23 – The Simurgh's Plan
[Interlude]
"…above all, expect the unexpected. This is likely to be unlike any other Endbringer fight in recorded history. Not only is the Simurgh attacking for the second time in a row since Canberra in February despite the Endbringers normally taking turns, we have an on-going S-class situation in this city. We don't know what objective the Simurgh may or may not have. All we know is that we have to end this fast. Dragon and Armsmaster's advance warning might give us the chance to make this a good day, but other issues threaten to make it just the opposite."
Legend had just finished giving his speech to the gathered capes who volunteered for the Simurgh fight when he received a transmission from Director Armstrong.
After a short pause while he listened, he smiled.
"It looks like CRUCIBLE's just taken care of Echidna and will be joining their forces with us shortly," he announced. "That's one S-class threat down, and one less problem for us to worry about. Alright, that's all for now. Refer to your armbands and group leaders for further instructions, and get ready."
Cheers erupted from the crowd, as the good news broke the grave mood they'd been in when they first heard about the situation.
"That's impressively efficient," said Alexandria as Legend walked off the speaking platform to rendezvous with his colleagues.
"Maybe those three could take up the mantle of the Triumvirate some day," said Legend.
"They have quite a different modus operandi however. They've started to make fewer appearances in person and merely send out their bugs," said Alexandria.
"That's just the nature of their powers isn't it? They don't have the kind of durability or heavy hitting capability we do, and Skitter is a Master. That's not the kind of powerset you'd go to the frontlines with," said Eidolon.
"Alexandria does raise a good point, however. If they don't appear in person, their images as heroes would suffer for it. People like personable heroes," said Legend.
Just then, a portal appeared next to them. Out of habit, they'd assumed it was Contessa, but they were proven wrong when the portal expanded and a group of bugs pushed through a wheeled cart.
The other gathered capes all looked over at the sight.
A swarm of smaller bugs bunched up and formed the silhouette of a woman, before speaking with synchronized buzzes and chirps.
"Hello Legend, Alexandria, Eidolon. This is Skitter speaking."
"Hello Skitter. Glad to have you and your team with us. What's this you've brought?" Legend asked.
"We have an idea as to how to kill the Simurgh, or at least remove her from the board. These are time stop bombs. From Thinker powers, we have good reason to believe that they will work on her, but we don't have any way to land a hit on her ourselves. You guys might be able to do it."
"Killing an Endbringer…I won't dare to hope for such an outcome, but if there's any chance at all, we'll take it," said Legend.
"These are Bakuda bombs aren't they?" Alexandria asked.
"Yes, they are."
"With her precognition and telekinesis, it will be hard to pin them on her, but it's still the best chance we've had in a long time. Thank you," Alexandria said.
"It might work if I'm lucky. I'm a blindspot to precogs, and that probably includes the Simurgh. I'll take some extras," said Eidolon.
The three of them moved to grab the bombs and read the instructions for their use.
"She's getting close. Our forces will engage her first in the atmosphere and try to stop her from getting to the city."
Legend looked up and saw the Simurgh in the far distance.
"Everyone, get ready! Watch your timers!" He shouted.
O O O
Twenty minutes ago…
Back at the CRUCIBLE command centre, Amelia stood up and swore loudly.
"How did she dodge that?! Does Teacher's device not work on her? This is such bullshit!"
They had just sent through a hypersonic missile with a time bomb via portal, the same way they sniped Jack Slash earlier.
However, the Simurgh had moved out of the way easily.
"Analyzing. She may be able to detect the formation of the portals, giving her a slight forewarning. Alternatively, she may have used telekinesis to adjust the trajectory of the missile," said Offensive Bias.
Numerous portals appeared as hundreds of missiles flew through in an attempt to surround the Simurgh and allow nowhere to dodge.
She weaved around them expertly as they chased her with homing features.
Then, as if she'd been merely playing with them earlier, all the missiles' navigation systems stopped working and they started flying towards the city together with her.
