Seventy percent of Olympus was burning.
The king was dead. The barrier was gone. The myths were everywhere. The city's defences had been holding lines for hours — lines that were shorter now than when they'd started, the attrition of fighting things with no ceiling running its mathematics through the MK ranks.
The three remaining legends found each other at the city's centre.
Fujin arrived carrying a child under one arm — a boy, perhaps ten years old, with the specific quality of stillness that suggested he was choosing to be carried rather than being unable to escape it. Fujin looked at him the way he looked at things that didn't fit his existing categories.
"Why do you have a human with you?" Suijin asked.
"Because something is strange about him," Fujin said. "I sense something familiar in his aura. Something that belongs to us rather than to them." He looked at Suijin. "You feel it too?"
Suijin studied the child. "Yes," he said slowly. "It's like — multiple presences. Layered."
Takemikazuchi arrived — moving carefully, his severed shoulder still radiating the evidence of what had happened in the throne room. Suijin looked at him.
"Look who showed up all beaten," Suijin said.
"Watch your tone with me, new blood," Takemikazuchi said. "I am not in the mood."
"Oooh. Did I hit a nerve, Mikazuchi?"
Takemikazuchi conjured a sword. Fujin stepped between them.
"This is not the time," Fujin said. The authority in his voice settled the question immediately. "Takemikazuchi — what do you sense from the child?"
Takemikazuchi looked at the boy, irritated but focused. "Human. Animal. Myth." He frowned. "Simultaneously. That shouldn't be possible."
"It would explain the layered aura," Fujin said. "A shapeshifter. Something that can be whatever it needs to be."
"There's no point analysing it," Takemikazuchi said. He conjured a blade and aimed it at the child. "We kill it and move on."
The sword flew.
The child became a cat in the half-second before impact and was gone — small and fast, sprinting through the rubble with the specific urgency of something that had been pretending to be helpless and had decided to stop.
Takemikazuchi sent more swords after it. The cat wove between them with the ease of something that had been navigating difficult spaces its entire life.
Then Melissa arrived.
She came from the eastern approach at a pace that didn't announce itself as anything except decisive, and when the three legends registered her presence the quality of the air changed — the specific shift that happened when something that operated at a different level entered a space. She deflected Takemikazuchi's remaining swords with a single motion before they reached the cat.
The three legends went still.
"How convenient," Melissa said. "All three of you in one place. That saves me the trouble of hunting you individually."
The cat shifted back into a boy. Melissa crouched briefly to his level.
"This is dangerous," she said. "Take my Axemer. Find somewhere far from here and hide until I come for you."
The boy looked at the weapon she was offering him — the Axemer, her weapon, the one she'd carried through twenty years of deployment. He took it with both hands and ran.
Melissa straightened.
"6th Form: Enhancement Frenzy," she said.
The transformation that followed was not the 3rd form's visible expression or the Overcharge's continuous discharge. The 6th Form was quieter than either of those — the enhancement running at a depth that didn't need to announce itself because everything in the immediate vicinity could already feel it. The ring tattoos blazed across her arms and legs in thick bands. Her eyes went white.
She looked at the three legends.
"Which one of you wants to die first?"
✦ ✦ ✦
Takemikazuchi answered with swords.
"Infinite Swords Style: Rush of Swords" — the continuous volley, the technique she'd watched from a distance when he'd used it against Gabriel. She moved through it at 6th Form speed, each dodge placing her closer to him, using his own attack's density as a path rather than an obstacle.
Close enough. She caught one of his conjured swords by the handle as it passed, used its momentum, swung it at Takemikazuchi — who unconjured it before it arrived, leaving her arm extended and her centre briefly open.
He conjured another and drove it toward her.
She caught the blade between two fingers.
"Ultra Impact," she said, and hit him.
Takemikazuchi went through the city's skyline and kept going.
Fujin was already moving — not toward her, away, the wind god's instinct recognising the gap between what he'd expected and what she was. She caught his face before he'd covered three metres and threw him through the block of buildings to her left, the specific throw of someone who had decided where she wanted him and placed him there.
Suijin attacked from range — water dragons, multiple, covering the angles. She moved through them with the 6th Form's specific quality, each dodge looking less like avoidance and more like she'd already known where not to be. Her elbow found his gut as he overcommitted, and he went into a building and stayed there for a moment.
