The sounds of Blasters unloading grows louder as the eleven of us slowly murder our way through the shrinking waves of minions separating us from Erinye, each group less prepared and more frantic than the last. They've become increasingly unbalanced, increasingly desperate to harm us, and as the fight goes on I become more and more sure of our victory. Silently, through action and experience, we've learned whose powers work best against what species of monster, and now we're calling out targets to one another, marking each not-person for death by whoever happens to have the closest thing to a counter, a collective that's more than the sum of its parts.
We're winning.
Proof comes when I slip bone into the soft spot just under the earlobe of a rather pretty cape with too many eyes glaring out of her arms, bursting past her and searching for targets as I find myself unable to bleed off the rest of my momentum. As I let her rapidly-stilling corpse fall out of my hands, I find that I can't locate any more monsters to fight. There are a few engaging my teammates behind me, but for once when I look forward all I see is Brockton Bay, flooded and shattered and somehow still standing.
In that moment I feel a weight lift from my shoulders.
We can do this.
Then Erinye tears around the corner.
She's tall, taller than Leviathan. Wider too, with at least three times his volume. Where Leviathan looks sleek and smooth though, she looks wrong. A mass of half-mutated body parts from both animals and humans, cobbled together without rhyme or reason, with mouths and limbs and eyes sewn together without regard for either aesthetics or function, bile and blood spilling out of her whenever she moves, twisted arms and legs pushing awkwardly off the ground to shove the whole mess around. A human torso sits on top of it all, naked and hairless, and for a moment I can see a truly haggard face, one that looks like it's been fighting for years, not hours.
I think she sees me too, and for a moment, there's nothing but the pitter-patter of rain as we stare at one another.
Then two bodies spill out of an open mouth, limbs twisted and thin, eyes bright with murder. I bring up my blades to face her minions as she dashes down a different street, thundering footsteps sending great gouts of water into the air as she flees and I go back to fighting her creations. These ones' torsos are so twisted they can barely breathe, and a pair of quick cuts send them tumbling down without a chance to engage their powers. Erinye is gone by then, a fading rumble in the distance.
Well, gone for now.
The second time I see Erinye, I nearly become a casualty.
At this point the tables have turned completely and the monsters are now trying to ambush us, to find a way to tilt the odds in their favor against our superior firepower and numbers.
"Incoming attack at ten o'clock, one and four," my bracelet chimes out. A woman in a skin-tight suit with a green and red optical illusion on it steps forward, waving her hand dismissively as she sways her non-existent hips.
"I got this," Asher says confidently. "Mop up after me?" she asks coyly, throwing a wink over her shoulder. The Tinker in the gargantuan power armor steps after her, a blue glow flickering around the square eye holes in their helmet.
"Prepared to engage," they say, arms coming up with a hum that we've all grown familiar with. I take a few steps away, even if I know intellectually it's safe. Grounder has yet to hit anyone they haven't meant to hit with a bolt of whatever lightning derivative it is they generate, but being around them makes my hair stand on end and sets my teeth grating. There's too much static and just-barely-audible noise for me to be comfortable. Asher doesn't seem to mind though, and continues to stroll through the water, liquid turning to mist as it comes into contact with her legs.
The tension ramps up as the seconds tick by, each person reacting one of two ways. The truly powerful capes loosen up, the ones who have instantly-lethal powers, the ones that haven't worried about being hurt in a long, long time. Morpheus sucks on his cigarette and grows a little more blurry, Titania starts humming to herself, still untouched by anyone and everyone, and Bloody Mary shakes herself like a dog, sending water and gore everywhere.
"Watch it," Snow growls, his monochromatic static field flickering as it gets doused in the pink mist. Bloody Mary just growls something that sounds like satisfaction and grins at him, baring teeth the size of butcher knives. The haggard cape looks away first, one hand clenching and unclenching, a blast of whatever fuck-you his power is made of dropping from it and doing something to the water, pushing it away from him.
Snow is from the other group of capes, the ones that are here because they're good at staying alive and killing people. Composed of veterans with good but not great powers and rookies who've made a splash, no one in this group is indestructible. Hookwolf is difficult to hurt, but I saw him hanging back against a monster with a disintegrating touch. Snow's fuck-you field isn't always on, and only a combination of reflexes, good luck, and backup from Analog has kept him alive. Shrike is mobile and dangerous, but her prostheses don't have the same sort of tankiness as the rest of us so she has to be careful not to cut too deep into anyone and get stuck.
That group, my group, is just a little more fragile, a little more on-edge.
