Hope Through Overwhelming Firepower Interlude 6 Armsmaster-2
At the sight of Buster holding onto Leviathan by its tail registered, Armsmaster remained fairly baffled. What, exactly, was she hoping to accomplish?
Leviathan seemed to barely pay any attention to its new hanger on, as it made a grand leap up into the sky in what was, presumably, an attempt to strike down a flyer.
Or at least, it tried to.
What actually happened was that Leviathan made it a few feet into the air before abruptly stopping, as if held down by the world's heaviest anchor.
It flailed around in the air for a few moments, splashing water from its echo everywhere, and then fell to the ground.
Buster still held tight roughly halfway up its tail.
Leviathan quickly recovered, spinning onto its feet faster than anything that size had any right to. It lashed out at Buster, the water echo left behind from its strike gathered up to form blades meant to scythe into Buster.
Leviathan's fist struck Buster with, according to what Armsmaster's helmet was telling him, enough force to shatter a fairly large building.
Leviathan quickly drew back its hand, slight cuts covering it from when it had come into contact with Buster's hair, and lost.
The hailstorm of water blades was similarly ineffective.
"Someone's been taking lessons from the Siberian." Armsmaster muttered to himself. He noted that the number of processor cycles he had available had once again risen to hilarious levels. "What the hell I would ever need that much power for, I'll never know." It just wasn't fucking fair.
A part of Armsmaster, an honestly pretty large part in fact, was still feeling bitter about his inability to noticeably damage Leviathan. If only he had a bit more time, he could have finished that Nano-Edge technology he and Dragon had been working on. And then Buster comes along, reworks his own programs to work better than he had ever dreamed, and then collapses. Armsmaster almost held out hope for a moment that she just might have something vaguely resembling a limitation, but no, she gets back up and proceeds to pull off a good imitation of the fucking Siberian.
Armsmaster sighed. There wasn't much he could do right now, he would have to accept the fact he had already put on a good showing; he'd have liked to see Dauntless pull that off. Armsmaster settled back and prepared his prediction program to counter Leviathan's moves against other capes.
Speaking of other capes, upon seeing Leviathan apparently crippled, they flocked in.
Blasters pelted Leviathan with everything they had. Purity carving helix shaped scars onto Leviathan's skin, Legend striking with an assortment of beams both exotic and powerful, Laserdream adding her own firepower to the mix.
A few Brutes made an awkward attempt to offer help to buster, but she just waved them off.
Others, with less range, were the ones Armsmaster had to worry about. A torrent of plasma already in the air to catch a water strike that would have bisected Battery. He reluctantly used a hook to drag Kaiser out of the way of where Leviathan's leg was going to be a second later.
As the battles continued, blood began to flow, and damage piled upon Leviathan, its water echo slowly gaining a red tinge. However, none of the damage appeared to make much progress beyond a point.
"It grows exponentially denser as you get deeper; you need to focus all of your attacks on the base of the tail, that's where its weak point is." Buster shouted out.
There was a slight pause in the attacks, before most decided to believe the cape that was holding Leviathan down, and winning. A few seconds were spent communicating the information to those who had not heard, and the attack was renewed. The attacks for the most part, there were always a few rebels or people unable to understand simple instructions, focusing on the aforementioned point.
Buster continued to pay no real attention to any of the destructive side effects of the attacks, apparently concentrating on something.
Armsmaster's prediction programs reevaluated the situation. "Eidolon." Armsmaster spoke at the man in charge of holding back Leviathan's waves. "The waves will break through within twenty-five seconds, at the current rate of progression, you should see about rectifying this."
"Really?" Eidolon questioned, before looking at Leviathan, who was increasing its struggles as the focused attack continued to burrow into it. "It's worthy of consideration, I suppose. Cryo, Zero, to me!" Eidolon called out to the two other heroes with ice powers present.
As the barrier of ice increased in height and thickness, and Leviathan continued a futile struggle to gain any mobility, Armsmaster almost allowed himself to feel hope.
