With myths surrounding him, Levi remained by his mother's corpse.
"Well."
The voice came from above — easy, almost amused. Levi didn't look up immediately. He finished setting his mother's hands across her chest. Then he stood, slowly, and turned around.
Fujin descended from the dark sky and landed in the street behind him, close enough that the wind displaced by his arrival stirred the dust at Levi's feet. The wind god was lean and unhurried, his storm-grey hands clasped loosely behind his back, his eyes moving between Levi and Jane's body with the calm assessment of someone totalling a bill.
Behind him, filling the street from wall to wall, were myths. Dozens of them — SSS down to B class, packed together, their attention fixed on the two figures in front of the rubble.
"Horus managed to take her after all," Fujin said, in a tone of genuine mild respect. "I'll pass that along." His gaze settled on Levi. "Her son, I assume. And the girl is—" he glanced at Jasmine, still unconscious against the rubble behind Levi— "her daughter? Unfortunate timing for a family reunion."
Levi said nothing.
Something was happening in his chest — something that started cold and was getting hot very quickly, a pressure building behind his sternum that had nothing to do with his Flux and everything to do with it at the same time. His hands were shaking. He was aware of that. He was aware of the myth standing in front of him was a Legend, aware of the hundreds behind it, aware of Jasmine behind him and his mother's body at his feet and the daggers in his hands that were suddenly, overwhelmingly heavy.
The shaking got worse. His breathing came apart. He'd trained for combat — years of it, with the best teacher he would ever have — but training had never included this: the weight of grief and fear arriving simultaneously, his body deciding this was the moment to remind him that he was seventeen years old and there was a god standing in his street.
He gripped the daggers until his knuckles went white.
The leather was warm. Still warm from her hands.
He thought about the pool. The moonlight. Her voice — end this war, Lee. Hold onto it. It's worth holding onto.
The shaking slowed.
It didn't stop — he wasn't going to pretend it stopped — but it slowed, and in the space that opened up he found something underneath it. Not courage, exactly. More like the decision that comes after courage has run out. He was going to die here probably. He understood that clearly and without drama. Jasmine behind him was going to die here too, unless he made it mean something.
He lifted his head and looked at Fujin directly.
"I made a promise to my mom," he said. His voice came out rougher than he intended. "That's it. That's all you need to know."
Fujin tilted his head slightly. "A lion cub," he said, to no one in particular. There was something in his tone — not contempt, more like the word you use when something surprises you into respect that you hadn't budgeted for. He gestured at the mob behind him. "All at once, then."
The myths surged forward. One, ahead of the others, lunged at Levi.
He vanished in a flash—Telestride—then reappeared behind it. Resting his hand on it, he said one word: "Electrocution." The beast convulsed violently in a burst lightning before collapsing in a smoking heap.
Another rushed from behind. Levi spun, swiftly unsheathing blades that sung with crackling arcs, and severed its head in a single, fluid counter. Blood sprayed across the rubble.
The mob hesitated. For the first time, they saw not a boy—but a storm wrapped in human form.
Fujin's smile widened. "Interesting. The cub has claws after all."
Levi transformed.
The 2nd Form arrived differently from the 1st — not the body-wide warmth of Electrified but something that came from deeper, a current that cracked through him from the inside out. The tattoo patterns lit across his skin in blue-white lines, electric and sharp, and the world sharpened with them. Everything got faster and slower at the same time — his own movement feeling natural and inevitable, the myths closing in feeling slightly, crucially delayed.
Arcana circles flared open in the road beneath every myth in the street.
The Electric Bondage chains erupted upward — thick coils of condensed electron energy snapping closed around limbs and torsos and wings, locking every myth in place with a crack like a lightning strike repeated forty times simultaneously. The street went still. Even Fujin, who had taken approximately half a second longer than the rest to react, found his ankles locked to the ground. He looked down at the chains with interest.
Levi was already moving.