—
Fujin transformed.
"The God of Wind, Fujin."
The winds that came with it were not the controlled application of earlier — they were the full atmospheric expression of a wind god who had stopped managing his output. A hurricane formed around him, rubble caught up in it, the streets becoming dangerous in the broad radius of something that was making weather rather than using it.
"Now we're talking," Melissa said, and charged.
The vortexes came in sequence — each one large enough to take a building, directed at her approach vectors with the intelligence of something that had been reading her movement patterns. She went through alleyways, over buildings, the 6th Form's enhanced sensory reading the paths the attacks would take and finding the ones they wouldn't.
He combined the vortexes with the hurricane's debris — buildings and vehicles becoming projectiles, the attack density becoming something that couldn't be navigated by speed alone. She activated the Ultra Impact and sent it straight through the obstacle field — the impact force clearing a path through buildings and debris and vortexes simultaneously, the wave reaching Fujin before he could close the opening it created.
She went through it.
Inside the hurricane, Fujin dodged her approach. She passed him — by design — and hit the floating rubble and bounced. The redirection caught him from the angle he hadn't covered, and she hit him without the Ultra Impact because it wasn't necessary, and he went out of the hurricane and down.
He recovered. He didn't retreat. He fought — cars and debris and focused wind attacks, everything he had, against someone who had more. Melissa noted this without sentiment: the specific quality of something that knew it was losing and fought anyway. She noted it and kept working.
She had him on the ground, the Ultra Impact ready, Fujin finished — when Suijin's water bullet crossed the distance from behind and she redirected the impact to intercept it. The bullet dispersed. She turned.
Suijin had been recovering while she fought Fujin. The magic circles around him were large — the specific size of a spell that needed time to build and was now ready. The devastation she read through her Ultra-Sensory was total: a tsunami, aimed at the city, timed for when she was committed to the other fight.
She ran.
—
The wave came before she reached the boy.
"Rampaging Waters: Tsunami" — the full output of a water god who had been given time to prepare, the wave carrying everything in its path and replacing it with ocean.
Melissa reached the boy first. She piggybacked him and turned toward the wave.
She enhanced the Axemer — the weapon she'd given away and taken back, the one that had been with her since before Levi had been born. The ring tattoos blazed.
"Ultra Slash."
The slash split the water. Not deflected, not dispersed — divided, a clean line through the wave that became a path, the ocean pulling back on either side and holding while Melissa ran through it. The slash's force reached the end of the path and beyond, into the position Fujin and Suijin had taken, and they moved — barely, the surprise of it catching them a half-second behind the response they needed.
Melissa came out of the path.
They fired simultaneously — a combined wind and water vortex, the two abilities working together the way they'd been designed to work together.
"Ultra Impact: Stagnant Force."
The force field absorbed the vortex. Then she repelled it — the accumulated impact reversing direction, the combined attack going back the way it had come with her output added to it. The legends were driven back.
The Axemer left her hand.
It crossed the distance to Fujin with the Ultra Impact loaded into it — not thrown, sent, the distinction being that thrown things arrived with the force of the throw and sent things arrived with whatever was put into them. What Melissa had put into it was everything that needed to end Fujin.
Fujin had no time.
The impact was total. The God of Wind was gone.
Suijin stood in the wreckage of his ally and looked at what had just happened and looked at Melissa approaching him and arrived at an honest assessment of the situation.
She hit him with the Ultra Impact Fist Frenzy before the assessment had fully resolved — the multiple impacts landing in sequence, each one carrying the full force, the city block around them recording the event in the specific way that city blocks recorded events they hadn't been designed to record.
The tremors ran through the district.
When it was over, Melissa stood in the quiet of a city that was still damaged and still burning but no longer had four legendary class myths in it.
She looked up at the cloudy sky. Something in her exhaled that had been held for the entire battle.
"We did it, kid," she said. "We beat them."
The boy on her back said nothing. He was staring at the radius of the Ultra Impact Fist Frenzy with an expression that had moved past speech into something more immediate.
She picked up her Axemer. She checked herself — the depletion was near-total, the 6th Form requiring more than any other form to sustain, the battle having run long. She was empty in the specific way of someone who had spent everything and was now running on the residual.
"Let's get you somewhere safe," she said, and started walking toward the Gate Portal.