Monday morning arrived with the specific quality of mornings that matter — the kind where you wake up and the day has already decided it's going to be different from the ones before it.
Levi and Sylvia were at breakfast when Priscilla arrived. The chauffeur was outside. The Military HQ was across the city. And Sylvia had announced, between bites, that they had a stop to make first.
"The king's palace," she said.
Priscilla looked up. "The king. Has gifts. For us."
"For all three of us, yes."
Priscilla considered this for a moment. Then she smiled the smile of someone recalibrating their morning upward. "Okay. Let's go."
They left ten minutes later, the chauffeur navigating toward the palace through the early city traffic, the morning light coming through the car windows at the angle that made everything look like it was just beginning.
✦ ✦ ✦
The palace dining room was mid-breakfast when the butler announced them.
Gabriel was out of his chair before the butler finished the sentence.
"Sylvia!" He crossed the room at a pace that was technically walking and practically not, and pulled her into a hug with the straightforward affection of someone who had been her uncle her whole life and saw no reason to be formal about it. "It's been too long. Why don't you visit more?"
"The trial," said Sylvia, hugging him back. "I've been a little busy."
"The trial." He held her at arm's length, looking at her with the assessing quality that ran in the Blaze line. "I heard how it went. Melissa described it in her report." Something moved in his expression — pride, but the contained version, the kind that had been thinking about how to express itself. "I'm proud of you, Sylvie."
Sylvia blinked. "Thank you, Uncle."
He turned to the others. Levi had straightened slightly without meaning to, the reflexive response to being looked at by someone whose opinion carried weight. Gabriel's gaze moved over him with the same careful quality he'd used at their first meeting — not a social scan but an actual assessment, the read of someone who had developed the habit of looking at people properly.
"You must be Levi," he said.
"Yes, sir. Your Majesty." Levi paused. "King Sir."
Sylvia closed her eyes briefly.
Gabriel laughed — the genuine kind, surprised out of him. "Melissa told me about you," he said. "The entrance exam. The trial. The Overcharge." He looked at Levi directly, and the laugh had settled into something more serious. "I read the colonels' full report this morning. I've been king for eighteen years. I've commissioned hundreds of MKs." He paused. "I've never read a report like that."
Levi didn't know what to do with that, so he said nothing, which was probably the right response.
Gabriel nodded — the nod of someone who had said what they meant and didn't need it confirmed — and turned to Priscilla. "And Priscilla Jefferson."
"Your Majesty," said Priscilla.
He looked at her for a moment. "Melissa is remarkable," he said, almost to himself. "She becomes the strongest MK in the kingdom, raises a hybrid prodigy, and then — in her spare time — trains three wonders." He smiled. "She really does make running this kingdom easier."
Queen Abigail, still at the breakfast table, said: "She also makes your insurance costs higher every time she goes on deployment, but yes."
Gabriel conceded this with a gesture.
Then the doorway filled with Charlotte.
She was in her pyjamas, hair unsettled, one eye more open than the other, with the specific expression of someone who had heard her father laughing from two floors up and had come to investigate. She saw the three of them standing in her dining room and blinked.
"Why are you here," she said.
"Nice to see you too," said Sylvia.
"I literally just woke up. I haven't calibrated yet." Charlotte looked at Levi. Something passed across her expression — recognition, warmth, quickly managed. "You passed the trial."
"We all did," said Levi.
"I know. I watched." She looked at him for another moment. "You were—" She stopped. "Congratulations," she said instead, in the tone of someone who had elected not to finish their original sentence.
Levi looked at her. She looked back.
"Thank you, Charlotte," he said.
She nodded once, gathered her pyjama collar with some dignity, and went to pour herself something from the sideboard.
✦ ✦ ✦
Gabriel led them to the palace basement.
He opened the door and stood aside, and the trio looked at what was inside.
Swords. Hundreds of them — mounted on walls, arranged on racks, displayed with the care of someone who made things they were proud of and wanted them seen properly. Every size, every configuration, the range of a collection built over years by someone who understood the craft completely. The room smelled of metal and oil and the particular warmth of a furnace that had been burning recently.
"You made all of these," Priscilla said. Not a question.
"Swordsmithing," Gabriel said. "It's what I do when the kingdom gets to be too much. Which is frequently." He walked them toward the back, past the racks, to the work area where the furnace was still holding heat from the morning. "I finished yours today. Melissa told me your abilities — I chose the materials based on what would serve each of you best."
On the workbench: three weapons, laid side by side.
—
Gabriel picked up the first — two daggers, paired, sheaths of dark leather — and held them out to Levi.
