I was shoved back – not by the water itself, but the tide of bodies that were struck, crushed and thrown by the afterimage. As I was pushed backward, hard, I was spun by an impact at my shoulder. My arm slammed against a windowsill, and it exploded with a sharp, jarring pain. I landed on my back, saw someone else get sent head over heels over the crowd, colliding against the wall with an audible cracking sound, landing limp as a rag doll, a matter of feet from me. He had a trumpet and a flag on his chest.
Escutcheon deceased, CD-6. Herald deceased, CD-6.
Kaiser – I hadn’t even seen him in the group – erected a latticework of blades across the front of the alley, between us and Leviathan. It wasn’t enough. Leviathan tore through them like I might tear through a wicker basket. Edged pieces of steel spun through the air and clattered to the ground.
Kaiser changed tactics, creating columns of steel instead, each three or four feet across, harder to shatter. They were slower to emerge, but they bent rather than broke.
Leviathan responded by pushing. He exerted his full strength on the barrier of blades and the columns, leaning against them. The walls broke around the base of the columns, and the pieces of steel fell.
A stab of pain from my arm reminded me I was hurt. Fuck, it hurt a lot. It throbbed, and each throb seemed to be worse than the last. I felt shaky as I used my good arm to stand.
Leviathan didn’t make noise. I kept expecting a roar, or hiss, or something, but Leviathan was dead silent. I somehow imagined a victorious howl as he broke through the barrier, crouched, and lunged into the crowd.
He stopped, and I thought he was using his afterimage, halting so it could rush forward, but even the watery echo stopped a second after it appeared, only the very edges of it continuing forward to crash violently against the sides of the alley.
For several long heartbeats, it was nearly quiet, but for the sound of rain, people’s noises of pain, mine included, and the sound of one of Kaiser’s iron columns ripping free of the wall and falling atop a pile of blades.
It took me a second to realize what had happened. Leviathan hung frozen mid-pounce, and his emerging afterimage similarly stood there, frozen in time. In the midst of the afterimage was Clockblocker, half-immersed in water.
“Someone get him out of there! He’s going to suffocate!” I shouted, my voice made that much more edgier and strained by the pain I was in. My voice, though, coincided with no less than five other cries, all rising to be heard over everyone else. Trap Leviathan, contain him, use more of those grenades to get him before he got free. Someone was even shooting arcs of lighting at Leviathan’s frozen form. Too many commands from too many people who hadn’t fought with or against Clockblocker, who didn’t know how his power worked, who had conflicting ideas on what we had to do.
This chaos would fuck us over, keep us from accomplishing anything before Leviathan got free. We needed order, and most of the people who could have given it to us were out of action or nowhere nearby.
The armbands. Armsmaster had said it prioritized orders based on need.
My left arm hung by my side, and I couldn’t even bring myself to raise it. Just gravity and the weight of my hand pulling down on it was excruciating. The idea of pressing the buttons was too much.
I reached for the person next to me, grabbed her wrist. Some woman with a crescent moon on a blue costume. She gave me a startled look with a lost, shellshocked expression. When I first pressed against the communications button, she moved her arm, as if she thought I was guiding her movements.
“Stay still!” I snarled at her. When I pressed again, depressing the two buttons with my pinky finger and thumb, she held her arm firm.
I shouted into the armband, “Clockblocker down, CD-6! Need a teleporter to get him free, stat!”
The time freezing effect of Clockblocker’s power lasted anywhere from thirty seconds to ten minutes. How long had we spent, here, since Clockblocker had given us this momentary reprieve? It was hard to judge the passage of time with the adrenaline, the frenetic pace of the ongoing battle.
Trickster appeared in the place of the blue moon Woman, tipped his hat at me.
“Clockblocker, in there,” I pointed with my good hand.
Trickster frowned, looked around.
“I apologize for desecrating your body, brave hero,” he spoke, looking down at where the cape with the trumpet icon on his chest had flopped, dead. “You do good work even in death.”
