Atlas grunted something unintelligible, which was an impressive enough feat, given his barrel chest.
“What’s that?” I leaned in, holding a hand up to my ear.
“I’m strong,” he said, more firmly.
“I need specifics. Numbers. What’s your brawn at peak?”
“His base is fifty,” Blackstrike said, causing Atlas to adopt a wounded, betrayed expression. “Scales up from there depending on how long he’s been in combat. As for the definition of combat, he needs to be taking or dealing damage within ten-second intervals to keep stacking.”
I nodded. “What’s the stack?” I asked. “The rate, I mean.”
“Five points every ten seconds,” Atlas said. He didn’t seem happy to be sharing, but at least he was sharing.
“So you hit one hundred brawn at max,” I concluded.
He hesitated a bit longer on that, then nodded. “So long as I can keep up momentum. If I’m out of the fight for one of the ticks, my stats will descend accordingly.”
“Impressive,” I said. “That’s quite the brawn roll you got there.”
Atlas beamed. “It’s going to stack even higher as I tier up.”
“How about armor?”
“Thought you knew everything already—”
“The base,” I said, waving my hand for him to speed it up. “And the stack rate.”
“Base fifty,” Atlas said. “Stack rate is two and a half points every ten seconds with an eighty max.”
“Half the stack rate,” I said, nodding as I ran the calculations. “One hundred seconds to max brawn and armor. Long time.”
“Not so long,” Atlas argued.
“Long time when you’re fighting Leviathan,” I said. He didn’t argue against that.
“I thought you were going to force him to Shift,” Blackstrike said. “That is the plan, is it not?”
“To Shift off of armor,” I said. “And he’ll need to put those points somewhere. I’m guessing a ton will go into brawn.”
“And Atlas will have enough to cover that for as long as you need?” Starshot said. She looked unconvinced. “Even if one hundred is enough, how will he last long enough to reach his max?”
“That’s partly your job,” I reminded her. “In the pretend fight you two are about to have, just give Atlas enough play to keep up his brawn and armor stacks before Leviathan’s on the ground.”
“You mean… damage him?” Starshot asked, looking from me to Atlas, who eyed her with renewed suspicion
“That’s what you need, right?” I asked Atlas.
The big man nodded grimly again.
“Damage him,” I told Starshot. “Just a bit. A point or two of damage is worth maintaining the stack. We want Atlas sporting his max stats before Levi shows. Now,” I switched over to Blackstrike before Atlas could raise any complaints, “how fast are you, really?”
“Fifty agility at my current tier,” he said, quick and easy. “No stack.”
“Hmm.”
“Not as fast as you hoped? Don’t worry, I hit harder than it looks like I do.”
“I’ve seen it firsthand,” I said, remembering him taking Prism out of the sky. “That’s some Anticipation power, then.” Blackstrike was no speedster, but his Anticipation power made him seem far faster than he was.
If anything, an Anticipation or precognition ability was better for our purposes.
“You’ve heard of the theories on how to out-speed a pre-cog?” I asked.
Blackstrike shifted uneasily, but he answered, “I did some research when I rolled this new build, yeah. No one knows for sure if it’s true, though.”
“Well, I have some experience in moving fast,” I said, referring of course to Streak. “I can attest that it’s partly true, insofar as moving fast enough will out-speed an Anticipation power such as yours, but it takes a lot.”
“Three times the agility of the pre-cog,” Blackstrike added. “Or so the community theories go.”
I nodded. “So the theory goes. Sadly, I never got a chance to perform the ultimate test. As Streak, my Sound Blitz ability could send my agility into the stratosphere and I planned to take down Deadlock, the greatest pre-cog to have graced the game – until your good self,” I added to Blackstrike with a mock tip of the hat. “But I had plenty of run-ins with lesser precogs before that. I think the theory is true enough and, for what we’re about to do here, I’ll have to assume it’s correct. If Leviathan makes your Anticipation redundant, we’ll say he’s put one hundred and fifty points or more into his agility.”
