Hannah threw herself into the path of the inferno at the final heartbeat.
Arms flung wide, body arched like a shield made of flesh and will, she met Henry's roaring wall of fire head-on. The flames struck her torso first—white-orange teeth sinking into her ribs, chewing through cloth in an instant. Her shirt blackened and curled away in glowing flakes. Skin blistered instantly, then split, red muscle shining wet beneath. The heat was so fierce it turned sweat to steam before it could fall; her hair smoked, strands glowing cherry-red at the tips before crisping to ash.
Yet she stood.
A dark silhouette inside a living furnace.
"H-Hannah…?" Alfie Sr.'s voice cracked behind her, small and trembling. His eyes caught the firelight and gleamed with sudden, fragile hope.
"Get out. Now." Her words cut through the roar—cold, flat, emotionless as a blade drawn from ice.
Alfie Sr. didn't hesitate again. He seized Junior's wrist and yanked. The boy stumbled, legs churning, tears streaking through dirt. They fled down the tunnel, shadows stretching long and frantic behind them.
"Thank you so much!" Junior's voice cracked once, high and breaking, before distance swallowed it.
Hannah remained rooted in the blaze.
Gary hovered a few feet away, head cocked, mouth twisted in smug confusion.
"Huh? Who the fuck are you?"
Henry's fists tightened; tiny tongues of flame danced between his knuckles like living serpents.
"And what the fuck are you doing helping these peasants? You're not on their side, right?"
Hannah lifted her chin, firelight painting half her face gold, the other half shadow.
"What if I was?"
Twin grins—sharp and identical—flashed across their faces.
Then they moved.
Two armored bodies slammed into her at once. The collision sounded like a car wreck compressed into a single heartbeat: metal screeching, concrete powdering, ribs creaking. She was driven backward through the wall as though it were wet paper. Rebar snapped like dry twigs. Dust billowed outward in a choking gray halo. She hit the far side so hard the floor beneath them buckled and collapsed inward, revealing a vast, hollow void below—black and empty, a forgotten stomach in the city's guts.
They didn't pause to wonder.
They just started punching.
Fists blurred—left, right, left—each impact blooming with sparks of blood and pulverized stone. Hannah's head snapped sideways, then back, then sideways again. A tooth skittered across the cracked floor like a tiny die. Her cheekbone caved with a wet crunch. Blood sprayed in fine red arcs that caught the firelight and glittered like rubies.
She kicked.
Her boot caught Henry square in the sternum. He staggered back one step, surprise flickering behind his visor. Hannah twisted and drove her fist into his jaw—bone cracked like porcelain under a hammer. Teeth flew. Blood misted the air in a brief scarlet cloud.
Gary lunged from the side, right hook already whistling. Hannah raised her forearm; the punch landed with a meaty slap. She countered instantly—jab to his solar plexus that folded his armor inward, then an uppercut that snapped his head back so violently his neck vertebrae popped audibly.
Henry seized her wrist. His palm opened.
Inferno flames erupted in a roaring jet—bright white at the core, deep orange at the edges, twisting like a living serpent. The stream struck her chest and exploded outward, swallowing her torso. She twisted violently and shot upward in a wide, desperate spiral, flames chasing her like a comet's tail.
Gary flew in from her blind side.
He exhaled hard. A thick, churning fog of white frost blasted from his mouth. It struck the tunnel walls and instantly grew—jagged pillars of ice spearing upward, blocking her path. Hannah smashed through the first barrier; frozen shards exploded outward like broken glass, slicing shallow lines across her arms and face. She didn't see the second wall coming.
Freeze.
Ice clamped around her mid-flight, locking arms and legs against the wall in a crystalline coffin. The fire stream kept coming—rushing, roaring, growing brighter.
She screamed—a single, guttural sound of pure refusal—and shattered the ice. Cracks raced outward like lightning. Shards detonated in every direction. She lunged, seized Gary by the throat, spun him once like a rag doll, and held him directly in the path of his friend's flames.
The inferno slammed into Gary's back.
His armor glowed red instantly. He roared in panic, palms thrusting forward. Twin jets of biting white cold spiraled out of him—jagged, crystalline streaks that stabbed into the oncoming fire. Steam erupted in a blinding white wall; the two forces collided with a sound like a thousand panes of glass shattering at once. Fire hissed, ice cracked, water flashed to vapor.
"STOP!" Gary's voice cracked, raw with terror.
Henry cut the flames. He stared—saw Gary, not Hannah, shielding himself.
Hannah didn't hesitate.
She slammed Gary face-first into the wall. Concrete spiderwebbed. She started pounding—left, right, left—each punch landing with the wet sound of meat tenderized by a mallet. Blood sprayed across the stone in rhythmic arcs.
