Alexandria?
He shook his head, nearly losing his balance as he continued his forward march. He could barely see straight, and it wasn’t helped by the phantom images that riddled the mass of capes. Images he had called glimmers when he was a youth, that he called shadows now that he was an adult.
But Behemoth… the Endbringer was little more than a skeleton with extensive padding. He’d never seen this much damage delivered.
Chevalier focused his power on his blade, making it as large as he could. He continued marching forward. There was no indication Usher was okay. Rime was dead, and he had little idea about the state of the supporting forces who’d been intended to help him attack, who’d trained to assist him.
He extended his blade towards Behemoth, using it to gauge the distance for the kill aura. Defending capes cleared out of his way as he walked forward, between two of the stone hands. The shadow of his sword was warning enough.
One of Behemoth’s legs seemed less developed than the other, the toes missing, the bones less pronounced, the flesh thinner. He reached the perimeter and slammed the weapon down into the earth with his one usable arm.
His steam nearly spent, he collapsed over the handle of the weapon, his hand still gripping the handle, and he pulled the trigger.
The size of the weapon and the effect of the firing pin seemed to help with the jammed mechanism. That, or the transition to being closer to his largest blade had shifted something in a fractional way. The shot blasted Behemoth in the calf of his weaker leg, and the Endbringer fell.
Again, he pulled the trigger, over and over. Three, four, five shots.
He stopped before he spent the sixth.
He’d dealt damage, but it was precious little. Flesh had torn at the leg, not quite as dense as it should be, by all reports. Had the regeneration not finished rebuilding the complete structures?
Rendered effectively one-legged again, Behemoth crawled forward on three limbs. Alexandria struck him from above, driving him face first into the ground.
Why was she here? She was supposed to be functionally dead.
Chevalier could feel a sensation crawling through his body, an energy. It didn’t invigorate, not on its own, but he could feel a kind of relief.
Usher was alive, and Usher’s power coursed through him. With luck, he’d be immune to Behemoth’s power, or at least partially immune. Nobody had received the benefit of Usher’s ability and been brave enough to venture into Behemoth’s kill range.
Chevalier pulled his sword from the ground, swayed, and very fell over.
Defiant caught him.
Old friend, Chevalier thought, though he didn’t have the breath to speak.
Anyone else might have spoken up, told him he didn’t have to do this, that it was madness.
Defiant was silent, supporting Chevalier, helping him right himself. Defiant understood this much. The need, the drive.
Chevalier took his first step with Defiant’s help. The second was only partially supported. The third was on his own.
He closed into the kill area, and he could feel the heat touch him. It heated the armor, but didn’t reach him. Usher’s power at work. He tried to inhale, and found no air. Choking, he forced his mouth shut.
Holding his breath, Chevalier brought the sword down on Behemoth’s shoulder, a blow from above much like Alexandria had delivered, followed by another.
His aim wasn’t good, the blows off target. If his form were better, he’d be landing each strike in the same place, time after time. Not so, with the blade this big, the margin for error so great.
With that in mind, Chevalier shrunk his sword as he closed the distance, shut his eyes as lightning crackled around the Endbringer. With the scale smaller, the effective edge was that much sharper. The blade bit just a fraction deeper each time.
He couldn’t stop walking without falling, couldn’t stop swinging the weapon in the same rote motion without risking that he’d never be able to raise it again, however light it might be.
His goal was the spot Tattletale had mentioned. The core.
Behemoth swiped at him, but he was already shifting the balance of his armor, moving to block the blow with the flat of the blade. The sound of the impact was deafening, and it wasn’t something Usher’s power protected against. But Usher’s power was finnicky at best. Unreliable.
At the very least, it was holding up here.
He found a measure of strength, then swung the cannonblade, driving it for the deepest part of the wound.
Behemoth lurched, changing position, and the painstakingly created notch in his shoulder shifted well out of Chevalier’s reach. He let up on the intense heat, turned to radiation instead. Heroes scrambled to retreat from the ominous glow.
