A/N: Thanks to my editors: Waela, Elsannity, and SexyMist.


Calhoun rushes over the burning Ambassador bodies littering the floor and rams the wall shoulder first. The metal groans—weakened by the holes she blasted through it earlier—and breaks with a sharp crack.

Two sets of wide eyes stare up at her, shining with the same type of fear Calhoun witnessed during the first Incident. Maybe she would have cared if it were any other day.

Calhoun bares her teeth behind her helm and grabs the first goat by the neck, then squeezes. His neck caves in like a sponge under her strength. She turns on the other Ambassador and whips the dead man at her so hard they both fly off the far ledge. A moment later there's a scream, a wet ripping, then silence.

Calhoun walks over to the railing and stares down at the cooling fans. Then to the blood splattered along the rounded walls.

This is what happens when you fuck with people. They fuck you back. Her hands ball into fists, suppressing her urge to holler. And, perhaps, the instinct to gut Kida for giving Anna the last excuse she needed to give up.

"You're lucky you're on my team," Calhoun spits as she summons a blaster canon. Her lips curl into a vicious smile when she fires it into the fans, imagining the cogs and gears are the Asgardian.

Killing has never been anything other than a necessity to Calhoun, but right now a burning satisfaction bubbles against the inside of her ribs with every bone she breaks. Is this what Anna felt, when she lost the old Elites? While an old Elite herself, Calhoun was more a supervisor for the common good of the League. She still had the junior leaguers and Anna when the death toll rose, then she had the new leaguers to keep her busy.

But Anna . . . she lost the four people who had been her whole world and no one, not even Calhoun, could reign her back in. Guilt had consumed Anna; it festered and boiled until that was all her senses knew.

Then Kida told Anna exactly what she's been wanting to hear. That a part of her could help, just not her, and she left. She left the League, she left her family, she left Calhoun.

For so long Anna was all Calhoun had of the past. Anna was the only other meta in the whole universe who had seen her planet implode, and then she . . . she just . . .

With a roar, Calhoun summons a poison vapour mortar and fires it into the nearest vent. "Fuck you. Just—fuck you." She ignores the moisture burning in her eyes and stomps out of the room. She finds the nearest airlock and busts it open. It isn't much trouble for her to hold on while the chamber depressurizes.

This is why having a fully enclosed suit is so important. If Kida—or Elsa or Ariel, for that matter—were to tumble into space they'd die from lack of oxygen. It would be an undignified way for any Elite to die but it makes Calhoun chuckle all the same.

"Alright, let's do some damage." Calhoun changes her weapon to a particle disintegration sniper rifle and aims at one of the other cruisers. She zooms in and scans the hull until she spies a seam where the metal hull doesn't seal as perfectly as the rest. She fires. Nothing happens.

Calhoun sneers. These assholes upgraded based on our powers, just like those infuriating bugs back then.

Well. She supposes it's time to use a weapon they don't know she has. Her rifle disintegrates into nothing and she places her hands on the floor. She closes her eyes and forces herself to breath in a calm, slow pattern. Then she curls her hands on two summoned rods. She stabs them into the deck and launches herself into space towards the closest cruiser.

She's hit by a fighter halfway through. Calhoun punches her fist through the glass, grabs the man by the scruff of his uniform, and rips him out of his seat. His legs don't come with him. She throws him away like a piece of trash and glances back at the way she came.

Already the cruiser's nose and tail are buckling towards the gravity rods.

Didn't expect that, I see. Calhoun turns once more and kicks off the fighter towards a cruiser that isn't about to become like her home planet. "One ship going down," she says as an afterthought into the comm. "Heading to a second."

"Zeus is on the one you're going to," Rho replies.

"I'm almost done here, as well," Kida adds. "Just have one more compartment to subdue and I'll be good to move."

"I know." Rho doesn't sound impressed, not that she ever does. "Archangel will be with necessary parties shortly."

Calhoun lands on the ship's hull and holds herself in place. She takes the time to take stock of the situation around her. There are over a dozen cruisers, which makes her wonder how many the Ambassadors had before Emma ripped a hole through the fleet.

Four ships a person. Calhoun rubs the back of her helmet. She could do that relatively quickly if her gravity rods worked faster, but they don't and she can't summon more than one weapon at a time. There has to be another weapon she has that can move this process along.

Planet shredding rounds come to mind, but it's all too likely that the shot will keep going through whatever she's aiming out. She destroyed a moon the last time she used it.

She turns her sights to Earth and, for a moment, only stares. How many people are still down there? How many of them are likely to survive?

