The punch landed and the ground cracked under Hercules' feet.
Levi had put everything into it — the grief, the cold rage, the full output of the Absolute Current focused into the point of impact. Windows shattered in the buildings on both sides of the street. The sound carried three blocks.
Hercules looked at his chest where the fist had landed. Then at Levi.
"Good punch," he said. He caught Levi's wrist before the arm could retract. "But it's going to need more than that to hurt me."
The knee came up into Levi's gut. Once. Again. A third time, each one deliberate and measured, the force of something that wasn't in a hurry because it didn't need to be.
Hercules released him. Levi hit the ground and coughed blood and telestrided before the follow-up arrived, putting thirty metres of distance between them and spending two seconds doing nothing but breathing. The three impacts had done something to his internal architecture that his body was going to be processing for a while.
He stood. Pulled his daggers.
Hercules charged. Levi met him — not head-on, laterally, the telestride putting him to the right at the last possible moment, both blades running along Hercules' arm as he passed. The blades didn't bite. They tracked across the surface as if the surface wasn't there.
He tried again. Same result.
*Energy barrier,* he thought. *Or a hardening ability. Either way, edge attacks are useless. I need to test pierce.*
He shifted his grip on the left dagger — point forward rather than edge — and went in again. At the last moment he poured the full Flux into the tip.
The dagger went through.
Not deep. Not meaningfully deep. But through — a paper cut's worth of penetration, enough to confirm the principle. Pierce worked. Edge didn't.
"So that's it," he said, mostly to himself.
He sheathed the daggers and shaped the lightning in his hands instead — not bolts yet, just the raw concentrated current, the form he'd been developing since Melissa's training note. He moved back in.
The next exchange was different. He stopped trying to cut and started trying to impale — the lightning finding the paths through the barrier that blades couldn't take, the current running through the gaps between the energy layers. A pierce through the shoulder. Through the collar bone. A lightning bolt detonated directly into Hercules' face from point-blank range.
Half of Hercules' face came apart.
Levi telestrided back and watched it regenerate. The tissue rebuilt itself in real time — a process that was both fast and completely unfair — and Hercules stood in the street looking at him with an expression that had shifted from assessment to something closer to interest.
"You're the first person today who has injured me enough to require regeneration," Hercules said. "You are worthy to face forty percent."
Levi looked at him. *Forty percent.* After all of that. *Forty.*
"Fine," he said. "Then you're worthy of eighty percent of mine."
He intensified the Absolute Current — not a new form, but the 3rd form pushed toward its ceiling, the output rising. Hercules laughed, not unkindly, and gathered energy in his fist.
The blast came fast and wide. Levi drew a dagger and cut through the centre of it — the lightning slash splitting the energy mass cleanly, the two halves passing on either side — and what remained of the slash reached Hercules. He cancelled it with his palm.
Then he charged.
—
The fight ran its course over the next seven minutes, and Levi learned the shape of the problem.
Hercules fought on instinct — pure, refined, the instinct of something that had been fighting for longer than the kingdom had existed. He had no sword artistry, no structured technique. What he had was the ability to read momentum and respond faster than the momentum expected. Every time Levi established a rhythm, Hercules absorbed it and countered from inside it.
The heart and brain were protected by dedicated barriers — Levi had confirmed this. He'd hit both directly. Both had held.
But one was weaker than the other. He'd felt it on the second heart strike — a fractional difference in resistance, as if the energy maintaining the brain barrier was being drawn from the same reserve as the body's general regeneration. Hercules was managing his power budget. Which meant it was finite.
"Godspeed Style: Hundred Lightning Strikes," Levi said, and moved.
The strikes covered Hercules' body before he could respond — a hundred points of lightning pierce in under a second, the Godspeed carrying each one past the surface barrier and into the tissue below. Hercules went to one knee. Got back up. Regenerated.
But slower than before.
*He's spending more energy on regeneration now,* Levi thought. *Which means less on the organ barriers. If I can find the window—*
Hercules blasted multiple energy spheres simultaneously — not aimed, area denial, forcing Levi to move. Levi cut through them.
"Godspeed Style: Lightning Bolt Impalement."
He drove a focused lightning bolt through Hercules' heart before any of the spheres had finished dispersing.
Hercules registered the impalement approximately one second after it happened — the Godspeed delay working exactly as it had against Scarlett, the body's reaction time unable to process ultra-speed attack until it was already inside. He attacked Levi immediately, reflexively.
Levi telestrided. The clones surrounded Hercules.
"Ecstatic Clone Style: Lightning Dagger Strikes—"
Hercules released a full-body shockwave.
