The first blow James landed wasn't elegant at all. It was harshly desperate.

  A short, ugly hook that cracked against a true blood's jaw and snapped the man's head sideways like a puppet's string had been cut. The true blood staggered, boots skidding over ice that had no right to be inside Olympus's palace halls.

  James breathed through his teeth, the air sharp and metallic. His disguise still clung to him in scraps, useless in its entirety. ‘So much for a quiet rescue,’ he thought.

  Another one lunged. James ducked, shoulder slammed into ribs, and he felt the satisfying give of armor plates deforming. The man tried to grab him; James twisted, yanked, and drove a knee up into the stomach with zero mercy. The true blood folded, choking, hands clawing at nothing.

  James didn't finish him. He couldn't afford the time. He needed space. Needed breath. Needed—

  A ripple ran across the snow with sheer speed. The world blurred at the edges, and the hairs on James's arms rose as if reality itself had been pulled thin.

  Hermez struck first. He didn't announce it this time. No arrogant proclamation. No theatrical dialogue. Just violence delivered at a god's velocity. James only saw the afterimage, a white slash through the air—and then something heavy collided with his chest. The same weight that reminded him of his fight with his lord.

  Pain exploded suddenly. His ribs cracked. His feet left the ground in that very second, and he flew backward across the hall, tearing a trench in the snow, slamming through a collapsed pillar chunk that should've shattered his spine.

  He coughed, and blood steamed in the cold. He tried to stand up but fell down again, the nausea from that impact settling in.

  Hermez didn't give him the dignity of recovery. The god was already there, already on him, hand open like a blade.

  James, with his survival instincts, just threw himself sideways.

  Hermez's strike missed by a hair, but it didn't feel like a miss. The air where the palm passed burned, and the impact wave shattered nearby ice into glittering dust. If it had connected cleanly, James understood, understood in his bones, it would have taken his head off his shoulders.

  He rolled, scraped his elbow raw on stone, and came up half-crouched. The Staff of Transit thumped against his back. Thank the lord he had the staff. Somehow it was pushing him to dodge.

  He hadn't even drawn it.

  He didn't know how to use it. Aron had pressed it into his hands like a weight. James had done what anyone would do with a weapon they didn't understand. He'd hung it there. Let it be a symbol of Aron’s and his reunion.

  Hermez blurred again.

  James reacted on instinct and nothing else, turning, twisting, arms up to guard a strike that wasn't meant to be blocked—

  —and the staff vibrated.

  Not a gentle hum. A violent, furious shudder that rattled through James's spine and into his teeth. It felt like something inside him answered something inside the staff, like two distant thunderheads suddenly recognizing each other.

  The connection was so loud, even Hermez felt it. “It recognizes you...” he voiced. “But not for long.”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Hermez's next impact, another god-speed collision aimed at James's throat, skidded wrong. Just wrong enough. James's body moved without understanding why. The staff's vibration pulled at his balance like invisible strings, and he slipped a fraction to the left.

  Hermez's hand ripped past his neck close enough that cold burned along James's skin, but it didn't sever.

  James stumbled, heart slamming, and grabbed the staff's shaft over his shoulder as if it were trying to bind with him.

  "What—" he rasped.

  The staff trembled harder.

  Hermez's eyes narrowed. For the first time since the clash began, the god looked less amused and more… interested. Like a predator hearing a new sound in the brush.

  "So that's why the immortal gave it to you," Hermez said, voice calm, almost gentle. “Because it answers you."

  James swallowed blood. He didn't have an answer. He barely had a plan. He only had the familiar memory—Aron's hand on the staff, the moment it was given, thinking it was a matter of responsibility. Now it mattered in a way James didn't understand at all.

  The true bloods regrouped, forming a loose ring around James, boots crunching snow, blades out. Disciplined. Olympian discipline.

  Hermez lifted one finger like a conductor, feeling his own divinity running low. He could finish James off, but the connection between him and the staff was something he wanted to see. Analyze.

  "Break him," he ordered.

  They moved together.

  James met the first one with the butt of the staff, swinging blind, not even activating anything, just using it like a heavy pole. It cracked into the man's shoulder with a dull thunk and drove him down. Another blade flashed. James jerked back, felt the edge kiss his cheek, warm blood spilling down in contrast to the cold.

  Hermez blurred again. This time James saw it coming, and still couldn't stop it. The god's knee drove into James's stomach.

  James folded, breath gone, vision exploding into white. He heard ribs shift, felt something inside him tear.

  Hermez caught James by the collar mid-collapse and flung him like trash.

  James slammed into a wall. Stone fractured. Snow sprayed. The staff on his back screamed with vibration like a living thing in pain.

  James coughed again, choking, and for a second the world tilted so hard he thought he might black out.

  Hermez was already walking toward him. Walking, because he could afford to. "Even with the staff, you're slow," Hermez said, and there was disappointment now. "Your old immortal chose poorly. Here I thought I saw some potential."

  James forced his legs under him, shaking. He wanted to say something heroic. Something defiant. All that came out was a wet laugh.

  "I'm… a slow learner," he rasped, as he accepted the vibrations of the staff, his whole body slowly vibrating with it.

  Hermez's mouth twitched. Then he vanished. James felt the momentum coiling from inside him and raised the staff, more reflex than knowledge, and the staff vibrated so hard it yanked his arms upward.

  Hermez's strike came in, a straight punch aimed to crush James's sternum and end the fight.

  The staff intercepted it instead. Not with magic. With impossible timing.

  Hermez's fist hit the staff's shaft, and the shockwave boomed outward. The snow on the floor lifted in a ring like a blast had detonated. True bloods staggered, some thrown off their feet.

  James's arms went numb. His shoulders jolted and dislocated from that single impact. He almost dropped the staff. But he didn't die.

  Hermez looked at the staff like it had insulted him. Then he smiled.

  "Oh," he said softly.

  ‘Then my theory is true,’ he thought as he leaned forward, and his voice dropped low enough that only James could hear.

  "I lost my fief, I lost my children, but from this destruction, a gift has been bestowed upon me...You."

  Hermez struck again.

  Brutal.

  A heavy elbow, god-weight, smashing down into James's collarbone. Something snapped. Pain lanced so sharp James's vision went black at the edges. He fell, staff clattering, and Hermez followed with a downward heel meant to crush his skull into the snow.

  The staff vibrated—

  —and he finally vibrated with it.

  {Speed charge: 12%}

  James rolled at the last instant. Hermez's heel hit stone and collapsed it, carving a crater into the palace floor. James crawled, dragging his body like it belonged to someone else and in his heart it did, it belonged to his lord. Aron.

  Hermez's gaze flicked upward suddenly, as if he'd heard something distant. His expression tightened. A pulse moved through the palace, subtle, but real, like a thread being tugged in a web.

  Someone was moving where they shouldn't. Hermez's eyes narrowed further.

  “Peter… is escaping,” he murmured, and the words weren't for James anymore.

  They were for Olympus.

  For the whole palace.

  Then he raised his head and shouted, voice cracking through the snowstorm halls like thunder.

  "Seal the lower levels."

  James's heart sank.

  Peter.