Inside the Olympus Military HQ, a man named Proteus stood before the crystal chamber.
He had been waiting for this moment for five of the six months he'd spent in Olympus — six months of cultivated unremarkableness, of mid-rank uniforms and mid-rank posture and the face of someone who worked in logistics and was always in the building but never in anyone's specific memory of it. He had memorised this corridor. He had memorised this room. He had memorised exactly what needed to happen and how long it would take.
The signal came — a specific frequency only he could detect.
He acted on it immediately.
The barrier crystal had been here for forty years. It maintained its function through continuous output, humming at a frequency below hearing, projecting the city's defensive field in every direction from this single point. It was the reason Olympus had never fallen.
Proteus destroyed it.
The hum stopped. Above the city, the barrier dissolved.
—
In the throne room, Gabriel felt it the instant it happened.
He was at his workbench — a sword half-finished, the swordsmith's habit that no amount of kingship had ever displaced. He set down his tools. He looked at the half-finished blade for a moment.
Then he went to the window.
The portals were already tearing open across the city — dozens of them, bleeding myths into the streets, the carnage erupting in seconds. Citizens scattered. The city's defences, built to withstand siege, began to buckle against opponents that had no ceiling.
Somewhere in the distance, something was moving toward the castle with the directional purpose of something that had a specific destination and intended to reach it.
Gabriel picked up his sword.
✦ ✦ ✦
The SSS-class MKs deployed toward the legends. Every rank below them pushed into the myth-flooded streets.
Fujin was intercepted by two SSS-class veterans who fought with everything they had — genuinely challenged him, pushed harder than most things could. They landed nothing that mattered. Fujin cut them down.
Suijin found Leroy in the eastern district.
Leroy was Melissa's closest friend in Olympicõ — the SSS-class MK who had theorised that the attacks were a distraction, who had told her she'd always make a plan, who had sat beside her on a bench outside HQ while she worked through the problem of the trial. He had been in more battles than most of the city had seen, and it showed in the way he fought: not reckless, not desperate, but with the particular settled confidence of someone who had faced hard things before and had come through them.
The fight shook the ground beneath the eastern district. It was real — genuinely, impressively real — and Suijin knew it was real, which was as close to respect as he offered.
It wasn't enough.
The eastern district went quiet.
✦ ✦ ✦
Takemikazuchi forced through the palace the way something forces through anything — with categorical superiority and no particular interest in what was in the way. The guards who attempted to stop him did not stop him. The throne room door lasted approximately two seconds.
Gabriel was standing in the centre of the room.
Not behind the throne. Not at a defensive position. In the centre, in his sword artistry stance — the one his students had been learning the beginning of for three months, the one that Charlotte had spent three years refining a single technique from. The one that belonged to someone who had been building toward this his entire life and was not surprised it had arrived.
"So you've finally arrived," said Gabriel.
"You were expecting me." Takemikazuchi moved into the room, his assessment moving over Gabriel with the deliberate quality of something that was used to its assessments meaning something. "I stand in the presence of the King of Swords," he said, "and yet I feel underwhelmed."
"Is that so." Gabriel's expression didn't change. "You don't see me as a threat?"
"You are a king. I am the Sword God. It would be beneath me to feel threatened by a mortal title."
Gabriel was quiet for a beat. Then something that was almost a smile crossed his face.
"I love it when they underestimate me." He reached for his sword. "Let me show you why they call me the King of Swords — in a world where you're nothing but an old myth."
Takemikazuchi's composure cracked — just slightly, just for a moment, the specific crack of someone who has been spoken to in a way they didn't expect and has registered it before they could decide not to. Then he drew his blade.
The magic circles appeared at Gabriel's hips. Three, then five, then more — the conjuration array opening in sequence, swords emerging from each one and taking their positions around him like an orchestra waiting for the downbeat.
In the throne room of Olympus, the King of Swords and the Sword God began.
✦ ✦ ✦
Melissa stepped through the Gate Portal into a city that smelled of smoke.
She didn't slow down to take it in. She felt the city the way she always felt it in the field — the Flux signatures, the concentrations of mythic presence, the specific frequencies of things that were in a different category from ordinary threats. She located the nearest legend.
She moved.
Fenrir turned at the sound of her approach and went very still.
"Of course," he said. The tone had something of resignation in it — the specific resignation of someone who had been hoping for a different draw and was being honest about it. "Of all the mortals to find me first."
"You drew the short straw today, Fenrir." Melissa stopped a few metres away, reading him the way she read every opponent — fully, without performance. "Whatever hope you came here with — let it go. Your end has arrived."
Fenrir steadied himself. He looked at her for a long moment — the cold patience that was his defining quality, the assessment of something that had been in enough situations to know what it was looking at.
What he was looking at, he knew, was someone who meant exactly what she said.
"Then let's not waste time," he said.
The western district held its breath.
The battle began.