The call came at 05:47 in the morning, Themyscira local time, and Diana was already awake.
She had been awake since four, which was not unusual. Themyscira kept its own relationship with sleep schedules — warriors who had lived for centuries sometimes found the night more useful than the day, the quiet hours producing a particular quality of clarity. She had been on the training terrace watching the sea when her satellite phone — a concession to the outside world, kept charged and hated — went off in her quarters.
Batman's voice was what it always was: information delivered without preamble.
"Aristides Demetrios is dead. Athens. Last night, waterfront district near Piraeus. You should see the scene."
She was in Athens by 06:30.
* * *
The scene had been cordoned by the Greek national police, but the police captain recognized her and stepped aside without the conversation that would otherwise have been required. She walked the waterfront while he briefed her in rapid Greek.
Demetrios. Found by a man walking his dog. Time of death estimated between seven and eight PM. The medical examiner's initial assessment was acute compression injury to the throat — the word he used was strangulation, but that was not quite right, because strangulation implied a person's hands and this was something else. The marks on the throat were not fingers. They were patterned — a series of parallel compressions, evenly spaced, as though something very long and segmented had been wrapped around him and applied pressure in a way that no single human grip could replicate.
"A chain," she said.
The captain nodded. He pointed to the concrete. She crouched down.
The drag marks were unmistakable once you knew what you were seeing — a continuous furrow, slightly irregular, the width of a thick linked chain, running from the crane to where the body had been found. Forty meters of it. She traced it with her eyes and then looked at the crane, where the shoulder-shaped crater was still clearly readable in the metal.
She stood. She looked at the harbor and thought.
Batman's first analysis had come in while she was in transit: chain-based combat. Target selection: Olympian-connected, explicitly divine-empowered. No collateral. No witnesses identified. Single perpetrator based on scene reading.
She had added her own layer in the air over the Aegean: personal. The way the body was positioned after — not discarded, not displayed. Set down. Deliberately set down. There is intention in how that was done.
She spent three hours at the scene. She talked to the police captain, to the medical examiner, to two officers who had been first on scene. She walked the crane, the waterfront, a fifty-meter perimeter. She came back to the drag marks twice.
What she kept returning to was the noise. The chain dragged across concrete made a specific sound — not quiet, not subtle. It was audible for a hundred meters in still air. He had dragged it the full forty meters on his way out. He could have lifted it. He chose not to.
That was a statement.
She photographed everything. She spent another hour in the police station reading their preliminary file. Then she went to a café near Syntagma and called Batman.
"He's not local," she said. "The style of the combat — the chain use — it's not a technique I recognize from any European fighter in the database. The footwork at the crane, the way Aristides hit the metal — that's not a European martial tradition. That's something else."
"Something old," Bruce said. There was the sound of keys.
"The divine durability on the armor failed," she said. "The armor's protective properties were absent at the throat. That's not possible through physical force alone — you cannot beat divine protection out of existence with a chain, no matter how strong you are. Something else was happening at the point of contact. I don't have a name for it yet."
A pause. She knew what the pause meant.
"Chain combat plus divine targeting plus an unknown secondary power," Bruce said. "Unique profile. No matches."
"No matches," she agreed. "Which means he is either entirely new or he has been somewhere we cannot access for long enough that no record exists."
She drank her coffee. It was very good coffee, which seemed beside the point and was also real.
"He is going to do it again," she said.
"Yes," Bruce said. "Who else in Europe has Olympian-grade divine empowerment?"
She already had the list. She had started building it on the plane.
She told him she needed forty-eight hours in Athens, then she would need to be mobile.
* * ** * *
The train from Athens to Rome via ferry took thirty-one hours.
Korvos spent them in a window seat reading. He had purchased five books at the Athens central train station — history, one on contemporary Greek politics, one broad survey of European geography, one on something called the internet of things which seemed relevant to understanding how information moved through the world he was in, and one novel which he had picked up on an instinct he could not fully explain and which turned out to be a translation of a Japanese work about a man who had lost most of his memory and was reassembling himself from fragments. He read all five before the ferry docked at Brindisi.
The world moved past his window. Mountains and coastline and small towns and then the sea, flat and grey-green and enormous, nothing like the underground springs of Themyscira and nothing like he had assembled from descriptions — larger, more indifferent, more beautiful than either.
He ate on the ferry. His first proper meal in the outside world was a paper tray of fried calamari purchased from a counter near the stern. He ate it standing at the railing watching Italy appear on the horizon and thought that this was an extraordinarily mundane thing to be the first meal of a two-thousand-year-old demigod after his imprisonment.
He kept this observation to himself.
In Rome he rented a room. He spent two days in libraries and online, building the picture of Achilles Warkiller — the name still registered as strange, the contemporary world's tendency to brand its heroes with names that announced their mythology rather than concealing it. He understood the logic: the disclosure was the deterrent. But it was also a ledger of affiliations, a clear listing of who owed what to which divine patron, and in that ledger the Architect read something useful.
