The target in Germany was a man named Wilhelm Kantor who operated under the name Wünderle and who had received a divine blessing from Ares — specifically, the gift of strategic battle-perception, the ability to read a combat situation in real time with godlike clarity. Ares had given it to him as part of a scheme that had been foiled by the League two years prior, and Wünderle had kept the blessing when the scheme collapsed, the divine gift having been embedded thoroughly enough that Ares's subsequent indifference could not reclaim it.
An abandoned gift. Still granted. Still received.
Korvos found him in Frankfurt and took two days to study him. Wünderle operated openly — he was a registered hero, he had a press profile, he attended public functions. He was careful in a professional sense: he varied his routes, he kept his home address out of databases, he was rarely in the same location at the same time on consecutive days. But careful, in the contemporary sense, had limits that careful in Korvos's sense did not. He knew Wünderle's complete operational pattern within thirty-six hours.
The fight was different from the others. Wünderle's blessing was not physical — it was perceptual. He could not be surprised. Every move Korvos made was readable to him the moment before it happened, the chain's trajectory predictable, the Temporal Touch visible as an intention before it became an action.
The first exchange proved this in four seconds. Korvos sent the chain in a standard redirect — the same opening that had worked against Demetrios, that had put Achilles off his axis — and Wünderle was already moving laterally before the chain began its arc, already in a position that negated the redirect before it could do what it was designed to do. He did not dodge. He was not where the chain was going to be before the chain got there.
Korvos stopped. He stood in the Frankfurt street and looked at Wünderle across twelve feet of cobblestone and thought.
Every action is readable. Stop making readable actions.
He sent the chain in seventeen directions in four seconds.
Not seventeen distinct attacks — seventeen simultaneous expressions of the chain's capacity, every link moving independently of every other link, the chain becoming a distributed environment rather than a directed weapon. There was no intention behind any of the individual movements because the intention was not in any single movement but in the totality of them, and the totality was not a tactic but a weather system, and divine battle-perception could read intentions but it could not read weather.
Wünderle's clarity overloaded.
It took thirty seconds for the disruption to take full effect — thirty seconds of the chain making the air around them a constant shifting geometry of star-iron that Wünderle could not fully process because the information volume exceeded what even a divine perceptual gift could handle simultaneously. In those thirty seconds Wünderle landed two solid hits on Korvos, because his raw combat ability was real even when the blessing was overwhelmed, and they cost Korvos in ways he noted and accepted.
In the thirty-first second, the chain found the contact.
The Temporal Touch had a different quality on the divine blessing in Wünderle than it had on the others. Ares had embedded his gift carelessly — not with Athena's structural precision or with the foundational depth of Zeus's direct creation. It was the gift of a god who had been making a point, not an investment, and Ares's attention had moved elsewhere the moment the scheme fell apart. The blessing had been holding on its own momentum for two years without divine maintenance.
It aged out in six seconds of contact. Faster than anything he had previously encountered.
Without the blessing, Wünderle was a trained man in a street fight against something two thousand years older than him. He landed one more hit, a solid right hand and then the chain took his legs out, dropped him onto his back on the Frankfurt cobblestone, and when he tried to rise the chain was already around his chest, pulling both arms in, and Korvos used his bodyweight and thirty seconds to finish it.
He was exhausted afterward in a way the others had not produced — not from injury, but from the technical intensity of the chaos approach, which required maintaining seventeen simultaneous chain states for a sustained period. He sat in the Frankfurt street for three minutes before he moved, the chain loose around his shoulders, and he thought about the ceiling of what he was currently capable of.
He had not hit it. But he had felt it in the distance.
He would need to practice the chaos approach further. It was useful. He was going to encounter other perceptual gifts.
He left no drag marks.
He sat in his Frankfurt hotel room afterward and thought about the fight. Not to review the tactical decisions — those were sound — but because the fight had shown him something about himself that he had not previously had a reference point for.
He had never fought anyone before this month. He had centuries of theory and practice in an empty cavern, and before that a room, and before that nothing. He had never hit a person with the chain before Athens. Every fight in Europe had been, in some sense, the first real deployment of things he had only ever tested against walls and air.
The chaos approach had not been in his preparation. He had invented it mid-engagement. That was significant — it meant that whatever he had built in the cavern was sufficient to improvise from, and improvisation was what the world actually required. Theory met reality and required revision. He had revised well.
He would keep doing that.
He also thought, briefly, that Wünderle had landed two clean hits during the thirty-second overload period and that neither of them had done what they should have. His durability was real. This was information he had known theoretically and now knew practically, and practical knowledge had a different weight than theoretical.
He was harder to hurt than he had fully understood going in.
This would matter.
* * *
The Frankfurt scene told Bruce what he had been working toward.
"The blessing in Wünderle's case came from Ares," he said. "Not Zeus. Not Athena. Ares. The target selection is not tied to a specific Olympian — it is tied to the act of divine gifting itself."
Diana was in a café in Lyon, preparing to move.
"Anyone who received something," she said. "That is the criterion."
"Anyone who received divine empowerment, divine creation, divine blessing, or divine artifact. All four targets fit that. The connection is the receiving, not the source."
She thought about what that implied about the wound.
All four of them had something she had not yet named correctly. It was not just that they had received gifts from Olympus. It was that they had been seen by Olympus. Acknowledged. Attended to. Given things that said: you matter to us.
And something in the person doing this had not been given those things.
"Bruce," she said. "Run the search I asked for. Older. Go to the mythology record. The League has the Olympian archive access — use it. Search for any mortal or semi-divine individual connected to Themyscira or Zeus who was documented as receiving nothing. Not losing it. Never receiving."
Silence on the line that meant he was typing.
"That is going to take time," he said.
"I know," she said. "I am going to try to get ahead of him."
"The next European target with Olympian connection is in Austria," he said. "Vienna. A minor figure — Marlena Kessler, empowered briefly by Hermes three years ago. Limited connection. He may or may not include her."
"He will include her," Diana said. "She received something."
She left Lyon that afternoon.