He looked at them. He attacked.
The speed of the demi-god form was categorically different from the speed of what they'd been fighting. Levi telestrided and was still hit — not cleanly, but the margin was gone, the gap between his speed and Hercules' speed almost closed. Sylvia's enhancement form couldn't track it at all. They went through buildings together, Hercules driving them, the city taking the damage.
Levi lost consciousness at some point in the middle of it. He came back to rubble and Sylvia's voice on the comms and the specific darkness of being buried under structural material.
✦ ✦ ✦
Priscilla had seen the vortex from the 1st quarter.
She'd known it was them — the specific combination of fire and electricity, the scale of it. She'd cleared her area, left the remaining MKs to hold, and flown toward the crater with three others from her squadron who'd volunteered.
She found them in the rubble two streets from the crater — unconscious, buried, Hercules nowhere visible but the damage trail pointing clearly back toward the centre. She pulled them free with her telekinesis, checked them both, established they were alive, and lifted.
"Hospital," she said, to the squadron members with her. "Run interference if anything comes at us."
She flew.
The city moved below her — the damage, the cleared streets, the distant sounds of the fourth wave still being managed in other quarters. Levi was breathing. Sylvia was breathing. They were both in the specific state of people whose bodies had received more than they could process and had shut down to manage it.
Sylvia stirred. "Priscilla?"
"Don't move. I'm taking you to the hospital. Both of you."
"Levi—"
"He's here. He's alive. Don't move."
Behind her, the squadron MKs reported contact. She didn't turn. She flew faster.
The thing that hit her from the side wasn't something she'd tracked — it came through a building face and caught her in the ribs and sent all three of them sideways. She got the Flux up in time to keep Levi and Sylvia from hitting anything hard, but the impact knocked her into a facade and she went down.
She was on the street. Levi and Sylvia were three metres away. Her ribs were reporting something significant.
She looked up.
Hercules was walking toward her.
The squadron MKs were behind him, not pursuing. She didn't look at why.
"Great Repulse," she said, and released it.
The force that left her hands was the full output she'd used against the military at the Levatian border — the spell that had reshaped the landscape, sent jeeps and helicopters a mile backward. She directed every particle of it at Hercules.
He slowed.
He didn't stop.
He walked through it — one step, then another, the force pressing against him and failing to move him, the ground cracking beneath his feet under the competing pressures. She poured more into it. He kept coming. She felt the reserves she'd been careful with since Gabriel's training emptying in real time.
He stopped in front of her. The Great Repulse was still running. It wasn't moving him.
"Do not blame yourself," he said. His voice in the demi-god form had the resonance of something that operated at a different frequency from ordinary matter. "Your spell is powerful. My will is stronger." He looked at her with something that wasn't cruelty — something more like the acknowledgment one combatant gives another. "Now feel the full might of Hercules."
She released the Great Repulse and pulled him instead.
Gravitate — full force, all of it, catching him mid-speech with the directional switch, the sudden inward acceleration pulling him off-balance. Then she concentrated everything remaining into her fist and drove it into his face with the Repulse behind it.
The force shattered his skull.
Hercules flew.
Priscilla stood in the street and breathed. She was empty — truly empty, the reserves gone, the ability present but with nothing to run it. She looked at Levi and Sylvia. She looked at the direction Hercules had gone.
She lifted them and flew.
—
"Priscilla?"
Sylvia was conscious, barely, held in the telekinetic field beside her.
"I'm here," Priscilla said. "How far is the hospital?"
"Few more streets. Is Levi—"
"He's here."
"That skull punch," Sylvia murmured. "I saw that. That was—"
"Not enough," Priscilla said. "He'll regenerate. Just like Levi said." She watched the sky ahead. "We need to be gone before he does."
Behind them, something in the direction Hercules had gone rumbled.
She flew faster.
The energy beams came from above — not aimed, seeded across a wide area, the demi-god form's equivalent of area denial. She moved through them with what she had left, the spatial awareness reading trajectories and finding paths. One clipped her shoulder. She absorbed it and kept moving.
Then she saw the shadow.
Above them, descending, Hercules had jumped from ground level to the sky and was coming down at her position with the specific calculation of something that had extrapolated her trajectory and placed itself ahead of it.
She had no speed left to use. No reserves. Nothing to dodge with.
She had one option.
She released Levi and Sylvia — the telekinetic field setting them down on a rooftop two metres below — and turned to face what was coming.
Hercules landed on her.