Bastard, Chevalier swore. He released a sound somewhere between a moan and a groan, exhaling the last of the air in his lungs, greedily sucking in air.
Something flew past him, shearing straight through Behemoth’s chest. A wheel of metal, thin, with two bars sticking out of the center. It cut through the Endbringer like he wasn’t even there.
Dazed, lungs fit to burst as he held his breath, barely coherent, Chevalier turned. He saw Tecton with his piledrivers extended, Weaver just behind him, along with two of the new Wards: the white supremacist’s child they’d picked up in Boston and a boy in a white cloak. They stood all the way at the back lines of the battlefield, by the temple, along with a character he didn’t recognize. A girl in black.
His eyes settled on Weaver, surrounded by the nimbus of her power, which glowed with an intensity that surpassed any and all of her teammates. When she stepped forward, it was like she was pushing against a curtain, only it was a membrane, a network of individual cells, each with tendrils extending out, so thin he couldn’t make them out, except by the highlights that seemed to rush down them as she gave conscious direction to her bugs.
Second chances, Chevalier thought back to his inauguration to the Wards. He’d harbored doubts about taking her on board, but memories of that day had been a factor. He’d needed a second chance. So had Hannah.
Colin, even, though it came much later.
It was a good feeling, to see that coming into play. He knew she wasn’t all the way there, but she’d taken a step forward.
It was a better feeling to watch as Behemoth’s shoulder shifted, attached by a mere hair. The weapon had cut through his ribs, torn through the space where his heart should be.
That’ll do.
Alexandria hit him, and the arm came free. Behemoth lurched, planting his one remaining hand on the ground, and came just short of collapsing on top of Chevalier. He was only a few feet away, glowing with the radiation.
I’m dead, Chevalier thought, without a trace of the despair he’d imagined he would feel.
He tried to move, to raise his blade, only to find his armor refusing to cooperate. It had melted, the joints and joins flowing into one another. His sword wasn’t much better. The ceramic properties he’d applied to the edge were heat-resistant, but the remainder of the weapon were growing more nebulous in shape, the hottest parts of the metal flowing down to obscure the edge.
He concentrated, and found his power beyond his reach. Too tired, his stamina gone.
Trapped in a hot wreck of metal, an explosive death just a short distance away. It had been his starting point, and it had been the end.
It would be the optimal time for a second trigger event, the thought passed through his thoughts.
Of course, the joke went that you couldn’t get a trigger event by trying to have one, so even thinking about a second trigger event was enough to banish any possibility.
Not so funny, in this moment.
His power worked best with similar things. Differences made it slower. It was why he had the same firing mechanism at the core of each of the three weapons he used for his Cannonblade.
Now, as the battle raged around him, he was nearly blind with the visor of his helmet melting, at his utter limit in ter
ms of stamina and pain tolerance. Behemoth delivered a shockwave, and Usher’s power protected him, his boots welded to the ground kept him from falling over.
He reached for his power, grasping at his armor, and he didn’t reach for anything familiar or similar. He reached for anything, everything. The ground, the soil, air.
Somewhere in the midst of that desperate struggle, he found his armor coming apart. He wasn’t even willing it, not even forming any coherent idea of what he was doing, but his power operated of its own accord.
Free of the armor, he could move his weapon. It was slag, barely a sword anymore, but the core still had some density to it.
He made it grow.
He made the sword grow, from ten to twenty feet in length. It was more by the growth than by any action on Chevalier’s part that it extended into the wound. The weapon penetrated into the scar Weaver’s crew had created, as close to the core as Chevalier could get it.
He made it grow to its greatest possible length, a full thirty feet, his head turned skyward to the monster that glowed silver and black.
Space and time distortion were supposed to protect it? He’d fight fire with fire.
Flesh parted as the blade grew inside the wound. He put his finger on the trigger, ready to fire.
