On a cliff outside Olympicõ, a portal opened at two in the morning.
The man who stepped through it stood at the edge and looked at the city below — the lights, the wall, the harbour, the particular density of a place that had been built to last and had been lasting for a long time. He was quiet for a moment, with the quality of someone taking in something they're about to change.
"Such a shame," he said. "I wonder which gives out first — the city or me."
Two legendary class myths stepped through the portal behind him.
Hercules was exactly what the classification charts described and nothing the charts could adequately convey — twelve feet of muscle and purpose, the light around him bending slightly the way light behaved near things that generated their own gravity. He looked at the city below with the expression of someone looking at a problem that wasn't really a problem.
Fenrir stood beside him. Larger, quieter, the cold patience of something that had never needed to hurry.
"Do you two think you're enough to make this city fall?" the man asked.
"Hercules alone is enough," said Fenrir.
Hercules smirked.
"Then go back to the base," the man said to Fenrir. "Get ready with Fujin and the others."
"And miss the warm-up?"
"Warm up at the base. I want to see if Hercules can take out every MK in this city on his own." The man looked at Olympicõ. "The Blazing Beast is in Olympiqué tonight. Which means this city is unprotected at the level that matters."
Fenrir considered this. Then he stepped back through the portal.
"Ready?" the man said.
"Ask the humans that," Hercules said, and cracked his knuckles.
He jumped off the cliff.
The man watched him fall toward the city and opened his hand, and hundreds of portals bloomed across the valley below, and the myths poured through them like water through broken stone, and he stood on the cliff and watched it begin.
✦ ✦ ✦
Levi's phone rang at two in the morning and he answered it with the word "hello" in a register that communicated approximately zero consciousness.
"Baron." Colonel Theo's voice had the quality of someone who had already been awake for an hour and had no patience for anyone who hadn't. "Olympicõ. Now. HQ."
Levi looked at his phone after the call ended. 2:04 AM. He sat up, ran his hands over his face, and got moving — the MK response, the thing that had been trained into him, overriding the part of his brain that wanted to negotiate with the alarm.
Sylvia was already in the corridor when he came out, dressed, fire sword at her hip. She looked at him. He looked at her.
"Melissa's note is on her door," Sylvia said. "She's in Olympiqué. Got called at one."
"So whatever's happening, they split the attacks."
"Yes."
He called Priscilla. She was already awake. He reverse-teleported her to the mansion and then the three of them to the HQ, and the Gate Portal took them to Olympicõ in under four minutes from the phone call.
✦ ✦ ✦
Kevin was already there. Dwayne and Vanessa beside him, the three of them wearing the expression of people who had been pulled from sleep into something serious and were processing the transition.
Colonel Theo briefed them standing.
"Olympiqué took the first hit an hour ago — heavy, coordinated, all our top-ranked MKs deployed there. Thirty minutes later, Olympicõ was hit. You're the second best we have available. The city has survived the first two waves but taken significant damage and casualties." He looked at the trio. "You three are generals. That means you're leading squadrons tonight — not supporting, leading. Any questions about that?"
Priscilla opened her mouth.
"You'll gain the experience by doing it," Theo said, before she'd spoken. "That's how this works."
She closed her mouth.
"One more thing." Theo looked at the room. "We believe Hercules is in the city. Code Yellow. He took down the barrier alone — punched through it with his hands." He paused to let that register. "Don't face him alone. Don't underestimate him. If you engage, you engage with numbers." He looked at Levi specifically. "Understood?"
"Understood," said Levi.
"Kevin, you're in Levi's squadron. Dwayne with Sylvia. Vanessa with Priscilla." He picked up his radio. "Get out there."
They got out there.
✦ ✦ ✦
The 4th quarter of Olympicõ had the specific quality of a place that had recently been a city and was working hard to remain one. Buildings with structural damage held up by their neighbours. Streets cleared enough for movement but not for normalcy. The MKs already stationed there were holding a line rather than advancing.
The general who met Levi's squadron at the quarter boundary looked at Levi, recalibrated visibly, and moved on. "I'll take the eastern district. You take downtown. Keep your line intact and don't let anything through to the civilian shelters." He looked at the team behind Levi. "How many of yours are 3rd form capable?"
