He found Dwayne on the north wall, where the last myths were being cleared, and grabbed his shoulder without stopping.
Reverse Teleportation brought them both to Sylvia's position using her mark as the anchor. She got three seconds of warning before they appeared.
"I need your size magic," Levi said to Dwayne, before either of them could speak. "And your enhancement," to Sylvia. "Here's what we're doing."
Thirty seconds. Sylvia enhanced her throwing strength, took the rock Dwayne provided, and threw it at the Hydra. Dwayne enlarged it mid-flight to three-quarters the creature's size. The collision drove the Hydra backward fifty metres and bought them time.
"Priscilla — drop the field and come to me," Levi said.
She descended from the wall. "The breach—"
"We're ending this now. Sixty seconds." He looked at her. "Can you keep a force field up inside the fog while we move?"
"I can try."
"Good enough."
They ran into the fog together.
—
Inside, visibility dropped to nothing. The ground was slick where the gas had condensed. Levi held his breath and ran by feel — forward, toward the heat signature of the Hydra, which was the only landmark in the white-green nothing. Priscilla's force field held. The gas pressed against it and didn't get through. She was breathing; he wasn't. He gave himself ninety seconds.
They found the Hydra by running into its leg.
Three heads came down immediately — acid punching craters around them, one strike hitting the force field and sending a shockwave through it that Priscilla absorbed through her arms. They scattered. The fourth head caught them mid-scatter with a tail sweep from below their awareness and drove them into the earth.
Then the fang came. One head drove its jaw into the force field and pushed — not a strike but sustained pressure, full weight bearing down.
"It's piercing through," Priscilla said, strain in her voice for the first time.
He had maybe thirty seconds of air left. He looked at her. She looked at him. She touched her fingers to his forehead and her own — the telekinesis finding a path between them — and her voice arrived inside his head.
*Go. I'll get out. You do the spell.*
"The telepathy—"
*I figured it out under pressure. Go, Levi.*
The force field came down. The gas flooded in. Priscilla was already moving — silver light cutting through the fog as she flew clear. He felt the telepathic connection hold for a few more seconds as she cleared the cloud. Then it was just him and the Hydra and thirty seconds of air.
He transformed. The Absolute Current arrived — azure blue, continuous discharge, the full 3rd form. He moved under the Hydra before it could find him in the fog, crouched beneath its central mass, and cast.
"Mega Electric Bondage."
The chains erupted from the ground on a scale he'd never used the spell at before — not individual restraints but a network, thick as tree trunks, spreading outward and upward, anchoring to the earth and wrapping around every limb and neck simultaneously. The Hydra hissed and thrashed. Every chain held.
He teleported to Sylvia and arrived gasping.
—
She caught his arm. "Did you do it?"
He nodded, hands on his knees. "Immobilised. Won't hold forever." He straightened. "Priscilla — the fog."
She was already working. Her telekinesis moved through the cloud like directed wind, pushing it away from the Hydra until the creature was visible in a clear circle — six heads thrashing against chains that crackled with continuous electricity.
"Dwayne." Levi held out the six shuriken discs from the armoury. "Enlarge these on contact with the necks."
Dwayne took them and read the plan without needing more explanation.
"Sylvia." Levi looked at her. "Everything you have. When Dwayne throws."
Sylvia rolled her shoulders. Infused the fire sword. The blade ran deep orange-red — she was drawing from reserves she'd been managing since the assault began and letting them come all at once.
Dwayne ran. At thirty metres from the Hydra he threw all six discs in rapid sequence — flat spinning throws, each aimed at a separate neck, his ability activating on them mid-flight. They hit simultaneously, grew from hand-sized to tree-trunk diameter in the same instant, and drove through.
Levi reverse-teleported Dwayne back before he finished the last throw.
Six discs. Six necks.
The heads fell.
Sylvia released the Full Throttle blast in the same moment — a focused column of fire that didn't burn so much as erase, aimed at the Hydra's body before regeneration could begin. It hit the exposed wounds, the severed necks, the full mass of the creature, and kept going.
The Hydra did not regenerate.
✦ ✦ ✦
The smoke cleared. The ash settled. The chains were still embedded in the earth, no longer connected to anything.
Priscilla landed beside him. "We killed the Hydra," she said.
"Yeah," said Levi.
"The one that no MK has ever killed."
"Also yeah."
She was quiet for a moment. "I figured out the telepathy mid-fog. Under pressure. Just — connected the spatial awareness to thought-transfer and it worked." She looked at her hands. "I keep finding new things in the moment."
"That's what the inner realm is for," said Levi. "It teaches you what's already there."
✦ ✦ ✦
General Victor and Colonel Damian were on the wall when the four of them came back through the breach.
Victor was looking at the ash field with an expression that had moved through several states and arrived somewhere Levi couldn't fully read. He was quiet for a moment.
"The Hydra," he said, "has been in the formal documentation as an unkillable myth since before I joined the military. The standing recommendation is evacuation and containment." He looked at the ash. "You have approximately thirty seconds before I have to explain to command how four A-class rookies on their first posting killed it."
"You could leave the A-class part out," Dwayne suggested.
Victor looked at him.
"That was a joke, sir."
"I know." The general turned back to Levi. "The plan was yours."
"Yes, sir."
"You read the fight, identified what each person could contribute, designed a tactic around its specific weaknesses, and executed it while blind and holding your breath." He paused. "Where did you learn to do that?"
Levi thought about a pool in Velvetia. About sitting beside someone who had done this her whole life and watching how she thought. "My mother," he said.
Victor and Damian raised their hands in the salute of senior officers acknowledging something worth acknowledging. The rookies returned it.
"Get some rest," Damian said. "You've earned it."
They walked back through the breach into the quiet town — exhausted, carrying the particular aliveness of people who had been in real danger and come through the other side. Levi looked back once at the ash field and the chains still embedded in the earth.
He thought about Gavin's class at the academy. *If you're up against a Hydra — best of luck. You're going to need it.*
He thought: the chart is wrong. The ceiling is wrong. The limits people have decided are fixed are not fixed.
He turned and walked into the town.
There was more work to do.