Levi took them.
The handles were familiar. He recognised the weight of them, the specific balance, the way the grip settled into his palm. Because they were the same handles — the guards his mother had carried, the leather his father's hands had worn smooth years before his own. Gabriel had taken the handles from Jane's daggers and fitted them with new blades.
New blades. His mother's grip.
He stood in the basement of the king's palace and held them and didn't say anything for a moment.
"The blades are forged from an ore out of Inayuka," Gabriel said, giving him the moment without drawing attention to it. "Nearly unbreakable — the only thing known to cut it is Fenrir's claws, which I'd prefer you not test empirically. I reworked the blade geometry slightly. Better edge retention, cleaner point."
Levi unsheathed one. The blade was longer than the original, the design different — sharper at the geometry, the metal carrying a faint luminescent quality in the light from the furnace. He turned it once in his hand.
His mother's energy was still in the handle. He could feel it — the specific warmth of the Flux trace that objects carried when they'd been held by someone long enough. She'd carried these for years. His father before that.
"Thank you, Your Majesty," he said. His voice came out level, which he was grateful for. "These are — thank you."
Gabriel nodded once, the nod of someone who understood what had just happened and didn't need to make anything more of it.
—
The second weapon was a sword — straight-bladed, simply designed, with the clean lines of something that didn't need ornamentation because it was already what it was.
"From the Kingdom of LePortia," Gabriel said, handing it to Sylvia. "Infuse your Arcana Flux into the blade."
Sylvia took it. Let the Flux run through her hand and into the metal.
The blade became fire.
Not coated in fire — the blade itself, the metal expressing the flux running through it as pure combustion, the edge burning with the same deep orange-red of Sylvia's 3rd form. She turned it in the light and watched the flame move with her breathing.
"Oh," she said quietly.
"Simple design," Gabriel said. "I know. But sometimes—"
"No," Sylvia said. "It's perfect."
—
The third weapon was a double-ended spear — a shaft of dark metal with blades at both ends, balanced at its midpoint with the precision of something designed to be thrown or spun or controlled at range.
Priscilla took it. Or rather, she reached out her awareness toward it and it came to her — rising from the table and settling into her hand with the ease of something that had been waiting to be picked up.
"Gravitonia ore," Gabriel said. "Lightest metal currently known. Comparable strength to ultimatium."
Priscilla sent the spear into the air above her head and let it rotate — slowly at first, then faster, the blades catching the furnace light at the ends of each revolution. She sent it in a wide arc around the room, threading it between the sword racks with a precision that made Gabriel watch with the particular attention of a craftsman seeing his work used correctly.
"Yes," she said, bringing it back to her hand. "This is it."
✦ ✦ ✦
Gabriel walked them back through the palace to the entrance, where the chauffeur was waiting. He shook Levi's hand, hugged Sylvia, inclined his head to Priscilla.
"I look forward to reading about what you do for this kingdom," he said. "Make sure you come back for maintenance on the weapons. And — come back anyway. You're welcome here."
They said their goodbyes to Queen Abigail. Charlotte had reappeared — dressed now, more calibrated — and stood in the entrance hall as they left. She looked at Levi once more as he passed.
"Don't get killed," she said.
"Working on it," he said.
She almost smiled. He caught it at the edge.
—
The car moved through Olympus toward the Military HQ, the city getting busier as the morning opened up around them. Levi held the daggers in his lap — both of them, sheaths on, the familiar weight of them different now from the weight they'd had six weeks ago.
"He kept the handles," Levi said, not to anyone specifically.
Priscilla looked at him. Sylvia looked out the window with the particular quality of someone who was listening without looking.
"My father's handles. My mother carried them. He could have replaced everything — new blade, new guard, new grip. But he kept what mattered and replaced what needed replacing." He looked at the sheaths in his hands. "That's — that was the right thing to do."
Nobody said anything. There wasn't anything to add.
The car turned onto the road that led to the HQ — a broad street, administrative buildings on both sides, the Olympia Military emblem visible above the main entrance ahead.
Levi looked at it and felt the weight of everything that had happened in the last two months settle into something clear and specific. Velvetia. The waterfall. Melissa's training. The trial. The Overcharge. The wonder designation. And now this: a commissioned Myth Killer, his mother's daggers in his hands with new blades, pulling up to the place where the actual work began.
The car stopped. The HQ entrance was ahead.
"Ready?" Sylvia asked.
Levi slid the daggers into their sheaths at his belt. Felt them settle — familiar, right, exactly where they were supposed to be.
"Yeah," he said. "Let's go."