The city was quiet in the specific way of things that had survived something enormous and hadn't yet started the process of understanding what had happened.
Melissa walked through it with the boy on her back, her Axemer in hand, the 6th Form deactivated because she didn't have the energy to sustain it and didn't need it for a walk. The streets were empty — citizens in shelters, MKs at their positions, the battle's aftermath settling into the particular silence that followed catastrophe.
"You know," the boy said, from her back, "you're very strong. Scary strong."
"Thank you," said Melissa.
"I hope one day I can be as strong as you."
She smiled at that — the specific warmth of someone who had heard this from many young people and meant it every time. "You will. So long as you work toward it."
"You really think so?"
"I know so."
A pause. The Gate Portal was two streets ahead. The city's damaged skyline rose on either side of them, the afternoon light coming through the smoke in the particular way it came through smoke — orange, diffuse, the light of a day that had been through something.
"Thank you, miss," the boy said quietly. "For letting your guard down."
Melissa registered the words a fraction of a second before she registered what they meant.
The spikes came from his body — part of him, shaped from the same shapeshifting ability that had turned him into a cat, driven through her back before her body had time to process the instruction to move. Through the shoulder blades. Through the lung. Through the places that a body needed to remain intact to remain a body.
She hit the ground.
The boy — the child she had given her Axemer to, the child she had carried through a tsunami, the child she had told she believed in — stood over her and became something else. Not a child. Not a cat. The original form: tall, composed, with the specific quality of something that had never been what it appeared to be.
"After watching you fight those other myths," Proteus said, "I'm somewhat surprised it was this easy." He looked at her without apology. "But you were depleted, and you never considered that a child might be a legend. It's only natural to let your guard down around something that looks like it needs protecting."
She looked up at him. The sky above him was the smoky orange of the afternoon, the bright light of it getting strange at the edges of her vision.
"Before you go," he said, "you should know the name of the legend that killed you. I am Proteus. The God of Shapeshifting."
She heard him. She processed it. She filed it in the place where she filed things that mattered.
Then she closed her eyes.
✦ ✦ ✦
In the void between consciousness and not, there was darkness.
Then her ability lit it up — the enhancement running at the level it always ran at when she stopped managing it, the Ultra Impact blazing through the dark the way it blazed through everything. She was floating in it. Around her was the record of everything she'd built: the training years, the deployments, the seventeen years of being the strongest human in Olympia, the students she'd shaped, the kingdom she'd protected, the brother she'd lost in a throne room an hour ago, the three children in a hospital in Blizzaria who were going to wake up and find a different world.
She thought about them.
Levi, who had his mother's certainty and his father's handles and a ceiling no one had found the top of yet. Sylvia, who had fused two abilities in the moment of grief and found a form that hadn't existed before she needed it. Priscilla, whose spatial awareness had protected her even when she was unconscious, whose telekinesis had shaped into something that could reshape landscapes.
She thought about what they would need. About the world they were walking into — the legends, the mystery man, the war that had been building since before the comet, the thing that was approaching that the mystery man had called Power.
*I still have one last job to do,* she thought. *I will do it with everything that remains.*
The ability moved through her like a final answer to a question that had been asked her whole life.
"As oblivion calls my name," she said, in the dark, "I summon my last flame of life. For my last stand—"
She opened her eyes.
"Life Enhancement: Final Surge."
—
Proteus sensed it.
The danger arrived in his awareness before he understood its shape — something approaching at a speed that his shapeshifting reflexes existed to respond to. He began to move.
He didn't finish moving.
Melissa was in front of him. The 6th Form running on the last of what life itself could give — the Final Surge, the ability she'd developed knowing it could only ever be used once, the enhancement drawing on biological reserves that existed past the point where the body was supposed to have any. The thick ring tattoos blazed across her right arm in the specific pattern of total commitment. Her right hand was white.
Everything she had. Everything she'd ever built. Focused into one point.
"Ultimate Impact," she said.
The impact erased everything in its path and range. The street it touched became the record of what Melissa Blaze's full output looked like when she had nothing left to hold back. Proteus was in the path.
Proteus was gone.
The shockwave ran through the district. The dust settled. The city absorbed it the way the city had absorbed everything today — with the silent resilience of something that had been built to last.
Melissa fell.
✦ ✦ ✦
The ground was cold.
She looked at the sky — the orange-grey smoke-diffused sky of a city that had survived the worst day in its history and was still standing. She'd made sure of that. She'd killed four legends and the traitor who had been the mystery man's real weapon, and Olympus was still standing, and the people in the shelters were alive, and the king was dead but the kingdom was not.
She thought about Levi.
In a hospital in Blizzaria, on life support, his mother's daggers on the table beside his bed. He was going to wake up and the world would be different from the one he'd gone to sleep in. He was going to have to carry things she'd been carrying for him, things she'd been planning to give him gradually, in the right order, when he was ready.
He would be ready. She knew that. She had known it since the inner realm, since the oak tree with its static blue leaves, since she'd looked at the open door quality of his awareness and understood that she was looking at something that would surpass everything she'd built.
She thought about Sylvia. About the specific joy of watching your child become extraordinary — not because of you, but alongside you, in the way that the best things grew.
She thought about Priscilla, who had walked into the Blaze mansion one day and become part of something she hadn't known she was looking for.
*I'm sorry, kiddos,* she thought. *This is where my road ends. I wish I could have given you the lecture. I wish I could have told you properly how proud I am — not just of what you can do, but of who you are. I've done everything I can. The rest is yours now.*
*Even knowing, I couldn't change it. But I wouldn't change what I did with the time I had.*
The sky was very still.
Melissa Blaze — the Blazing Beast of Olympia, the Blazing Wonder, one of the Seven — closed her eyes.
She slipped away.
✦ ✦ ✦
A portal opened beside her body.
The mysterious man stepped through it and stood in the ruined street and looked at her for a long moment — the specific quality of attention given to something significant. Around him, the city of Olympus lay damaged and changed, its king dead, its greatest defender gone, the barrier down.
"After all these years," he said quietly, "my plan has exceeded even my own expectations. Proteus performed his purpose perfectly — six months inside your walls, waiting for this moment." He paused. "It's a pity you killed him. I may be able to recreate him."
He looked at her.
"In this war, you were my most formidable enemy," he said. "You have taken five of my legends in a single day. No human has ever accomplished such a thing. Not in this war. Not in any war." He was quiet for a moment. "Rest in glory, Blazing Beast of Olympia. You were worthy of everything they called you."
From the shadows at the edge of the street, an Egyptian casket emerged — ancient, ornate, made with the specific care of something designed for someone worth the care. It opened. It received her.
The mystery man watched this and looked at the sky.
There was a bright star visible in the afternoon — not a sun, something else, something that occupied the sky the way stars occupied it at night but was here in the day, growing slowly brighter as it approached.
"He is coming faster than expected," the man said, to himself. "I hope Power wakes soon."
He stepped back through his portal.
The street was empty. The casket was gone. The city of Olympus stood damaged and leaderless in the afternoon light, its people beginning to emerge from the shelters into a world that had changed while they were sheltering from it.
In Blizzaria, in a quiet hospital room, a boy on life support breathed in and breathed out, his mother's daggers beside his bed, the oak tree in his inner realm growing in the dark.
He didn't know yet.
But the morning was coming.
It was always coming.