The powerful roar of a jet engine sounded, as a mechanical suit flew onto the battlefield, and offered a sword with a faint cloud around it to Alexandria.
It took only a moment for Armsmaster to realize that Dragon had finished a prototype of the Nano-Edge weapon.
Alexandria took the weapon after a brief explanation from Dragon and dove down at Leviathan, other capes getting out of the path of her supersonic flight, and drove the edge into a spot right above Leviathan's tail. At first, it slid in without trouble, but it slowed its penetration as it went in deeper.
Alexandria let out a grunt, and pushed the sword in further.
Leviathan reacted poorly, to say the least. Its flailing increased to a level that would be almost comical on anything else, jumping about in the air and flinging limbs every which way. Like a child with a temper tantrum, if that child's every swing created bursts of pressurized water that would bisect the average human.
Alexandria, in a feat of impressive mental focus, continued driving the weapon into Leviathan's back, no matter how many glancing blows from Leviathan and its echoes she received, or how many different ways she was flung around by Leviathan's movements.
Alexandria's sword drove in another layer, and the ice barrier broke.
A spinning hurricane of ice and water drove onwards to the battlefield. Eidolon and a few others immediately turned to begin the process of at least slowing it down. It was clear that the effect was nothing unusual.
The scale, however, was.
It spun and tore its way through everything set up to impede its progress. Massive barriers of ice and energy were ripped to shreds in seconds, as the hurricane rapidly grew in both strength and size.
The spiral of water continued to increase in speed, until a literal windstorm began from the forces involved. All the while Alexandria continued to drive the sword in.
Eidolon dropped to the ground, as he presumably dropped whatever power he was using for flight for another one to impede the vortex of water. And every other Parahuman power that might even slightly impede its inexorable approach was brought to bear against it.
It made little difference, for the wall of churning water and ice ground its way through everything in its path.
Armsmaster was feeling rather useless right about then. He could already tell that Leviathan's last minute panic attack was going to break through long before Alexandria was done; assuming that Buster's comment about exponential density was true.
A warning came from his prediction programs, telling him to get down, and an earthshaking roar resounded. The sky turned red, and the hurricane Leviathan had conjured broke like so much fine china.
Armsmaster picked himself out of the new crater he found himself in. The whole area had been reduced to rubble, Buster standing at the center of the destructions. Considering she had both of her hands pointed up towards the sky, it wasn't difficult to figure out what had happened.
However... Leviathan was nowhere to be seen. Alexandria tore herself out of a pile of rubble, still holding the Nano sword.
She had let Leviathan go.
Armsmaster lifted himself up with a wince, that leg was going to be pain. "Why?" He questioned Buster. "Why did you let it go? I saw it, fear. We were so goddamn close to killing an Endbringer."
"I couldn't both keep a hold on Leviathan and disperse the hurricane." She explained. "That attack was going to kill pretty much everyone here."
Armsmaster couldn't believe her naiveté. "It would have been worth it." Armsmaster stated. "If every single person here who could have been killed by that had been, it would have been worth it. Any sacrifice would have been worth it to kill an Endbringer."
Buster crossed her arms over her chest. "I don't believe that."
"You-you naïve brat." How could she not understand. "You think that just because you have all of these fancy powers that you can be better then all of us?" Armsmaster spat. "You think you can spit on the sacrifice of every cape that gave their lives to maybe, maybe stop the Endbringers?"
"There will be a next time to stop Leviathan, if everyone here had died and we had not killed it, who would have stopped the next attack?" She postulated.
"Pretty words, why don't you tell them to the next man to die to Leviathan?" Armsmaster replied with a scowl. "Someday, you will have to give up that naiveté of yours and understand why we give up everything to fight the Endbringers." Armsmaster turned and left, not listening to anything else Buster might have to say.
The idea that scared him the most was that she might not ever have to lose that naiveté of hers. That she would someday go so far beyond any other Parahuman as to make all of their sacrifices superfluous. Would her power exceed even Scion's someday?
Armsmaster retreated to his workshop, and told himself that next time, he would be the one to stop the Endbringer.