Lucien ducked under the vicious slash of a metal spike, dodging right to avoid a follow-up stab from Constantine’s left hand as the priest pressed the attack. Both of them were in the strange blurring of reality Lucien had come to call speed mode, their exchanges enacted faster than the human eye could follow, and yet perceived as normal speed to their own metahuman senses. He knew Tiberius could follow the action, if only because of the way the camera in his mask automatically slowed down their movements, though he’d be operating on a natural delay as a consequence.

“You are an abomination!” Constantine spat as he attempted a roundhouse at Lucien’s ribs, which Lucien blocked with his left arm and a discharge of force. Instead he delivered a lightning jab to the Nigerian man’s mouth, snapping his head back and following up with a successful snap-kick to Constantine’s sternum. Small shockwaves accompanied each hit, and the priest was thrown back several feet as Lucien reset his stance.

Malachi’s lessons were paying off. Grasping the Tempo permanently was still outside of his capability, but now and then he could successfully assume that mind-state for a precious couple of moments, greatly enhancing his combat acumen each time. It was evidenced in the look of feral anger in Constantine’s eyes, showing his frustration at failing to land a significant blow. It wasn’t that Lucien hadn’t taken damage; he was bleeding from several lacerations across his body, and even his suit’s tremendous durability had failed against whatever metal Constantine was using for his spiked rods.

Each time they cut him Lucien felt a glimmer of something — a something that deeply unsettled him. Those rods were, for lack of a better word, wrong. His musing was interrupted as Constantine attacked him again, and Lucien stepped right to dodge a powerful thrust at his chest, reflexively slamming his palm into Constantine’s extended arm as his muscle mimicry took over. The older man seemed to falter just slightly, and Lucien moved in for another blow, angling to slam his knee into the shorter man’s kidneys.

He realised his folly a moment too late.

Constantine moved with viper-like speed when he saw Lucien fall for the feint, flipping the rod in his extended left arm smoothly and snapping it backwards at the same time as he pivoted his body. In spite of the younger man desperately trying to twist away, the result was a sudden flash of agony in Lucien’s left arm and shoulder as the spike punched clean through his suit and into his flesh, muscle, and bone. A strangled scream left his throat as his legs pushed downwards to throw him clear of Constantine’s reach, stumbling into a landing that saw him crash backwards into the concrete.

Lucien spasmed as his mind tried to process the level of previously incomprehensible pain radiating from his left arm and shoulder, every twitch a lesson in pain. The Priest had not pursued him as he retreated, instead opting to watch as he desperately reached for the metal embedded in his flesh, attempting and failing to pull it out. The moment he tried, the pain made him cry out and release the rod immediately. Panic and fear laced together into a poisonous mix as he fixed his eyes on Constantine, feeling the gravity of the situation settle in on him.

“Unblooded and untested.” The Cultist said with a blend of mockery and hatred. “A boy pretending to the mantle of a deity. A blasphemer and devil was Olympus, but a deity nonetheless.” He advanced towards Lucien at a leisurely pace, conjuring another rod in his vacant left hand. With two impaled in Eventide, one in Morpheus, and one in Lucien… That made five conjured to date. Was there no end to his ability to form them?

“Your father slew my Master, Holy Amun-Ra, and Holy Quetzalcoatl all in one day. I was there, boy.” Constantine’s eyes narrowed in spiteful focus as he drew closer, his words growing harsh and bitter. “I was there when that Devil of Devils held aloft my Martyred Lord’s lifeless body, the radiance of his existence snuffed out by Olympus’ evil.”

The crowd drew back instinctively as Constantine advanced, and worried murmurs passed among them as they took note of Lucien lying on the asphalt. He could almost feel the panic and terror of the civilians mirroring his own, twisting towards a miasma of despair. The boy in him quailed; the hero in him rallied. He was supposed to be helping them, not scaring them. He groaned and snarled as agony beyond measure lanced through his body, and he forced himself to focus. Not on the still-advancing Constantine, not on the crowd, not on the sounds of Morpheus stirring behind him.

Instead, he focused on pain.

He focused on remembering the night of his manifestation, on remembering the feeling of imminent self-detonation. He wanted to vomit as the familiar traumatic stress reaction gripped him and fought against his mind’s reactive desire to suppress the memory. He fought against the child in his mind that screamed at him to make it all go away, and instead held tight to the hero in his soul that demanded he bear it. He thought about his bones erupting out of his flesh, of the feeling of every piece of his skeletal structure shattering and elongating in a prolonged session of pain so intense it defied classification.

