The portals burned at the edges the way portals always burned — the specific visual violence of interrupted space, the air around each one distorting briefly before stabilising into the clean oval geometry of a fully opened gate. They were large. Each one large enough that what came through didn't need to compress itself, didn't need to fold or reduce or negotiate with the opening. They came through at full size, which communicated something specific about whoever had opened the portals.
Whoever had sent these knew what they were sending them against.
Four portals. Four myths emerging. The group had a moment — the specific compressed moment between a thing being identified and a thing being addressed — to take stock of what was coming.
SSS class. All of them. Flying myths, built for exactly this environment — the open sky over open ocean, no terrain to use, no ground to stand on, the specific advantage of creatures that were native to altitude. A pair of storm hawks, the wingspan of each one spanning twenty metres, the electrical discharge running along their feathers visible even at this distance. Something serpentine and winged that moved through the air with the fluid efficiency of something that had evolved specifically for aerial combat. A fourth shape that was harder to classify, its silhouette wrong in the way of things that had been made rather than grown, the geometry of it too deliberate for natural evolution.
"Four SSS class myths," Kylie said. "Over open ocean. On a plane."
"Yes," said Winters.
"I'm noting that this is a bad situation."
"Also noted," said Winters.
The pilot had the plane banking already — not running, the myths were faster than the plane and running was a calculation that didn't work out — but buying time, the specific professional response of someone who understood their vehicle's limitations and was working within them rather than against them.
"We can't fight from the plane," Kiyandra said. "Not four SSS class. Not at this altitude with this much restriction."
"We need to be outside," Levi said.
"Outside the plane," Kylie said. "At altitude. Over open ocean."
"Yes."
"I have something," Priscilla said.
✦ ✦ ✦
Everyone looked at her.
She was standing in the cabin with the specific quality of stillness she had when she'd made a decision and was in the process of implementing it rather than discussing it. Her spear was orbiting at combat radius. Her expression had the focused inward quality of someone accessing something they'd been working on privately.
"A spell," she said. "I've been developing it. It's not finished — the theory is complete, the execution needs field testing." She looked at the group. "This qualifies as field testing."
"What does it do?" Levi asked.
"Levitation," she said. "My telekinesis applied externally to people rather than objects. I've been working on the range and duration — I can hold multiple people simultaneously if I have enough focus and if the contacts are established properly." She paused. "I need to place a mark on each of you. A point of contact that anchors the connection. Then I need time to charge the spell before it activates."
"How much time?" Winters asked.
"Enough that someone needs to keep the myths off the plane while I work," she said.
Winters looked at the cockpit, where the pilot was running every evasion the plane had available, and then at the rear window, where three of the four SSS class myths were now visible and closing. "We can manage that," he said.
"There's a condition," Priscilla said. "Once the levitation activates, it requires sustained concentration. I have to remain stationary and focused. If my concentration breaks—"
"The levitation drops," Levi said.
"Yes. So I stay on the plane." She looked at each of them in turn. "You go outside."
A brief silence.
"Alright," said Levi. "Do it."
She moved through the cabin with the efficiency of someone who had rehearsed this in her head enough times that the physical execution was just the last step. Her right hand to each forehead — Levi first, then Winters, then Kylie, then Kiyandra. The mark she left was subtle, a faint geometric impression that caught the light briefly and then settled, the specific signature of her telekinetic ability establishing its anchor point.
Then Levi touched each of the others, his lightning leaving a faint warmth at each mark — a secondary anchor alongside hers, his Flux paired with her telekinesis.
"Why his mark too?" Kylie asked.
"Belt and suspenders," Priscilla said. "My concentration is the primary anchor. His flux is the secondary. If one wavers the other compensates." She moved to the centre of the cabin and sat down cross-legged with the deliberate ease of someone choosing their position carefully. Her spear lowered to a horizontal orbit around her at knee height, the slow rotation of something keeping watch. "Buy me time."
"How much?" Kiyandra asked.