In a war far scarier than this, Calhoun had given everything she had only to see her entire species ground into dust. That . . . isn't the case this time. Even if something happens to Earth the human race will continue on, just with a few billion less.

A memory, as clear as if it were happening again, shows Arson dragging Calhoun's limping form towards a League shuttle. She remembers Black Dragon's condescending smile when Calhoun begged to at least try to help her people. Now she stands on the opposite side of that, looking at a planet that isn't hers and full of people she doesn't know. Can she honestly say she cares if one of her shots goes astray?

She smiles and shakes her head. Athena, I think I finally understand. Athena's loyalty was always given to her team and just them, everyone else be damned. She was never heartless, just selective in who she gave a crap about.

"Four years on and you're still ruining my life," she sighs. She reactivates her comm. "Rho, point me in the direction of a ship with no Elite on board. I want to test something." Lines appear on her helmet display and she follows them until it leads to a ship with a target on its back.

She takes a quick peek at the cruiser with the gravity rods. It's destroyed enough for her to leave it to its fate. She dematerializes the rods and summons a planetary destruction cannon aimed at the unfortunate cruiser acting as target practice.

Calhoun takes a steadying breath, confirms her trajectory, and pulls the trigger. The blast rips through the dark sky and blows the cruiser in half.

"Heh," she half laughs. "Guess they weren't expecting that." Every ship in sight begins breaking formation, and a few turn their nose on her. Or, perhaps, they didn't think we were enough of a threat until now. It would make sense. They have a lot of meta defenses specific to the League members, just like last time.

"Rho," Calhoun says into her comm. "Get you or Emma to teleport all the Elites up here back down with you. I can wipe out this fleet."

"Very well." No question, no argument. Either Rho is negligent or she's paying way more attention to what's happening up here than Calhoun gave her credit for.

Then Rho flips head over heels out of a hell gate and slams into a cruiser nearly a hundred kilometers behind her. Hades is on Rho in an instant. It's the last thing Calhoun can distinguish before the two are zipping through space faster than she can track. All she can see are the fading lines of Rho's fire and the explosions of clashing magic.

A light catches her attention. She glances towards it, and her eyes widen. "Fuck!" She jumps further down the cruiser, scrambling along the metal in a weightless sky.

An explosion ripples along her armour, so close that sweat builds on Calhoun's forehead. The Ambassadors are shooting at their own ships just to get at her. She didn't think they'd be callous enough for that, which sounds foolish in retrospect.

"Bogy entering Sol airspace," Vikke announces.

Great. "Archangel, hurry up and get—gah!" Calhoun screams as she gets hit in the leg. She knows without looking that her foot is gone. It isn't the radiating pain that gives it away, it's the hiss of oxygen exiting her suit.

"I've got you, hold on!" Is that Elsa?

Calhoun spins in the blackness, having lost her grip, and stares straight into the maw of a cruiser's main cannon. She grits her teeth, her heart in her throat, and outstretches her hand. Her mind burns with the telltale sign of a new summon. It locks to her forearm and extends like a long-barreled grenade launcher.

"Wait, Reeves," Rho says when Calhoun puts her finger on the trigger.

Calhoun's a half second from firing anyway because she is not dying here, when ice explodes out of half the ship. The glow of the cannon dies out and the cruiser starts drifting. She blinks. "Oh."

"Now, Reeves. Everyone's out."

Calhoun swings her weapon to the nearest enemy vessel and fires without hesitation.

Whatever she shoots hits the side of the craft and . . . folds it in half. She has no other way of describing it. It's like the fabric of reality itself split in half and tried squishing both sides together as if they were meant to be one. Something like this is bound to have consequences, but it's too useful right now to question that.

So she turns and she shoots, and she keeps shooting. Through the cold, through her armour's warnings, through the blood loss.

It isn't until her eyelids flicker closed that she realises how far gone she is.

Where the hell is Archangel?


"Damn the Old God," Kida spits as she presses her hands against Elsa's bloodied stomach. "What the hell happened?"

Elsa, her armour melted beneath her, flashes Kida a red smile that can't hide the pain that flares in her eyes. "I wanted to save Reeves. I didn't do it smart."

A lot of this isn't smart. Kida's eyebrows furrow and she looks around. They've been teleported into the middle of a suburb that hasn't been fully evacuated. People are coming out of their houses to stare at the three heroes in the middle of the road.

Ariel, who's absolutely covered in Ambassador blood, snarls at the surroundings. She takes to the sky, turning around in circles as if she's trying to re-find the battlefield.