He pulled himself onto his knees.

Lucien closed his eyes as Constantine’s ranting washed over him still, the words and specifics of what he was saying lost to his single-minded focus on the pain. He forced himself to swallow bile and ignore the coppery taste of blood as he reflexively bit down on his lower lip, breathing as steadily as he could while reaching up to the rod in his shoulder. His lips parted in harsh, gasping breaths as he wrapped his gloved fingers around the smooth surface of the metal — and that sense of wrongness struck him again.

He grit his teeth in the same moment as he tapped into his strength and ripped the rod from his flesh in a wordless howl of agony, sensing as much as hearing Constantine halt in surprise. His fingers seemed to almost burn as he held the dark metal, and Lucien slammed it spike-first into the asphalt. His healing, despite the impediment being removed, didn’t kick in; but the vast majority of the pain seemed to have instantly faded. It was odd, almost as if the rod had been amplifying his suffering.

Tentative cheers erupted from the watching crowd behind him, and one enthusiastic voice shouted “Fuck yeah, Kid Olympus!” to a scattering of laughter.

Lucien forced himself to his feet as Constantine tightened his grip on the two rods in his hands.

“Lucien, Selena says that first responders are about two minutes out.” Tiberius interjected over the radio. “She wasn’t sure, but there’s reports that Tempest herself was escorting them to help. You need to get out of there.”

“Can’t.” Lucien said through gritted teeth. “He’ll kill them.”

“Dude, if Tempest catches you…”

“It’s okay.” Lucien responded more calmly than he felt. “It’s the job.”

“… Yeah, okay, that was pretty badass.” Ty said with what Lucien imagined was a strained smile. “Kick his ass, man.”

Lucien smiled around his pain. “You got it, Quarterback.”

His eyes looked for Eventide and found her on the ground a distance away, looking to be in bad shape. She possessed no healing factor or superstrength from what he understood, and it seemed like old fashioned blood-loss had simply drained her of energy. She’d clearly tried, and failed, to remove the rods in her shoulder and thigh. From what his eyes could discern, she needed the attention of paramedics as soon as was possible. A quick glance behind him told him that both Morpheus and the injured civilians — the ones that weren’t already dead, he noted with a flicker of horror — also required rapid assistance.

That meant Constantine could not be allowed to interfere.

“Here goes everything.” He muttered to himself before turning back to the Nigerian cultist. A flicker of understanding entered Constantine’s hateful eyes and he launched himself at Lucien in the same moment as Lucien launched himself at the priest. Constantine attempted to lead with a vicious stab at his ribs, but Lucien willed himself to move faster, managing to grip the older man’s extending wrist and shift around him as they impacted in the air with a colossal boom.

His inertia helped him drag a surprised Constantine around his body, and Lucien smashed him down into the street with the priest’s gripped wrist as a lever. Not holding any punches, the impact actually managed to wind the cultist, who wheezed out a stunned breath as his spine shattered the concrete. Where Lucien might normally have hesitated, the threat Constantine represented spurred him onwards and he slammed his foot into the shorter man’s side, sweeping him from the localised crater to smash into the wall of a nearby club with a sound of breaking concrete and cloud of debris.

An ‘Oooh’ of approval radiated from the crowd, and Lucien was almost tempted to shout at them to leave, but he knew — even with the blatant evidence of the injured or dead spectators — that they wouldn’t. New Avalon’s residents defied all logic in their desire to witness climactic battles, and many of those that had not already fled would be counting on their recordings of the event making them a very healthy amount of money when submitted to news agencies or online blogs.

Lucien narrowed his eyes against the dust from Constantine’s impact, and instinctively embraced his speed mode — a move that saved his life. Constantine erupted from the debris in a blur faster than a normal human could reasonably track, blowing apart the neon-lit cloud of dust and attacking with a speed beyond anything he’d shown earlier. Lucien managed to shift at the last moment, turning a fatal strike to his sternum into a heart-stopping penetration of his ribs instead. Something told him that, by sheer luck, Constantine had missed anything vital; but he had still managed to put another rod clean through his body.

