himself upright, and bared his teeth. "Then let's give it one target."
Marcus slammed a fist against the beam beneath him. Gold flashed in the metal and held instead of spilling away. "Ground it," he said.
Jack looked across the station.
Steel towers. Hanging wires. Broken transformers full of dead ceramic and copper coils. A whole floor built to move power from one point to another.
Not just a battlefield.
A circuit.
"All right," he said. "We stop chasing it. We tell it where to go."
They ran through.
Jack tore free three fallen support masts with gravity and dragged them upright in a rough triangle across the central floor. The strain made blood leak warm from his nose, but the beams rose, screeching, and locked against higher crossmembers.
Dex bounded from catwalk to catwalk planting compressed holy charges into cracked insulators, and switch boxes, stacking them so tightly their light disappeared.
Lily moved behind them, drawing quick gold lines across steel and water alike, linking tower to tower in narrow threads that did not glow until she touched the next point.
Marcus took the center, dropping to the lowest platform where black water sloshed around his boots, and braced both hands around a hanging cable thick as a wrist.
The dragon watched from above.
Maybe it understood. Maybe it just saw prey gather.
It came.
It fell from the storm like judgment.
Jack thickened gravity above Marcus, trying to slow the dive. The dragon punched through it with sheer violence, scales shedding sparks. Marcus met the impact with a roar and caught both jaws one-handed for an impossible instant while his other hand clamped the live cable to the creature's neck.
Current erupted through him.
Gold burst from Marcus's skin in dense, bright cracks. He held.
"Now!" he shouted through clenched teeth.
Lily's threads ignited. The thin lines she'd laid through the station became a blazing pattern, a web of gold pathways spreading through the steel triangle Jack had raised. The dragon tried to burst back into the lightning and escape through the overhead lines.
Jack felt the change the moment it happened.
Some instinct sharpened under the pressure. He bent the field.
Gravity caught the path, the space.
The bolt that should have shot upward curved, slamming sideways into the first standing mast. From there Lily's gold carried it to the second, then the third, closing the loop. The entire station boomed. Dex triggered his first stack.
Transformer housings detonated in sequence under the dragon, holy pressure collapsing toward the center of the circuit. The monster shrieked as white current and gold fire wrestled inside its ribs.
It was still not enough.
The dragon ripped free of Marcus's grip, tearing trenches through steel. It beat its wings, climbing against the trap with sheer fury, larger now, storm drawn into its frame until its whole skeleton showed through the scales like hot metal. The nearest mast buckled. Lily cried out as one of her gold lines snapped back and scorched her palm.
Dex looked at Jack. Jack looked at the glowing crack still visible in the dragon's chest.
The same place his slash had opened.
"Heart," Lily gasped, seeing it too.
Marcus wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. "Then make one lane."
Jack drew every loose piece of metal he could feel. Railings, plates, shattered conduit, torn cable trays. He flung them outward in a ring, clearing the center. The dragon wheeled for another dive. Dex planted his feet, raised both hands, and began building charges in open air, three, then six, each nested inside the next so tightly they hummed.
He had never held that many at once.
Lily stepped beside him and pressed burning gold into the spinning cluster until the explosions went white at the core.
Marcus ran straight at the oncoming dragon.
He jumped from the edge of a broken platform, caught the lower ridge of its rib cage with both hands, and hauled himself up onto its chest like a man climbing onto a train. The dragon convulsed, trying to shake him loose.
Jack gave him the lane.
Gravity slammed down on the creature from both sides, narrowing its path to one corridor through the open center. Enough to aim it.
"Dex!"
Dex threw the nested charges.
Jack caught them mid-flight with gravity and accelerated them. A collective bombardment straight into the glowing crack in the dragon's chest.
Lily fired a spear of gold after them.
It struck the opening the same instant Marcus drove both fists down with everything he had left.
Jack followed with a full black-gold slash.
For one impossible heartbeat, all four attacks occupied the same point.
Then the dragon came apart from the inside.
Light blasted through every seam in its body. White lightning, gold fire, orange detonation, and black gravity folded inward, crushing the monster's core into a star-sized point. The station went silent.
A moment later the dragon collapsed in a rain of dead scales and burnt wire.
Darkness rolled across the floor as every remaining bulb died.
Jack dropped to one knee. He couldn't hear anything but the thud of his own pulse. Then sound came back in pieces: Lily breathing hard, Dex laughing weakly again because he did that when survival surprised him, Marcus coughing, cooling metal ticking in the dark.
The storm overhead unwound. Clouds thinned. What had looked like a sky was only ceiling after all, now revealed as cracked concrete and hanging rebar miles above.
Lily came first, laying careful light over Marcus's blistered arms, Dex's scorched ribs, Jack's trembling hands. Her power felt different now; denser, steadier, less like flame and more like something forged. Marcus stood straighter when she was done, gold resting deep and hot behind his eyes. Dex flexed his fingers, and three tiny charges bloomed above his knuckles before he let them wink out. Jack reached for a fallen beam to test his strength and nearly hurled it across the room by accident.
The tower had done it again.
Not kindly. Never kindly.
It had sharpened them.
Across the ruined station, the next stairwell door stood open now, waiting under the last drifting threads of smoke.
Jack looked at it for a long second. Beyond that door was the eighteenth floor. Where the Duke, his father waited. Beyond that was the the roof; where his mother was being kept.
No more room left for someone else to save him.
He tightened his grip on the blade-shaped bat and looked back at the others.
"You good?"
Dex rolled one shoulder and winced. "No."
Marcus gave a tired grin. "Close enough."
Lily met Jack's eyes, exhausted but unshaken. "Let's go get Mom."
Together, stronger than they had been an hour ago and more battered than ever before, they crossed the blackened floor and climbed toward the last door before the King.