2.7
Flechette removed her quiver from her shoulder and threw it onto one of the work tables of the kitchen.
Thus unimpaired, she moved closer to the Halutian body, until she stood directly behind them, dwarfed by their massive form.
Tolot stretched the hands of their lower arms backwards, and Flechette used the palms as holds to climb up with surprising speed and agility.
"Come on Panacea, no time like the present to become a kangaroo pup!" she called towards the healer in a tone much too flippant for the occasion.
She was very obviously hiding her own insecurity behind a screen of false cheer.
Taylor herself couldn't help but have a few last minute doubts at her own idea, mostly because this whole thing was what amounted to a totally untested and pretty severe body-hack, but she fought her misgivings back down with the thought that the planning brain knew the capacity and redundancies of their body much better than she.
Panacea ignored Flechette's gallows humor and stayed silent, but she approached the pair and waited for the Ward to reach her preplanned position, with her head slightly below the Halutian's shoulders and her feet at the small of his back, still supported by the lower arms.
Flechette was of a slightly more than average height for a female teen, about five feet five, and could therefore be fully hidden behind their form, protected by the main mass of the Halutian's body.
Their upper arms reached back and fixed the heroine in place, enabling her to let go of their shoulders, and to put her hands on the black skin at their flanks.
"Icho Tolot is ready, Panacea," their body's voice announced in its deep bass.
"Remember that the skin of the pouch must have a thickness of at least two inches at all places, and that Flechette needs closable openings for her hands and for breathing."
Panacea gave them a curt nod in reply, then she touched their lower back, and the process of turning their Halutian frame into a marsupial began.
The effect on their body was the same as the first time when Panacea's power had taken hold of them, but ten times more intense, especially on their back.
There, the tingling they felt all over and throughout their body turned into a piercing pain, one they could only endure because the planning brain was in full control of their body.
To distract Taylor from the constant ache, Tolot deployed their central eye once again, and with a mix of fascination and disgust, they watched on as lappets of their black skin began to grow up from their body, climbing up Flechette's suite at all points, from her toes to her neckline.
"Ugh, this is mega creepy!" the Ward muttered, and Taylor was sure that it was costing her enormous efforts to keep herself motionless, while a film of alien skin was pullulating all over her body.
"Icho Tolot admires your perseverance, little one, just carry on as you do, and it will soon be over," the planning brain grumbled in the "soft" tone it often resorted to when addressing the young heroine.
An ironic grimace played over the visible parts of Flechette's face for a second, but she didn't reply otherwise, clearly concentrating on staying still and not freaking out on them.
In less then a minute, the flaps of skin were covering Flechette's whole form, including her head, leaving only half a dozen small openings facing towards their left shoulder, over her mouth and nose, in order to let her breath.
The sac of black Halutian dermis began to thicken and to bulge out, building what could rightfully be called a rounded pouch, its walls stabilized by cartilage to keep as much of the skin's weight as possible from squeezing down on the Ward inside.
Nerves started to grow in the new tissue, and for the first time, they could actually feel Flechette inside their own body, a warm and soft presence enclosed and protected by them, stretching the new marsupium very slightly by the rapid - surely stress induced - breathing of her lungs .
Panacea wasn't done though, and as Taylor watched on, the skin covering Flechette's hands began to transform – the smooth surface started to show detailed features, until it turned into bladed shutters, carbon copies of the ones that could snap shut over their body's eyes if there was any danger to them.
When the two openings were complete and connected to Tolot's nervous sytem, Panacea took a step backwards and lifted her hand from their arm, breaking the contact essential for the use of her power.
"Your body has large reserves of energy to work with, Mr. Tolot, but before I make the last rounds of adjustments, I would prefer it if you could eat something, so that your metabolism can start replacing what I used. You are taking Flechette into a fight with Leviathan, after all."
Panacea's tone was utterly professional, no feelings colored her voice, but it was nonetheless very obvious that she didn't care one iota for Tolot's own survival, but only that of the Ward.
"Icho Tolot is indeed experiencing hunger – it shall be addressed." their form answered rumblingly.
They stamped away from the healer, the ground vibrating in accord to their heavy steps, and walked over to a huge steel door inset in the kitchen's wall on the far side of the cantina.
