by Simon Archer
Its friends were much smaller but just as wicked looking. They were the winged ones, half-human, half-pterosaur, and there were so many of them that they formed a green cloud around the giganto-saur. It was like a blight of claws and wings that now swept out in front of the big one as it started to stride out of the wreckage.
And then came the realization that there were six of these giant beasts, each with their own harbingers of death.
“Nick,” Matt growled over the comms, “I know you wanted to hold your power in reserve but…”
“No, Matt,” I got out in disbelief. “If I were holding onto it for the right moment, I think this is that moment.”
Lioness glanced sidelong at me, concern bleeding through her stoic demeanor. “Nicholas, please say you have a plan… because I cannot think of one.”
I took a deep breath as I reached out to the boundless power inside me. She was right in that we needed a plan. My first instinct was just to power up and tear into them, but while that might work to take the big ones out, I couldn’t even take out that entire mass of winged ones before they harmed or killed countless civvies. I focused myself and forced myself to think, and the plan became clear, well, as clear as it could be in these dire straits.
“Okay, Valcav, Kai-lao, listen up,” I announced as I touched my power and opened the floodgates. As it surged through my veins and muscles, my mind and body sped up, and my senses expanded to take in everything around us. “I can take the big guy, but I need everyone else to keep saving innocents and thinning out the flying monkey squad. Aylin and any of you Kai-lao girls who can shift to flying forms, intercept them before they do too much damage.”
“What about me?” Kristen chimed in. “I can take this whole damn shell into battle and tear them apart.”
With my super speed, I was already up and off before she had finished talking. “No, keeping anyone we rescue safe is our top priority. I’m counting on you to do that. Everyone that can’t fly, huddle up on the shell, because that will be a big target for these guys, I’m sure. Kara, reconfigure your boxes for some big explosions, we’re going to need that!”
I was going so fast that before I had finished talking myself, I was punching through the cloud of winged Androsaurs. Just because I could, I let out a pulse of force through my body in an omnidirectional jolt that pulped a hole clear in them. As the first of them fell from the sky, a resounding chorus of acknowledgments from our combined team rattled off in my ear.
From my new aerial vantage point, I could see that the other teams were struggling to respond as well to this new threat. However, unlike us, they seemed determined to face it on their own and in their own way. The Brand had cut a bloody swath into the heart of the city, no doubt racking up a huge amount of offensive points, and seemed all the more eager to dive onto one of the goliaths with Akemi leading the charge.
Carter, meanwhile, had taken the site defense approach. Along the north side of the town, they occupied a cluster of the red-marked high-value buildings, Switch maintaining multiple portals to allow them to swap members quickly between buildings. While the bulk of the team kept the buildings safe, Oliver was doing the same as I was, flying towards one of the big Androsaurs as his now completely refurbished power suit expanded to show off more guns, missiles, and blasters than a battalion of troops.
Krona and Osata were another story, because it was clear whatever strategy they were going for was falling apart. All that they could manage now was to fight an organized retreat under the new wave of monstrous beasts. If we could take down our two big guys, I swore we’d see if we could rescue them as well.
With that, I put the rest out of my mind, confident that my friends and our allies could pull out the rest, and focused on the big boy in front of me. While I had power that was only limited by how much I could take flowing through me, I was still only the size of a human, and despite what they say, size sometimes does matter. No matter how hard I punched or blasted, the point of impact and area of effect was tiny compared to this monster. If I could have, I’d have thrown the thing into orbit, but even if I could somehow throw something that was a billion times my size and as unwieldy as a giant beast like this, the arena had a ceiling. I’d take out that ceiling and rain rock and stone down on the cityscape and the people in it.
“Right now, I wish Gemma was here,” I muttered below my breath as I did the best thing I could to amplify my attack by summoning up a shaped cone of energy, much like an arrowhead. As I burst through the swarm of flyers, I put on the speed and aimed right for what I figured would be the heart of the blood-red beastie. With a target this huge and with how fast I was going, there was no chance of missing, and a split-second later, I drilled into it.
