Exalibar stood on the rooftop with his hands in his jacket pockets and looked down at the spider for a moment.
He really hated these. Monster extermination jobs. Of all the things a person with his particular skill set could be doing at this hour — finishing breakfast, for instance, which he had been doing before this, standing on a rooftop in the financial district staring at something that had no business existing in a city centre was not high on his preferred list. These things had habitats. Forests. Caves. Whatever damp, lightless geography produced a spider the size of a respectable house. The point was, that geography existed, and this spider had apparently decided it wasn't enough.
He exhaled through his nose.
"Okay," he said to no one in particular, and dropped off the roof.
He hit the ground at a run, already calculating eight legs, central body mass, eyes clustered at the front, probable reaction time based on the way the thing was oriented toward the screaming crowd it was slowly pursuing. It hadn't noticed him yet. That was fine. He preferred to introduce himself first.
He launched himself off a parked car, clasped both hands together above his head, and drove them down into the top of the spider's head with everything he had.
The sound of impact was deeply satisfying. The spider's legs buckled. Its entire front end cratered into the square's paving stones, dust and cracked tile erupting in a ring around it.
Exalibar landed in a crouch beside the thing's head and looked back at Sky, who was holding the perimeter thirty meters away.
"Extermination or containment?" he called.
Sky didn't even hesitate. "Do you want to carry this thing back?"
Exalibar looked at the spider. "No."
"Then KILL IT!!!!"
"With pleasure." He rolled his shoulders, satisfied, and turned back to the spider.
Which was already getting up.
"This is going to be soo easy," Exalibar said, stepping forward. "I don't even know why you called me ou—"
The leg hit him like a horizontal freight train.
It came from the left, swung low and fast and it connected with his side hard enough to take him completely off his feet. He crossed thirty meters of air in approximately no time at all and crashed into the office building opposite the square through its ground-floor reception window.
The desk was the first thing that registered. Then the ceiling. Then the ringing.
Then the sound of Sky's voice, drifting across the square with the mild tone of someone sharing an observation at a dinner party. "I forgot to mention it's fast for its size."
Exalibar lay in the ruins of what had recently been a perfectly adequate reception area and stared at the drop ceiling. A potted plant had landed somewhere nearby. The computer monitor was beeping at him.
"I NOTICED," he yelled back.
He was on his feet in the next second, already moving. He grabbed the reception desk on his way out a heavy, solid thing, and spun once, twice, using his momentum to build the arc, and launched it. The desk tumbled end over end across the square and caught the spider square in the face, buying him exactly the three seconds he needed to cover the distance back to Sky.
He pulled up beside his brother, breathing measured, and took a moment to assess.
The spider had shaken off the desk. It turned toward the direction of the retreating crowd, tracking the movement with the patient without mechanical focus of an apex preditor, not distinguishing between targets just stimuli and proximity.
"I can see why you wanted Chloe here," Exalibar said.
"I wanted her to vaporise it," Sky said, watching the spider. "Apparently it can regenerate."
Exalibar turned to look at him. "Since when?"
"Since before I called you. Check."
Sky drew both katanas in one smooth motion the sound of the blades clearing their scabbards cutting cleanly through the ambient noise of the square and assumed his stance. Then he moved.
He was a white blur, crossing the distance to the spider before the eye could track it properly, and the cuts came in a single, continuous sequence, eight motions so fast they registered as one. The spider's legs all eight of them separated from the body with a sound like a cable under tension finally giving way.
The spider dropped. The screech it produced was enormous, a sound with physical weight to it that rattled windows two streets over.
Sky was already back beside Exalibar, katanas lowered.
Then the steam started.
It rose from the eight clean stumps in thick, white columns, and underneath it, with an audible series of wet, organic sounds, the legs began to grow back. The new ones pushed out of the wounds with horrible speed, segments extending and locking into place, the whole process taking less than fifteen seconds.
The spider finished regenerating and stood up.
"Yeah," Sky said.
"Okay." Exalibar's jaw shifted. "We dice it to nothing, then you do that mana thing."
Sky looked at him. "That's my ultimate move."
"Then start spamming it."
"That is not how ultimate moves..."
"Sky."
A pause.
"Fine."
Exalibar took a slow breath and rolled his neck once. He adjusted his gauntlets, and the blue glow that traced the articulation lines brightened, the hum of charged mana rising to something audible. He hadn't slept enough for this. He hadn't slept enough for the bank job either, and that had been before this, and before this there had been whatever Aisha needed at he checked his internal clock and decided not to finish the thought.
"Barely even slept," he muttered, "and now I'm an exterminator."
The spider had, while they were talking, oriented itself back toward the crowd. The evacuation was still in progress, a knot of slower-moving people, elderly, a child in a pushchair, a man on crutches who had made the geometrically unfortunate decision to be near the square this morning. The spider's leg swung in a broad, sweeping arc toward them.
Exalibar's hand came up.
The leg stopped.
