The crane went over first, a slow-motion collapse that gave the crew just enough time to get clear before four hundred tonnes of steel folded into the half-built tower like it was made of drinking straws. Nobody had seen him arrive. One moment the Halvorsen Yards site was a normal Tuesday of rebar and shouted instructions, and the next a man built like a shipping container was walking through a chain-link fence without slowing down, dragging it off its posts on his shoulder like a shrug.
"Brutus Kane," he said, to no one in particular, loud enough to carry over the alarms. He said it the way other men said their own names when they wanted a bar to go quiet. "Somebody call the flying man. Tell him Titan's asking for him personally."
He put his fist through a support column to make the point. The building above it groaned, tilted four degrees, and stayed up out of what felt more like spite than engineering.
Alex heard it on three channels at once — Elena's alert, the police band, and the low animal roar of a crowd already gathering at the safe perimeter with their phones up. He was airborne before the third one finished registering, the city sliding past beneath him in the particular blur that still, some mornings, felt like the best thing that had ever happened to him.
He landed in the cleared ring the workers had made without meaning to, boots cracking the concrete, and took a second to actually look at the thing waiting for him. Two and a half metres of him, maybe more, skin the dull grey of poured stone, veins running under it like seams of ore. Not human anymore in any way that showed. Whatever the meteor had done to Brutus Kane, it had done it to the outside as much as the in.
"There he is." Titan rolled his shoulders, a sound like gravel in a cement mixer. "I've been asking around. You're supposed to be the one thing out here that doesn't go down."
"You could've just asked me to coffee." Alex kept his voice easy, aware of the phones, aware — pleasantly, distantly aware — of how this was going to look on every feed in the city by lunch. "Would've saved the crane."
"Wasn't really asking." Titan planted his feet, and the concrete starred under them. "I've spent two years being the strongest thing in every room I walk into. Getting old. Wanted to see how it feels to lose for a change. Or win." A grin split the grey face, too many teeth for it to be friendly. "Either one'll do."
The first punch came without a wind-up, which was its own kind of warning — nobody who'd needed to build up power the normal way threw a hand that fast. Alex caught it on a forearm out of pure reflex and felt something he hadn't felt from a person in longer than he could easily remember: an actual jolt, travelling clean up through the shoulder, the kind of hit that would have needed real effort to shrug off a year ago.
He grinned back. He couldn't help it.
The return punch put Titan through the fence he'd already wrecked and into a stack of concrete pipe on the far side of the yard, a sound like a quarry blast rolling out across three blocks. For one clean second Alex let himself enjoy it, the crowd's noise spiking behind the barricades, somebody already narrating for a livestream in a voice pitched somewhere between terror and delight. Six months ago he'd have been checking on the bystanders before the dust settled. Today some smaller, louder part of him wanted to see if the next hit could go further.
Titan came up out of the pipe stack laughing, an ugly, delighted sound. "There it is," he said, spitting concrete dust. "Nobody's ever made me feel that before."
"Give me a minute," Alex said. "I'm just getting started."
What followed wasn't a fight so much as a slow demolition of a city block, conducted by two men who had both, for entirely different reasons, stopped being afraid of getting hurt. Titan threw a length of guardrail like a javelin; Alex caught it out of the air and used it to put him through a half-finished wall. Titan answered by tearing a shipping container off its stack and swinging it two-handed, and Alex took the hit rather than dodge it, absorbing the impact through gritted teeth and a grin that had nothing careful left in it, because dodging wasn't the point today. Winning clean wasn't the point. Being tested was the point, and it had been so long since anything had actually tested him that some old, honest part of Alex Mercer was having the best afternoon of his life underneath all that concrete dust.
They went up, briefly — Alex hauling Titan a hundred feet into the air by the collar of his ruined jacket just to see if he'd panic. He didn't. He laughed the whole way down and put a crater in the yard's loading dock on landing, then stood up out of it rolling his neck like the fall had been a stretch he needed.
"You don't feel that, do you," Alex said, half question, half something closer to relief. "None of it."
"Feel it. Don't mind it." Titan cracked his knuckles, each one like a door slamming somewhere down a long hallway. "Difference between us and everyone else in this city, flying man. They break. We don't. Question's just who breaks slower."
From the barricade line, Torres watched through a borrowed pair of binoculars, jaw tight in a way that had nothing to do with the property damage. He'd seen Alex fight plenty of times — clean, fast, economical, a man who hit exactly as hard as the situation needed and stopped the instant it didn't. This wasn't that. This was a man laughing while a building came down around him, and enjoying the sound of it more than the win.
"Someone should call him off," Torres said, mostly to himself, keying the comm anyway. "Vanguard to Superman, you want to wrap this up before the whole yard's in the river?"
The answer came back half a beat late, breathless, delighted. "Wrapping it up," Alex said, and put Titan through the last standing wall hard enough that the word wrap felt, to Torres's ear, like the wrong one entirely.
The end of it came down to something simpler than either of them wanted to admit: stamina. Titan hit like a landslide and took punishment like bedrock, but a landslide only had so much mountain behind it, and Alex, whatever he was running on, hadn't found the bottom of the tank yet. Round after round, the gap between them stopped being about who could hit harder and started being about who was still standing to throw the next one. Titan's punches came slower by the twentieth minute. Alex's didn't.
He caught the last swing on an open palm, held it there — Titan straining against a grip that simply wasn't giving, sweat and dust cutting tracks down a grey face that had stopped grinning somewhere in the last five minutes — and didn't throw the punch that would have ended it. He just held on until the fight went out of the arm he was holding.
"That's enough," Alex said, and for the first time all afternoon he meant it the way he used to mean things, plainly, without an audience in the sentence at all.
Titan sagged, chest heaving, and didn't get up when Alex let go. He looked, for a moment, less like a weapon and more like a very large, very tired man sitting in the wreckage of a construction site. "Two years," he said, to the sky more than to Alex. "Two years since anybody made me work for it." A short, cracked laugh. "Worth the crane."
By the time the police perimeter closed in and the news drones found their angle, Alex was already back on his feet, waving off the paramedics checking him for injuries he didn't have, grinning for the cameras in a way that would run on every channel in the city by six o'clock. Titan Faces Superman In Metro City Slugfest. He'd read the headline later and feel, underneath the satisfaction, a thread of something he didn't examine too closely — the fact that of everything about the last twenty minutes, the part he kept replaying wasn't the rescue. It was the fight.
Torres met him at the barricade, arms folded, saying nothing for a long moment while Alex signed a construction helmet for a kid who'd ducked under the tape. When the kid ran off, Torres finally spoke, quiet enough that it wouldn't carry to the cameras.
"You had him in the first two minutes."
Alex's smile didn't move, but something behind it did. "Did I."
"You know you did." Torres held his gaze a beat longer than was comfortable. "Just checking somebody up there's still keeping score."
Alex looked back at the wreckage — the crane, the crater, the wall that used to be a wall — and for a second the grin faltered into something more honest and considerably less certain. Then a phone camera found him from across the tape, and he put it back on, and lifted a hand to wave, and didn't answer the question at all.