The man with the chain came at Michael and Michael got his axe up in time to catch the first swing but the impact shuddered all the way up his arms and knocked him back a step and the second swing came before he could reset and caught him across the left shoulder and he went into the shelving unit behind him hard enough that the whole thing rocked.

Two of the bat men went for Sera and that was a mistake because Sera had been a kickboxer for six years and the first one found that out very quickly, she put him down in three strikes that the first guy couldn’t follow up with.

She was brutal and seemed like a demon as she stepped into the second guy before he had finished processing what happened to his partner.

But there were five of them and four of Michael’s group and the leader hadn’t moved yet, just stood back and watched with his hand on the handgun grip and his eyes moving across the room.

Shin had her axe up facing the fifth man who was circling her with a bat and looking uncertain because his attempt at intimidating her had failed instead she was even trying to fight him back.

Maya was against the cold storage door with her table leg raised and her eyes on the leader and Michael could see her doing the calculation of whether to move and deciding correctly that moving toward the man with the gun was not the play.

The chain man came at Michael again.

He was good with it which showed he had practiced with it a bit, using the length to control the distance and the weight to make every swing cost something even when his opponent had managed to block it.

Michael’s left arm was going numb from the shoulder hit and his grip on the axe was compromised and the second and third exchanges went badly enough that he ended up on one knee with the chain wrapped around the axe handle and the man pulling it and his options narrowing fast. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

The leader walked forward slowly and crouched down to Michael’s eye level with the handgun now in his hand, he didn’t point it at him rather he just held it loosely.

"Here’s what’s going to happen," he said quietly. "Your girls stay with us. You and whatever’s wrong with your shoulder can go."

Michael looked at him.

"Or," the leader said, "you don’t go and we have a different conversation."

Michael looked at the chain wrapped around his axe. At Sera who had put both bat men down but the chain man had his weight on the axe and pulling it free was going to take a second he didn’t have. At Shin who was holding her ground but the fifth man had gotten her against the shelving and her axe swing radius was compromised. At Maya who was still against the cold storage door watching the leader with an expression that was frightened and furious in equal measure.

At the two women at the back of the group who were looking at the floor.

He opened the shop.

He was halfway through selecting a purchase when the pulse exploded.

The tracker in his vision lit up like someone had thrown a switch, signatures appearing at the edge of the range and moving toward the warehouse in a mass that had no individual shape, just a density that kept growing as he watched it, coming from the southeast where the cluster he’d been tracking for two days had been sitting stationary and was now, for reasons he didn’t have time to figure out, moving.

Moving fast.

Moving toward them.

The building’s north entrance rattled.

Then the south entrance rattled.

Then something hit the loading bay door from outside with enough force that the whole structure shuddered and the sound that followed was not one Rotter, not seven Rotters at a building entrance, it was the sound of a number of things that made individual counting irrelevant, a continuous pressure of sound and impact that rolled through the warehouse walls like weather.

Everyone in the room stopped.

The leader straightened up slowly and looked at the north entrance and the easy relaxed expression was gone and something underneath it had come to the surface that looked considerably more like what it actually was.

Michael got to his feet.

He looked at the leader and the leader looked at him back. The chain man had let go of the axe.

Outside the warehouse the world had gotten very loud very fast and the pulse was showing him something that made every other problem in the room feel like it had just changed category.

"That’s a horde," Michael said. Not to anyone in particular. Just out loud because it needed saying.

The leader looked at the walls. At the shuttered windows. At the loading bay door that was shuddering on its frame with the continuous pressure of something outside that had no intention of stopping.

"How many," the leader said. His voice had lost the easy quality entirely.

Michael looked at the pulse.

"All of them," he said.

---

The loading bay door shuddered again and this time something gave in the frame, a sound like metal fatigue making a final complaint, and a thin line of grey light appeared at the bottom where the seal had warped under the pressure of however many bodies were pressing against it from outside.

Nobody in the warehouse was looking at each other anymore. Everyone was looking at the doors.

The leader was the first one to move. He took three steps toward the north entrance and looked at it and looked back at his group and something passed across his face that was the specific expression of a man whose plan had just become irrelevant and who hadn’t come up with a new one yet.

Michael was already pulling up the Blueprint Interface.

The warehouse was not his Anchor Point. He couldn’t build here the way he could at the apartment, no instant construction, no base tier upgrades, none of the infrastructure that had taken him thirty days to establish. What he could do was use the shop and what he had on him and the layout of a building that Maya had read better than anyone in the room.

He looked at Maya who was already looking at him.

"The second floor," she said. "Loading warehouses this size always have a supervisor mezzanine level above the storage floor. One access staircase, metal, internal. If we get up there and pull the staircase we control the only access point."

"Can the mezzanine hold everyone?"

She looked at the ceiling, reading the structural lines. "Yes."

Michael looked at the leader who also looked at him in return. The handgun was still in his hand but it was pointed at the floor now and the arithmetic on his face had changed considerably in the last thirty seconds.

"We can stand here," Michael said, "or we can move. Your call."