Jack could hardly believe what he was seeing.

He’d outrun sliding stones, spiked iron balls, even flaming boulders before.

But he’d never had to flee from a beached warship.

He sprang into action, racing to the port-side edge of the deck and swung himself off it, gripping it by his fingers as the steel grey hull of the massive destroyer screamed by inches away from his fingertips, kicking up sparks that sprayed all over Jack’s helmet.

And then, with a metallic shriek, the Russian destroyer ground to a halt on the carrier’s back, rolling a little to one side as it did so.

Jack hauled himself back onto the flight deck: he had a slim metre of room to stand on as he stood there in the shadow of the warship beached on the deck.

It towered over him. Confused shouts in Russian echoed from its decks.

‘This is nuts,’ Jack said.

He continued down the sloping flight deck, staying close to the hull of the destroyer, on its port side.

As he came to the bow of the beached destroyer, down near the low end of the carrier’s flight deck, he suddenly heard voices—speaking in English—and he froze, staying back out of sight.

Two Omega monks had evidently had the same idea and had been moving down the starboard side of the carrier’s flight deck, on the other side of the destroyer.

‘Move, move, move!’ the first one yelled to the second. ‘Ezekiel is going to bring down this whole castle with RDX—destroy it—topple the throne and Sphinx! Then he will venture into the deadlier half of the Labyrinth that leads to the second throne, the Throne of the Tree of Death! The passageways to it are reached through the arch of Malkuth! Come, we must hurry before Ezekiel blows the explosives!’

Jack remained hidden behind the beached destroyer’s bow.

Another throne?

At the Tree of Death . . .

He didn’t have time to fully process that comment now.

For right then, he saw the tiny figure of Ezekiel appear at the base of the central castle . . .

. . . laying explosives.

Ezekiel planted them on the southern side of the magnificent castle: a cluster of superpowerful RDX charges.

The plan was simple.

When they went off, they would cause the castle to topple southward—bringing down this Throne and Sphinx while allowing Ezekiel to pass through the arch of Malkuth at the bottom of the castle and enter the second half of the Supreme Labyrinth.

Ezekiel was just about to set the timer on the array of explosive charges—

—when a sniper round sizzled through the air and slammed into the armour plating on his left shoulder, hurling him off his feet.

As the ground around him was strafed with bullet-fire, Ezekiel scrambled for cover, snapped to look up and saw a sniper on a nearby temple.

Damn it. Sphinx still had one last protective sniper.