A GAME OF FATE AND GAUSS
The Simurgh is the sort of adversary who cannot be allowed the time to react and adjust. So you don't give her one second longer than you have to. Redirecting your secondary power pool to teleportation, you focus for a few seconds, and appear less than a hundred feet from her. You need a second to readjust, shifting your power pool to mental super-speed and regeneration, and already you're blasting at her. She dodges effortlessly.
The next instant, tens of kilotons of magma and rocky debris assail you from every direction. Normally, being hit by kilotons of rock flying faster than a speeding bullet would be the sort of things you can ignore; in your current almost-dead state, this attack nearly kills you.
Thankfully, your mental super-speed is kicking in. With enough time to analyze your surroundings, you generate a force-field and barrel through the pile of asteroids and magma. The Simurgh is flying away… but she is not faster than you. Not even close.
You send another blast at her… noting, dejectedly, that she deflects the first one with an asteroid when it tries to home back in on her. Not good. She's adapting too quickly. You doubt any of your blasts will hit her unless they're backed by fate-control, but that power is a limited resource.
Hm. From your fight with Leviathan, you know an Endbringer's power remains just as deadly until its control core is destroyed… and you needed fate-control just to hit it on Leviathan, not knowing where it was located. But… it was late in the fight that you even learned, from Tattletale, about that particular Achiles's heel. Right now, if you get closer to the Simurgh, then you can scan her with your cosmic senses, hopefully detecting the control core… then combine that knowledge with fate-control to overcome her precognitive dodging, hopefully killing her with just one or two good hits!
...Assuming your fate-manipulation is good enough to actually land a hit on her. Otherwise, you'll have just wasted a shot.
Several pairs of eyes observed the battle.
"She's pulling all the stops to kill him," said Alexandria, "except that… he's still alive. Either she's planning something, or there's some blind spot of hers he can somehow exploit."
"More likely the former," Numbers Man commented. "Still, he's been extremely useful so far, and he doesn't seem to be winning. Is there a way for us to tip the balance?"
"If you have any suggestions, I'm listening, but I doubt it," said Doctor Mother. "Alexandria can't breath in space. Legend can only survive in a vacuum by staying in his travel form. Even Eidolon would only be able to assist by wasting one of his three powers on surviving the environment. Parahumans aren't designed for space battles.
"For now, best let Legend and Eidolon organize the heroes at Brockton Bay. If she kills the Avatar and comes back, at least we'll have our forces ready for her."
"And if he wins?"
"Well. It would raise a number of questions."
Without a planet Earth around you, and with mental acceleration on your side, it's hard to gauge the actual speed of everything happening around you. You see the broken planet looming "below", with the explosion's shockwave still travelling across its surface, ripping mountains away. Debris, molten and otherwise, is still careening across you at great speed, ranging from small pebbles and magma droplets to rocks the size of mountain ranges.
And ahead of you, the Simurgh elegantly navigates this veritable bullet hell. You're uncertain how much of that is her precognition allowing her to dodge, and how much is her telekinesis moving obstacles out of her path.
She's still flinging all sorts of projectiles your way, though. Thankfully, now that your mind is accelerated by orders of magnitude, you are able to dodge nearly as well as her.
More importantly, you are gaining on her. You are close enough that your cosmic awareness can sift through the Simurgh's structure; mental acceleration allows you to make sense of it much faster that you did with Leviathan. Your cosmic senses also detect, to your surprise, a small pod flying alongside her, protected by a force-field, carrying an unidentified adult human male.
Not that you are letting go of the offensive. Blast after blast, you're doing your best to keep the Simurgh on the ropes. She dodges them and blocks with asteroids, but hopefully, this is putting at least some strain on her.
She deflects your latest blast by placing a ferrous asteroid in its path - that bit might have been an iron mine on your world. As megatons of iron particles explode in every direction under the force of your attack, you keep analyzing the Simurgh's structure. By now, you're almost positive her control core isn't in her head or torso. Just a little while longer, and…
That train of thought is interrupted when you realize you're dying.
Well, rather, your injuries are getting worse faster than you're regenerating. You're inches away from death.
It's not hard to tell why. Your cosmic senses can detect billions of nanomachines coursing across the outer layers of your body, shredding it with some kind of energy fractal claws. They've probably been at this for a while - you just didn't notice until now, despite your cosmic senses, because your attention was focused on analyzing the Simurgh.
Well, you're already mostly dead. You can't afford to become all-dead.
Without missing a beat, your cosmic blast surges… but this time, you're channelling it differently. The energy takes a new shape, exploding outward as a magnetic pulse of cosmic proportions. Every single nanomachine in your body is instantly obliterated.
You've experimented with this sort of magnetic blast before - good at destroying machinery, but, for obvious reasons, you can't use it inside a city: If you ever had, every building would be torn apart as the steel in its structure would be ripped away, converging on the center of the pulse at-
…
The ferrous asteroid.
Even at mental super-speed, you barely have the time to realize it: Just a few seconds ago, the Simurgh deflected your attack with a ferrous asteroid. There's still megatons of iron bits and pieces flying around… and all of it is converging toward you at dozens of kilometers per second, because you used a magnetic blast reflexively to deal with the nanomachines. As if you'd shot at yourself with a billion railguns.
You only have a short instant to act before this trap destroys you. Fast as you can, you move your power pool around, switching all of it to insubstantiality.
