Topple a mage's tower, then watch them flee…
I almost called this chapter "Sappers and Siege Engines" but I feel like that didn't adequately apply to the dichotomy between the characters taking center stage here.
Taylor's massive bolt of lightning had entirely shattered the head that she hit and the hood draped over it, sending a spray of shrapnel across the sky. When the Magician moved out of the dust cloud, dodging her next bolt of lightning, Taylor saw the stump of the thing's neck, still slightly smoking, writhing slightly, almost as if it was trying and failing to regrow its head because of something in her attack.
"Taylor!" She turned just in time to catch Victoria coming in for what would have been a bone-rattling hug on a normal person (or even some Brutes). "I thought- When you just took that blast-"
"I'm here, Vicky," said Taylor quietly, wrapping her arms around her girlfriend and squeezing gently, raising a barrier around them to prevent the Magician from hitting them while they were vulnerable. "It's gonna take more than some grimderp Living Tribunal knockoff to put me out."
Vicky blinked. "What?"
Taylor opened her mouth to respond, then stopped when she realized she had nothing she could say to explain the non sequitur she'd just dropped. "Never mind. How are things going up here?"
Vicky winced. "Not great. Aunt Sarah caught the edge of that blast that hit you, and she'll survive but she's lost a leg and she's out of the fight. She's lucky, though, we're having trouble keeping up with the use of both Myrddin's power and Damsel's, and it doesn't help that she's whittling us down."
"Let's see what we can't do about that."
Vicky gave Taylor a level look. "Strong words- you sure you can back them up?"
Taylor wasn't sure where, exactly, she was remembering the line from, but it seemed almost perfect for the situation. "Although only breath, words which I command are immortal." Then, more quietly: "I'm sure."
Vicky blinked twice before blushing. "Go get 'em, tiger."
The shield vanished, and immediately the two of them separated, letting one of Damsel's energy blasts scream its way between them as they both returned their focus to the Endbringer whose non-ruined faces were both gazing at them.
"You know," said Victoria, shouting somewhat to be heard over the distance, "she's not all that much taller than you are!"
"Size matters not," Taylor returned, flicking out another lightning bolt that vanished into an infinitesimal rift between dimensions mere feet away from its blonde head. "Besides," she continued, changing tacks away from direct damage towards area control and conjuring a pair of flickering runes, hagalaz and raido, above her left arm, "she's too edgy. Take off the damn hoods!" This last part was shouted at the Magician, who was at that moment flying through a particularly low-hanging cloud.
It gestured towards Taylor with one hand, and with a crack of displaced air, she was swatted leftwards, managing to stop herself just shy of a screaming cone of wrongness.
Taylor shot directly up and went to click the button on her armband. Hitting nothing but air, the fact that it hadn't stood up to the Endbringer's attack registered to her, and in a quick flicker of wunjo, a new one appeared, secured to her arm in just the same place as her old one.
After wasting precious time re-setting it up, Taylor jammed both buttons down. "Hard Override: anyone in the air, I'm trying something that might be able to disrupt its ability to reach out and touch us. Watch out for turbulence- I might not quite be able to keep the air calm as I do so."
With that said, she pushed her will through the runes, sending them blazing to life. As if in response, the Magician turned to glare at her, but it was too late to do anything, as the wispy clouds it had flown through moments before seemed to explode outwards, turning into stormclouds crackling with lightning as they wrapped themselves around the Endbringer.
The Magician wrenched one of its arms free to point at Taylor, but a bolt of lightning connected from the bindings around its waist to the outstretched limb, battering it aside with the force of a particularly disgruntled deity and sending the attack it had prepared screaming off into emptier skies.
At the same time, the winds around the Endbringer were picking up, giving the less adroit flyers nearby more trouble as they howled around the Endbringer and made its flight unpredictable at best, battering it around like a particularly energetic six year old with a stick would a piñata: with much vigor and enthusiasm, but less lasting damage.
This did, however, let the other flyers take a moment to regroup, with Legend and Eidolon finally appearing (one as a streak of actinic blue-white light and the other fading into view from within a cloud of green sparkles almost but not quite identical to a tube of glitter glue).
They took a moment to coordinate with other flying Blasters before firing, all kinds of attacks both conventional and esoteric converging on the Endbringer. Some of them were captured within small distortions of space that, given what she knew of parahuman powers, were likely a result of Myrddin being able to connect to other universes, but the vast majority impacted the Endbringer to greater or lesser extent. Some, like Laserdream's, only left what appeared to be scorch marks, but others cracked or pierced the Endbringer's flowing robes, like a not-quite-crossbow bolt that rose from ground level (probably Flechette's, thought Taylor, seeing how it penetrated through and through, ascending towards Mani's sister as if the Endbringer wasn't even there) or a beam of those same greenish sparkles that Eidolon appeared in.
