Chapter 395: The Best Available Outcome.

My eyes moved, and every possible outcome opened at once.

I charged into the infected and it dropped onto its knees. I was already moving. Azure behind me — pink hair, the flash of her shifting weight as she committed.

I jumped to land the God Hand punch and its hand closed on my neck before the punch got anywhere near the skull.

The fingers were cold. Wrong. No strain in the grip, only the sudden absolute fact of it. Ingrid and Azure froze behind me. At the bottom of the stairs the Donman was already coming, over the rail rather than down the steps, his boots hitting the hallway floor in the same second Monica’s did — the sound of both impacts arriving together, one living, one composed.

He landed while the thing crushed me against the tiles. The hand was heavy in a way nothing living is heavy. No grip in it, no strain. Just weight arriving and staying. The paint under my shoulder cracked. Air left me in a single forced sound.

[ Wrong move. ]

I was back on the stairs. Monica came off the last step in real time. The whole sequence folded away behind my eyes.

Not close, then. Never close.

This time I stayed where I stood.

I put the charge into it from where I stood and I kept it coming. White light building in my palms, the air between us tightening. Past the point where its arms stopped working. Until whatever was holding that body upright let go of it and the full weight went flat onto the tiles with a sound that ran the length of the hallway.

The punch landed on the skull as it hit the ground, and I felt every bone in the top of that head give at once — a wet, final collapse under my knuckles, the charge still discharging into what was no longer organised enough to be a threat.

I looked back.

Ingrid, Azure, Monica already clear, turning toward the open side of the hallway.

Sophia and Melissa were caught. A metallic web thrown from the man’s open hand, strung across the bottom of the stairway and set hard — threads bright against the stone, already rigid — and both of them inside it. Sophia’s hand still half-raised. Melissa’s face turned toward me, reading whatever was left to read before the web finished closing the option.

We go. And I leave Melissa and Sophia behind.

[ Acceptable. ]

[ Best available outcome so far. ]

Best.

She put herself at the back of that line because I asked her to read two people for me.

I’m not leaving anybody in this building.

Sophia came off the stairs into the hallway and moved in behind us.

The infected’s blank eyes went across every one of us in turn, unhurried. Head turning slow. Wet sound of air moving through ruined lungs.

Give me another.

[ Analysing. ]

Melissa stepped onto the floor.

The two Donmans came up behind her — Celine’s blonde hair, the man’s set jaw, the easy proximity of people who had already decided how the next minutes would go.

[ There is only one outcome in which all six of you leave. ]

[ It requires you to hold them for six minutes. ]

Show me.

"Let’s move," the man said, in the voice you’d use on children taking too long with their shoes.

The infected started walking and the girls went after it — Ingrid first, then Azure, Monica already ahead as if the route had been hers from the start.

I didn’t.

I took one step back and went into him.

Shoulder into his chest. The two of us over the edge of the stairway together, and the whole drop came at me in pieces. Steel rail. Concrete risers. His shoulder driving into my ribs.

My eyes found the top of the stairs on every third turn. Celine already coming down after us, leaving the girls up there with the giant and nobody at their backs, her boots taking the steps in a controlled fall that was almost flight.

Those stairs were long. We hit the bottom wall hard enough that I felt it in my teeth and in both hips — the impact travelling up through bone, the breath leaving me again, his weight and mine tangled against the painted stone.

His palm came round before either of us had stopped moving.

Iron web came off it at my head.

I turned.

It went into the wall beside my ear with a sharp metallic crack, strands biting into concrete.

He hauled on the line and brought himself in behind the pull.

His fist arrived a half second ahead of the rest of him — hard, precise.

The world narrowed to the point of contact. My vision strobed.

He stood up off me.

My eyes tracked Celine coming down the last of it — blond hair, the half-turn of her face still calm, boots finding each step without hurry.

Time. That fall took real time.

Two minutes. Maybe more.

He put the web into my chest.

It hit like something fired rather than thrown, straight through the sternum and out the other side of my breathing. Air left in a wet rush. Strands locked.

Then he pulled.

Up into the ceiling.

Down into the stairs.

Up again.

Every direction chosen, nothing wasted. My body followed the line. Concrete and steel took the impacts in sequence.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it my eyes found somebody on the rail.

Sliding it. Four floors of it, coming down without touching one step, black against the white of the stairwell — a shape that moved like a decision rather than a body.

Code.

He went past her in a blur and landed behind the Donman without a sound.

The man dropped before he could lift me again.

Blood came down the stairs in a sheet — bright, fast, running over the edges of the steps — and reached my boots and kept going past them in a thin red river.

Then the body moved.

Because Celine’s hit him from above — a hard downward strike that drove the already-falling man into the concrete and left him still.

No.

Not that one.

[ That is the outcome. All six of you walk out of this building. ]

Celine has to live.

Show me another.

[ ]

And I was standing in the hallway again with everything back where it had been.

"Let’s move," the man said, in the voice you’d use on children taking too long with their shoes.

The infected started walking.

I followed.