Asher stares at an intersection for a moment before turning around, a pout on her face.
"What's a girl gotta do to-"
The rest is cut off when a building nearby explodes outwards, sending debris flying through the air. What little would hit us gets intercepted by spontaneous explosions, bright orange flares knocking rocks the size of trash cans aside. Monsters stream out of the rubble, a sudden rush with numbers we haven't seen since the tide at the beginning of the campaign.
Behind them, Erinye.
A twisted cape sits on either side of her human torso, gnarled hands gripping slim shoulders as Erinye (she doesn't look older than twenty) surveys the battlefield. She says something, the words lost to the rain, and the crowd surges forward, a tidal wave of mangled flesh and flaring powers.
"Down!" Hookwolf shouts, slapping me to the side as he takes his own advice and crouches into the water. Asher flies through the space where I just was, clipping him and turning a patch of metal on his side to dust as she passes through it.
I push myself back up, the mass of Brute-alikes nearly upon us, and spray bone fragments at them, backpedaling, trying to make space. Hookwolf charges into the fray, my projectiles bouncing harmlessly off of him as the monsters prepare to learn whether they can stand up to a living chainsaw the size of a shipping container.
Most of them can't.
"Need an esoteric effect!" Shrike shouts, the insect-limb jigsaws she has instead of arms whirling around her as she tears through the enemy capes, keeping just out of range of their counterattacks and leaving the would-be offenders to stumble into traps of spinning blades. "Cutting a guy and it's not working!"
A warble sounds out across the battlefield as black replaces white and white replaces black, and for a moment I feel like I'm floating, lost in a monochrome void...
Only to crash back into reality, stumbling from a sudden bout of vertigo. I'm not the only one. More than half the monsters are either on the ground or hunched over and clutching their heads from Analog's attack. Bloody Mary is growling but back to moving after a few tentative steps, while Hookwolf and Titania are having a field day among the staggered minions. After a moment Analog joins the fray, lighting and flashes of Snow's static lashing out and carving swathes through the mutated capes. Analog distorts, a wavering image that grows and grows and grows as it tramples forward, now a massive creature at least twenty feet tall and shaped like an elephant with far too many legs, trunks and tusks. She weathers attacks from dozens of sources, crushing bodies with every stilted step, letting out a horrible keening noise turning the turbulent water into a opaque, misting pool.
I can't help but stare at the chaos, a lone point of stillness outside the melee.
This is what it looks like when capes cut loose. Wholesale slaughter and destruction, faster and more violent than almost anything I've ever seen. I caught glimpses of it against Lung, and more when we attacked Bakuda, but those were so much smaller in scale.
My moment of distraction costs me.
A flash of light, then pain as something strikes the side of my face and sends me reeling back. More flashes of light, and I bring up shields of bone thick enough that I have to brace them against the ground or overbalance. The hits feel odd, pure pressure with none of the slight tearing I've come to associate with physical weapons.
"One's down!" a deep, rumbling voice shouts. "Get her!"
Enough.
I push out more bone, condensing, honing, hiding, until I'm surrounded by a shell of stacked blades, whisper-sharp and almost too heavy to move. I grow bone down into the cracks in the street, in between the rushing legs of the monsters, anchoring myself in place as fire, claw, and more flashes of light rain down upon me.
Then I spin.
Scythes of bone fly out, tearing through flesh and armor alike with equal ease. Needles follow behind, searching for flesh and expanding into trees moments after they sink in, rendering the grotesque unrecognizable. Hooks spring from beneath the water, grabbing whoever's left and pulling them down, holding close and never letting go until the bubbles stop coming.
I shatter my connection to the layer of bone that's now covering the street below the waves and surface to look around.
Erinye's gone, and what monsters remain are corpses or offal. Hookwolf steps over them towards me, his face of blades unreadable.
"You okay, Rosie?" he asks, voice gruff and tinged with iron.
"Never better," I respond stiffly, pushing through the sudden adrenaline crash and weak knees with a combination of pride and bone. Hookwolf nods his head once, his skepticism clear.
"You, uh, got something here," he says, one claw coming up to point to his face. I reach up on the same side and feel a flaw in my mask, a crack, and just like that the left side of my face is on fire, one big ache that makes me want to curl up with something cold pressed against it until it doesn't hurt as much.
"Never. Better," I say, fixing my mask and walking back towards the group. "Where to next?"
The third time we find Erinye, we almost win.
