The graduation ceremony lasted two hours and forty-three minutes. Levi knew because he'd counted.
Not because he was impatient — well, mostly not because he was impatient — but because there was something quietly strange about watching twelve years collapse into a handshake and a rolled-up certificate. He'd expected to feel more. Relief, maybe. Pride. Something worth the build-up.
What he actually felt, standing on the roof of Velvetia High with the diploma tucked under his arm and the city spread out below them, was a sort of hollow lightness. Like the day itself hadn't decided what it wanted to be yet.
"Can you believe it?" he said. "Twelve years. Served."
Jasmine turned from the railing with a look that suggested she was reconsidering their entire friendship. "You make it sound like we just got out of prison."
"Twelve years of mandatory attendance, Jasmine. You tell me the difference."
"You graduated top of our class," Alex said, dropping into a crouch beside the edge and squinting at the skyline. "Top. Of. The class. And you're describing it like a sentence."
Levi shrugged. "Top of the class just means I suffered more efficiently than everyone else. My grandma made sure of that." He glanced sideways at Jasmine. "Our grandma."
"She made us study on Saturdays," Jasmine said, in a tone that conveyed this was still, even now, a personal wound.
"She made us study on Sundays too."
"And public holidays."
They stood in silence for a moment, communally grieving their lost weekends.
The city of Velvetia stretched below them — a dense, tiered kingdom wedged between the towering borders of LePortia and Olympia, two kingdoms large enough to make Velvetia look like a footnote on a map. But what it lacked in size, it made up for in noise. Even from the roof, Levi could hear the city humming: market vendors, patrol sirens, the distant clang of military drills from the eastern quarter.
Home. For whatever that was worth.
"So," Alex said, standing and brushing dust from his knees. "What now, Lee? You following in your mother's footsteps?"
"Obviously." Levi said it the way he said most things — like the answer had never been in question.
"Son of a legendary Myth Killer," Alex said, affecting a dramatic voice. "Destiny calls."
"Don't be annoying about it."
"I'm being sincere."
"You're being annoying and sincere at the same time, which is somehow worse."
Alex laughed. He turned to Jasmine. "What about you? Following in your aunt's footsteps?"
Something shifted in Jasmine's expression — just for a second, too fast to catch properly. "I haven't decided yet," she said.
Levi didn't push it. He'd known Jasmine his whole life, which meant he knew when she was thinking about something she wasn't ready to say out loud.
Alex, who had known Jasmine for slightly less time and was therefore slightly less wise about it, opened his mouth. Levi stepped on his foot.
"Ow—"
"So," Levi said, raising his voice half a notch, "I'm thinking whoever hits General rank first wins. Loser buys lunch. For life."
Alex forgot about his foot immediately. "General? Why not go for SSS class while we're at it?"
"SSS class is the goal. General is the checkpoint."
"Fine. Deal. But no using your mother's name to climb the ranks."
Levi pressed a hand to his chest like this genuinely wounded him. "As if she'd let me. Jane Baron doesn't give her own son a discount. She'd probably make it harder just to prove a point."
"He's not wrong," Jasmine said.
"I know I'm not wrong. She once made me redo a training exercise six times because I passed on the fifth attempt but my form wasn't right." He paused. "That's not love. That's a psychological experiment."
Alex grinned. "Fair enough. May the best MK win."
"Already planning my victory speech."
Jasmine let out a long breath that was not quite a sigh and not quite a laugh. "Can we please just exist up here for five minutes before you two start competing? This is technically still a celebration."
They existed for five minutes.
It was, honestly, a decent five minutes. The sun was starting to descend over the western quarter, throwing long amber shadows across the rooftops. Down below, a pair of MK patrol officers crossed the main road in their armoured coats — the Kingdom's first line of defence, the people who stood between Velvetia's walls and whatever crawled in from beyond them. Myth Killers. The only job that mattered when the alternative was extinction.
Levi watched them until they turned the corner.
"My dad says it's hell out there," Alex said, quieter now. He was staring at the same spot. "Once school's done. He says — enjoy your days of youth, because once they're gone, you don't get them back."
The mood shifted, just slightly. Not into sadness, exactly. More like recognition.
"How long do you think it takes?" Levi said. "Before it feels normal? The real stuff."
"Depends what normal means to you," Alex said.
Levi thought about his mother's face when she talked about her missions. The way her voice stayed level and careful, like she was carrying something breakable. He thought about the stories she didn't finish — the ones that ended with a pause and a subject change.
"I think we'll be fine," he said.
He wasn't entirely sure he believed it. But it felt like the right thing to say at the top of a building on the last afternoon of their old lives.
Alex nudged his shoulder. "For what it's worth — expired milk incident aside — these were good years."
Jasmine made a sound of pure involuntary joy. "Oh no—"
"Don't," Alex warned.
"The principal thought you were skipping class," Levi said, grinning, "and you had to explain to him that you'd been in the bathroom all day because of the cafeteria's milk—"
"I was on the toilet for 2 hours, Levi—"
"2 hours!"