"Three confirmed," Levi said. "Kevin — show him."
Kevin activated his 3rd Form: Master of Earth briefly — the earthy glow, the ground shifting in response to his presence, the weight of someone who had learned to carry it without being crushed by it. The general looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone adding data to their assessment.
"Good luck, General," he said, and took his team east.
Levi turned to his squadron. He'd spent the ride learning their abilities — seventeen people, a range of forms and specialisations, most of them more experienced than him in years if not in rank. He'd paired them based on coverage and complementarity, the same logic he'd applied to the Hydra in Celia.
"Pairs deployed to their areas," he said. "Radio in every five minutes. If something goes wrong, call it immediately — don't wait until it's worse." He looked at Kevin. "You're with me until the wave starts, then we split."
"Copy that," Kevin said.
The third wave came through portals that opened in the streets themselves — Evogres flooding out of them in the particular coordinated way that suggested someone was directing the distribution rather than just opening gates and letting them run. Levi activated his 2nd Form and moved.
The battle had its own logic once it started — the logic of sustained combat over a large area, where the decisions were tactical rather than strategic and the job was to stay ahead of the attrition. His squadron held the downtown district. The Evogres were fast and they were strong and they were smart enough to test a position before committing, which meant his MKs had to maintain pressure rather than just react.
They held.
For forty minutes they held, and the wave began to thin, and Levi started to think about the after.
On the cliff, the mysterious man watched his Evogres dying in the 4th quarter at a higher rate than the others.
"Hercules," he said. "It's time."
"Finally," said Hercules. "My muscles were starting to sleep."
The portal opened in the ground.
✦ ✦ ✦
Kevin heard the impact before he saw the cause.
A sound like a building deciding to become rubble — deep, structural, the kind of impact that registered in the chest rather than the ears. He turned, and the dust cleared, and Hercules was standing in the street twenty metres away.
"You've got to be kidding me," Kevin said.
His partner — a veteran MK named Sorrel, fifteen years in the field, someone Kevin had spent the last forty minutes fighting beside and learning to trust — was already reporting in. Kevin could hear her voice on the comms, steady and professional, calling it in.
Hercules looked at them with the expression of someone who had been told this was a warm-up and was deciding whether to be insulted by that.
"I don't like that look," Kevin said, mostly to himself.
"Backup is coming," Sorrel said, beside him. "Levi's on his way."
"How long?"
"He said a minute."
Kevin looked at Hercules. Twelve feet. Code Yellow. The classification charts had described Hercules as possessing strength that scaled with resistance — the more force applied against him, the more force he could return. The sandstorm and the golems and the earthquake were the right approach: indirect, attritive, remove his ability to read and respond.
Hercules moved.
Kevin went sideways — not fast enough. The hit caught him across the shoulder and sent him through a building front and into the street beyond, and he was upright and running his damage assessment before the dust had fully cleared. Ribs. Something in his shoulder that wasn't right. Manageable.
He heard Sorrel's voice rise on the comms. Then stop.
He came around the corner and saw why.
He stood in the street and looked at what had happened to Sorrel, and something went very cold and very quiet inside him. Not the hot rage from the trial. This was different. This was the specific coldness of someone who has been shown the stakes and has decided, very clearly, that they understand them.
"3rd Form: Master of Earth," Kevin said.
The ground answered. The earthy glow came over him — not the first time now, the form arriving with the familiarity of something he'd trained with rather than something that had surprised him. The rage was there but it wasn't running the form. He was.
He cast the sandstorm first — the avenue filled with it, Hercules's senses neutralised, the direct engagement made indirect. He moved through the storm himself, immune to its disorientation, and hit Hercules from three angles in sequence while the legend couldn't locate him.
It landed. All of it landed. Hercules took damage and it showed.
Then Hercules stopped trying to find Kevin and simply expanded — raw magic energy radiating outward as a shockwave that dispersed the storm by force of output. The golems that had assembled during the storm came next, seven of them, and Hercules walked through them with the particular unhurried quality of something that had decided to stop being interesting.
Kevin ran the earthquake. Magnitude 7.
