The factory floor was quiet except for Fernando's wet, hiccuping sobs. He was curled into a ball near Brick's mutilated corpse, glasses fogged with tears, trembling so hard he looked like he might vibrate apart.
Greta lay on the concrete like a discarded mannequin. Her eyes were wide, bloodshot, frantic—darting back and forth with terror—but her chest was still. She wasn't breathing.
Jude stood alone.
His hands shook as he gripped the Celestial Bow. The golden light wavered, reflecting his fear. He'd fought sludge-monsters, subway demons, giant demonic rats. But this was different. Those things had been mindless. Hungry. Predictable.
Caligo stood under the flickering floodlight, brushing an invisible speck of dust from his funeral suit. He didn't look like a monster. He looked like an accountant who had died at his desk and simply kept working.
"The Angel," Caligo droned, his voice flat as a dead phone line. "Let's assess the vessel."
He didn't charge. He didn't roar. He just started walking.
THUD. THUD.
Each footstep hit the concrete like a coffin lid closing.
Jude gritted his teeth. "Stay back!"
He drew the string. A shaft of blue light materialized. He aimed for the knee, hoping to cripple his mobility.
Twang.
The arrow screamed through the air.
Caligo didn't dodge. He didn't shield himself. He simply shifted—a micro-movement, a subtle twist of the hips that let the arrow pass harmlessly through the fabric of his pants without grazing skin.
Efficient. Boring. Perfect.
"Slow," Caligo stated.
Jude backpedaled, firing again. Two shots. Three.
Caligo slapped the second arrow out of the air with the back of his hand like swatting a gnat. He caught the third mid-flight, crushing the hard-light construct into sparking dust between his fingers.
He was closing the distance. Ten feet. Eight. Six.
Arrows aren't working. I need speed. I need altitude.
Jude grabbed the center of his bow and twisted. With a sharp snap, the weapon split into two curved, glowing short-swords. At the same time, he flexed his shoulder blades.
Fwoosh.
His wings erupted from his back—two brilliant constructs of white light, scattering dust and debris across the factory floor. He kicked off the ground, hovering six feet in the air, looking down at the pale man below.
"You can't hit what you can't reach," Jude shouted, trying to sound brave. Trying to believe it.
He dove.
He banked hard left, using the wings to generate speed, swinging the twin blades toward Caligo's neck in a scissoring arc.
Caligo didn't look up. Didn't flinch. He simply raised his left arm—not to block, but to intercept.
As Jude swung, Caligo stepped inside the arc of the blade. The move was textbook. Jude recognized it from P.I.T. highlight reels: the Titan Intercept. Standard riot control. The kind of thing they taught heroes to use against flying threats.
Caligo caught Jude's wrist mid-swing.
Jude's momentum stopped instantly. The shockwave rattled his teeth, sent pain shooting up his arm.
"Your flight path is predictable," Caligo whispered into Jude's ear. His voice was dry, like dead leaves scraping pavement. "You rely on the wings to compensate for poor footwork. You fight like a child with a borrowed toy."
He twisted Jude's arm, forcing the blade to dissipate into sparks, and yanked him down from the air. Jude's feet slammed back onto concrete hard enough to jar his spine.
He tried to flap his wings, to pull away, but Caligo was an anchor. Immovable. Absolute.
"Sleep," Caligo said.
He didn't punch. He simply placed his open palm against the center of Jude's chest, right over the sternum.
THUMP.
The hit wasn't hard. It felt like a heavy book being dropped on his chest.
The effect was instantaneous.
Jude was launched backward. He flew ten feet, his wings crumbling to dust mid-flight, and slammed back-first into the brick wall of the factory.
WHAM.
He slid down the wall, hitting the floor on his knees. His mouth opened to gasp, to scream, to do something—
Nothing happened.
Inhale, his brain commanded.
His diaphragm didn't move.
INHALE.
His lungs were heavy sacks of lead. The muscles between his ribs were locked tight. His throat felt like it had been filled with wet cement.
Jude clawed at his chest, fingernails scraping against his shirt, leaving red trails in the fabric. He looked up, eyes bulging.
I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe.
His heart gave a weird, jagged flutter—thump-thump-pause—and then stopped beating entirely.
The world began to turn gray at the edges.
Jude stared at Caligo. The pale man stood there, adjusting his cuffs, watching Jude suffocate with that same impassive, dead-eyed stare. Like he was timing an egg.
He's not just a monster, Jude's mind raced, thoughts growing weaker as oxygen ran out. The moves. The stance. The way he grounded me. That wasn't instinct. That was training.
He fights like a hero.
He fights like Ironclad.
Caligo tilted his head, watching Jude's face turn purple.
"The pulse is fading," Caligo noted, checking an invisible watch on his wrist. "Thirty seconds to brain death. Efficient."
