Worm and Perry Rhodan belong to their owners.
2.1
Like probably every child of the early 21st century, Taylor had occasionally harbored dreams and fantasies of becoming a cape.
Sometimes, she'd imagined herself with a power like Alexandria's, as an invulnerable shining heroine who would descend out of the sky to save Brockton Bay from the gangs, at others, she'd hoped to become a tinker like Dragon.
As one of the techno-capes, she could've supplied everyone with useful gadgets and weapons, or could've even repaired the harbor ferry to fulfill her dad's ambitions for the revival of the dock worker's union.
But now, while her new "Halutian" body was fully submerged in a torrent of debris-filled seawater, lurking beneath the raging waves to ambush the island sinking monster known as Leviathan, Taylor realized that all her earlier yearnings and speculations had been infantile and simplistic, outright laughable compared to undergoing the effects of superpowers firsthand.
Enduring a structural change of her brain that made her feel like a dimmed down version of herself, only to be thrown back into the deadly reality of her situation with a disorienting lurch, was the least of the things she was experiencing that differed from her preconceptions about life as a cape.
Much more daunting than these rather technical - if disconcerting - aspects of her power was the oppressive mortal fear she was feeling despite Tolot's tampering with her brain.
Maybe she was developing a resistance against his methods of emotional manipulation?
Anyway, the feeling was truly agonizing, and would be paralyzing her right now if Icho Tolot weren't at the helm of their shared form.
That sort of extreme emotion, combined with the fact that it needed an Endbringer attack and a horrific traffic accident for her to gain powers, hadn't been even imaginable to her before she became a cape herself.
How could it be worth the cost to others and herself?
"Stop distracting yourself with useless reflections, Leviathan has reappeared." Tolot's voice interrupted the flow of her thoughts.
Sure enough, when she concentrated on it, she saw the Endbringer fill the field of vision of their central eye, which was currently sticking out of the flood on a 15 inch long stalk, much like a biological periscope.
She saw that once again, Leviathan was using the agility his power granted him, as long as he stayed over water, to evade most of the fire directed at him.
He slammed his afterimage and tail into the fundaments of every human made structure in his vicinity, smashing not only windows, but whole fronts of buildings, even collapsing some of the smaller ones in the process, only to race over to the next one in fractions of a second, repeating the process.
Someone a whole lot nerdier than Taylor, like Greg from school at home for example, might've drawn an analogy between Leviathan's movements and the behavior of the ball in a pinball machine, mostly in order to distract himself from the approaching fight, but she wouldn't do that of course, because it was a callow thing to think in the face of all the destruction Leviathan was dealing out.
"The wounds in the enemy's right shoulder and the rightmost eye appear to be severe, especially if the visible rate of blood loss is taken into account, but there is no corresponding slowdown in his attacks." Tolot analyzed their observations, eschewing to comment on her absurd ideas about arcade games.
"Well, he's an Endbringer, no one knows how his powers work."
"Or such information has not been made public." Tolot corrected her.
"That's possible too," Taylor admitted grudgingly, not comfortable with the thought that the good guys could be hiding such important information from everyone, but not willing to argue the point at the moment.
She felt as if her inner tension was nearing a breaking point as their body was closing in on Leviathan, half wading and half swimming through the flood, permanently adjusting their molecular structure to achieve optimal buoyancy.
Tolot used the two eyes under the waterline to avoid hitting any obstacles larger than a compact car, which was made trivially easy by their infrared sight.
Apparently, lack of oxygen was not a problem either, their body seemed to have huge reserves on which they could draw for hours - their form was an actual living submarine!
"It is unfortunate that Icho Tolot was not able to acquire a weapon before contact to the enemy was established. This will complicate the fight." Tolot stated rather abruptly.
"He really isn't a good conversationalist," Taylor thought, a bit irrelevantly.
"With our durability, you could just pummel Leviathan like a punching bag, you know." she suggested a heartbeat later, with false cheer, driven to flippancy by the fact that their body had now entered an intersection the Endbringer was crisscrossing ever so often in his rampage.
"Or were those alien masterminds who you claim designed our body too fixated on advanced weapons to consider giving you instinctive unarmed combat skills?" she needled Tolot further.
There was no reaction to her rambling - Tolot was really terrible at mollifying her, he didn't even try!
"I haven't even been in a schoolyard scuffle before this, you know! If you want me to stare a genocidal monster down, you could at least try to assure me a bit! " Taylor thought at Tolot in a snit, feeling that the silent treatment the alien was giving her was petty, considering their situation.