"What are you doing?" Flechette queried from behind their back, her voice somewhat dampened by the small, closable air holes, which reminded Taylor of the blowholes of whales or dolphins.
They were the Wards only remaining connection to the world outside her pouch.
Taylor could well imagine how nonplussed the Ward must be by her inability to see what was happening around her - they were in similar positions now, after all, both trapped inside Icho Tolot's body, but to different degrees.
"Assumption: Icho Tolot will find the kitchen stores behind this unusually large door," the planning brain told their new passenger.
With one swift and effortless movement, the heavy metal door was swung open, and the Halutian entered what was by one look confirmed to be a supply room.
The shelves were stocked with huge amounts of the kind of food you expect to find in a commercial kitchen, and another door led to a walk-in freezer.
Without hesitation, the planning brain steered their frame to the frozen-storage room.
"Meat will provide high density nutrition," their body informed Flechette, while they opened the insulated door, and entered.
It seemed that the hospital staff was constantly fed with all kinds of health degrading fast food, because one whole transport box directly besides the entrance of the freezer contained hundreds of shrink-packed burger patties.
"This will suffice," the planning brain commented.
Their body lifted the whole box up to their wide open mouth, where they commenced to tilt the container, leading to a constant avalanche of still wrapped burger-meat tumbling into their gigantic maw.
It took them less than 10 seconds to gobble all of the box's contents down their gullet, then they threw the pallet cage to the ground carelessly, and returned to Panaceas's side.
"This ones metabolism has absorbed approximately 335 pounds of frozen mincemeat, that seems adequate for the moment." they informed the healer.
"Well, uhhmmm... that's ok than, I guess," she replied haltingly, trying and failing to hide her shock and revulsion at their form's eating habits.
She restored their bodily connection again, and Taylor could sense how the New Wave heroine resumed her work.
The inner layers of the pouch began to liquefy, as Panacea's power changed the freshly grown skin cells into her own version of the shock absorbing gel that surrounded, according to Tolot's quick explanation from before, the miniscule heap of cells in the Halutian's brain that stayed active even while 99.999% of their body was transformed.
"Hmm, this stuff is surprisingly comfortable." Flechette said from inside their marsupium, and from her tone it was evident that she wasn't only trying to convince herself, but really meant it.
"It's warm, it doesn't smell, and it will save my ass when we're hit by the wannabe dragon out there - I'm sure this is how a baby feels inside her mother's womb," the Ward continued.
That analogy made Taylor very uncomfortable for some reason, but it seemed to have the opposite effect on the planning brain.
"Icho Tolot will protect you, little one," their voice declared in a strange mixture of fierce determination and soft overtones.
"No one shall harm you while you are with Icho Tolot."
"That's good to hear, I hope you remember it when Eidolon or Jouster find out that I agreed to the insane idea of being carried around like an embryo in an unknown cape's body pouch." the Ward quipped.
Taylor was very happy when this unsettling conversation was cut short by Panacea, who declared them to be "As prepared as I can make you", and promptly turned around to leave them.
"Icho Tolot will remember the agreement you made with this body." they called after her, but the young healer gave them only a short last glance over her shoulder, before she disappeared back into the corridor, undoubtedly on he way back to her duty in the sick bay.
"Well, let's go out there and kick some ass!" Flechette called out, her voice audibly shrill despite her inclosure in their pouch, most likely from the adrenaline that must've started to course through her system with Panacea's declaration that they were ready to engage.
Obediently, their massive body followed her demand, grabbed the quiver containing her darts, and fell down to their running arms.
Like a living main battle tank, they sped away, eager to resume their fight against the Endbringer.
2.8
They left the hospital by a side door, thereby avoiding the triage area in front of the main entrance and the teaming mass of humanity there.
It was getting dark fast, and looked as if nightfall was only an hour or two away, although it couldn't have been later than three pm, according to Taylor's reckoning.
The racing storm clouds overhead poured a never ending stream of torrential rain down on Boston, adding to the ocean's floodwaters that were already covering whole square miles of the city.
With their perfect Halutian hearing, they listened in as Flechette used her Protectorate issued com-badge to get them transportation, but it was a slow process, because, as she had explained while she waited to get into the loop, everyone with any authority was protected from receiving simple combat chatter by a prescreening process, and the network operator had marked the young Ward as "out of action", which usually meant " out of communication" too.
