Like a storm, Jane moved through the city the way lightning moves through a conductor — not choosing a path so much as finding the path of least resistance and burning through it.
Twin daggers out, Flux running hot beneath her skin, she cut through the myths flooding the residential streets with the precise, economical violence of someone who had long since stopped needing to think about it. An A-class myth lunged from a doorway — she sidestepped, opened its throat, kept moving. Two S-class myths flanking her from opposite sides — she dropped low, let them collide with each other, and drove a dagger into the base of each skull on her way back up. She didn't break stride.
The city was in chaos but the chaos had a shape, and she was reading it.
She had almost reached the breach in the eastern wall when a second presence registered — not through sight or sound, but through something deeper, the particular sensitivity that years of Flux training had built in her. A pressure in the air. A weight that didn't belong.
It was moving toward her fast.
Jane had time to raise her daggers in a cross-guard before the impact hit — a blade of pure compressed light that rang against her steel and sent her skidding back twenty feet across the road, boots carving grooves in the asphalt. She absorbed the force through her legs, caught her balance, and looked up.
Horus descended from the dark sky above the street and landed thirty feet ahead of her without a sound, his light filling the road like a second dawn. He was even larger up close. His eyes tracked her with the flat, patient focus of something that did not experience urgency.
Jane straightened up slowly. Rolled her neck. Looked at the god of light standing before her.
"Code purple," she said to herself, quietly.
She shifted her weight onto her back foot — and transformed.
—
High above, from the dark of the upper sky, the mystery man watched the clash begin. Fujin drifted to his side, arriving from the direction of the western quarter, trailing wind behind him like a comet tail. The wind legend was lean and restless-looking, with storm-grey skin and eyes that moved constantly, cataloguing everything. He watched Jane and Horus trade the first exchange of blows — a collision of light and lightning that lit up the entire eastern district and left a crater where a road had been — and let out a low whistle.
"She's fast," he said.
"She's the Purple Ace of Velvetia," the mystery man said, without looking away. "She's amongst the fastest Myth Killers alive. Horus can match her. You can't."
Fujin considered this without visible offense. "So I'm sitting this one out?"
"Horus handles Jane. You handle the rest." The mystery man finally glanced sideways at him, something unreadable in his expression. "The Gate Portal Centers. Make sure nobody leaves the city."
Fujin smiled — slow and easy, the smile of someone who had just been told they could do whatever they wanted. "Say less," he said, and dropped.
✦ ✦ ✦
At the Gate Portal centre in the western district, Quinton arrived in the way Quinton always arrived — loudly, dramatically, at the exact moment the situation was closest to unrecoverable.
"Fear not, citizens!" he announced, touching down in the plaza with his coat fanning out behind him, already gathering his Flux. "Legendary class Myth Killer Quinton is—"
He didn't finish the sentence.
Fujin came down from the sky like a dropped blade. There was no fight, not really — just a brief, ugly exchange that lasted perhaps four seconds, and then silence. The myths in the plaza went very still. The citizens pressed against the walls of the centre, not moving, not breathing.
Fujin straightened up. He was holding something. He looked at it with mild curiosity, the way someone might look at an object they'd picked up without meaning to.
"Hm," he said. "More bark than bite."
He set Quinton's head down on the ground with something almost like care, and turned to face the Gate Portal centre.
✦ ✦ ✦
Being surrounded by myths, Levi had no where to run. The myths came rushing in with claws and weapons out. Vanishing in a blink, Levi telestrided away from harm's way. Appearing behind his attackers with Jasmine, he sprinted through the chaos, myths snarling close behind. Desperation surged, and he summoned his Arcana Flux.
"First Form: Electrified."
Blue sparks crackled across his body, his eyes blazing with shocking light. Energy flooded his limbs, and suddenly he was faster—much faster. He blurred through streets and alleys, outpacing the horde until, at last, he shook them off. They had made it to the roof of a twelve-story building in the northern quarter by going up instead of through — the streets at ground level were impassable, blocked by myths and rubble and the spreading fires from the breach.
He set Jasmine down against the rooftop access door as gently as he could manage. She didn't stir. He checked her arm — broken, badly, the kind that needed a hospital asap. He felt a helplessness that he filed away immediately, because there was nothing he could do about it right now.
He stood and walked to the edge of the roof.
Below, Velvetia was unrecognisable. Fires in the eastern quarter. A quarter of the northern residential blocks reduced to rubble. Myths moving through the streets in packs, and between them, moving much faster than the myths, the scattered bright lines of MK Flux — his people, fighting back, being pushed back. He tracked the lines of conflict automatically, reading the shape of the battle the way his mother had taught him to.
It was going badly.
Then he found her.
Jane and Horus were fighting in the eastern district, and even from this distance, even in the middle of a city falling apart, the scale of it stopped him cold. They moved faster than he could properly track — two streaks of light and electricity crashing into each other above the rooftops, separating, circling, crashing again. Every exchange sent a shockwave rolling outward. Buildings cracked. Windows blew out in cascades of glass. The sky above them was permanently lit, flickering purple and gold, like the world's most catastrophic storm.
His mother was breathtaking.