At that moment, I could only liken it to the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object. The arrow of force plowed into diamond-hard scale and thick skin with me right behind it, and my world was blood, oil, tissue, and steel… but after a moment of digging in, my penetrating strike was slowed, and I could feel the entire monster take one big step backward before steadying itself.
I had no idea how much damage I’d actually caused, but I was set to maximize it. My vision turned ruby-red as I focused a long, sweeping pulse of laser light through my eyes, and for those moments of light, I got a clear view of the disgusting mess of muscle, bone, scale, metal, and electronics I was drilled into. The stink of seared flesh filled my nose as I raked my twin beams back and forth, slicing and cauterizing a huge chunk out of it… but that was only by my perspective.
“Ol’ Nickie laid the smackdown, but Big Lizzie just keeps comin’!” Eric commentated in my ear as thunder accompanied him.
“Now’s not the time for the wrestling shtick, as amusing as it is,” Kristen shot back. “Nick, you’re hurting him, but you’re just a very tiny bullet to this guy.”
I grunted as I pulled out, making sure to spin my body with arms outstretched as I felt, just to widen the wound a tad more. “Copy that. I guess I’m going to have to go in the hard way.”
As I ripped free of the massive monster’s chest, I got a clear view of our team going to town on them. Between Kara’s technopathy and Kristen’s magnetic manipulation, they had transformed the turtle shell into a rocket-launcher-toting tank. Considering Kristen had made it mostly out of wrecked hover-cars and bikes, it was a giant lump of parts for Kara to shape. High explosive shells exploded amid the flying beasts, taking out clumps at a time, while Eric’s lightning fell like the finger of God into the midst of them. Aylin was flying point of a multi-colored formation of monstrously huge eagles, exploding through Androsaurs like a glowing comet as the Kai-lao girls spread out to pick off stragglers. Anything that managed to get past that ran into Matt and Andie, a whirlwind of stretchy mallet fists and werewolf claws.
Excellent. Now, all I had to do was deliver on my end. Though my initial attack hadn’t been a telling blow, it must have still hurt like a son of a bitch, because Big Lizzie, as Eric had coined it, was entirely focused on me. With mass totally not being on my side, I spiraled around a huge claw swipe as I flew upward toward its head.
The only way I figured to take this thing down at this point was to get inside its body, get at its softer internal organs or robotics or whatever. Now, I saw two options to do that, and both involved the head. I could either try plowing right through its eye to get to where I hoped its brain would be, something that might prove harder than I thought but was safe to me… or I could go in the easy-yet-probably-really-painful way.
“Fuck it,” I growled to myself. I could deal with pain if it meant taking Big Lizzie out faster before it did even more damage than it already had.
With that in mind, I sped up past its clawed arms and twisted around its head. One of those car-sized golden eyes tracked my movement as it let out another bone-shaking roar. Just to make sure I had its attention, I reared back both arms, flattened my palms, then slammed my hands together as I pushed power through them.
The concussive shockwa
ve exploded out from my hand clap, backed by a surge of raw energy from my powers. As that wave raced through the air, every last bit of smoke, dust, and debris was stripped from the sky, and for blocks around, every last bit of glass still intact shattered as a few still-functional car alarms went off for good measure. More importantly, the tremendous blast of sound and fury made Big Lizzie flinch, its eyes squinting shut for a moment as it tried to regain its sense.
And then, I waited, hovering in the perfect spot to say ‘Hey, big boy, I’d be a great snack.’ It only took a split-second for the mighty Androsaur to recover, and when it did, it took the bait. Which was me. By biting it with teeth the size of a house.