Was he mentally cracked? Was he serious or was he playing around? I suspected the latter, but kidding around and wasting time in a situation like this?
In a second, the cape was replaced by an unconscious Clockblocker. The pane of his helmet was cracked and leaking a trail of blood. I bent down to examine him, was pushed out of the way by someone else. Some woman with a costume that outlined her bones, like a really good version of the skeleton costumes you saw on Halloween. She began using her fingers to check Clockblocker’s neck, and I couldn’t help but suspect she was a doctor.
“Listen!” the voice that cut through the shouts and the frantic chatter was authoritative, strong.
Armsmaster. He had Myrddin, Eidolon and Chevalier just behind him. People turned to listen, myself included.
“He’s torn through our front line, he’s taken down some of our best, and he’s deliberately targeted and eliminated most of the capes who were in Bastion’s group. We have precious few left who can take a hit from this creature and survive it, and we’re running low on those who can wall off another tidal wave or block his path.
“We’re not going to be able to go on with Plan A.” The words hung in the air.
“This brute is hurt, but we don’t have the resources to hold him down while we hurt him any more. We’re too tightly packed, like this, and it’s too easy for him to take us down in droves. Two or three more minutes of this, and there won’t be any of us left.”
Armsmaster turned, looked up at where Leviathan stood, frozen. He pointed up at the Endbringer with his Halberd. “We spread out. The second this beast is free, he’s going to look for a way out, to run and heal up what we’ve done to him. So we cut him off, we slow him down and keep him from getting to any areas where he can do real damage.
“Eidolon is going to leave, do what he can to minimize the damage from the waves and ensure the rest of the city doesn’t get leveled while we’re fighting here. The rest of us are going to slow Leviathan down best we can, take any opportunities we can to hurt the motherfucker. In just a second, we’re going to organize you guys, put the toughest and strongest closest to this bastard, space out the people who can hurt him, get the weakest ones positioned to pass on word if they see him slip past us.
“This is our plan B. We stall, from here on out we prioritize survival over putting this abomination down, and we fucking pray that Scion notices there’s an Endbringer around and shows up before this city and everyone in it is a memory.”
8.04
I got my orders and left behind a bizarre scene where Armsmaster was working hand in hand with Kaiser, of all people. Kaiser worked to build the same sort of trap that he’d imprisoned Lung in, some time ago, creating bars of metal between and around each of Leviathan’s limbs, a cage tight to the body. Rune and another telekinetic were working to bend the metal from Kaiser’s shaken barrier around Leviathan’s limbs and face.
It wouldn’t last. Leviathan was too big, his tail extended a long distance behind him, and it was thin and supple enough to slip through almost any barrier Kaiser could erect, strong enough that it could bend metal. Leviathan would get free, there could be no illusions on that front.
While Kaiser worked, Armsmaster was simultaneously ensuring that he could maximize the damage delivered the second Leviathan moved again. Gingerly, he worked with the grenades the Protectorate had liberated from Bakuda, the same explosives Miss Militia had been firing at Leviathan, and hooked them up as motion activated or proximity mines. A complicated affair, I imagined, when your target could star
t moving any second, and when you couldn’t fully know or understand what the individual bombs did.
In the end, though, it was still our best bet to do one final measure of damage against Leviathan before he was free to wreak havoc once more.
There were a little more than fifty of us left. Hookwolf, Fenja, Menja, Genesis, Aegis and Manpower were among the fifteen or so standing combatants that remained and were able to go toe to toe with Leviathan. Parian, the girl in the doll costume, had formed some massive stuffed animals – a lion and a pig that stood as tall as Leviathan’s shoulder. Tougher than they looked, according to her. I had my doubts. I mean, it wasn’t just that they were stuffed animals, but according to Parian, this was her first fight.
