They crossed the distance simultaneously.
Scarlett's attack came first — or appeared to. "Scarlett Brute Style: Lightning Blood Rows" — four blades of crimson-charged force launched in sequence, the kind of attack that filled space rather than targeting a point, designed to catch someone who moved rather than someone who held still.
Levi moved.
"Godspeed Style: Lightning Triple Strike."
The Godspeed carried his attack to a speed where the movement and the strike existed in different moments — he was past her before she'd registered the approach, the three strikes placed and gone, and then he was standing with his back to her at the far end of the field.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Scarlett was still standing. Her swords still raised. Her expression carrying the beginning of a smirk.
"Well," she said. "That was anti-climactic, dagger boy. I was expecting—"
Both her sword blades hit the ground.
The handles were still in her hands. The blades had been separated at the guards — clean cuts, the kind that required both precision and speed so complete that the material hadn't registered it was cut until it was already separated. Then the rest of it arrived: the three strikes running through her at the delayed speed of a Godspeed technique, her body's reaction time unable to process what had happened until well after it had happened.
The cuts opened across her face, chest, and legs.
She went down.
"What—" She pressed her hand to her face. Her left eye. "My eye — what did you do!"
Levi turned around. "The Godspeed Style runs at ultra-speed," he said, quietly. "Your body's reaction to the attack is delayed. That's why you're confused about what just happened." He looked at her. "This was my first time using it at this degree. If I'd refined it, we wouldn't be having this conversation."
Scarlett was on the ground, hand over her eye, blood running freely because her ability was spent and she couldn't manage it anymore. She laughed — once, short, genuine. "Not bad, dagger boy. Not bad." She looked at him with her remaining eye. "I guess you win this one."
She clenched her fist.
Levi stopped breathing.
The air left his lungs and didn't come back — not blocked, not compressed, but his blood expanding internally, sharpening into forms that pressed against his organs, his skin, the spaces between. He tried to inhale. Nothing.
"I'm not going to kill you," Scarlett said, from the ground. "Same mercy you showed me."
She flicked her wrist.
The blood emerged — sharp, precise, through his skin in a pattern that was deliberate rather than random, damage distributed across his body the way an architect distributes load. He hit the ground. Everything was warm and wrong and loud.
"At the rate your sword artistry's growing," Scarlett said, her voice carrying the specific quality of someone saying something they mean, "you'll be a master swordsman. I want to see that." She was reaching into her jacket with her good hand — a piece of paper, a magic circle inscribed on it. "Next time we meet, I'll be trying to kill you properly. But I'm looking forward to it."
She infused the circle with her last available Flux. It activated.
Scarlett and Jack disappeared.
Levi lay on the scorched grass and looked at the sky and breathed in shallow increments and thought: still alive.
✦ ✦ ✦
Sylvia was there in seconds.
She'd seen him fall and crossed the distance before the sound of impact had finished. She got down beside him and assessed — bleeding from multiple points, all of it significant, none of it immediately fatal but collectively urgent.
"We need to get to the wall," she said. "Now."
She got him upright carefully, one arm under his, and started moving. Her 2nd form carried them faster than walking, faster than running, the enhancement magic doing what it did best — making her more than her unaugmented self in exactly the way the situation required.
Then the sound reached them. She looked back.
The Levatian military was coming — jeeps and helicopters and fighter jets crossing the distance at speed, the kind of deployment that meant someone had ordered pursuit with full force and no ambiguity about the objective. She counted what she could see and stopped counting.
"When will this end," she said, to nobody, and ran harder.
"Sir, they're running toward the wall," said a pilot through the command channel.
"Don't let them reach it," the commander said. He focused his magic energy and circles bloomed outside the helicopter. "Missile Arsenal: Heat-Seeker Bombardment."
The missiles came in from three angles simultaneously — not aimed at a point but at a zone, the tactic of someone who understood that a moving target required coverage rather than precision. Sylvia moved through the first salvo on instinct, the enhancement carrying her fast enough that she was already out of the projected path when they hit. The blast radius from the detonations was less manageable. The force caught her and sent her sideways, Levi going with her, the ground rushing up at an angle that was going to hurt.