The ground shatters as Emma falls to the Earth in a heavy crouch. Golden magic is leaking out of her nose, mouth, and ears in earnest, and she doesn't walk like she's sober as she makes her way out of the crater she created.

Emma turns her glowing eyes, the same shade as the sun, towards the blood pouring out of Elsa like a leaking faucet. She waves her hand. Then she tilts her head towards the sky and disappears into thin air.

Elsa sucks in a sharp breath through her teeth and eases herself into a sitting position. "That was close," she murmurs. She pokes at flawless skin that used to be a gaping hole in her abdomen.

Kida nods, not knowing how else to respond, and wipes the sticky blood on her hands off as best she can on her pants. "We should get back in the fray, so we can win this." Not that Kida cares about that so much anymore.

When Kida got up in Anna's face and made her disappear, the deep weight of the Old God left her shoulders with a menacing hiss at the back of her skull. She completed her task. After all these years, she can finally go home.

All she has to do is survive.

"Bogy entering Earth's gravitational field," Vikke says.

Elsa's eyes harden and she pushes to her feet, icy armour locking over her body as she does. "Identify."

"Friendly," Rho gasps. She . . . doesn't sound okay. "Asgardian."

Kida's head snaps to the sky. Could that be her ride home? Then she shakes her head. Even if it is her way off this horrible planet, she won't abandon her friends to do it.

"Archangel," Elsa says into her comm, which echoes into Kida's ear a microsecond later. "Can you teleport us to the battle?"

There's no response.

Kida glances around again. The civilians are staring at them like they're not sure whether they should be frightened or in awe. Her lips pull into a mirthless smile at the thought. If they had any idea how much danger they're in, that confusion would be gone and—if they were smart—they would be running as far away from them as possible.

Frigid air with enough of a nip to make Kida wince makes her turn back to Elsa, or where she was. She looks skyward and, sure enough, Elsa is using her powers to propel her . . . somewhere.

"Oh, come on!" Kida calls into the sky. Is she the only leaguer in the batch who stayed without some method of getting airborne? That's just not fair.

She turns and leaps on the tallest building she can see. It doesn't give her much of a vantage point but it does tell her that there's nowhere she can run that'll get her out of a populated area, or at least not fast.

A curse is halfway out her mouth when a small space ship stops dead in front of her. The side door opens, but Kida can't hear it over the sound barrier breaking in the vehicle's wake.

"A friendly face, lovely." The figure, with a broken blue tattoo exploding out from her chin like a mangled spiderweb, offers her hand. "Please allow me to assist you, princess Natarah."

Kida's heart stutters in her chest at the words, spoken in her native tongue, and warmth numbs her limbs. It's princess Ameeil Karliran, one of the few royals in recent history who's been strong enough to bind to a Godly Weapon. Also someone who's already completed their task, so why is she here?

Ameeil wiggles her fingers. "Don't dally. I think I have one of your people on board and they need medical assistance."

"One of us?" Kida murmurs. She hops into the cargo hold without taking the outstretched hand. It doesn't occur to her that she's breaking proper etiquette until Ameeil smiles with a knowingness so bitter it pours lead into Kida's bones.

"You've changed," Ameeil notes, which is a polite way of saying 'I see you got fucked up, too.' She waves her hand and the door behind her closes. "That's an interesting outfit. Doesn't seem suited for war."

Kida glances at herself. She admits that she may have gone more for what looked cool rather than what was necessary for protection, like with her cape. "I was a peacekeeper." She shakes her head. "At least whatever the League passed off as peace. Where's this wounded person you mentioned? Are they—"

Ameeil grabs Kida's wrist in an iron grip. She doesn't look as kind as she did before, her understanding expression replaced by a fervour not often found in royals who've completed their duty. "Where are the Elites?"

A frown pulls at Kida's lips. How does Ameeil know about the League rankings? Even Kida didn't know until she got thrust face first into it. That's just not . . . "Why are you here?"

Ameeil tightens her grip enough to hurt. "Athena. Black Dragon. Arson. Where are they?"

Kida blinks. She doesn't know. "You met them before."

"Kidagakash," Ameeil says in a tone little more than a growl.

Kida rips her arm out of the painful hold and pushes the other royal away. "They're dead!" she shouts. "They've been gone for years. Arson is—well, her body is still functional, but she's not really her anymore." Thanks to me. She can't find it in herself to feel guilty, not when the cause was her speaking the truth. "Now. Where is your passenger?"