He'd known she was strong — of course he'd known, everyone knew, she was Jane Baron, the Purple Ace — but knowing it and watching it were different things entirely. She moved with a fluency that made the legendary class myth look like it was working to keep up. Every attack she landed was precise and devastating. Every attack she absorbed she turned into positioning for the next one.
Levi watched and felt something in his chest that was equal parts awe and ache and a fierce, wordless pride.
Then both figures stopped moving.
High in the air above the eastern district, Jane and Horus faced each other across a gap of perhaps thirty metres, both of them gathering everything they had left. Levi watched his mother's hands. Watched the electricity coalesce between her palms — a dense, spinning ball of electrons in her right hand, a mirror charge of positrons in her left, the two fields straining against each other with a sound like reality being wrung out. Horus was doing something too, the light around him thickening and compressing, wrapping him like armour, like fuel.
They released simultaneously.
The explosion that followed was not like the one that had taken the wall. That had been destructive, brutal, final. This was something else — a detonation of two opposing forces meeting at the exact same point at the exact same moment, a white-purple flash that swallowed the entire eastern district for a full second, followed by a pressure wave that rolled outward in every direction and hit the skyscraper like a physical wall.
The roof lurched. Levi grabbed the edge, lost it, felt the building tipping — and then the world was sideways and loud and he was falling.
✦ ✦ ✦
Levi dug himself out of the rubble by feel, hands finding gaps and pushing, ears ringing too loud to hear anything useful. The building had partially collapsed — not fully, but enough that the roof he'd been standing on was now somewhere at street level, distributed across a radius of about forty metres.
He surfaced into dust and smoke and the smell of burning.
"Jasmine!"
Nothing. He turned in a circle, trying to get his bearings through the haze. He dropped to his knees and started moving debris, methodical, working through the shock by working.
He found her arm first. Then the rest of her, curled beneath a section of roofing that had landed at an angle and made a tent over her rather than crushing her. She had a new cut along her jaw and her broken arm had been jolted again, but she was breathing steadily. He exhaled.
He got her onto his back and turned east.
—
He heard his mother before he saw her.
Not her voice — the absence of the sounds that had been coming from the eastern district. The explosions had stopped. The Flux discharge that had been lighting the sky in rotating waves of purple and gold had gone dark. The battle was over, one way or another, and the silence that replaced it was the specific silence of something having been decided.
He found her in the street outside what used to be a residential block, lying on her back in the space between two collapsed walls. Horus was nowhere visible — somewhere under the rubble, most likely, or dispersed. Jane was on her back, one arm across her stomach, and she was very still.
"Mom."
He was kneeling beside her before he'd decided to move. She opened her eyes when she heard his voice — slowly, like lifting something heavy — and something in her face shifted when she saw him. Relief, maybe. Or the thing that sits just underneath it.
"Lee," she said. Her voice was wrong. Too quiet, too careful. The voice of someone managing their breathing.
He looked at her midsection and went cold.
The wound was deep. A light sword wound — he'd never seen one before but he understood what he was seeing — a puncture through the abdomen that glowed faintly at the edges, the surrounding tissue refusing to knit closed the way a normal wound would. Her Arcana Flux was trying. He could see it, the faint electrical shimmer around the injury where her body was attempting to close what it couldn't close. She'd never fully mastered self-healing. The ability was there — somewhere in her Flux, at a depth she hadn't yet reached — but not here, not now, not for this.
"Mom, we need to—"
"Levi." Quiet. Firm. Just his name, but it stopped him completely.
She reached up and found his hand. Her grip was still strong — stubbornly, almost offensively strong given everything — and she held on.
"I need you to listen to me," she said. "And I need you not to fall apart until after."
He pressed his lips together. Nodded once.
"I'm sorry I missed your graduation." A ghost of something crossed her face. "That's not — I mean I'm sorry I won't be there for the rest of it. For the military. For whatever you become. I wanted to be there for that."
"Mom—"
"I know." She squeezed his hand. "You don't have to say anything. Just listen." She paused, gathering herself. "You're going to be remarkable, Lee. Not because of my name — in spite of it. Because of what you are. I've known since you were small." Another pause, shorter. "Your father knew too."
Levi went very still.
Jane reached down with her free hand — slow, painful, deliberate — and unclipped the twin daggers from her belt. She pressed them into his hands. The leather of the sheaths was warm from her body heat.
"These were his," she said. "I carried them because they kept him close. Now you carry them for the both of us." Her eyes held his, steady and clear and heartbreaking. "Don't put them in a display case. Use them. Get into trouble with them. Make us proud."
He couldn't speak. He didn't try.
"End this war, Lee." Her voice was getting quieter now, not weakening so much as settling — the way a fire settles when it's given everything it has to give. "That dream you told me about by the pool. Hold onto it. It's worth holding onto."
She let out a slow breath.
"I love you, kiddo."
"I love you too, Mom."
He felt the moment her grip loosened.
He stayed where he was. The city continued burning around him. Somewhere in the northern quarter, a building groaned and fell. He heard myths moving in the street behind him, still hunting, still searching.
He stayed where he was a little longer.