She got her feet under them before they landed. Barely.
Another wave incoming. She didn't have the energy to accelerate further — the 3rd form was spent and the 2nd form had limits and she'd been in sustained combat for the better part of an hour. She looked at the missiles tracking toward them and thought: this is going to hurt.
"Telekinetic Force: Motionless."
Everything in front of Priscilla stopped.
The missiles hung in the air — suspended, their momentum arrested mid-flight, the heat from their engines still running but the bodies going nowhere. The helicopters, the jeeps, the fighter jets in their approach vector — all of it held in the silver grip of Priscilla's extended awareness, the spatial knowledge that could reach across a kilometre of Levatian countryside and say: not yet.
She looked back at Sylvia and Levi. "Are you alright?"
"Still alive," Sylvia said.
"Good." Priscilla turned back to the immobilised military. She extended her arms, palms out, and reached for the reserves she'd been building since the hospital, since the flight across forty kilometres with two people and an unconscious ambassador. The reserves were there. She'd been careful with them, specifically for this.
"Telekinetic Force: Great Repulse."
The force that left her hands wasn't a spell so much as a statement. Everything held in the Motionless field reversed — not released, actively reversed, the full magnitude of Priscilla's spatial awareness expressed as directional force. Jeeps and helicopters and fighter jets went backward simultaneously, covering a mile in the direction they'd come from, the landscape between them and the border reshaping itself around the impact points.
The ground was different after it.
Sylvia stared at where the military had been. At the new geography of the field. At Priscilla, who was breathing slightly harder than usual and had her hands at her sides and was looking at the result with the focused calm of someone who had decided to do a thing and had done it.
"Since when," Sylvia said.
"Who knows," said Priscilla. "Come on."
She touched them both. They lifted. She flew.
✦ ✦ ✦
Melissa was waiting at the wall.
She saw Levi first — the bleeding, the specific pattern of Scarlett's farewell, the damage distributed across his body with the precision of an ability that understood anatomy. She got to him before Priscilla had fully descended and ran her enhancement through his system — not healing, she didn't have that, but accelerating the body's own response. His blood clotted faster. The wounds began to close at the surface.
"That stops the bleeding," she said. "It's temporary. He needs a hospital."
"What exactly did you just do," Sylvia asked.
"Enhanced his healing rate. His body's doing the work, I'm just running it faster." Melissa looked at Sylvia — the scorched hair, the blown ears, the accumulated damage of a fight that had gone several rounds past reasonable. "You too. Both of you."
She looked at all three of them — Levi bleeding but breathing, Sylvia upright through determination rather than comfort, Priscilla floating with the serene expression of someone who had just moved a military unit a mile in the wrong direction and felt the effort of it.
She pulled them in.
Not a careful hug. The real one, with grip, the kind she gave when words weren't the first thing.
"I'm glad you made it," she said. "Not that I was doubting you."
"Yes you were," said Sylvia, muffled against her shoulder.
"A little," Melissa admitted. "Come on. Gate Portal. Now."
✦ ✦ ✦
The hospital room had four beds and one window and all four of them in it, which Zarraz appeared to find specifically unfortunate.
"Why," he said, looking at the ceiling when they were brought in, "are you in my room."
"We were injured in the mission you abandoned us in," Sylvia said pleasantly, easing herself onto the nearest bed while a nurse tried to guide her to a different one.
"I didn't abandon anyone. I transported the ambassador to the border as planned."
"Priscilla could've done that without you. You could've stayed and helped fight."
"I was in no condition to fight. I would have been in your way."
"You're an elite sniper. A sniper who stays back and shoots things from a distance." Sylvia looked at him with the expression of someone presenting irrefutable evidence. "Exactly the kind of person who is useful when your allies are in close combat and you have a clear line of sight."
"She was cutting bullets," Zarraz said.
"She was in close combat with Levi. She wasn't cutting anything aimed at her from behind."
Zarraz had no immediate answer for this.
"Damn," Levi said quietly to Priscilla.
"She's not wrong," Priscilla said equally quietly.
