Magical Girl Lyrical Taylor
(Worm/Nanoha)
by P.H. Wise
5.3 - Who By Fire?
Disclaimer: The following is a fanfic. Worm belongs to Wildbow. The Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise is owned by various corporate entities. Please support the official release.
Thanks to
@Cailin for beta-ing!
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The field hospital was set up beside the mobile command center on the far side of Eagle Park, and well outside the projected path of Behemoth's advance. Bright red crosses decorated the sides of most of the hospital's thirty one tents, and the place had a feeling of tenuously leashed chaos.
Within one of those tents, Amy Dallon brushed a few errant strands of mouse-brown hair out of her eyes as her adopted mother helped her to make the final adjustments so that her Panacea costume rested comfortably on her shoulders; Amy hadn't actually worn it very much since she'd learned how to create a barrier jacket, and she'd forgotten how much she disliked it. "Whose idea was it again to put me in a white robe with a hood in a city with a white supremacist gang?" she grumbled.
Othala came out of the changing room. Amy had known that she was there, she just didn't care. "No offense," she said insincerely.
"Some taken," Othala replied as she headed for the tent's exit, but she sounded more tired than anything else.
"Amy, hush," Carol said. "You were the one who refused every other costume option we suggested."
"Every other costume option you suggested was some variation on 'form fitting bodysuit,'" Amy groused.
Carol smiled. "Beggars and choosers, Amy. And you look fine."
Things had gotten better between her and... and Carol these past few months. Time was they barely spoke two words to each other over the course of a day; now they almost acted like they were family. It was nice. Amy couldn't quite bring herself to smile back, but she wanted to.
Carol had only just arrived on her first drop-off at the Field Hospital a few minutes earlier; though most of the rest of her family was at the first defensive line, Carol and Vicky had volunteered to help with search and rescue.
"I'd like to believe there's room between 'skin tight bodysuit' and 'full length white robe,' Mom," Amy snarked. Then she felt awkward for calling Carol 'Mom,' and almost corrected herself: would have corrected herself.
A brief alert sounded before either of them could say anything else. "Panacea," a man's voice said, "Othala, Scapegoat, please report to Triage 3."
"... I should go," Amy said.
There weren't usually many injuries in Behemoth fights. Usually, anyone who was close enough to be hurt was close enough to be killed. This time, with huge numbers of civilians trapped in the danger area, the injured were pouring in not just to the hospitals, where doctors and nurses at facilities not in Behemoth's path were staying at work despite the arrival of the Endbringer, but also being brought en masse here, to the field hospital that was nominally for the treatment of capes wounded in the battle.
As more and more people were brought in through the doors, Amy found herself assigned only to the worst cases, those beyond any other help. Othala and Scapegoat and a handful of other parahuman healers took the next tier down, and the doctors and nurses handled the rest.
She passed a shattered-looking woman who was sitting just outside the tent for Triage 3; the woman didn't look up as Amy passed, but just kept staring down at her hands and repeating over and over, "... I dropped him. I dropped him. Oh God, I… I dropped him."
As Amy went from one ruined human body to the next, as she painstakingly pieced back together flesh that had been ripped and torn and broken again and again and again, she tried not to wish that she were on the front line with her friends. It was stupid: this was where she could do the most good. These were the people who needed her, who would die without her, and yet some selfish part of her missed her team: her friends.
A middle-aged man with grey temples and a receding hairline looked up as she approached, his guts crudely stuffed back inside his open belly, burns covering most of his body, and when he saw her, a look of hope came over him that was almost too painful to look at. "Panacea," he breathed.
She smiled as she approached him. "Sir," she said, "Do I have your permission to heal you?"
He didn't reply. Even as she spoke, something in his eyes changed. He wasn't looking at her anymore. "Oh," he said, and died.
Amy took that as a yes. She lay her hands on him and knit his flesh back together, restarted his heart and lungs, and let his body take over from there.
The man took a deep, shuddering breath as awareness returned. "Panacea, did you see it?" he asked in a breathless whisper.
"See what?" Amy asked.
The man looked confused. "I... I don't... it was behind you."
"Try to get some rest, sir," Amy told him. "You're going to need to eat a lot of calories to replace what I used to fix you, okay?"
The man nodded distantly. "... Okay," he murmured dreamily. "Thank you."
