Time seemed to freeze for Brick, watching as the kanabo came swinging down toward his head, his eyes seeing it in slow motion.
This was it.
If Brick didn't move now it was all over. Everything he had worked towards.
The blood, sweat and anguish.
Everything.
Brick thought back to his fight against Vali. How Damon had saved him time and time again.
How his own weakness had allowed this to happen.
No... I refuse... I won't let it end like this!
Brick's eyes snapped open, and he dropped beneath the descending kanabo with a sudden burst of speed. He felt it scorch the air above his scalp, but pushed forward as he drove his shoulder into Ren's stomach.
The tackle was ugly. Desperate. The kind of move a street brawler would use when everything else had failed.
But it worked...
They slammed into the wall together, Ren's back hitting it first.
Brick burst through it with Ren's body as a battering ram, marble exploding outward in a shower of white debris. They crashed into an adjoining gallery — a wider space with vaulted ceilings and columns carved with the relief of ancient heroes. Statues toppled. A stone Perseus smashed into the floor and shattered at their feet. A marble Athena teetered, fell, and broke across Ren's back as both demigods rolled across the rubble-strewn floor.
Brick scrambled up first. His knee buckled, and he almost went down, but his hand found a cracked column which held. Rain poured through the hole they'd made, Ren's storm following them into the gallery, turning the broken marble into a landscape of puddles and rubble steadily.
His hammer was in the other room. Twenty feet and a demolished wall away now.
Ren rose from the rubble laughing.
Not a chuckle. Wild, full-throated laughter that rang through the gallery and competed with his own thunder. Blood ran from a gash across his forehead where the statue had caught him, but his grip on the kanabo hadn't loosened by a fraction.
"Now that's what I'm talking about!" Ren said, spitting blood. He stalked forward through the rain, lightning flickering across his shoulders. "But you're still not showing me everything."
Brick's hand tightened on the column behind him. The marble cracked under his grip.
This is what it felt like, a bitter voice said inside his head. Same as Vali. The same humiliation. You can't—
No...
The thought died before it finished forming.
Because something inside him refused to break.
The ember behind Brick's sternum started to glow brighter.
Not all at once. Not the desperate, flailing eruption he'd tried against Vali in the Norse zone, wrung from depleted reserves and snuffed out before it could catch. This was different. This was fed — not by any realm, but by the pain itself. The knee. The bruises. The humiliation of being disarmed. Every wound was a coal dropped into the furnace, and his father's gift took those coals and burned.
The fire grew the way fires were supposed to grow — steadily, hungrily, with the patient certainty of a monster that would not be extinguished.
His skin began to glow. A dull crimson pulse, faint at first, matching his heartbeat. His eyes slowly turned white, becoming more focused and dangerous.
The pain in his knee didn't disappear. The cuts didn't close. The bruises didn't fade.
They were becoming fuel. Feeding his rage and his lust for battle.
Every wound became a coal in the furnace. Every ache became an ember toward the raging inferno that he would become.
The more you hurt me, the stronger I become... Brick said to himself.
"You want everything?"
His voice had dropped an octave. The crimson light spread across his shoulders, down his arms, turning the rain on his skin to steam. Where his feet touched the flooded marble, the water started to hiss.
Ren looked at him, confused, not sure what was happening.
"Alright then. It's time." Brick said in a low grumble.
"What are you going on about!" Ren started, only to have his words cut off.
Brick suddenly ripped the column out of the floor with his brute strength.
Six feet of solid Greek marble, carved with the deeds of Heracles — he tore it free with one hand and swung it like a bat.
Ren's eyes went wide as he tried to react.
The column caught his kanabo, using it to block the incoming attack. The impact shattered the marble into a thousand pieces. Stone shrapnel peppered both of them, and the shockwave blew the rain sideways.
Ren staggered backwards.
For the first time in the fight, the son of Susanoo took a step back that he hadn't chosen.
Brick didn't let him recover. He surged forward — still limping, still bleeding, the crimson glow brightening with every step.
Brick was without his warhammer, but in this state, his body was his weapon, throwing a powerful punch with blinding speed.
His fist connected with Ren's jaw, and the crack echoed through the gallery like a gunshot. Ren's head snapped sideways, and his feet left the ground.
The Japanese demigod flew through the air before he hit a pillar, cracking it, and slid down to one knee.
Ren shook his head, regaining his senses before he spat a tooth out onto the ground, looking up toward Brick.
And grinned.
"There you are," Ren breathed, blood pouring from his split lip. "That's the one I was looking for!"
He exploded upward. Attacking with his kanabo as it came around in a devastating horizontal arc toward Brick's head.
