Levi woke up in the infirmary two hours after the trial ended.
The ceiling was white and unfamiliar for approximately three seconds, and then the depletion in his bones reminded him exactly where he was and why, and the ceiling became less important.
"Look who decided to join us," said Melissa, from the chair beside his bed.
He sat up. Sylvia and Priscilla were in the adjacent beds, both awake, both watching him with the expression of people who had been waiting. The other contestants were distributed across the infirmary in various states of recovery — Kevin talking quietly with James, Dwayne and Vanessa side by side, everyone present.
Everyone.
"All seven," Levi said.
"All seven," Melissa confirmed.
He let that land for a moment. Then he looked at his hands — ordinary, no discharge, the Overcharge fully dissipated — and flexed them.
"You three were extraordinary," Melissa said. She said it without performance, the way she said things she meant. "All of you were. But Levi—" She paused. "When did you develop the Overcharge?"
"During the training weeks, when you were in Olympicõ." He looked at his hands. "I spent time in the inner realm working on new spell combinations. I asked Ivel if Heavens Wrath could push the 3rd form past its ceiling. He said it wouldn't evolve the form, but it could overcharge it — if I could absorb and channel that amount of energy without it destroying me."
"And if you failed the channelling?"
"Electrocuted from the inside." He said it with the equanimity of someone who had considered this risk and decided it was acceptable. "I didn't fail."
Sylvia looked at him. "How did you learn to absorb electricity in the first place?"
Something shifted in Levi's expression — briefly, controlled, the specific quality of someone choosing not to open a door. "A long time ago," he said. "I'd rather not get into it. It was traumatic."
The infirmary was quiet for a moment.
Priscilla looked at Sylvia. Sylvia looked at Levi. Levi looked at his hands and didn't elaborate.
They let it be. They'd been friends long enough to know when something needed space rather than questions. The question would wait, and when he was ready to answer it, they'd be there.
"What it means practically," Levi said, after a moment, "is that the Overcharge is a last resort. I can't activate it without Heavens Wrath or a comparable lightning source. I have to stay still while the storm builds. In a real fight that could be impossible." He looked at Melissa. "I'll find a way around the limitations eventually."
"I know you will," she said, with the certainty of someone who had watched him think his way around things for months. "That's not what concerns me."
"What concerns you?"
She looked at him for a moment. "The thing you're not telling us about." She said it simply, without pressure. "When you're ready."
He nodded.
She nodded back, and the subject was set aside for later by mutual agreement.
✦ ✦ ✦
Veronica appeared in the infirmary doorway with the energy of someone who had been carrying good news for twenty minutes and was about to release it.
"The officials have finished deliberating. Arena. Now." She looked at all seven of them. "And — before we go. In twelve years of running this trial, I have never seen what I saw today. All of you. Every single one." She paused. "Whatever happens in that arena, I'm proud of this class."
Kevin, from his bed, said nothing. But he sat up straighter.
—
The arena welcomed them back with applause — sustained, genuine, the crowd that had watched seven waves and a Code Purple legend and a foundation-phase student hold his own against it for two minutes, processing all of it through noise.
They stood in the centre of the floor and received it.
Veronica took the microphone. "Ladies and gentlemen — the moment we've been waiting for. Colonels, your decision."
Colonel Ralph carried the envelope to the centre. Handed it to Veronica. She opened it, read it, and her expression did something that was not quite a smile and not quite shock but contained elements of both.
"Ladies and gentlemen," she said, and her amplified voice reached every corner of the arena, "for the first time in this academy's history—"
She paused. She was enjoying this.
"—all seven contestants have been chosen to join the Military."
The crowd erupted.
Kevin heard it and stood very still for about one second. Then he picked James up off the ground — one arm, James's feet leaving the floor — and started jumping.
"I PASSED," he shouted, loud enough to carry over the crowd noise. "AFTER FIVE ATTEMPTS, I ACTUALLY PASSED—"
James, suspended at shoulder height and bouncing, had the expression of someone who was genuinely happy for his friend and would prefer to be put down.
