The metro howls through the storm.

Alone between its rows, washed in the watercolor neon of the night, I keep a handhold directly across from Prazen. Face set in grim determination. Fingers gripping the plastic so hard that one squeeze could crack it. The city is a smear outside the windows. Electric Town highrises drop away as we cross a bridge over a seam in the crust of the city. A thump-thump heartbeat passes through the deck. Then the warm lights of my home away from home wash in. The University district.

Of course, Vex Shimano would choose to make his stand here. Like everything he does, he does it to make a point. Nowhere is beyond his reach.

I get the message, loud and clear.

I throw a vitriolic glare across the aisle as the metro begins to slow. Already watching me, Prazen doesn’t emote more than the tiniest twitch of his lips. No words between us enemies. Anything more than silence would spark the gasoline tension keeping my hands from his neck. That, and a primal fear for my sister’s safety. The famed honor of the Shimano family only seems to exist when it’s convenient.

Prazen shifts back to the door. There’s a moment where his back his turned, his hands filled, that Mecha armor not fully formed- just plating and shell extending from his sleeves. As if sensing my intent, that lip-switch grows into a smirk.

“Do it,” he drawls, golden eyes watching me in the glass reflection. “We both know you will, sooner or later. Or do heroes not take shots at the back?” He snorts when I don’t answer. “No wonder Pops likes you. You act like he wishes he could. Righteous and a slave to it.”

“Is that why you’re doing this?” I growl back. “Petty revenge? Pride? To teach the old man a lesson?”

“Nah. He’ll get what he deserves when it’s his turn.” He blinks languidly. “This, you and me, it’s the world he made. You’re mad at me for playing by the rules when you want to break them; because they weren’t made for the good guys. They’re made for people like me. People who make the old man suddenly wish he’d done it different once he sees what only the strongest really means.”

I stare into his back. “You’re not the strongest. You’re just a murderer with an ego.”

“And no one ever asks if the guy I killed deserved it.” Prazen shrugs, peering down at the rain-slicked streets below where a lone pair of haggard figures races towards the station steps. “He didn’t, but that’s besides the point.”

The doors cut open.

“Don’t keep me waiting, Showmaker. Vex’s trigger finger is a little itchy.”

Prazen heads towards a roof access stairwell. Glaring daggers until he disappears, I finally rip myself away and shove through the exit turnstile, stalking down to the station’s street-level exit in the darkened University district.

No one braves the storm tonight save two haggard figures who jog under the awning still buckling weapons to hips and activating classes. Their eyes widen as they splash to a stop in front of me. My aura activates on unconscious impulse, barely-restrained anger burning reflected in their irises. White-hot shadows cast their drenched hair in shadows of frightening length.

I slather my hands in tape while they process the fury I brought with me.

Mori grimaces as she tears her revolver out of its holster. “It’s my fault,” she hisses. “I let her go out for drinks alone. Even told her I’d come with until she waved me off.” The gun gives a feral click as its first projectile loads. She blinks, and the storm vanishes in a bubble around us. Droplets scrape down the sides of an invisible sphere of elemental control. “Then AJ-”

“It’s not… your fault.” Ajax shakes his head, almost wilting in front of my eyes. His breathing is labored like he ran a marathon just to climb the station steps. His shoulders, so painfully thin now, sag weakly as he forces his body into motion. “I didn’t consider Vex would make a move tonight. None of us did.”

I wave him off with a slash of my hand. The sight of him cools my temper, but not by much. I bite back all the rage I feel as I pivot to look across the district, searching through the rain for the familiar lights of my gym. Shimano’s handiwork is apparent everywhere I look. The desolate, empty sidewalks. Depowered streetlamps. Shuttered windows. He empties a neighborhood like he emptied a highway; brutally efficient at both.

“We’re ending this tonight,” I tell them, tearing off a last strip of tape with my teeth. I glance over as Ajax steps up to my left. “Can you fight?”

His lips press into a hard, thin line. One question stokes that old fire in his eyes back to life. He nods with the certainty of a dying man.

“Always.”

We splash through the streets at a dead sprint. I find myself outpacing the others and have to ratchet back my speed to match. It kills me to do so. I can’t stop thinking about Jolie. What I’m going to do to that bastard. If Prazen touched a hair on her head, I’m going to rip his off.