However, to his surprise, Brick reached out a hand and caught the tip of the kanabo, stopping Ren's attack in its tracks.
Bare-handed. His crimson fingers wrapped around the iron studs; lightning detonated between them — arcing through his palm, up his arm, across his chest. The pain was enormous, white-hot, and it fed the rage like gasoline thrown on a house fire. His skin blazed brighter. The steam pouring off his body thickened into a crimson haze as he let out a roar of pure rage.
Ren's grin faltered.
Not fear. Something deeper...
Recognition...
He was looking at someone who got stronger the more you hurt them, and he had just given him everything he needed.
Brick wrenched the kanabo sideways in his anger, but Ren held on, refusing to let go of his weapon. The force was so great that the motion swung the Japanese demi-god off his feet. Brick spun him once, then twice like a hammer thrower winding up before he threw him through the air.
Ren flew through the air, unable to control his fall due to the force before he hit a statue of Ares himself.
Something that didn't go unnoticed by the gods watching from above...
The marble war god exploded into rubble as Ren tumbled through the debris, hitting the ground hard as he rolled three times across the flooded ground, forcing himself up onto all fours, skidding to a halt.
Ren was clearly done playing around now, after seeing what he had unleashed in Brick with rage. It was time for him to grow serious.
Lightning erupted from his body — defensive, instinctive, a corona of electricity that turned the rain into steam and the puddles into sparking mirrors. His storm-cloud tattoo had spread to cover his entire torso now, a living thunderhead inked into skin, every line pulsing with raw energy.
"Alright," Ren said. Blood covered half his face. His ribs were broken now — at least two, maybe three, where he favoured his left side, where Brick's hammer had caught him earlier.
"Alright... Now we have a fight! Let's see who breaks first!"
Ren planted his feet, raising his kanabo above his head with both hands. The storm overhead intensified beyond anything Brick had felt — wind screaming, rain driving harder, lightning forking across the sky in continuous sheets. The storm-cloud tattoo across his body blazed to life.
The lightning ceased its wild dance and streamed into the weapon, each bolt sinking into the iron studs until the kanabo blazed white-gold, shining too brightly to behold.
Everything he had. Every shred of storm power, every drop of divine inheritance from the god of tempests, funnelled into a single strike.
Then the fierce wind died, and the rain froze in midair.
For one horrible, breathless second, the world went silent.
Brick watched it gather. Watched the most powerful strike the son of Susanoo could muster build itself above his head like a star being born. He felt the battle rage inside him roar in answer — a crimson tide rising past his chest, past his throat, past his eyes, until his entire body burned like a signal fire lit on the peak of a mountain.
His knee was agony. His ribs were cracked. The burns on his hand where he'd caught the kanabo wept fluid. Lightning had scorched patterns across his skin that would most likely scar.
Yet, none of it mattered.
All of it was fuel.
Suddenly, a strange glint caught his eye, spotting his war hammer but five meters away. He hadn't even registered crossing back through the shattered wall; he didn't care as he dived to grasp it.
The weapon was in his hand now, the iron-bound head pulsing with a deep, molten crimson that matched his eyes — his own rage bleeding into the special metal, the war hammer answering its master's fury with its own.
He planted his feet in the flooded stone. Braced his legs. Raising the war hammer to meet whatever was to come.
Not defence. Not survival.
His answer. His own power.
In the fraction of a second before impact, Brick felt it — the full weight of his father's gift, not as rage but as certainty. The absolute, unshakeable knowledge that he could take whatever the world threw at him and remain standing. Not because he was the strongest. Not because he was the fastest.
Because he was too stubborn, too angry, too alive to fall.
"Let's see if you can survive this!" Ren yelled, letting out all of his fury and rage into his attack, bringing the kanabo down with everything he had.
Brick swung up to meet the attack head-on, not skying away from the very real power he faced.
The sound was like a mountain being split in half.
Not thunder. Not lightning.
Something deeper.
The shockwave blew outward from the point of impact in a visible ring — compressed air and shattered stone, cratering the gallery floor in a spider-web pattern that spread thirty feet in every direction. Columns cracked from the force of the strike. The vaulted ceiling split. Chunks of carved marble fell like hailstones, smashing into the flooded ground around them.
Brick felt it in every bone. Felt his feet driven two inches into the stone. Felt the handle of his hammer bow under the strain, the metal screaming, screaming, on the edge of breaking. Felt the lightning arc through his entire body — every nerve alight with white-hot agony.
He held.
The agony fed his rage.
The rage fed his strength.
And somehow it held strong.