Due to their high ground speed, they reached the spot kept free for teleporters in less than a minute, long before the Ward had been able to convince anyone that, yes, she was really Flechette, fully healed, and indeed, needed a jumper to get them back into the fight.
The plot of asphalt used by the teleporters was marked by wildly fluttering warning tape, surely a tinkerfab product if it could keep up with the wind pressure Leviathan's tempest created.
Taylor noticed with concern that even here at the hospital, which had surely been chosen as evacuation zone for wounded capes because it was situated at an elevated point of the city, the water was ankle-deep, and kept rising.
A single parahuman was sitting slumped on a folding chair directly outside the barred area, protected from the worst of the storm's violence by an empty PRT truck.
The crew of the vehicle, eight men and women in the bulky armor of the Parahuman Response Teams, had taken up posts around the area, securing it and standing ready to help the incoming wounded.
The PRT soldiers ignored Tolot, having seen the mighty form before, and instead of talking to them, they approached the cape, who was wearing a hodgepodge set of badly fitting armor, and was surely either an independent hero, or even a villain – he lacked the rounded and professional look the Protectorate and Wards managed to provide for their members.
The Halutian hulked over the unknown cape and inspected him dispassionately, but he didn't even notice them, obviously fatigued to near unconsciousness.
"This parahuman is not a reliable source of transportation," Tolot commented, and they turned away, leaving the depleted teleporter to his recuperation.
While they stood there in the rain, useless and impotent without transport, a large group of wounded people was teleported in, all of them unpowered civilians.
Even their lightning fast reaction time wasn't enough to do more than open their mouth in order to shout, before a golden opportunity to enter the fight vanished in front of their eyes, as the jumper who had brought the injured disappeared again
"It would be the height of irony to have gone to all these lengths to protect and heal Flechette, to blackmail Panacea into using her full power on us, only to be left here, unable to influence the battle," Taylor thought with rising frustration.
Inside their marsupium, Flechette was still debating hotly with whoever was on the other end of her radio.
"What do you mean with 'you have no priority'?" she shouted into her miniaturized microphone, audibly angry at the stonewalling.
"Icho Tolot wrestled Leviathan to a standstill, and I shot him several times, punching right through his head! Give us the damn priority!"
She paused and listened for a long span of time, only to reply even more caustically.
"No, this can't wait! Let me talk to Myrddin if you are so fucking "unauthorized", he'll give the necessary orders!"
Taylor wasn't sure that the tone Flechette was taking with the operator would be all that conductive in getting what they needed, but she could understand the heroine's anger.
"Hey, big guy, could you give us a hand with these people?" one of the PRT troopers called to them, the soldiers responsible for helping the wounded clearly not enough to deal with the dozen or so bleeding and confused civilians that had been dumped on them.
"Icho Tolot will comply," the planning brain answered, and walked their body over to the struggling soldiers, who had already failed to keep some of the wounded from collapsing into the water.
They spent the next minutes, while they were waiting on the Protectorate chain of command to untangle itself, with carrying people from the teleporatation point to the triage area, mostly those who were unconscious or too out of it to be scared by their form's horrifying appearance.
Finally, Flechette managed to get Myrddin on the line, and her tone changed massively, from angrily demanding to calm and respectful.
"Sir, Flechette here. I've been fully healed, and I've found a way to combine my power with that of Icho Tolot, to put it to greater effect. I need a teleporter to pick us up from the hospital where Panacea is treating capes, didn't catch the name."
Even with the Halutian's senses, they couldn't overhear the answer, because it was delivered through a tightly fitting plug directly into Flechette's ear canal, but when she spoke next, Flechette seemed relieved.
"Yes sir, thank your for the help, sir!" she told the leader of the Chicago Protectorate, before cancelling the call.
"A jumper for us will be here soon, but there is the slight problem that they still don't know where Leviathan has gone. They've just come up with the theory that he might be hiding in the Charles River though, there are seismic shocks happening around the MIT. We'll go there first."
"Icho Tolot thanks you for your help. Attacking a center of high technological research fits with what is known to this form of Leviathan's operational mode."
Taylor shuddered as she heard the Halutian's conclusion, but she couldn't deny that it was plausible enough.
