Fighting a wizard and their tower is,,, a difficult proposition, for most.


Beta'd by Kinsfire, SpytheEngineer, and FirstSelector.

Before anyone freaks out, the different names for Endbringers are intentional. There hasn't been a consensus on what to call them yet, in-universe. Also the Endbringers aren't quite configured the same as in canon.

I think Sundancer might be a little OOC… ah, well, it's my story.


These new Endbringers were a much different experience than fighting the Simurgh.

On one hand, there wasn't the same kind of time pressure that the Simurgh's scream brought, forcing combatants to measure the fight as a whole against their own individual time limit.

On the other hand, the tall one (Taylor had taken to thinking of it as the Tower, although she'd heard Bohu, Babel, and even Pisa thrown around) was surrounded by a gradually growing area in which the city was being changed. Traps, barricades, and alterations of the buildings were plentiful, and only spreading, and Taylor didn't want to think about the people who were going to have their lives and livelihoods ruined by it. Hopefully someone would be able to do something about it after the battle, or maybe there'd be a power suited to blunting the effects that could be positioned to block it off.

On top of that, the other one was harassing the whole field, hurling out blasts of Purity's power with impunity that she only sometimes managed to flick out barriers to stop, and while the medical tent had four different kinds of shields around it, including one that looked like glimmering shards of glass that some instinct told her was important, they were doing their best to keep attention off of it.

Not that they were doing super well, of course. External communications were quickly disrupted by the flying one taking on the abilities of Manpower and extending his electromagnetic field to block in the city, which unfortunately also disrupted most Movers' attempts to arrive. Strider could slip through if given enough time, and most Alexandria packages or flying artillery capes could blast through given enough time (as demonstrated by Victoria, sun glimmering in her hair as she exploded through the barrier, and less romantically by Purity), the rate of reinforcements slowed past what they needed, especially given how flat-footed they were.

A lightning bolt flickered out from Taylor's outstretched hand, deflected narrowly by the Magician's use of Manpower's ability, and she growled before invoking thurisaz instead, a hail of conjured thorns falling onto the Magician. Most were also deflected by an electromagnetic force field, but a few made it through, digging into the Endbringer's supernaturally dense flesh.

"Volur! Try a closer engagement!" shouted Victoria, currently attempting to seize and then break the Magician's limbs. One was already missing, the result of a lucky shot from Laserdream combining with Victoria getting her hands on the limb, and in the wake of that success, the Magician had chosen a third power. Its face turned red and angular, not entirely unlike a biker's helmet, and it was apparently some sort of aerokinetic, using bladed ribbons of solidified air to try and slash through anyone who lacked their toughness to make an attempt to get close.

A quick invocation of gebo manifested a spear, glimmering golden, in Taylor's left fist, and she dove in, heedless of the windy blades that skittered off her armor like so many pebbles and failed to do more than exfoliate what skin she had exposed.

The spear pierced deep into the Endbringer's hand, and Taylor sent lightning crackling through it to scorch the flesh around it. When both other hands came around to smack into Taylor, she raised a barrier, and while rattled against it by the still-impaled hand, nothing came of it that was worse than causing her to let go of her spear, which vanished in a shower of light.

Now that she wasn't anchored to the Endbringer's hand, it stepped up its use of the aerokinetic power, and she was sent hurtling almost a hundred yards away from it before she could restabilize her flight.

Taylor looked back at the battle to see Laserdream, desperately throwing up her shields as wind blades carved through them, and then beyond that, to see the Endbringer glowing with the charge of one of Purity's blasts, and knew she wasn't close enough to stop it-

Alexandria slammed into the Endbringer, piercing through the dying whirlwind around it like a particularly well-thrown dart and taking it high on the chest. The blast swings wide, slamming Taylor into and then through a building, and as she shakes the vertigo of the sudden motion off, she finds herself glad in a curiously detached way that her chain mail's so durable (the implications of it flexing under the blast and transferring almost all of the force to her, and the lack of effect the Endbringer squishing her against her own shield, will be something to think about later), and that she was glad that she, who could handle the beam, was hit instead of someone like Laserdream or Kid Win.

Shoving herself up off the rubble, Taylor rose back into the air and flicked out a hand, invoking kaunaz to try and kill the Endbringer outright.

