Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  It was a contingent of lesser heroes that joined the fray, now. It was as though the tougher fighters were staggering their attacks, to ensure that just the right amount of force was being exerted to keep Leviathan on his heels, taking the maximum amount of damage while being prevented from taking out too many capes at once. These three were clearly members of the same team, flying in formations, moving in sync. Two of them had super strength, and were gripping at the damaged areas of Leviathan’s flesh, tearing, pulling away as he lashed out in response, while the third had a massive battleaxe with what looked like a chainsaw setup on each blade, opening more wounds. The damage was superficial, only taking off slices of Leviathan’s hide, but surely stripping away his hard exterior would help in the long run?

  The armband directed me to someone that was already getting assistance. An obese cape in armor, getting CPR from a man with a princess-bride style mask over the upper half of his head, a goatee, a chainmail lined mantle and a shotgun three times the normal size. He didn’t know what he was doing – the fat man’s chin was almost touching his collarbone.

  When I moved to take over, Shotgun Westley left without a word, wiping his mouth and unslinging his gun as he ran back to the fray. I was irritated.

  Hew down, CD-5.

  It was my first time giving CPR for real. So much harder than it was in the class, on so many levels. I don’t know if it was the fat man’s powers, his weight, his armor, or some combination of the three, but it took incredible effort to actually fill his lungs. Just doing it made me want to gag. He’d vomited a little at some point, and though I’d wiped it away as best as I could when I was done checking his mouth for blockages, the taste lingered. The taste of salt water only accented that flavor, sort of the same way table salt did with a cooked meal.

  Strapping Lad down, CD-5. Intrepid down, CD-5.

  I was aware of Narwhal stepping into the fray, in my peripheral vision. She raised her hands, manifesting a dozen forcefields like oversize crystal shards around her, then flicked them forward. Like guillotine blades, the forcefields raced toward Leviathan, faster than the eye could follow, sunk into his flesh. Those that glanced off stopped mid-air to turn around, edges against his body, getting in the way of his legs moving.

  There was a horrendous crash, I looked up, pausing to catch my breath, saw the remains of a car falling apart around Leviathan. Another crash, a piece of rubble turning to dust from the speed of the impact. I couldn’t see through the bodies, but I had an idea of who it was. Ballistic.

  A dumpster hit Leviathan in the upper body with the speed of a bullet, and he folded backward, his shoulders hitting the ground while his legs and feet were still held against the ground by a mess of razor blade forcefields. Narwhal sent another forcefield flying into his neck, and it cut as deep as any attack had yet. Blood spilled down from the opened wound, thick, more like ichor than anything I was used to seeing.

  I heaved another breath of air into the lungs of the fat man, he sputtered, coughed up a mouthful of dark water. I knew I was supposed to follow up on the CPR, but there was no way I could move or roll this guy.

  Unable to do anything but wait and see if he recovered, I raised my head to watch the continuing battle, feeling just a touch dizzy.

  The ranged attack continued. Miss Militia had a bazooka as long as she was tall, and was firing a series of warheads into Leviathan. She wasn’t reloading, either. Between shots, the weapon crackled with energy, fresh ammunition loaded into the chamber by her power. One projectile fired off each second.

  There was the girl with the crossbow, who had been with Shadow Stalker. She had a teammate next to her, handing her the needle-like bolts from a quiver, was loading them into the large crossbow and firing them as fast as she was able. More than any other attack, the bolts were stabbing deep into Leviathan.

  The attacks were actually having an effect. He was on the defensive, now, and he was hurting.

  We’re winning, I thought.

  A flash to my left caught my eye.

  It was my armband. The screen was ringed by a square of yellow, a yellow triangle with a black exclamation mark pointing in Leviathan’s general direction.

  People were shouting. Screaming, Narwhal was moving forcefields up in between us and Leviathan, other forcefields were going up.

  “To me!” someone near me shouted. I turned to look, saw Shielder from New Wave.

  Tidal Wave.

  The fat man’s eyes weren’t even open, he moved too slowly as I shook him.

  There was no helping it.

