0.15
It was a strange thing having a break in the middle of a fight.
"Here you go. Good luck out there."
Some girl with a British accent and wearing a black and white costume handed her a ham sandwich and a water bottle before flying off.
"Thanks!" She cried out as the young woman raced off, unable to stop herself from watching. "Well. Uh. Guess that's why I'm not gonna wear a skirt."
'Pants do have their benefits when you can fly, yes. But you still lack the most important piece of all.'
'Is now really the time for hat jokes?'
'And why would it be a joke?' Humor washed across their bond and Taylor almost said something before Focalors elaborated. 'This is a chance to catch your breath. You're still in pain, too, and I wish we had, had more time to prepare.'
"I'll live."
Taylor ate her sandwich and washed it down, still flying about two thousand feet up, staying relatively low to the ground. All around her, she kept the bubbles containing Canberra's water floating at the ready. Ammunition in case the shape hanging back in the distance decided to approach.
It let her keep an eye on everything.
Especially it.
The Simurgh.
Ziz.
Israfel.
Ulama.
The Third Endbringer had a reputation unlike those who came before her. Whether it be Behemoth or Leviathan, Ziz was in a league of her own when it came to the fear she inspired. Death by radiation was understandable, if tragic. Burning oil wells and ruined deserts were crippling. The destruction in the wake of a tidal wave, the flooding that swallowed Newfoundland, she had seen those, been there to look at the aftermath.
Yet nothing the first two have done could compare to the terror their 'sister' inflicted on everyone.
The idea of a monster looking through your thoughts, reading your mind, and driving you insane went beyond fear of death. It was a fate you wouldn't want inflicted on other people, because deep down you still wanted to see them treated as people.
She often wondered why something so terrifying would choose to look so human.
Like an angel.
Like a fairy, or a goddess of old.
Wearing a guise that had inspired hope and awe in the minds of humans to torment them with an image they associated with goodness and wonder. There was a sick sense of humor there. But now that she'd had time to take a closer look, Fontaine could say with absolute certainty.
"You aren't human."
There was a strange sort of realization to that knowledge.
She, herself, hung in midair. Just as Ziz did. She, herself, controlled invisible forces. Just as Ziz did. She, herself, had killed. Just as Ziz had.
For entirely different reasons and on utterly incomparable scales, sure. But in terms of actions, there was nothing necessarily inhuman or alien to what the Hopekiller did. The Nine were a perfect example of how monstrous humans could be. Never mind others like Heartbreaker, the Fallen, or just her own local homegrown Nazis in the Empire. Some of whom were down below right now.
'Why would they fight for people they consider subhuman?'
Admittedly, the World Wars weren't her special interest, but Taylor was rather sure the Australians fought the Germans both times. And with distinguished valor. Not to mention the appreciable number of Asians, Aboriginals, and just… general non-whites.
But it wasn't the conflict of impulses that bothered her. That she was all too familiar with. Perhaps, she decided, it was the absurdity of staring at the end of a city in manifested form.
Ultimately, It wasn't that people were bad, at least not inherently. But that badi people did bad things for bad reasons. And sometimes good people did bad things. But they were people. Yet Focalors had been clear, this was a construct they were fighting.
'Not a projection?'
'Unfortunately, no, child, it is a golem, a machine-knight. A mechanical combine of a scale most unpleasant.'
Feeling a mixture of frustration and annoyance, she looked away from where Hookwolf, of all people, was helping other Brockton capes drag several damaged vehicles out of the way of the evacuation convoys. Taylor instead turned back towards the shape in the distance, matching its movements with her own.
The gentle tug on her body as the water echo around her that kept debris, insects, and wind gusts from impacting grew slightly stronger as she accelerated. While Taylor could handle the speed she was moving at, it was still strange, and the annoyance she felt continued to build.
Something felt off.
The Simurgh was just… hanging back. After the initial fight ended with her landing outside city limits, the Endbringer attempted another charge, before withdrawing when Fontaine threatened to match it. Instead, she was hanging back, barely out of range for the past ten minutes. Sometimes approaching, other times withdrawing.
She'd even pelted them with large boulders and cars scooped off of the road.
But other than that? Nothing.
Was she trying to lure them away from the city?
'Or maybe she is attempting some sort of test or experiment.'
Pressing a button on her armband, Fontaine cut across the low, regular chatter to speak.
"What is she doing?"
