Chapter 377: Dead Starakian
The route to the terrace level was narrower than the lower mall floors, boxed in by shuttered storefronts and half-collapsed signs that made the light from my torch catch in broken angles. My footsteps sounded too loud. So did my breathing. Somewhere farther off, metal gave a faint creak that could’ve been the building settling or something moving where I couldn’t see it.
I tightened my grip on the axe and kept going.
The higher I got, the worse that feeling became.
It wasn’t pain exactly. More like my nerves pulling tight under my skin. The same reaction I got around Starakian tech, but sharper here, more focused, like I was finally closing in on the source instead of only catching the edge of it from a distance.
By the time I reached the terrace access door, I knew for sure.
Whatever was up there, it was real.
I pushed the door open slowly and stepped out onto the terrace level, sweeping the torchlight across the open space ahead while the pressure in my body turned hard and cold, like something up there had already noticed me too.
The second I stepped through, the terrace opened up around me.
Open air. Bright sun already high enough that the whole place sat under a hard, exposed light. I switched off the torch at once and shoved it away. No point wasting it up here.
I stood still for a moment and let the metal door ease shut behind me with a faint creak.
Then I looked out across the terrace.
It was huge.
The whole floor had clearly been made for entertainment before everything went to hell. There were little stands, half-covered booths, game areas, open spaces meant for families or crowds, and enough scattered junk to make it all look like some sad, gutted fairground. A place built to squeeze every last dollar out of bored customers and smiling kids.
Now it was dead.
No voices. No movement from anything human. No life anywhere.
Just that presence.
It crawled over the back of my neck and settled deeper the longer I stood there. Not a sound. Not a smell. Just that same wrong pressure from before, only sharper now that there was nothing between me and it.
It was ahead of me.
I knew that much for sure.
I tightened my hand around the axe and started forward, slow at first, keeping my eyes moving across everything. The booths. The railings. The corners between the structures. The little pockets of shade. Every place something could lunge from.
I spotted the first Infected almost immediately.
Then they noticed me too.
They started drifting toward me from different angles, some from between the stands, some from farther back near what looked like a pool area. Their movements were slow at first, then quicker the closer they got.
I cut the first one down without breaking stride.
The second came in from the left. I buried the axe in its temple and kicked it off the blade before it dragged my arm with it. Another stumbled over a fallen chair toward me and caught the edge of the axe across the jaw hard enough to spin it sideways before I finished it with the next hit.
I kept moving.
The farther I went, the worse the pressure got.
A headache started to build behind my eyes, deep and ugly, not like normal pain but something that felt forced into my skull from the outside. Each step closer made it tighten. My vision stayed clear, but my body hated whatever I was walking toward.
I gritted my teeth and kept going anyway.
Then the pain jumped.
I hissed and pressed on faster. No point creeping now. If this thing was really here, I needed eyes on it. Needed to know what the hell I was dealing with before it got worse or before something else found me up here.
I moved around one of the larger stands, rounded its side, and came out near what had once been a swimming pool area.
That was where I stopped.
It was there.
I didn’t see the device first.
I saw the body.
My gaze caught on something at the far edge near the ramp where people probably used to walk up for a better view over Atlantic City. Not inside the pool. Just below that viewing point, stretched awkwardly on the ground.
I stepped closer, cutting down another Infected on the way. A few more shuffled inside the drained pool itself, trapped down there, arms reaching uselessly toward the rim. I ignored them and kept going.
When I got close enough, I looked down.
It was a corpse.
Not human.
Starakian.
Even half-rotted, there was no mistaking that white-grayish skintone. Male too, from the build of him. He’d been dead for a while, days at least, maybe longer. Blood had dried black-brown across the concrete around his chest, where something had torn or punched through him. The side of his body had already started sinking into rot.
Then the real source of the pain hit me.
"Ugh—"
The sound tore out of me before I could swallow it. My whole head seized so violently I stumbled back a step and clamped a hand to my temple.
I looked up.
There, bolted to the side of the ramp, was the thing doing it.
It looked like some kind of antenna, but wrong, too sharp, too alien in the shape of it. Black metal. Twin uprights splitting upward in a kind of double-Y frame. It wasn’t large, but it didn’t need to be. I could feel the waves rolling off it even without seeing them, pounding into me in hard, vicious pulses.
And the second I focused on it, it got worse.
Like it had felt me noticing it.
Like it had recognized what I was.
"Ughhnn—"
Pain ripped through my head so hard my knees hit the ground. Blood ran warm from my nose at once. Then hotter drops slid from one ear too. My vision shook.
Shit.
I triggered Time Freeze immediately.
Everything locked.
The air. The drifting dust. The trapped Infected below. The whole world stopped in the middle of itself, and the sudden stillness gave me just enough room to move without the pain worsening every second.
I forced myself up and rushed the device.
Up close, it looked even worse. No markings I could understand. No obvious switches. No screen. No interface that made any kind of sense to me. I grabbed it, braced a foot against the ramp, and tore it free with a hard wrench of both arms.