"You'll know when it's ready," Priscilla said, and closed her eyes.
✦ ✦ ✦
The rear door opened.
The sound of open air at altitude came in again — the specific roar of wind over ocean, colder than before because they'd lost altitude during the evasion, the ocean closer beneath them than it had been. The light was going, the grey of the sky deepening toward the grey-blue of early evening over water.
The storm hawks were close. The nearest one banked toward the open door as if it had been waiting for the opening, its wingspan filling the frame, the electrical discharge along its feathers building toward a directed strike.
Winters stepped out.
Not out of the plane — onto the plane. He stepped from the open door to the fuselage roof in the specific movement of someone who had decided the roof was more useful than the interior and the wind was not a factor. He placed both feet on the metal surface and the cold ran up through his boots and he was in his element in the specific way that made the wind and the altitude and the exposed position simply conditions rather than threats.
The storm hawk fired.
He took it on the snowflake shield and let the discharge disperse and sent ice back along the same channel — not a block but a counter, the specific targeting of someone who understood that electrical attacks had trajectories and trajectories could be reversed. The storm hawk pulled up hard, its own discharge coming back at it along the path it had sent, the surprise of it visible in the sudden change of its flight pattern.
Levi came through the door and went up.
Not onto the fuselage — up, the lightning carrying him vertical from the doorframe in a burst that took him ten metres above the plane in a second. He looked down at the myth configuration from above and the configuration made more sense from up here — the storm hawks covering the flanks, the serpentine myth running parallel to the plane at distance, the fourth shape holding back and watching.
He went for the second storm hawk.
—
Below on the fuselage Winters was managing the first storm hawk with the methodical precision of someone who had read its attack patterns in the first exchange and was applying that reading systematically. Ice constructs — not elaborate, functional, barriers and channels and the specific application of cold force to a creature whose primary weapon was electrical and whose primary weakness was anything that disrupted the conditions electrical discharge required.
The twins came through the door together.
They stood on the fuselage in the wind for exactly the moment it took to find each other's frequency — the half-second of chi alignment that preceded their trance state — and then they separated, Kylie going left toward the serpentine myth pacing the plane on the port side, Kiyandra going right toward the fourth shape which had finally begun its approach from the starboard quarter.
Kylie looked at the serpentine myth. It looked at her. It moved like water moved — not in the way of things that resembled water but in the way of things that understood fluid dynamics in their bones, each motion leading into the next without pause or commitment. She watched it for three seconds, identified the pattern, and launched her chi.
On the starboard side Kiyandra faced the fourth shape.
Up close it was clearer and more wrong than it had been at distance. The geometry of it was deliberate — deliberately asymmetric, the specific wrongness of something that had been designed to disorient opponents whose abilities relied on reading physical structure. Her chi spatial sense ran across its surface and found things that didn't resolve.
She hit it anyway.
—
Then Priscilla's spell activated.
It arrived as a sensation rather than an instruction — the specific feeling of the ground being replaced by something else, something that offered the same resistance to downward movement but was neither ground nor surface. Levi felt it through the mark on his forehead, the telekinetic anchor establishing itself with the particular warmth of Priscilla's ability fully deployed.
He stopped moving his lightning.
He didn't fall.
He hung in the air over the ocean and let the information of it settle through him — the absence of the constant lightning expenditure that aerial movement required, the specific freedom of being suspended without cost — and then he looked at the storm hawk which had banked and was coming back for another run.
He went toward it without spending a single volt on altitude.
Below him, on and above the fuselage, the others had the same realisation in their own ways. Winters stepped off the fuselage and remained at altitude. The twins pushed off simultaneously and the chi that had been partially occupied with maintaining their footing on the moving fuselage was suddenly entirely available for combat.
Kylie's chi blazed. Kiyandra's chi blazed.
From inside the cabin, Priscilla sat with her eyes closed and her spear orbiting and the spell running at full extension through four anchor points, the sustained concentration of someone doing something difficult and doing it correctly.
