The zombies come shambling down the hall towards the front door. There aren’t three of them this time, but a wave of dozens. I'm a drummer. I'm good with counting up to sixteen or thirty-two. This is more than that. Goro gently pushes me out of the way and takes the right half of the entrance into the mountain. I can’t handle two zombies, much less twenty, and we both know it, so I slide back.

Danae sets up on the right side, now twirling two thick ropes. She’s pulled a dozen of her rope loops out of her pockets, and hung them on a--wouldn’t you know it--rope belt she now has looped around her waist.

As I drop back, I send a message to Priya, “We’ve got a swarm of zombies incoming. Maybe fifty? Maybe more. Any chance Carter’s free to do aerial support?”

“He’s still decompressing the prisoners, and it’s not safe to leave them. If it’s abandon ship, then we’ll try to escape, but we’re not heading out until all hope is lost.”

I put away my baseball bat, and back off fifteen yards. I can’t fight for shit, but I can drum. I lay out my taiko set, with some drum stands, in a traditional western drum configuration. I’m gonna have to actually kick the drums at my feet, and my stool is with the prisoners, so I even have to use one of the drums as a seat. Here I go, the rhythm section against the zombie apocalypse.

The first pair of zombies shambles their way past the threshold. They last about two seconds. Goro’s four swords and Danae’s two snake-ropes detach limbs at an unbelievable speed. Billie Flay can't chop a chicken that fast. That said, the zombies are moving at about half-human speed, so two seconds makes about two steps for the zombies, and when the first two are down, the next two are about where the first two started. At the tenth zombie, Goro misses a swing, and the zombie survives an extra couple steps. Goro retreats backwards a step, and keeps reaping. On the seventeenth zombie, Danae misses a strike, and she has to step back as well. Numbers twenty-five and twenty-eight are additional minor missteps, but that’s all it takes. Now Danae and Goro are now facing two zombies each.

I’m drumming for thaum regeneration, with a full six layers of whorl running at max speed, and I’m hoping it helps the team with stamina. It’s all thaums, right?

Danae and Goro are harder pressed, and use more of their abilities. Danae is flicking rope circles at every third zombie now, and goro is breathing fire to char them, trying to keep ahead of the horde. They push back for a moment, and only have to deal with one zombie at a time, then mistakes happen again, which allows the zombies to push forward. They’re each losing energy with every second. Fuck it. Thaum regen isn’t working. If we're going to win this, I have to do better.

I turn all my senses up to eleven. I need everything I can see, everything I can hear, everything I can sense with my audiomancy. I can make this work.

I start in on the time rhythm. 15/4 time: beats on every one, two, three, four, and five. I play the first round slow at a hundred and fifty BPM to make sure it’s right.

It takes six seconds to go through the cycle once.

k k L T R L k T L R k TL k k LR T k L k TR L …

Goro and Danae each cut down two zombies. I double the speed. The next cycle takes three seconds to run at 300 BPM. I run it again, faster. Six hundred BPM takes a second and a half, and then the rhythm at twelve hundred BPM takes three quarters of a second. The feel is there. I can tell this is right--time is moving differently in this space--but how the hell do I do anything with it.

One of the zombie axes cuts Goro, and he starts to bleed. It seems to be a light cut, but I have to solve this. We can't win like this. There’s eighty zombie corpses on the ground, and more are coming out. My rhythm breaks for a second when I see zombie Randi come out with her axe. It looks like they had a use for live prisoners, and for resisters. Is that what Dr. Jones does? Is he a necromancer?

Danae removes Randi’s legs, and she keeps crawling forward like the half- corpses in Diablo 9. Danae removes the legs from three more zombies before finishing off Randi.

Fuck fuck fuck. I lost my rhythm. I take the fifteen seconds necessary to speed up slowly, and I'm back in. I can feel the music, I can feel the time flowing, and I can’t do anything with it.

Suddenly, time changes around the zombies. The undead speed up. But it's not them, it's a time manipulation, and I can see it. Whereas before, Goro and Danae were each about four times as fast as the average zombie, the zombies pick up six-times speed, and each zombie is faster than Goro or Danae. Fortunately, they're no smarter.

In three seconds, the good guys go from reaping the endless fields of zombie to barely surviving against creatures that are faster than them. Goro accumulates a lot of nicks in the next three seconds. Danae is speckled with zombie gore, and there's a nick in her hat, but she doesn't seem to be bleeding anywhere.

Fuck. Tim the time-wizard is here. Did he come back? Can’t see him anywhere. And then I realize what happened. The Tim I fought before wasn’t Tim. It was Sharon. She’s already very fast, and Tim’s six-upling time magic was able to make her faster than me. Sharon ran away, and Tim’s still here.

But Tim doesn’t know I was on the cusp of understanding the sound of time, and the fuckwit just showed it to me.

I catch the echo of the rhythm he’s imparted to the zombies. I layer another rhythm in with my left foot on sixes: six, twelve and eighteen. It’s now complete at 1200 BPM. That's about eighty strikes per second, and the rhythm is only 60 strikes long. I play it three times pefectly, as the Goro and Danae continue to lose slowly. Then I double it again: 2400 BPM.

Time moves for me. I play in the rhythm of time itself. I begin to move faster as I feel time’s embrace. Everything else slows to a crawl. Tracking external speeds, the beat speeds up: I go from 2400 BPM to 3600, then 4800, up to 6000 BPM. I’m over 30,000 strikes per minute, 500 strikes per second. And the newfound speed exerts further control over time. I’m moving two and a half times faster than I was. I push past two and a half up to four times speed before I can’t go faster. 9600 BPM and I’m feel like a god. Fuck Apollo's lyre, I've got Dyonesius's drum.

As I see Goro falling back in front of triple-speed zombies, I envelop him in the sound, and he speeds up as well. Then I cover Danae in the rhythm as well.

The fight that had turned against us with Tim’s zombie speed switches back with alacrity. The zombies started at half speed, against D and G's double speed. It was a bit of a massacre. When the zombies jumped to triple speed, D and G barely survived the thirty seconds it took for me to find the magic. But now, faster zombies are running into a blender. Goro’s four swords at eight times speed are frightening. Danae is running some combination of bullet time, and wire-fu while managing not one but two ropes that move better than any weapon I've ever seen. One moment her rope is a rope-dart, and the next it’s a lasso. It acts like a chain, and then a meteor hammer. Then she stops respecting physics. She throws one of her ropes into an arch, and as it stiffens, she runs up it, striking down on the zombies heads with her insane range. Balanced on her swaying rope arch, I see zombies trying to chop it down as she rains destruction down from above. They certainly hit it hard enough, but all that happens is that their axes break. The wood shatters between the undead strength and the impossible hardness of the rope.

All of a sudden, it’s over. There are hundreds of zombies in pieces on the ground, and none left outside the door. I’m surprised when I notice, and my rhythm stumbles. Time comes falling down, as I slow down rapidly. Danae and Goro are panting and covered in bits of zombie as they stagger over to me.

I say, “I think we should barricade..."

That’s all I remember.