Levi and every clone went outward simultaneously. He hit the building face and came off it and landed badly, and lay in the rubble for a moment taking his own inventory. Something in his ribs. The internal damage from the three earlier knees was worse now. His energy reserves were at — he checked — sixty-one percent, which had seemed manageable until he'd just fought a Code Yellow legendary class myth for eight minutes and it now seemed like a cruel joke.
*I can't finish this alone,* he thought. Not defeat — just accuracy. *I need Sylvia.*
He reached for her marker and pulled.
✦ ✦ ✦
She appeared beside him in the rubble with the specific expression of someone who had been in the middle of their own fight and had been teleported out of it without warning.
"Levi." She looked at him. "You look terrible."
"I know." He stood, slowly. "I've been fighting Hercules."
She looked at Hercules, thirty metres away, who was removing a lightning bolt from his own chest with the unhurried efficiency of someone removing a splinter.
"He looks completely fine," she said.
"He regenerates. Everything I've done to him he's already undone." Levi wiped blood from his mouth. "But I've figured out how he works. Pierce attacks only — edges don't penetrate his barrier. He fights on instinct, no sword artistry, which means once you establish an unexpected angle he can't pre-read it. His heart and brain barriers are separate from his general regeneration energy. He's been spending more on healing which means the organ barriers are thinner now than they were ten minutes ago."
Sylvia processed this. "So we hit the organ barriers until one breaks."
"With everything we have, in sync. The way we trained."
She looked at him. "Levi. You're bleeding internally."
"I know."
"We should retreat. Wait for backup—"
"He regenerates. If we retreat, everything I've spent the last ten minutes building — the attrition on his barriers, the energy depletion — resets. We'd start from nothing." He looked at her. "I'll fight him with or without you. But I think we can end this."
Sylvia was quiet for a moment. She looked at the street — Kevin's area, a few blocks over, the rubble of what had happened there. She looked at Hercules.
"If we die," she said, "I'm going to be furious with you."
"Fair," said Levi.
They transformed together.
"Took you long enough," Hercules said, looking at both of them. "Now show me something worth watching."
✦ ✦ ✦
They hit him from both sides simultaneously and didn't stop.
The synchronisation they'd built over months — the specific rhythm of two people who had trained together until they didn't have to think about each other's positions — ran underneath the fight like a current. Levi created the openings, Sylvia drove into them. Sylvia drew Hercules' attention, Levi found the blindspot. Neither of them held back.
The pierce attacks accumulated. Each one individually insufficient; collectively attritive. Hercules tanked them and regenerated, but the regeneration was slower now, the energy budget visibly strained. His responses were fractionally delayed compared to the start of the fight.
"He's adapting," Sylvia said, between exchanges. "He's reading our pattern."
"Then we change it." Levi caught her eye. "The vortex. Above."
She understood. She always understood.
"Godspeed Style: Hundred Lightning Strikes," Levi said, and deployed them all at once — the full coverage, Hercules' body lit with a hundred simultaneous pierce points. The legend went still for one second under the combined impact.
That second was the window.
They hit him together — both fists, both ability outputs, the combination driving him upward. Not a controlled launch. A statement. Hercules went through the cloud ceiling and kept going.
Levi teleported them above him.
The sky above Olympicõ held them for a moment — the city spread below, the overcast sky around them, Hercules rising toward them with the disoriented momentum of something that had been sent up rather than jumped. Levi and Sylvia looked at each other. Both of them running on reserves rather than capacity. Both of them past the point where the body negotiated.
"Everything," Levi said.
"Everything," said Sylvia.
"Blazing Electric Vortex."
The fire and the lightning combined — not separately, not in sequence, but as one expression, the two abilities fusing at the point of contact the way they'd been training to fuse since Gabriel's sessions began. The vortex descended from above with everything both of them had in it, and the city below saw it coming, and the sound it made was the sound of weather rather than a spell.
It hit Hercules on the way down.
It hit the ground with him inside it.
The crater it left was sixty metres wide.
—
Levi and Sylvia pulled themselves out of the crater's edge in their normal forms, depleted past the point where the forms held.
Sylvia was on her hands and knees. Levi was sitting with his legs over the crater's lip, looking at the bottom.
"Did we—" Sylvia started.
An energy beam shot from the centre of the crater straight up into the sky.
The light that came next wasn't the ambient light of a Flux expression. It was the specific quality of something changing states — a transformation happening at a level that rewrote the air around it. Hercules rose from the bottom of the crater, and what rose was not what had gone down.
The demi-god form was larger. Denser. The rage and wrath of it had a physical component — Levi felt it as pressure, the way you feel a storm before the rain arrives. The regeneration had completed at a different scale. Whatever barriers they'd depleted during the fight had been rebuilt with the energy of the transformation itself.
They had reset him.