Before he could, the sword’s tip touched the core, and everything went wrong.
His power abruptly ceased to take effect, and the blades came apart, in its three individual pieces. They slid from the wound, falling down around him.
Behemoth lurched forward, and his wounded leg struck Chevalier, knocking him to the ground. He could feel the gunshot break of multiple ribs shattering.
Supine on the ground, unable to breathe, but for tiny pants, Chevalier stared at the sky, unwilling to look directly at the ensuing scene, even if he could have managed to turn his head.
There was a horrible crash as a sweep of one claw shattered the stone hands. Glowing silver, he loomed over the defending capes, scorched and electrocuted those who’d fallen within his instant-kill range. One of Hellhound’s mutant dogs, Dragon. Others he couldn’t make out in the midst of the clouds of dust. Rendered to ash and melted armor in heartbeats.
They were the lucky ones, Chevalier thought. The radiation was generally observed to be concentrated, limited to a certain range, manipulated to strike only those within a hundred feet or so of Behemoth, to saturate the landscape and render it uninhabitable. These capes were close enough. Their deaths would be slow, painful.
A failure. Hopefully the ones in the temple had been evacuated, and the capes at the rear of the battle line free to retreat.
The ground rumbled violently, churning and smoking. Behemoth was burrowing.
The fight was over.
Chevalier stared up at the shifting smoke of the sky above, struggling to breathe, not entirely sure why he was bothering. Maybe he wouldn’t die of the radiation, thanks to Usher’s power.
Long moments passed as the rumbling of the earth faded in intensity. The air was still filled with the screams and shouts of the various capes and doctors fighting to save the wounded, the dull roars of distant helicopters, carrying the evacuated capes away.
Chevalier watched as the worst of the smoke cleared, and he imagined he might have seen the glowing blur of the sun through the clouds.
Not the sun. It was a figure. Scion.
He would have laughed if he could.
Too late.
You showed up too late.
Scion lowered himself to nearly ground level. His golden hair moved in the wind as he gazed over the battlefield. His white bodysuit was smudged here or there on the sleeves, but otherwise seemed so pristine that it seemed to glow in the gloom.
No, part of that glow was real. The faint light touched Chevalier, and he could feel his breathing ease. It was reaching out to everyone present.
A consolation prize? A bit of healing? Maybe a helping hand against the radiation, for the others?
He managed a soft laugh. The glow was making the pain easier to handle. He could almost breathe, now.
He closed his eyes, and he felt a tear roll down from the corner of his eye. He suspected he wouldn’t have been able to tear up without the healing.
Not sufficient to fix the broken bones, or the damage to his stomach, perhaps. He opened his eyes to look at Scion, to ask a question.
But Scion was gone.
A noise rose up from those who remained in the crowd. Gasps, cheers, shouts of surprise.
Chevalier forced himself to move, stared at the spear of golden light that had risen from the earth, just on the horizon. Scion.
He held Behemoth in his grip, released the Endbringer to fall two or three hundred feet to the ground, struck his falling foe with a beam of golden light, as if to shove Behemoth into the ground.
Behemoth’s lightning crackled between them, catching Scion, but the hero didn’t even seem to flinch. He hit Behemoth again, and this time the beam of energy didn’t stop. With virtually every structure leveled, there was nothing to hide their view but the lingering smoke and dust, and even that wasn’t thick enough to hide the light.
The aftershock of it traveled across the city, quelling dust storms, blowing past the assembled heroes like a strong gust, faintly warm. Even though the ray didn’t reach quite that high, the clouds of smoke and dust parted visibly above Scion.
Chevalier watched, staring, belatedly thought to count how many seconds had passed.
One, two, three, four…
Behemoth generated a shockwave, but it was muted by the light, suppressed.
…eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve…
Behemoth’s silhouette thrashed as he tried to move out from beneath the shaft of light, but Scion only reoriented the beam, keeping it fixed on his target.
…sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one…
The light ceased. Behemoth was gone. A plume of dust rose from the earth, at the very limits of their vision.
Scion plunged beneath the ground, heedless of the intervening terrain.
Again, Scion rose from a point beneath the shattered surface of the city.
Again, he held Behemoth in his hands. Thinner than a skeleton, the Endbringer was little more than a stick figure from Chevalier’s vantage point.
Only this time, with a flare of golden light to accompany the movement, he tore the Endbringer in two. The legs came free of the pelvis as two individual pieces, and Scion obliterated them with a pulse of the golden light. The air that reached the crowd of wounded heroes was cool, this time.
In Chevalier’s peripheral vision, people were emerging from within the temple. Chevalier didn’t spare them a direct glance. If he was seeing what he thought he was seeing, then he wouldn’t take his eyes off the scene for anything.
Behemoth slammed his claw into the glowing hero, and the shockwave tore him free of Scion’s grip. Scion followed him with a glowing sphere of light, and Behemoth redirected his fall, generating an explosion in mid-air, hurling himself towards the assembled crowd.
Eidolon stopped him with a violet forcefield that spread across the sky, a solid obstacle to arrest Behemoth’s momentum, stopping him dead in his tracks and leaving him suspended a hundred feet up in the air. His one intact claw clutched the edge.
Scion followed up with another shaft of light, and the forcefield shattered in an instant. Behemoth was slammed into the road, three streets down from the gathered heroes outside the temple.
The Endbringer glowed, and the swelling light was too intense to look at.
Just seeing it, there was no question of what he was doing. A final act of spite. Turning himself into a bomb.
A stream of darkness poured from one of the helicopters, filling the street Behemoth lay in. For an instant, the Endbringer was almost entirely obscured.
Scion fired one more beam, and the darkness was obliterated, swept away.
The silhouette of the Endbringer flickered, then disintegrated. There was no detonatio
n, no destruction to the landscape. Only the cleansing light.
The beam dissipated, but its effects hung in the air, canceling out noise, stilling the air.
Slowly, the crowd took up a cheer, a cry of victory from everyone with the breath to spare.
As noise returned to the landscape, the stilling effects of Scion’s light fading, Chevalier closed his eyes, listening. With the noise of the helicopters and distant fires mingling with the shouts and hollers of joy from the defending capes, he imagined he could hear the whole world cheering alongside them.
24.y (Interlude 2, Aftermath)
“Well bandaged. They did a good job,” the doctor had to raise her voice to be heard over the helicopter’s rotors. She was older, blond to the point that it was hard to distinguish if her hair was still blond or graying, her expression creased in concern.
Wanton nodded mutely.
“What happened?” the doctor asked him.
“Falling debris,” Tecton offered, from the other side of the helicopter.
The doctor nodded. “We’ll leave it as it is. The pain’s okay?”
“Meds help,” Wanton said. “Feel like I’m almost dreaming. And I’m going to wake up, and none of this will have happened.”
“It happened,” Tecton said.
“Why isn’t everyone cheering and hollering anymore?”
“Really fucking tired,” Grace said. She was beside Cuff, who’d been stripped of her armor from the waist up, with only a thin covering of near-liquid metal on her upper body for modesty’s sake. A nurse was attending to her arm.
“Really tired,” Golem said. “Oh my god. My entire body hurts, and I didn’t even take a direct hit.”
“The roars and shockwaves might have done internal damage,” the doctor said. “You’ll each need a CT scan and MRI. Let me know if there’s any acute pain.”
“I think it’s more that I’ve never exercised this much in my life,” Golem said.
“You’ll hurt worse tomorrow,” Grace commented.
“Damn.”
The doctor, for her part, turned her attention to Wanton. “We’ll need to double-check for bone fragments when we get back to the hospital. You’ll need surgery. Chances are good this was a rush job.”
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