Unfortunately, while the concentrated onslaught couldn't slay the Endbringer, it did quite the number on the not-quite-solid shackles of clouds Taylor had wrapped the Endbringer in.
It seized the opportunity, releasing what amounted to essentially an expanding sphere of screaming not-space, and Taylor was forced to abandon the runes she already had running in order to conjure enough defensive barriers to stop the wave from killing anyone with the power she had available.
While Taylor was distracted, it repositioned, a visible glow manifesting around its three remaining hands, before a massive explosion from below gave them all pause. Looking down, the most noticeable thing was the fact that the massive form of the Tower was toppling over, massive chunks blown out of it.
Taylor snapped her attention back to the Magician, cursing herself for her lack of situational awareness, but she needn't have bothered- it was hurtling away into the skies at a speed far in excess of anything Myrddin had ever been documented using.
With one Endbringer fleeing, and the other probably dead, the fight was over, and Taylor let herself drop to the ground abruptly, arresting her fall with a jolt just feet above the top of a building before she moved, the medical tent growing in the distance- the fight may be over, but the cleanup was just beginning, and she'd have to move quickly in order to actually get the visiting capes to help out at all.
Flechette was glad that she wasn't being thrown into the fray like she had been last time she'd been in an Endbringer fight.
Don't get her wrong, she was proud of her contribution to sending the Simurgh packing, even if it was pretty clear that Volur was the major factor there. That said, having the Simurgh turn its blank gaze on you hatefully (could a blank face convey hate? if that wasn't the case normally, the Simurgh sure as shit could), even if it was in retreat, was an experience she was perfectly okay not repeating.
Shooting down any one of the little versions of Bohu that made it out of Vista's maze of twisted space without falling off of a surprise pitfall and shattering itself all over the parking lot was more than enough for her tastes.
It didn't last, of course.
The disruption, in this case, took the form of a leather-clad archer stepping out from within a tent that she couldn't have fit in, not with that big of a bow.
"Quarrel! What happened?" Vista turned and left, leaving the gap within the shields that had formerly been filled by her impossible maze wide open and letting the monsters rush in.
"Killed the Teeth," is what Flechette heard before she returned her focus to the task in front of her. Absently, she noticed the glasslike shards of the shields nominally to her right drifting into the area formerly covered by Vista, but her focus was mostly dominated by the encroaching minions.
Despite her name, she hadn't been allowed access to the PRT's stores of flechette canisters (kept in the event of something like a Slaughterhouse incursion or a Biotinker like Nilbog, not that the former was really possible at this point), and while that was probably the correct move in most cases, this was one situation where she really wished the specialty ammunition was available to her, resource limitations and permissions be damned.
Still, she would make do with what she had, that being her arbalest and a toy version of the foil she used to use from the gift shop (she hated the way it made her feel like March, but in a situation like this, she'd take every weapon she could get).
She quickly stopped trying to line up her shots to take out four or five of the things at a time- the time was better spent putting multiple bolts in the air, and eventually they clustered together so much that even snapshots would pass through as many of the things.
Fortunately, they didn't get close enough to force her to draw the sword- five projectiles lanced forwards over her shoulders, trailing crackling green light, and slammed to the ground in the middle of the horde, detonating in clouds of superheated gases that left shattered creatures in their wake. In the time that it took the minions that were further back to press forwards, fear apparently unknown to them, the girl in a bloodred scarf bridging the gap between her whole head mask and her red-streaked crop top spread her hands out wide, glassy shards carving their way into existence to protect the medical tent.
"Get your head in the game, kid!" she snapped at Vista, eyes wide with fury and terror behind her mask. "Slacking off like that gets people killed!"
The diminutive Ward (ex-Ward? Flechette wasn't quite sure, given some of the issues ENE had had of late obstructing normal operations, especially administratively, and now wasn't the time to ask) made to respond, but she was cut off by Quarrel, whose voice brooked no argument. "Not the time. Flechette, Vista, with me. We're taking the high ground to see about cutting those things off at the source. Vex… stay safe." Her voice softened on the last. "We're all that's left, I want to have someone who knows what they were like before."
The now-identified Vex nodded curtly. "Go." There was pain in that voice, but also resolve, and Flechette found herself taking another look at the girl and how her costume accentuated and highlighted her tanned muscle.