Henry grabbed her hair from behind and yanked her head back. His fists rained down—short, vicious hooks that split her eyebrow, crushed her nose, pulped her lips. Then he opened both palms.
Her entire body ignited.
Flames erupted across her skin in a roaring sheet—hair flashing to ash, flesh blackening in curling patches. She didn't scream. She simply wrapped both arms around Gary in a crushing embrace and pulled him into the blaze with her.
Gary panicked. Frost exploded outward from his palms, freezing them both solid in an instant—two statues locked in a burning embrace. Henry and Gary reared back together and struck the ice block at the same moment. It detonated in a spray of glittering fragments.
Henry stepped forward. Both hands opened wide.
A full-bore flamethrower roared out—dense, white-hot, swallowing Hannah whole.
She screamed.
The sound wasn't human. It was a supersonic blade—high, piercing, cutting straight through the air. The shockwave slammed into Gary and Henry like twin sledgehammers to the skull.
"Shit!" Gary clutched his ears; blood trickled between his fingers.
"The fuck was that?!" Henry snarled, crimson leaking from both ear canals.
Hannah lunged.
She snatched Henry off the ground by the throat and flew—hard—carrying him far from Gary in a single violent streak.
One-on-one. Her only chance.
Henry threw a left hook. She ducked. Uppercut—Henry slipped it. He drove a flaming fist into her stomach; the blast threw her backward into stone. He charged again. She weaved, kicked him into the wall—cracks raced outward like lightning.
Before she could follow, he opened both hands—another streaming torrent of fire. She took it full in the chest, then closed the distance while he was committed. He kept punching with one hand, the other pouring flame in an unbroken river.
She caught his next punch between her teeth.
Teeth closed.
They didn't shatter.
They tore.
Flesh and bone parted with a wet, ripping sound. Blood sprayed in a hot arc across her face. She ripped his hand apart and landed a right hook that caved his jaw and fractured his skull in the same brutal instant.
Henry roared—pure animal rage. The sound itself blasted her backward; his flames surged hotter, brighter, blue-white at the core.
He began firing fireballs—each one a compact sun that detonated on impact, filling the tunnel with smoke and orange glare.
Hannah flew through them—dodging, weaving, closing distance. Henry panicked. He unleashed one final blast—a solid wall of fire that swallowed the entire passage.
When the flames cleared, she was gone.
Only her charred shirt lay on the ground, still smoking.
"Fuck you, bitch…" Henry muttered, smiling through blood and broken teeth.
BOOM.
A fist came from behind and drove straight through the back of his skull.
Hannah's arm emerged from his face in a fountain of bone and brain matter. She'd punched clean through. Henry dropped—dead before he hit the floor.
"Now," Hannah said, voice cold and flat, "where was that other one?"
She was shirtless now, burns weeping across her torso, skin blackened and cracked. She stripped Henry's shirt off his corpse and pulled it on over the ruin of her body.
Every breath Hannah took now felt like swallowing broken glass. Each inhale sliced deeper into her ruined lungs. Blood ran in thick, steady streams from her nose and split lips, dripping from her chin to pool beneath her boots in a dark, spreading mirror. Her legs trembled violently; she could only stand because sheer stubbornness refused to let her fall. The borrowed shirt clung wetly to her burns, the fabric already stiffening with drying blood and charred skin.
"Henry?! Holy shit!" Gary's voice cracked—real fear, high and jagged, stripping away every layer of smugness he'd worn like armor.
"You… what did you DO?!"
He lunged.
A single, monstrous shape moved faster than sight.
Knox Maiden appeared in the flickering tunnel light like a nightmare stepping out of shadow. One arm blurred forward. His fist met Gary's charging chest with a sound like a sledgehammer driven through wet plywood. Armor crumpled inward. Ribs snapped like dry branches. The punch continued through—clean, surgical—until Knox's fingers closed around the still-beating heart.
He ripped it free in one smooth, casual pull.
Blood fountained in a bright red arc, painting the wall behind Gary in dripping streaks. The heart glistened wetly in Knox's grip, still twitching, still pumping uselessly. Gary's eyes widened in shock and disbelief. One hand reached up, fingers splayed, grasping at the empty cavity in his own chest as though he could somehow put it back. A single wet gasp escaped his mouth—half surprise, half plea—then his legs buckled. He collapsed forward in a boneless heap, blood spreading beneath him in a rapid, glossy pool.
Hannah stared, chest heaving, unable to process the speed, the ease, the finality of it.
"Knox?!"
Every instinct screamed at her to run.
She knew it was pointless.
