The fight had been running for seven minutes when Scarlett realised the battle was going in her, so she stepped back and reached into her jacket.
Levi watched her pull out a blood bag. Open it. Drink it with the same unhurried manner she brought to everything — as if this were a routine rather than an escalation.
"Whose blood is that," he said while cringing at the sight.
"An electric Evogre. SS class." She dropped the empty bag. "I prepared it for this contingency."
He processed this. "You had a blood bag of an SS class myth ready in case you needed it."
"I prepare for the range of possibilities." She looked at him with the bright expression of someone who found their own work interesting. "The synthesis takes thirty seconds. You're welcome to try interrupting it."
He did try.
He pushed every angle during the thirty seconds, working the telestride into sequences he hadn't used yet, trying to find an entry that would break her concentration. She managed her defence while the synthesis ran — the blood ability operating at a biological level that didn't require her full attention to maintain. He landed three hits. She sealed the wounds before they bled and kept going.
The dome formed anyway.
Crimson electricity sparked through it — his frequency, his signature, running through the medium of the Evogre's nature and coming out wrong in the way that a copy is wrong: recognisable but off, the electricity obeying her rather than being her. The dome dissolved and Scarlett was different.
Taller. Heavier. Two extra arms had grown on either side of her torso, each hand crackling with red-shifted current. She flexed all four hands, testing, and the borrowed electricity ran through her swords like something that had finally found its channel.
"Now the field is level," she said.
"You have four arms and my lightning," Levi said. "I'd say you're ahead."
"Then close the gap with something else." She raised her swords. "Show me what you actually have."
✦ ✦ ✦
The fight shifted.
The speed differential was gone — she had his speed now, borrowed and imprecise but functional. What remained was technique and creativity and the specific advantage of someone who had grown up with his ability versus someone who had acquired it twenty minutes ago.
He worked the telestride in ways he hadn't tried before — not entry points but the spaces between them, the geometry of a fight where both participants could move faster than they should. She stopped tracking positions and started reading patterns. He changed the patterns. She adjusted. He changed them again.
"Ecstatic Clones Style: Lightning Dagger Dash."
The mirages saturated her peripheral vision and he converted them — every afterimage becoming an attack vector, the combined strikes landing across every surface she had to defend simultaneously. She took the cuts. The blood didn't flow. She sealed it all internally and looked at the damage with the assessment of someone noting the score in a game.
"You'd need to aim for something vital," she said. "Head or heart."
"I know," said Levi.
"But you won't."
He didn't answer that.
He had been watching what she did with the borrowed lightning. She generated bolts and discharged them through her swords — effective, but the technique of someone using a powerful tool they'd only recently acquired. She didn't know what he'd learned: that the electricity wasn't a tool. It was him. It didn't obey him. It was him.
He focused the Flux to a single point.
His right fist. The concentration Melissa had described, the way Sylvia's fire gathered at her knuckles — not distributed, not ambient, dense and specific and present at one point. He held it. Felt it building. The electricity at his hand was different from the electricity across his body — separate, charged, waiting.
Not the complete technique. The prototype. Functional enough.
He moved.
She sent lightning. He cut through it — his own Flux running as a counter-current through his daggers, the borrowed lightning dispersing against the original the way a copy disperses against the thing it was copied from.
All four arms swung simultaneously in an attack that should have been unanswerable.
He telestrided into the gap between them — the fraction of space where four simultaneous attacks left no attack — and drove his right fist into her chest.
The concentrated charge discharged on contact.
It ran through the synthesis — through the blood-mediated connection between Scarlett and the electricity she'd taken from him — and the synthesis destabilised. The extra arms dissolved. The crimson lightning flickered out. Scarlett went to one knee.
She looked at her hands. Then at him.
"You disrupted the synthesis," she said.
"Your borrowed electricity and mine are the same source," he said. "I changed the frequency."
She was quiet for a moment. Something in her expression wasn't what he expected — not anger, not recalculation. Something closer to genuine surprise, from someone who had seen a great deal and wasn't surprised often. "How old are you?"
"Seventeen."
She stood.
The wounds were still sealed. Her own ability was still intact. Both swords still in her hands. The synthesis was gone but Scarlett without synthesis had been more than enough to push him to his ceiling for seven minutes, and she still had everything she'd started with.
"Impressive," she said. "But the fight isn't over."
✦ ✦ ✦
On top of the border wall, Melissa watched.
Priscilla had arrived ten minutes ago — floating above the crossing with the ambassador and Zarraz, both handed off immediately to the medical team Theo had arranged. The ambassador was alive. His pulse was weak but stable, the morphine circle still doing its work, and the doctors were moving fast.
Priscilla had turned around immediately and flown back toward the field.
Melissa had watched her go and said nothing.
Now she stood on the wall and watched the field below — the scorched grass, Jack unconscious against the slope, Sylvia catching her breath in the aftermath of whatever she'd done to him, and Levi standing across from a woman whose synthesis had just been disrupted in a way that Melissa had never seen done before.
"Should we go in?" Theo said, beside her.
"No," said Melissa.
"The bounty is still active. The Empress issued it within the hour — she's the new head of state and she has reach. The Syndicate doesn't stop for borders."
"I know."
"He's seventeen. She's a ranked Syndicate hunter."
"I know that too." Melissa watched Levi across the distance — the Absolute Current still running, the azure discharge steady, the quality of his posture carrying the particular readiness of someone who had just done something they hadn't done before and knew it had worked. "He disrupted her synthesis. In a live fight. At seventeen."
Theo was quiet.
"He doesn't need me," Melissa said. "Not for this. What he needs is to find out what he's capable of when I'm not there." She watched the field. "That's what this whole mission was for."
Below, Scarlett raised her swords.
Below, Levi raised his daggers.
Melissa folded her arms and watched.
✦ ✦ ✦
The field between them was twenty metres of scorched grass and the specific silence of two fighters who had taken each other's measure and were past the stage of conversation.
Scarlett's blood ability was running at full output — every cut sealed, her body optimised, the synthesis gone but her own power fully intact. She held her swords at the angle of someone who had refined a technique over years until it had no waste in it.
Levi's Absolute Current was running at the ceiling of his 3rd form — the continuous azure discharge, the tattoo patterns bright, the fist technique still charged at his right hand, the daggers carrying the counter-current that had disrupted her synthesis. He'd used the prototype once. He knew the shape of it now. His second attempt would be cleaner.
Whether the second attempt would be enough was the question.
He thought about Sylvia on the ground with her ears blown out, still fighting. He thought about Priscilla flying an unconscious ambassador forty kilometres on her own. He thought about Zarraz in a hospital bed with a broken arm, still completing his task with the wrong hand.
He thought about his mother.
The road that lies ahead of you is a painful one. Are you still sure?
He tightened his grip on the daggers.
Scarlett moved.
He moved.
On the border wall, Melissa's expression didn't change.
She watched her student run toward the hardest thing in his path, the way she'd always known he would, and she held her breath.