Too many others were capable of delivering the hurt, but were too fragile: Browbeat, Shadow Stalker, Lady Photon, Purity, Laserdream, Brandish and others I didn’t know. The Ward with the crossbow, some guy with crimson skin. There was a light show in the sky above as Kid Win teleported in pieces of the cannon he’d had at the bank robbery, manifesting them onto a hovering platform set directly in front of Leviathan. He’d get anywhere from a few seconds to a minute’s worth of concentrated fire with the gun firing on the highest settings, directing a beam through a gap in the bars to where Narwhal’s razor sharp forcefield had opened a gap in Leviathan’s neck.
Beyond those first few moments after Leviathan woke up, it woul be anyone’s guess.
I hurried away from the site Armsmaster had indicated to me, my right hand on my left elbow, keeping my arm from moving too much. Sector CC-7, a block and a half South, a block West. So strange, to think that this was an area I’d walked through a dozen times, on my way to or from the Loft. Now I was looking at it as a battlefield, trying to figure out what routes Leviathan would take. What things I had to watch out for – the grates leading down to the storm sewers, the rain barrel on top of one of the buildings that might or might not be intact enough to retain any water in it. Puddles.
Stuff I could use… hardly.
It wasn’t like there was any weapon I could deploy, no feature of the terrain I could use to deliver the critical blow. This was Leviathan. A creature that had killed more people in the last 12 years than I had even seen in my entire life. Seen in person, anyways.
I was scared. A huge part of me wanted to just close my eyes and hope Leviathan didn’t come, that I wouldn’t have to deal with him. It would be nice to join the three hundred and fifty thousand other Brockton Bay residents that were trusting the heroes to handle things, find a peace of sorts in surrender and helplessness. Except I couldn’t. I’d seen firsthand how Leviathan had taken down some of the strongest capes. I couldn’t find refuge in that kind of trust anymore. My mental and emotional resources were better spent on figuring out how to help than they were on hope.
I was hurting, too. The only thing keeping the throb of my arm from consuming my attention was the fear. It was a kind of grim cycle: the pain reminded me of why I should be scared, but the emotion and the adrenaline kept the pain as this intensely unpleasant background chatter in my brain, where it might have crippled me otherwise. It was a teetering balance that had me on edge in a way I’d never experienced to this degree. There were probably people who lived for that hypervigilant, heart-racing, brain-going-in-overtime experience. I wasn’t one of them.
Priorities. Back to what I was thinking about – there obviously wasn’t anything to be found here that would win me a fight against Leviathan or even hurt him. Ridiculous to think that way. Any advantages to be gained would be ones that kept me alive.
I wiped the beads of water from my lenses with my glove, which only seemed to divide each of them into a mess of smaller droplets. Leviathan was bigger than me, stronger, faster, tougher. I had to think like a mouse who might run into a murderous cat at any moment. Like prey. Use my small size. Hide. I needed a position that kept me out of sight, gave me a good vantage point, but left me free to make a run for it. A spot where I had an escape route if things got bad. To top it off, in the event Eidolon couldn’t stop the wave, I could also do with cover.
It was the sort of street you saw often enough in the Docks. Large buildings lined either side, like giant boxes made of concrete or brick. I could have maybe found a fire escape to climb up, in the hopes that I’d be out of reach of the wave, but my experience with Lung back on day one had taught me better. The higher ground was an advantage, sure, but if your opponent could get up or down from that location faster and more easily than you could, that stopped being an asset really damn quickly. If there was anything that was going to be useful, it would be on ground level. I saw a rusted van that had sat in front of an old workshop since I’d first passed through this area, all tires flat, windows broken, interior gutted. A chain link fence stretched between two buildings, but someone had cut the wires that connected the fence to the frame, so half of it was curled back and waving slightly in the wind and rain.
No, those things weren’t useful. Larger scale? There was an old roof supported by two pillars, attached on one side to a building, a carport, perhaps. The roof was mostly intact, corrugated steel with a smallish hole in one lower corner, which meant the area beneath it was largely dry, but for a small puddle. It was also exposed on three sides, which meant I couldn’t stay there. My bugs could. It was a place they could keep dry until I needed them.
