Crestfall Bridge. 9 PM.
Voss walked to the centre and stopped.
His three-crew spread wide behind him - Hollow on the left, Sable on the right, Raze directly behind. They'd done this before. They knew their positions.
Sentinel Prime came in from both ends simultaneously. Eight heroes this time. Marshal had studied the first fight, called in reinforcements, built a strategy. Volt, Cascade, Barrier, Aria, four more from the extended roster - all moving in a coordinated pincer.
Voss watched them deploy with the patience of someone who had already decided how this ends.
"Hollow," he said quietly. "Raze. Sable. Handle the team."
He looked at Marshal coming down the centre, silver and blue, every step deliberate.
"The Sir and I have something to discuss."
Marshal stopped ten feet out. His visor was up - he wanted to be seen. Wanted Voss to see a face, not Armor.
"This doesn't have to go further," he said. "Stand down. All of you. Whatever you've lost - this isn't the answer."
"No," Voss agreed pleasantly. "It isn't."
He raised his hand.
[ENTROPY FIRE - DIRECT LANCE]
A focused beam - not a wave, a lance - dark red and tight, aimed at Marshal's chest. Not to destroy. To test.
[MATTER HARDENING - PERSONAL ARMOR: MAXIMUM DENSITY]
Marshal hardened everything. Every plate of his Armor compressing to beyond-diamond density in under a second, the metal groaning with the sudden change.
The lance hit and spread across his chest like water across stone - dispersed, not penetrated. He slid back two feet. Still standing.
Voss tilted his head. "Good."
He fired again - three lances, triangulated.
Marshal hardened the air in front of him. A wall of compressed atmosphere, invisible but solid.
[MATTER HARDENING - ATMOSPHERIC COMPRESSION WALL]
The lances hit the wall. The air cracked like glass, superheated, glowing orange at the stress points - and held.
Marshal grabbed the compressed air wall while it was still hot - he could harden anything he touched, and the superheated section had become something new entirely - and wrenched it free.
A jagged disc of compressed, heat-fused atmosphere, glowing at the edges.
He threw it at Voss like a blade.
[MATTER HARDENING - PROJECTILE: COMPRESSED AIR DISC]
Voss caught it with both hands. Absorbed every joule - the kinetic force, the heat, all of it.
[ENTROPY FIRE - ABSORPTION: KINETIC + THERMAL]
For a moment he glowed. Then he shaped what he'd taken and sent it back as a meteor - the disc now coated in dark red fire, twice the mass, three times the velocity.
Marshal dove left. The meteor hit the bridge surface behind him and the concrete exploded outward in a fifteen-foot crater.
He came up already moving. Grabbed chunks of bridge debris as he ran - rebar, concrete sections, twisted steel - hardening each one to maximum density as he picked it up.
[MATTER HARDENING - BARRAGE: ULTRA-DENSE SHRAPNEL]
He threw them rapid-fire. Twelve pieces in four seconds, each one harder than any natural material, moving at speeds that should have been impossible for a man throwing by hand.
Voss absorbed every single one. His body expanded slightly with each impact - not physically, but the sense of pressure around him grew, the fire at his edges burning hotter.
[ENTROPY FIRE - SATURATION STATE]
He was full. Marshal had overloaded him intentionally.
"Now," Voss said, and released everything simultaneously.
The bridge shook. The guardrails on both sides blew outward. Twelve pieces of ultra-dense shrapnel returned as a storm of fire-coated projectiles moving in every direction at once.
[MATTER HARDENING - FULL BODY SHELL: EMERGENCY]
Marshal curled inward, hardened everything, became a statue for three seconds while the storm hit him from every angle.
The impacts rang like bells - dense on dense, each one a shockwave through his arms and spine.
When it ended, he was on one knee, Armor cracked along the left side, breathing hard.
He got up.
Voss looked almost surprised.
"You're better than I remember," Voss said. There was something close to respect in it.
"You were one of us," Marshal said. Still steady. Still moving forward. "You know what this city means. What we fight for."
"I know exactly what this city means."
Something shifted in Voss's voice. The control dropping slightly.
"I know what the night of The Fracture means. I know what fourteen years of meaning means when you're the only one left who remembers their names."
He hit Marshal with everything. Not a technique - just raw, everything he had, the grief and the fire and the fourteen years of it all at once.
[ENTROPY FIRE - GRIEF STATE: UNRESTRAINED]
Marshal hardened and charged - full body maximum density, a living battering ram, two hundred kilograms of beyond-diamond-density hero at full sprint.
[MATTER HARDENING - CHARGE: FULL BODY IMPACT]
He hit Voss square in the chest.
And Voss absorbed it. Every newton of kinetic force from a V4 at full charge - absorbed in the moment of impact, held for one second, then returned directly into Marshal's own armor from the inside.
[ENTROPY FIRE - KINETIC RETURN: INTERNAL]
The armor cracked from within. Marshal went down hard - both knees, one arm, visor shattered. He stayed there for three seconds.
Then he put one foot flat on the ground. Pushed up. Got to one knee.
Voss watched him. Something moved in his face that wasn't victory.
"Stay down," he said.
"No," Marshal said simply. He made it to both feet. Swaying. One arm useless. Visor gone. "Not while there are people on this bridge."
Voss raised his hand for the finishing strike.
"Voss."
A new voice. From behind. Raze's voice, tighter than usual.
"We have a problem."
Voss turned.
His three crew - Hollow, Sable, Raze - were standing in a rough triangle sixty feet away. All of them battered. All of them upright.
And between them and the Sentinel team, a gap had opened - because something was standing in it.
A kid. Seventeen. Hood up. Hands in pockets.
He hadn't been there a second ago.
He hadn't made a sound arriving.
The fire on the bridge - the ambient dark red that had been burning since Voss started - went completely still.
[CAUSAL ANCHOR - PASSIVE SUPPRESSION]
Voss looked at the figure. Then back at Marshal. Then at the forty people still on the tram at the south end of the bridge.
He lowered his hand.
"Tomorrow night," he said to the kid, quietly enough that only the immediate area heard.
"Ashfield harbour. Come alone."
A pause.
"Or the tram."
He walked off the bridge railing and stepped into the dark. His crew followed, one by one.
The kid looked at the tram. Then at the battered Sentinel Prime team. Then he stepped off the bridge railing himself.
By the time anyone reached the edge to look, the water below was empty.
Marshal stood on the damaged bridge in broken armor and looked at the place the unknown figure had been standing.
The fire was still gone - not died down, gone, like it had been switched off by something that didn't need to try.
He had been a hero for twenty years.
He had never once felt like the least powerful person in a situation.
Until now.