At some point during it, one man on the floor stopped pretending to be unconscious.

  He was one of those Rex had left breathing. A stocky man with a split lip and one eye swollen shut, the kind of face that had taken hits before and wore them with a certain pride. He looked at Rex working, and he looked at Creed and the thin man against the wall, and he made a calculation that turned out to be the last bad one he ever made.

  "You were quirkless," the man said.

  Rex stopped.

  "Eight years ago. Word got around about you. Creed's little quirkless errand boy." The man laughed, short and ugly. Grateful for scraps. That's what they said about you. Too grateful to ask questions. Too weak to do anything when they decided they were done with you." He spat blood onto the floor. "And now what. Someone gave you a quirk, or just awakened it, and you think that makes you invincible and dangerous? You think that changes what you were?"

  The room was very quiet.

  "You were nothing," the man said. "You are still nothing. You just have a light show now, I don't care if you kill, just know you will join me too."

  "What...what are you saying, you crazy fellow. Rex, none of what he said was true..." Creed tried to reassure that the man had just lost his mind, he was too afraid of Rex.

  Rex looked at him for a long moment.

  Then he crossed the room toward him.

  What happened next was fast. The man had no time to realize his mistake. Rex did not take his time with this one. There was no methodology to it, no patience. Just the red power moving through him, hot and final, and then it was over for that man.

  Rex straightened up.

  He looked at his hands.

  The pleasure was there. He could feel his mind changing.

  He recognized it distantly, the way you recognize a smell from a long time ago. Deep and immediate and not entirely his. It moved through him from somewhere behind his own thoughts, warm in a way that had nothing to do with warmth, satisfied in a way that felt like drinking when you had been thirsty for years.

  He told himself it was relief.

  He told himself this was what closure felt like.

  He went back to the wall where Creed and the thin man were sitting.

  The thin man looked up at him. The composure was completely gone. Whatever the thin man had been in that warehouse eight years ago, whatever cold professionalism had let him do what he did and walk away and sleep at night afterward, none of it was present anymore. Just a man against a wall, understanding exactly what was coming.

  "I have money," the thin man said. "I have contacts. I can disappear. You will never hear from me again. Nobody will. I will be gone, and it will be like I never existed."

  Rex crouched in front of him.

  "I know," Rex said.

  He broke his neck.

  Creed made a sound beside him. Not words. The sound a person made when their body understood something before their mind was ready to accept it.

  Rex turned to look at him.

  Creed had stopped crying somewhere in the last few minutes. The tears were still on his face, but the sobbing had gone quiet, replaced by something beyond fear, the specific stillness of a man who had run out of responses to what he was experiencing.

  "You said not yet," Creed said. His voice was barely there. "Back at the house. I asked if you were going to kill me, and you said not yet."

  "Yes," Rex said.

  "Please," Creed said. "Please. My children. Rex, please. Whatever I did to you. Whatever they did. It was business. It was never personal. You have to understand it was never personal."

  Rex looked at him.

  "I know," Rex said. "That was always the problem."

  Rex stood in the underground room afterward and let the silence settle around him.

  The red power moved through him slowly and satisfied, like something fed.

  He thought about the man with the split lip. About what he had said. Quirkless errand boy. Too weak to do anything.

  He looked around the room.

  He felt nothing that resembled regret.

  That should have concerned him. He filed it away in the place where things went that he was not ready to examine yet, and picked up his jacket from the floor and walked toward the stairs.

  Behind him, the red light faded slowly from the walls. The warmth at the back of his mind had gone very quiet. The kind of quiet that came after something had been fully enjoyed and did not need to announce itself.

  Rex did not notice.

  He walked out through the back door into the Melbourne night and did not look behind him.

  A man called Grin arrived at the base twenty minutes after Rex had walked in.

  He was not supposed to be here tonight. Change of schedule, last minute, the kind of small administrative decision that nobody thought twice about. His Quirk: Collapse Emitter type with minor strength enhancement. One precise strike can break structures or bend them toward a direction.