The street fractured. The buildings in the immediate area swayed and two of them came down in the direction Kevin had calculated, the rubble burying Hercules under several hundred tonnes of material. Kevin stood in the still air afterward and breathed and thought: bought time. Not a victory. Time.
"Kevin." Levi's voice on the comms, urgent. "What's your status?"
"Still alive. Partner's down." He watched the rubble. "I buried Hercules under about half the neighbourhood. I don't know if it's enough."
"I felt the tremor. I'm coming. Stay on comms."
Kevin watched the rubble.
The rubble moved.
Hercules rose through it — not dramatically, not explosively, just steadily, the way something rises when stopping isn't an option. Stone and structural material falling off him in pieces. He stood on top of it and looked at Kevin below.
"You've been quite the annoying amusement, human," he said. His voice was the voice of something that had been doing this since before the kingdom was built. "You fought well. But I'm done being amused."
Kevin created the Colossal Golem.
It rose around him — the 3rd form's full expression, forty feet of packed earth and will, Kevin at the core of it, buying time the way he'd asked Levi to buy time for Vanessa at the trial. The Golem engaged Hercules directly, and for thirty seconds it was a contest.
Then Hercules hit the Golem with something that wasn't a punch so much as a focused expression of everything he was, and the Golem came apart.
Kevin was in the air.
He saw the city spread below him in the moment before Hercules hit him again — downtown Olympicõ, the lights still on in the civilian shelter areas, his squadron's positions scattered across the district. He thought, with the specific clarity of someone moving too fast to feel fear: *at least the shelters are holding.*
Hercules drove him through three buildings in sequence, knuckle to ribs to spine, each impact carrying the accumulated force of something that scaled with resistance and had been resisted. Kevin hit the street at the end of the sequence and didn't get up.
He was alive. He could feel that. He was in the specific state of someone whose body had received too much and was making decisions without consulting them — he could hear, he could see the sky above him, he could feel the comms device still active at his wrist. He couldn't move.
MKs from a nearby position arrived — three of them, his squadron, responding to the comms signal. He heard them assessing the situation. Heard them deciding to engage.
"Don't," he tried to say. The word didn't carry.
Hercules landed in the street.
—
Levi heard the silence on the comms before he heard anything else.
Not static — silence. The specific absence of Kevin's voice from a channel that had been carrying it. He was two streets away and moving at full 2nd Form speed and he pushed harder.
He came around the corner and stopped.
The street was still. The three MKs from his squadron were on the ground — not unconscious, not recoverable. Kevin was on the ground too, also still, but in the centre of Hercules's attention rather than the periphery. Hercules had his back to Levi. He was leaning down toward Kevin.
Levi moved.
He was not fast enough.
He arrived in time to see it happen and not in time to stop it happening, and those two things were different things, and the difference between them was going to be with him for a long time.
Hercules straightened. He turned, and he was holding Kevin by the head, and Kevin was not moving, and Levi understood in the first second what that meant and spent the next several seconds refusing to understand it and then it settled into him whether he refused it or not.
Kevin.
Who had failed this trial four times and kept coming back. Who had heard his brother's voice telling him he was the disappointment and had answered it with a fifty-foot Golem. Who had called Levi "surprisingly a good leader" forty minutes ago over the radio with the tone of someone who meant the compliment and wasn't sure how to give it.
Hercules looked at Levi across the ruined street. He let Kevin's body down — not gently, but not carelessly either, with the specific consideration of something that had made its point and no longer needed to hold it.
He looked at Levi with something that wasn't quite recognition and wasn't quite curiosity.
"Another one," he said.
Levi stood in the street and felt the rage arrive — not the hot, unfocused kind, not the kind that made you reckless. The cold kind. The kind that knew exactly what it was looking at and exactly what it intended to do about it, and was in no hurry, because hurry was for people who weren't sure.
The electricity came up through him from somewhere below the 3rd form's ceiling.
"Absolute Current," he said.
The azure arrived — continuous discharge, the world going precise, the tattoo patterns blazing white across his skin. The street held the specific quality of the moment before something irreversible. Levi looked at Hercules and Hercules looked at Levi and neither of them moved yet.
Not yet.
But soon.