Lucien could feel the front-to-back impalement as he reacted reflexively, blocking the follow-up attack from Constantine’s left hand with his right, and delivering a jumping spin-kick to the older man’s guarded ribs with his left leg. It blew Constantine away from him, sending the priest skidding and tumbling across the concrete as it ripped itself up from the force of his motion, lending credence to exactly how strong Lucien had become under Malachi’s merciless tutelage.

The moment his feet hit the ground Lucien fell to his knees, vomiting up a small stream of blood and bile as his body reacted to the traumatic feeling of the rod impaled in his body. He could almost feel his being spasming, feel the way it wanted desperately to reject the evil thing stuck into his flesh. Unlike his shoulder, however, he knew that pulling the new rod out could lead to a far worse level of bleeding. With his healing seemingly nullified around the rod’s impact, that wasn’t a risk he could afford to take.

Instead Lucien pulled himself to his feet, putting up his guard as Constantine recovered himself from the blow. A flicker of satisfaction echoed through Lucien as he saw a permanent cut on the other man’s lip, telling him that Constantine’s healing factor had been overloaded. It must have been far, far lower rated than his strength, speed, and ferrokinetic abilities. That made sense; few if any metahumans had more than three powers at equal rating. Constantine, it struck him, was probably as close as he’d come to fighting a member of the Golden League or Supremacy Corps to date.

The thought almost made him laugh hysterically.

A sudden flush of heat and painful itching feeling managed to surprise him, and the sudden loss of concentration cost him. Constantine came in with a full-bodied punch that smashed into Lucien’s mouth, hurling him off his feet and smashing him into the concrete in much the same way as his own kick had done to the priest. The difference, however, was the rod sticking out of his front and back.

Lucien let loose a howl of agony as he came to a rolling halt near the crowd, positioned almost parallel to Morpheus. The registered superhero turned to him as Lucien looked over, and he noted a bitter smile on the Asian man’s features. “Sorry.” Morpheus rasped out as Lucien tried to fight back the blackness creeping at the edge of his vision from the effect of the rod being rattled and shifted by his impacts. “I got cocky. Don’t die for me, Aquila.”

Lucien felt himself shudder and retch again and threw up another — but smaller — puddle of blood and bile. “Would you…” He gasped out, spitting to clear his mouth reflexively. “Would you do any different?”

Morpheus wheezed in what Lucien thought might have been a laugh. “Fair enough.” He coughed as he shifted, his limbs no longer bent as wrongly as before, though clearly still not recovered to a capability for combat. “You… You really the son of Olympus?”

Lucien considered lying but realised there was no point. His life’s strange journey could end any moment. “Yes.” He said, surprised at how calm his own voice sounded.

“Can I ask… your name?” Morpheus coughed weakly. “I’m Sung-hyun Park.”

Lucien hesitated, but once again realised it was needless. “Lucien Pendragon.”

“That’s a… heroic name…” Morpheus said with a wheeze. “Dramatic, too.”

“Thanks.” Lucien replied. “My father named me.”

Morpheus smiled at him, and then a shadow fell over them both.

Constantine stood above Lucien with a look of loathing, his bleeding lip giving him a wild and maddened appearance. He held another rod in his left hand, and Lucien was certain it would be plunging down towards him any moment. He wanted to fight, but he felt as if his energy had been leached from him. The rod in his abdomen was… weakening him, somehow. It was as if he just couldn’t access the strength he knew was there. Like there was a kind of block around his powers, one that had been slowly growing.

“I see the Perdition field is in effect.” Constantine said with a cold pseudo-calm that unnerved Lucien. The Priest was psychopathic. “You should both feel honoured.” He continued in the same tone, looking between Lucien and Morpheus. “The metal of these rods is a rare and unique thing, blessed by Messiah himself. It is anathema to those not granted His benediction.” The priest seemed to come to a decision and stepped away from Lucien, advancing closer to Morpheus. “You fought well, Devil-spawn, to defend this wayward child. I had thought to bring him to Revelation, but seeing the desperation with which you defended him… perhaps he will serve as a lesson in inevitability, before I purify you in turn.”

Lucien’s eyes widened as Constantine’s meaning sank in, and he felt a surge of desperation rise up in his body, granting him a moment of strength. “No!” He spat, launching himself at Constantine from the ground in an attempt to punch the Priest away and protect Morpheus. Instead the veteran warrior moved like a serpent, dodging around the sloppy attack and grabbing Lucien by the throat to slam him face-first into the asphalt near Morpheus.

