And still just ahead of Sphinx in this final desperate race to the top.

Jack used his newly attached hand to grab the next indented handhold in the wall and scaled the last vertical section to the overhang.

At the overhang, he gripped the first hand-rung and made to swing out above the drop and get up and around it—when suddenly a large muscular hand appeared from out of nowhere below him and gripped Jack’s foot like a vice and yanked him back down to the ledge.

Jack landed back on the ledge in a clumsy heap and looked up to see Rastor standing over him, back from the dead, his eyes blazing with fury.

50 seconds . . .

Rastor picked Jack up by his lapels, lifting him fully off the ground again and holding him up to his massive face.

The giant general growled, ‘As I fell I managed to clutch a balcony further down that pylon. Like you, I don’t die easily.’

Jack couldn’t believe this.

He was so close!

Over Rastor’s shoulder, he could see Sphinx, climbing upward, about to take on the overhang.

He didn’t have time for this.

‘I see that, General,’ he said. ‘So you’ll just have to die hard. This is my gift to you for killing my mother, you rat bastard son of a bitch.’

And with those words, Jack—still hanging from Rastor’s mighty fists—pulled something from his jacket pocket and jammed it into Rastor’s mouth.

Rastor never expected the move, never saw it coming, and his eyes sprang open in surprise.

Jack took that split-second opening to punch away Rastor’s forearms, forcing the big man to release his grip on Jack’s lapels.

Jack dropped to the ledge, landing like a cat, and he unleashed a withering uppercut with his new titanium fist, a blow that smashed up into Rastor’s chin, causing his teeth to clamp together . . .

. . . and puncture the small red orb that Jack had stuffed into his mouth.

Jack dived away as Rastor’s head exploded, blown apart from within by the blast of the ancient orb—the one Jack had removed from the ceiling of the Endless Tunnel to examine.

Liquid fire splattered outward and Rastor’s whole head just vanished, vaporised in a burst of red, and suddenly the big general’s body was standing there stupidly without a head.

It wobbled unsteadily for a moment before its legs buckled and the headless body fell with a whump to the ledge before rolling off it and falling down the side of the pinnacle.

General Rastor—commander of the royal forces, escapee from Erebus, nihilist who wanted to see the end of the universe—was finally dead.

40 seconds . . .

Jack was moving before Rastor’s headless body landed.