A teakettle-like noise goes off and I promptly encase myself and Asher in a shell of bone, the two of us separated by maybe a centimeter. Shortly thereafter the shell catches on fire, a dull agony compared to what my face feels like. Once the burning stops, I explode the shell off of me.
"Too close!" I shout to Morpheus. "Next time give us more warning." He shrugs once, a level of nonchalance in his stance that tells me he'd be rolling his eyes right now if he had any.
"Aww, but it was so pretty!" Asher chirps, already over her near-death experience and looking across the field to see the effect. "Boom!" she shouts, clapping her hand together. "Just like a firework!"
She's not wrong. I'm not sure what Morpheus did, but it blew a chunk the size of a sedan out of Erinye, odd-colored fire still licking over her form. She's growing back, but I'd like to think she's growing back more slowly than she was at the beginning of the fight. On a whim, I reach out and twist everything in sight, aiming for nothing in particular, and get rewarded with a cry of pain. Monster or no, Erinye still seems to have bones.
In the middle of one of Brockton Bay's few public squares is a pit. It didn't used to be there, but when you have dozens of offensive powers active for multiple minutes on end, there's going to be a crater. Inside of it is Erinye, a group of Shakers with powers either too slow or too weak to be effective against Leviathan hemming her in, a boar-circle of parahumans standing strong against the monster. The few of us who can actually go toe-toe with her are caught in the middle, catching the clones that try to make a break for it as Blasters shell her from distant rooftops, their respective emissions more distinct than their silhouettes.
Another cry echoes across the battlefield as Cineral ignites again, dim light turning bright as noon as fire hot enough to vaporize steel turns liquid to mist and flesh to ash. I wince at the sound of screaming even as I keep reaching for more things to twist.
"Feels kinda wrong," Hookwolf mutters from where he's laying on the ground beside me, head on his paws. "Ain't that sporting."
"Shut the fuck up, that bitch could kill us all if we gave her half a chance," Snow says, tossing a blast of his particular brand of physics-violation into the pit. "When they're scary enough, shooting a fucker in their sleep with an artillery piece is self-defense." He's standing in front of Analog, a slim, short woman dressed in a black bodysuit and a mask shaped like a vintage TV, complete with antenna. It flickers to life, showing a handsome man in a bed.
"The show must go wrong. Everything always goes wrong."
"Fuckin' don't say that," Snow mutters, one hand going up to squeeze Analog's shoulder. "Shit's almost over," he adds quietly. "Just gotta make it through this. Figure out a way to beat the healing. You have any ideas about how to make this go faster?" he shouts, turning to Morpheus.
The cape takes another drag on his cigarette, looking thoughtfully at the sky, then holds his hand up in front of him. A sphere of water forms, then evaporates, forming a mushroom cloud.
"No," Grounder interrupts, shaking their head. They're standing next to the bickering black and white capes, still as a corpse. "If there was a Tinker nuke that could be deployed safely in a city, Dragon would've brought one in by now. Besides, anything you could fire off probably isn't much more dangerous than what's out there," they add, motioning to the bonfire, which has only grown brighter as the Blasters finally overwhelm the last of Erinye's defensive Shakers. The screams redouble.
"Still feels wrong," Hookwolf repeats, sullen but accepting. I'm inclined to agree with him. I don't think I'd do anything differently, but hearing her cries from all the way over here...
It's unsettling.
We stare at the pit for a little while longer, watching as the mountain of flesh slowly shrinks from something larger than an Endbringer to house size to truck size to smaller.
This isn't a fight. Just an execution.
Eventually, I can't stomach the sight anymore and turn away, looking for something, anything to take my mind off-
"Endbringer!" someone shouts.
I whip my head back towards the pit.
Leviathan looks bad. Chunks of flesh are missing and gouges mark his body, irregular and numerous. One arm looks nearly severed, ichor oozing from every wound. It's almost impossible to connect him to the flawless monster that rampaged freely through ranks of capes earlier in the night.
What happened to him?
The damage doesn't seem to be hindering him too much, though. Already capes are falling to him, their area denial flickering. A black blur, a star, and a green specter hover around Leviathan, tearing at him, trying to knock the monster back, but they can't seem to hurt it enough. More capes, less obvious but still apparent, throw themselves at the monster, teleporting or flying or just throwing themselves into the fight as orders, indistinct and panicked, echo out.
"What do I do?" Shrike asks, quiet enough that I think she doesn't mean for anyone to hear it, arms splitting open slightly, eyes locked onto the mess. "I can't hurt hurt him but people are dying and maybe I can drag someone out-"
Static briefly flickers for a moment as Analog's face lights up, drawing the attention of everyone of the roof. It's a cartoon this time, a young boy and a young girl on top of the building in an urban setting.
