The Evogres were fast.
Not fast the way the Chimeras had been fast — that was agility, the speed of small things changing direction. This was mass in motion, the speed of something large that had decided to move and didn't have to think about it. An SS-class Evogre in full charge covered ground the way a natural disaster covered ground: inevitably.
Levi didn't meet them head-on. He moved laterally — the 2nd Form's speed giving him enough margin to stay outside their committed attack lines — and let them carry past him, redirecting the momentum into the wall or the ground or each other. When the opening came, he used it: the electron dagger finding the joints, the real dagger finding the follow-through.
They were strong. They hit hard when they connected, and sometimes they connected — the smartwatch flickering down from 97 to 91 to 88 across the first wave of them. But they were also predictable, and predictable meant manageable, and manageable meant he could keep going.
He bound six of them with Electric Bondage, watched the chains snap around their limbs with the satisfying precision of a spell that worked exactly as intended, and snapped his fingers.
"Electrocution Frenzy."
The current ran through every chain simultaneously. Six Evogres, six seconds, done.
He looked up and found Sylvia thirty metres away, standing in the middle of what had been a dense pack of Evogres and was now an expanding ring of ash and scorch marks. Her hair was fully fire. Her skin had taken on the amber of her 3rd form's early edge — not fully activated, but close, the hybrid abilities running hot.
She hadn't used the full Solar Flare again — too much energy cost — but whatever she had used had cleared a city block.
"You alright?" he called.
"Fine." She was breathing harder. "Energy's down though."
He checked his own watch. 82%. She'd be lower.
They didn't have to say it. Both of them knew the same thing: four more waves. Save the 3rd form for seven.
✦ ✦ ✦
James ran.
Not in panic — deliberately, with a specific destination in mind. The Evogres that had locked onto him were fast enough to keep pace but not fast enough to cut him off, and he needed distance. Distance from Kevin, distance from Dwayne and Vanessa, distance from anyone who might hear.
He counted streets as he ran. Three. Four. Five. The sounds of the rest of the wave were audible but not close.
Far enough.
He stopped. Turned. The Evogres closed the distance in four seconds — a pack of eight, charging hard, the electricity in the electric Evogres' arms already arcing.
James put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.
The sound was very loud and very specific — not just volume, something in the frequency of it, a quality that reached into the brain stem and hit the switch that turned the lights off. The whistle carried down five empty streets and died against the buildings.
All eight Evogres hit the ground simultaneously. Not hurt, not dead — simply absent, the consciousness switched off mid-stride, bodies dropping with the abrupt completeness of power cuts.
James walked forward with Levi's dagger.
He was methodical about it. Heart of each one, precise, no wasted motion. He'd practised this — the killing part, the part that came after the blackout, the part that was his responsibility because his ability handled the incapacitation but nothing else. He finished the last one and stood up and checked his watch.
72%. More than he'd like, but the wave wasn't over and he had range.
He looked at the dagger in his hand — Jane Baron's dagger, passed to her son, passed to him for the duration of this trial. He turned it once in his fingers, feeling the balance of it.
He went to find more myths.
✦ ✦ ✦
Kevin's enclosure was three metres of packed earth and stone, shaped in the instinctive way his ability shaped things — solid, layered, the grain of it running the right direction for maximum compression. He'd made enclosures before. He knew the construction.
What he hadn't accounted for was the number.
The Evogres were pounding the exterior in rotation — not randomly, in sequences, the way things pounded when there were enough of them to maintain continuous pressure. His watch read 27%. The health bar was red. He could feel each impact as a vibration through the stone, and the stone was taking damage even if he wasn't taking it directly.
He sat in the dark of his enclosure and looked at the red numbers and breathed.
He'd failed this wave before. Four times. Four trials, four attempts at wave four, four times the Evogres had found him and pushed him past his limit and the simulation had ended and he'd walked out of the arena and gone home and had to explain it. Four times.
His family had stopped asking him to explain it.
That was worse.
The pounding continued. 24%. 21%.
He thought about his brother — not intentionally, just the way certain thoughts arrive when you're cornered and running low, the thoughts you've been most carefully not thinking. Marcus Dander, SSS-class MK, commissioned at seventeen, celebrated by everyone in the family as the standard against which other things were measured. Marcus who had looked at Kevin's fourth failed trial result and said nothing, which was worse than anything he might have said. Marcus whose silence communicated everything their parents had said out loud.
*You really are pathetic.*
The voice arrived fully formed, the way it always arrived — not a memory exactly, more like a recording he hadn't chosen to play. His brother's voice, unhurried, with the particular quality of someone saying something they considered obvious. *Crying like a helpless child in a battlefield. You wonder why they call you the disappointment. You think you'll become a myth killer. You think you'll be greater than me.* A pause. *Don't waste your time believing that. You'll always be the weak one.*
Kevin sat in the dark and heard it again.
