He studied Aristides Demetrios for three days before he moved.
The man had a pattern, as men with public identities always have patterns. He lived in a flat in Kolonaki — expensive neighbourhood, old money district, the kind of place where a national hero could walk to a café in his civilian clothes and have the café owner comp his espresso without being asked, because the owner had a photograph on the wall and it would be awkward not to.
He conducted two patrols of Athens per day: morning, roughly seven to nine, covering the northern districts; evening, roughly six to eight, covering the port corridor. He was visible. He wanted to be visible. His whole function in the ecosystem of heroism was visibility — the reassurance of presence, the knowledge that the Olympian was watching.
He was strong. Very strong — the gods had not given him a half-measure. He was fast, had divine durability, and the white and gold armour was not decorative. It had properties. When Korvos had pressed his hand flat against the television set in his hotel room and watched the man's recent fight footage with the sound off, he had been reading the physical language of the impacts — the way Demetrios absorbed hits that would have broken a building's structural integrity, the way he moved, the weight of his body, the specific quality of his footwork when he was comfortable versus when he was at his edge.
He had a tell when he was comfortable. He planted his back foot.
On the third day, Korvos went to where the evening patrol would end — a stretch of waterfront near Piraeus, where Demetrios liked to stand for a few minutes and look at the sea before going home. He had done this at the end of every patrol in the footage going back eighteen months. Creatures of habit, heroes. Their virtue was also their vulnerability; you could not be a reassuring presence without being a predictable one.
He got there two hours early and waited.
* * *
Demetrios landed at the waterfront at 07:43.
He did not immediately notice Korvos, because Korvos was standing in the shadow of a cargo crane forty meters away, perfectly still in the way that two thousand years of practice in small spaces produces — a stillness that was not absence but was close enough to absence that inattentive eyes moved past it.
Then the chain moved.
It went out low and fast, a single link snapping the distance between them, and it caught Demetrios across the shin just above the ankle — not with full force, not yet, just enough to announce itself. The sound it made against the armor was sharp and clean.
Demetrios turned. He saw the mask and he saw the chain and he said: "Who are you?"
"Someone you were not expecting," Korvos said.
Demetrios launched himself forward — not the slow gathering of momentum that telegraphs intention, but the immediate explosive acceleration of a man who had trained his entire superhuman career to move before a threat could establish itself. He covered the forty meters in two seconds, fist raised, impact incoming.
The chain met him.
Not as a block — the chain was not a shield. It met him as a redirect, a single long loop thrown wide and then snapped tight at the last moment so that the force of his own charge was leveraged sideways, spinning him off his axis. He went into the side of the crane with his shoulder instead of his fist connecting with Korvos's chest, and the metal buckled around him with a sound like a car accident.
He came out of the crater in the crane's side immediately — that divine durability was real, the impact had done nothing to him — and this time he was more careful, circling, reading the chain. He had fought with chain-users before. He understood, or thought he understood, how chains worked.
He did not understand how this one worked.
The chain did not move like a weapon in an arm. It moved like a second body, fully articulated, with its own relationship to momentum and gravity that was independent of what Korvos's physical form was doing. While Demetrios's eyes were tracking the arc of chain going left, the loose end on the right had already changed direction, and it hit him across the jaw hard enough to rock him back two steps.
He recalibrated fast — that was his training. He stopped trying to track the chain and rushed past it, directly at Korvos, reasoning that closing the distance would negate the weapon's advantage.
It was a sound theory. It was wrong.
At close range the chain became something different — not a long-range strike, but a binding mechanism, and Korvos had two centuries of practice making it one. Four links went around Demetrios's right arm before he registered it, and then the chain went taut and the leverage pulled the arm backward at an angle the shoulder was not designed for, and even with divine durability the joint screamed, and Demetrios went down to one knee.
He recovered. He always recovered. That was what the gods had built into him — the capacity to keep getting up.
Korvos let him.
He needed the next part to mean something.
Demetrios got up and charged again, and this time the chain went for the throat — a full loop, not a strike but a wrap, and Korvos walked backward with it to control the distance and let Demetrios's own forward momentum do what it was going to do. The chain tightened with his movement. And then Korvos placed his free hand on the links at the back of the neck, and pushed.
The Temporal Touch went into the chain at the contact point. Just there. Just where the divine armour had no coverage, just where skin met star-iron. He did not age Demetrios. He aged the moment — pressed the divine protection at the throat backward through time until it reached the specific point at which it had not yet been granted, and in that gap, the chain was just metal against skin.
Metal against skin, at that pressure, did what it did.
Demetrios stopped moving.
The waterfront was quiet. The sea made its sounds. Korvos held the chain's position for a moment longer than necessary — not out of cruelty, exactly, but because the Boy needed to be sure. Then he let the chain down.
He dragged it deliberately across the concrete as he walked away — not to leave a signature. Because he had always carried it this way. Because it was his and he moved with it. Because the sound it made against stone was the sound his name had come from.
Let them hear it.
Let them know something had been here.
He was in his hotel room in Athens by nine. He sat on the bed with the mask in his hands and looked at the wall.
The Boy was quiet, which was unusual after something like this. The Architect was running implications.
The Olympian. Given everything by the gods who gave Korvos nothing. The receiving end of the exact generosity that Korvos had never been the object of.
It was not satisfaction. It was something colder and more permanent than satisfaction.
It was the first payment on an account two thousand years in arrears.
He left Athens the next morning.