The Endbringers as a whole seemed to prefer attacking cities and areas with high concentrations of population, most often in first world or at least in newly industrialized countries, while third world states like Bangladesh or Liberia were mostly ignored by the monsters.
Not that they hadn't their own variety of evil and insane capes there, but that was still better than attracting the attention of Leviathan or his siblings.
They came back to the teleporation spot, which had been cleared of the injured by now, and for once, they didn't have to wait long.
Just seconds after their form had arrived, a loud report sounded, and a cape stood a mere two feet in front of them, too close for either Tolot's or the teleporter's comfort.
The parahuman took a few steps back from them and stared up at their monstrous head, especially the teeth, his facial expression hidden behind a full face mask that was covered by physics formulas and pictures of bright, majestic galaxies.
"I'm Curvature," he introduced himself with a slight quiver to his voice, probably shaken up by landing this close to the huge, muscle packed and deeply intimidating Halutian.
"Myrddin told me to jump Flechette and one " Icho Tolot" over to the MIT. I focused on her and my power brought me here. But... where is she?"
He looked around, searching for the Ward, highly confused by her absence.
"Greetings Curvature, this form is called Icho Tolot," they introduced themselves, and gave the teleporter a slight bow.
"The Ward Flechette is riding in this body's marsupium in order to protect her," they explained, and promptly pivoted around, to present the cape with their pouch.
"Hey there, Curvature!" Flechette called from inside their body, her voice muffled, but easily understandable, and tinged with an amused undertone.
The Protectorate hero stared, then did a classic double-take, and Taylor chuckled mentally, delighted despite herself at the stupefaction her idea of turning their form into a Halutian kangaroo was causing.
To his credit, Curvature got a grip on himself in less than ten seconds, and he gave them a sharp nod, signaling his understanding.
"That's a bit unconventional, but not the strangest thing I've seen in my career." he stated, gaining back his confidence while he was speaking.
"As long as it works, it's all good in my book." he concluded, and stepped up to their body again.
"If you would give me your hand, Icho Tolot, I'll take you and your... passenger to your destination."
The planning brain followed his request, and Curvature took the offered hand in both of his.
"Wow, you are one heavy... eh, person. This will take a lot out of me." he complained after a moment of silence.
Tolot didn't comment, and they stood there for a few seconds longer, until Curvature gave a strained grunt, and the landscape surrounding them vanished from one blink of the eye to the other.
They arrived with an extremely loud sound, nearly a detonation, and Curvature let go of their hand, and fell to his knees, winded and breathing heavily.
Taylor took in their new environment through Tolot's senses, and was surprised to find them on the roof of a high rise, which they shared not only with a large group of other capes, but also two huge spheres that reminded her of radar cupolas she'd seen on TV before.
"Quite correct, these are radomes, domes protecting primitive radar installations from atmospheric conditions." Tolot concurred.
They bowed down to check on Curvature, but the cape was already rising on his own power.
"You are really a lump of a brute." he informed them, clearly put out that teleporting them had taxed him this much, then he promptly jumped away without another word.
Their form ignored the slight, and marched over to the group of capes, and Taylor was relieved when the concrete beneath their massive feet showed no sign of buckling under their massive weight.
The unmistakable figure of Myrddin stood at the center of the formation of capes, some of whom were clinging to the rail of the roof, staring downwards, while others were just holding on to some technical installation or another, securing themselves against the storm, and waiting for the next round of murderous combat against the enigmatic foe of humanity that was Leviathan.
"Icho Tolot, welcome to the fittingly entitled Green Building of the MIT, tower of our hope. It is good to meet you once again, albeit the circumstances leave a lot to be desired," Myrddin greeted them, rather ramblingly in Taylor's opinion.
He was floating a feet above the concrete, and his wet cowl was plastered onto his thin figure by the raging wind, but despite that, he kept his position easily.
"Where might young Flechette be, though?" he inquired in his typical anachronistic speech, and Taylor was once again reminded that she - or at least Tolot, piloting what had become of her body - was now playing in the highest league of parahumans in the country, if not the world.
"I'm here, sir!" the Ward called from her pouch, and Myrddin's eyes went wide when their form turned sideward, and he could see the newly grown marsupium on their back.
"Egad! What kind of wizardry is this?" he shouted in alarm, and some of the other capes stared over to them, distracted from their efforts to stay on the roof by their leader's exclamation.
