Colonel Theo was waiting for them in mission room six.
He looked at all six of them the way he'd looked at them on the first day — the rapid, comprehensive assessment of someone taking inventory. Whatever he found, it appeared to satisfy him.
"Mission success," he said. "Colonel Damian's report was thorough. The Hydra incident in particular." He looked at Levi, then the others, then back. "Four A-class rookies. First posting. Unkillable myth." He let the silence sit for exactly one second. "Well done."
Kevin, beside Levi, exhaled audibly. Five trials, one mission, and those two words from Colonel Theo apparently meant something.
"Promotions," Theo said. "Kevin, Vanessa — SS class, effective immediately. Levi, Sylvia, Priscilla, Dwayne — SSS class."
The room absorbed this.
Levi looked at his hands. SSS class. In the classification charts they'd studied at the academy, SSS class myths were the Hydra, the dragons, the Suzaku, the Elementals — the things that required coordinated squadron tactics and prayer in equal measure. Being classified at the same level as the things they hunted meant something specific: that command had decided they were capable of facing them consistently.
"Is it legendary?" Kevin asked, with the voice of someone who already knew the answer and was asking anyway.
"No," said Theo.
"I didn't think so." Kevin nodded philosophically. "Still though. SS. That's not bad."
"SS is not bad," Theo confirmed. "SSS is also not bad. Legendary is—" He paused. "Legendary is a different conversation for a different day." He looked at the group. "New missions within the week. Rest until then. Dismissed."
He saluted. They saluted back. He left.
Kevin looked at James. "SS class."
"SS class," James confirmed.
They shook hands with the gravity of two people who had been through something together and were marking it.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Blaze mansion was quiet when they arrived — the afternoon light coming through the east windows at the low angle of late day, the kitchen empty, the household staff apparently still on the extended rest Melissa had given them before departing for Olympicõ.
Sylvia found cold pizza in the fridge and reported this discovery with the satisfaction of someone who had been looking forward to exactly this outcome. They warmed it up, took it to the patio, and sat in the late sun eating slices directly from the box.
"So," said Sylvia, through a mouthful. "Next mission. Where do you think?"
"Olympicõ or Olympiqué," said Levi. "Both cities have been getting hit regularly. SSS class mission probably means something harder than Celia."
"As long as it's not another Hydra," Sylvia said.
"We killed the last one," Levi said.
"There are more than one Hydra, Levi."
He considered this. "Fair point."
"I hope it's not another Hydra," Sylvia clarified.
A hand reached past Levi and took a slice of pizza.
Both of them turned.
Melissa was sitting in the third chair, apparently having materialised from nowhere, eating the pizza with the unhurried expression of someone who had been asleep on the lounge sofa and had been awakened by the smell of her own food.
"You were asleep," Sylvia said.
"I was. Then I smelled this." She gestured at the pizza box. "How was the mission?"
They told her. The assault, the Hydra, the plan, the kill. Melissa listened the way she always listened — without interruption, tracking everything, filing it. When they finished she was quiet for a moment.
"The Hydra," she said.
"The Hydra," Levi confirmed.
"SSS class on the first mission." She looked at both of them. "That's — yes. That's correct." Something in her expression was trying not to be too pleased and not quite managing it. "Good."
"We think we could hold our own against a legend," Levi said.
Melissa looked at him. The trying-not-to-be-pleased expression resolved into something more specific — the expression of someone who has heard a statement that requires testing.
"Do you," she said. "Training area. Ten minutes."
✦ ✦ ✦
"Come at me like I'm a legendary class myth," Melissa said, from the centre of the training field. "Both of you. Don't hold back. If I think you're holding back, I'll make you regret it."
She said it pleasantly. Which was somehow worse.
Levi activated his 1st Form. Sylvia lit up her fire. They charged together.
Melissa wasn't there when they arrived.
She was behind them — and then they were at opposite ends of the field, which they processed after the fact as having been thrown. The transition from charging to landing was so compressed that neither of them had a clear memory of the middle part.
Levi recovered first and went back in — a volley of punches, fast, targeting the openings he'd been trained to find. Melissa stood still and didn't move from her spot, letting each strike miss by exactly as much as it needed to miss, her weight not shifting.
She caught one.
"You're holding back," she said, and right-hooked him.
He went sideways and caught himself on one knee. Behind Melissa, Sylvia was already attacking — taking the opening — and Melissa turned, absorbed the approach, and hit her once in the chin and once in the stomach. Sylvia slid across the training field and stopped against the far edge.
Levi stood up. He looked at Melissa standing in the centre of the field, completely composed, and made a decision.
"3rd Form: Absolute Current."
The transformation ran through him — the azure blue, the continuous discharge, the world going precise. He took a breath and moved.
