A/N: Wow. Two years and change since the last update. This was never my most popular story, and it's one of the hardest to write for personal reasons, but it really didn't deserve that long of an unplanned hiatus. It's my first fic, it's pretty well-loved even two years after its temporary death, and in a way it's both my favorite and least favorite work. I can't promise this story won't hit the chopping block in a few arcs, but I can say that I'm not leaving my readers hanging again; all of my stories have returned on weekly rotation, so expect monthly chapters of Shangri-La for the foreseeable future.
Also: This is a pretty major chapter, which is partly why it went on hiatus in the first place. You might want to reread the last few installments before continuing.
This chapter beta'd by Undead Robot.
Imbalance 4.4
Behemoth rose like an obelisk of pure destructive might from the molten remains of a city torn apart.
We headed straight for him.
"Mandala, you defend, I'll phase and shoot," Stalker shouted when we landed on a rooftop. "Let's get this big fucker!"
Wincing at the rough language, I nonetheless nodded as she shifted back to shadow. The sentiment was certainly shared; I wanted this monster to hurt.
There was no more fog obscuring the view, no rooftops soaked with rain. All of that liquid was going straight into the burning hot air. I did my best to shield us from the heat, but there was only so much I could do while running full tilt, so little I could do to cool the air before we hit it. To remove the heat entirely would require pulling vast amounts of humidity from the air, and I could only use so much before I was just dumping water on the ground to re-evaporate. Instead, I let what dried air I could keep with me sing forth in a cone before us, shoving aside the humid air and forging a metaphorical path.
Six blocks. Four. Three. We stopped short, running out of building, and jumped down to ground level. I quickly started carving out a path, raising concrete and asphalt slabs and drawing the heat away, giving us a clear road across the foundation of a building.
Less than a quarter mile away, Alexandria fell from the heavens like a meteor, slamming into Behemoth from behind. I barely had time to react as the Endbringer, apparently not nearly as off-guard as he'd seemed, redirected what must have been a strike of immense power into a single, massive clap of thunder, blowing back Legend, making Eidolon teleport, and forcing me to throw up a rocky wall to deflect high-speed rubble. A moment later, Eidolon threw a glob of something at the ground near one of Behemoth's feet, and the leg sank a bit into the ground. Another glob missed the other foot, and with small effort, the massive beast tore his stuck leg from the ground, raised it up, and slammed it down, making the flames of the battlefield jump to massive heights.
"Over there, on that rubble! I think I can get a shot in from there!" Stalker pointed at a nearby structure, only around 200 feet from the rampaging monster from hell. I shook my head strongly, motioning an emphatic 'no'. It was too close, I'd never be able to defend from there!
"Well, what then? I'm not gonna cower-" a thunderclap drowned out her words, "-hit! We need to act!"
I scanned the area. A staging area would give him an easy target, while being in the open would risk death by fire, lightning, or lava. We needed cover, and coordination. Someone to help us with striking at the right times.
Nobody. There were probably ten, fifteen people this side of the forcefield barricade. I recognized maybe five, if only from TV and stuff. Wait, no; there was a duo, on the far side of the fight, that looked to be coordinating in a pattern I recognized. I pointed.
"What?"
I pointed, more emphatically, spearing my watery tentacle for emphasis.
"Is that… Oh, hey, it's the adults. Good eye." She started heading in the opposite direction, circling around the fight. I caught up to her, wondering what she was doing. When she didn't reply, I gestured again.
"Yeah, I know. If they see us, we'll be in trouble for leaving search and rescue, right? So we avoid them." She ducked into a ruined building while I nodded, suddenly understanding. We weren't supposed to be in the fight, so Bad Things would happen if we were. Still, I wished I'd thought of that before this point, so we could ask permission. Stupid.
"Well, I guess we do hit and runs, if you don't like the spot I pointed out?"
I nodded, then had to nod again when she hadn't been looking.
"God, it's annoying that you can't talk. Still, you've got guts." She pulled out her crossbow and nocked a bolt. "Let's do this, little guy."
We tore out of the building, weaving through the rubble like it wasn't there. When necessary, I hardened ground, cooled fires, and stifled shockwaves. We dipped in to her range, and she let loose, phasing out, shooting, reloading, and shooting again, before turning to run.
I watched for some reaction as the shadowy bolts phased into the Endbringer, but he was hit by a barrage of lasers, reeling back. I followed Stalker as she rattled off several more bolts, watched the dark blurs fly into the monster's chest cleanly and not exit the other side. A direct hit, and nothing. No matter how perfect the shot, she wasn't hurting him. The bolts weren't hitting anything important, and every moment spent this close was a moment he might retaliate.
I got ahead of her, and motioned her away. She ignored me, loading up another shot.
Behemoth smacked Battery aside, and with a surprising fit of grace, ducked beneath Alexandria's supersonic attack, giving himself an opening. Sophia's next shots went wide as he strode towards the shields unhindered. Soon, he'd be close enough to start frying people, makeshift barriers or not. I tried to pull her back again, using a combination of basic signs and gestures to convey the fact that we needed to fall back.
She ignored my frantic signaling, and popped out of shadow form just long enough to tell me to stop distracting her before switching back to fire again. I was forced to surrender my efforts to stop us from losing our footing in another quake, seizing the soft asphalt with both hands and kneading it like dough to cushion the vibrations. As soon as the quake stopped, Shadow Stalker leapt into the air, seeking a better vantage point.