"Let's run away somewhere," the boy says, determined and angry.
"Where would we go?" the girl asks, hesitant.
"Anywhere. Just the farther the better," he answers, bitter as battery acid.
"Fuckin' right," Snow says quietly, shaking his head and backing away from the edge of the building. Then he turns to me. "Rose, you mind giving us a ride? Annie doesn't like tryin' on this many different powers at once."
I look at the two capes that want to flee, then at the battle. Every second I waste is another second where someone could be hurt, crippled, killed. Every second is a second I'm not evacuating someone, not getting people who asked for my help away from danger.
I'm paralyzed with indecision.
"Fuck, that ain't good," Hookwolf says, and I follow his gaze to the fight. "Levi just punched the big ol' ice cape into Erinye." I think I see a flash of blue in the middle of the mass of regenerating flesh, but it could just be a trick of the light.
"Rime!" Shrike shouts, arms splitting into savage-looking chainsaw/tendril hybrids even as her legs unfold to gain an extra knee, circular saw blades sliding out of her feet. She tenses her legs, then pushes off, leaping twenty feet up and I-don't-know how far forward, coming down in a splash of water as she transitions to running with barely a pause.
"Fuckit," Snow mutters before moving to stand in front of Analog, both hands on her shoulders. "Listen, we gotta go. Try just grabbing a few people okay? Just the ones around us," he murmurs. "Do you think you can do that?" he asks, voice soft and caring.
Analog shakes her head and the screen flickers on again. A girl, beautiful, in a modest cottage with an older woman, both dressed in faux-renaissance clothing.
"I must be overtired," the girl says. "The excitement and all."
"Rest then," the older woman replies. "Terrible things can happen when you're overtired."
"Okay," he says, giving her a hug before spinning around and glaring at me, the slight static effect leaking from his eyes betraying just how livid he is. "Listen, I'm not asking you to carry our asses back to Nevada. Just get us the fuck away-"
"Incoming!" Grounder shouts, spreading their arms wide as they step in front of the two black and white capes. I push out bone and feel it turn to ash hotter and faster than it did from Morpheus's attack. I push out more, trying to shift myself away from the blast before the roof melts out from under me.
A short storm of pain later and the fire stops. I drop the armor, taking in the aftermath. A blue field is slowly receding into Grounder, lighting shooting from their armor to the roof, melting rocks where it strikes. Morpheus and Titania stare at the mess of fighting capes, unharmed, but the gravel around them has melted into a single, glowing mass. Hookwolf and Bloody Mary are shaking it off, Hook still cherry-red and Mary sloughing off the charcoal of her six limbs and compound eyes, stepping out of the mess naked and terrified.
"Holy shit," she whispers. "What was that?"
"That bitch," Hookwolf answers, and I can hear the pain in his voice. "Fuckin' burned me. Gonna die." With that he jumps off the edge of the roof, splashing down in a torrent of steam and shattering metal. "Get down here!" he shouts, plowing through the water and leaving shards of metal in his wake. Titania goes after him, floating through the rain, while Morpheus flies off in a burst of compressed air. Asher pouts, stomping her foot and cocking her head at me.
"Come on, if we don't hurry they'll finish up without us!" she pouts, pointing at the brawl. Massive conflagrations flaring from the pit make the shadows dance oddly across her face, giving her an ageless appearance that unnerves me. "I don't think I'll be able to get over there fast enough on my own!"
I look back to Snow and Analog, the first muttering quiet words as the second keeps shaking her head, screen flickering on and off too fast to understand, while Mary shivers in the rain and rubs her bare arms.
"I'll take them," Grounder says, monotone snapping me out of my fugue. I look up at the tower of metal, expressionless as ever, a single blue slit for vision offering no information about the mind behind the mask. "Risk of friendly fire is too great," they add, shrugging. "If you want to fight, go ahead."
I look out over the battlefield, and already I can see the fight turning. Erinye has regenerated, spitting out capes that look incomplete, missing limbs, missing skin, unhealthy and disgusting. They throw out the full wrath of nature, spinning up spindles of lighting, wreathes of flame, most only lasting long enough to use their ability once. It's working though, and I see our side giving ground, slowly retreating from the overwhelming firepower.
Maybe I could help.
Then I remember my promise to Amy. I remember Dad.
"No," I say, and a dream melts in my chest. "I can't do anything that would matter here." I turn my back on the war and walk over to Mary, extending a hand.
"Let's run."