I was ready for it, of course, as I surrounded myself with what I realized in retrospect was a pill-shaped field of energy. Not to say that it still didn’t suck. My shields only held from the intense pressure for a few moments, but the fact that it tanked the initial chomp probably saved my life. Thankfully, I’d already accounted for the size differential. While those teeth were razor sharp against something its size, Big Lizzie’s teeth were more like a car crusher to me than scything blades. It wasn’t much better, but my invulnerability seemed more effective against crushing force and large impacts, as Matt had proven to me in the past.
The end result was that I felt like I had been run through a trash compactor, then dropped into surprisingly antiseptic and gooey darkness. Again, to give Dad credit, this thing seemed to have a full mock-up of a digestive tract, which I was now sliding into. My uniform sizzled as the robot equivalent of digestive juices covered me, and even with my super senses, it was hard to make heads or tails of anything.
So, I didn’t bother. Everything around me felt squishy, so I simply focused all the power I could draw up inside of me, putting my faith in my own healing factor and invulnerability to take care of the acid. Once I had gathered up every last bit of energy I could, I let it go in one full-power radial explosion. The picture I concentrated on in my mind was a nuke going off, and while I have no idea if the blast was even close to one, the effect it had was rather dramatic.
Where there had once been squishy flesh, goopy acid, and utter darkness, there was now the flash of pure, unadulterated energy all around me. That flash set off a cascade of bursts as the raw force passed through the giant lizard’s artificial flesh, then as the tissue around me fried and pulped from the ever-expanding blast, the explosion hit something important. I’m not sure what, maybe a fuel cell or its internal reactor or something, but it was highly volatile, that much was certain.
Everything, and I mean everything, exploded around me. Gore, blood, tissue, and viscera blew outward, and the backlash of the explosion hit me as well, throwing me ass over teakettle into the air.
Oh, right. I was able to be thrown up into the air… because the entire top half of the dinosaur was now blown across a five-block radius. Bone, scale, and robot parts rained down like the world’s shittiest parade confetti, and despite the churning in my gut from all the spinning, I forced myself to stop in mid-air and find my bearings.
“My God,” Kara whispered in my ear, “you blew it up. Like… all of it.”
I didn’t pause to bask in the glory of the moment as I looked down on the ruined pile of gore that was Big Lizzie. I couldn’t, because I only had eight minutes of power, and there were more of those giants to topple.
“And there’s five more to go,” I replied as I let out a slow breath. “Let’s get to it, team.”
23
When I thought back on it, the last eighteen minutes of the defense event was a messy blur. Eight of those involved taking giant dinosaurs apart from the inside out, though to be fair to the other academies, I didn’t have to kill all of them. Both the Brand and Carter found a way to take down their respective beasties, and while I bailed out Krona and Osata, the rest of my team and Kai-lao took down the last beast together.
As I said, I knew I could trust them to figure it out and win the day.
After that, I barely had the juice to get back to my friends and get under the Kristen-Kara turtle-tank before the power left me. The crash was hard this time, harder than it usually was, but then again, I had burned way more power and taken harder hits than usual. The last time I had been forced to strain so hard was with Petey, and that was enough of a thought that I took Kara’s worried encouragement to sit back a minute and let her and the team take the lead for the rest of the fight.
“S’not often I get to rest on my laurels,” I managed to get out as Kristen shaped a bench in the side of the shell for me to lay out on. “You jus’get the people to safety.”
Kara wiped the blood and sweat from my brow. “Don’t worry, Nick. Let us save the day for once.”
This time, I didn’t argue… though after a few minutes, I did force myself to get back up and get back to work. Honestly, I can’t really remember much of what I did, but one thing I was certain of, I was never so thankful to hear anything as that booming voice from mid-match echo over the field again.
“Your thirty minutes have ended. Congratulations, you have survived the defense event.”
All the remaining Androsaurs immediately went dormant, including the one I had been struggling with, and I did what I should have after taking out three multi-story tall monsters: I fell to my knees and just sat there to catch my breath.
“I want a vacation,” I gasped out as I leaned forward and put my hands on my thighs. “When we win this, I get like a month off, right?”