The impact drove her through the rooftop and into the floor below and through that floor and into the street. The building came down around them, section by section, the structural cascade of something that had been asked to absorb more than architecture was designed for.
When it stopped, there was rubble.
And silence.
On the rooftop fragment that remained — two metres above where Priscilla had been — Sylvia came back to consciousness. She looked at the rubble below. At Hercules, standing on top of it. At the complete absence of Priscilla.
Hercules looked up at her.
"Oh my," he said, with something that sounded almost like surprise. "I appear to have crushed her."
He reached into the rubble.
Sylvia's voice came out of her before she'd decided to speak. It wasn't a word exactly. It was the sound of something breaking.
"You killed her," she said. Then louder. Then she was screaming it — "You killed her, you killed Priscilla—" — and the fire was already up, already past the 3rd form, past anything she'd accessed before, the grief and the rage burning together into something that had no name for it yet.
Hercules straightened, Priscilla's limp form in his hand.
He looked up at Sylvia.
He smiled.
The building came down in sections.
Sylvia watched it happen from the rooftop fragment — the structural cascade of a building that had absorbed more than buildings were designed for, the floors giving way in sequence, the sound of it enormous and final and wrong.
When it stopped, there was rubble.
And silence.
And Hercules standing on top of it.
He reached into the debris with the unhurried motion of someone retrieving something. He straightened. Priscilla was in his hand, limp, her silver light — the 3rd form that had been running continuously since before the fight, the spatial awareness she'd built over months of training — gone.
Sylvia's mind registered this in pieces, each one landing separately.
Priscilla, who had flown forty kilometres with an unconscious ambassador on her own because it was the mission. Priscilla, who had discovered telepathy in a poison fog and treated it as a research opportunity. Priscilla, who had said *who dares disturb my slumber* and been launched out of a car window and come back to catalogue the tactical applications. Priscilla, who had rebuilt herself from the girl who had destroyed a building and the people in it into someone who used that same ability to protect everyone in range.
Hercules looked up at her.
"Oh my," he said. "I appear to have crushed her."
Something in Sylvia tore.
"You killed her." The words came out wrong — too quiet first, then not quiet at all. "You killed her. You killed Priscilla—"
She was screaming it. She didn't decide to scream it. It came from somewhere past decision.
Hercules dropped Priscilla's body and looked at Sylvia with an expression that had nothing apologetic in it. The demi-god aura radiated from him — the wrath and rage of a transformed legend, the kind of presence that should have ended the fight before it started, the kind that had pushed the Great Repulse back step by step until Priscilla had had nothing left.
He smiled.
"Good," he said. "Let that feeling in. Let it be everything."
✦ ✦ ✦
The fire came up.
Not the way it had come up before — not the deliberate activation, not the channelled output of someone who had learned to manage their ability. It came up the way things come up when the person containing them stops containing them. It came up from everywhere at once.
Her fire 3rd form and her enhancement 3rd form had always been separate expressions of the same hybrid ability — two streams running in parallel, switched between, combined in sequence but never simultaneously because simultaneous had always felt like it would cost too much to control. The grief and the rage didn't ask about cost. They simply ran both.
The fusion happened.
The temperature spike was immediate and violent — the ambient air around Sylvia jumping several hundred degrees in the space of a second, the rooftop fragment beneath her feet beginning to soften at the edges. Her hair was fully combusted, but the fire had changed. The tips ran blue — the specific register of heat that existed past what fire was supposed to be capable of, the colour that appeared when combustion operated beyond its ordinary parameters.
Her skin held the amber of the fire form and the particular density of the enhancement form simultaneously. Not layered. Fused. The two white ring tattoos she'd never had before blazed on her forearms and lower legs — the enhancement's signature made visible in a way it never had been, the physical record of two abilities that had finally decided to speak the same language.
Her hands and feet glowed completely white.
She looked at her hands for one moment — the white light, the blue-tipped fire, the heat that made the air itself uncertain about its molecular arrangement — and something settled in her that wasn't calm exactly but was the specific quality of having nothing left to lose and understanding, clearly, what that meant.
Hercules felt her aura shift. The smile changed — still present, but the quality of it had changed. The acknowledgment of a combatant who has just registered that the fight has changed.
"3rd Form: Blazed Furnace," Sylvia said.
And then, to Hercules, with a voice that had gone somewhere past rage and arrived somewhere colder and more total:
"Be ablazed and become ashes, you brute."
The blue-tipped flames rose around her.
Hercules smiled wider.
The fight for Olympicõ entered its final phase.