He didn't look back. He scooped Jasmine up in one motion, felt the Flux surge to compensate for the weight, and ran — not away from the city, but through it, angling north, using the collapsed buildings as cover the way his mother had taught him to use terrain. Behind him he heard the chains breaking — not immediately, but working, the myths sawing at them with claws and teeth. SSS class would take longer. Fujin would take almost no time at all.
"Hm." Fujin sliced through his chains with a single wind-edged gesture and straightened up. He watched the space where Levi had been for a moment. "Smart. Annoying, but smart." He released the remaining myths with a cut of his wind. "Don't let them reach the wall."
✦ ✦ ✦
The myths found them again three streets from the breach.
A portal cracked open ahead of them — the mystery man's work, Levi realised, using him like a coordinate to aim at — and the myths poured through directly into his path. He telestrided sideways without breaking pace, Jasmine held tight against his back, and kept moving.
The chase that followed was ugly and fast. Most of the myths fell behind almost immediately — in his 2nd Form, Levi's speed was a different category — but the Electric Evogres were another matter. Dense, low to the ground, built for pursuit, they drew their speed from the same source as him and matched it closely enough to keep the gap narrow. He felt their attacks as displaced air, as the whisper of claws that caught nothing, as the impact of rubble thrown at his back.
The breach was ahead. The gap in the eastern wall, still glowing at its edges from Horus's attack, fifty metres wide and open to the dark outside. He aimed for it.
He was twenty metres out when Jasmine woke up.
"What—" She took in his face, his speed, the ruins of Velvetia around them. Looked behind her. The Evogres were close. "Seriously," she said. "This is what I wake up to."
"Could be worse."
"How."
"Could be raining."
They hit the breach and came out the other side into open air, grass beneath their feet, the dark of the countryside spreading out ahead. The Evogres followed without pausing — the wall was broken, the wards were down, the city's boundary meant nothing now.
Levi ran another hundred metres into the dark and then stopped.
He set Jasmine down. She was pale and her broken arm was held against her body with the careful stillness of someone who'd learned exactly where the pain was. She looked at him with an expression that was trying to be calm and not entirely managing it.
"They're still coming," she said.
"I know."
"Can you—"
"Yes."
He turned to face the breach.
The Evogres came through in a group — seven of them, SSS class, built like walls with teeth — and Levi went to meet them alone in the dark outside the ruined city.
It was different from training. Everything his mother had drilled into him — the footwork, the economy of motion, the discipline of letting the opponent commit before you moved — all of it was still there, still functional, but running underneath it now was something rawer. Grief and anger don't make you better or worse at fighting; they make you clearer. They remove the hesitation that lives between knowing what to do and doing it.
He moved through the Evogres with a focus that surprised even him — telestriding through their attacks, using their size and momentum against them, letting his 2nd Form carry the speed differential and his training handle the rest. He wasn't reckless. He was just completely, entirely present in a way he had never been before.
When the last one dropped, he was breathing hard and bleeding from two places and still standing.
He walked back to Jasmine. She put her good arm around him. "Since when were you a MK?"
"Just graduated. We need to move," he said blankly.
"Yeah," she said. "We do."
—
They had made perhaps four hundred metres into the countryside when the wind shifted.
Levi felt it the same moment Jasmine went rigid against his side — a pressure, a displacement, the specific sensation of something very large moving very fast arriving somewhere nearby. He turned.
Fujin descended from the sky and landed in the grass between them and the distant tree line. He was unhurried, as ever. His hands were loose at his sides. He looked at Levi with the evaluating expression of someone revising an estimate upward.
"You killed SSS class myths," he said. "In your condition. At your age." It wasn't a question.
Levi said nothing. He moved Jasmine gently behind him.
"Interesting." Fujin raised one hand, and the air around his palm began to compress and darken, wind pulling inward from a wide radius, leaves and grass and grit spiralling toward his fist. A sphere of concentrated pressure formed — dense enough that the light bent slightly around it. "This will be brief."