Vista turned, looking up to the top of the PRT building, and it was only her sense of timing that let Flechette close her eyes to avoid the sight of space bending around the three of them like the rules in a playground game of tag. She didn't open them again until she felt the cool breeze on her face, and then immediately took a step back because they were mere inches away from the edge of the roof.
"Geez, warn me next time!" Flechette spared one last thought for Vex, then put the other girl out of her mind for the time being, running a check on her arbalest out of long-ingrained habit. "What's the plan here?"
"Hit the Endbringer, don't get hit. Vista, you're focusing on the latter. Flechette, pick your targets, but focus more on the big ones than the minions." Quarrel's voice seemed to befit a general commanding their troops more than the situation they were in, but it was a sound move.
Quarrel started firing at a rate that almost beggared belief, alternating targets between the creatures on the ground (that had been gradually deviating from the humanoid form as the battle went on, with claws, tails, and quadrupedal body plans becoming more and more common) and Bohu. Flechette, firing at a more restrained rate, was mostly firing at Bohu, with an occasional shot aimed for Tohu.
As they had at the Simurgh fight, Flechette's attacks passed through the Endbringer, although at this distance it was hard to see if it wasn't being backlit, letting light pass through the holes to make them more noticeable.
In contrast to Lily's steady, almost singleminded fire, Quarrel seemed to be all over the place, with arrows covered in all sorts of exotic energy effects from blue plasma to orange shells of something to even one that dissolved into a stream of red… probably light, as it pointed a number of creatures out of existence.
Eventually, she seemed to hit on something she felt confident would work mere moments after Legend and Eidolon made their arrival known, loosing seven arrows within a second. As they passed beyond the bow, they shivered, and in their place appeared pink needles of some kind of crystal, practically humming with danger. All seven pierced the superdurable hide of Bohu, and no sooner did the seventh embed itself within the Endbringer that they all began to glow and hum concerningly.
Within a matter of seconds, they detonated in a flash of pink light and smaller shards of the material, a crack not unlike the sound of a geode being split open accompanying the detonation.
Huge chunks of flesh were blasted off the Endbringer, revealing a no-color-yet-every-color sphere at the base of its neck. Quicker than anyone Flechette had ever seen move, Quarrel had another arrow nocked and fired, seeming more a stretch of outer space than any physical projectile before it slammed into the sphere.
The Endbringer toppled backwards.
Quarrel held an arrow in her hand, ready to nock, but not quite strung yet. "Be ready, in case it gets back up."
"What do you mean, 'in case'?" asked Flechette, one last bolt winging skywards to punch a hole through Tohu.
"It should be in Yu Di's hands now, but the Endbringers are not alive in the same way as something like the Butcher. Still, I doubt it has a powerful enough benefactor to shield it from from the vastness of the universe- ah, there we go." Flechette turned to the Endbringer to see it flaking away, almost as if it were made of layers being peeled back by a child who was moving too fast to preserve the wrapping paper of this year's first Christmas present.
"Is that… normal?"
"Normal enough- constructs and spirits given form react differently than mortals do to that arrow, but this is a not entirely unique expression." Quarrel looked down to Vista. "C'mon, kid. Let's get down there and see what we can't do to help with rescue efforts."
"...and you're sure it's dead? All dead, not just mostly dead?" asked Flechette.
"Dead enough that it's time to start going through its pockets looking for loose change."
With that, Quarrel stepped off the roof, vanishing before she could fall more than five feet and (probably) appearing outside the medical tent down in the parking lot below.
"Show-off," grumbled Vista. "Now come on, time's wasting."
"R-right," said Flechette, taking the proffered hand and closing her eyes again to not see sights that would have her throwing up from the inside.
When they arrived on the ground, Flechette kept staring at the flakes of Endbringer rising into the sky until someone nudged her, jumping away and half-drawing the toy sword at her side before she recognized Vex from earlier, hands raised nonthreateningly. "Hey, sorry, not looking to scare you or anything."
"What's up?" asked Flechette, still internally reeling at being witness to the killing of an Endbringer but more than able to keep up a good front.
"Wanted to check in with you- you were looking a little overwhelmed there- well. Still are, to be honest."
"I-" She'd never had anyone she was close enough to care like that before. "Thank you."
She couldn't quite see Vex's eyebrow rise under her mask, but some instinct told her it did. "You're welcome, then. You want to talk about it while we go and try to clear out what that bitch did to the city?"
"Absolutely I do," said Flechette, eyes flickering from Vex's face down to her exposed abs briefly. "Shall we?"
The almost feral smile on Vex's face was audible in her next words. "Then by all means, lead the way, Flechette. We've got monsters to kill."
And that's that!
Surely this isn't going to cause any problems whatsoever.
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!