"Combat calculation complete: this body will engage the enemy with a high speed collision to the head, which should at the very least unbalance him, while at the same time positioning Icho Tolot for follow up attacks on the remaining eyes in order to blind the enemy."
Taylor shuddered at the mechanical tone of Tolot's statement, which sounded as if he did things like this all the time, but she suppressed her unease, telling herself that everything that increased their efficiency was a net positive right now, regardless of ethical considerations about the bloody-mindedness of her head's cohabitant.
In fact, his ruthless coldness could be seen as a soldier's professionalism, something that ought to hearten her own resolve!
"In order to achieve maximum speed and surprise, an unflooded hiding place inside a building is required. Optical search for ambush site under way..."
At the same moment Tolot made this announcement, Leviathan came into view again, rushing towards them, a blur of claws and spraying water, but Tolot kept moving in the same direction as before, undeterred.
Taylor for her part hunkered down in their mindscape, instinctively bracing for a collision.
"Get out of the way, get out of the way!" she screamed at Tolot when the thirty feet colossus was nearly upon them.
Half a second later, the Endbringer passed directly in front of their hidden form, less than 15 feet away, and Taylor's internal shouting stopped, giving way to indignant embarrassment.
Tolot simply ignored it all, and under steady guidance, their body entered the monster's wake and followed it, their underwater cruising speed increasing greatly as they were caught up in the current.
Taylor's thoughts slowed down suddenly, and almost simultaneously, their eyestalk was pulled back in, and their body burst through a wall and into a building.
From what Taylor could see when her brain was restored to full function, they had "entered" a shop selling diving supplies.
In any other situation, she might've found the irony of a flooded scuba store more than slightly amusing, but here and now, it just reminded her of the great many salvage divers the city of Boston would need in the near future, who would doubtlessly have to fill many body bags.
Tolot, intent on losing no time, disregarded the fact that most buildings provide such things as stairs for vertical movement, and simply jumped up, breaking through the shop's ceiling with casual ease.
They took a few steps to the side, only to repeat the same mighty leap, and crashed up into the next floor.
Not all of the office room they found themselves in was flooded, but the water was still pretty high, which prompted Tolot to repeat his very peculiar form of ascend one more time.
As soon as they reached the floodwater free fourth floor, this time inside the large, opulent conference room of a law firm, which was dominated by a mahogany table as black as their body's skin, Tolot ripped the brocade draperies from the window, broke the glass along the way, and scanned for Leviathans' position.
The Endbringer was nearly a block away.
"How do you plan to strike him with what you called a "high speed impact" if even the heroes who were with Myrrdin on that high rise could barely hit him with their weapons?" Taylor asked a question she had wondered about for the last minute.
She'd finally found the courage to ask after the embarrassment caused by her previous overreaction had subsided.
"Icho Tolot's senses are excellent, in this case his ears will be of special utility."
"Ears? This body doesn't even have any, at least not visible ones!" she protested, remembering what she had seen of the smooth surface of their domed head back at the accident site.
"Negative, this forms's ears are able to hear Leviathan closing on its position while he is still far away."
While Tolot was still "speaking" to her, she felt in amazement how two ears unfolded themselves, deploying from small holes in the side of their dome shaped head.
When the ears had stopped unfurling, Tolot sprung into action.
First, their body demolished the conference table into splinters with a few quick blows of their massive fists, until the room was mostly free of obstacles, then they turned around and stormed towards the room's door, destroying it off-handedly by passing through it, as if it was just a curtain, and not solid wood.
The next minute saw them bulldoze the whole floor, smashing walls, doors and windows until there were two straight, 50 yards long passages running from each exterior wall of the building to the opposite one, crossing in the middle.
Their body took up a position on that newly formed intersection in the midst of Halutian inflicted devastation.
They faced the conference room Tolot had entered first, already down on the lower arms and ready to explode into an all out run at a moment's notice.
"You haven't really explained your plan." Taylor complained,
"I mean, good for us that our body has actual ears, but I still say it's impossible to hit Leviathan while he passes this building, especially if you have to take a run up first. He's unbelievably fast!"
"Icho Tolot's planning brain is able to calculate Leviathan's position with a margin of error of about 20 feet as soon as the enemy enters a radius of 250 yards around this form. The major sound reflecting surfaces in the area, the air temperature, humidity, and the sound pressure level caused by his movement, must be at least roughly known to achieve a successful computation, of course."
