They were three children sent to collect a king, and the king was not amused.
Zeri's plasma tore jagged scars through the executive suite, but her covering fire only boxed Ravion into corners, forcing the knight to break his own lunges to avoid incineration. They weren't fighting as a team; they were competing hazards. Darian simply moved like a ghost between collapsing marble pillars, lungs burning, looking for a place not to die.
Kerro Vance stood in the center of the crossfire like a man enduring a delayed flight.
His massive frame barely shifted as plasma and steel struck him. Impacts sparked off his hardened suit. Armor blackened, but nothing gave. He adjusted a frayed cuff with absolute indifference.
"POND sends cadets now?" Vance's voice was low and resonant—more boardroom than battlefield. He tracked Ravion's frenetic movement without urgency. "I run half this city's arteries. I move markets. And they send me children with sharp toys."
Ravion lunged, throwing furious precision behind the spear thrust. Vance caught the shaft in one hand, stopping a ton of kinetic force dead in his palm.
"I don't know your names," Vance murmured, twisting the weapon. Ravion's footing collapsed. Vance seized the knight by the gorget, hoisted him clean off the floor, and pitched him through a slab of reinforced paneling. "And I don't care to."
Zeri screamed in frustration, her twin cannons locking together into a blinding lance of overcharged energy. The beam struck Vance square in the chest, driving him half a step back.
Half a step.
He glanced down at the smoking crater in his armor, then up at her. "You burn everything around you," he observed, stepping right through the weapon's thermal afterglow. He backhanded her mid-charge. The blow shattered her energy shield and sent her skidding across broken glass.
Darian moved before panic could stop him—a blind, desperate swing. Vance didn't even look. He swatted Darian aside like an insect. Darian struck a support pillar hard enough to crack ribs, sliding to the floor with blood in his mouth and a high ring in his ears.
Vance exhaled slowly. Patience spent.
He drove both augmented fists into the floor. The ferrocrete ruptured. A concussive shockwave of pure kinetic force tore outward, ripping the suite's balcony from its foundation. Ravion was thrown deeper into the rubble. Zeri's secondary barrier evaporated. Darian, already broken, slid helplessly across the tilting floor toward the yawning, wind-swept abyss of the city below.
The balcony edge gave way. Vance stepped forward through the drifting dust, walking onto the crumbling precipice as if inspecting a private terrace.
As Darian slid over the edge, Vance's hand clamped around his wrist.
He lifted the boy effortlessly, dangling him over open air. "This is what POND thinks of me," Vance said, inspecting Darian's trembling, suspended form. "A message. You come into my city to make an example."
His grip tightened. Wet grinding gave way to the clean snap of bone.
Darian screamed, thrashing wildly.
"You are not my rival," Vance said, leaning closer with clinical curiosity. "You are paperwork."
Across the shattered suite, Zeri hauled herself upright. Her cannons locked on the silhouette framed against the sky, whining as they overloaded to lethal brightness. Her expression wasn't heroic; it was coldly furious. She wasn't trying to save Darian. He was just the pin holding the target in place.
She fired.
A beam of annihilating white punched clean through Vance's torso. For the first time, surprise flickered across the kingpin's face. He staggered back, molten alloy pouring from the ruin of his chest.
But his hand spasmed. A dead-man's grip locking tight around Darian's broken wrist.
The rest of the balcony sheared off. The world inverted.
Wind shrieked past them as steel, glass, and bodies tumbled into the abyss. Darian dangled from the falling titan, agony radiating up his arm. He didn't think. Driven by pure, animal panic, Darian swung his free hand up and clawed frantically at Vance's face, driving his fingers deep into an optic socket.
Vance convulsed. The death-grip broke.
They hit the plaza below like dropped gods.
First, silence. Then, a world of white pain.
Darian's legs shattered on impact. Instantly, his hyper-regeneration ignited—threads of biological fire tearing through bone and muscle, knitting him back together in a process so violent it felt like being rebuilt from the inside out. He screamed until his vocal cords tore.
When the fire subsided, he was gasping against cold stone. Shaking. Alive.
A few yards away, smoke curled from a crater. Vance lay in the center of it, utterly broken. Dead.
Footsteps approached through the settling dust. Plaza guards, surviving civilians. Faces lit by the burning wreckage of the tower above.
"He did it." "He defeated Vance." "The hero..."
The word landed against Darian's ringing ears like a coin tossed into an empty cup. Hero.
Applause began. Hesitant, scattered claps that swelled into a rhythmic, deafening cheer. He found himself counting the claps without meaning to. One. Two. Five. Eight. Every clap was a layer of armor over the truth. He hadn't won. He hadn't led. He had been bait. He had survived an accident. And these people were building a monument out of it.
Darian straightened slowly, wiping drying blood from his collar. He adjusted his posture, forcing his shattered, healing legs to hold his weight. He lifted his chin, and the smile came easily.
As the chanting grew, he kept counting.
Insurance. Protection. Narrative.