"Talk to me Tattletale," I said swinging the drone around and keeping Leviathan within it's sights. Mayhem had set up something to let Tattletale tap into the video feed a while ago, if at a slight delay, but he hadn't gotten around to making two way communications devices yet, so I also held my phone to my ear. Dangerous, considering Shatterbird was definitely within the city, but worth the risk.
It was hard to gather a proper swarm in this rain, but not impossible. My range had expanded as well, encompassing a couple more blocks. I wasn't sure why that happened, but I wasn't going to object to it.
"They aren't doing anything. I haven't seen anything yet that's hurt him more than the Siberian did, and he hasn't even slowed down," Tattletale said. Her voice was crackling almost beyond recognition as the storm disrupted reception.
Genesis has said she was going to try some sort of nerve toxin thing. It was obviously not working.
Many of my bugs gathered inside the warehouse I was currently hiding in, forming telescopic arrays that I could use to watch Leviathan, watch the sea, and watch the people still fighting him. Other bugs were forming arrows, leading Blasters and Brutes to the fight, leading Movers to the downed and injured.
"Any ideas on where the Siberian is?" I asked.
More bugs crawled over the monster himself, trying to get into his eyes, uselessly stinging his flesh, and jamming themselves deep inside his wounds, letting me place him even when he disappeared in the torrential rain.
"Maybe. My power doesn't work as well if I'm not there in person, but I think I see a sort of hole leading into Leviathan's body that looks like her silhouette. It's deeper than any other injury on him. There's an entry wound, but no exit."
I was down to four Eve's, soon to be three. The first two were beside Gallant, trying to keep him alive as he coughed up blood, his chest crushed despite the thick armor he wore. The third was splinting her broken ribs and arm as best she could, trying to get back into the fight after a wave caught her unprepared. The fourth was drowning under a fallen beam. She fought to push it up, but I didn't send help. There were others who needed it more.
"She's still inside his body?" I asked.
The Adam was nearby, his mechanically augmented arm was starting to seize in the rain, but he was still able to destroy and splinter wreckage with it. There were two civilians trapped under the limbs of a fallen tree in a park five blocks north of here, and they would die if they didn't find shelter before the next wave hit.
"Or she lost her ability to destroy matter, and was washed out. Or she's dead to some sort of internal defense. Everything I'm getting is… fuzzy. Did you just lose the drone?" Tattletale asked.
"No, it's still following him." I said.
Murder Rat I had lost a while ago. Sending her to help the injured had panicked people, and so I'd made her pounce on Leviathan's face, and scrabble to hold on with clawed fingers until he squashed her body into uselessness. She distracted him for a few brief seconds, and that was about the best that anyone short of the Triumvirate had managed so far.
Sundancer and Ballistic were finally in position, Sundancer on a nearby rooftop, and Ballistic in a car park, standing near the pile of cars pushed up against the fence by Leviathan's latest wave. Genesis was winding around the arm of Leviathan as some sort of gigantic snake, tensing and flexing, fouling the monsters attempts to pluck Hookwolf from it's torso, as the Empire's Brute scraped his blades futilely on the monsters flesh.
"Then I've lost the connection. Whatever server Mayhem ran the drone feed through just went underwater," Tattletale told me.
Crawler was less than a minute away, and his lurching, ground eating lope was only accelerating, like an eager puppy wanting to play. If we could hold Leviathan here a bit longer, Crawler might be able to buy the time we needed to get barriers up, and let the Blasters do their thing again. Or whatever it was that the Triumvirate had left to plan.
"Anything else you can tell me?" I asked.
Gallant died, and the Eve's left him, seeking other injured. My real body started to shiver in the waist-high water inside the warehouse, so I threw a rope up and climbed to the rafters as I considered if Gallant was worth preservation.
"No. Stay safe Taylor," Tattletale said as I hung up. The drone wasn't useful watching Leviathan anymore, I had bugs that could do that. Instead I sent it high into the storm, to watch the retreating sea.
Mayhem had all but forgotten the head bags when he left the lab, but my clone had collected them. Mayhem had made twenty four bags in total. I had seen more corpses than that after just the first wave, and the sheer, harsh reality of budgeting them had been obvious. At first I had just decided to use them for capes, a decision which I'd only gone back on twice, for young children who's bodies had been both very fresh, and laying right next to my clone. I only had five bags left.