Amy went on to the next patient at the next bed.
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Behemoth was coming, and Kaiser was calling up vast fields of blades in front of the line, with dozens of make-shift lightning rods scattered across the length. He pushed the button on his armband and spoke into it. A few seconds later, his voice was broadcast to everyone with an armband: "This is Kaiser. I've set up a series of lightning rods to draw Behemoth's fire. Anyone who doesn't wish to die should avoid touching them and any of the metal around them."
I eyed the jagged defenses Kaiser had set up for a few seconds, trying to guess how they might affect Behemoth's approach. When Vista started twisting the space covered by the metal trees and their mesh of sword-roots, I gave up trying and went back to calling up a spell swarm considerably smaller than my ordinary one, this one made almost entirely of Divine Shooter bolts.
While Kaiser was still speaking, Aegis landed near Kid Win, and I blinked when Raising Heart identified Aegis as Carlos.
I almost said something. Both boys noticed me staring, and both turned to regard me until I blushed and looked away and pretended I wasn't eavesdropping.
"Kid Win, are you doing what it looks like you're doing?"
Kid Win looked up at the sound of Aegis's voice. "What does it look like I'm doing?"
"It looks a lot like you're getting ready to fight Behemoth," Aegis said.
"I guess it is what it looks like," Kid Win said as he did the final checks of his oversized rifle.
Aegis's pressed his lips together in a look of disapproval. "Come on, Win. You can't be here and you know it. Your parents aren't okay with you participating in Endbringer battles."
Kid Win looked down at the neatly organized stack of Tinker-tech equipment at his feet and didn't say anything.
"Besides," Aegis said, "you're a Tinker, man. You shouldn't be on the front line. If you want to contribute to this, hook someone up with your equipment, show them how it works. But don't put yourself in the line of fire."
"Armsmaster does," Kid Win said.
Aegis didn't have a good answer to that.
"I get what you're saying, Aegis," Kid Win said, "But I'm not leaving. Brockton Bay is my home. My family lives here. If you think I'm going to just hide in a shelter somewhere and let Behemoth or any other Endbringer smash this place flat, you've got another think coming."
Aegis grit his teeth in frustration. "Kid, as the leader of the Wards, I'm ordering you to get the hell off the front line."
Kid Win gave Aegis a level look. "Go to hell, Aegis," he said.
Another voice rang out, then, not speaking through the armbands but using a microphone and projecting his voice through deceptively small speakers that managed to make him easily heard despite the wind and the rain. He was a black man with bad teeth who looked like he hadn't showered in weeks, and had the kind of face you only got by really, REALLY going off the deep end with drugs. His mask covered the top half of his face really badly, and did very little to hide him.
"Listen up, you rug-munchers, jizz-swillers, cock-jockeys and dripping rectal cysts!" he bellowed through his microphone. Hearing his voice felt a little like what I imagined getting stabbed in the eardrum would feel like, and I winced. It certainly got him attention.
"Uncle Skidmark is gonna fucking educate you rancid pukes about the blue and purple skidmarks he's been layering for you sorry shit-lickers!"
He'd spent the last half hour layering zones of blue and purple energy on top of each other all the way down the gun line, and now he had a grotesque grin on his face as he explained exactly what that meant. "That line of magnificent glowing shitstains is gonna make even the sorriest limp-dicked pecker pistols pack some serious juice! And you fuckers with the artillery pieces are gonna be slapping whole skyscrapers over with your ducks every time you turn around!"
Wait, ducks? [Does he mean 'dicks'?'] I asked Raising Heart.
[
I choose to believe he does not,] Raising Heart replied.
"You want to start skull-fucking that city-humping cyclops right through the goddamn eye socket, you do what Uncle Skidmark tells you and you fire into the glowing shitstain fields, got it? And don't you fucking try to go through them the wrong way! You launch your sorry ass through those fields and you've got a one way trip through Kaiser's fucking metal blender! Any questions!?"
There weren't any questions.
A wave of shimmering purple light expanded out from our position, not enveloping us, but spreading out to envelop Behemoth as Yuuno worked his magic. Then Chrono threw up a field overlapping Yuuno's. Then came another, and another and another and another and another, until they were trembling with the strain of maintaining so many at once.