  I gave the fat man one backwards glance, and bolted for Shielder. I mouthed an apology I didn’t have the breath to utter, more for my conscience than for the man I hadn’t saved.

  Shielder waited until the last second to erect his cerulean bubble around himself. I caught a glimpse of one cape, a step too slow, getting trapped on the outside, a half second before the wave hit. Crushed against the exterior of the solid-light forcefield by the onrushing waters.

  I’d been in an earthquake before. A three on the Richter scale, brief. I’d been at home, and a check of the house afterward only found a few books knocked off the shelf, a mirror fallen from the wall in the front hall. This was a hundred times more intense, the water rolling over us, against the nearby buildings, making the ground shudder.

  For one brief moment, we were submerged, currents running past Shielder’s bubble. water in front of us, to either side, behind and above. Outside the translucent bubble, I saw a massive dark shape zip past us, saw Shielder fall to his knees, as though the force of the water against the bubble in Leviathan’s wake was nearly more than he could bear.

  Heavy casualties, please wait, a chorus of identical voices announced, coming from the armbands of those ten or twelve of us in the bubble. Telling us that we’d just taken losses so heavy that the Dragon’s computer system couldn’t or wouldn’t list them all.

  The water surging around us stopped abruptly, evaporated into a mist in a second. Swirling, the mist began drifting.

  Myrddin, working with Eidolon. They stood in the center of the road, Eidolon turning the water into mist, while Myrddin gathered it. Myrddin’s wooden stick was held aloft, and the mist was forming a sphere the size of a beachball at one end.

  Ok, I could almost buy the wizard angle, seeing that.

  Leviathan leaped from the roof of a nearby building, landing in the midst of one group that was still reeling from the wave, started tearing through them.

  The armbands remained ominously silent, even as I watched the casualties.

  Myrddin pointed his staff and launched that orb at Leviathan. It hit harder than anything yet, and the brute was sent flying into the interior of a nearby building.

  “Seal him off!” someone shouted. Chevalier. “Make him come back our way!”

  Forcefields went up around the exterior of the building. The building itself bulged and warped as Vista exerted her power, thickened the walls, made the middle floors of the building draw together slightly, a slight hourglass shape. I saw her, wet and worn out, one hand raised, shouting something I couldn’t make out at one of the out-of-town Wards. The Ward was speaking into his armband, replaying some message.

  Depart from the rooftops, buildings may come down imminently, my armband announced.

  Flying capes left the roof of the building, each carrying someone. They were still leaving as Leviathan lunged through the side of the building and the forcefields that had been reinforcing the walls. He tried to retreat, was stalled by more forcefields. I saw a figure on the far side. Bastion. The hero who had been in the news over his racist tirade.

  Bastion bellowed, “Do it!”

  Leviathan lunged, crashed through one barrier, making it shatter like glass, only for another to appear immediately after. He turned to head our way, was stopped by another.

  “Fucking do it!” Bastion called out, barely audible.

  The building above him bent and the midsection, unable to support the upper fl
oors, crumbled. The upper half of the building crashed down atop Leviathan and Bastion.

  Vista turned, wrapping her arms around the Ward next to her, burying her face in his shoulder.

  “Move forward!” Armsmaster called out, “He’s going to want to escape to recover! We can not let him!”

  Leviathan had more than halved our ranks with the wave. I could see people face down in the water. Others were crumped up, their bodies contorted, broken, still.

  And the damage to the city was just as bad, in a different way. I stared at the wreckage, the block and a half of shattered buildings, and saw a looming mess of arches and massive iron beams and girders, unable to comprehend what it was.

  It dawned on me. The PHQ. The headquarters of our local superteam, tourist attraction, torn from whatever fixtures had rooted it in place, smashed to ruins against our coastline.

  The Armband spoke. Losses are as follows: Debaser, Ascendant, Gallant, Zigzag, Prince of Blades, Vitiator, Humble, Halo, Whirlygig, Night, Crusader, Uglymug, Victor, Furrow, Barker, Elegance, Quark, Pelter, Snowflake, Ballistic, Mama Bear, Mister Eminent, Flashbang, Biter…

  The names kept coming. I almost wanted to cover my ears, but not knowing for sure was worse.

