Ladybug tensed, staring up at the massive Beasts standing to either side of her. Most of the Heroes of Paris were arrayed around her, in the no man's land of demolished buildings between the Lion and the Bear. The lines of Army tanks and police vehicles remained to the north and to the south, with the police holding back the crowds of curious bystanders while the tanks kept their main turrets trained on the Beasts – and on the cluster of Heroes of Paris between them. Ladybug's jaw clenched. Although she had agreed to the plan to deploy the Army against the Beasts, she hadn't considered that it would mean staring down the barrels of their cannons. But she trusted her teammates – Amun-Vatar and Carapace could shield them, should the worst happen.
Although Amun-Vatar had dismissed his light-barrier once the Beasts showed no sign of moving, the Heroes had been maintaining a round-the-clock watch on the Lion and Bear ever since, alongside the Paris Police. Turing had deployed a trio of drones to monitor the Beasts and measure their vitals, to no avail. In that entire time, the Beasts had remained as still as statues, not even breathing, as if they were waiting for something.
And now the thing they were waiting for might actually be about to happen.
According to Max's satellite images, the Ox, Scorpion, and Turtle would all arrive simultaneously, in less than ten minutes. Pegasus was back at the Mansion, waiting with the rest of the Heroes of Europe, along with their American allies, ready to portal them onto the scene if they were needed. Impératrice Pourpre, the Owl, Anansi, Volpinax, and the Heretic had all agreed to stay with the police along their line in order to assist them with crowd control. But the Army lines had been separated, in two places on the south side and in one on the north. At those breaks, the police had established long barricade lines to either side of wide avenues down which the Scorpion, Turtle, and Ox would shortly appear. The Scorpion and Ox had already entered the outermost arrondissements of Paris; the Turtle had reached Sarcelles. Ladybug had told Sent-Bee and Sk8r Girl to join the others with the police, but both of them had flat-out refused. Sent-Bee stood to one side of Ladybug. Sk8r Girl hung just behind Geber and King Monkey. While she was afraid for Chloe and Alix, Ladybug couldn't ignore the warm feeling in her heart, knowing that her friends trusted her, even in the face of a crisis of this magnitude.
Even when perhaps they shouldn't.
Master Fu had never prepared her to face something of this magnitude. He had chosen her to hold the Ladybug Miraculous, and then he had expected her to just learn everything on the fly, to make her own way without any preparation or any advance training or knowledge. Against Hawk Moth she had nearly failed on multiple occasions, and he had only been a man – a man with a miraculous but nevertheless human! And even still he had almost taken away her miraculous several times! But Hawk Moth had been nothing compared to the sheer power of these Monsters. Fighting one in Japan had been bad enough; how were they supposed to fight against five of them at the same time?
As if sensing her inner turmoil, Cat Noir placed his hand on Ladybug's shoulder, steadying her, grounding her. He squeezed encouragingly, and she glanced up to see him grinning confidently, without a trace of doubt in his eyes. "Ready for a little 'big game hunting,' Milady?" he asked her, arching an eyebrow.
Her mouth was set in a thin line, her brows furrowed in concentration. But with her Kitty… suddenly all of those defenses disappeared. Slowly she forced her facial muscles to relax and gave Cat Noir a wan smile. "With you, I'm always up for some 'big game'!" she teased him, wagging her eyebrows and smirking.
Beside her, Rena Rouge rolled her eyes. "And here I was thinking that you were planning to save that kind of thing for the honeymoon, girl."
"Oh, you know how I am with my Lady," Cat Noir responded, grinning. "I never pass up an opportunity to whisker off her feet!"
"Dude…" Carapace drawled.
Ladybug stuck out her tongue. "What's wrong with a little teasing?"
"'Teasing'…" repeated Amun-Vatar dubiously. "Is that what the kids are calling it these days?"
"Ugh, could you sound any older, loser?" demanded Sk8r Girl, turning to him and cocking her head to one side. "I'm seriously reconsidering allowing people to think we're related."
"Trust me," he retorted. One corner of his lips turned up in a grin. "The feeling is mutual!"
"Is… is this normal for a fight?" Prequinateur whispered to Taureau Dechaine, raising an eyebrow doubtfully.
"I was kind of wondering the same thing…" added the Lancer, folding her arms. "I – I thought the Heroes of Paris were a bit more of a, um, professional group…"
Sent-Bee scoffed. "More often than not. Cat Noir is ridiculously childish when he wants to be."
Cat Noir smirked. "Only because I know how im-paw-sible it is for you to resist!"
She snorted. "Keep telling yourself that."
"Still, you can't exactly argue with their results!" Geber chuckled.
"We do know how to behave responsibly," argued Ryoku, who stood stock-still with her sword drawn and eyes fixed on the Lion in front of her.
"We just choose not to!" Bengalia interjected, elbowing Ryoku in the ribs.
Ladybug allowed herself a small smile, listening to her friends banter. Almost all of the Heroes of Paris had only been heroes for a year or two at most. They were standing between two Beasts that were each half the height of the Eiffel Tower, with another three only a few minutes away, and they could still laugh and joke. They trusted her to see them through this.
She couldn't let them down.
"I wish the African Team had come," she muttered to Sent-Bee, her lips pursed.
Sent-Bee sighed heavily. "Believe me: I tried everything I could with them, but Rugindo Leoa wouldn't budge," she answered. "Of her five teams, four have members off on their own missions around the continent with these warlords and others cropping up everywhere, and her team is chasing some mysterious… something or other all around Luanda. We're on our own."
"We're not on our own," Multiplice insisted, leaning in between Sent-Bee and Ladybug. "We have all our other friends around that we can rely on! And we have each other." Taureau Dechaine put a hand on her shoulder, his mouth set in a thin line.