The sky went busy.
✦ ✦ ✦
It lasted eleven minutes.
Levi didn't count them — the eleven minutes was a retroactive accounting, the kind of number that only made sense after the fact. In the moment there was only the storm hawk and the electrical counter-exchange and the specific work of addressing a creature that had been flying longer than he'd been alive. He found its pattern eventually, the way he found everything eventually, and the Electric Vortex closed it out at the nine-minute mark.
Winters took the first storm hawk apart methodically over approximately ten minutes, the ice constructs accumulating in the storm hawk's environment until the storm hawk's environment was no longer the open sky but a constrained channel of Winters' making, and constrained channels had predictable ends.
The twins' fights were faster. The serpentine myth was fast and fluid and Kylie was faster and more fluid in the trance state, the chi finding the one transition state the serpent had at minute seven. The fourth shape was harder — the deliberate wrongness of its geometry resisting Kiyandra's chi spatial sense until she stopped trying to read it and started treating it as a space rather than a thing, her chi running around it rather than at it and finding the edges the asymmetric design had tried to hide.
Minute eleven. Four SSS class myths addressed.
Levi came back to altitude above the plane and looked at the others — the quick inventory, everyone present, everyone functional — and allowed himself three seconds to acknowledge that the levitation spell had changed everything about that fight. Without it they would have been managing four SSS class myths from a moving fuselage. With it they had been free.
He looked at the plane below him.
Through the cabin windows he could see the interior. The pilot at the controls. Priscilla sitting cross-legged in the centre of the cabin, eyes closed, the spear orbiting.
He started to descend.
"Good work," Kylie said, from somewhere to his left. She sounded slightly surprised, in the way of someone who had expected something difficult and found it merely hard.
"The spell," Kiyandra said. "We need to tell Priscilla—"
✦ ✦ ✦
The ocean opened.
There was no other word for it. The surface of the water below the plane didn't break — breaking implied resistance, implied a surface asserting itself against what was moving through it. The ocean simply opened, the way a mouth opened, because that was what it was.
The scale of it was not immediately processable.
The upper jaw alone was wider than the plane's wingspan. The lower jaw, rising from beneath the surface simultaneously, caught the last of the evening light on something that was neither scale nor skin but the specific surface material of something that existed at depths where light didn't reach and had come up anyway. The geometry of the head was wrong in the way of leviathan class myths — the specific wrongness of something that had been here before the continents were where they were, that had been here when the ocean was a different shape.
It didn't slow down.
It didn't announce itself or adjust its trajectory or indicate any awareness of the things in the air above it. It came up at the plane with the specific purposefulness of something that had identified what it wanted and was taking it, the jaws widening on the approach, the plane-sized gap between them receiving the aircraft with the specific precision of something that had measured first.
The plane went in.
The jaws closed.
The ocean closed over them.
Levi hung in the air where the plane had been and looked at the surface of the water below him, which was already settling, already returning to the grey-blue evenness of open ocean at dusk, already becoming the kind of surface that didn't show what was underneath it.
Priscilla was in the plane.
The pilot was in the plane.
The leviathan was already gone, the depth swallowing the scale of it the way the ocean swallowed everything — without comment, without acknowledgment, without any indication that something significant had just moved through it.
The levitation dropped.
Not all at once — Priscilla's concentration hadn't broken, it had been interrupted, and the distinction mattered in the specific way of an anchor that had been cut rather than released. The four of them felt it go at the same moment, the specific loss of the support that hadn't felt like support until it wasn't there.
Levi's lightning caught him before he dropped more than a metre.
He looked at the ocean.
Then he looked at the others.
Winters was looking at the water with the expression he wore when he was running an inventory and finding the result unacceptable. The twins were looking at each other with the specific communication of people who had just watched something happen that didn't have a response yet.
The sky was empty. The ocean was flat. The evening was going.
"Priscilla," Kylie said.
Nobody answered.
The ocean said nothing.