Then the long row of Shakers put forth their power, and I felt a faint vibration in my teeth as they did whatever it was they were doing. Vista reached into each of the overlaid fields and twisted the space around Kaiser's field of blades differently inside each one. A girl in a green robe with a maze design further reshaped the world on top of Vista's alterations, building a twisted, impossible universe and sub-universes inside the bounded fields that made my eyes water to look at.
By the time the Shakers were done, each overlapping Bounded Field had been restructured like tesseract origami, and even Raising Heart's sensors took a good two minutes before she could make sense of it.
Behemoth was behind a long stretch of buildings now, his wounds slowly regenerating, and if we let him have his way,he'd be behind them until he was about a hundred meters away from us.
We weren't going to let him have his way. "Detonation in three!" Dragon called out through her armbands. "Two! One!"
The long row of buildings between us and Behemoth rippled with explosions, and swiftly collapsed into their own foundations. An intense gust of wind combined with the rain to sweep the dust-plume away, and there he was, three hundred meters away from the defense line, almost shockingly small given the distance.
"Open fire!" Dragon said.
Every Blaster on the line and every cape that could imitate a Blaster began firing at Behemoth's distant form. An instant later, the National Guardsmen and the terrified police officers did the same. .50 cal machine guns went off like buzz saws. Artillery cannons thundered into the night, and every projectile that passed through Skidmark's layered fields suddenly accelerated from standard bullet and shell velocities to something in the region of Mach 12.
Hundreds of blue-white lasers shot out from Legend's extended hand, each one going into a different dimensional fold before it burned, slashed, froze, or shattered its way into Behemoth. Laserdream, Shielder and Lady Photon added their firepower to the mix, and Narwhal sent needle-sharp force-fields buzzing into the Endbringer's body across the intervening space.
Eidolon opened fire next, using some kind of beam attack that was nonetheless able to benefit from Skidmark fields, and as I looked at Raising Heart's sensor readouts, I realized that he was hitting Behemoth with them before he fired.
"
Excelion Mode," Raising Heart said, reconfiguring herself, wings of iridescent light flaring out from her body. Then she loaded a full magazine of mana cartridges.
With her guidance, I channeled the sudden explosion of mana into the mental construct of my spell math, and the Midchildan spell circle flared beneath my feet. "Excelion Buster!" I cried, adding my own doom-blast to the throng, which I followed up by sending my entire spell-swarm into Behemoth's throat in a hundred and twenty lances of iridescent light.
Most of the attacks seemed to disappear as they flew into dimensional pockets, Bounded Fields, and alternate universes, but their effect was unmistakable; as Behemoth focused on redirecting the energy of my Excelion Buster, firing it straight back at us in a wave of fire that our defensive capes scrambled to deflect, the rest of the first salvo hit home, blowing great ragged chunks out of the Endbringer's body and blasting him off his feet even as it did ungodly amounts of damage to everything around and behind him.
Explosions ripped through the street and the rubble of the line of buildings, and for a few seconds, the light and thunder and smoke obscured his massive form from view.
Behemoth struggled ponderously back to his feet as we kept firing, moving as if through thick molasses, and his skin began to glow a pale white. He made two bounding leaps forward, and then the explosive charges went off in the building he was next to, and the Brockton Bay Bank of America tower fell over sideways on top of him with a deafening crash.
We kept firing, and Dragon detonated the second set of explosives.
A battered Behemoth broke through the pile of rubble just in time for a high rise apartment building to land on him.
Behemoth returned fire with a whole storm's worth of lightning. It whirled out from him like an electric spider web, and three quarters of it went straight to Kaiser's lightning rods, with the rest grounding into force fields, armor, and occasionally into living bodies. The armband announced the names of a handful of fallen, but I couldn't hear it above the din even with my ears.
Artillery batteries shot shells into the monster that trailed plumes of plasma; I fired Divine Buster after Divine Buster; parahumans and ordinary human beings stood side by side against the Endbringer, firing everything they had.
A light bloomed in the back of Behemoth's throat, and instantly, Alexandria, Vicky, and a whole group of Alexandria-packages descended on him, harassing, deflecting, forcing him to engage them instead of hitting the firing line. Everyone who wasn't completely confident in their accuracy stopped firing, which was about two thirds of the line.