Several times the Empire State Building's mass in iron collides all around you, going faster than shooting stars. Yet another conflagration of cosmic violence, leading to large amounts of iron plasma floating around… but in your insubstantial form, it cannot hurt you.
You get out of that deathtrap, and back in range of the Simurgh. Ready to resume your combined analysis and harassment tactics… but without mental acceleration, it'll take far more time than you're willing to let the Simurgh have. You move your power pool back from intangibility to the regeneration-mind acceleration combo…
...and in the very millisecond you switch, an eighty-foot asteroid hits you from "above", going at several kilometers per second.
Like a bug splattered on a windshield, you are carried away by the asteroid. Unlike the bug, you are actually very much alive. Even in your injured state, this isn't enough to…
...and then, the tip of the asteroid near you gets bathed in the same ray that preceded the first explosion. The one that nearly killed you.
As the milliseconds tick, your accelerated mind can sense, within the asteroid, electrons turning into positrons. Quarks turning into anti-quarks. In another fraction of a second, this whole thing will erupt with more power than mankind's combined nuclear arsenal at the height of the Cold War, finishing the job of killing you.
This is how the Simurgh works. It's what she does. You think you're fighting her, and it's all part of her plan. The chase she's been leading you on? A distraction so she could send the nanomachines. The nanomachines? A bait to get you to almost kill yourself with the magnetic pulse. The magnetic pulse? A trick to make you drop mental super-speed just long enough for this deathtrap. She sees the future, and computes through possibilities with mental processing abilities beyond the ken of gods and mortals. That is why the Simurgh always wins.
You do not allow it. With the next millisecond, as particle and antiparticles begin their dance of mutual annihilation, you reach into fate, declaring that a short, unlikely (but not impossible) ebb in your cosmic energies allows you to switch your power pool back to intangibility in that very instant, ghosting through an explosion greater than a million nukes.
Deadly, but not as big as the explosion that shattered the planet (probably due to having less material getting annihilated this time). Putting a few dozen miles between yourself and the explosion, you drop intangibility, and resume regeneration and mental superspeed.
For all the good regeneration has been doing you. With only half your power pool fueling it, it's just not working fast enough to make any real difference in such a fast-paced fight. You're still half-dead, your entire body covered in what could very generously be described as third degree burns.
Stop. Think.
Your well-honed combat reflexes are working against you here - they help you react quickly, but your tried-and-true tactics were never designed to fight a precog. You don't know how to approach an opponent who sees your actions coming.
Well, you've been blessed (not literally) to work with some very intelligent heroes. What would some of your smarter teammates do?
Causality and Tracer Pulse, in their wildly different ways, are analytical geniuses. They would strive to figure the Simurgh and her plans out, thus getting a better idea of how to counter them. They have a point - knowledge is power, or at least one very important type thereof.
Techno-Paladin would treat the problem like a logic puzzle. He'd try to break it down to its components to find the solution. He'd examine the issue of an opponent who can predict your moves… well, actually, he'd point out that the Simurgh can only predict what you do without fate-manipulation. Does that mean that she can't see tactics you wouldn't employ unless fate-manipulation was on your side?
And Bleu-Blanc-Rouge? Bleu-Blanc-Rouge is a tactical thinker. He'd point out that, between your injuries, the intel she gets from precognition, the superior range of her telekinesis, and apparently the tinkertech she's prepared the battlefield with, the Simurgh has too many advantages. In that sort of situation, he would recommend stripping the enemy of their advantages one-by-one, until they no longer control the flow of the battle.
Very competent heroes, all of them. Their intellect has saved the day on many an occasion. Perhaps you can apply a fraction of their wisdom to your current predicament…
Well, you hope you can. Because you only have two more guaranteed uses of fate-manipulation left.
[ ] Operation Crazy Shooting: Normally, knowing about the Simurgh's precognitive dodging, you wouldn't even bother trying to blast her before getting into close-range. But, seeing as she can't predict your luck-control… You fly back toward her, then blast from medium range, twisting fate to make the shot.
Pros: Very simple plan, with few moving parts. Cons: It banks everything, including your most precious resource, on a shot that the Simurgh might still be able to dodge… and even if it does hit, how much damage will it actually cause her anyway?
[ ] Operation Stone Age: The Simurgh brought tinkertech into this. Well, that's one advantage you should take away now. Start peppering the area with EMPs to remove further nasty surprises.
Pros: You can do it while maintaining a safe distance from the Simurgh and any asteroid she could turn into an antimatter bomb. Cons: It's a space battle, with the insane volumes thus implied. EMPing the "battlefield" will take time, which the Simurgh will be using for her own plans.
[ ] Operation Role Reversal: One thing you definitely wouldn't try without luck-control on your side: Telepathic scans on the Simurgh. By using fate-manipulation to create a quick ebb in your power pool, you can reinforce its power for a short duration, allowing you to combine mental super-speed with extremely powerful mind-reading powers. Then, with your mind accelerated a thousandfold, you can read the Endbringer's own thoughts, discovering her plans, her contingencies, even her future visions.
Pros: If it works, you get to negate the Simurgh's biggest advantage, learning about her plans, her remaining devices, the guy in the pod… For once, the Simurgh could be forced to fight an enemy who knows at least as much as her. Cons: If.
[ ] Write-in.