"This is Dragon to Fontaine." A reply came instantly. "What do you see? I'm not tracking anything unusual."
"I'm matching her and having to speed up to keep up. It's… she's not moving normally."
"Are you sure?"
Frowning, she wanted to say something sarcastic, but was, thankfully, saved by Legend's intervention.
"Fontaine is a relatively new cape and still developing her powers. I'm heading out to confirm. Fontaine, can you continue your evacuation procedures?"
'I have been carrying away as many groups as I can with our bubbles, but even then it will be some time before they are all safe. Combat will slow us down. Unless we do something risky.'
"So long as Ziz doesn't begin pressuring us."
"Noted." Dragon's voice replied, a note of apology in it. "I've got more craft inbound, but we're a little farther away from my base than I normally operate and I'm having to use a US Navy aircraft carrier for relay purposes. Everybody, I hate to ask you, but if you're able, buy Fontaine as much time as you can."
Her ill temper faded with that.
'She must feel worse than useless.'
'Perhaps, dear one, but the few craft she has here are already evacuating several groups of hospital patients.'
"Heads up to all fliers, ADF helicopters inbound. Every bit of airlift we've got are in-bound."
The accent was thick, but understandable, and the voice of the ADF commander disappeared as soon as it crackled across the line.
"This is Eidolon. You heard the major and Dragon. All fliers and Blasters are to form up and prepare to screen the city. We're playing tag, I have point. Legend will command the rear."
Grunting, Fontaine simply turned to the city and closed her eyes.
It was strange, touching her mind to Focalors'. And… whatever it was she wasn't ready to meet. That had been a deeply surprising reveal in the middle of a life or death struggle, but, even now, she could notice the feather light touches that followed both her and her power's actions.
That would keep.
There was so much information at the moment that she faltered, her mind drowning under the sheer weight of sensory input of so, so, so much everything. But that passed.
Fontaine centered herself and while Focalors carried bubbles of neatly argued people away from bus stops, she cast tendrils of writhing, ever so slightly glowing liquid into every nook and cranny of the whole city.
The old and the sick who couldn't walk, others trapped in car wrecks, many who were just hiding, and more who were too scared to do anything but wait for the end. She could lead emergency services to them, guide them to evacuation points, or, in a few cases, crack open vehicles whose doors were stuck.
Sometimes the people in those wrecks couldn't be helped anymore.
She ignored those.
Mostly just moving those off to the side and sweeping the roads clean so others could pass by.
Fontaine did not dwell.
"We've got contact!"
"She's rotating debris in like a whip!"
"Watch out for anything coming up from below!"
Tuning out the now sudden, hurried calls from the radio, she focused on continuing to help. On making sure people were moving and being moved as swiftly as they could be. This was her job right now. This was how they would win!
"She's firing weapons! They're going for the city!"
Instinctively throwing up a dozen layers of defenses, Taylor still screamed when half a dozen feathers of all things exploded right behind her! The objects were made out of shaped debris - mud, stone, wood - compressed into hyper lethal darts. But when she heard the ripple of explosions behind her, she could only turn in horror at what had happened.
"Oh my God."
The line of military helicopters approaching the city had tried to dodge.
The other parahumans had tried to help them.
But of the two hundred or so aircraft that had been moving in to land across the city, less than two dozen had been saved.
Of the rest, they were burning, flaming wrecks, ripped apart by a massive volley of weapons accelerated to faster than the speed of sound. And it was all the defenders could do to throw up barriers or shoot down the few they could - Legend himself managing to save a group on his own.
"Keep helping the people."
Snapping out the command, she trusted the other voice in her head to keep working as she conjured up a vast swarm of tentacles to entangle the burning debris. Even as secondary explosions rippled across them, she did what she could to crush and separate the craft. After all, the pilots were her priority. And if she could get the fuel tanks away from them, then setting down a pair of very scared men in a hunk of badly damaged metal was preferable than letting them burn.
Or so she told herself.
Once again, she refused to look too closely at some of the falling debris, merely catching it, snuffing out the burning material, and setting it down as gently as she could.
But that action allowed shock and fear to give way to anger.
To a bitter sort of vomitus made of roiling bile.
They couldn't let her do this again. Even if she wouldn't get hurt by those feather shots, they were too fast for her to properly shield everyone from. Especially when she had to keep Ziz in sight, lest she try and charge straight into Canberra a second time.