"It was a medical situation—"
Jasmine was bent over the railing laughing. Even Alex, despite his best efforts, was fighting a smile.
"Good years," Levi agreed. "Great years."
They stayed on the roof until the light started to go. Then Alex picked up his jacket, said he'd text them later, and headed for the stairs. Levi watched him go — his best friend since the third year, the person who'd once eaten a bug on a dare and then tried to act like it hadn't happened, the only person who could keep up with him in training and in arguments and probably in whatever came next.
He'd see him in a few days at the military academy. He knew that.
It still felt like the end of something.
✦ ✦ ✦
Arriving home, they smelled the house before they reached the front door.
Levi stopped on the path. Jasmine stopped beside him. They looked at each other.
"That's... not bad," Jasmine said carefully.
"It's not bad," Levi agreed.
A beat.
"She might have actually done it this time," Jasmine said.
"Don't. Don't jinx it."
The front door opened before either of them could reach it.
Jane looked exactly like someone who had survived a hundred battles and chosen to commemorate this particular one by cooking. She was still in her travelling clothes — the kind with reinforced seams and not-quite-visible armour panels built into the shoulders — and she was wearing an apron over the top of it all, which was somehow the most alarming part.
"Hey kiddos!" she said. "Guess who made it just in time for dinner?"
"Mom." Levi stepped forward and she pulled him into a hug that had more grip than most people's handshakes. He let himself stay in it for a moment. She smelled like the road and something faintly smoky that wasn't entirely from the kitchen.
"I'm sorry I missed the ceremony," she said into his shoulder.
"It was two hours and forty-three minutes of people pronouncing names wrong," Levi said. "You're fine."
She laughed and let him go, then turned to Jasmine and pulled her in too. Over his mother's shoulder, Levi caught his grandmother's expression from the hallway — a particular look that said: I tried to stop her and I failed and I'm deeply sorry.
"I made dinner," Jane announced. "Almost done. Go get cleaned up."
"Actually," Jasmine said, with the confidence of someone who had not adequately prepared a backup plan, "I'm quite full. I think I'll just—"
"What did you eat?"
A pause.
"...Water."
Levi closed his eyes.
"You're full from water," Jane said.
"I drank a lot of it."
"Mmhm." Jane's smile did not waver. It was the smile of someone who had been lied to by much better liars in much higher-stakes situations. "You can sit down for dinner and drink more water there. Off you go."
Jasmine looked at Levi with the expression of someone who had been outmaneuvered by a woman in a tactical apron. Levi offered her nothing.
"Water," he murmured as they headed upstairs. "Really."
"I panicked," she hissed back.
—
The first bite was, genuinely, quite good.
Levi chewed thoughtfully. The seasoning was right. The texture was right. He glanced at Jasmine, who had the cautious expression of a person defusing a device with an unclear timer. She chewed. Her eyes widened slightly.
Then the second bite happened.
It wasn't that it was bad, exactly. It was more that the first bite had made a series of promises that the second bite had no intention of keeping. The flavour unravelled in stages — first the good parts retreated, then something underneath them asserted itself, something that tasted of ambition and miscalculation.
Levi kept his face completely neutral. He'd had years of practice.
Across the table, his grandmother was pushing things around her plate with an expression that said she had attempted an intervention during the cooking process and had not been fast enough. Jasmine had stopped chewing.
"So, Lee!" Jane said brightly, hurrying over to the kitchen to get the drinks. "Still have that appetite, I see."
This was his window.
Levi waited until she turned for the kitchen, then swallowed in one committed movement. "Grandma. What happened?"
His grandmother leaned in. "She got a phone call halfway through. I nearly had them. I had the ingredients in my hand. She came back before I could finish."
"So what are we eating?"
"A meal that is approximately sixty percent saved and forty percent hers."
"Which forty percent."
His grandmother's expression answered that clearly enough.
Jane returned with the drinks, and the conversation moved on to safer territory — her most recent assignment, the border skirmish near the southern walls, the myth that had apparently taken four MKs to bring down before it stopped moving. She told the stories the way she always did, with the violence smoothed out and the funny parts emphasized, and Levi listened the way he always did, trying to read the gaps between the words.
By the end of dinner, they were all blue-faced and quietly suffering.
"Anyone want secon—"
"No," said all three of them, at once, with a unanimity that briefly silenced the room.
Jane blinked. Then she started laughing — properly, the way she laughed when something had genuinely caught her off guard — and the table dissolved with her.
Later, when Jane had gone ahead to the backyard and Levi was stacking plates with Jasmine, she nudged him.
"She knows," Jasmine said quietly.
"She's always known."
"Then why—"
"Because she thinks it's funny." He handed her a dish. "And honestly? Respect."
✦ ✦ ✦
The backyard was quiet. The pool caught the last of the evening light in long, shifting ribbons, and Jane had her feet in the water, her shoulders loose in a way they almost never were.
Levi sat beside her. The stone was still warm from the afternoon sun. He took off his shoes and dropped his feet in, and for a moment neither of them said anything, and it was one of the better moments he could remember in recent memory.
