AN: *shrug* Endbringer arc over
In Aeturnum.5
In Aeturnum.5
The Leviathan was being herded.
Armsmaster didn't need to understand the stream-of-conscious Russian recorded into his systems to see it. With the same, eerie silent precision as the Endbringers themselves, the lithe hydrokinetic was countered, beaten back, and herded towards the stadium away from the river and towards the north east. The familiar itch between his shoulder blades told him he should be out there fighting, but he kept his post. Watching the calculations running through
his program and
his computer made it easy.
It was beautiful.
There was a group of four or five, bishops and knights in a 3D lethal game of chess playing out across his screens. The distinctive markers of each individual wearing Dragon's wristband or neck bracer were pale grey dots on a black expanse marred only with faint green grid lines and the pale grey satellite image of the city. The game board had been set some time ago. He could see it in the way it was clearly dividing into four quadrants surrounding the creature in every direction but one.
He didn't have the memory to recall which number fit which parahuman power, but some had been etched into his mind.
A3.
Leviathan ducked around Legend's laser in a smooth, sinuous movement, only to stutter into a blow from the side by some Brute or Breaker normally too slow to land a hit. He knew that, because he had seen just that before. Leviathan was hard to hit, it was an immutable truth. Nothing slower than it could touch it, one needed that speed or -
Precognition.
The ability to predict where the blows needed to fall.
When the creature attempted to advance into a quadrant, the entire unit pulled together with a surety and organization that generals could only dream of. Numbers and tags ducked and weaved, advancing forwards to replace who fell back with perfect timing. There were no gaps that he could see.
Dragon's voice remained silent.
That meant nothing.
Sasha was also quiet with the complete absence of any calls. No one was down. No one was lost. No one deceased.
With a group of roughly forty parahumans, they fought like they were one hundred. Every inch Leviathan gave up, was one the creature did not get back.
Where were they - she, Farseer, he knew it - where was she herding him to?
He risked increasing the height of his perception. The battle shrunk as more details of the city came into focus. The stadium?
One moment Leviathan was fighting.
The next it was running.
Its water shadow disengaged violently, attempting to clear a path back out to open water. It was a signal. Their forces shifted, again, silent. A new pattern emerged of some strange geometrical shape. His jaw clenched a bit as he caught glimpse of the white lightning corona of Dauntless flying.
It should have been him.
The uncharitable thought was wiped away by the man catching a water whip to the stomach on camera. D12, down. The immediate, reactionary guilt was only alleviated by the fact that his team member wasn't bisected.
No, this data was priceless, he thought. He couldn't fight without his suit and he certainly couldn't fight with it hooked up to half a dozen subsystems and a Russian Tinker, so here he would have to stay.
He wasn't ready anyway, he told himself. He hadn't been ready.
Leviathan flitted around the battlefield. For a confused moment, there were several of him. Water shadows. Dragon had been in charge of keep track of him, he recalled and felt the tight heat at the base of his throat as he also recalled the screech of static overtaking her voice. Later, he admonished himself.
Later.
The creature was being easily kept up with, instantly located the moment it moved. Or perhaps, a second before it moved. It dropped the charade soon after. It was given few options, and each one it took, limited its movements further.
It must have realized this as it went still.
So did the parahuman force facing it.
For up to a minute, no one moved. Armsmaster felt his gut twist. Was this it? He thought. Did it crack the code? Had the entire fight simply been accurate counteractions, lacking initiative of its own?
What now?
Leviathan
moved.
Those closest to the creature burst like water balloons of blood and gore.
No.
Hydrokinetic, he thought wildly. Not human. Why would it be
Manton Limited?
The Russian swore. Armsmaster almost did. On the screens, Leviathan was obliterating his previously recorded top speeds towards the shore, going through everything in its path. Poles. Buildings. Trees. People. The program started to run calculations, reacting to the Russian's thought patterns taking the place of Dragon's analysis programs. He had to moment to think; did Farseer know Dragon wouldn't be available?
It updated quickly, lines of code blurring past his eyes that only caught one word out of dozens.
There was an unknown signature dead center of the projected path.
His suit focused the camera.
A child? A boy.
Caked in concrete dust with dull brown hair. He reached out a hand just as Leviathan hit him.
The air roared with the thunder of displaced water and mass.
The beast vanished, reversing all of the progress it had made toward the river in a fraction of the time. It was as if time itself froze, speeding up again with the force of a freight train with another ear-shattering sound of a giant metal statue of a man on a horse becoming dust. A third sound in the staccato of microseconds. A concrete pillar of the stadium flared into light.
The Simurgh screamed, a sound that cut through the song in his head with pure force and
rage. It knew what was about to happen, reacting in a way he had never seen it do before. But it was too late.