  …Cloister, Narwhal, Vixen, The Dart, Geomancer, Oaf, Tattletale…

  The recitation continued, but I was numb to them. Tattletale? I started, looked around, as if I could find her. Where had she been?

  No, what I suddenly really wanted to know was what the armband meant by losses. Were all those people dead? Was Tattletale dead? Why wasn’t the armband directing me to help someone? Was there no point, or were our numbers so reduced we couldn’t afford to?

  I could hope it was the latter, but having seen some of the injuries I had, it didn’t make me feel better. It was almost worse, thinking that Tattletale might by lying somewhere, bleeding out or unable to breathe, not getting help.

  “Be ready!” Armsmaster called out.

  Leviathan heaved himself up out of the building’s remains in one motion, used his tail to pick up and fling a mess of broken wood, concrete and rebar at us. Aegis threw himself into the cluster of projectiles, but two capes were struck down by smaller chunks. A third was folded in half by the arc of water from Leviathan’s tail.

  Brigandine deceased, CD-5.

  I couldn’t afford to dwell on what might have happened to Tattletale. I wiped beads of water from the lenses of my mask with my gloved hands, pushed my hair out of my face, and made a note of my bugs. There were scant few in the way of bugs that could navigate in this storm. Myrddin had banished the water from the wave, somehow, but the downpour was making the streets flood fast enough that I didn’t trust anything to crawl. No, my power was dead useless, here.

  Leviathan turned around, lashing his tail behind him to cast three lashes of water our way, then crouched.

  “He’s running!” someone called out.

  Leviathan dashed away from us, fast, only to skid to a stop and turn a corner for cover as Legend, Lady Photon, Laserdream and a half dozen other heroes opened fire from the skies above.

  Others had picked themselves up, were moving into the side streets and alleys to follow, intent on cutting him off. I looked around, glancing over at the injured and wounded, knowing Tattletale was among them.

  Eidolon was staying behind, raising his hands, and green sparks began rising from the ground, clustering around Eidolon and the fallen, obscuring them.

  A second later, he and half of the bodies that had been scattered around the battlefield disappeared, the sparks blooming outward in twenty small firework explosions.

  I took that as my cue to join everyone else in the pursuit. Eidolon could help the wounded. I couldn’t, really.

  I ran after the others, nearly tripping into a pothole in my hurry. My armband showed a green icon for Leviathan, and I followed it.

  Rounding a corner, I came up at the rear of a small crowd, perilously close to the Endbringer.

  Fog was blocking one route, while Sundancer stood at another, her superheated orb between her and Leviathan. The remaining capes were divided between the other two possible alleys Leviathan might have moved through and the air above him. Legend was hammering Leviathan down to the pavement with a series of laser blasts.

  “Care!” Miss Militia cried out, “Fire in the hole!”

  She fired a shot from her grenade launcher, grabbed another grenade with a blinking LED from her vest and loaded it into her gun. Why? She’d shown with the bazooka that she didn’t need to load ammunition, hadn’t she?

  Then I realized why. It wasn’t the kind of ammunition you found in normal guns. The first shot exploded into a mess of golden sticky ribbon, familiar, though it somehow escaped my memory where I’d seen it. The second exploded in midair, near Leviathan’s shoulder, leaving the tips of the scales and one gaping wound glinting like crystal. As Leviathan moved to recoil, the edges of the crystal separated from his flesh and seeped with that dark ichor.

  The third was a modified explosive I recognized. It bounced off the ground between Leviathan’s foot and the hand he had planted on the ground, landed a ways behind and to the side of him, and exploded much like any other grenade might. What I recognized was the shimmer in the air around it, a near perfect sphere encompassing the surrounding area, catching Leviathan’s leg, the end of his tail, part of his waist and stomach.

  The explosion made Leviathan rear back, and the water that followed in his wake moved slower in that bubble, slowed down with each passing second.

