I woke up to the gentle hum of a plane. I could feel the vibration of the engines through the floor at my back, and it felt as though I wasn't in a bed. I was still wet, which meant that it hadn't been that long since I had fallen into the ocean.
For a moment I couldn't think of anything. I was alive, and that was enough of a surprise that it crowded out all of the other thoughts I might have had. A moment later, though, memories began to return, and I felt my stomach drop.
I'd killed thousands of people.
The fact that I'd killed an Endbringer probably meant that the world was going to give me a pass, and even if they didn't, I doubted that the Birdcage could hold me. If they really wanted me dead, most likely they'd kill me in the middle of the night as I lay sleeping, a cape able to shut down breathing or shut down the heart doing the deed.
Even that was unlikely. They needed me to kill Scion.
I could sense him now, on the other side of the world. My senses were worldwide now, and while I had to know someone to identify their Ki, his Ki was so much stronger than that of everyone else that it was obvious.
It had taken everything I had to kill Behemoth, but in terms of power Scion outclassed Behemoth like the sun was brighter than a cheap five dollar flashlight; there was simply no comparison.
Scion was so powerful that it was actually hard to sense the Ki of the people around him; his power was blinding. Against someone like that I couldn't see how I could possibly fight him.
Most likely I could kill Leviathan, assuming he didn't drown me. The Simurgh would be harder; my only chance would be to be so fast that she couldn't react even though she knew what I was going to do. If she got inside my head, it was likely that I'd be worse than any Endbringer, because at this moment no one on the planet could fight me one on one.
I could feel the other seventeen Endbringers waiting in the earth; from the amount of power they had and their similarities to the other three they couldn't be anything else.
Without the golden glow I was now twice as strong as Alexandria. With it, I suspected that I could destroy the entire planet if I really worked at it. Despite that, I probably didn't have a snake's fart of a chance to beat Scion, and I couldn't see how I was going to get strong enough, unless someone lined Endbringers up for me to fight one by one.
No one else in the entire world would be enough of a challenge for me to get much stronger. I could continue to work on technique, of course, and I would continue to train, but there would be diminishing returns without sufficient opponents.
Everything had been so clear when I was under the influence of the glow; I hadn't felt fear or doubt; the deaths of so many people hadn't crippled me. I'd had laser like focus, and an endless rage, and I'd felt so free.
Now I felt a crushing wave of depression, not merely because of all the lives I'd ended, but at the thought that there was no way for me to get strong enough to do what I had to do.
"I know you aren't asleep," Panacea said quietly.
I opened my eyes. We were on one of Dragon's transports, presumably heading back home.
So much for our vacation.
"Dragon fished you out of the water," she said. "Brought you to me. You had extensive radiation damage, although not nearly as much as I would have expected. You're lucky to be alive."
"Where's Dad?" I asked. She didn't have to tell me how close I'd come to dying. It had happened over and over again, and all it would have taken was for one thing to go wrong and I wouldn't be sitting here now.
"He's taking a different transport," she said. "There were a lot of people who needed help in the aftermath of what happened. He stayed behind to help with rescue and retrieval."
"And they didn't want you to stick around?" I asked.
She shrugged. "There was a lot of radiation going around, and I'm the only one I can't heal, so they're sending me off to safety. Apparently I'm too valuable to risk."
"And what about the volcano?" I asked.
"There are capes who are working to contain it," she said. "Without an Endbringer actively stopping them, it's not the hardest thing they have to do."
"I should probably help with that," I said, starting to sit up.
A selfish, fourteen year old part of me wished that he'd realized that I might have need him as much as those unnamed people, even though the rest of me understood. Dad had always been a leader, of the Dockworkers at least, and now that he was part of the new community of Capes, he was taking on the old comfortable role.
She shook her head. "Dragon says that you've done more than enough. There's going to be people waiting for you back at home; reporters and some political Bigwigs who want to get their picture taken with the Endslayer."
"Endslayer?" I asked.