Something Ajax sees in me chills him. He calls my name twice before physically yanking me to a stop right as we reach the front doors of the gym. Sudden guilt purges my darkest thoughts when I whirl and see how much the exertion takes from him.

“Mars,” he repeats. He coughs blood into a hand. It smears across my shirt as he seizes my collar and pulls me down. “Listen… to me. Listen to me, please.”

I let out a hard breath through my nose. He takes it as the clearance it is.

“I cannot keep up with you, not anymore. You need to fight for me.”

I nod, then bite back a curse when he slaps me across the jaw.

“Don’t ignore me. Listen.” His fingers tighten inside my collar. “You go in there like this and we all may die. Even Jolie. So focus. Don’t forget what you learned. You are not alone.” He pats me once on the chest as he releases me. “You blaze such a path, friend. But you can’t let yourself burn out.” Slowly, his fingers unclench at his side. “You… you are next. Never forget that.”

He’s gone before I can reply, already moving ahead to melt the door and clear our way forward. Mori grabs me by the chin and yanks me down, pushing her forehead into mine. “Lean on us. No more suicide tactics.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

-

The lobby smells like oil.

Its empty tiles and hollow chairs are a disinfected parody of the gym’s usual liveliness. Where late-weekend watch parties and training sessions usually reign until the morning hours, an eerie, tomblike atmosphere stretches from hall to hall in pyramidal silence. Every light is on. Training machines hum and blink in the main floor of the gym, but the space itself and its fighting squares are completely empty. Sand bags hang like corpses between racks of weights and gymnastic equipment. We pass over them and the reception desk, straightlining for the rarely-used elevator waiting at the end of the lobby. The doors split open automatically for us as we approach. Our footsteps slow to a crawl.

We trade tense glances before I lead the way in with Ajax at my side. Mori throws a distrustful scowl at the doors before finally crossing the threshold. They close and the lift selects our destination of its own accord. Years of shared training unconsciously position Ajax and I at the front of a fighting trinity, the most optimal formation for our number. Mori bristles like a caged animal, trigger finger bouncing, uneasily eyeing the narrow confines.

Light from the lift’s lone halogen casts us in a warm glow. I look over to find Ajax staring up at me, a strangely nostalgic look on his face now tinged by wistful emotion.

How many times has he stood behind doors just like these, waiting for a battle to begin? The pain in his eyes tells a number in the thousands. Tens of thousands. A lifetime of training for the briefest moments of heart-pounding violence. I doubt even he remembers how many times he has walked into danger. But he knows this will be his last.

Content with that shared glance, his gaze returns to the door, and a weary smile takes its place. Metal from the gym’s superstructure leaks through the chipped floor to form his arms and armor.

“Mars.”

“Yeah?”

Ajax’s lips work in silence for a moment. “Do you… believe in destiny?”

I run a thumb over my finger. “I think we’re all meant for something.”

“As do I.” He gives his old heirloom blade one testing swing. The weight satisfies. “But if it does not exist, then I am glad to have made this fate mine.”

The doors slide open, and we stride into battle.

I duck my head as we enter the vast, dust-choked attic of the gym. Equal in size to the first floor with ceilings at a cavelike height, it is owned by a blueprint copy of the Metro Blockhouse’s championship fighting square. Hapless scaffolding fills in the circumference of the room. Holographic tape slapped with markings of Stands Here and Booth Here dangles from the woodwork. And at the steps of the sandstone stage, right where I left it, is a folding slab of plastic and metal I named Caster’s Chair.

My sister is tied to it by a strangehold of rope and simmering like boiling water. Beside her, casually sneezing from the dust in the chamber, the vainglorious Vex Shimano keeps a silenced handgun aimed in her general direction. Jolie doesn’t even twitch at the threat. I know the look in her eyes. She’s not scared. She’s mad. At herself or her captors or me, I can’t quite tell. Vex’s voice rises as he paces around her, both unknowing of our arrival.

“…Jolie Mons, you should know by now that you’re a little too valuable for me to kill. At least until that famous brother of yours appears.” The handgun tilts from side to side. Vex’s half-shaved head tilts up as he inspects the leaking girders above. “I would wonder how he will make his entrance, but there isn’t much guesswork involved. It will be something flashy. Perhaps a window. Though…” he pauses, licking at his obsidian underbite. “…the roof isn’t out of the question, either.”