Jude clawed at the floor, vision tunneling to a single point of light. He looked over at Greta. She was still frozen, still staring at him, her eyes screaming words her paralyzed body couldn't form.
Is this it? Jude thought, the darkness closing in. I die in a warehouse in Kensington because I wasn't good enough?
Again.
I wasn't good enough again.
The darkness was absolute now, edges of his vision curling into black smoke, consciousness slipping away like water through fingers—
Then a roar shattered the silence.
Not a hero's battle cry. A feral, guttural shriek of pure, unadulterated hatred.
"ROAAAAAR!"
Greta moved.
She didn't stand up gracefully. She exploded from the floor, her paralysis breaking not through finesse or technique, but through sheer overwhelming rage. The Angelic Remedy Bob had given her spiked in her blood, mixing with adrenaline to override the biological lock through brute chemical force.
She swung the Wyrmmaker blindly—a chaotic haymaker aimed at the man who had turned her into a statue.
Caligo turned, his dead eyes widening a fraction of an inch. He raised a hand to catch the weapon again, the same move that had stopped her before—
He was too slow.
SHRRRRIP.
The neon blade caught Caligo's shoulder, tearing through the funeral suit and carving a deep, sizzling furrow into pale flesh. Black blood, thick as tar, sprayed onto the concrete.
Caligo stumbled back, his focus breaking.
GAAAAASP.
The moment Caligo flinched, the invisible anvil on Jude's chest vanished.
Air rushed into his lungs with the force of a vacuum seal breaking. It hurt—sharp, burning agony that tasted like blood and desperation—but he was breathing. His heart kickstarted with a violent thud against his ribs, pounding so hard he thought it might crack through.
He can't hold us both, Jude realized, coughing violently as he scrambled to his feet. When he focused on the axe, he let me go.
That's a weakness. That's something we can use.
"I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU!" Greta screamed, swinging again. No form. No technique. Just a whirlwind of violet light and violence, the Wyrmmaker leaving trails of neon energy in the air.
"Greta, move!" Jude wheezed.
He re-summoned his twin blades, ignoring the trembling in his legs, the spots still dancing in his vision. He didn't fly this time—he couldn't trust his wings, couldn't trust himself in the air against someone who read flight paths like sheet music. He charged low instead, aiming for Caligo's legs while Greta went high.
For a moment, it was two-on-one.
They rained blows on the pale man. Jude slashed at his thighs; Greta hammered at his guard. They were fast. Desperate. Fighting for their lives with everything they had left.
It didn't matter.
Caligo recovered almost instantly. The wound on his shoulder didn't bleed anymore—the black gash just sat there in the gray meat, already sealing.
He blocked Greta's axe with his forearm, bone making a sound like a hammer striking steel, and simultaneously kicked Jude in the stomach with perfect, mathematical precision. The blow lifted Jude off his feet and sent him skidding back across the concrete.
"Enough," Caligo said.
The amusement was gone. The clinical detachment had evaporated.
Caligo didn't step back. He stepped in.
He grabbed Greta's axe handle—not to stop it, but to yank her forward. As she stumbled into his range, he drove his knee into her nose with a sickening CRUNCH.
Greta's head snapped back. Blood exploded from her face in a red spray.
Jude screamed and lunged, thrusting his blade toward Caligo's ribs.
Caligo caught Jude's throat mid-lunge, fingers closing like a vice.
"I've assessed you two enough," Caligo growled, his voice dropping into a register that vibrated through Jude's skull. "You two are resilient. I will end this now."
He didn't just stop Jude's heart this time.
He looked at Greta, who was staggering, trying to wipe blood from her eyes. He pointed a finger at her.
"Die," Caligo commanded.
Greta dropped. She collapsed, as if every bone in her body had vanished at once. She hit the floor screaming, clawing at her own skin like it was burning off from the inside.
"GRETA!" Jude yelled, struggling in Caligo's grip.
Caligo turned his gaze to Jude. He released the throat and placed both hands on Jude's shoulders instead.
"Rot," Caligo whispered.
Jude's scream tore itself from his throat before he could stop it.
Not suffocation this time. His blood had turned to ice water. His skin was withering, muscles atrophying, organs shutting down one by one in sequence. It was the sensation of decomposing while fully conscious—feeling yourself become a corpse in real-time.
Then Caligo switched.
He released Jude, letting him crumple to the floor, gasping and sobbing, and turned his hand toward Greta.
SNAP.
Greta arched her back, a howl of agony ripping through the warehouse as her nervous system flooded with the phantom pain of a thousand breaking bones.
Caligo was playing a symphony of torture. He could only hold one note at a time, but he was playing them fast—conducting agony like a maestro, switching between victims before either could recover.
Jude: Drowning. Greta: Burning. Jude: Freezing. Greta: Crushing.
Back and forth. Back and forth.
The screams had lost their human edge. They were just raw, wet sounds of agony echoing off the cold steel walls.