I felt it, the moment she left the ground. The same building power that had almost struck me earlier today, a branching finger of energy forming a tether from the monster to us. There was an emptiness too, not around me, but Sophia.
With only moments to react, I turned my crouch for a leap into a forward roll, pulling down on the strange air that made up my otherwise doomed teammate. She slammed downward to the ground, flickering between shadow and flesh, mouth agape in a scream that neither of us could hear over the deafening clap of thunder directly overhead.
-Shangri-La-
Today, I'd been subjected to more pain than I had ever imagined could be felt. I'd been hit by shrapnel, blinded, deafened, nearly killed in multiple ways. If movies had been right, by now I would be used to it, ready to act despite my newest injuries. Unfortunately, if I'd learned anything in my short time as a superhero, it was that real life is never so easy.
I was blind, a branch of searing light the only thing left in my vision. I was deaf, the only sound a piercing, painful ring. Every organ in my body ached from the concussive wave of thunder, and for an unknown amount of time I could process nothing but the pain and the ever-present array of priceless jewels that rested at the edges of my awareness.
I pulled myself together slowly, huffing a silent groan as I lifted my head. The bolt still filled my vision, leaving me to use the untouched edges of my sight and the senses afforded by my power to take things in. Without my constant attentions, the air had returned to a throbbing, sour, humid heat, heavy with the smells of a city aflame. The rain came down with tails of steam behind each drop, the radiation and heat making them sizzle briefly as they hit the ground.
I craned my head stiffly to search for my teammate, unable to call out and barely able to listen regardless. I caught sight of Behemoth first, and it took precious seconds to process how urgently we needed to move. The adults were still keeping up the pressure, but by some twisted irony, they were pushing him towards us. We were, at most, half a football field away from the Endbringer, which meant we were well within the danger zone.
I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists, and in one fluid motion, I pushed myself to my knees. Every nerve was like fire, and for once I was thankful to be mute, because the scream I would have made would have given us away. With a jerky swipe, I pulled every scrap of water I could to me, shocking my hot skin and sore muscles out of their lethargy with an inelegant, ice-cold splash. I used the brief numbness to clamber to my feet, and stumbled over to the place I'd seen Sophia fall.
I found her lying in a crumpled heap. She was breathing, but it was shallow and pained, and there was blood on her mask. I awkwardly guided my hands to her neck, checking her pulse, and found it unsteady.
I grabbed her wristband, pressing the emergency buttons, but knowing any help was unlikely to reach us. I couldn't lift her myself, and I wouldn't be able to move fast enough to save us both if I had to focus on hovering her on a slab of concrete.
She shuddered in another shallow breath. I made a decision.
We made it twenty feet when I felt her stop breathing, her pulse flickering to a stop under my finger. I set the slab down, pulled a rock to my hands, and started compressions, using the rock to push on her ribcage where my own strength wouldn't. When she took another shuddering breath, I nudged her onto her side, lifted the slab to my hip with my free hand, and began staggering away again, doing my best to hold things steady as I desperately prayed for help.
She stopped breathing again soon after. As I performed compressions, I checked on Behemoth with my recovering vision. He was close, his fifty-foot frame towering over the ruins of the town. How big was his kill radius? A hundred feet? A hundred fifty? Either way, the location where we'd taken the bolt was probably at least somewhat inside it now. I started moving again.
We stopped again, far too soon. Sophia took longer to revive the third time, and I was pretty sure I'd broken a few ribs. Help had to come now.
When we stopped for a fourth time, I stopped using the rock. I climbed on top of my teammate, pushing air into her lungs, bringing water in to cool her burned skin, pressing down on her chest with crossed hands, the life-saving first aid techniques I'd been taught only a few short weeks ago doing next to nothing. I kept performing compressions even as I could feel the impacts of Behemoth's footfalls and stumbles, even when I knew it'd been too long.
I wiped my eyes of tears, taking a moment to check her pulse, just in case. Nothing.
It wasn't fair. I'd tried to save her, I'd done everything I could manage. I didn't always like Stalker, but she was my teammate, and now she was dying because I couldn't do enough.
No, that was wrong. It was because I wouldn't do enough, wouldn't use my abilities out of fear. Because I was scared of the consequences of my powers, and lost sight of the consequences of not using them against an opponent who deserved my full attention. As I stared at my teammate below me, looking at the burns and the blood, I felt a familiar, hopeless frustration rise to the surface.
This was my fault, but it wasn't mine alone.
I stood and turned to look at the monster. It was looking away from me, almost casually batting aside an attacker, its oddly slender form weeping magma-like ichor from a hundred wounds with seeming indifference. The damned thing had caused so much pain today, the past few hours leaving a city uninhabitable and hundreds of people like the one behind me dead, and I could feel myself resting on a precipice, like I had been on the night I'd gained my powers.
Anger rose at that thought, flooding up like gorge in the throat. I swore I'd never feel that way again, and I was going to keep that promise. Within me, something snapped awake, pushing to the front of my mind like a mother crocodile ready to defend its nest.
"Judgement," it declared with my mouth, and with purpose clear we sprung into action.