The argument escalated in the way of arguments between two people who are both partially right and neither will concede it, until Melissa appeared in the doorway and knocked Sylvia on the head with two fingers — not hard, precisely.
"Hospital," Melissa said. "Both of you. Beds."
"He started—"
"Beds."
They went to their beds. The room settled into the sullen quiet of two people lying three metres apart and performing indifference. Levi and Priscilla watched this from their respective positions and communicated via brief eye contact.
✦ ✦ ✦
The corridor outside the room was quiet.
Melissa found Theo near the nurses' station and they walked to the far end of the corridor before either of them spoke.
"Confirmed?" she asked.
"Confirmed." Theo kept his voice level. "The forensics assessment says he died in the crash — the impact, the state his body was already in. The car accident was the final insult to a system that had already been failing for three days." A pause. "He was going to die regardless. The crash just determined when."
Melissa looked at the window at the end of the corridor. Outside, the city of Olympus was going about its afternoon.
Three days of torture. Zarraz's arm, fractured in a car accident. A Bounty Syndicate hunter with a blood ability. The ambassador in the crash, his pulse barely there when Priscilla reached the border, the medical team moving fast and it not being fast enough.
The mission had succeeded. The ambassador was dead anyway.
"Are you going to tell them?" Theo asked.
She was quiet for a moment. "No."
"Melissa—"
"They went through everything this mission asked of them and more. They extracted him alive. They got him to the border." She looked at the window. "The fact that his injuries were already fatal before the crash is not something they could have controlled. Telling them now serves nothing except making them carry something that isn't theirs to carry."
Theo was quiet.
"I'll inform Gabriel," she said. "I'll write the report. It's my responsibility to manage, not theirs."
She walked back toward the room.
She paused at the door. Through it she could hear the muffled remnant of Sylvia and Zarraz's argument, the low sound of Priscilla saying something that made Levi laugh once. She stood in the corridor and let it be what it was — four people who had done something very hard, in a hospital room, alive.
She pushed the door open.
✦ ✦ ✦
"The ambassador is in recovery," Melissa said, from the doorway. "We sent him to a specialist outside the kingdom — his injuries needed someone with specific experience. He'll be alright, but it'll take time."
Sylvia exhaled slowly. "Good."
"As for the mission itself—" Melissa looked at all of them, Zarraz included. "I watched the broadcast. I watched the field. What you accomplished in those ten seconds at the embassy was extraordinary. What you did after, getting out of the capital with a lockdown active and the Syndicate in the field, was even more so." She paused. "You were never formally trained for stealth operations. We gave you resources and information and sent you in. You did the rest." She looked at each of them. "Superbly."
"We could've done better," Levi said.
"Yes. And you will, next time, because of what this one taught you." She looked at him — the bandages, the damage Scarlett had distributed with such precision. "How are you feeling?"
"Like someone did targeted structural damage to my entire body using my own blood," he said.
"Accurate." She almost smiled. "Rest. All of you. When you're cleared, we go to the palace. Gabriel wants a debrief in person."
"Yes, ma'am," they said — all four of them, including Zarraz, which appeared to surprise even Zarraz.
Melissa left. The room settled.
Levi lay back and looked at the ceiling and thought about Scarlett's parting words. *At the rate your sword artistry's growing, you'll be a master swordsman.* Not a compliment from a defeated opponent — a professional assessment from someone who had no reason to say it unless she meant it.
He thought about the Godspeed Triple Strike. The first time he'd used it at that degree, unrefined, enough to win. What it would be when it was refined.
He thought about the fist technique — the concentrated charge, the synthesis disruption. A prototype that had worked once. Something to develop.
He thought about Scarlett's eye.
He thought about winning a fight and lying in a hospital bed bleeding, and whether those two things were the same event or different ones with the same timestamp.
Outside the window, Olympus was doing what it always did. The city that had taken him in when Velvetia fell, that had given him a training ground and a team and a mission and sent him across a border with nothing but his ability and his mother's daggers.
He pressed his hand against the bandages at his side and felt the scabs Melissa had helped form — the body doing what it did, repairing itself, building toward the next thing.
There was always a next thing.
He closed his eyes.