Metal snapped loose.
I nearly dropped the thing from the pain still echoing through my skull, but I forced my hands to stay steady and searched it fast.
No buttons.
No controls I recognized.
Then I saw it.
Set into the base of the antenna were two blue Starakian powerstones, smaller than the ones I’d seen before but real ones. Embedded clean into the structure like twin power cells.
That, at least, I understood.
I dug my fingers in, ripped one free, then the other.
The device died in my hands.
Ten seconds ended.
Time slammed back into motion.
The air shifted. The trapped Infected below jerked alive again. A loose piece of debris clattered somewhere to my right. I staggered back a step, breathing hard, but the pressure was gone.
Gone.
I bent over with one hand on my knee and sucked in air, blood still running down over my mouth and chin, my pulse hammering hard enough to shake my arms.
Whatever that thing had been, it was finished now.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my wrist, kept hold of the dead antenna in one hand, and lifted my head again, looking from the Starakian corpse to the open terrace around me while the wind moved over the rooftop and the blood kept dripping from my nose onto the concrete.
"W... what the hell..." I breathed out.
The words barely made it past the pain.
I stayed bent over, both fists clenched so hard they shook where I braced them against my knees, and forced myself to keep breathing through it. My head still throbbed like something had reached inside and scraped at the nerves directly. My nose kept dripping blood onto the concrete in slow dark drops. One ear still burned too.
After a few seconds, I raised my eyes again and looked at the dead Starakian.
Why was there a dead Starakian here?
None of this made sense.
My first thought was Gaspar.
If he had found this thing, if he had run into this Starakian and killed him, that would explain the body. It was the most obvious answer. Gaspar had the power for it, the nerve for it, and he was the kind of bastard who could absolutely put down something not even human and keep moving without losing a second of sleep.
But then that made the rest of it wrong.
If Gaspar had really found him, why leave this device behind?
That didn’t fit him.
He was too careful for that from the way he didn’t even dare approach the Boardwalk because Marlon had literally a gun against him. A weapon like this, one that could hit a Symbiote Host hard enough to drop him bleeding to his knees, wasn’t the kind of thing a man like Gaspar just ignored. He would’ve destroyed it, or taken it, or hidden it somewhere no one else could stumble onto it.
He wouldn’t leave it mounted here like trash nailed to a wall.
Unless he never saw it.
Or unless something else happened first.
I stared at the Starakian again, trying to force my head to work through the pain.
Was this the same one?
The one behind Jackson Township?
The one who had overseen that attack and used Jason to unleash the Screamer?
The thought hit me hard enough that I straightened a little despite the ache. If it was him, then maybe he had followed us after that. Maybe he came here to make another move. Maybe he was after Wanda again. That would explain a lot. It would explain why there had been pressure, why things kept circling around us, why it always felt like some distant hand was setting pieces in place and then waiting.
And if he died here before he could act again...
Then maybe that also explained something else.
Maybe the reason the Starakians had stopped pressing us lately wasn’t because they lost interest.
Maybe it was because the one dealing with us was dead.
I looked down at the body again, more carefully this time.
The wound in his chest looked ugly, but not random. Not torn open. Not blasted apart. Something had gone through from behind and come out the front. It looked more like a stab than anything else, like something long and solid had punched clean through him.
That ruled out a few things.
A gunshot would’ve made more sense if humans did it. Most people, if they saw a literal alien standing in front of them, wouldn’t run in close unless they had no choice or no fear left. A knife felt too small. Too personal. Too reckless.
So what the hell had done that?
I kept staring at the wound like it would explain itself if I looked long enough.
Nothing came.
Maybe I was overthinking it.
Maybe the answer was simple and I just couldn’t see it because my head was still half-split open from that antenna. But right then, standing over a dead Starakian on a rooftop terrace with blood on my face and a dead alien weapon in my hand, confusion felt like the most honest reaction available.
I needed answers.
Needed them badly.
But no matter how I turned it around in my head, I couldn’t get a clean line through what had happened here. Too many gaps. Too many wrong details. Too many things that should have fit and didn’t.
I stayed there a little longer, breathing slower now, waiting for my vision to settle fully.
The dizziness still clung to me.
That thing had hit hard. Way harder than anything small like it had a right to. If I hadn’t frozen time when I did, I didn’t even want to think about what a few more seconds of exposure might have done. Knocked me out. Cooked my brain. Left me twitching on the floor until something came up from below and finished the job.
I lowered my eyes to the broken antenna in my hand.
Then I looked at the blue powerstones I had ripped from it.
A slow thought pushed through the pain.
If this thing worked that well against me...
Then it could work against Gaspar too.
I held it more carefully after that, suddenly a lot less interested in tossing it aside.
A strained smile pulled at my mouth before I could stop it, rough and crooked and probably a little unhinged with blood still running down my face.
Yeah.
I knew exactly what to do with it.
I tightened my grip on the dead device, took one last look at the Starakian corpse, and turned back toward the mall door, already moving despite the pounding in my skull.