. . . only its middle had been blasted apart with explosives sometime earlier that day.

Jack never stopped running.

He just drew his Maghook from his backpack as he ran and fired it at a higher bridge, latched it on, and swung across the wide gap.

He landed on the other side, reeled in the Maghook and kept on going.

It was a hell of a run, and thus he made his way to the castle, until he was only one long slender bridge away from it and he could see Ezekiel and his last two remaining Omega monks at the other end of the bridge, about to mount a high hill of stairs that led to the castle’s base.

He also saw, off to his left, Rastor and some men come swooping in on a zip-line and overtake Ezekiel. They arrived at the castle’s entrance, fired more shots that took down one of Ezekiel’s monks and hurried inside it.

Rastor stepped inside the castle structure.

He gazed up at its soaring hollow interior, with its crisscrossing stairways and impossibly tall columns. It looked like the mightiest cathedral ever constructed.

The archway of Malkuth stood before him, in the exact centre of the bottom level.

It was an evil-looking thing, shot through with carvings of demons and devils, serpents and jackals. Every angle on it was sharp, giving it a menacing aspect.

It was also actually quite large—it was probably seventy feet tall—but against the scale of the space around it, it looked small.

Three soaring stairways leapt upward from its spiked roof, while inside it was a round rimless well that plunged into darkness.

‘That’s our path!’ Rastor called to his men.

They hurried for the archway and climbed down into the wide well, the first team to enter the second half of the Labyrinth.

High above Rastor, Sphinx and Mendoza were bounding down the stairways of the castle’s interior.

‘Damn it, fuck!’ Sphinx swore as he saw Rastor and his troops hurry into the archway of Malkuth.

Rastor had taken the lead in this race.

And Sphinx was well aware of what Rastor wanted: to destroy the other Throne and let the whole universe collapse.

‘Hurry!’ Sphinx urged Mendoza. ‘We can catch him in the second half of the Labyrinth, but we can’t let him get too far ahead!’

They hurried into the well shortly after.

Jack kept running, out across the last long bridge.

The spectacular white-and-silver castle rose up before him, mounted on its hill of stone steps.

The incoming seawater kept rising beneath him—now maybe fifty feet below his bridge and filling fast.

Jack never stopped running.

He couldn’t stop.

The water was rising quickly below him and would overwhelm his bridge in seconds.

Jack continued up the hill of stairs just as the water behind him swallowed the bridge.

Half a minute later, he burst inside the castle and beheld its soaring nave.