Shiloh Kane laughed—short, bright, vicious. The sound snapped through the execution chamber like a whip.
"Strongest there is," she said, rolling her shoulders as the silver sword lifted into guard. "You broke a pair of cuffs. Lucky trick. That's all."
Around the ring, bodies unconsciously shifted into two camps: those already edging toward the exits—faces pale, feet angled for flight—and those planting their weight to rush him if the order came. Armor hummed, gauntlets primed, a half-circle of living weapons caught between awe and terror.
Marc's eyes stayed on Kane. Calm. Unblinking. "Stand down," he said, voice low enough that the floor seemed to carry it. "Kane, you don't want this."
"Oh," she purred, the sword drawing a lazy half-moon as she advanced, "you have no idea how much I want it."
Marc's mouth tilted—half-grin, half-warning. "Don't say I didn't warn you."
He didn't move first.
Kane did—three steps and a cut that split the air. Marc caught the flat on his forearm, turned his wrist, and let the blade skate off the line of his knuckles. No sound but the kiss of metal on a field of force that wasn't there a breath before. He gave ground, hands open, a boxer's economy written into a demigod's spine.
She pressed. He parried. She carved the air into clean geometries; he folded each into a smaller shape and handed it back. The room learned a new silence: the kind that forms when witness replaces spectacle.
"Why isn't he striking?" someone whispered.
Because he didn't intend to—yet.
Kane's face tightened. Her swordwork, usually a lesson in restraint, sharpened into something personal. Her footwork turned savage. She feinted a low draw, spun high; Marc slipped the edge by a breath, two fingers grazing the blade's wake. A hair singed and curled in the air between them.
He smiled—annoying, insolent—and redirected her next thrust with the heel of his palm. The sword rang against the floor grate and leapt back to her hand like a trained thing. Sparks chased the grid. She was breathing harder.
On the second ring, the Lioness watched with arms folded across gold-etched cuirass, eyes narrowing, breath measured. She had fought gods. She had killed one. Rage sharpened her famously; anger made her surgical. She could recognize the moment a fight changed direction long before the fighters did.
It changed when Kane's blade found nothing but air for the fourth time in twenty seconds.
"Shiloh," Palisade warned, not quite loud enough to be heard.
Kane heard anyway. "I'm fine," she snapped, and drove.
Marc retreated a step, then another, then none. He caught her arm on a half-beat and turned her shoulder. She recovered too fast to fall, slid, spun, cut, and found his hand waiting where her wrist meant to be. A twist—gentle, humiliating—and she had to choose: keep the sword and lose the hand, or yield an inch and keep both. She yielded an inch. The chamber inhaled as one.
A hairline fracture crept through Kane's smile.
Around them, restraint protocols went live in hushed chain: magnetic snares powered, Aether dampers hummed brighter, microdrones lit green in a whispering constellation above the ring. Half the heroes angled to jump. The other half stared—paralyzed by the possibility that choice, any choice, might be the wrong one.
"Why isn't he striking?" the whisper came again, thinner.
"Because he's measuring," Lioness said, almost to herself.
Kane cut left, right, and down the middle. Marc bled none. He gave her wrists back each time, let her keep her footing, never once punished, never once rewarded. And for the first time since the verdict, the chamber remembered fear's older cousin: respect.
Lioness exhaled—and then staggered.
It wasn't the fight. The room seemed to tilt for her alone, a sudden weight pressing against lungs bred to sprint at gods. She grabbed the rail, jaw clenching, a tremor running like lightning along her arms.
"Are you alright?" the Cyber-Titan snapped, servos whirring as he pivoted. "Vitals?"
She ignored him. Her pupils blew wide, then narrowed to slits. The world she saw was not the one the rest of them saw.
"What happened?" Palisade pressed, stepping in. "Lioness?"
Her breathing thickened. "It's… not the cuffs," she managed. "Not luck. Not a trick."
"What is it?" Shiloh barked without looking back, now forced to keep half an eye on Marc's hands instead of his chest. "Report!"
