The Wraith Sovereign Returns to Conquer

My ability was channeling and, in the apocalypse, it was the most useless power a person could have.It did not help me fight. It did not help me defend myself. The only thing it ever did was force me to hear the dying screams and bitter resentment of the dead. Three years of that noise had made me the laughingstock of the entire base.Axel Kain let out a contemptuous laugh and pulled Sasha Frost closer by the waist. "A piece of trash who talks to ghosts thinks he can compete with me for a woman? Throw him out and feed him to the dead. Make it clean."The garrison soldiers hauled me up and dragged me out like a puppet. I thrashed and screamed like a cornered animal, but when I looked back, all I saw was Sasha wrinkling her nose in disgust, as though one more second of looking at me would dirty her.The massive alloy gate slammed shut behind me and sealed off that world of pretty lies. Ahead of me stretched nothing but endless ruins and the shrieking dead already closing in.Cold d

Sasha had moved into Axel's villa and become the most envied woman in Base Seven.I did not go looking for her right away. Rafe's death had sent shockwaves through the entire base. Axel was furious and ordered a full lockdown, which suited me fine. I used the time to keep building my strength.I found the base morgue.It was the single most resentment-saturated place in all of Base Seven. Every day, soldiers who had fallen to the hordes and civilians who had been weeded out by the base's brutal survival rules were wheeled in and left there. For someone like me, it was paradise.I bound over a dozen warrior souls, men and women who had died ugly, violent deaths and carried enormous resentment because of it, then fused them all into a brand-new wraith.[Wraith Fusion successful. C-class wraith acquired: Hundred-War Specter. Skills: Coordinated Combat, Weapon Mastery.]This wraith was built from the combined souls of multiple fighters and could split into several units that worked i

I stood on top of the quarantine zone's outer wall and looked down at the sprawling compound below, the perimeter covered in razor wires and high-voltage fencing.Inside it, thousands of zombies wandered aimlessly, filling the air with their flat, hungry groaning.They were raw materials for the base, kept alive to be studied, to test weapons on, and to dispose of garbage, the same way they had tried to dispose of me three days ago."You'll do nicely," I murmured. "You're going to be the opening act."I needed a key, something that could tear the defense apart from the inside. My gaze swept across the entire quarantine zone and settled on the center, where a single massive figure sat caged behind a set of reinforced alloy bars, separated from everything else.It was a mutant Titan, over ten feet tall, wrapped in knotted slabs of muscle, its skin a grotesque blue-black. More than a dozen thick steel sedative rods jutted out from its chest, and even with all of them buried deep, eve

Sasha was in terrible shape.The expensive dress she had been wearing was torn to rags and caked in blood and dirt. A jagged wound ran from the corner of her eye all the way down to her jaw, carving through the face she had always been so proud of.One of her legs was bent at an angle that no leg should bend. It was clearly broken.The Augments had not killed her. They had toyed with her the way a cat toys with a mouse, then dumped her here with her injuries and left her to die on her own.Now a handful of zombies had smashed through the glass doors and were closing in on her, snarling. The look on her face was pure, bottomless despair.The instant a zombie's claws were about to reach her, the Hellfire Titan let out a single low growl. The zombies froze as though an invisible fist had clamped around each of them, and in the same breath they burst into clouds of red mist.Sasha screamed. Then she saw me.She saw me sitting on the shoulder of a monstrous wraith, my expression empt

A crushing wave of force slammed down from the top floor of the villa."Who... dares kill my son!"The voice was old, but it carried absolute authority and a fury that shook the walls.The entire Wraith Dominion trembled under the weight of it.An elderly man descended the staircase. He wore a black high-collared military suit, and his hair had gone silver-white, but his eyes were as sharp as a hawk's. Every step he took exuded the certainty of a man who had never once been told no.His name was Roland Kain, the founder of Base Seven and a genuine S-class ability user, the highest tier there was.Behind him followed six Augments, but these were nothing like the ones I had faced before. There was no madness or instability rolling off them. They moved like precision instruments, silent and controlled, and each of them carried energy reserves that rivaled a full A-class ability user.They were Roland's final card, the Praetorian Guard."Some piece of garbage that should've been de