Ameeil's hand shakes as she points to one of the doors. "I'm—I'm going to fly us somewhere." She turns and walks towards the cockpit.

For a moment Kida only stares, unsure what this means. Then she shrugs and walks into what looks like a small closest furnished with a metal slab of a bed. A slab currently occupied by a person in broken armour who's bleeding out.

Her eyes widen and she scrambles to Calhoun's side. "Shit, shit." She removes the older woman's helmet to check her pulse. She freezes when she sees how pale Calhoun's complexion is.

She's still breathing. Kida grits her teeth. "Archangel," she says as she connects to her comm. "Reeves is dying, I need you at my location."

"Tracking your magical signature."

Confusion makes Kida splay her hand against the wall, where she feels the low hum of the engine. I see. We're moving. She didn't feel the acceleration, which either means Ameeil is a phenomenal pilot or the speed dampeners on this ship are better than the League's.

Kida pokes her head out of the room and shouts, "What's the max speed limit on this thing?"

"Several KPPH," Ameeil calls back.

That makes sense. Kiloparsecs are necessary to travel between galaxies in any sort of timely fashion, but League ships can reach up to MPPH so why do their speed dampers suck compared to this?

Emma teleports into the cargo hold and lands with a bang that rocks the ship. She cracks her neck and turns to Kida with those solar eyes. Then her sight turns to the wall as if she's capable of seeing straight through it, which . . . yeah, she probably can.

Emma outstretches her arm and snaps her fingers. Her eyes narrow, then she snaps again. "Rho. I need a top-up."

Kida glances back into the tiny room. Calhoun's foot is back, but it's hard to say if she's stopped bleeding with her armour still on.

"What—who are you?"

Kida turns her attention back to the hold. Ameeil has frozen halfway into the cargo bay, her hand on the gravity scorpion chain dart at her hip.

Kida runs between them and throws out her arms to either side of her. "Stop! She's our healer."

Ameeil doesn't move her hand from her heaven weapon. "Healers don't weep magic."

Emma grins around the heaven energy dripping from her mouth in a trail down her chin, but the action feels empty. "There's recognition in your tone. You've seen something like this before, haven't you?" Her gaze flits above Ameeil's head. "I see. May I guess who it was?"

"Athena," Ameeil grits. "Are you her?"

"That's insulting," Emma mutters. "I'm far less temperamental than she was."

When Emma makes no move to introduce herself, Kida waves a hand at her. "She's Archangel."

That makes Ameeil's hand slip off her weapon. "But—how—you don't look a century old."

Emma just shrugs. Right before a golden hand is slamming into her face.

Rho, with half the face of her armour blown off, pins Emma against the wall and hisses out hard, heavy breaths. The armour on her torso is glistening with what Kida can only assume is blood.

When Rho staggers backwards she collapses to one knee clutching her abdomen. "Heal me. Please." Blood bubbles out between her lips.

Emma cries out as the voltage in her eyes crank up to 'lightbulb' status, but she still obeys because Rho stands without issue and spits out a glob of crimson.

Rho turns to Kida and shoves two fingers into her chest. "Collect the others on this ship and fly to Berk. None of you are any good against Hades and there's no other remaining targets for you to focus on. Go after our people and protect them." She turns to Ameeil with hard eyes. "I expect you to comply, Hive Queen." Then she looks somewhere else. "And I expect you not to kill her."

Kida follows Rho's gaze to Calhoun, who looks a half second away from beating someone into an early grave.

Calhoun answers while maintaining an eery eye contact with Kida. "I won't run. Not again."

"Okay." Then Rho teleports away, leaving an awkward silence in her wake.

Ameeil shuffles from foot to foot, her gaze flicking to everything in the room besides the parts with people. She sucks in a sharp breath through her nose and takes a hesitant step forward. "Reeves—"

"Stop." Calhoun finally breaks from staring into Kida's soul to address the other Asgardian. "You were under orders from the Old God back then, weren't you? That's why you didn't stop fighting, even though you wanted to."

Ameeil freezes like a deer in headlights. "You don't doubt his existence."

"They've all met him," Kida says in low tones. She isn't sure why she keeps her voice down, but gets a vague impression that she's balancing on a knife's edge.

Emma, apparently done with the conversation, teleports away.

"I suppose that's my cue." Calhoun moves in an uneven gait—thanks to her one bare foot—towards the door. She pauses in front of the security panel and turns back around. "I don't hate you, Hive Queen. You were in an impossible position, fighting morality and orders you couldn't possibly defy. I think . . . I think you did better than her."