The trio watched Kevin jump and felt something warm settle in. Not just the result — the specific joy of watching someone who had been told they weren't good enough finally get to be wrong about themselves.
Levi looked at Sylvia. She was already looking at him. Neither of them said anything. Neither of them needed to.
✦ ✦ ✦
Colonel Theo gathered them in the training area afterward — quieter than the arena, the crowd gone, the seven of them and their instructors in the space where they'd spent months working.
"Congratulations," he said, with the directness of someone who had said this before and meant it every time. "All of you earned this. What I want to talk about now is what comes next, because for some of you it's not what you expected."
James, he explained, would be going to the stealth division rather than active myth-killing. His ability — sound-triggered mass blackout, effective at range, absolutely catastrophic if used near allies in a chaotic fight — made him too valuable for a role where the primary risk was friendly fire.
James opened his mouth.
"The stealth division," Colonel Theo said, "handles missions that myth killers can't. Infiltration. Information extraction. Neutralising targets without engagement. Your ability in that context is not a liability. It's extraordinary." He looked at James. "This isn't a consolation. This is an assignment based on what you actually are."
James closed his mouth. Thought about it. Nodded.
Theo turned to the trio and Dwayne. "You four will be myth killers. That's your primary role. But you'll also be part-time stealth agents — called up for specific missions that require your particular skills." He looked at Levi. "Speed and precision teleportation. Priscilla — ranged object manipulation and levitation. Sylvia — enhancement allows you to move and operate in conditions that would stop most people. Dwayne — size reduction to undetectable scale."
"Undetectable scale?" Dwayne said.
"Particle size," Theo confirmed. "Yes."
Dwayne looked at his hands with the expression of someone discovering a feature of themselves they hadn't fully considered.
"Report to the Olympia Military HQ Monday morning," Theo said. "Further instructions there. For now — well done. All of you."
He left. They saluted his exit.
Kevin looked at James. "Stealth division."
"Stealth division," James confirmed.
"That's actually really cool."
"I know," said James. "I'm still processing it."
✦ ✦ ✦
Veronica found them one more time before they left the academy — in the corridor outside the training area, her headmaster's composure slightly undone in the way it sometimes was when she allowed herself to feel things.
"I wanted to say it without a microphone," she said. "I'm proud of this class. Every one of you." She looked at them. "Go out there. Make names for yourselves. Make the kingdom safer than you found it." A pause. "And come back and visit sometime. I expect to read about you in the reports."
"Thank you, Headmaster," they said — all seven of them, at once, with a genuineness that made Veronica blink quickly and look at the ceiling briefly.
"Right," she said. "Off you go."
James returned Levi's dagger in the corridor. Pressed it into his palm with the care of someone returning something borrowed from a person who hadn't had to lend it.
"Thank you," James said. "For the dagger. And for—" He stopped. "For wave four."
"You would have figured something out," said Levi.
James looked at him. "Maybe. But you made it easier." He nodded once — the specific nod of a new friendship finding its footing — and went to find Kevin.
✦ ✦ ✦
Chef Jeff had been busy.
The Blaze mansion dining room had been transformed in the way it was transformed for occasions: the full table, the good dishes, every surface carrying something that smelled extraordinary. The household staff were already seated — butler, maids, gardeners, kitchen crew — waiting with the barely-contained energy of people who had been watching the trial on the arena feed all day and had opinions about what they'd seen.
Levi and Sylvia sat down and started eating before anyone had finished saying hello. Priscilla arrived fifteen minutes later with the specific expression of someone who had nearly fallen asleep in the shower and had only survived through determination.
The evening moved in the way good evenings move — conversation overlapping, Chef Jeff bringing additional dishes with the confidence of someone who knew they were going well, Melissa at one end of the table looking at all of them with the quiet expression of someone taking an inventory they were satisfied with.
When the main course was nearly done, Chef Jeff stood up. He did it with the natural authority of someone who knew the room was his when he chose to claim it. He picked up his glass.