For three eternal seconds, they stood locked. Ren pushing down with everything the storm had given him. Brick pushing up with everything the pain had forged into strength. Crimson light warred with electric white, the two energies grinding against each other in the space between their weapons, and the marble floor continued to splinter outward in slow, groaning cracks.
Above the labyrinth, each pantheon of gods watched the battle unfold between Brick and Ren.
Susanoo stood frozen mid-breath, his grin locked in place but his eyes wide for the first time since the fight began. Lightning still crackled through his beard, but it had gone quiet. His concentration masked his face.
His son had poured everything into that strike. Every volt of lightning, every ounce of divine inheritance, channelled into a single blow.
And the Greek boy had met it head-on.
Not dodged. Not deflected. Met it head-on and held strong.
Susanoo's grin slowly reformed — but it was different now. Wider. Hungrier. The grin of a storm god who had just watched things get much more interesting.
"Well," he breathed. "Well, well, well..."
Hachiman glanced sideways at his brother deity. "You seem less confident than you were a moment ago."
Susanoo barked a laugh. "Confident? I'm delighted." He slammed both fists on the railing, cracking the polished wood. "Where has this boy been hiding? My son hit him with everything, and he's still standing there with that stupid grin on his face!"
Across the divide, on Olympus, Ares had risen from his throne.
He hadn't noticed he'd done it. The god of war stood with his scarred hands hanging at his sides, his dark eyes burning as he watched his son — broken knee, cracked ribs, scorched skin, lightning scarred through his body. Yet he held the line against everything the storm had to offer.
Not because he was stronger.
Because he refused to surrender.
Something one could not be taught.
Ares understood that. Understood it in a way no other god in that hall could, because that was his gift. Not strength. Not speed. Not strategy. The refusal to break. The ability to turn agony into fuel and keep fighting long after the spirit should have surrendered.
And there it was, burning crimson in his son's chest, radiating through the viewing pool like a war banner planted on a hill.
"Interesting," Zeus murmured, stroking his beard. "The boy endures."
"He does more than endure," Poseidon said quietly, his sea-green eyes fixed on the crimson light warring against the white-gold lightning. "He's turning the punishment into power. Every blow makes him stronger."
Hermes let out a low whistle. "Note to self — never hit that one twice."
Athena studied the deadlock with narrowed eyes, her mind already dissecting the mechanics. "He cannot sustain this indefinitely. The mortal body has limits, regardless of divine gifts."
"You're wrong." Ares's voice cut through the analysis like a blade.
The other gods looked at him. The god of war didn't elaborate. Didn't explain. He simply watched his son hold against the storm, and for one brief, unguarded moment, something passed across his scarred face that none of them had seen in a long time.
Pride. Not the performative kind he wore like armour. The real thing — raw, fierce, and almost painful in its intensity.
Then it was gone, buried beneath the familiar scowl. But it had been there. And several gods had seen it.
Across the chamber, Susanoo caught Ares's eye through the shimmer between realms. The storm god's wild grin had settled into something resembling respect — grudging, hard-won, and genuine.
He said nothing. Simply dipped his chin a fraction of an inch, and Ares returned it.
Below them, crimson light and white-gold lightning continued to grind against each other in the space between two weapons, and the marble floor kept splintering outward in slow, groaning cracks.
Suddenly, both weapons shattered against one another, neither being able to withstand the onslaught of power any longer.
Bricks war hammer's head fractured, a chunk spinning away like shrapnel. Ren's kanabo's iron studs burst free, scattering across the gallery in a hail of sparking metal. What remained of both weapons flew from their wielders' hands and embedded in the cracked walls on opposite sides of the room, being rendered completely useless.
The storm around them had faded now.
The last of the rain hit the floor all at once — a final curtain of water crashing down.
The chamber plunged into near-darkness, lit only by the fading crimson blaze behind Brick's eyes and the last flickers of electricity dying on Ren's skin.
Both of them stood in the wreckage. Arms still raised. Empty-handed.
Ren dropped the shattered remains of his kanabo, tossing it aside.
The pieces hit the flooded stone with a series of dull, final splashes.
Brick let the broken hammer slip from his fingers, allowing It to clatterer away into the dark.
Neither looked at their weapons.
Neither looked away from each other, their eyes fixed on their opponent.
Blood dripped from their knuckles.
The labyrinth held its breath.
Brick's battle rage was still burning, his body a hulking red hot mess. His muscles were bulged, his veins expanded. Steam continued to flow off his body, the heat growing hotter the more his rage built. However, he could feel it now. He was reaching his limit, knowing he didn't have long left until he wouldn't be able to sustain this form.