"ETA three minutes," Pegasus reported over the communicator.
Ladybug tensed, her eyes narrowed in concentration. When the Monsters arrived, she couldn't afford to be distracted. She had to be focused. When she was distracted, when she lost focus, that's when people started getting hurt. She started scanning the horizon to the south along the cleared and cordoned avenues for signs of the Beasts' appearance. The police had again evacuated a kilometer-wide avenue where each of the Beasts would travel, in which the Army Engineers had cleared away most of the buildings. Unlike Brazil and Newark and Lisbon, here they were going to avoid as many casualties as they could. Even though that meant even more refugees flooding into the evacuation centers and spilling out of the city into the surrounding countryside.
So many sacrifices had already been made because of the Beasts. So many sacrifices still remained to be made. She couldn't allow any of them to be in vain.
The ground beneath the Heroes of Paris rumbled faintly, almost imperceptibly. Ladybug's mouth set in a thin line. This was it. This was the moment they had been waiting for. She couldn't let her friends down. She couldn't let them see her afraid. Again the ground shook, harder this time. Prequinateur and Capricorn stumbled, barely maintaining their footing. The ground vibrated more and more, almost constantly now. Taureau Dechaine growled, his eyes narrowed, shifting from one foot to the other, and held out an arm to catch Prequinateur. Multiplice crawled up his arm to stand on his shoulders, staring to the north.
"I–I see it!" she called, pointing.
Ladybug drew her yo-yo and clutched it tightly in one hand. "Be ready!" she shouted, dropping into a fighting stance.
On the edge of the horizon, due north of them, the Turtle's head appeared over the horizon, looming above a four-story building. It opened its mouth and let out a high-pitched shriek, shattering windows well outside the evacuation zone. Walking right up to the building, it stomped straight through it with a colossal crash as if it weren't there. At the same time, the Scorpion's tail rose above the skyline to the southeast, darting back and forth. To the southwest, the Ox's horns were the first part of it to become visible over the horizon as it made itself known, lowing deeply as it drew closer to the other four. Ladybug's jaw clenched. The Scorpion was close to the only win they had managed yet against one of the Beasts: with a nudge in the right direction as the Scorpion had appeared on French soil, they had pushed it far enough east that it would only cross Paris' eastern communes on the farthest edge, leaving most of the city intact. For now. The Scorpion hissed, its pincers clicking together in a cacophony of sound, as it scuttled through the wreckage of what had previously been an apartment building.
Ladybug frowned. There were just so many things they didn't know, even now, when the Beasts were minutes away from a meeting. What was going to happen when the Beasts met? What had brought them into existence? And why had they chosen Paris? Behind her, Goosilla grunted lowly, his attention focused entirely on the Bear. Cat Noir placed a hand on Ladybug's hip opposite where her yo-yo normally rested and pulled her flush against his side. She leaned into him, drawing strength from his presence. When they were together – Creation and Destruction united against a single threat – they could accomplish anything. Even apart from their miraculous, when she was united with her partner, they were virtually unstoppable.
"Certainly puts the Maw in purr-spective, doesn't it, Milady?" he whispered.
"Didn't you almost die that time?" she hissed back, quirking an eyebrow.
"Almost… but I didn't!"
"Dude," Carapace interjected, elbowing Cat Noir in the ribs, "if you'd known you were going to be fighting something like that, you totally should have given us a call. We'd've backed you up in a heartbeat."
"I know you would've," Cat Noir assured him, elbowing him back. "But I couldn't ask anyone else to put themselves in danger on the off chance that we might be able to wake up my mom." He jerked his head to Ladybug. "I didn't even want to bring her, but she wouldn't let me go without her!"
Ladybug nudged him, and he stilled. The ground around them shook even harder as the Ox, Turtle, and Scorpion drew closer the reverberations of their steps merging together into a confused and disjointed rhythm. Miss Pinky almost fell to the ground before Bengalia grabbed onto her for support. Prequinateur dropped to one knee, his cutlass half-drawn. Ryoku tensed, her mouth set thinly and attention focused entirely on the Scorpion. Ladybug's eyes narrowed in concentration. The Beasts had passed the original police line – the police rushed to block it off behind them, placing themselves between the Beasts and Paris. Army tanks returned to their positions. Helicopters circled overhead – police, military, and even a pair of news choppers. They had tried to keep the reporters away, but there was no way to hide something of this magnitude. Facing Paris, with the Lion and Bear to either side of her, Ladybug stared the Scorpion in the face, tensed to spring into action. Around her, the Heroes of Paris shifted into a tight circle. Amun-Vatar, Hato Gozen, and the Lancer all took to the air in unison, fanning out above the Heroes of Paris and drifting in a slow circle overhead. Ladybug put one hand on the hip pouch with her power-ups, clutching her yo-yo tightly with her other. The three Beasts had crossed half the distance between the military line and the heroes."Not yet…"
The three Beasts reached the ring and paused, all five equidistant from each other and forming a star shape. All of the Beasts very suddenly stood rigidly still, with the small knot of heroes huddled between them, dwarfed by their enormous size.
"I see something!" called the Lancer, pointing her lance back toward Paris, past the police blockade.
"What is it?" Ladybug asked. In response, the Lancer held out her lance and braced herself in midair. Ladybug tossed her yo-yo to loop around the lance and pulled herself up until she was holding the Lancer's arm, with her foot braced against the Lancer's knee. Holding her hand up to shield her eyes from the bright sunlight, she looked over the tops of the police vehicles to see five figures flying in their direction, with two being carried by the others.