"I'm going to keep this short," he said, "because I know certain people at this table have thoughts about the dessert and I don't want to stand between them and it."
Levi and Sylvia had the grace to look slightly guilty.
"These three," Chef Jeff said, looking at the trio, "have been in my kitchen, at my table, and in this house for two months. I've watched them train every morning and eat everything I put in front of them every evening, which is the highest compliment anyone can pay a cook." He paused. "Today they walked into an arena and showed everyone in Olympia what they were made of. And then they kept going when a legendary class myth walked through a portal, which — I want to be clear — is not normal. That is not a thing that normal people do."
Quiet laughter around the table.
"We're proud of you," he said, dropping the comedic register into something simpler and truer. "All of us. And we have one request." He looked at each of them. "Don't die. I know that's a lot to ask, given the job. But come back and have dinner with us again. That's all we want."
He raised his glass.
The trio stood. Levi looked at Sylvia — she was already standing, already looking back at him. He looked at Priscilla — she was smiling, the real version, the one that wasn't performing anything.
"We promise," they said, together.
"CHEERS," said everyone in the room, and the glasses rang out, and the celebration went wherever celebrations go when they're the right ones at the right time.
✦ ✦ ✦
Later, when the staff had moved from dinner to dancing and the champagne had made its work felt, Melissa pulled the trio out to the patio.
The night was warm. The garden was dark beyond the pool lights. From inside they could hear Chef Jeff singing something that was more enthusiastic than accurate.
"I have to go back to Olympicõ tonight," Melissa said. "The wall reconstruction is almost done. A few more days and I'll be back." She looked at Levi. "I need your daggers before I go."
Levi looked at her. "My daggers."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"You'll understand Monday." She held his gaze. "I need them tonight. I'll have them back to you by your first morning report."
He was quiet for a moment.
The daggers had been on his person since the night his mother pressed them into his hands on a street in burning Velvetia. Through the waterfall, through the weeks of training, through the trial and wave eight and the Overcharge and everything that had come after. He had never set them down voluntarily.
He went inside. Came back with them. Held them out.
Melissa took them carefully — the way you hold things that belong to someone else, aware of the weight they carry that isn't physical. She looked at them for a moment. Then at Levi.
"Monday," she said.
"Monday," he said.
She tucked them into her jacket, hugged all three of them with the same grip as always, and walked around the side of the house toward the Gate Portal.
They watched her go.
"What do you think she's doing with them?" Priscilla asked.
"No idea," said Levi.
"Are you worried?"
He thought about it. "No. It's Melissa."
That seemed sufficient. They went back inside.
—
Somewhere around three in the morning, the dancing stopped not because anyone decided it should but because everyone was simply where they had ended up — the butler asleep in an armchair, two maids on the sofa, Chef Jeff sitting at the dining table with his head propped on his hand, still holding his glass. The gardener had found a blanket from somewhere.
The trio were on the lounge floor, which had ended up being where the celebrations landed when everything else got occupied. Levi was on his back with a cushion under his head. Sylvia was next to him with her arm over her eyes. Priscilla was sitting against the sofa, already mostly asleep, her head tipping forward in slow increments.
Through the lounge window, the sky was changing at the edges. The deep blue of late night giving way to the particular grey that came before dawn, the first suggestion that the sun was somewhere below the horizon and working its way back.
Levi looked at it and thought: MK. He was an MK now. Tomorrow — today, technically — he would wake up and he would be a commissioned Myth Killer and everything that meant would begin.
He thought about his mother. He thought about the daggers, handed to Melissa, gone until Monday. He thought about the oak tree with its static blue leaves, the Overcharge, the way Horus had looked at him when he'd made himself visible — the flat gold eyes registering something that might have been recalculation.
He thought about the mystery man's closing line from the night Velvetia fell: *that leaves seven.*
Six now, with Horus gone. And someone was still running those attacks. And Melissa was in Olympicõ because someone was keeping her there deliberately.
He thought about all of it, and let it be the shape of what came next, and closed his eyes.
The sun came up over Olympia.
Three Myth Killers slept in the lounge.