"That's what they're calling you on social media... well, at least they were until it went down."
"What?" I asked.
"You broke the Internet," she said. "there was so much traffic that social media platforms have been going down like dominoes. The whole world is talking about you and what you did.."
I groaned and covered my face with one arm. "Are they blaming me?"
"For what?" she asked.
"All those people I killed," I said. "There were at least four or five Endbringer shelters in the way of my last blast, and I felt the people in them die."
"People die," Panacea said, shrugging. "It's what happens when Endbringers come around. Nobody is going to blame you for something that's ultimately Behemoth's fault."
I didn't say anything. I simply lay with one arm across my face. In my previous life I probably would have been cold, laying on the floor of a metal plane and being wet. There were at least a few advantages to being a brute.
"It wasn't your fault," she said. "Even if some people start to say it was."
"Wasn't it?" I asked. Behemoth had never destroyed half of a town in a single blast. He liked to take his time and spread the destruction out.
Having the power to destroy cities didn't make me an Endbringer; actually destroying cities might. It was sobering to think that I could be as destructive as Leviathan if I wasn't careful. I might me much worse if I pointed my beams straight down at the ground. That couldn't ever happen again.
"Are they?" I asked. I took my arm from my face and stared at her. One of the nice things about Amy Dallon was that she wasn't the kind of person who would try to spare my feelings."Saying it was my fault?"
She shook her head. "Everybody's too busy celebrating. There's probably going to be some people who criticize you eventually though; there always are. New Wave had its haters too; every time we attacked the ABB we were accused of helping the Empire because we were white."
She leaned forward. "You can't listen to people like that. There are always people who want to spread crap everywhere they go, because it makes them feel better about themselves."
"I was stupid, and I got a lot of people killed," I said. "That's more than just people trolling me."
"And how many would Behemoth have killed if you hadn't showed? Maybe twice as many?" she asked. "At least the people who are left don't have to flee a home that's a radioactive wasteland."
"Yeah," I said weakly. "Ki isn't radioactive. Armsmaster checked."
Because of course he did. The man was ridiculously anal about things, and for a time I'd thought he was being a control freak for no reason. I was starting to realize, though, that being that much of a perfectionist was more necessary the stronger you got.
When I'd started all this, a mistake would have just gotten myself killed, or Dad. Now I could literally destroy the planet. While there was no way to know this for certain, I could feel it in my bones. The next time I made a similar mistake everything could end.
As powerful as Behemoth had been, he'd really only had a few really strong powers. It was possible to plan around them, and I had. No amount of planning would have worked if I hadn't had the power to back it up, but it had been doable.
But I'd been having quiet conversations with Alexandria about why she thought I needed to fight and kill Scion. She hadn't revealed a lot; only that Scion or someone like him was responsible for all the powers on the planet. If that was true, wouldn't that mean that he potentially had any power?
Did it matter how strong I got if he could simply shut down my breathing, or control my mind?
How could I kill someone who was so much stronger than I was, especially if he was supposed to end the world. Alexandria hadn't explicitly said so, but she'd told me I needed to kill Scion and that the world was soon to end. I could read between the lines as well as anyone my age.
I felt tired, which was something I'd never felt before after one of Panacea's treatments. It was likely that it wasn't anything physical; most likely it was the weight of what I had done, and of what I still had to do.
I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep, and for the rest of the flight, Panacea let me.
As we landed, I opened my eyes. I could have flown the entire distance in a fraction of the time, but I'd wanted time to get my thoughts together. Mostly I'd ended up wallowing in my own guilt, which ultimately I knew wasn't healthy.
Dragon hadn't said anything during the entire flight; whether that was because she was coordinating efforts to take care of the volcano back on the island, or because she was being discreet and giving me a chance to decompress I didn't know. I was grateful either way. The last thing I wanted to do was to face people right now.