A blast from Kid Win's rifle followed up by Miss Militia firing a weirdly oversized missile into one of the Bounded Fields from a weapon that Raising Heart identified as an M-29 Davy Crockett took Behemoth's arm off, and a cheer went up from the fighters. Even louder was the roar of approval when Alexandria scooped up Behemoth's severed arm and started beating him with it.
And then things got worse. Behemoth roared, and the sheer sonic power of it knocked Vicky and the others out of the sky. He snapped Alexandria herself out of the sky by catching her in his jaws and then flinging her a dozen kilometers with a savage twist of his head. He roared again, and the through a nearby sensor sphere I could see Vicky writhing in agony on the broken ground, clutching at her bleeding ears alongside six other capes, and my heart leaped into my throat. Light bloomed in the back of Behemoth's throat, and he unleashed his nuclear laser on the gun line.
This time, there was no Alexandria to stop him.
The world flickered. One second Behemoth's beam was about to sweep over me and the people around me, the next the beam was gone, the air was so hot I could barely breathe, and Behemoth was about twenty meters closer. The data from my sensor spheres filled me in on what had happened: Clockblocker had frozen the majority of the firing line in time with his new Shaker effect. Behemoth had poured his beam onto us, and it had done… nothing. We were inviolable.
Clockblocker was not. He lay on his back a meter behind us, gasping for air, his costume burned away and his body a ruin of burned tissue. He hadn't been directly touched by the beam, but convection was a bitch.
Vista was at his side in less than a second. "Fuck!" she hissed. "You idiot! Why would you…" She began to cry, but she still had presence of mind enough to hit the button on her armband and call, "Medic!"
"That's weird," Clockblocker whispered. "It doesn't hurt at all."
Behemoth opened his mouth to fire again, and Vicky hit him from above like a cannonball. Unbalanced by the loss of his arm, he toppled, and his head smashed down into the ground even as he discharged his laser again, swiftly carving a hole in the earth two kilometers deep. He shook his head, but a handful of the other Alexandria-package capes who had recovered during our localized time freeze held him down, forcing him to discharge the entire blast.
Then he roared, twisted like an eel, grabbed Vicky with his good hand, squeezed until her forcefield broke and her ribcage shattered, and then threw her aside like a broken doll. I forced my emotions out of my body, into my other mental partitions. 'Later,' I told myself.
She landed somewhere in the wreckage that used to be the Bank of America building, and I couldn't tell if she was alive.
The gun line resumed firing, and now Behemoth was close enough that more of the shots hit the base of his throat. A few chunks of rocky flesh were blown out, and we kept firing. Behemoth's body had grown ragged and obscene, less a hulking form of obsidian and muscle than a skeletal, one-armed figure covered in ragged crystalline meat. Cracks of brilliant light began to form at the base of his throat. In that moment, a new arrival to the gun line -- a girl from the New York wards in a deep purple costume with platinum-white armored panels -- leveled her arbalest, and fired off a single perfect shot. A three foot long needle charged with her power went into Behemoth's body at the base of his throat and kept right on going out the other side, lancing directly through his core.
Light too bright for me to look at flared from both sides of the hole the girl had shot in Behemoth, and for the first time this battle, Behemoth reacted as if he were in pain; he bellowed in agony as something molten began to drip from the wound.
The storm exploded.
The Storm. Exploded. A whirling maelstrom of fire erupted across the sky, burning away the rainclouds in an instant. It hung there in the sky for a second, giving us all time to see it. Then it poured down on the gun line in a cataclysmic fiery tsunami.
"Wide Area Protection!" I called, bringing up my force field in a wide dome above us and feeding a mana cartridge into the effort: I had five left, now. "
Round Shield," Raising Heart added, forcing a second force field into place between the first barrier and me.
An impenetrable barrier of crystalline force fields formed above Narwhal and the capes nearest her. Others added their power to the effort: Shielder, Lady Photon, Laserdream, others, a glittering interlaced dome coming into being between the firing line and the oncoming firestorm.
Just before the fire tsunami hit, there was a flash of golden light. Capes looked up in sudden hope, expecting Scion.
"Multi-Defenser!" Fate called as she added consecutive layers of force field in front of and behind our own.
Behemoth's apocalyptic attack hit Fate's layered shields first, and one after another they shattered into fragments of golden light. It hit my Wide Area Protection next, and there was a moment of strain before that, too, broke.