Not a charge. A flash — the telestride at 3rd form speed, crossing the field in a fraction of a second, arriving inside Melissa's guard before the 1st Form attack pattern had prepared her for a different order of magnitude.
He hit her in the stomach.
She took a half-step back.
It was a small movement. But it was a movement. Levi registered it with the specific clarity of someone who had been paying attention.
Melissa looked at him. Something shifted in her expression — not surprise exactly, the update of an assessment already in progress. "Good," she said.
Then she transformed.
Her 3rd form was enhancement — the same ability as the foundation phase but expressed at its 3rd form ceiling, the physical augmentation running at a level that was visible in the quality of her stillness. She didn't radiate heat or electricity; she simply became more present, more weighted, the kind of density that preceded very fast movement.
Levi felt the change and adjusted. He telestrided — and she was already tracking it, the Enhanced Sensory spell extending her perception into the small future that good fighters lived in. She started blocking. He pushed harder. She blocked harder.
They were, for about twenty seconds, genuinely even.
Then Melissa transformed again.
The 4th form arrived differently from the 3rd — not a change in quality but a change in register, as if someone had turned a dial past the range it was supposed to go. The training field seemed to adjust around her, the air carrying a different pressure. She moved to match his telestride speed and suddenly the twenty seconds of evenness was over.
Sylvia rejoined from the far edge, 3rd form active, fire and enhancement running together. She and Levi found a rhythm — alternating pressure, one attacking while the other reset, covering each other's angles. Melissa started being moved backward by it, her blocks absorbing rather than redirecting, and Levi felt the fight tilt and pushed harder.
Melissa caught both their punches simultaneously.
She held them there — one in each hand, the momentum fully absorbed — and looked at them both.
"You're working well together," she said. "That's real." She released them. "But your hits aren't landing the way they should be, Levi. You feel the difference?"
He did feel it, now that she'd named it. His punches were fast, they were accurate, they were landing — but when they landed they weren't converting speed into impact the way they should. The force was dispersing somewhere between intention and contact.
"Your Flux is distributed throughout your body in the 3rd form," Melissa said. "That's what the form does — total electrification, everywhere at once. Which is correct for speed and general augmentation. But when you punch, you need concentration, not distribution. The Flux at your fists specifically, dense enough that it manifests visibly." She looked at his hands. "Think about Sylvia's Fiery Fists. The fire doesn't run through her whole body when she punches — it concentrates at the contact point. That's where the weight comes from."
Levi looked at his hands. He understood it immediately — the way you understand things that explain something you'd been doing wrong without knowing it.
"You rely on your daggers for impact," Melissa continued. "Which is fine — your daggers are excellent. But you won't always have them. The fists need to be just as dangerous." She stepped back. "That's your next thing to work on."
"Yes, Sensei," he said.
"Good." She stretched her shoulder, which seemed slightly stiff in a way it hadn't been before his punch. She didn't comment on it. He noticed anyway. "You two actually exhausted me. That hasn't happened in a while." She started walking toward the house. "Don't tell anyone."
Sylvia looked at Levi.
"We exhausted her," she said, quietly, after Melissa had gone inside.
"She went to her 4th form," Levi said.
They stood in the training field in the late afternoon light and sat with that for a moment.
✦ ✦ ✦
Later, after sushi had been ordered and eaten and Sylvia had gone to bed, Levi sat on his bed in the quiet of his room with his hands in his lap.
He raised his right fist. Looked at it.
In the 3rd form, the electricity ran through him like weather — total, ambient, everywhere at once. That was the form. He'd always treated it as the point. But Melissa had seen it differently: distribution where there should be concentration, dispersal where there should be density.
He didn't activate the 3rd form. He just reached for the Flux the way he reached for it in the inner realm — not the surface warmth but the thing beneath it, the ability itself — and tried to direct it somewhere specific.
His right fist.
Just there. Just that point.
He held the intent for about ten seconds before it dispersed back to his resting state. But in those ten seconds, at the outer edge of what he could feel, there was something — a density at his knuckles that was different from the ambient warmth, a gathering that hadn't been there before.
Not manifesting yet. Not engulfing his fist in visible electricity the way Sylvia's fire engulfed her hands. But the beginning of a direction.
He looked at his fist in the dark room.
He thought about what Melissa had said: *you won't always have your daggers. The fists need to be just as dangerous.*
He thought about his mother's hands — the electrostatic fists she'd used in the streets of Velvetia, the crackling impact he'd watched from a rooftop while she fought Horus. She'd had both. Daggers and hands, both dangerous, both expressions of the same ability applied at different scales.
That was what he was working toward.
He lay back and closed his eyes. The Flux settled to its resting state. The ocean received him before he'd finished the thought, and in the branches of the static blue oak tree, Ivel was sitting with the patient ease of someone who had been expecting this particular question for a while.
"Show me," Levi said.
Ivel smiled. "That's more like it."