Ren's storm-cloud tattoo had retreated to a small, spent swirl on his left shoulder, barely twitching. Both his eyes were swelling. Three ribs were broken. His right forearm hung at a bad angle.
Two fighters, stripped of weapons and their powers fading, standing in the rubble of a gallery they'd demolished in whatever section of this labyrinth they were in now.
Ren smiled.
"You surprise me... Here I thought you didn't have it in you." Ren said.
Brick smiled back.
"I have more than enough to finish you off."
Ren's smile turned into a frown.
"Lets see you try!"
Both of them lunged, rushing forward with nothing other than their fists.
This was a dog fight now.
Ren threw the first punch — a right cross that connected with Brick's jaw like a freight train, snapping his head sideways, spraying blood from a split lip across the flooded marble.
He answered back with his own punch.
His right hook caught Ren square in the temple — the damaged hand, the burned hand, lightning scars tearing open against Ren's cheekbone — the pain lanced up his arm and fed the embers in his chest, the next punch coming harder.
Ren rocked sideways, catching himself before he drove his knee into Brick's gut with enough force to fold a car door. Brick's breath exploded out of him. He doubled over — and headbutted Ren on the way down, clean in the nose.
Bone met bone, blood spraying from Ren's nose and both of them staggered back.
But, neither fell.
Ren suddenly pushed forward, a mad smile on his face as he hooked Brick's arm into a shoulder lock, driving him face-first into the flooded stone. Water exploding upward in a blinding sheet.
Brick came up blind.
Swinging his arms out as he broke free, trying to land a hit where he could.
His fist connected with something — jaw, cheek, he couldn't tell.
But Ren hit back.
Followed by Brick hitting back again.
Neither blocked. They were past defence now, past strategy, past anything that could be called technique. Every strike was a promise: if I fall, you're falling first.
They crashed through the gallery like wrecking balls. Ren slammed Brick into a surviving column, and the marble cracked against his spine. Brick grabbed Ren by the throat and threw him through the remains of a stone hero whose name neither of them would ever know. Ren came up from the rubble with a chunk of masonry in his broken hand and swung it into Brick's ribs.
The pain hit like a bomb — white, blinding, the kind of agony that short-circuits thought. For one terrible second, Brick couldn't breathe. Couldn't see. The crimson glow in his skin flickering as he struggled to maintain his rage.
I can't give up... Brick bit through the pain of his already broken ribs.
Letting his anger spill out once again, pushing everything he had, using all of the mind numbing pain to unleash everything he had left, his rage roaring back to life.
The broken ribs pumped heat into his bloodstream, and his father's gift took that heat and transmuted it into something unstoppable. His fist came around in a devastating overhand right that split the skin above Ren's eye and sent the Japanese demigod skidding backward through ankle-deep water, heels carving furrows in the broken floor as he stumbled.
Ren hit the far wall, his back bouncing off it from the force, leaving cracks, somehow keeping upright.
Blood sheeted down his face. One eye was swollen shut. His broken forearm hung useless at his side. He had nothing left — no storm, no lightning, no strength that hadn't already been spent.
Spitting a small pool of blood onto the ground he raised his one good fist, refusing to surrender.
"Is that all you've got..."
Brick limped forward. His knee had given up pretending it worked. Every breath was like broken glass scraping the inside of his chest. His hand was a ruin and his vision swam.
The crimson glow that covered his body was the only thing keeping him upright — Ares' gift, the promise that a son of war could always take one more hit, throw one more punch, stand one more second.
Embodying war itself...
This was it. They both knew it.
One final attack, everything that they had left into this last attempt at victory.
They both swung at the same time, putting everything they had into it. Unleashing the last of their power.
Brick's fist hit Ren's jaw.
Ren's fist hit Brick's jaw, both at the same time.
The impact rang through both of them like a bell being struck — a single, clear note that carried through the ruined gallery and echoed off the cracked walls and faded into the sound of dripping water.
Both of them stood there still, each pushing their fist into the others face, with neither of them budging.
Bloodied.
Battered.
Spent... Neither of them wanted to conceal defeat.
The gods above held their breath as they watched, with some even placing bets on who would fall first.
Both Ares and Susanoo watching with intense focus. Willing their sons to keep standing to the last.
However, Brick's legs gave out first, his knee not being able to support his weight anymore as he dropped to his knees in the ankle-deep water, chest heaving, his vision fading.
His body had shrunk back down to its normal size, the huge red hulking muscles shrinking back down to normal, his skin returning to its normal colour.
Blood covered his face, ran from his lip, his knuckles were split raw. His ribs shrieked. His knee had stopped sending pain signals entirely it was so badly damaged. His arms felt as if they belonged to someone else.