  He saw the guard outside first, slumped against the wall with his chalk skin cracked along the jawline, breathing but not present.

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  Grin crouched beside him and looked at the damage for a moment.

  Then he straightened and pulled out his phone.

  "Central," he said when they picked up. "This is Grin. The Northcote base seems compromised. The guard is down at the rear entrance. I am going to investigate. Send more men, but keep them quiet when they arrive, no vehicles with lights; we do not need attention on this street." He paused. "Yes. Now."

  He put the phone away, rolled his neck once, and looked at the door.

  Grin was not a large man. Medium height, lean, the kind of build that did not advertise itself. His hands were wrapped in worn tape the way a fighter's hands were wrapped, not for performance but out of habit, the tape changed so many times over the years that the ritual of it had become part of how he prepared himself. He had a wide mouth and the permanent expression of a man who found most situations faintly amusing, which was where the name came from.

  He did not like to use his quirk in public.

  Not because he could not. Because he had learned a long time ago that the moment structures started coming down, heroes came with them, and heroes created complications he preferred to avoid. His quirk was the kind of thing that left evidence. Cracked pillars. Fractured floors. Walls that came down in patterns that structural engineers wrote confused reports about afterward.

  He liked to keep it quiet.

  He went inside.

  The stairs down were dark. He moved slowly, one hand trailing the wall, letting his eyes adjust. At the bottom, the fluorescent lights were still swinging faintly from whatever had disturbed them, throwing uneven light across the room.

  He stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked at what was in front of him.

  The room had been taken apart. Not in the chaotic way of a brawl. In the methodical way of something that had moved through it with a purpose and removed every obstacle between itself and that purpose. Crates scattered. Shelving collapsed. The table was broken in a way that suggested impact rather than age.

  Seven men on the floor.

  Grin looked at each of them carefully. He noted the angles. He noted the pattern of where they had fallen relative to where they must have started. He noted that none of them had made it to the stairs.

  He noted Creed against the far wall.

  He stood very still for a long moment.

  Then the red light moved at the edge of his vision, and his body turned before his mind finished the instruction.

  Rex's strike hit his forearm instead of the back of his skull.

  The force of it traveled up Grin's arm like a current, and he let it redirect him, spinning with it rather than absorbing it, putting distance between them in the same movement. He came up in a low stance on the far side of the room with both hands raised and looked at Rex properly for the first time.

  The red light under Rex's skin. The stillness of him. The way he stood like a man who had not been in a hurry all evening and was not starting now.

  Grin's wide mouth moved into something that was not quite a smile.

  "You did all of this," he said.

  Rex looked at him and said nothing.

  "You've got devastating power behind that punch," Grin said. "I felt that in my whole body." He shook out his arm slowly without taking his eyes off Rex. "Who sent you? Vorel is going to want a name."

  "Nobody sent me," Rex said.

  "Personal then." Grin glanced at Creed against the wall. At the thin man beside him. He looked back at Rex and updated something behind his eyes. "Old business."

  "Finished business," Rex said.

  "Not yet," Grin said.

  He drove his fist into the nearest support pillar.

  The crack ran from floor to ceiling in a single sharp line, and the pillar leaned, and the section of shelving attached to the wall beside it lurched forward, and Rex moved barely, the metal edge catching his shoulder instead of his head.

  Grin was already moving. Not toward Rex. Away from him, putting the room between them, his hand trailing along the wall as he went, and the wall fracturing where he touched it, controlled and deliberate, reading the structure the way a musician reads an instrument.

  "You want to fight indoors," Grin said, almost to himself. "Indoors is my room."

  Rex came at him straight, and Grin hit the floor between them once, a short, precise strike, and the floor fractured in a line that shifted Rex's footing and turned his charge into a stumble. Rex caught himself on a shelf that immediately came away from the wall under his weight, and he rode it down and came up with a section of metal in his hand.