Perhaps feeling left out, Starshot cleared her throat. “Don’t you want to know how hard I punch?” She smirked as she said it, raising her white-gloved fists, which began to turn golden as she called to her rays.
“I’ve felt it,” I said, returning the smile.
“Not as much as you think.”
“Good,” I said, meaning it. “Save as much of it as you can. As soon as Leviathan shows, park yourself on the nearest rooftop and start charging. You’re going to need it. We all are.”
A brief look of concern passed over her fair features like a shadow. She hadn’t reacted nearly as badly as I thought she would when I’d explained her final and ultimate role in the plan before leaving the docks. I’d promised her no penalties for perming – if everything went as it should – but that didn’t mean I was right. Somewhat surprisingly, I felt a kernel of guilt more at the prospect of causing Starshot to deliver the killing blow than for endangering the others.
“Just remember—” I started.
“I know. As long as the beam is aimed at Atlas, no penalties should come my way. Hopefully,” she added.
“And hopefully no hero vengeance,” Blackstrike added.
“That all depends on how well they play their roles,” I said.
“And if my strongest ray does little more than chafe Leviathan’s chin?”
“Once we have him Shifted enough off of armor, it’ll do a hell of a lot more than that.”
All three of them looked like they were in various states of pre-argument. All three held back. Even Blackstrike.
Looking at them then, in the moments before the moment, it struck me profoundly that I had found the right followers. Now it only remained to be seen if they had found the right leader.
“How does that work again?” Starshot asked. “Power Shift, you call it?” She tasted the term. “That’s his superpower? You’re sure of it?” She seemed more fascinated than dubious. I couldn’t blame her.
For years, players and viewers alike had assumed Leviathan just had the most ridiculous stat roll in the history of Titan Online. I had no doubt that he had a large pool of stat points to play with. My guess was in the 400 range. Split among five core stats, that was a lot, no matter what your power was.
But with a power like his? With the potential to place 400 points into a single stat if he chose to do so? It was near-impossible to stop. The thought that he had a full 100 in every stat with a potential of 500 in one of his choosing was too awful to contemplate. Surely the AI had kept it in check to some degree, so I was running with 400 total in my calculation. Either way, we were going to take a swing at him.
“Leviathan can change his stats in real-time,” I explained to the group. “That means he can be either the strongest, fastest, sturdiest, smartest or most likable player in-game, at any given time. Sometimes, he’s a mix of a few. However, it takes time for him to Shift, a much-needed limitation on his superpower and about the only thing we have going for us. Even at base, he’s likely rocking anything from eighty – I hope it’s eighty – to one hundred across the board. That’s a lot of marbles to play with.”
“You’re saying he can… Shift his brawn to five hundred points?”
“Four hundred is the guess,” I said, not telling them how I’d arrived at the figure because I desperately wanted to believe that I was right, and that we weren’t all about to be smashed into smithereens in a laughable, sad display of misplaced hubri
s coming up against the earned version of it. “And yes, I assume he can dump it all into one stat at a time.
“But,” I said before any of them could start us down a new road of worry, “that would not be very wise for old Levi, would it?”
“Leaves his other stats goosed,” Blackstrike said. He had such a way with words.
“I doubt he ever goes all in on any one thing, but nobody knows how his superpower works. Nobody but us. If he’s as arrogant as we think he is, he’ll make mistakes. Mistakes nobody before us has had the ability to take advantage of. Leviathan is a force. There’s no arguing with that, but his superpower can leave him as vulnerable as a tier six, or more so, if he makes even the smallest miscalculation.”
“You really think he’d move a significant number off of armor?” Atlas asked, sounding as doubtful as Starshot hadn’t.
“If we make him,” I said, my voice holding steady. “Look, it’s going to be hard to get him off brawn and agility, given the footage I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot of it.”