They could have transported me via Strider, but I suspected that Dragon had wanted me to have a chance to have some time alone. It showed that she had a lot more sensitivity than Armsmaster had ever shown; he likely would have had me back to working the moment Panacea healed me.
Still, there was a heaviness in my chest as Amy handed me a replica of my helmet. The original had been destroyed sometime during the battle and I'd barely even noticed. The fact that dragon had a replica already on the ship showed that someone had been planning ahead.
I put it on my head, and a moment later the door opened.
I blinked out into the lights outside; the sun had been setting in Hawaii and Brockton Bay was five hours later. It had to be at least the middle of the night by now, but there were lights everywhere.
We'd landed on the beach outside the rig. There was a huge crowd outside, even though it had to be midnight, and as I stepped into the spotlight there were roaring cheers.
I forced myself not to grimace, as much as I wanted to. At least that lesson in PR had stuck with me.
"The video of you fighting Behemoth has gone viral," Amy said quietly beside me. "Dragon posted it. Before the internet broke."
Most likely that had been what had broken the Internet. I could understand why they'd had Dragon post the video. The news of the destruction of Behemoth would make the horror of what had happened to the people in town a moot point. People tended to forget the victims of the Simurgh and others as quickly as they could.
It was a little like seeing someone with a handicap in public. Most people ignored them to the point that they didn't really even see them.
I forced myself to smile and wave, and a moment later Alexandria, Legend and Eidolon were flanking me, as though they'd been waiting for this moment to set up a sound bite. Most likely they had; I had the impression that Alexandria was very careful about the image she crafted for the public.
"Hope has been an elusive quality in our world for a long while," Legend said. "Heroic men and women laid down their lives time after time, all in the hope of slowing down an unstoppable force that was chipping away at humanity. Sometimes we succeeded in saving lives, often we failed."
He took a deep breath. "Always we left a trail of broken bodies. Every one of those people who fought were heroes, even people who in their daily lives chose to be known as villains. Yet all of us were ineffectual at doing the one thing that we always really wanted to do... end the Endbringers."
The crowd was silent, not as much as a single cough breaking their rapt attention toward him. Legend exuded charisma; he could say things that said by anyone else would seem trite or silly; from him it seemed inspiring.
"Today that all changed.," he said. "Today we looked the Endbringer in the eye and said No more. We told him that we will not go quietly into the night! We will survive! Today is a day that will be written in the history books as the day humanity first began to take back the world!"
The crowd cheered wildly, and even the reporters didn't seem like they wanted to ask any of the hard questions. This wasn't the crowd that would ask about a town destroyed, and it was possible that no one ever would, at least not to my face.
After all, who would taunt someone who had killed an Endbringer?
"This young woman isn't old enough to drive," Legend said. "But she faced the monster, and she won. Today we celebrate her victory, because her victory belongs to all of us!"
I forced myself to smile and wave as the PR guys had told us to do when we didn't know what to say. It was better than doing what I really wanted to do.
"You know there are nineteen other Endbringers, right?" I murmured under my breath. Legend didn't hear me, but Eidolon and Alexandria did. Alexandria was professional enough that nothing showed on her face. I felt her hand tighten on my shoulder with a force that would have crushed anyone else.
Eidolon's face turned white as a sheet.
I felt a small vindictive surge of pleasure at ruining this moment for him. He and Alexandria had sent me to fight the Endbringer without any idea whether I would survive or not, and now they were at least symbolically taking credit for what I had done.
I saw a woman in a pantsuit walking toward us. I vaguely recognized her as one of our state senators. Had the whole reason I'd been put on a plane was so this woman could get here in time to greet me?
I shook her hand and forced myself to smile. If it didn't reach my eyes I doubted that anyone noticed. At least this stupid helmet was good for something.
Letting depression overcome me wouldn't help anyone, much less the families of the people I had killed. The only way I could make it up to them was to save them, which meant that I had to save the world.
The only way I could do that was to defeat Scion, someone who had so much power that he could possibly do anything.
I was going to have to step up my game.