"Are you kidding me? Coil, cut!"
In the other timeline, Coil reported the results, and the team tried a new set of tactics. Every time, they split a timeline to attack the Simurgh, while the other one used all the portal generators in support of Taylor's troop deployments in Buffer1 instead.
This way, they could take advantage of the time before the Simurgh arrived to experiment and learn more about her, while retaining the control timeline where they were still preparing their forces to fight Echidna.
What they'd found out however, was highly discouraging. Kaleidus' notes on how the Endbringers were sandbagging had been right, and but none of them had expected just how ridiculously overpowered Simurgh actually was.
Their portals were utterly useless against her, because in the second it took to open one the Simurgh could fly tens of kilometers away if she wanted to. Her telekinesis? The range seemed to be as far as she needed it to be to deal with whatever they threw at her.
Literally nothing damaged her body in a significant way. Sure she took superficial damage but it was quickly healed and apparently didn't affect her at all. The only things she hadn't let herself be hit with were the time stop bombs, so that was potentially something that would work—if they found a way to hit her.
And realistically, that meant they had to use a precog blindspot that didn't require a portal to strike from. Now because Teacher's students had also made a mobile version of the perception blocking device, that was the next thing they tried.
That too was defeated because the Simurgh could apparently indirectly detect the blindspot by sensing where her telekinesis power couldn't control. And they only found out how the Simurgh did it by waking up Tattletale and forcing her to analyze it.
As the clock ticked down and the Simurgh got close to city, they came to the sad realization that the outcome of this battle would most likely be…whatever the Simurgh wanted it to be.
Eventually they had to stop when it was time to fight Echidna, and turn Coil's power over there instead, which led to a quick and successful mission.
However, even after they successfully captured Echidna and her clones, the mood of the CRUCIBLE team remained a sombre one.
Reaching the limit of what they could do, they could only put their hopes in the Triumvirate and Scion, just like everybody else.
O O O
The start of the fight against the Simurgh didn't seem particularly different than usual. Blasters, Shakers, and other long-range capes unloaded on the flying angel to more or less no effect as she dodged or easily brushed off the attacks.
The Triumvirate were in the thick of it while most other capes played minor roles, not being able to damage her in any significant way or keep up with her.
The battle swept across the city, as the Simurgh flew about and the teleporters desperately tried to keep up by moving the non-Movers.
Every Simurgh battle was a battle of Thinkers, despite appearances. What was the Simurgh trying to accomplish? There was always something.
Unlike the other Endbringers who seemed bent on mindless destruction, death, and fighting whatever was in their way, the Simurgh was more than intelligent, it always had goals in mind and engaged in complex plans.
The true battle was figuring out what it planned to do, and stopping it.
Thanks to the early warning algorithm, the Protectorate and PRT had managed to evacuate a good portion of the population. Shelters were useless because the Scream would affect them all, so they had to be brought out of the city entirely. As such, the shelters merely served as gathering points so people could be quickly teleported away.
Despite this, casualties were skyrocketing.
"It's targeting the shelters that haven't evacuated!" Alexandria shouted into her armband before flying in a devastating punch and getting blown away in exchange. The bomb she'd tried to leave on her was dismantled before it could do anything.
A string of names, lost capes, was continuously announced by Dragon's voice.
Eidolon moved quickly and erected some kind of barrier over the next shelter the Simurgh couldn't easily get through, while Legend blasted the fake angel and seared off bits of flesh.
"The Simurgh is creating a Tinker device hidden within the telekinetic storm," Dragon's voice informed the capes.
Blasters concentrated fire onto that area while the Simurgh blocked by uprooting several whole buildings.
Like this, the battle raged on as the city was quickly being destroyed.
O O O
In Earth Buffer1, CRUCIBLE forces had collected the prisoners from the Echidna fight, including Noelle herself and her clones.