Right now, she was probably the only thing giving her pause, but wouldn't be worth anything if she could just snipe at them from farther away. Already dozens of additional projectiles were blasting into their lines as Blasters of every stripe tried to run point defense. But that just meant the bitch started firing at them and people started having to throw defenses up to protect them, too.
"What the Hell do we do?"
'I propose we split the burden.'
What?
'You go and engage the beast. Keep it contained and distracted, draw as much fire as you can away from the city. I will focus my efforts on evacuation. Carry them away if needed. But that means you'll be fighting without my support.'
Taylor, no, Fontaine frowned.
She didn't like it. It felt like having an arm tied behind her back. But right now they didn't have a choice if they wanted to save the city.
'Oh, before you leave. Allow me.'
A surge of… something caught the heroine by surprise as another layer of water manifested over her echo, as if a huge portion of the lake she had been fighting with was condensed and shaped over her like a suit of armor. What surprised her was how weightless it felt.
She might as well have been floating inside the echo now.
'Now, go.'
She didn't need to tell her twice. Questions could wait until this was over. Until then, Taylor sped forward, shooting through the air like a liquid meteor, wind parting and forming a cone around her as she accelerated the mass of water around her towards the target like a missile.
A barrage of feathers soon came.
She didn't blink as one shattered harmlessly around the echo's head. The hyper dense projectile pinging off the strange glowing water as if made of glass.
That was when the Simurgh moved.
And this time she was coming straight at her.
'I suppose I wanted a close look, after all.'
And by close look, she meant she was currently pressing her forehead against the Endbringer's, glowing blue eyes staring daggers at the dead unnatural eyes of the creature as they battle for momentum, each doing their best to try and push the other back as dust and rain swirled around them.
She didn't know what she expected to see.
Frustration? Annoyance? Anger?
Yet nothing showed on the Simurgh's face, just a blank look of intense focus as her milky white orbs burrowed into her own with an inhuman, unblinking stare. Not even the cracks running down the side of her head seemed to inconvenience the Endbringer as she continued to look at her.
She didn't know what she expected.
But there was nothing there.
'She is intelligent… but that is all. A body lacking a soul, driven by physical impulse alone.'
Yes.
That's right. This eerie sensation, and the anger that followed at the realization that the creature she and the rest of the world had been terrorized by and lived in fear of was a soulless hunk of crystal. The thing that had been killing and driving them mad… felt nothing about it!
Hopekiller?
Endbringer?
"You…"
Fontaine found her voice, the watery echo transmitting it for the world to hear in a thunderous roar.
".. are nothing more than a damn monster!"
A surge of blue energy seeped through the echo, expanding in a wave of power that sent the Endbringer flying backwards. Fontaine felt her chest clench painfully, a hissing sigh of main escaping her as the unfamiliar power once again coursed through her veins.
But she didn't stop.
Couldn't stop.
"You're not getting away!" Giving chase, Fontaine surged through the air once again, weaving through the rainbow of energy attacks from her fellows as the Simurgh rained down another barrage of stone feathers. These projectiles were seemingly perfectly placed, disrupting energy blasts and throwing up clouds of dirt, covering the Endbringer's movements as it ascended higher and farther away.
But Fontaine was having none of it and she could pull this trick, too. Her water echo returned fire, hyper dense water droplets whizzing through the air like bullets.
The sound of their attacks shattering was ugly and loud.
Like a strangled cry amidst booming thunder.
The Simurgh curved in its path, stone artillery melding into a serrated, thorny vine which lashed down at her. The sharpness was enough to pierce into the echo, but not deep enough to touch her actual body, before one of the layers detonated, blasting the stone vines away with an eruption of mist and steam.
Yet even that was another feint, as the rippling debris sent tens of thousands of tiny pieces of debris across the entire line of fliers.
"Don't breathe!"
Her radio barked and Taylor complied, exhaling and screwing her eyes shut on pure instinct, all as a cloud of fire suddenly engulfed her. Even behind her eyelids the world burned yellow and red and her body was instantly drenched in sweat, even under the cooling layers of her protection. But then it passed, her lips dry and cracked and her body unharmed, with the shower of weapons gone, too.
"Thanks Fontaine."
The British pyrokinetic came rocketing by, blasting out at Ziz, trying to pressure the telekinetic by directly attacking the weapons she was forming. Unfortunately he only found limited success.
When another salvo of feathers came down, she chose to get creative.