It takes Kida a moment before she realises Calhoun is referring toher. "Now wait a—" She has no time to react before Calhoun is atop her. A scream lodges in her throat when a fist buries itself into her gut and slams her into the wall so hard the back of her skull cracks against it.

"You better do what Rho told you," Calhoun snarls into Kida's ear. "Otherwise I don't really see a purpose for you, if you catch my drift."

Kida gurgles on spit. She can't find the strength to swallow. "You'd kill me?"

Calhoun backs away, letting Kida collapse to the ground like a sack of dead weight. "No, but I wouldn't save you."

Sweat gathers under Kida's collar. Against an enemy like Hades, not helping each other is the same as signing each others' death warrant. She blinks against the dark spots blotting the edges of her vision. "I'll get them out."

Calhoun hits the control panel, opening the door. "You'd better, Zeus." She leaps out of the ship without regard to how fast they're going, how high they are, or even where they are.

Kida swallows bile and finds her way into a sitting position against the wall. "Blizzard, Poseidon," she says into her comm. "Rho's ordered us three to retreat. We're going to come around and collect you."

Ariel scuffs in her ear. "You and what ship?"

"The Asgardian one that just came in. It's owned by an acquaintance of mine."

"Oh. Well, I'm not going. TO GLORY!"

Kida winces away from her earpiece. Ariel truly has lost her marbles if that's what she cares about now. "Okay, so—"

"I'm not going, either," Elsa says. "If we don't stop Hades now, we won't stand a chance against him later. Rho and Archangel are our only option, and I can't risk either of them falling if I have even a slim opportunity of protecting them. Go alone, Zeus, and defend our people."

A headache blossoms in Kida's temples, though she can't be sure if it was the words or the punch that did it. "Are you sure?"

"Go."

She turns to Ameeil with a heavy sigh. "We're the only two leaving. Can you plug in coordinates to Berk?"

Ameeil, who's been staring out the open door like a statue, jolts and snaps her attention to Kida. The muscles in her cheek twitch and her eyes narrow, as if she's trying to figure out what's going on. Then her expression smooths. "You know how to fly this, don't you?"

Kida's eyes widen. No. No. She knows what this fool is planning. "You can't be serious."

"The woman with the yellow arm has outdated tech in her head, I can feel it skipping," Ameeil says, but her sentence trails off as if she believes she's thinking instead of talking. She glances at her hand. "Upgrading is all I'm good for and she's your biggest hitter, isn't she? She needs to get her processor fixed. I can give her that."

"Ameeil, no," Kida all but whines. "They're up against a full hell meta, just like Reaper. You won't—" survive. She grits her teeth. "Our tasks are done. There's no need for us to stay."

"If you believe that . . ." Ameeil grabs her helmet from its place on her lower back and puts it on. "You'll remember this choice when the nightmares come, Princess." She takes a running jump out of the ship.

"Ameeil! No!" Kida screams, but the other Asgardian is already gone. She presses her palms against her eyes and roars into the empty space. "Fuck! Fuck! FUCK!" She stands, turns, and punches the wall over and over until her knuckles split and her own blood spatters over the gray metal.

With one last curse, Kida closes the door and finds her way to the cockpit. She searches the Milky Way in the navigation panel until she finds Berk. She selects it and sets the ship to autopilot.

She clenches her teeth and takes a seat in the chair. This is the moment she's been waiting for all these years, isn't it? The time when her task is over and she can finally just stop.

She closes her eyes. This may have been the moment she's been waiting for, but she's known from the beginning that the chances of being satisfied were slim to none. If she could be then there'd be at least one royal on Asgard that didn't look like they wanted to kill themselves.

That's why Ameeil's here, isn't it? She's looking for a closure that her task didn't give her.

Kida chuckles mirthlessly and wipes off her bloody knuckles below the dried patch on her thigh. Perhaps this is why I'm sticking with the League instead of going home. She's supposed to go home. She needs to report her task complete, learn how to rule in case she becomes monarch for her region in the future, and then have kids. To make more tasks. For more people to suffer at the Old God's hand.

"I'll return eventually," Kida murmurs because she can't hold it off forever. She's pushing it as it is by not going back immediately. Most people on their task get immediately returned to the temple by the Old God himself, for whatever reason. She supposes she should be glad she isn't one of them.

She opens her eyes to look at the displays. She's out of Earth's orbit and the system is prepping to accelerate from lightspeed into PPH.

Kida pinches the bridge of her nose and grits her teeth.

I may not be going home, but I'm still running away.