"This is the combination of our powers I spoke about, sir." Flechette explained hastily and as loudly as she could from inside the pouch.
"If Leviathan turns up, Icho Tolot's hardened skin will protect me, and he's fast and powerful enough to throw my darts after I infuse them with my power."
Everyone stared at them, dumbstruck by the strange and slightly disgusting concept, and the no less disconcerting sight, but Tolot just ignored the very uncomfortable silence, and soldiered on as if nothing untoward had happened.
"For optimum combat efficiency, Icho Tolot needs a melee weapon in addition to Flechette's bolts. Is there a cape here who has a spare?"
No one answered the question, and a second later, it became immaterial, as the voice of Dragon's armbands sounded from every device on the rooftop:
"Leviathan spotted, CF 2."
"That's somewhere at the Harvard Bridge!" a local cape shouted, and pointed in the direction
Together with everyone else, their form turned towards the Charles River, and away from Myrddin.
Their body approached the rail in a run, surprising those capes who hadn't seen them in action before with their ability to move freely in the gale, without any visible use of their power.
Taylor noticed with their peripheral vision as the other parahumans followed them more slowly, most of them fighting intensely against the head winds coming in from the ocean, but nearly all of of her concentration was on the vista in front of their eyes.
Leviathan had indeed emerged from the Charles River, and was speeding towards the massive but low-slung Harvard Bridge.
Despite the fight the Endbringer had slugged out with the triumvirate, while Tolot brought Flechette to the hospital, got her healed and worked out their deal with Panacea, Leviathan didn't look all that much worse for wear.
Only two seconds after they had spotted him once again, the monster smashed into the bridge, his chest even with the roadway.
In his furious race over the river's surface, he had built up enough kinetic energy to simply break through the whole width of the construction, spraying debris in every direction, and leaving a gaping hole in the structure behind, as he submerged himself in the water of the Charles once again.
"It is time to prepare our arms, Flechette," their voice grumbled, loud enough to be heard by the Ward in her protective sac.
"I'm ready, Tolot." came the steady and simple answer.
Taylor didn't believe for a second that she could have sounded as collected and prepared as the Ward at this moment, but that was why someone else was running her body, a fact she still despised, but had at the same time learned to appreciate the longer this nightmare of a battle lasted.
Tolot took three of Flechette's bolts out of their quiver, which he was holding in his left lower hand.
With each of the other hands, they gripped one of the projectiles a few inches ahead of their blunt ends, with the sharp tips pointing outwards, away from them.
Judging by the adroit way their fingers held the bolts, this wasn't the first time the Halutian had used similar throwing weapons.
Taylor felt how Tolot activated the bladed shutters over Flechette's hands.
"Icho Tolot suggests charging three-thirds of the darts' front length." they told the heroine bluntly.
What came next surprised even Taylor in its perfect coordination and smooth execution.
The end of two bolts touched the centers of the shutters on both sides of their back, the thick membranes opened up just wide enough to let two inches of the weapons length glide inside, and simultaneously kept squeezing the darts so tightly that not one drop of the protective gel contained in the marsupium could leak out.
A second later, they felt Flechette's soft touch on the bolts, and saw the projectiles change in a very subtle way.
They had lost some of the metallic shine the ends still held, and looked blurred, as if someone had used a soft-focus tool on them.
"They're powered up!" Flechette called - and that was all that was needed to turn their body into a living bolt-throwing machine.
Tolot had assured Flechette in their short discussion of the idea that they would have a range of at least three-hundred yards, especially with the physics-breaking quality of the changed bolts reducing the influence of "trivial" things like gravity and friction.
Two of their three red eyes roamed over the river, searching for Leviathan's reappearance, while the central one was once again deployed to keep a look at their back, which meant, this time around, constantly checking the status of the bolts.
After exactly 31.34 seconds, both weapons changed back into normal darts, and Tolot signaled Flechette with a simple "Reload!" that she had to use her power on them once again.
Tolot started to patrol the length of the roof, but was very careful in keeping a save distance between the points of their highly destructive weapons and the other capes.
Half of the new charge had expired, when a large number of flyers appeared in the distance, lead by the triumvirate.
In seconds, Eidolon was circling above the Charles River, and his power that looked like a waterspout sprang into action again, sucking up tons of river water in mere seconds, all from one spot close to the their side of the shore, about 600 yards away.