She spun, the water of the echo losing its sea-angel shape for a moment to instead become a massive corkscrew, shooting upwards like a rocket through the barrage before sending the Simurgh flipping backwards mid air on contact.
It would have been comical… had it actually achieved anything.
But the Endbringer just wouldn't stop.
Still tumbling across the sky, body rotating randomly, debris flying around in an ever shifting shield, she had now resorted to mines of sorts.
Pockets of disrupted air that would violently rupture, one flier dropping from the sky, blood spewing from his eyes and ears, as his body was suddenly subjected to gale force winds and pressures. Then there were gouts of flame rippling up from the broken parts of the city below.
'When did we get back to Canberra?'
Suddenly aware that Ziz had maneuvered them back to her target, and that she was once again weaponizing the city itself against them, Fontaine decided it was time to get serious.
Damn the songs.
Damn the warnings.
She would have to pressure it head on!
So the Shaker paused, floating midair, and concentrated on Focalors' construct. Her vision was blurred, tinted by the cerulean water that now covered her body, rather it was like her body was floating inside a much bigger echo, safely tucked away under multiple thick layers of water.
The last time she'd done this, it had been in the aftermath of the ABB attack, to get her out of there when she was too stunned to do anything. Yet here, she didn't sense Focalors controlling or moving the echo.
It was as close to an extension of her own body as it got.
'My analysis points to her next avenue of advance to be an all out offensive. The build up of particulates in our surrounding area is a possible attack vector or ammunition. Though she lacks a soul, her mental faculties allow her telekinetic grasp to manipulate separate grains of sediment. It is quite impressive, especially when combined with additional constructs forming down below.'
Which was why the voice in her head had beefed up their defenses.
"Thanks."
'This is about as far as I can help I'm afraid. The efforts to evacuate the city have slowed down as more people panic and attempt to leave.'
Made sense. Those helicopters getting shot down probably spooked everyone.
"Wait, it's doing something again." Taylor hit her radio again. "I'm sensing something weird going on with Ziz again! Heads up everybody!"
It wasn't the Endbringer per se, rather, it was the small, otherwise invisible but rapidly increasing numbers of black dots that seemed to be gathering around her. Each other couldn't be larger than a house fly, but, together, it felt like she was taking apart the city below piece by piece and forming what looked like a sand storm around herself.
She fired off a barrage of explosive bubbles, and the explosions managed to part the dust cloud around the Simurgh for a moment. But only a moment before more and more dust joined the storm.
Something else then?
She fired a barrage of water bullets, peppering the cloud to no avail.
Then switched tactics and tried to hammer it with one of her tendrils, the echo's wing-like arm striking down into the telekinetic storm like a massive hammer with half a lake's worth of mass.
Yet the result was the same.
Focalors, a little help.
'She is telekinetically moving individual grains of sediment. No… it's not at random at all. She is compiling, categorizing, matching and merging them. Like a blacksmith tempering an alloy in this forge, her power is capable of inducing heat and pressure as it molds the carbon together.'
That was ridiculous. Since when was she this powerful?
'Well, whatever she's making won't make a difference if I shoot first!'
Peeling off a layer of her echo, she shaped it into a dense sphere. Pressing it together to the breaking point, before allowing a singular spot to release itself in a thin ray of water, faster than anything she'd shot before, it was only the blink of an eye before it nailed Simurgh in the face with enough force to pierce through an armored tank.
Or it would have, if a strange chunk of crystal hadn't appeared from thin air to block it.
Worse yet, the water ray had barely dented it.
Wait a second.
Heat, pressure, and carbon? She had a feeling she'd heard that before.
The crystal in front of the Endbringer seemed to grow as if it was alive, absorbing the particles from the air, sizzling and hissing as it grew, extended, curved and sharpened itself into a wicked blade, the crescent shaped edge growing from the tip of a haft of smooth pearlescent crystal.
Taylor only had a moment to throw herself backwards as the Simurgh descended upon her with its scythe.
And slashed open her chest.
Or she would have, had the echo not taken the full brunt of the attack. Yet even then, the vibrating shrill blade managed to carve a massive gorge in her defenses, and probably would have gotten her too if she hadn't realized the danger on sight.
'Taylor, withdraw!'
"Fuck no!"
Lashing out with her own water blades, Taylor accelerated the bursts of liquid to several times the speed of sound. And damn the bitch's song! She wasn't backing down. There were lives on the line and she could save waves of machines spilling out of several more buildings already.
