by wildbow
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 terms 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 detonation, 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.
Interlude 24 (Donation Bonus #1)
“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.”
“I… my arm,” Wanton said, lamely.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor responded.
“No, it’s like… I should feel worse, but I don’t. Maybe it’s the drugs, but I feel this rush, like I’ve never been so glad to be alive. I’m pumped.”
“You may be in shock,” the doctor observed.
“We’re all in shock,” Tecton said.
There were murmurs of agreement across the helicopter.
“Is anyone else a little freaked out?” Cuff asked.
“Freaked out?” the doctor asked.
Cuff shook her head, not responding. Her attention had shifted to her arm, as the doctor bound it.
Tecton ventured a reply instead. “I think I understand what Cuff means. It’s hard to believe he’s gone. It’s like, you’re five years old, and Leviathan appears for the first time, and your parents have to explain that a bunch of people died, and it’s because of these monsters and yet nobody has figured out why.”
“Yeah,” Cuff said. “What happens next? Leviathan or the Simurgh? We kill them? Stop them from blowing up or doing their version of blowing up? I can’t really imagine that we’d beat them, give our all and hope that Scion shows up and fights like that again, kill them, and then have everything be okay.”
“You just got powers, barely a month ago, and you’re already this grim?” Wanton asked.
“I’ve been dealing with the aftermath of the Endbringer attacks for a while,” Cuff said. Her eyes were on the floor, and an expression of pain crossed her face as the doctor cut away a tag of burned skin on her shoulder. The scar was like a snowflake carved into the skin’s surface, angry and red. Her arm seemed to tremble involuntarily.
“It’s okay to worry,” Tecton said. He gestured towards Weaver. “Weaver said as much. They’ve got a nasty habit of escalating, in the fights themselves and in the grand scheme of things. Behemoth got too predictable, so Leviathan started to show up. We started to coordinate defenses, get the world on board to deal with them, Simurgh comes.”
“And now we killed one, so how do they escalate from there?” Grace asked.
“It’s a concern,” Tecton said. “And it’s one that people all around the world are going to be discussing. Rely on them. Don’t take the full weight of the world onto your shoulders. We fought, you guys made a good show of it,” Tecton said.
“I could’ve done more,” Cuff said.
“You’re new. Inexperienced, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. As far as jumping in with both feet first, you guys managed it. You, Golem, Annex, you stood up there, shoulder to shoulder with veteran heroes, and you fought, even though you’re roo
kies. You have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of, okay?”
Cuff didn’t reply.
“Okay?” Tecton asked.
“When my family got killed in Hawaii, I made promises to myself. It’s why I came. I don’t feel like I did enough, to fulfill my own end of those promises.”
“There’s always next time,” Tecton said.
“You say that like it’s a good thing,” Wanton said.
“Yeah. Shit,” Grace muttered. “It’s not quite over yet, right?”
“Right,” Tecton said. “But there’s time before the next one. Let people in the know handle the worrying. We did everything we could. Now we recuperate. We celebrate, because was deserve to. We take the time to heal.”
In response to the glances cast his way, Wanton waved his stump around. “Going to take getting used to. Getting dressed, eating…”
He moved the stump in the direction of his lap, jerked it up and down.
Cuff looked and squeaked in embarrassment before averting her eyes.
“…writing,” Wanton finished, a goofy smile on his face.
“Your handwriting must be awful,” Golem said.
There were chuckles here and there from among the group. Even the nurse tending to Cuff smiled.
“We did good,” Tecton said. “And some people will recognize that. Others are gonna see all the bad that happened in New Delhi and point fingers. Be ready in case you fall under the crosshairs.”
There were nods from the rest of the Chicago Wards.
Tecton glanced at Weaver, then back to his team. “What do you think?”
“You have to ask?” Grace asked.
“You weren’t keen at the idea at first,” Tecton replied.
“I’m still not, not a hundred percent. But whatever little doubts I have, it’s kind of a no-brainer.”
“Yep,” Wanton said.
“Golem?” Tecton asked. “Have you even talked to her about it?”
“I’m a little scared to,” the boy said. “I mean…”
He glanced at the doctor.
“Everything here is confidential,” Tecton said.
“Well, given my past, the people I was with before I came here, I’m worried there’s hard feelings. They were in the same city. I don’t know what exactly happened. What if one of them did something to Weaver or her friends? Is she the type to hold a grudge?”