"Eidolon must have spotted the enemy, it is unconceivable that he plans to drain the whole river," Tolot stated inside their mindscape.
"Yeah, that would take hours even at this speed," Taylor agreed.
With one of his enormous leaps, the Endbringer proved them correct, as he emerged from the stream, and catapulted himself towards a large pier that protruded into the Charles, the mooring place of at least three dozen motorboats.
When the monster landed and crashed through the marina, he destroyed the whole structure, and most of the small ships either capsized, or were simply turned into ricocheting plywood.
"Distance: 385 yards. Probability of hitting the target: 38%. Engagement inadvisable at this time." the Halutian observed coldly.
They stood at their perch high above the river, and looked on as Legend attacked the monster with an intense shower of red laser beams, while Eidolon sucked as much water away from the Endbringer as his twister power allowed.
Many other capes, including some of those on their rooftop, entered the fray, and added their blasts and projectiles, until Leviathan was constantly hit with one attack or another, despite his unbelievable quick movements.
The monster seemed to dislike the barrage from afar, although it didn't do all that much damage to him, and he left the crushed marina behind with the largest jump they had seen him perform as of yet.
"Trajectory calculated. Enemy enters firing envelope in 0.35 seconds," Tolot informed Taylor with the speed of thought.
At the same moment, he ordered Flechette to recharge the two bolts, then immediately removed them in the same totally controlled and swift way they had been entered earlier.
Down on the ground, Leviathan landed on a tennis court situated on the outskirts of the MIT campus, bowling the referee towers over as if they were mere miniatures.
Through the sudden change of position, the Endbringer had forced the blasters and other long distance combatants to either come closer, or disengage, because he was now surrounded on three sides by MIT buildings.
Tolot, on the other hand, had him in the cross hairs now, and the Halutian wasted no more time.
"Target acquired. Two shots to the right knee joint."
Their upper arms, which were holding the charged bolts, were lowered down behind them, giving Tolot the longest possible period of acceleration, then their titanic muscles tensed, their movements perfectly guided to the micrometer and -second by the planning brain.
The two bolts shot from their hands with a speed significantly higher than those managed by the conventional torsion weapons of early human history, their planned flight paths adjusted to Leviathan's movements until the instant they left the Halutian's finger.
Half a second later, the two projectiles hit home, piercing the right knee of the monster from the front, punching through the whole leg with effortless ease, and finally ejecting at the back in a dense shower of ichor.
Leviathan stumbled and went down, ramming the already wounded knee deep into the ground, his tail thrashing wildly to regain the lost balance.
"Injuring joints appears as effective as inferred. Continuing attack with these parameters."
Every cape in the vicinity who hadn't already, took advantage of the Endbringer's momentary quandary, and opened fire on him.
"Reload!" Tolot demanded from Flechette, while he performed the necessary movements in perfect syncronicity, and injected the next two bolts through the openings of their marsupium.
Only Flechette's human reaction speed and the short spans she needed to charge the darts hindered the Halutian from raining a constant stream of projectiles down on the Endbringer, but even so, the next salvo left their hands only three seconds after the first.
As planned, the two bolts punctured Leviathan's other knee, and produced two wound canals that made the whole leg buckle under the monsters great weight.
Having lost the support of both limbs, the Endbringer began to fall sideward, crushed the remains of one referee tower into toothpick sized fragments under his claws, and tumbled to the ground.
The enemy was nothing but resourceful though, and before Tolot could line up his next shots, Leviathan had used the momentum of his fall and powerful thrusts of his arms and tail, to turn his utter collapse into a fast roll towards the closest house.
He slammed into the wall of the historic campus building with such force that it gave way, and Leviathan disappeared inside, hidden from view.
Some of the other heroes on the roof started to swear so furiously that their curses could be heard even over the din of the storm.
"What's happening out there, I can't see a thing!" Flechette complained, and Taylor sympathized greatly with her predicament.
She herself couldn't follow even half the things the Halutian was doing at any given moment, how much worse would it be for the Ward in her pouch, nearly blind and in a fixed position on their back?
Tolot didn't react to Flechette's demands at all, but simply put the already half raised darts back into their biological fittings, where Flechette powered them up, while still bemoaning her total ignorance of the situation.