Fernando sat in the corner, hands clamped over his ears, eyes squeezed shut. But he could still hear them. Could hear Jude wheezing for air that wouldn't come. Could hear Greta's voice breaking as she screamed.
Coward, his brain hissed. They're dying because of you. You brought them here. You led Caligo right to them.
And now you're hiding. Again. Just like always.
He thought about his mother. About the last time he'd seen her, in that hospital bed, skin paper-thin and yellowed. She'd held his hand and told him he was brave. That he had fire in him. That someday he'd use it to help people.
She'd been wrong. He wasn't brave. He was a coward who played spy games and got people killed.
But Jude had helped him up outside of the coffee shop. Had listened to his rambling about economics without making fun of him. Had treated him like a person instead of a nuisance.
And Greta had thrown him to safety in the tunnel when the Gloom-Ticks swarmed. Had put herself between him and the monsters without hesitation.
They were dying. And Fernando was just watching.
Something hot and heavy uncoiled in his chest. Not the small, flickering flame he used for reading in the dark. Something older. Something that had been sleeping for a very long time.
Something angry.
Fernando stood up.
He didn't tremble. He didn't wipe his nose.
He thrust his hands forward, palms out, fingers interlocking.
"GET AWAY FROM THEM!"
FOOM.
Not a fireball. A sun.
A column of white-hot plasma erupted from Fernando's hands, so intense that the concrete beneath him instantly glazed into glass. The air in the factory screamed as it was incinerated, oxygen combusting in a visible shockwave. The heat was blinding—brighter than the floodlights, hotter than magma, hot enough to turn steel into vapor.
The blast hit Caligo square in the chest.
There was no shifting this time. No parrying. No elegant evasion. Physics took over.
BOOM.
The pale man was launched backward as if he'd been hit by a freight train. His funeral suit disintegrated instantly, fabric becoming ash before it left his body. His skin blackened and cracked like dried mud. He slammed into a row of heavy machinery sixty feet away, crumpling the steel like aluminum foil around his impact crater.
The connection was severed.
Jude gasped, his body arching off the floor as air—sweet, precious, beautiful oxygen—rushed back into his lungs. The sensation of rotting vanished, leaving him shaking and drenched in cold sweat, but alive.
Fernando didn't stop to watch Caligo fall.
He ran.
He slid across the floor to where Greta lay. She was conscious but gray, her nose shattered into a mess of cartilage and blood, her shoulder bent at an angle that made his stomach lurch—collarbone snapped clean through.
"Don't move," Fernando ordered. His voice wasn't squeaky anymore. It was focused. Sharp.
He hovered his hand over her bleeding shoulder. His palm glowed—not with the white rage of the blast, but with a precise, controlled orange heat.
"This is going to hurt," Fernando said. "A lot."
He pressed his hand down.
SSSSST.
"FUCK!" Greta shrieked, her back arching off the floor. The smell of burning flesh filled the air, sharp and acrid, mixing with the ozone from Fernando's plasma blast.
But the bleeding stopped. The wound was sealed, cauterized by controlled flame.
Fernando pulled back, panting. "Messy. But you won't bleed out."
Greta blinked through tears of pain, staring at her shoulder, then up at the nerd in the bloodstained cream sweater. She looked at the blackened trench where Caligo had been standing, at the molten glass pooling on the factory floor.
"You…" Greta rasped, spitting out a mouthful of blood. "You're a heavy hitter?"
"I am a teaching assistant," Fernando said, adjusting his crooked glasses with trembling fingers. "But I have a high thermal output."
Jude stumbled over to them. He was limping badly, bruises blooming across every inch of visible skin, but his bow was back in his hand, humming with angry golden light. His wings flared out behind him, shedding sparks of renewed energy.
"Is he down?" Jude wheezed, staring at the pile of twisted metal across the room.
From the wreckage, a piece of steel shifted.
Then another.
Caligo stood up.
His suit was gone, burned away to reveal a body that looked like it was made of gray, dead muscle stretched over exposed wiring and mechanical joints. His skin was charred black in patches, peeling away in flakes to reveal something metallic underneath. The host body was dying—but whatever was inside it didn't seem to care.
He cracked his neck. Click.
"Thermal manipulation," Caligo droned. His voice was distorted now, rasping through a throat that had been half-melted. "Impressive output. This vessel sustained significant damage."
He took a step forward. The leg dragged slightly, servos whining.
"Time for a different approach."
Jude stepped forward, blades reforming in his hands. Greta scrambled to her feet, hoisting the Wyrmmaker with a grunt of pain, blood still streaming from her ruined nose. Fernando stood between them, his hands wreathed in white fire, the heat making the air shimmer around him.
They were beaten. Broken. Terrified.
But they were standing.
"Round two," Greta spat through bloody teeth, "you son of a bitch."