  Grin was already on the stairs.

  "Outside," Grin said. "If you can keep up and want to continue this, you will follow me outside because this building is going to come down in about one minute, and I would prefer to be in the street when it does."

  Rex looked up at the ceiling. At the new cracks spreading from the pillar, like a map of everything about to fail.

  "It seems you don't care about civilian life," Rex replied

  "When fighting someone strong, worrying about others' lives is meaningless." Grin's voice was heard while he was already out of the room.

  He followed him outside.

  The street was quiet when they came out.

  Then Grin hit the exterior wall of the hardware store, and it stopped being quiet.

  The facade cracked from ground to roofline, and a section of the upper face came down in chunks that scattered across the pavement, and the sound of it rolled down the street like an announcement. The lights came on in the buildings opposite. A window opened. Someone at the end of the block stopped walking and stared.

  Grin used all of it.

  He moved through the street the way he moved through the room, reading it, touching it, turning it into a problem for Rex to solve while Grin positioned himself for the next one. A streetlight post, struck at the base, came down in Rex's path. The low brick wall of the property next door went through like a wave, the top section launching itself as rubble. The concrete lip of the gutter cracked and lifted, and Grin kicked the raised section toward Rex's feet with the casual precision of a man who had done this a hundred times in a hundred streets.

  Rex was fast enough to avoid most of it.

  Most was not all.

  A section of brick caught him across the ribs. A chunk of the streetlight post hit his left leg, and he stumbled. Grin read the stumble and drove his fist into the facade of the building behind Rex, and the wall section came down, and Rex threw his arms up and took it across his shoulders and went down to one knee under the weight.

  The red power pushed him back up.

  "You are strong," Grin said from across the street, shaking dust from his wrapped hands. "But you keep coming straight at me, and I have had this conversation before with people a lot stronger than you." His wide mouth moved again, that almost smile. "It always ends the same way."

  Rex stood up straight and looked at him.

  The red light was brighter now. Not the low-banked fire it usually sat at. Something higher and less patient.

  "You are good," Rex said.

  "Yes," Grin said.

  "You are the best fight I have had tonight," Rex said.

  "I believe that," Grin said. He glanced at the building. At the street around them. At the lights coming on in every window on the block. "Reinforcement is coming. You should leave while you still can."

  "They will not make a difference," Rex said.

  Grin looked at him for a moment.

  "No," he said quietly. "I don't think they will, because I'm enough."

  He hit the road surface between them, and the crack ran the length of the street, and the pavement buckled and rose, and Rex felt the ground shift under both feet simultaneously.

  Three blocks away, a woman with her dog saw the front of the hardware store missing its front face, the dust rolling across the street, and the two figures standing in the middle of it, and took out her phone and started live-streaming.

  "Guys, look at the hardware store in my neighborhood, it got destroyed, it seems there is a big fight going on."

  It didn't take long for many viewers to join it; the title was quite intriguing.

  Someone said they should call the police.

  Not far, a hero got a notification.

  She had been in Melbourne for six hours, called in on a separate case, and she had been sitting in a parked car eating a Japanese store onigiri and reading the case file when the alert came through. Structural damage reported. Possible quirk incident. Location attached.

  She looked at the address.

  She looked at the case file in her lap.

  She put the case file on the passenger seat and started the car.

  The smoke was visible from three blocks out. She pulled up at the intersection, stopped, and looked at what was in front of her through the windshield.

  The hardware store had lost most of its front facade. The street was cracked open in a line that ran further than any ordinary structural failure, explained. Dust hung over everything. Civilians were moving away from the scene quickly, some of them running, all of them going in the same direction, which was away.

  Two figures in the street. One of them was wrapped in red light that she could see clearly even at this distance.

  She sat with both hands on the wheel and looked at it.

  Then she got out of the car.