It didn't work, but its three faces all shattered, not-quite-porcelain shards falling off to reveal three vaguely feminine faces, shadowed in hoods. These faces didn't remain for long, though, and as Tohu started falling, one of them swelled and morphed into Myrddin's bearded visage, halting its descent. Another turned into a domino masked blonde with a smattering of freckles across her nose, and the third became a gaunt woman's with flowing, almost white hair, black lipstick, and an almost baroque mask.

"Hard override," came Alexandria's voice through the armbands, even as she disengaged. "Tohu has taken the power of Damsel of Distress, an Annihilator-class Blaster, as well as a local Thinker and Myrddin. Do not try and test your durability against Damsel of Distress' power."

Well, thought Taylor, even though she'd made it more offensively terrifying, she'd at least accomplished her goal of getting rid of the Manpower head.

She took a deep breath in, then let it out, and drew a bead on the Endbringer. Her first thought was to aim for the head bearing Damsel of Distress' visage, but some instinct told her that the freckled face was the more important to remove, so that is the target she chose.

Before she could launch her attack, a veritable column of something she could only describe as "distortion" accompanied by an earsplittingly painful noise slammed her back into the disintegrating rubble, chipping at her armor and making her feel vaguely sunburned as the world seemed to wink around her. Dazedly, she noted the dust falling from her arm where the armband was, before searing away the weakness with an influx of magical energy drawn from the environment that wiped away both the fuzziness inside her head and the aches and pains she'd picked up over the course of the fight that had seemed so far below her notice.

She rolled her head around on her neck, feeling as much as hearing it pop, then cracked her knuckles on both hands, continuing to draw in energy and condense it behind one strike.

A thought had her baring her teeth as she rose off the ground, winds swirling around her dramatically. There was something to be said about the impact of a dynamic entrance, after all, and that was one thing she could perform well.

"Soulless machine!" she shouted, rocketing back up into the air. "How dare you strike the heir of Odin?"

There was no small degree of shock and awe as a result of the entrance, not least of which because of the massive lightning bolt crackling out from her hand to shatter the no-longer-smug head of the Brocktonite Thinker.


Sundancer was terrified.

Not necessarily as terrified as she would have been had, say, the Simurgh been attacking (the lecture Amy had given her about what, exactly, the Simurgh had done to their brains still gave her chills), but the presence of two Endbringers at once was naturally terrifying enough to mostly close the gap.

For once, she thought, vaporizing one of the tiny versions of Babel that was about to make a run at Flashbang, having such a destructive power was a good thing.

Where others would be stymied by barriers grown out of the brickwork and the buildings, not her- she could afford to melt it with her orb and then cool it down with her presence. She had nothing to fear from the minions, either- others reported them running hot, molten even, to move, and when they got into the area around her, they cooled and congealed into something like obsidian but much more fragile, something easy to shatter with the steel toes Accord had been generous enough to build into all of their costumes.

What was more, she didn't have to worry about her surroundings as she would normally- in fact, her orb was useful there, too. Most of the traps couldn't withstand the heat of her power, springing closed on nothing and shattering under the intense heat, and those that could (mostly the pits) were filled in by molten asphalt or concrete as she swept her power around her.

She felt, as the battle went on, that tension that she held herself with normally, the tension of being able to break the world with nothing more than a stray thought, slipping away, and she recognized something similar in some of the other capes around her. Flashbang was one, for sure- the disciplined man seemed almost at peace, now, being able to stand in the middle of explosions that shattered brick and creature alike without the worry of his teammates, when they crossed paths, and they'd even shared nods, recognizing their own situation in the other.

Then, of course, she caught a glimpse of the aerial dogfight occurring, and all that tension flooded back and then some.

None of the faces of the Endbringer were familiar to her, but given the way that it was hurling around energy blasts and beams of something that looked wrong in a way she couldn't verbalize, some of which echoed with a sound that made her tense up and check for broken bones despite its dissimilarity to the sound of bone snapping, they were all dangerous.

This was borne out when some of the beams ended up aimed in the same general direction as her, which swatted a bare-chested man in a tiger mask out of the sky in an explosion of blood and bone shards.

Another beam came down near her, and she barely managed to swing her orb around in time to take the bigger pieces of rubble and debris coming her way. She could feel the shrapnel whiz by, one or two pieces close enough to open up a gash on both skin and costume, and the dust of the building settled over her, but she remained otherwise unharmed.