"That's insane, are you telling me we have radar ears like ..."
Taylor's question was cut off abruptly as their body moved fluidly backwards inside the corridor their titanic frame had formed, until the outer wall was directly behind them.
"You will undergo a temporary blackout while this body hits and engages Leviathan." Tolot' informed her impassively, and Taylor didn't protest this time, knowing that Tolot would do whatever he saw as required action.
"This is it now," Taylor thought, rolling herself up into an embryonic position, at least metaphorically.
Would she ever see Emma again, or get another hug from her dad?
If she'd been in control of their tear ducts - she wasn't sure if Halutians even had such anatomical features - she would be crying right now, but in her current state, she was reduced to the mental equivalent of deep, wracking sobs.
Why didn't Tolot brush these feelings of terror and longing for her loved ones away like her anger at him? It would've been so much easier to endure this!
She felt their body start it's sprint, speeding up faster than it had ever before, and despite herself, she peeked out of their eyes, unable to look away when her live was at stake.
The last feet of the ruined law firm's office sped by, and Leviathan came into view, the epitomization of death and destruction.
Taylor's perceptions began to slow down as they reached the take-off point, but she could still feel Tolot making last second adjustments to their trajectory, even as his powerful limbs shot them into the air and at a point the Endbringer would pass in a few hundredths of a second.
Her thought process ceased abruptly as the brain matter constituting Taylor's mind was structurally changed into a substance harder than anything humans in this universe had ever developed, denser than the best tinker armor and durable enough to withstand everything short of a direct hit with high yield atomic weapons.
More than 99.97% of the Halutian planning brain that had guided their body to this point was transformed as well, until only a tiny and specialized cluster of cells was left.
It was surrounded by impenetrable armor, protected by shock absorbing gel, and was entrusted with the only task to kickstart the reconversion of the body into a preprogrammed state, which would be still armored up on the outside, and ready for action against Leviathan.
After an interval of less than two seconds, the entity Taylor called "Icho Tolot" was back online, while keeping the ordinary brain in a suspended state at the same time.
It immediately accessed damage levels to the body - none detected - and took in data on the enemy.
Their collision had thrown the two mighty frames down into the churning flood, mostly following the Halutian's vector of movement.
Tolot's temporary weight of more than 150 tons, combined with a ramming speed of 70 mph had won out over Leviathan's higher velocity.
There was a deep dent in the side of the Endbringer's head, one into which Tolot's chest was pressed, while his four arms were clasped around the monster's head in a vicelike grip, exactly as the planning brain had intended before shutting itself down.
The Endbringer was already reacting to the surprising assault, obviously neither concussed or otherwise impaired.
He tried to wrench the offending Halutian away from the remains of his ugly, ichor covered face, his lethal claws scratching and punching at the attacker in a frenzy, but they simply glanced off impotently.
Even Leviathans' superpowered strength and deadly talons were not up to flinging the thirty-tons killing machine that was Icho Tolot away, at least not without a lot more effort.
The Endbringer's afterimage was conspicuous in its absence, possibly rendered inoperative because the monster was pinned to the ground.
The planning brain maintained its hold on the enemy, pushing the rearing and struggling monster down, keeping him in place through sheer heft.
Leviathan's tail slashed through the water, but his prone position on the ground and the Halutian's placement at the other end of his body made it nearly impossible for the Endbringer to land a blow with the appendage.
Two of Leviathan's eyes had survived the impact, and after digging Tolot's other hands even deeper into the Endbringer's thick skin, the planning brain jotted out with its left upper arm, and hit one of the balefully staring orbs with tremendous force, spraying even more dark gore into the air.
A devastating followup punch, which targeted the second eye, managed to connect as well, but Leviathan's claws caught Tolot's bent arm on the rebound, grasping the elbow before it could be pressed back firmly into the the monster's skin.
The brute force both of the Endbringer's arms were bringing to bear was swiftly overpowering even the massive muscles of the Halutian's limb, and it had to be abandoned to a full transformation, freezing it up and making it unable to move even an inch in any direction.
Leviathan didn't notice the change for a moment and kept up the attack, but it was only a question of seconds before he would adjust.
The simplest way to regain control of the upper left arm was to give up the hold on the monster's head and engage in literal hand to hand combat, but that would instantly end the advantage Tolot had gained by using the Halutian's superior weight on the Endbringer's head, where it could unfold maximum leverage effect against Leviathan's strong legs.