The brilliance collapsed onto itself, bringing the east section of the stadium down onto the malevolent creature in a shower of concrete dust and atomized steel.
The data flatlined.
No movement. No response.
Armsmaster held his breath, barely daring to believe what that meant. What that meant for all of them. He would have to review the data, wring every last clue from it.
Could this be what they needed to kill an Endbringer?
Just when he worked up the courage to believe, the sky opened with a crack of thunder. He looked up. He barely registered the Russia swear again, almost violently, as they both looked up into the mouth of hell.
Armsmaster had lived in Brockton Bay for close to sixteen years now. One of its landmarks of dilapidation was the Boat Graveyard, an abandoned section of town where everything from large haulers to small fishing boats had been left to rust. That was what he was looking at.
Ships.
___________
The sky roared as it opened its mouth in a plume of dark, billowing smoke like an ash cloud with flashes of red and purple lightning. Farsight grabbed onto the balcony railing as the building trembled, and the maw yawned open over New Delhi. She looked up.
It was a graveyard.
Floating in an ugly, twisting void was a graveyard of what looked like ships, space ships, like the ones from Star Wars, and yet nothing like them. They weren't round, like Han Solo's or triangular like the evil Empire's, but blocky, bulky behemoths with ports shaped like the front end of bulldozers, covered in towers and spires and sharp square shapes venting debris. They were covered in skull and eagle motifs, shining with gold. They were sweeping, majestic crafts like space birds or fish with flaring fins and bone wings shattered in the sky. They were smooth, round, organic shapes of bone white and crystal beauty, caved in and empty. They were organic, massive rotting whale and insect corpses in pieces, spindly legs and limp tentacles bleeding ichor into the void.
Farsight could feel the slight pinch in her eyes as her power dilated her pupils further, so she saw farther. Far in the distance, they were jagged, twisted vessels resembling bloody rib cages with skulls and large, bloodshot eyes still looking, still
searching and razor edges.
These ships were
wrong.
They were a giant twisted hulk like a dark sun, a frankenstein corpse of all of it. Great and strong, elegant and fragile, flesh and exoskeleton, corrupted together.
In a way, the Boeing 747 passenger airplane with a bent tail and one wing missing was its own kind of surreal. The Simurgh rose up to meet it, white wings flared out in an unspoken expression among falling detritus, pieces of the carcasses trickling down from the sky over the city. It watched the plane glide down out of the maw.
Next to her, Farseer began to chuckle a broken, ragged laugh as she fell to her knees at the edge of the roof.
Of course, the girl murmured.
I see now.
Then her burning green eyes closed, and she fell, tumbling off the side. Farsight heard herself scream, futilely reaching for the now empty space, nearly following the taller girl off the side. Alexandria beat her to it, hand closing around a flutter of red cloth. It was as if she grabbed at a shadow the way it slipped through the strongest woman in the world's fingertips. She forced herself to look over the railing, expecting to see a bloody corpse on the ground a hundred feet below.
There was nothing but the flood waters running over red stone.
Everything felt hushed. A cold wind blew across the city. The hole in the sky was big enough to swallow it whole and add them to its collection. The passenger plane descended in a controlled glide, angling its remaining wing towards the remains of the stadium. It was being piloted, Avni thought. Someone was alive in there. Something stirred in the corners of her memory. There had been something not too long ago on the news about a missing passenger plane.
Four hundred and twelve people. She focused her sight on the dark front windows.
"
Oh god." Dimly, she heard Alexandria bark something that sounded like it was passing through water. She absently noticed the woman's brown eyes were still dilated, turned an inky black from the large pupils. She watched the plane make an emergency landing in the stadium parking lot feeling spiders run up her spine. "Stop them!" she hissed, motioning towards the people edging towards the plane under the Simurgh's watchful gaze.
"Stop them!"
Alexandria didn't ask why. She disappeared in a black blur.
One of the emergency hatches popped open. A man stumbled out. He was pale. Black hair and grey eyes in a dirty, creased business suit covered in holes. Trails of old dried blood streaked from his nose.
'
Oh please,' Avni saw him beg. She could read the way his lips puckered over and over again.
'Please. Please. Please. Please.'
A undulating worm was protruding out of his neck forcing his head to tilt to the left to accommodate its size. A bulbous sack of a fleshy membrane was on his back. As one, everyone recoiled from him as he shuffled forward. Others in similar states, or even weirder conditions, crowded the emergency hatches, fighting to get off the plane. Some snarled with extended jaws, or multiple faces, some whimpered and spoke without mouths, seeing without eyes.
The man drifted closer. He raised a hand, begging, and someone stepped forward. Alexandria hauled them back.
The plane and the man vanished under golden light.
Scion had arrived.