Blackstrike balled a fist. “Then how—”
“I’ll deal with the Shift,” I snapped. “We know the brawn Atlas rocks at full tilt, meaning if Leviathan is matching him or besting him, he must have one hundred or more brawn at that moment. That’s a start. If he beats Blackstrike’s Anticipation, then he must have one hundred and fifty or more in agility. We’ve got some tech too. To fully resist the stasis gun requires fifty or more in mind, and he’ll need over sixty-five to see through my swarm grenade images. I won’t know for sure, obviously, but I can make a guesstimate as to where he’s Shifting points. When I think it’s worth the chance, I’ll call Starshot to unleash hell.
“You just worry about playing your roles, and the rest will take care if itself. First, we need to worry about the mayor. Without kicking off a crisis event, we won’t last. Chaos is the ocean we’ll need to swim in, and the only one deep enough to drown Leviathan.”
Twenty-Four
Bait
“Be more dramatic than you think you need to be,” I said, directing the statement toward Atlas.
“Why you looking at me?”
“Because I’ve seen this one play earnest,” I said, nodding toward Starshot, who looked slightly embarrassed. “At least, I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt in saying she was playing. Either way, she doesn’t need any pointers in the roleplay department.”
Atlas didn’t respond and Starshot smiled nervously, switching her eyes from me to her prospective acting partner.
“You ready, big guy?” she asked.
Atlas didn’t immediately respond. Instead, he fixed his eyes on me. It seemed as though he were trying to guess at something, perhaps to see if he could discover one last trick I was playing on the lot of them. I decided to speak up to break the tension.
“Work up to it. Drag it out. Remember, the longer you take, the longer we have.”
“And if Leviathan shows up before you’re ready?”
“He won’t,” I said, confident. “A low-level—” I caught myself as Atlas and Starshot both made sour faces, “relatively speaking, of course – dust-up in Heroes’ Square won’t get his attention if he’s off the clock. Meteora holds no love for Starshot – no offense.” She shrugged in response. “Getting her attention will be a welcome distraction for us. Would have been better if she wasn’t online, but we’ll have to make do. The idea is for Starshot to engage Atlas before Meteora can. Besides, she’ll have a hard time perming you out in the open, even if she does decide to get involved. Not with so many witnesses. Blackstrike and I will nab the mayor. Once we have him, the crisis event will trigger, and the server will be flooded with glorious chaos in the form of players.”
After a few awkward moments that stretched long enough to make even Blackstrike shift from foot to foot, Atlas grunted an affirmation and turned toward the south side of the rooftop, away from Heroes’ Square.
“But I’m warning you,” he said as he walked, “any of those beams do more than a point or two of damage, and we’re going to be a long way from play-acting.”
“Loud and clear,” Starshot said to his back. She tossed me a wink and levitated, energy flickering off the bottoms of her white boots and white-gloved palms with yellow tongues. Her eyes went milky and then lost their centers to the bright yellow light that enveloped her. She shot up and carved a path north, away from Atlas, the force of her passing kicking up sparking gray dust that had Blackstrike, Luther and I shielding our eyes and covering our mouths.
I watched Starshot until she disappeared into the brightening blue sky. The sun was arcing higher in the east, casting the great shadow of Gallant Tower straight ahead so that it bathed the center of the square and the steps leading down to the park in late-morning gloom.
“Everyone in?” I asked Luther. I was always catching him mid-grumble, but I thought I was starting to be able to parse one from another. “In the tower, I mean. Are Spunky and her crew in position?”
“Spunky?” he growled, annoyed at having to use full words.
“Lyza,” I clarified.
“Yes.”
“And our gear?”
“C4 accounted for,” Luther said, doing his final checks over his bags and satchels for what I doubted was the final time. “Comms,” he pointed at the bud in his ear, “accounted for.”
That was a relief. I had forgotten to remind Atlas and Starshot to check theirs and saw Blackstrike doing so now.
“Who said Madam Post never gave us anything?” I smiled.