He launched it.
Levi telestrided. The sphere punched through the space where he'd been and continued into the dark, and everything it passed through — grass, a stand of young trees, a section of fence forty metres away — simply ceased to be intact. Levi came out of the telestride into a dead run, angling at Fujin from his blindside, daggers up.
He was fast, like genuinely fast, and he knew it. He went for Fujin with every bit of that speed and every bit of the form his mother had spent years installing in him.
Fujin didn't move until the last possible moment. Then he stepped sideways with the casual precision of someone sidestepping a puddle, caught Levi's wrist, and redirected his momentum downward. The counter that followed was three wind attacks in under a second — contained, accurate, aimed to end things — and Levi hit the ground hard and didn't get up quickly.
He got up anyway.
He didn't know why, exactly. His body had better reasons to stay down. But he got up, slow and shaking, and stood.
Fujin watched him. Something in the wind god's expression was different now — not the amusement from before, not quite respect, but something adjacent to it. Something that looked almost like reluctance.
Levi charged again. He knew it wasn't going to work. He knew it before he'd taken two steps. He cast Electric Bondage as he ran — watched the chains snap closed around Fujin, watched Fujin's eyes register the restriction — and then jumped, twisting horizontally, feeling the Electric Vortex building around him as he turned. The spell discharged on contact: a spiralling vortex of compressed electricity that drove into Fujin and kept driving, pushing through him and past him and through the tree line beyond, leaving a scar in the landscape fifty metres long.
The smoke cleared.
Fujin stood at the centre of the destruction, his robes torn, his skin unmarked. He looked at the ruined tree line behind him, then back at Levi. He reached up and touched a small cut at his jaw — the only evidence the attack had made contact at all — with what appeared to be genuine surprise.
"You actually touched me," he said.
Levi's legs gave out. He caught himself on one knee, the Flux guttering, the arcana cost of the vortex arriving all at once as a wave of exhaustion that pressed down on him from every direction. He was empty. He'd spent everything he had, and the thing standing in front of him had only a cut on its jaw.
Fujin gathered wind into his palm again. Slower this time, almost thoughtful.
"You have good fighting spirit," he said. "And real potential. I mean that without condescension." He let the attack build. "But right, it's simply not enough."
The wind hit Levi like a wall.
He was airborne for a moment — genuinely airborne, the ground gone, the sky in the wrong place — and then the river was there, cold and black and moving fast, and he went into it with the kind of impact that removes decisions from the equation. The current took him immediately. He was too spent to fight it.
He was aware, distantly, of the waterfall.
He was aware of going over it.
Then he wasn't aware of anything at all.
✦ ✦ ✦
Fujin stood at the river's edge and watched the current for a long moment.
No one came back up.
He turned and walked back toward the breach in the wall, unhurried, stepping over the bodies of the Evogres Levi had killed. He counted them as he passed. Seven. SSS class. He filed this information away without particular expression.
When he reached the breach, he found the mystery man waiting at the edge of the broken wall, hands clasped behind his back, looking out over the smoking remains of Velvetia with the calm proprietary satisfaction of someone surveying something that now belonged to them.
"The girl?" the mystery man asked, without turning.
"Gone," Fujin said. "Someone moved her while I was dealing with the boy. I don't know who."
"And the boy?"
"In the river. Over the waterfall." Fujin paused. "He touched me."
The mystery man turned at that. He looked at Fujin for a moment, reading something in his expression that Fujin hadn't entirely meant to put there. Then he looked back at the city.
"The Purple Ace is dead," he said. "Her city is fallen." He let the silence sit for a moment. "That leaves seven."
Fujin said nothing.
The fires burned. The myths moved through the empty streets below. The kingdom of Velvetia, which had stood for thirty years in the space between two larger kingdoms and built something worth protecting, settled into the silence of a thing that had been and was no longer.