She hit him three times before he registered the first one.
Not because he was slow - because she was operating at a speed that turned three impacts into one continuous event. Left side. Right shoulder. Center. He took all three on hardened armor and slid back four feet across the cracked industrial pavement.
[MORD - VOID ENHANCED SPEED STRIKE: TRIPLE]
He came back immediately.
[MARSHAL - MATTER HARDENING: FULL BODY]
A cross aimed at her jaw - full density, everything behind it, the kind of punch that had ended V3 fights in one hit. It connected.
She mirrored it back before his arm had finished extending.
[MORD - VOID MIRRORING: MATTER HARDENED CROSS]
Same density. Same angle. Same force. His own punch hitting him in the jaw from the opposite direction. His head snapped back. He tasted blood. He kept moving.
He threw a left hook. She mirrored it - his left hook coming back as her right. He blocked it with a hardened forearm. The impact drove the forearm into his own face. He adjusted. Threw a body shot. She mirrored it to his ribs. He threw three rapid jabs. She mirrored all three simultaneously - his own jabs hitting him from three angles at once.
He went back two steps. First time in this fight he had gone backward.
He switched. Grabbed a chunk of broken concrete from the ground - rebar still in it, dense, irregular - hardened it to maximum density and threw it at her head.
[MARSHAL - MATTER HARDENING: IMPROVISED PROJECTILE]
She caught it. Hardened her catch to match his density exactly. Threw it back twice as fast.
[MORD - VOID MIRRORING: RETURNED PROJECTILE]
It hit his shoulder guard and the guard cracked. He spun off the impact, used the rotation, came around with an elbow aimed at her temple.
She ducked under it and drove her knee into his ribs.
Not a mirrored move - her own. He felt the difference immediately. His ribs flexed against the hardening and held but the force behind it was wrong - heavier than a knee strike had any right to be. She was mixing her own attacks with the mirrors. Making the pattern unpredictable.
He hardened the air in a wall between them - bought himself half a second of space.
[MARSHAL - MATTER HARDENING: COMPRESSION WALL]
She put her fist through it. Mirrored the compression wall's density and broke it with its own hardness.
He threw debris - three pieces, different trajectories, different densities, no pattern. She tracked all three and mirrored all three simultaneously. Six pieces of ultra-dense debris filling the space between them. He took two. She took two. Two passed between them and hit the industrial district walls.
Both of them had hit each other. Neither had stopped.
He drove at her - full body, maximum hardening, shoulder first, the technique he had used on Voss. She saw it coming. She mirrored the hardening, braced, and when he hit her the collision was two equally hardened objects meeting head on.
The shockwave cracked the pavement in a six-foot circle. Both of them went back - him three feet, her three feet. First time she had moved backward.
She looked at him. Something shifted in her black eyes.
She stopped mirroring.
She came at him with her own ability - no mirrors, pure void-enhanced speed and strength. She hit him seven times in four seconds - each one aimed at a cracked section of his armor, each one targeted with the precision of someone who had spent the last three minutes learning exactly where his weaknesses were.
[MORD - VOID ENHANCED ASSAULT: TARGETED CRACK STRIKES]
Left shoulder joint. Right side ribs. Left knee. Left shoulder again. The already-cracked sections giving way under focused impact. He hardened against each hit and each hardening cost something.
He went to one knee. Left arm hanging wrong. Right side not responding the way it should. He put his right fist on the pavement and held himself there.
Mord stood over him. She was breathing evenly. She looked at him with something close to satisfaction - clinical, professional, the specific satisfaction of a job done to her standard.
"V4," she said. "Twenty years. Impressive for a human." She turned away. "Stay down."
She took one step toward Drax.
Marshal looked at the pavement. At his reflection in a shard of broken glass - cracked armor, wrong arm, blood from the jaw hit.
Whole city was watching the fall of best hero of city.