Lioness lifted one shaking hand and pointed at Moonveil.
Not at him, exactly.
At the air around him.
"There's a mark," she said, voice rough. "A god-mark. No—worse. Not borrowed. Not the way priests wear their patrons. This is seat-sigil."
The words meant little to most. To the old ones, to the half-divine, to the few who had studied pantheons the way others studied law, it meant everything.
Gasps rolled the ring.
Seat-sigil. The crown that is not a crown. The invisible diadem reserved for those who sit in a pantheon's empty chair—who are no longer merely of a god, but functionally are one; an office, not a blessing.
Kane's sword faltered half a heartbeat. That was all Marc needed to step through, not striking, merely present, the way a tide becomes a wall when it decides shoreline is a suggestion.
Lioness swallowed. Her tongue felt thick. "He's not just a vessel," she said, eyes locked on the pale nimbus that only she and a handful could perceive. "He's a seat. He's carrying the office of something old. And it's waking."
Silence—clean, absolute.
All at once, the murmurs turned; those ready to flee truly edged back. Those ready to restrain hesitated like men about to jump a chasm that had widened under their toes.
Kane laughed again, but the sound had an edge now, brittle in the middle. "Scare tactics," she spat. "Demigod theater. I've killed 'old' before."
"You've killed wounded before," Lioness said, low. "This is different."
Marc's face didn't change. He spoke without turning his head, as if continuing a conversation none of them had heard. "I told you," he said to Kane, polite as a man declining a dance. "You don't want this."
"Stop talking," she hissed.
"I tried that," he replied. "Didn't work."
She came in hard, blade singing. He did not answer with a blade. He answered with a half-step, a palm, and the kind of leverage that only belongs to someone who has mapped gravity in his bones. Steel met empty place; her momentum folded around his stillness and bled away.
Every time she swung, the crescent at his chest pulsed—not bright, not boastful, a heartbeat registering intent. The suit stayed matte, predator-dark, refusing spectacle. His hands remained bare of anything but the smallest growth of claw—promises, not choices.
In the gallery, a young speedster whispered, "He's… pulling his punches."
"No," Lioness said. "He hasn't thrown any."
Kane felt the room slip. Power had always come easily; now, in the first stretch of honest contest in years, the old engine inside her roared awake—rage, that hot auger down the spine that sharpened her to something fewer and fewer could stop. Veterans exchanged looks that were old rumor made fresh dread.
"When she gets there," Palisade said under his breath, "only Gaidan can cool her."
"Gaidan isn't here," someone reminded him.
Which was another way of saying: We may be about to watch something none of us can unsee.
Kane drew deeper from herself. The sword's edge grew thinner, brighter, so sharp the air around it seemed to dodge aside. Lightning crawled her forearms. The floor hairline-cracked under her stance. She smiled in a way that was all teeth.
Marc set his feet.
The heroes on the ring tightened their semi-circle. Restraint fields climbed another percentage point. The microdrones above arranged into a net configuration, tiny green eyes waiting for a vector. Palisade's hand hovered over a failsafe. Cyber-Titan's chestplate opened a petal, revealing a containment bloom that had only ever been tested on paper. Even the Lioness, breath slowly regaining rhythm, lowered her center of gravity by instinct.
"What do you see now?" Palisade asked her without looking.
Lioness didn't blink. "The mark is brighter."
"What does that mean?"
"It means he's still choosing not to be what he could."
The chamber hummed—the sound of systems and breath and belief straining together. Somewhere, high above the visible dome, the old sky of gods leaned in, Metztli cool as a blade's reflection, Tecciztecatl a thin line of prayer.
Kane rolled her neck, a vertebrae popping like a knuckle. "Last chance," she said.
Marc's answer was almost gentle. "Yours."
And then the floor lights dimmed by a single shade—the quietest omen—and every hero in the room understood that the next movement would decide not the fight, but the shape of the world that followed it.