Not physically it hit nothing, met no surface but it simply ceased to complete its motion, the force behind it redirected and arrested mid-swing. The spider's whole body torqued sideways from the interrupted momentum. Exalibar's arm was fully extended, fingers spread, the blue aura around him flaring visibly in the morning light.
He stretched the other arm out in the opposite direction.
The spider's body pulled apart, not torn, but extended, each limb drawn outward and held, the thing suspended in a spread configuration that exposed its central mass completely. Its legs scrabbled against nothing. The screech intensified.
The mana drain was immediate and severe. Exalibar felt it the way he always did a drawing-down of reserves registered as urgency.
"Sky," he said, his voice tight. "Any second now. This burns through mana like you wouldn't believe."
Sky was already moving.
He ran in the opposite direction — away from the spider, away from the square, out across the open road. The distance between him and the target grew to fifty meters, then a hundred, then more. At the far end of the street he turned, and for a moment he was still.
Then he came back.
He hit the building at the end of the block at a diagonal, using the wall as a launch surface, and the angle took him up and over, a white arc against the dark sky, and at the apex he oriented himself downward and came down with both feet aimed at the centre of the suspended spider's body.
The technique was a studied insult to physics. Sky poured every remaining unit of mana outward in the same instant of impact, an expulsion so complete it left nothing in reserve — no cushion, no recoil absorption, no distribution across the surrounding environment. All force, both directions, applied to one point.
"Οὐρανός λάκτισμα."
The impact drove the spider into the ground hard enough to crack the square's foundations. The paving stones around the impact point shattered outward in a ring. Dust and debris erupted in a column. The spider went through the surface and kept going, compacted into the earth several feet down, every structure in its body reduced to something that was no longer recognisably an arrangement of parts.
Sky landed and immediately stumbled, catching himself on one knee. He looked up.
The steam was rising from the crater.
"EXALIBAR," he shouted. "IT'S NOT DEAD."
Exalibar was already looking. The regeneration from the crater was slower than before as the scale of damage was greater but it was happening. Limbs assembling themselves from the compressed mass, the central body reconstituting with the same horrible efficiency as before, just with more raw material to work with.
He looked at his gauntlets. Then he pulled one off.
His bare hand was brown against the scorched paving. He extended it, fingers together, and a faint circle of blue light began to form in the air above his open palm.
"Wanna see a magic trick?"
He began to speak, low and measured, the words not quite in any language that had been used recently.
Then a light came from above.
It arrived without sound a single, vertical column of white incandescence that hit the crater with the precise, unhurried certainty of something that had been aimed very carefully from a very long way up. The regenerating mass stopped. The steam stopped. The sound of the square stopped.
When the light faded, there was nothing in the crater but scorched earth and the faint smell of ozone.
Exalibar slowly closed his hand, the blue circle dissipating. This wasn't him.
He and Sky stood in the silence for a moment.
Then they both looked up.
Ethan descended from the morning sky with the same effortless, infuriating quality he brought to everything unhurried, unruffled, his white-and-gold hair only slightly displaced by the altitude. He touched down at the edge of the crater and looked at the two of them across the ruined square with the mild expression of someone who had arrived at a situation exactly when it needed him and was doing them the courtesy of not mentioning it.
"Good morning," he said.
Sky looked at Exalibar. Exalibar looked at the scorched crater. Then he bent down, picked up his gauntlet from where he'd left it on the paving stones, and pulled it back on carefully, buying himself a moment to choose his words.
"You're late, Helios" he said.
Ethan glanced at the crater. "You seemed to have it handled."
"We had it handled before you showed up."
"The spider seemed to think otherwise though, wasn't it regenerating? Again?"
"I was handling the spider regenerating."
"You were muttering," Ethan said.
"I was focusing."
Sky, wisely, said nothing. He was looking at his katanas with an expression of intense professional interest in their condition.
Ethan's golden eyes moved between the crater, the ruins of the reception window across the square, the desk lying in three pieces in the middle of the road, and the eight severed spider legs that the regeneration hadn't managed to reclaim before his strike landed.
"The suit," Exalibar said, before Ethan could complete whatever observation he was assembling.
Ethan reached into his jacket and produced a data chip containing the suit's tracking log.
"I left it with Aisha"
Exalibar visibly swallowed whatever he had to say. "The man?"
"Woke up. Remembers very little." A slight pause. "You're welcome."
"I didn't say thank you."
"I know."
The three of them stood in the ruined square as the sun climbed above the skyline. Somewhere distant, the sound of emergency services arriving began to rise the unhurried cavalry that showed up once the actual work was already done.
Sky finally sheathed his katanas. "So," he said. "Breakfast?"
"Someone cooked this morning and I didn't get to eat it," Exalibar said, already turning toward the edge of the square. He pulled out his phone as they walked, already composing the message. Three words.
On my way.
A reply came back in under ten seconds.
The tea is cold.
He almost smiled.
Heat it up.
Heat it up yourself.