“That old crow will do anything that has a chance at improving her bottom line,” Blackstrike said.
“Wouldn’t we all?”
He shrugged and nodded, then rolled his eyes as I opened my mouth to speak.
“You really going to ask me if I’m ready?” Blackstrike asked in that venomous tone of his. “If I’m ready to storm Gallant Tower and capture the mayor in order to trigger a crisis event, during which I’m meant to help take down the most powerful hero in Titan Online?”
When I didn’t immediately answer, Blackstrike looked at me. His eyes were emotionless, but after seeing the effect he had on me, he actually cracked a smile.
“Screw it,” he said, extending his hand. I took it and returned his smile. We shook firmly, and it was the first time I felt a true kinship with the lord of the chemical towers of War Town.
“There he is now,” I said, nodding toward the square below.
Atlas strode right up the south-facing steps and cleared the top of the platform with little fanfare. A few NPC citizens waved at him, thinking his shining silver armor heralded the arrival of one of the city’s newest defenders. As for the few heroes that were flying or otherwise milling about, they were on their own quest logs, so they paid the would-be hero little mind.
When he crossed the threshold separating the sun-bleached stones on the south side of the square with the shaded gray tiles in the center, some of the NPCs’ looks changed. His armor went from shining to dull, leading more passersby to look him in the eyes. Whatever they saw there, whatever they sensed, gave them panicked expressions. Atlas slowed his deliberate pace and regarded them like a lion walking among the sheep, taking his time in selecting which to kill first, and how quickly to do it.
Their footsteps quickened.
Finally, Atlas came to a stop in the middle of the square and made a show of looking around. There were security guards dressed in blue standing beneath Gallant Tower, closest to the tinted glass doors. They eyed one another and straightened, their demeanors going from relaxed to tense as Atlas turned to face them. Or rather, as he turned to face the tower.
The great brute stood there for a long minute, staring, and the guards got on their radios and motioned for one another to either advance on the outskirts of the square or to hold back and wait until Atlas made his move. So far, he hadn’t done anything untoward, other than set off every latent mental alarm of every NPC within a quarter mile in any direction. There were a fe
w heroes scattered about him. Some were standing on the edges of the square – lower-tier heroes, most likely – using it as a sort of intro lobby, while others were lounging in the gardens nearby.
“Okay,” Blackstrike said, “he’s about to do it.”
I watched, resisting the urge to lick my lips as the beginnings of my crazy plan went into motion.
My eyes darted from the tower lobby to the federal building across the way, where Bartol and company would be preparing to unleash holy hell onto Heroes’ Square. On my command. All of it on my command.
One last look at my Sphere before go-time.
Sphere of Influence – 20/20
Single-Slot Members
1) Hobb 2) Brooks 3) Sascha 4) Kayde
5) Ratchet 6) Maria 7) Ruslan 8) Brock
9) Yuri 10) Reichert 11) Kay
Multi-Slot Members
Luther Smith (5 Slots)
Lyza (2 Slots)
Bartol (2 Slots)
Bartol had led a small group, including Hobb, Ratchet and Sascha, to the federal building across the way. They had the Shock Spears equipped, and now that Luther had made his modifications, they were a threat from a distance – or at least another means of healthy distraction and disruption. As for Lyza, she led the rest, including Brooks, Kayde and Maria, into Gallant Tower, where they were waiting for Atlas’s admittedly crass signal.
As for the big man…
Atlas pounded one meaty fist into the other, his breastplate rattling against its buckles loud enough for us to hear up on the roof. Now, the NPC guards started to circle him. Two approached from the front, each of them holding one hand out toward Atlas as they reached back into their navy-blue waistbands.
“Now, now, big fella,” one of them said, his voice fuzzy over Atlas’s comms. He had salt-and-pepper hair poking out like dry straw from under a black baseball cap with a white insignia. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“Name’s Atlas,” the big man rumbled. He turned a wicked smile on the security chief, “but ‘Trouble’ ain’t far off.”
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