In the end, it was an easy choice. Gallant was a hero, he had an excellent reputation. He'd save more lives if he lived.
I called my own clone Khepri. It was probably a bit presumptuous, naming her after a god, but it sort of fit. She stalked in Leviathan's wake, collecting the heads of the fallen, moving easily through the water on long legs of metal.
She moved to Gallant, and raised a leg to strike the head off, before pausing and looking into the sky. I'd learned my lesson when Mayhem got the drop on me, and now I always had a few bugs in a loose dome, alerting me, and my more important puppets, to attacks from above.
"You monster!" Glory Girl hissed, looking as if she was about to attack.
"He will live, if I preserve his brain," I said through Khepri's mouth. Swiping cleanly with the leg of the spider pack, and then lowering Khepri's body. I unwound one of the plastic bags, and took out the syringe.
Just two blocks away Leviathan slammed the arm with Genesis around it through a building, dispersing the projection even as his tail wrapped around Hookwolf, squeezing until the metal wolf shape was split in half, and casually throwing the larger half of twisted metal blocks away with another flick of it's tail.
"You're needed elsewhere," I told Glory Girl as our armbands announced that Hookwolf was down. Genesis didn't have a band anymore, she was on her third projection now.
The flier's fists clenched as I injected the syringe into another vein, flushing most of the blood out of the head, and replacing it with whatever Mayhem had concocted within the vial.
The wounded Eve hauled itself to it's feet, sighted down the barrel of it's rifle, and started shooting Leviathan. It's bullets did nothing, but they did draw the monsters attention.
I wonder why I was choosing to think of the Eve as an 'it' now? Probably because I was about to throw it away, and dehumanizing it made it more easily expendable.
"Now!" my swarm told Sundancer and Ballistic. Both started attacking as Leviathan turned towards the wounded Eve, a series of cars crashing into him, and the large sun chasing him as Leviathan turned his attention away from the Eve, and instead dashed around the sun, towards Sundancer.
There was a pattern of sorts in his movements. Prioritization of threats. Sundancer had managed to push her sun into his flesh before, while Alexandria, Rune, Crawler and Eidolon helped to hold the monster, down, and the burning field of fusion had done more damage than anything except the Siberian.
It wasn't enough to kill him, but perhaps enough to make him retreat, to make him leave before he could make the aquifer Legend had talked about collapse.
"You'd better fix him," Glory Girl yelled, following the arrow made of bugs that would point her to Leviathan.
Khepri ignored her and took out the capsule that would freeze the head, broke it so that the chemicals mixed, and placed it on the tongue of Gallant's severed head with fingers already burned by tongues of frost.
Trickster swapped the injured Eve with Sundancer, and I felt the clone break as Leviathan's water shadow tore her in half. I made it pull the pins on its grenade belt, and fling it at Leviathan, a useless bid to keep the monsters attention. The grenades exploded in empty water as Leviathan raced towards Trickster, who ran, swapping himself with anything close to the right size in his line of sight. Then the clone died.
Trickster wasn't fast enough or there wasn't enough humanoid garbage filling the street. Glory Girl slammed Leviathan in the side hard enough to shatter brick or destroy masonry, but it didn't stop Leviathan's foot descending on Trickster.
I moved my bugs over the brain-pan of the corpse. Crushed. There was nothing I could do.
Ballistic and Sundancer repositioned, so they could get a better line of sight.
Khepri took the plastic bag holding Gallants head, lined it up neatly on her back, along with the others, secured it tightly with cords of silk, and then deployed the climbing spikes to hastily scramble up the wall of the nearest building.
Another wave was coming. The drone, flying near the peak of my range, could see it.
In the park, the Adam lead the two trapped civilians to an alley, between two buildings which should break the wave, given their angles and the thick walls. The two uninjured Eve's would meet them there, and treat the female civilian's head wound before moving on.
"Wave." I warned Ballistic and Sundancer.
The real me looked for the most structurally secure rafter in the warehouse, and moved to it quickly.
Ballistic cursed, and ran for the nearest fire escape. My swarm placed a silk line around the handle holding the ladder in place, and some of my strongest beetles heaved, letting it drop.
Ballistic might make it.
Crawler finally caught up to Leviathan and bellowed in annoyance at being ignored. Leviathan threw his water shadow after Glory Girl, she dodged, closed in to punch the Endbringer's head, and then darted back as Leviathan reached for her again, only to be caught unawares by his tail. It hit her, throwing her into the side of a building.