Achilles Warkiller. Created by Athena from a template she had designed. Blessed by twelve of the fourteen Olympian gods at the moment of his creation. Given near-invulnerability as a base condition of his existence.
Near-invulnerability given to a created being.
Not near-invulnerability given to a child already in existence, already in need, already spending his years in a room below a palace.
The Boy did not have a word for what it felt when he read this.
The Architect had work to do.
* * *
He found Achilles Warkiller three days into his Rome residence, which was three days longer than it had taken to find Demetrios — because Achilles was more careful, more tactical, operating with the awareness of someone who understood that high-capability divine beings occasionally attracted high-capability threats.
He was not careful enough.
Korvos found him during a patrol of the Trastevere district and followed him for two hours without being detected. He was good — exceptional, by any reasonable standard. But Korvos had spent his first eighteen years learning to track a palace's worth of movement through stone by sound alone, and then two thousand years in a cavern where the only sensory input he had was his hearing. He could follow a target through a crowd with his eyes closed.
He chose the Ponte Sisto bridge at 10:00 PM on a Tuesday — low foot traffic, good acoustics for hearing anyone coming, wide enough for the chain to work in both directions, over water in case the fight went vertical. He positioned himself on the bridge's western parapet and waited.
Achilles came across it at 10:23, on his way back from a call-out in the southern district. He was in civilian clothes — the divine blessing was built in, he did not need armour the way Demetrios had. He was tall and broad and moved with the specific confidence of someone who had never been seriously hurt. His divine protection was not something he wore. It was something he was.
The chain went for his knees first, and he was fast enough to see it coming — he got sideways, took the strike on the outer thigh instead of the joint, and spun to face the direction it had come from with the efficiency of a man who trained constantly and took threats seriously.
"Who are you," he said in Italian, though his eyes said he had his own theories.
Korvos was already moving. The chain went wide right, a misdirection, and when Achilles adjusted for it the second strike came in low left — not a hit but a trip, and Achilles went down to one knee on reflex and then caught himself and rose immediately.
He was fast. Faster than Demetrios. And the durability was a different order entirely — when the chain connected with his left shoulder on the third exchange, a blow that had broken the crane's metal, Achilles rocked and kept moving. The divine blessing absorbed the force differently — not resistance exactly, more like distribution, the impact spreading across his whole body rather than concentrating at the point of contact.
Korvos understood the problem within the first forty seconds.
Physical force was not going to work at scale. The blessing was too deep, too distributed. He could not beat him into submission the way he had beaten Demetrios. He needed to work at a different level.
He bought himself sixty seconds by using the chain in a way that was not a weapon but an environment — looping it across the bridge surface in a rapid figure, creating a web of star-iron that forced Achilles to manage his footing while also tracking the strikes coming from above it. The disruption of movement gave him the contact he needed.
He got both hands on Achilles's right arm at the forearm during a grapple — the closest they came to conventional wrestling — and pushed.
The Temporal Touch was different this time. Not pressing against a specific protection at a specific point. He was reaching into something structural, something that had been woven into the very fabric of this man's existence at the moment of his creation. He could feel it — not as a surface but as a depth, layer on layer of divine intention pressed into biology.
He pressed back.
It resisted. He had expected this. He pressed harder, pulling the feeling of deep time into his hands the way he had practiced in the cavern, finding the specific moment in the past when Athena had sat before a blank template and decided what this person would be.
The blessing cracked. Not completely. But one layer of it gave, and in that gap, the chain connected with something real. The strike to the right arm landed at full force and the arm bent at the elbow in a direction it was not built for. Achilles went down to the bridge stone.
He got up. Because that was what they had built into him — the capacity to take damage that should be final and stand again. His arm was hanging wrong but the divine biology was already working, already trying to manage what had happened to it.
Korvos did not let it finish.
The contact was what mattered now. He got his right hand on the back of Achilles's neck as he rose — the chain looped over the shoulder and down across the chest, using Achilles's own upward momentum to pull the wrap tight — and this time the Temporal Touch went deeper, not hunting the surface of the blessing but going for the layer beneath the layer he had already cracked, the older foundation.
It gave in forty seconds. Achilles stopped fighting in thirty of them.
When it was over, Korvos stepped back and let him down.
He stood on the Ponte Sisto afterward, breathing. His arms ached from the sustained contact work. Three of his ribs were bruised where Achilles had landed clean hits during the first phase. The bridge stone had chunks missing from it where the exchanges had gone to ground.
He looked at the Tiber moving below in the dark and he thought about Athena sitting before a blank template and deciding what this man would be.
He left the chain-drag marks on the stone of the bridge.
He was on a train to Istanbul before midnight.