In the next instant, Alexandria rocketed into view like a suicidal dive bomber, and smashed her way into the ground level of the five story building, clearly planning to get the Endbringer out of his cover.
It seemed that Leviathan had anticipated her move though, because she was ejected back out nearly as fast as she had entered, and crashed into the house on the opposite side of the tennis court.
"Alexandria's entry and exit vectors can be used to determine Leviathan's last position with high accuracy," the Halutian told Taylor.
They fired off both charged darts, and from the sounds coming out of the house, Tolot calculated a 82% chance that they had actually hit the monster through the walls, and injured him further.
Their body turned around to the other capes on the high rise's roof, and they walked up to a small cluster of them, which contained some people carrying visible hand to hand weapons.
"This is a singular opportunity to engage Leviathan in close quarters combat. Icho Tolot needs a melee weapon. NOW!"
The last word was bellowed out so loud that many of the capes grimaced and grabbed their ears in pain, and Taylor thought by herself that this kind of shouting made them look like a stupid bully, but to her consternation, the intimidation tactic actually produced results.
A bulky cape in heavy tinker armor approached hesitantly, and handed them something that looked to Taylor like an enormously enlarged version of the hammers in her dads tool box at home, with an at least four feet long handle and a massive head that was spiked on one side.
"Here, take my warhammer, I'll stick to my gun for now," the cape told them nervously, while he patted a large holster that was fitted to his right thigh.
Tolot grabbed the weapon with the hand already holding Flechette's quiver, grasping both items easily with his large fingers.
"Thank you. This will be returned if at all possible."
Their body moved back to the rail, and Taylor felt her fear rising higher with every step they took.
"What's the plan?" she asked the Halutian, using the same shorthand speech he employed in battle, but she didn't even notice it.
"Icho Tolot will descend this building slower than usual, in order to keep Flechette as save as possible, and to test the effectivity of the shock-absorbing gel." the planning brain said, using their body's voice so that Flechette could hear the explanation too.
They reached the edge of the roof with the last word, and Tolot didn't give Taylor or Flechette any opportunity to protest or propose something different, but just stepped over the rail, and went into free fall, only a feet away from the building's face.
A moment later, the outer layers of their body were transformed, including all of the marsupium, and both of their action arms shot out and punched through the wall they were falling along.
Their weight and the already gathered speed made them break through the next eight floors before they came to a halt, their arms grasping a bent structural beam.
"How is your status, Flechette?" Tolot asked the Ward.
For a few seconds, there was no answer, and Taylor's concern for her fellow passenger in her own body skyrocketed, but then Flechette reacted.
"Phew, this was crazy shit... but I think that I'm still in one piece. Didn't feel all that much from the impacts, really, but I still nearly p... ah, never mind that."
The heroine was shaken, and her voice quivered slightly, but she was still there and mostly unharmed, to Taylor's immense relief.
"Impressive. This means the gel enables you to withstand forces of at least eight gravos without harm," the Halutian said, only to let go of the steel girder, and plunge the remaining sixty feet to the ground, with Flechette screaming all the way down.
They punched a crater in the asphalt with their hard landing, but the Halutian simply ignored it, and dashed off towards the last known position of the Endbringer.
"Reload!" their voice ordered once again, while their weapons were reshuffled.
The heavy warhammer went into the hand of their right upper arm, while the left stayed unoccupied, and the two lower hands injected two new bolts into the shutters of the pouch, where they were promptly charged up by Flechette's power.
Their sprint brought them to the mostly destroyed first floor of the building in an instant, and Tolot slowed down before they entered the ruined place.
"How can the bastard even hide in here, he's thirty freaking feet tall!" Taylor asked herself angrily, mostly to overcome her own paralyzing fear of the Endbringer, and accordingly, she got no answer from the Halutian, who was focused on the upcoming fight.
Their form reached what must've been the central entrance hall of the building, now a wasteland of rubble and broken furniture, but there was still no trace of Leviathan.
"This situation is abnormal. 64% chance of a trap, rising!"
The planning brain threw their body around, trying to escape whatever the Endbringer had wrought, but it was too late.
With a sound that reminded Taylor of dozens of explosive demolitions she'd seen on TV, the building's fundament crumbled beneath them, spongified by Leviathan's hydrokinesis, and the walls came tumbling down.