Lucien felt unconsciousness nearly claim him as the impact sent lances of pain through his entire body, and he spasmed at the agony of both the blow itself and at his abysmal failure. With desperation he turned his head, trying to focus his gaze on Constantine. What little energy he could muster welled up in his eyes, and he discharged his ocular lasers at the Nigerian man — only for them to fail to penetrate his adornments. Lucien’s attack cut out as he felt a ripple of shock, and then he swore. “Astral Weave.”

“Well-deduced.” Constantine allowed. “The harlot does her job well. I saw no reason to scorn her work.” He bent down over Morpheus as he spoke, resting his forearms on his thighs as he did. “Tell me, child…” Constantine spoke almost like a father to a son then, the suddenness of his attitude shifts disturbing Lucien further. It was sickening. “…are you ready to repent your misdeeds, and embrace the righteous cause of Messiah’s chosen?”

Morpheus glared up at Constantine, and then shifted his brown eyes to look at Lucien. It felt as if Morpheus were searching his soul as the Asian man stared at him, before something put a little, sad smile on his lips. Morpheus turned back to the impassive Constantine afterwards, and spoke as forcefully and as powerfully as his decimated body would allow: “Fuck you.”

“Very well.” The Priest intoned with something so close to genuine sadness, Lucien might have believed it if not for his enhanced hearing. Though heavily overshadowed, he heard the glee in Constantine’s voice, and the reality of his sadism sickened Lucien further. “Then may Messiah have mercy on your traitorous soul, when you pass before Him for judgement. To alleviate your sins, I shall grant you the mercy of a Repentant Baptism.”

Morpheus continued to glare at Constantine.

Lucien’s eyes widened in horrified realisation.

The rod slammed home through the black-coated hero’s left knee a moment later, and Morpheus screamed in pain, unable to move his leg properly from the rod impaling him to the asphalt. The crowd erupted into a panic, and more people decided that was the time for them to flee, knocked out of their stunned fixation on the horrifying scene by the cries coming from Morpheus’ throat.

“I grant you benediction through Agony.” Constantine continued undeterred. “That you may find lasting peace in the pain you suffer now.”

“Stop!” Lucien shouted hoarsely, before a sickening crunch of bone and squelch of flesh announced another rod driven into Morpheus’ right arm, through his elbow. Lucien felt himself physically recoiling at the horrifying sound, tears filling his eyes at the torture that the other hero was being subjected to. “Please!” He begged as his voice cracked. “Please stop!”

“I offer you the knowledge of your potential salvation in the arms of Messiah, when He greets you and judges your Worth for His Eternal Kingdom.” Another rod formed rapidly in Constantine’s right hand, and he plunged it into Morpheus’ right knee in accompaniment to the left, pulling a strangled, fading whimper of pain from the wiry man.

Lucien’s heart was thunderous in his chest, and he struggled for any semblance of power to help the other metahuman, raging against his own weakness even as sobs left him. “I’m sorry!” He cried out. “Please stop hurting him, I’m sorry! Oh god, p-please. I’m so sorry!” He could taste blood and gravel in his mouth, mixing together as he wept into the asphalt and pleaded with Constantine. “Hurt me! HURT ME INSTEAD!”

Constantine paused and turned to Lucien, a cold smile on his features. “But my dear child...” He said in falsely paternal tones, seemingly foregoing the Devil-spawn rhetoric in the heat of the moment. “...I am hurting you.”

Constantine drove a fourth spike into Morpheus’ left elbow without breaking eye contact with Lucien, and the satisfaction the Priest felt from the sickening sound of shattering bone and tortured flesh shook Lucien to his soul.

Evil. He was looking at true, unbridled evil.

Lucien dragged his gaze away from Constantine and back to Morpheus, staring at the Asian man through the tears that blurred his vision. “I’m sorry.” He choked out, ignoring Constantine as he recited another macabre, demented verse. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t strong enough.”

Morpheus’ eyes shifted to him, blood running from his mouth. He spasmed as a fifth rod slammed into his right shoulder. His lips moved, though no sound came out. Lucien blinked through his tears, desperate to understand what he was trying to say. Morpheus waited for a few precious seconds as Lucien cleared his vision, waited as Constantine lifted what must surely have been the final rod.

Lucien finally understood Morpheus’ words: Save Eventide.

The Hero smiled at him.

Constantine slammed the rod into Sung-hyun’s sternum.

Lucien passed out from shock.