Giving up on this hold would restore the enemy's high mobility - which was one of his greatest assets both against Tolot, and against the other parahuman forces defending the city of Boston - after it had been canceled for only 4.5 seconds.
Most of the other combatant's hadn't even started to engage Leviathan's prone form, obviously victims of typical human surprise and low processing speed.
Before the planning brain reached a decision, new factors to the equation arrived.
Alexandria and Legend, two fighters who held central positions in Taylor's memories about and conceptualization of capes, dashed into view from behind a skyscraper to the north, and were closing in rapidly.
At the same time, bright shields sprang up all around the wrestling forms of Endbringer and Halutian, surrounding them in a tight circle of energy that left them little space for movement.
The cage created by powers unknown to the planning brain was open on top, and as the group around Myrddin finally overcame their surprise and commenced firing, they poured their attacks through this uncovered space.
They were clever enough to target Leviathan's legs for the most part, as far way from Tolot's form as possible, but one either very confident or terrifyingly bad marksman send a slightly glowing bolt into Leviathan's upper torso.
It was very fast, but not quite fast enough to make it undetectable to Tolot's enhanced senses.
The projectile punched through the Endbringer's skin without effort, and made ichor explode around the wound.
Leviathan redoubled his struggles against Tolot, rolling his whole torso to one side, but was unable to move the head with the rest of the body, due to the enormous weight holding it to the ground.
The Endbringer's neck looked as if it was about to rip open under the stress, and it was bend in an angle that would've undoubtedly killed an unpowered human.
The planning brain concluded from the monster's reaction that the bolt it had seen was an effective weapon against Leviathan, but couldn't spare any more processing power to this discovery, because time was finally up.
Leviathan had seen through the immobilization of the upper left arm, and stopped attacking it.
Instead, he used it to gain purchase against Tolot's hold, and threw all his power into jerking the Halutian away, while the water around them erupted into the afterimage, apparently freed by the Endbringer lying on its side.
Tons of water were hurled at the back of Tolot's body in an instant, and combined with the effort of Leviathan's arms, it proved too much.
The planning brain lost its hold on the Endbringer's head, and the Halutian form was thrown into the churning maelstrom, where it displaced copious amounts of water, before being drilled into the ground through the body's own gargantuan weight.
Leviathan jumped upwards and regained his footing in a single move, slashing out at Tolot with both his tail and the afterimage.
The heavy blows were unable to hurt the Halutian body, but they kept the massive frame stumbling, driving it back further and towards the shields enclosing them.
Momentum had shifted, and the planning brain acknowledged that it had to formulate a new tactic for the battle, one that included the contributions of the parahumans who were entering the fray.
Indeed, losing hold of the Endbringer had not only produced negative results - the amount of firepower brought to bear had increased enormously after the Halutian had been dislodged, especially Legend was pouring regular salvos of lasers into the monster, driving it back and away from Tolot.
No, simply closing in again and grappling with Leviathan would deprive everyone else of the ability to attack, it was a bad tactic.
If the planning brain would've had the ability to feel regret, it would've chosen this moment to lament its lack of a traditional Halutian interval gun, which could most probably blow massive holes even into an Endbringer.
Another of the mysterious bolts the Halutian had seen before hit home, this time targeting Leviathan's head, impacting on the upper left side.
The monster swayed and faltered for an instant, obviously in pain, while a flood of blood sprayed from the point of entry and the even larger exit hole at an area of Leviathan's skull that would be called "chin" if he had a human anatomy.
The planning brain traced the projectile's flight path with ease, and found that it had been fired from the roof holding Myrddin's group of capes, most probably by a girl clad in a skintight costume with a visor covering her eyes, nose and ears.
She was pointing a massive crossbow towards the Endbringer while she was reloading her weapon, and the Halutian biological computer concluded that whatever power this young woman was using, was highly effective and one of the very few powers that could deal anything approaching real harm to Leviathan.
Unfortunately, the Endbringer had arrived at the same conclusion.
Shrugging of Legend's lasers and any other weapon and power smashing into him, Leviathan sank down on his hunches, only to rocket up into the sky on a huge column of water.
He left Tolot and the energy cage behind him, punched aside Alexandria, who tried to intercept his flight path, with a swipe of his tail, and crashed through the face of the tower that sheltered Myrddin and the crossbow sniper on its roof.