Due to the state of emergency, the PRT had agreed to let CRUCIBLE temporarily take care of the wounded allied capes, and to imprison the clones. As such, the allied capes and prisoners were being organized for transport to two different worlds, one with some medical facilities to house allied, neutral, or civilian groups, and another that was a high security prison.
To the maximum extent possible, CRUCIBLE tried to segregate worlds for different purposes, and minimized fallout in the event of a disaster in one of them, and to prevent their main bases of operation from being exposed.
However, in order for either Taylor or Offensive Bias to command their forces, there needed to be a continuous connection back to M2, the main command area. As a result, once the portals to Boston were closed, a portal was established from Buffer1 to M2 to maintain connectivity.
Additionally, M2 functioned as a nexus world for their portal system. The portal generators could only open a portal into another world from the one they were in. As a result, in order to connect two other worlds, it was necessary to use two portal generators to form a stacked double-portal, with the host world acting as nexus.
Because the portal generators were a vital technology, it was only natural for them to be kept in the most fortified core world of M2.
Both of these facts meant that despite their best efforts, there were certain moments and places where the main CRUCIBLE worlds were accessible.
Then CRUCIBLE had Coil keep the successful timeline as soon as they shut off all the portals to Boston.
Their own operations seemingly isolated from Boston again, CRUCIBLE opened the signal portal from M2, and began preparing the captures and wounded allies on Buffer1 for transport.
Meanwhile, Coil split a new timeline for CRUCIBLE to join the Simurgh defense force, keeping a control timeline as usual.
It was only after all this that the Morrigan struck—and unfortunately for CRUCIBLE, it happened in both timelines.
Having pretended to be one of the Echidna clones, the Morrigan had allowed itself to be captured in containment goo and seemingly fell unconscious when Canary's song was used to command them all asleep.
Having, possessing Master powers of its own, it was rather resistant to the effect, and merely bided its time until CRUCIBLE opened the signal portal to M2.
Using the weakened powers it inherited from its mother and father, it then proceeded to quietly execute the plan its mother had been transmitting to it from low atmosphere via low-frequency waves over the past few couple of weeks before it was awakened by Citrine's "accidental" attunement.
First, some telekinesis to loosen the goo enough to draw a symbol.
Next, the goo trapping it was absorbed into a pocket dimension. A Scream followed that turned all the other nearby biological lifeforms berserk, including all the bugs, Noelle, and her clones.
While Taylor was momentarily unable to control her bugs, the Morrigan drew another symbol and opened a pocket dimension right on the portal to M2, which destabilized its structure, scrambled the signals going through, and forced it to open wider.
It burst through the portal, at which point it was inside the area of effect of the Anti-Thinker Bubble device, and gained access to precognition and postcognition in the world.
It tore through the M2 base while the CRUCIBLE leaders were in shock and still didn't even identify what was intruding (because the signals going to Offensive Bias and Taylor had been scrambled).
Even as they diverted attention to their own world from the active Simurgh fight, the Morrigan had already found the portal generators.
Then it hacked into their systems and opened a portal straight to the Anti-Thinker Bubble device for Earth M2 and telekinetically destroyed it, before opening a second portal back to Boston and shoving an entire portal generator through it, complete with its coordinate information for M2.
Meanwhile…
The Protectorate Thinkers finally realized a startling truth about the Simurgh the Triumvirate had been fighting. "That's a decoy!"
Alexandria heard the relayed message from Dragon and flew up, rapidly looking around.
A few familiar items flashed through the air, and suddenly she remembered a similar scene she had seen before. From when the Simurgh attacked Madison.
And then she understood. But it was too late.
On the other side of the city, a massively oversized portal appeared in the air, and the true Simurgh flew through with nobody blocking her way.
Eidolon with teleportation and Legend in his light Breaker state followed right after, but Alexandria was forced to call off all the other capes.
Cauldron wasn't ready to reveal the existence of Doormaker, so they had to pretend as if the portal was a one-way trip.