"So," Jane said. "You want to become an MK."
"Yes."
She nodded, looking at the water. "I figured you would." She paused. "I want to make sure you know what you're saying yes to."
"Mom—"
"I'm not trying to talk you out of it. I just—" She stopped. Then, in a movement that was very unlike his mother's usual economy of gesture, she pulled up the hem of her shirt.
The scars ran across her abdomen in pale, uneven lines — some long and deliberate-looking, others jagged, the kind that came from something that moved. One of them had a texture that wasn't quite right, slightly raised and too smooth, the kind of wound that Arcana Flux could close but couldn't quite erase.
Levi didn't say anything.
"This job takes things from you," she said, pulling her shirt back down. "Not just skin. It takes colleagues. People you're supposed to protect. There are nights that don't leave you, no matter how long ago they happened." She looked at him properly now. "So I'm asking — not to test you, not to scare you — genuinely asking. Are you sure?"
The honest answer was that he was twenty percent fear and the rest of him hadn't fully caught up yet.
But underneath that — underneath all of it — was the thing he'd carried since he was old enough to understand what the Myth War actually meant. Not glory. Not a legacy. Just the simple, stubborn fact of it: humanity was losing. Four kingdoms were already gone. Eight remained. And every year the number of Myths increased and the number of people who could stop them didn't.
Someone had to push the number back.
"I'm sure," he said. "I want to end this war. I know that sounds delusional — I know it's a big thing to say. But that's why I want to do it. Not for rank. Not because you did it. Because I think it's the only thing worth doing."
Jane looked at him for a long moment.
Then she laughed — soft and fierce at the same time, the way she laughed when something surprised her into being proud — and pulled him into another one of those hug that doubled as a mild wrestling hold.
"Look at you," she said. "All grown up and already dramatic about it."
"I get that from you."
"You absolutely do." She let him go and settled back into herself, feet still in the water. "Tomorrow, I'm getting you enrolled at Velvetia Military Academy. They'll teach you what I can't — the formal stuff, the technique, the rules of engagement." She paused. "I'll also be helping Jasmine."
Levi glanced back at the house.
"LePortia," Jane said. "Her parents. I'm going to help her find them."
He didn't say anything. He just nodded. He'd known, in the way you know things you don't talk about — that Jasmine had been carrying that particular weight for a long time. The not-knowing was harder than most things.
"Good," he said finally.
Jane was quiet for a moment. The water moved between their feet. Then, in a different tone — lighter, almost careful: "How's the Flux feeling?"
Levi flexed his fingers against his knee. He didn't need to concentrate anymore to feel it; it was just there, the way your heartbeat is just there — steady, low, reliable. A current running beneath his skin that responded to intent before thought fully formed. Jane had started training him on it young enough that he couldn't clearly remember what it had felt like before.
"Good," he said. "Consistent. The output's still uneven when I push it hard, but the control's better than it was six months ago."
Jane nodded slowly, like she was filing this information somewhere. "The academy will push you harder than I have. There'll be people there whose Arcana Flux is more developed, more unusual. Don't let it get in your head."
"It won't."
"I know it won't. I'm saying it anyway." She looked at him sideways. "You're good, Lee. You're genuinely good. Just — keep your head down to start. Let them underestimate you if they want to. There's no advantage in showing everything at once."
He thought about asking her why she said it like that — keep your head down, don't show everything — like there was something specific she was steering around. But his mother had a particular way of answering questions she didn't want to answer, which was to give you a true answer to a slightly different question, and he wasn't in the mood to chase it tonight.
"Okay," he said.
She held his gaze for a moment longer than necessary. Then she nodded, apparently satisfied with whatever she'd found there.
Jane yawned — full and unself-conscious, the yawn of someone who'd been awake for thirty-six hours and was only now allowing their body the information. "Right. I'm going to sleep before I fall in this pool." She stood, ruffled his hair once, and walked back toward the house. "Don't stay up too late. Big day tomorrow."
"Goodnight, Mom."
"Goodnight, Lee."
He listened to the door close behind her.
The pool made small, quiet sounds. The moon had cleared the roof of the house and sat high and white above the city, and down in the streets he could hear the change-of-watch horn from the eastern guard post — the sound that marked the shift from evening patrol to night patrol, from day to whatever came after it.
Levi let the Flux rise, just slightly — not enough to do anything, just enough to feel it. A faint warmth spreading from his sternum outward, the edges of his fingers growing fractionally brighter in the dark, the particular hum of it that he'd known since he was a child and had simply assumed was normal. Jane had never told him otherwise. He'd grown up thinking everyone who trained hard enough got there eventually.
He let it settle back down.
Somewhere in the city, another horn sounded — farther east, toward the walls. The night patrol, beginning their rounds. Out beyond those walls, he knew, was everything the walls were built to keep out.
He thought about the scars on his mother's ribs. He thought about four kingdoms that used to be on the map and weren't anymore. He thought about what she'd said: there's no advantage in showing everything at once.
Tomorrow, then.