Letting Ziz move freely would just see the defenders on the ground wiped out!
That was when the massive weapon came around for a second strike, her echo losing an arm and most of its tail to the slash, and it required an effort of will and a surge of pain in her chest to fix the damage.
'This is harming your body. You're literally burning off your humanity at this point!'
"Stop distracting me!"
Snapping, snarling, spitting, Taylor threw her arms up, sending a dozen different pressure cutters at the weapon, hoping to knock it off course.
It deviated… and promptly swung up and then over Fontaine's own circling defenses, coming down straight at her, when a glowing pink-purple barrier flew up just in time to block the attack. Narwhal pressed her body against the unnatural crystal, which Taylor could now see more clearly, as Eidolon came flying into the scene.
Screaming at her.
"Listen to your Goddamn radio! Pull back you idiot child!" Using some sort of sonic boom power, the man threw out oversized hands, each of which would pop and knock the Endbringer back a few wingbeats. "Unless you want to go back home in a body bag, I am ordering you to pull back!
"Please!"
Narwhal sounded like she was in pain as the weapon ground against her barrier, the shard of… something seemingly pulsating and rippling with each vibration, like a heartbeat of all things. And worse was the strange veins growing through the scythe, its core seemingly drinking in light and bending energy attacks towards itself. All as both edges of the thing cracked and fragmented and budded out in every direction, only to snap off, cut at the light as they fell, and turn into an unwholesome sort of dust.
Focalors willed a whirring filter into being around Taylor's nose and mouth and she said nothing as she pulled back and lifted up huge waves of water to shield Narwhal's retreat in turn.
What was that.
'Some form of pseudo-organic construct utilizing a silicate base. It contains so many different forms of technology that I cannot even begin to unravel what is its basis. To construct something like wholesale in such a short time… just how far does her computing power go?'
'Admire the abomination later!'
Circling back away from Ziz, the fliers all pulled away. Legend continued to bombard her, applying different effects, but the scythe itself seemed to suck in energy that it touched. So, not wanting to charge it up any further, even he contented himself with waiting and watching.
"What do we do now?" An Australian in a timey welding helmet and… flak jacket? Taylor wasn't sure, at all, what he was supposed to be settled into a position near the rest of them. "I'm starting to run low on juice and she's heading towards the institute!"
"Are the Tinkers finished evacuating?"
The question was spoken by Eidolon and into his radio.
"All but the stay-behind group. More than three quarters of the city are clear as well. Brutes have just begun dragging sleds or inoperable buses of people out of town, with Movers bringing the Brutes back."
Dragon's response at least got the others to relax.
But it was only the silver lining to a very dark cloud.
Literally, in the case of the smoke and debris creating a layer of smog. Who knew massive gouts of fire and huge numbers of explosions could create a vision of Hell?
"And the armbands?"
That question came from a flier she didn't recognize, but his accent was mild and not particularly noticeable.
"Only two have needed to be used so far."
The answer was accepted without further comment. Even now the Simurgh seemed hell bent on approaching the remaining people, projectile feathers barely kept at bay as the wicked monster scythed through the heroes desperately trying to slow her advance.
Sometimes literally.
And seeing one of their comrades fall to the ground in two parts, even if the man had charged in without the support of any of the others, was enough to shatter the moment of calm.
Plans were not laid, ideas were not shared.
Victory was so close they could taste it.
But when Ziz abandoned her approach through the limited industrial presence of the city and pivoted straight towards the concentration of space and defense material, all of them felt the pressure suddenly spike. Because she was heading for where most of Australia's Tinkers had been based. The institute that was currently working on a weapon designed to hopefully kill the false angel.
And a weapon probably capable of razing everything around it to the ground.
Which was, of course, when the cannon fired.
A beam of blue white light flashed into being, several people screaming in pain when it lit up the sky, the roof of the university cracked open. Taylor herself was protected by her echo, but she had to save several other people, including a number of those on the ground, who had been suddenly rendered blind. Others, those who had the durability or technology to withstand the brightness of the weapon, watched on in hope as it burrowed into the side of Ziz's face!
Chunks crumbled away, the Endbringer swayed mid air, lines of clanking machines continued to be brought into being beneath her, and then… her scythe simply bisected the beam.