Cracks formed in the dome of parahuman power as it strained to hold back the tide. Parts of it failed, and plumes of fire shot through it and washed over human bodies.
Miss Militia saw it coming for Kid Win and sprinted to tackle him out of the way.
She didn't make it. One moment, Kid Win was fiddling with a piece of Tinker-tech to strengthen the force field he had projected, the next he was a screaming torch, the next he was dead. The fire took Miss Militia in mid-tackle; she burned and she died.
My gorge rose in my throat, and I forced the feelings away. Into the other partitions.
Fire rolled down onto New Wave, and they burned. Shielder died. Lady Photon died. Flashbang died. Manpower had time to scream in horror as his wife was burned to carbon before his eyes. He made no effort to get out of the flames, and when his force-field failed, he burned and he died.
'Later,' I told myself, over and over, repeating it endlessly in my thoughts. I could feel later. When it wouldn't get me killed.
Twenty other capes died, and over a hundred National Guardsmen. The heat was unbelievable, impossible, but somehow I could still breathe.
Behemoth barreled through the flames, moving at a full sprint. Moving for me.
"Flash Move," Raising Heart said, and in an instant I was fifty meters away and in the air.
He pivoted smoothly towards Fate, smashing through her remaining force fields like they were made of glass.
Fate whirled in mid-air, pivoting her body just above the sweep of Behemoth's arm. Then she flashed out of the way as he let loose with a blast of nuclear light that would have burned right through her had she been in its path for more than a fraction of a second. There was no warning this time, no glow in the back of his throat, just instant death ray, and she dodged it: it hadn't had time to do more than singe her barrier jacket before she reacted, and Bardiche released an expended mana cartridge in the wake of the movement.
The capes who were on the line and still able to function opened fire; Myrddin scoured Behemoth's body with an eruption of green light that ate at him like acid; Legend and Eidolon hammered him from every side; Alexandria slammed into him from above.
Chevalier burst into flames, lit from the inside; he was inside Behemoth's death radius, and now he was dead. And Behemoth pursued me. and he pursued Fate, only engaging other capes when they actively impeded his progress.
"... Oh, shit," I said.
We were his targets. Me and Fate.
We exchanged a glance and shot back out of his immediate engagement range; Behemoth immediately started sprinting on all his limbs in a bizarre three-legged stride away from the firing line: away from the Triumvirate.
He was heading straight for the Field Hospital.
The Triumvirate, Myrddin, Fate and I all shot off in pursuit.
The mobile command center was already pulling away by the time Behemoth arrived, and our sole consolation was that since that last salvo, since we'd cracked his core and that New York Ward had put a bolt through it, Behemoth had stopped regenerating. He was a mess, a gaunt, skeletal figure, with molten material bubbling horrifically down his body from the wound in his throat. Even as I looked, another crack spread across the base of his throat, and the flow of molten material ever so slightly increased.
A wave of fire rolled across the Field Hospital just in advance of the monster. Then Behemoth noticed my sensor sphere, and it winked out, effectively blinding me in that area.
I kept closing, and I got close enough to see a black girl younger than me in a hospital gown screaming in horror and denial as Behemoth approached her. The woman who, during Behemoth's initial arrival had dropped her infant son closed her eyes. Behemoth passed within a meter of the woman and left her unharmed. She sat there staring at the Endbringer in utter shock. Amy was running, and Behemoth was behind her. Everyone was running except for that black girl and the shell-shocked woman. Then Amy suddenly fell over; every parahuman fleeing the scene staggered, and I felt a strange sense of pressure that abated after a second.
Behemoth stepped on the black girl, but her scream didn't stop. Behemoth kept moving, and the girl was still lying exactly where she'd fallen, weeping and wailing.
Fate and I arrived. "DIVINE BUSTER!" I screamed even as Fate called, "PLASMA SMASHER!"
Behemoth dove into the Earth as if it were a liquid and not a solid, just barely evading our shots. The rumbling slowly faded as the Triumvirate and Myrddin arrived.
"Is it over?" Legend asked.
"No way it's over," Myrddin said.
"Tectonic sensors are tracking him now," Dragon reported. "Behemoth isn't leaving. He's going down to the aquifer."
I frowned. That didn't make any sense to me. He was making us chase him, that much I understood, but if Fate and I were his targets... "Why would Behemoth target the aquifer?" I asked.
Fate went very pale.