So she screamed instead—a full-throated, primal warrior's roar that tore from the bottom of her shredded lungs—and launched herself forward with everything left in her broken body.
Her right fist came up in a perfect arc, every muscle screaming in protest, aimed straight for Knox's face.
He didn't flinch.
He didn't even step.
He simply raised one hand and caught her fist mid-flight.
The impact shockwave exploded outward—air cracking like a whip. Knox's hair whipped backward violently. Hannah's arm locked rigid; she felt the bones in her wrist grind and threaten to splinter under the immovable grip.
"Do you really think you can stop me?" he asked, voice calm and cold as a glacier.
He answered with his own punch.
His fist struck her face like a cannon shot. The force lifted her clean off her feet and sent her flying backward through the tunnel. Her body tumbled end over end—hair whipping, blood spraying in fine droplets—until the far wall stopped her with a sickening crunch of concrete and spine.
She was still airborne when Knox closed the distance.
He rammed into her mid-flight—shoulder first—like a battering ram made of meat and rage. The collision sounded like two cars meeting head-on. Her back slammed into the ceiling; plaster rained down. Before she could fall, he was on her again—hammer-fist to the sternum, driving her straight downward. She hit the floor so hard the concrete cratered in a perfect five-foot radius around her. A spiderweb of cracks raced outward. Dust billowed up in a choking cloud.
Knox didn't pause.
He charged again—sonic booms cracking behind each step. He slammed into her like a missile. Then again. And again. Fists blurred into a relentless storm—left hook splitting her eyebrow open to the bone, right cross crushing her cheek until it collapsed inward, uppercut snapping her head back so violently her teeth clacked together and blood sprayed in a fan across his armor.
He seized her face in one massive hand—fingers digging into ruined flesh—and began smashing her skull against the wall.
Once.
The first impact rang like a gong—bone on stone.
Twice.
A wet crack as her occipital bone flexed.
Ten times.
Each strike faster, harder, more deliberate—her head leaving smears of blood and hair on the concrete with every collision.
"Is this what you wanted?!"
"Helping them is what you wanted, didn't you! You knew this was going to be the outcome! Yet you still did it, how PATHETIC can you BE?!"
"Is this what your ENTIRE life has lead up to?! Dying to help some maggots who will forget you in a few DAYS?!"
He accelerated—head slams coming in a brutal rhythm, faster, harder, the wall behind her beginning to crater inward from the repeated impacts.
Then he released her.
Hannah's body slid down the wall in a slow, boneless collapse—legs splayed, arms limp, head lolling forward. She hit the ground in a wet heap.
She was still breathing—shallow, wet, bubbling gasps. Each one felt like knives twisting deeper into her lungs. Blood frothed at her lips with every exhale.
Knox knelt beside her, calm, almost gentle.
"I will never forget this, Hannah."
He began to pound her face again.
Fist after fist—methodical, merciless.
"No matter how much you help them—" three brutal downward strikes, each one flattening what remained of her nose and splitting skin to the bone—"no matter how strong they get—" three more, the impacts wet and meaty now, blood and saliva spraying with every blow—"you know, and you always did—"
Again and again.
Each punch heavier.
Wetter.
More final.
"NOBODY WILL EVER TAKE THE RICH DOWN!"
The last punch landed with the sound of a melon splitting under a mallet.
Hannah's body jerked once—then went still.
No more breathing.
No more movement.
Knox stood slowly. Looked down at his fists—coated to the wrists in blood and tissue.
"I'm gonna get in trouble for this. I should've brought you in to Sovereign."
He sighed, almost tired.
"But oh well. He'll understand. I was blinded by rage. Sovereign will understand. He always did."
He flew away—boots lifting silently off the floor, vanishing into the dark tunnel without another sound.
Hannah's body lay in the flickering half-light, waiting to rot.
Alfie Sr. and Junior crept back from the shadows where they'd hidden. They stopped several feet away, unable to come closer.
"Hannah… I'm sorry… I'm so sorry…" Alfie Sr. whispered, voice breaking. Tears fell freely, cutting clean tracks through the grime on his face.
Milo and Aya arrived moments later, chests heaving, boots skidding on blood-slick concrete.
"Oh my god…" Aya's hands flew to her mouth, eyes wide and glassy.
Hannah lay motionless.
Her face was no longer recognizable as anything human—pulped meat, charred bone, one eye burst and leaking clear fluid, the other staring blankly upward at nothing. Blood had spread in a wide, dark lake beneath her, soaking into cracks and pooling in low places. The borrowed shirt was soaked crimson and black.
The four of them stood in silence, staring down at the woman who had just died for them.
No one spoke.
There was nothing left to say.