The same, however, could not be said about the alley around her- parts were wholesale obstructed by chunks of brick wall, while others were technically passable, although she'd spent too much time in ballet and not enough hiking to safely navigate the veritable maze of detritus left behind.

The same could not be said of the creatures produced by Babel- they skittered over and around the chunks of brick and rock, all but hurling themselves at her. This, she could handle, though, long hours of footwork practice letting her slip between the rapidly cooled minions and letting them shatter themselves on the floor, at least where she didn't melt them directly with her orb.

For a moment, she just let herself breathe, surrounded by the popping chunks of creature and building as she shrunk her orb down from three feet in diameter down to the approximate size of a basketball.

Sundancer felt her thoughts clear, and with the added clarity remembered that she probably shouldn't be so cavalier about her use of pyrotechnics- immune to heat she may be, but she still needed to breathe, and overuse of her orb too close to her could complicate that.

Before she could return to pushing towards Babel, she heard the background rumble of Flashbang's detonations abruptly stop. Almost without a thought, she pulled her orb to larger sizes and sent it hurtling left, through the already heavily damaged building, and followed it through, trusting in her power's protection to let her pass through without being burned.

Two alleys over was Flashbang on his back, one broken arm raised up to try and block a blow from one of the creatures while another gnawed on his boot.

"Hey!" shouted Sundancer, scooping up a half a brick that had fallen in the fighting. "Over here!"

The brick smacked into the creature winding up to swing at Flashbang's head, not hurting it much but definitely drawing its attention. The second one also looked up, teeth baring in presumable fury, and both of them leapt for her.

Just like all their predecessors, they didn't make it to Sundancer, shattering on the ground as she sidestepped them handily.

"Are you okay?" she asked, much gentler now that the only things around were rubble and a kindred spirit.

Flashbang scrunched his eyes closed. "No," he said, in a wavering voice. "Concussion, I think."

Sundancer winced. One way or another, he was out of the fight, and given the situation, he wasn't likely to be able to make his way out of the area to a medical area.

With the indescribable sound of Hekate's blasts in the background, the situation she found herself in (helping Flashbang stagger upright, in an alley that was gradually reshaping itself and trying to close off the exits) bore no small similarity to what she remembered of Madison.

Fortunately, she was… more than she had been in Madison, and she didn't have to resort to stealth here and now.

What obstacles stood between her and an escape from the city were all surmountable, in one way or another, with the aid of her power. Bricks could be shoved aside or smashed in their walls, or even superheated to the point of shattering if she managed the heat of her sun correctly. The minions couldn't stand up to either her orb or her own defense against her heat, and everything else could be destroyed with almost contemptuous ease by her orb. It gave her an almost heady feeling of power- or it would, at least, had she not been so acutely aware of the circumstances that led to her getting her power and those she was using it in now. It was so different from how she normally felt about her power that she almost stopped when she realized how unusual this mode of thought was, but the weight of Flashbang hanging from his one uninjured arm over her shoulders served to keep her head in the game, as it were, and keep moving.

Absently, she wondered how many people she was consigning to death or at least more severe injury because she couldn't bulldoze through the area before putting the thought out of her mind- as far as she was aware Movers were still being blocked, and she… she just couldn't let Flashbang die like Noelle could have.

She continued on her path out of the battlefield, not with certainty but with firmer resolve, a concussed man hanging from her shoulders, and two broken communication armbands (Flashbang's shattered by his own explosions, and Sundancer's fried by the temperature protection her power granted her), not that either of them would realize that until they arrived at the med tent.


And that's that!

So, uh, yeah. Taylor mostly just shrugged off one of Damsel's blasts scaled up to Endbringer tier (I say mostly because weird time shenaniganry).

I'm getting geared up to move in a couple months, if you want to throw some help my way on that one, I got me a Ko (fi) (https (:/) (/) ko (-) fi (/) lucifra) and a Pa tre on (https (:/) pa tre on .com (/) Lucifra). (remove spaces and parentheses)

I also have a discord sir ver for author stuff now (as in as of like right now it's going live)- if you have questions or comments that you'd like a more direct, that's another option: https (:/) (/) dis co rd dot com (/) NHRUKz8jyy (remove spaces and parentheses, dot to period)

That's about it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!