I’d been acutely aware of my bugs since the battle started, and for the second time I could remember, I found my power was responding far more effectively as I called for them. My reach extended further, my bugs were fractionally more responsive. The last time this had been the case, it had been when I teamed up with Bitch, Sundancer and Newter and wound up fighting Oni Lee and Lung. I couldn’t explain it, but I wasn’t going to complain. I needed every small advantage I could get.
As they began gathering under the carport, my mind returned to that notion of being successful ‘prey’.
When I’d originally designed my costume, I’d picked the darker colors, made sure that the varieties of chitin I used to make the armor were spaced out so the individual shading would retain some ‘speckling’ after being painted, all for a reason. Camouflage. I’d known I’d have my bugs all around me. I’d known I would be standing in the midst of them while they gathered into swarms, would have them crawling on me from time to time. So I’d picked darker colors and made my armor mottled to blend in with the bugs that were, obviously, specks.
Just hiding inside my swarm wouldn’t be enough. Too easy for him to attack just the one cluster, tear through me.
So I gathered more than one smaller swarm, clustering them in areas where it was dry. The interior of the rusted van, under eaves, in doorframes and on a roof, under a large rain barrel.
Then, struck by a little inspiration, I condensed the nine swarms into human-ish shapes. Black silhouettes crouched, stood tall with arms akimbo, leaned against walls, leaned partially outside the driver’s side window of the van. In the gloom, through the rain, it was deceptive. Deceptive enough? I couldn’t be sure.
I felt the bite of cold air. A chill breeze, going straight through the soaked fabric of my costume. When I looked down to where the long road sloped to the edge of the water, I saw the reason for the chill. Eidolon was flying at the coast, focusing blue rays on the water around the shattered boardwalk and debris at the water’s edge, hardening the waves into irregular sheets and glacier-like formations of ice.
Dangerous. I could remember seeing on TV that they’d tried something like this a few years ago. A Tinker using an ice engine, I think. I didn’t know exactly how or why, but judging by the fact that they hadn’t used the tactic again, I got the impression It had turned out really badly.
My guess was based on the notion that hydrokinesis was the movement of water, and ice was just water in another form. It wasn’t that Leviathan would levitate the chunks of ice. Nothing so blatant. Rather, when a tidal wave did break through the ice, rolled up onto the battlefield with frozen shards and chun
ks caught up in the current, Leviathan might move those chunks a little faster in the wave’s passage, make them hit a little harder, and give them a tendency to strike where they could do the most damage.
That was my suspicion, anyways. The heroes didn’t exactly dish out the full details at press conferences, afterward, so I could only make an educated guess.
Either way, it was a delaying tactic. Holding off the damage, in the hopes that we could end this or get reinforcements before Brockton Bay became another Newfoundland.
We were hoping for Scion. The first cape, the golden skinned man. The guy that could go toe to toe with an Endbringer and win, if things hadn’t already gone too far south. If Behemoth hadn’t already turned the area into a radioactive, magma-ridden wasteland. If Leviathan hadn’t built up enough momentum with his waves. If the Simurgh… Ok, the Simurgh was different, I had to admit. The issue with her wasn’t so much winning the battle. It was what came after. Win every battle against her, lose the war, more or less.
The problem with waiting on Scion was that the guy wasn’t exactly in touch with the rest of us. There was speculation he had at least one human contact – someone that had given him clothing and a costume, at least – but he never bothered to stop long enough for anyone to pass on any requests, to tell him to go to X place when we gave him Y signal. He rescued people twenty-four-seven, three hundred and sixty five days a year, handling crises only as they came to his attention, which meant that sometimes an Endbringer came and Scion was wholly occupied with saving sinking ships, stopping landslides and putting out housefires. I wondered what he was doing now.
My swarms were in place, which left me having to decide where to hide. The carport was too in the open, none of the eaves left me a good enough escape route, and as for the space under the rain barrel on the roof, well, I wasn’t that stupid, and I’d already dismissed the roof as an option anyways.
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