  Leviathan himself wasn’t as affected, and he had one foot and an upper body outside of the bubble to help him pull himself free. He raised his leg free of the golden string goop and up out of the sphere, lashed his tail toward the crowd I was at the back of, catching three people, entwining the tip around their arms, legs and necks. He flicked them into the center of the time distortion bubble, where they got caught, unable to make their exit fast enough to avoid being frozen in time.

  Jotun deceased, CD-6. Dauntless deceased, CD-6. Alabaster deceased, CD-6.

  He lashed his tail, sending out a scythelike blade of water toward the other group, turned and leaped.

  Miss Militia down, CD-6.

  Fenja and Menja moved to attack him, each tall enough to be at his shoulder level, but Leviathan was quicker. He darted backward, gripped the side of a building, and turned to run up the wall. He used his tail to radically adjust the angle of his ascent, hooking it on an open window and swinging himself forward over the edge of the roof, before anyone on the ground could get a bead on him. Debris fell where his tail had pulled through a section of the wall.

  Though he’d disappeared from my line of sight, I saw his afterimage continue rising. Shielder, floating in the air with the help of his sister, used a forcefield to stop the pair of them from being pulverized. The shield flickered out of existence a fraction of a second later. His reserves were exhausted, after helping save me and others from the last wave. He wasn’t strong enough to take a hit from Leviathan or his afterimage.

  Legend fired a barrage of lasers at Leviathan, but the Endbringer was quick to hop to one side, landing on the roof’s edge. He made a sudden, standing leap a good eighty or a hundred feet into the air, tail extending to reach for the airborne heroes.

  The whiplike tail struck Legend, and there was a firework display of light and sparks, Legend tumbling out of the sky, head over heels. In the same movement, the tail reached for Laserdream and Shielder.

  Legend down, CD-6, The armbands announced, just in time to coincide with Legend hitting the ground.

  Laserdream put her own shield up, and I could remember how Photon Mom, Laserdream and Shielder all had the same basic powers. The difference between them was that while Photon Mom’s powers were well rounded, Shielder had a far, far, better forcefield, almost no flight ability and weak laser blasts. Laserdream was the opposite… her lasers and flight were good enough, but her forcefield, not so much.

  Leviathan wr
apped his tail around the spherical forcefield that surrounded the siblings, bringing it and the pair down toward the roof as he fell. When they were halfway down, the constriction of the tail broke through the forcefield, snaked around Shielder’s body and Laserdream’s arm.

  The Endbringer landed on the roof with a shuddering impact and a showering of detritus, crashing through the roof. He bounded up to the edge of the roof, lunged off it.

  I could see it like it was slow motion. Laserdream’s hand glowed and she fired, using the concussive force of her laser to get her trapped hand free, flew up and back out of the way as Leviathan continued to fall.

  Shielder, still in Leviathan’s grip, had his upper body brought down against the ragged edge of the building in passing.

  Shielder deceased, CD-6

  Laserdream’s ragged scream was like something distant, something I was barely aware of, because Leviathan was landing back in the area where the two alleys met. He leaped in Sundancer’s direction, caught the ground with the claws of his hands and feet to halt his momentum. His echo surged forward, some striking the superheated orb, where it blossomed into massive clouds of steam. The rest went low, catching Sundancer below the waist, sweeping her legs out from under her in one violent rush. She flipped forward, her upper body colliding with the ground. The miniature sun winked out of existence.

  Sundancer down, CD-6.

  Turning on the spot, Leviathan moved his claw, creating a wave with all of the water he’d generated since entering the alley, driving it into one of the two gathered groups. As those capes stumbled and fell back, Leviathan leaped over the time distortion bubble, landing at the front of the other group. The group with some of the local wards, Velocity, some of Empire Eighty-Eight, and out-of-town capes I couldn’t name.

  The group I was at the rear of.

  Someone stepped up to grab him mid-lunge – some woman I didn’t recognize, who Othala was touching. She was granting this woman some form of invincibility that let her take a hit and not get knocked away by Leviathan.

  Invincible though she might be, she couldn’t do anything to stop the afterimage from crashing against and around her, through our assembled ranks.