I knew Glory Girl was tough enough to break through bricks. I'd seen it happen. This time she splattered instead, and I sent Khepri to see if her brain was still intact as Crawler clamped jaws onto Leviathan's tail and drooled acid as his claws sought enough purchase on the street to bring the Endbringer to bay.
My fourth Eve died as the next wave pushed the beam trapping her onto her chest, crushing it's empty lungs.
Sundancer stopped moving her sun towards Leviathan, letting it blink out of existence, and instead formed a new one in her hands as the wave crashed into the city, sweeping debris and chunks of ice from the failed barricade through buildings as if they weren't even there. Slowly, the sun spread, but it didn't move forward, if anything it moved back, covering her body completely as the water crashed around her, the weight of the ocean hissing into steam as it reached the incandescent orb.
Crawler braced himself as much as possible, trying to tighten his grip on his opponent with tendrils and teeth.
Ballistic made it onto the ladder, and was halfway up it as the wave rushed past him, the peaks battering at his legs.
I don't know if it was a freak accident, or subtle control on Leviathan's part, but a block of ice shot from the tip of a wave, as large as a beach ball and as fast as a bullet. It struck Ballistic in the head, wedging between the rungs of the ladder as his body dropped into the water below.
I sent the drone diving after him. Once I actually talked him into it, Mayhem didn't mess around when he 'water proofed' something. The drone went into the water, searching the surging currents for Ballistic.
Nothing, the cameras on the drone were good, but not that good. I bought it back out before it could be crushed by more debris or ice.
The water started to retreat, and I was relieved to see Sundancer's sun still standing, the brilliant globe that surrounded her held out until the water was waist height, and then it flickered out, and Sundancer fell to her knees, gasping for air. Not even her costume was singed.
Some sort of heat immunity power, to let her survive her own suns? I didn't know she had that.
Crawler roared in impotent rage, his prey long since slipped from his grip, and my bugs made more arrows, pointing him in the right direction to catch Leviathan again. The Endbringer was moving through the water faster than anything I'd ever felt. He was already almost out of my range, headed inland with the wave he had caused. I adjusted my grip on the rafter, forcing myself to drop into the icy waters building up below. I had to follow him. The heroes were planning something, an attack with what people we had left, but they needed to be able to find Leviathan to pull it off, and with a few bugs still jammed into his wounds, I was well suited to tracking him.
I clambered awkwardly over the jagged teeth of glass still embedded in the window sill, and stopped to help Sundancer stand up, putting the young woman's arm over my shoulder and forcing her into a weary jog through the low, treacherous river that the street had become.
In the alley the Eve's finished treating the civilians, and the Adam ran towards Leviathan. Khepri strode down from her perch on the nearest roof, and began a search for Glory Girl's corpse. Her head might still be recoverable.
Chunks of ice nudged my legs, and I was horrifyingly aware of how dangerous those were now. Part of me wanted to get higher. To have Khepri give me the stilt legs, climb to the rooftops, accept that there was nothing I could do, and go try to find my father, see if he'd made it to a shelter safely.
The fire, the righteous anger that Leviathan had dared do this to my city, that had faded. The excitement of hearing a speech from Legend, the joy at seeing my childhood heroes stand together, and tell me that I was needed. That had faded to.
Only a stubborn core of determination made me keep slogging through. That, and a flicker of hope. One that quickly became a glowing light in the sky.
At first I thought Sundancer was doing her thing again, to keep us warm or something, but my bugs quickly found the source of the light. Scion was flying towards the city, radiating a clean pulse that somehow pushed the clouds away.
I felt it as Leviathan turned around, running back in our direction as Scion homed in on him. Back towards the ocean.
Then something made the golden man stop, and I zoomed in with the drone to find out what it was.
A handsome, shirtless figure, laughing cheerfully, dark hair dangling in drenched locks over his face. He was hanging one handed from the cross on the rooftop of a church, one hand waving a knife in a sort of… beckoning manner towards Scion.
The attacks, and I was sure that they were attacks, didn't even show up on the golden man's uniform, but still Scion first turned his attention from Leviathan, turning to look at Jack Slash, and then abandoning the pursuit entirely to drift closer.
And so the worlds greatest hero went from facing one monster, to another.