18%.
And then something happened that was different from the previous four times. The previous four times, the voice had landed and he'd accepted it — not consciously, not with any decision, just absorbed it the way you absorb things that arrive with enough force. The fear had followed naturally. The resignation after the fear.
This time, the voice landed and he felt rage.
Not the hot, unfocused rage of frustration. Something colder and deeper and more specific than that — the rage of someone who has been told the same wrong thing enough times that they've finally stopped believing it's true and started believing it's an injustice. He was not weak. He had trained every day for a year. He was in the top class of the best military academy in the kingdom. He was on his fifth trial not because he was weak, but for the improvement he needed to undergo before facing the harsh reality of being a Myth Killer.
*You'll always be the weak one.*
No, Kevin thought. I won't.
The earth answered.
—
The earthquake reached the arena before anyone understood what was causing it.
In the stands, people grabbed armrests. The arena structure groaned. The VIP section held but the colonels exchanged looks — alert, recalibrating, the practiced assessment of people deciding whether this was expected or extraordinary.
In the simulation, the ground cracked in expanding rings from a point in the southern quarter. Buildings lurched. The contestants scattered from falling debris, smartwatches flickering as the impacts registered. Levi caught a falling section of wall with a telestride, landing clear. Sylvia took the shockwave through her feet and converted it into a jump.
Then it stopped.
And from the southern quarter, something rose.
Levi saw it first — above the roofline, above the buildings, still rising. A shape that was recognisably humanoid in the way that mountains are recognisably shaped by the forces that made them: roughly, at scale, without consideration for proportion. Stone and packed earth and something else, something that had the density of concentrated will. Forty feet. Fifty. Still growing as it found its final form.
A Golem. But not any Golem in the classification charts.
"That's Kevin," Levi said.
Sylvia stared. "That's Kevin?"
"Think about it. No SSS-class myth in this simulation. Earth ability. The earthquake timing." He tracked the Golem as it oriented — there was a quality to its movement that wasn't the blank momentum of a myth, something deliberate underneath it. Someone inside it. "He's the core."
"He's the core of a fifty-foot Golem," Sylvia said.
"Yes."
"In a trial."
"Yes."
She watched it for a moment. "Kevin really doesn't do anything small when he finally does something, does he."
—
Inside the Golem, Kevin looked down.
He hadn't fully planned this. The form had arrived the way his ability sometimes arrived when he stopped managing it — completely, all at once, the full expression of what it was rather than what he allowed it to be. He was at the centre of it the way a core is at the centre of anything: not controlling it from outside but being it, the Golem an extension of himself at a different scale.
The Evogres below him looked small.
They were still attacking — he could feel their impacts as pressure at the edges of his perception, the way you feel rain on your skin when you're wearing a coat. He looked at them and felt the last of the rage settle into something quieter and more functional.
He moved.
The Golem brought one foot down on a cluster of Evogres with the unhurried finality of something that had simply decided this was over. Then another cluster. Then another. He swept through the southern quarter methodically, the myths' attacks registering as nothing against his current scale, until the wave counter on his watch began moving toward zero.
When the last Evogre fell, he held the form for a moment longer than necessary.
Not performing. Just — being it. Being the thing he hadn't let himself be before.
Then he released the Golem. The earth settled back in a wide radius, the buildings that had cracked during the transformation now holding their new shapes. Kevin was standing in the middle of it, human-sized again, watching his watch tick back up as the simulation registered his health recovery.
His watch read 31%. Still in.
Fifth trial.
He was still in.
✦ ✦ ✦
Wave four signal: clear.
Seven contestants. All seven still active.
In the arena, the crowd noise had shifted into something different from the cheering of the earlier waves — louder, yes, but also more unsettled, the sound of people who had watched something unexpected and were still processing it. The colonels were writing. Colonel Ralph had filled two pages.
Melissa was on her feet.
She sat back down when she noticed. Composed herself. Looked at the simulation display where the seven health readings were tracked in real time — all active, various levels of depletion. She found Levi's: 82%. Sylvia's: 74%. Priscilla's: 100%.
She looked at Priscilla's number for a moment.
Still 100%.
Three waves of SS-class myths and the girl hadn't taken a single point of damage. Melissa filed this in the place where she filed things she would need to think about later, and turned her attention to the simulation display.
Wave five signal.
On the arena screens, the simulation environment shifted — the city of Olympicõ reassembling itself into something denser, tighter, the streets narrowing and the buildings rising. The SSS-class configuration. More room to be cornered. Less room to run.
In the simulation, Levi checked his watch, checked his energy, and looked at the street ahead.
Three waves left.
Wave seven was coming.
He rolled his shoulders and moved forward to meet wave five.