Jolie scoffs out a harsh laugh. “Whatever you thought you’d accomplish by capturing me is pointless, Vex. Your gamble failed. You’re finished. This is just delaying the inevitable.”

Vex’s Iros bodyguard and itinerant infiltrator whispers something in his ear as my presence announces itself. He shifts to face us. Dressed in black and formal with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow and an eerie second skin of metal stretching from his collar to his lower lip. All the handsomeness he possesses is stretched to its limits by cold, calculating brutality.

Vex sighs when he sees me coming through the elevator. “How subversively pedestrian.”

My hands know a thousand different ways to saw him in half. Only a flicker of motion on the square itself keeps me from acting them out right then and there. Fresh from the storm, Prazen watches us like mice from his higher perch, helmet down. An eerie hunger in those golden eyes. Like a predator behind a pane of glass, just waiting to be fed. This drama a pointless delay to his satiation.

Shifting back to Vex, I roll my neck from side to side, loosening the joints. “Hands off my sister.”

Vex waves the gun for the drama of it. “I’m the one with the threat in hand, Showmaker. It’s your turn to listen.” His tongue clucks once in warning, finger caressing the trigger like a flower petal. “I wouldn’t try that either, Lionhart. I can turn Ms. Mons’ rather intelligent brain into a smear on the floor faster than you could ever sabotage my weapon. Though please, feel free to keep tampering with it.”

Mori’s revolver cocks beside my ears, clicking like spurs as a lethal round slides into the chamber. “Faster than him, maybe.” She lets out a sinking whistle and shakes her head. “But even a rich shit like you knows there’s nothing twitchier than a Venter with a score to settle. And I’ve settled some with bastards a lot faster than you. Back it up.”

The Iros steps forward instead, positioning herself in the path of the shot. Prazen remains motionless on the stage. Vex disengages his safety and flexes the fingers of his offhand.

“This is a no-win scenario for any of you,” he says, raising his voice until it echoes through the chamber. He rips Jolie’s gag away in a single motion, leaving her gasping for breath. Hard silver eyes meet mine across the dust and sand. “You left me with so little leverage after that escapade on the train, but I am nothing if not honorable. I’ll gladly give you your chance to save the day. All it will take is your continued cooperation.” His gun waves at the stage. “Play your part, give Akis Prazen that fight you so bravely promised him on the train, and your sister walks free.”

My sister’s dead-cold glare scolds me silently, warning me to say nothing. Vex carries right along.

“I promised the head of a king as the fruits of my labor, and my hands are yet unfilled. I expect Prazen will kill you, of course. But like all who realize their mistakes too late, I am confident the Champion will try to save you before the end. Preach patience all he will, I imagine he’s already on his way. Partiality has always been his vice.”

I came here with my answer ready. Rather than respond with words, I break away from our formation and stalk towards the stage. Ajax’s hand brushes my shoulder as I go. He understands what I need of him. My mind freed, my heartrate begins climbing in a churn of fear, nausea, cold anger, and fiery temper. Blood pulses loud against my eardrums. I push the beat to the back of my mind and center myself on the brightly lit fighting square before me. Each step sinks below my view as I rise into the light. The stands and crowds I imagined would fill this place bleed into impermanency in the corner of my vision. My focus narrows on my enemy alone.

Across the square, Prazen rises to match, coiling from repose into readiness like a serpent king. An instinctual itch of danger slithers between my shoulder blades when he brushes a handful of black hair to the side. Though he is younger and leaner than I, there is no doubt in the room of who is the better fighter between us. He dwarfs me in every respect. The moment his dark arm wrappings dissolve and blackened steel replaces them, his augmented physicality surpasses mine in both power and weight. The pixels of his faceplate blink gold as they activate one at a time, then resolve into six thin lines in place of eyes. Power cores and miniaturized, exoskeletal hydraulics prime for combat across his body.

My heart pushes back in an instinctual response. My ki slithers into existence, forming a bristling aura whose wind currents send his hood fluttering back. It does nothing at all to unseat the rest of him. He’s a monolith.

His fingers play at making a fist, voice a disinterested rasp. “First you. Then Lionhart. Then the Venter.”

“And leave Ajax without a fight?” I chuckle as I sink into an aggressive stance, finally letting the adrenaline flood manifest itself in a smirk braver than I feel. “Unfortunately for your expectations, I die hard.”