Instead of an answer, a floating form loomed over me for just a moment before grabbing me by the shoulders and pulling me up. I looked up to see a frowning Aylin staring back with her glowing eyes.
“Starlight,” she said in a strange mix of concern and chastisement, “you told me that I was to be strong when you could not be, and yet here you are, trying to punch a terribly strong lizard man when you are exhausted.” I tried to formulate a response, but before I could, Aylin pulled me into a hug and buried her face in my shoulder. “Please, promise me you will not risk yourself like that again! That is what I am here for.”
Kara giggled from behind me as Andie stretched her torso up so that she was level with our floating forms. “She’s got you there, Nick.”
“Well,” I muttered, “I didn't want to let you guys down when there was still time on the clock.” I glanced between my three lovely angels and let out a chuckle. “Okay, okay, I won’t do it again.”
Aylin pulled away just a bit, still holding on so I wouldn’t drop, then kissed me with abandon. I returned it to the accompaniment of a cheering, dancing Eric in the background.
“We did it!” he cried out. “We survived! We saved a crap ton of people!” He hugged Kristen, who accepted it with a grumble, then Blue Mouse, his Kai-lao partner who enthusiastically hugged him back, then he hopped to Matt, whose uniform was a tattered wreck and covered in blood and gore. He stopped Eric dead cold.
“No, man,” Matt grumbled. “Yay team and all that, but I am covered in more blood and oil and dust than I ever want to be. Not in the hugging mood.”
Aylin finally relented in taking me to the street, only to pass me off to both Kara and Andie, who both had their turns with me. For how sore, tired, and nasty I felt, I ended my cavalcade of hugs and kisses feeling a million times better. As I turned away from Kara, I thought I caught Kristen eyeing us with an intense stare, but I was so tired I couldn’t be sure. I was about to stagger over to her when White Lioness intercepted me, first snapping into a formal bow before holding out her hand to me.
“Nicholas, thank you for giving us the honor of fighting by your side,” she said with a smile. “Regardless of where we place, we, the 14th World’s Finest team of Kai-lao Academy, will cherish the memory of this battle.”
I gave her a tired smile and a hearty handshake. “No, thank you and your team, Lioness. We fought really well together, and it’s always great to make new friends. Hopefully, we’ll get a chance to do it again in the future.”
�
�I, er, we can only hope so.” Her golden cheeks dusted with a faint hint of a blush as she tried to force her face back to being serious again. “Though perhaps our next meeting will be not so friendly if we do make it to the nemesis tournament.”
“If so, I can’t wait for the opportunity to face off against a skilled opponent.” I contemplated saying something more, a lot more. Lioness was tough, dedicated, beautiful, and a brave leader… but I held my tongue for the moment. After all, I was still getting used to taking care of my Sun, Moon, and Stars.
In time, maybe… but for now…
I turned to my friends and took a deep breath. “Let’s get cleaned up and find out how well we actually did.”
“That’s an idea I won’t say no to,” Matt agreed with a laugh. “I hope we still have some spare uniforms. I’m going to need one.”
As we walked towards where the massive doors had opened back to the locker rooms, I nodded. “I don’t think you’re the only one, man. I got ate by a giant lizard today.”
We all got a good laugh at that one, a good, solid release after all the tension of the battle beforehand. The fact was that I wasn’t the only tired one. We had all been battling for thirty minutes straight, and I can tell you that using superpowers, whether physical, mental, spiritual, or whatever, tires you out. The only two of us that weren’t completely dragging their way into the showers were Matt and Kristen, taking advantage of their shared regenerative powers and the super endurance that granted.
The pounding hot water worked away the soreness and bruises while it got all the blood, slime, and goop off of my skin. As much as I wanted to know what the final results were, I didn’t rush from my steaming Nirvana. Instead, I reveled in the peacefulness of it and made sure every inch of my body was soaped, scrubbed, and clean.