As the capes gathered in the destroyed street, they watched the portal shut close with confusion and trepidation. What the hell was the Simurgh trying to accomplish? Was the battle over? Instead of bringing things over from the other side like with Madison, the Simurgh had itself gone through this time. Was it coming back?
Not long after, a golden man arrived.
He looked around and saw there was nothing to do, so he moved on.
"Wait!" The capes called after Scion.
Back on M2, the CRUCIBLE leaders were paralyzed with fear as they saw the face of the Simurgh staring at them on the screen through a camera, and heard her Scream.
That was short lived as Eidolon hit it with some reality warping power that actually managed to shred one of its wings. Unfortunately, the wings were apparently cosmetic as the Simurgh kept flying without any problems.
Numerous facilities were telekinetically grabbed wholesale and flung around, destroying the horde of combat drones that moved to engage. Within seconds, a vast swatch of the base was reduced to rubble.
"We gotta go!" Amelia shouted. She hit a button and opened the door to Paige, who was in a sound-proofed room so she could sing without affecting the others.
"Paige, quick!" The older cape rushed over to join the other two leaders in a panicked run.
Amelia reached into a compartment on her Armoriont and activated her own mobile Anti-Thinker Bubble device.
The area of effect of two such devices could not overlap. The smaller one would be forcefully shut off if that happened. As a result, they had to manually activate the mobile ones after the world-spanning one was destroyed earlier.
"Bias, Omega Escape Protocol!"
A portal opened in front of them, and they rushed through to the M2 Dark Side Moon Base, and got into an escape AAPV stocked with supplies and a portable portal generator.
The portal closed behind them, and Offensive Bias continued the futile fight against the Simurgh. It attempted to delete records of all CRUCIBLE-known worlds from its database, but soon found that it stopped working halfway through. It'd been hacked.
Then it's only remaining role was to buy time. It could always restore from backup later.
The girls scrambled to launch the AAPV and blasted into outer space.
O O O
The escape AAPV, due to a lack of armaments, had enough space to hold all three of them, with transforming seats that could double as beds.
"Fuck," Amelia said once they were out of the moon's orbit and heading deeper into the solar system.
"Yeah. Fuck," said Taylor.
"That was too scary. I can't believe the Simurgh came after us," Paige said.
Taylor started up the program to restore a fresh Offensive Bias from backup from earlier in the day.
Once booted, it inquired as to why they had enacted the Omega Escape Protocol, and received some tired explanations from the girls.
"I can't believe we had to use this plan either. I thought Kaleidus was just being paranoid, preparing all of this," said Amelia.
The plan was to get somewhere definitively outside of the Simurgh's range and jump worlds via coordinates that hadn't been stored anywhere written or electronic, only in their minds.
"You can never be too paranoid when it comes to the Simurgh," said Taylor, then shuddered. "Ugh, it feels really weird without my bugs now. I feel so vulnerable."
"Could the Simurgh still follow us? I mean, your powers still work on the moon right Amelia? That means the Simurgh might still be able to use postcognition there and figure out which direction we headed. And it can probably fly faster than we can," said Paige.
"The protocol requires that we fly some distance from the moon first, to increase the chances of reaching an area of space which the shards' powers do not work. Due to an inability to determine whether the shards merely set a restriction on usage or whether they are truly unable to operate past the moon, the recommended procedure is to continue flying as far as possible until directly threatened."
"So unless we see the Simurgh on our tail, we'll have to keep going for a while," said Taylor.
The AAPV was theoretically capable of reaching 36 Gs of acceleration at maximum in a vacuum, but that would kill whoever was inside, and almost certainly destroy the vehicle too.
Fortunately in space, they only needed a simple 1 G of constant acceleration to reach extremely high velocities.
"Is this right? We can get to Mars in a day?" Paige asked with shock as she looked over the planned trajectory.