The crimson glow faded to a dull pulse, then to embers, then to nothing. The battle rage drained out of him like water from a cracked vessel, leaving behind exhaustion so profound it felt like his bones would shatter.
"Ha... Looks like, I wi—" Ren started to say.
However, before he could finish his words he dropped backward, Hitting the ground a half-second later, his back slapping onto the ground, the water around his feet splashing against his weight. His dark blue hair was plastered to his face. The storm-cloud tattoo had retreated to a faint, grey wisp on his left shoulder.
Brick could only just about make it out, surprised to say the least as he watched Ren fall over.
Then silence.
Water dripping from the cracked ceiling.
The distant groan of the shifting walls in the labyrinth.
Brick raised his head. Through the blood and the swelling, through the haze of exhaustion and agony, he looked at the son of Susanoo lying across from him in the ruins.
Shocked.
He started laughing.
It hurt — every breath hurt — but he couldn't stop. It bubbled up from somewhere beneath the cracked ribs and the torn muscles, it came out raw, rough and real. Not mocking. Not bitter. The pure, helpless laughter of a man who had found exactly what he'd been looking for.
A real challenge that tested his power to the absolute limit.
Here. On level ground. With every wound feeding the fire and his father's gift burning at full blaze, he had fought the son of the Japanese storm god to a dead standstill, and come out on top.
Ren lifted his head. Blood covered half his face. One eye was gone — swollen shut, purple-black, sealed like a window nailed against a hurricane. He looked at Brick laughing and for a moment as even the effort of lifting his head was too much.
Then the grin came back. Slow, and wide, then a laugh — wild, rough, punched out of battered lungs, mixing with Brick's until the ruined gallery echoed with the sound of two warriors who'd beaten each other half to death and found joy in it.
"You..." Ren managed between gasping breaths, "you hit pretty fucking hard, gaijin..."
"Yeah?" Brick spat a mouthful of blood into the water. "You hit pretty hard yourself... Like a hurricane."
"That's because I am one." Ren then said, a cocky grin still on his swollen face.
Brick's grin widened despite the split lip. "So I guess we're even."
Ren looked at him for a long moment. Something passed behind his one open eye — not the wild, hungry thing that had driven the fight, but something quieter. Respect, maybe. Or recognition. The understanding that he had found someone who would not break no matter how hard the storm blew.
Ren slowly sat up, forcing his broken body to move.
Then he extended one hand across the cratered, flooded, shattered gap between them. Not a fist. An open palm.
Brick smiled and took it.
The handshake was brief and hard, causing them both to wince — broken knuckles grinding against burned knuckles. But it meant something. Both of them knew it.
"In the later rounds," Ren said, pulling himself to his feet with a groan that suggested standing was the hardest thing he'd done all day.
"I want a rematch."
Brick dragged himself upright using a cracked section of wall. Every muscle in his body registered a formal complaint.
"Any time," Brick said.
Ren studied the wreckage around them — the cratered floor, the demolished wall, the shattered statues and cracked columns, the water draining through fissures into the labyrinth below — and shook his head.
"That was a good fight," Ren said.
The words were simple. They carried the weight of a hymn.
They both looked up through the cracked ceiling at the hourglass above.
The sand was almost gone. A thin golden stream, barely a thread, trickling through the narrow waist of the glass. Minutes left at most.
Suddenly from further down the corridor — through the hole they'd punched in the gallery wall — Brick heard the clash of metal on metal. The high, clean ring of Thalios's bronze sword meeting divine steel. Lightning crackled, illuminating the far end of the passage in strobing blue-white flashes, and through the flickering light, Brick caught glimpses of two figures moving with lethal precision.
Thalios and Akira had already begun, most likely fighting the entire time they had been.
Brick turned toward the sound, every step a negotiation with pain. His knee had swollen to twice its normal size. His ribs ground against each other with every breath. The burns on his hand had blistered and split. Walking was an act of pure, stubborn will — the battle rage's last gift, the inability to stay down even when staying down was the smart play.
Ren fell into step beside him. Not close enough for companionship, not far enough for distance. Two beaten, bloodied fighters walking in the same direction because the clock was dying and the finish line was the same for everyone.
"Your friend," Ren said after a moment, nodding toward the distant flashes of lightning. "Son of Zeus... He's an angry one."
"He's always angry," Brick muttered with a sigh.
"No." Ren shook his head, sending droplets of blood and rainwater scattering. "Not anger... Hunger... Like a storm that hasn't broken yet." He paused. "The son of Hachiman will test him. A fight I would like to watch."
Brick said nothing as the flashes coming from their fight got more intense.
"Me too..."