"And thirteen hours, yeah. It is pretty amazing huh?" Amelia said. "Apparently we can even go interstellar. Just takes a few years. Of course, we don't have the supplies for that, so we'd need to go into cryo."
"Do we really need to go that far?" Paige asked.
"Interstellar, no. We're just going to Mars because the portals don't work without a strong enough nearby gravitation source, and it's the safest one."
"What do you mean safest?"
"As the planets orbit around the Sun, Mercury and Venus are usually closer to Earth than Mars. However, they are also exposed to more dangerous solar winds, which this vehicle is untested for. Therefore, the safest choice is Mars," Offensive Bias explained.
"So what exactly are we going to do, now that the Simurgh has destroyed our base of operations? If we go back to Earth Bet, she might just attack us again, considering we were her target," said Taylor.
"I honestly don't know. The protocol says we're supposed to go to the Refuge moon base, which is the backup world. But the Simurgh might be able to find it through postcognition too. This totally sucks," said Amelia.
"But why didn't the Simurgh finish Cauldron off after Madison? Is Cauldron really that much stronger than we are?" Taylor asked.
"Dunno. Why doesn't the Simurgh just destroy everything immediately instead of attacking in a cycle with the other Endbringers?"
"Hm…I guess we'll have plenty of time to think about it," Taylor said with a sigh. "Dad is going to freak."
O O O
Three days later, after some sight-seeing at Mars, the CRUCIBLE leaders had rounded back to Earth Refuge's moon base.
To their relief, the base was fully intact. After docking, the AI in charge of it, Enduring Witness, essentially a renamed copy of Offensive Bias kept in hibernation, was woken up and they verbally reported on the recent events while it acquired updated data from the restored-from-backup Offensive Bias.
"I recommend that you take some time to unwind using the facilities aboard this base after your uncomfortable trip to Mars," said Enduring Witness. "The situation is not quite as hopeless as it appears. There are a number of secret contingency plans that Kaleidus left with me to deal with scenarios such as this. I will begin executing these plans to rebuild while you rest, and you can use the consoles to review them and my progress."
"Really? So we can bounce back from this?" Amelia asked.
"Of course. It is evident from this station's and your survival that the Simurgh's Thinker range is indeed limited. We can now determine that Mars is certainly outside of that range, and furthermore, that the Anti-Thinker Bubble devices create meaningful interference if not a complete veil against the Simurgh's precognitive and postcognitive powers. While we are hidden from the Simurgh's sight, we can colonize new worlds and use Mars as a transport hub to cross dimensions, thereby keeping each world untraceable from others, until a direct Earth connection is needed. With enough time and resources dedicated to R&D, we shall be able to colonize Mars as well."
"You mean we can build up worlds that are only accessed via Mars, then connect one at a time when we need to bring resources or whatever to Earth Bet, so the rest stay safe. That could work…" Taylor said. "Then we'd probably want to stop segregating worlds by function to reduce the number of free worlds we have to find. And if all the networked worlds are compromised anyways, it wouldn't make any difference if we just kept all the facilities on the same world or not."
"Alright. Sounds like a plan. Now let's stop thinking and hit the baths!" Amelia dragged Taylor away from the screen.
O O O
A/N: There were a lot of great ideas, thanks to everyone who gave suggestions and especially the ones who explained in more detail!
I have decided on the next world, based on a tip from a reader on SV. It will be Tower of God, which I'm actually quite familiar with and excited to write about, having already powered through a number of chapter drafts.
Guest101: Based on your comment, I guess you won't see my response, but I'll respond all the same if anybody else feels the same way. It's kinda weird you're using "Plot Armor" for what seems to be the opposite meaning. Usually that means main characters getting off too easy, surviving things they shouldn't...not that enemies are more competent than they should be. But either way, it's just a difference in preferences. I can't satisfy everyone and I'd rather keep the story interesting for myself to write, and that sometimes that means raising the difficulty level a little. Sorry!