Instead of splintering, it seemed to drink in the energy from the weapon and Focalors practically screamed at Taylor.
'It's absorbing the attack! And it's building up towards a critical mass!'
Swallowing her automatic response of "no duh", she simply parsed the sensations she was receiving. Sensations of focus, pressure, and then of fracturing.
"It's making a bomb!"
Hammering the button on her radio, she screamed at whoever was listening and rushed forwards.
Whoever was left, then, started firing everything they had. Guns, lasers, bolts of light or esoteric effects. A few military vehicles, including airplanes, fired missiles and rockets. Some of the people, Blasters and Shakers mostly, piled on with wave after wave of every single weapon they could bring to bear.
And it was visibly failing.
The massive cloud of rotating debris simply intercepted anything that seemed dangerous, the tinkertech construct in her hands reaping the energy it consumed, and what few blows that managed to penetrate her walls of defenses merely sheared off wing tips and and the outermost layers of whatever made up the thing's skin.
'What do I do!?'
'I… child, no, Taylor… I can help. We can help.' The other presence stirred, some vague, distant curiosity welling up inside of her mind. 'But it's going to hurt and it's going to cost you. More than you can imagine and more than I have time to explain!'
'I don't care. Do it.'
'No! No, you need to understand-'
'How many thousands of people die if I don't.'
'I'm trying to say-'
'Focalors. You're in my head. Do it.'
'There's no coming back from this. No undo button. No third wish to take it all back. If you, if we cross this line, something that might have taken decades or centuries will probably be measured in years or even months. Will you be happy with only another six months of life?'
'No. I'll probably regret it. But I'm not going to abandon anyone I don't have to.'
Pushing images of her dad, of the people burning alive in helicopters, of the thousands upon thousands of people still below them at Focalors, Taylor refused to consider her power's words. Refused to accept that there was a meaningful choice at all. Pain now, to save people who needed saving.
'If it's that simple… damn you humans. Damn you for being the children of Prometheus.'
"Now who's being dramatic again?"
Very carefully parsing out the water she was using and the water that had been drawn in, Focalors shunted a large portion of it back into the central lake of the city.
'The animals will need that much to survive what's about to happen.'
Questions flickered through her mind, but they could wait. Because that's when every cloud, in every direction began to sink. And sink. And sink. Water from the sky in every direction pooled above and started to glow. Fontaine's echo glowing with it, too, gathering into a massive ball.
And that was when the pain started.
"Legend." She had to swallow, the burn of acid in the back of her throat already starting to intensify. "I'm going-" she spat. "I'm going to hold her in place. Freeze her."
By now the pool of glowing water was about a kilometer across, with who knew how many tens of millions of gallons compressed into a single, impossibly dense sphere.
So dense, in fact, that it seemed to glow black. The mass adding more and more and more to itself without so much as swelling by a single droplet. That was about the time she vomited, sudden, shooting pains forcing Taylor to curl up into a fetal position. Violent muscle spasms leaving her moaning, unable to scream, and almost keening as what felt like a massive heart attack wracked her.
The Endbringer, unfortunately, noticed.
Flying towards them in a cloud of swirling crystal grain, her scythe floating above it, poised to strike. There was a split second where Taylor thought she could see through the storm, thought she could see a look of triumph on the false angel's face.
She met it with a crooked smile of her own as she stopped, wishing flickering black from the pain.
A water bubble, denser and larger than any of the others she'd thrown around suddenly appeared from thin air. Not condensed, not gathered, nor slipped through the cracks of the Simurgh's defense.
No, the water appeared from nothing in a flash of blue light.
"Now!" Fontaine gasped, glaring at the endbringer with teardrop-shaped cobalt pupils.
Legend charged into view, powerful blasts hammering into the bubble, a blast of cold wind nearly knocking her backwards as the manifested bubble froze around the Simurgh, locking it, its weapon and the cloud into place. Ice met energy blast and the world was filled with an immense orchestra of cracking, shattering, smashing slabs of ice falling away.
And with chunks as large as buses already breaking free, it was obvious that this was their one, last, final chance to stop whatever it was Ziz had planned.
So Fontaine let loose with every bit of power she had.
Physics violently reasserted itself in a torrent of burning blue-white Hydro that slammed into the frozen mass, propelling it towards the horizon with enough violence to repeatedly shatter the sound barrier. These booming cracks turned into a roar as the burning intensity filling her began to leave, drip by drip, until every last bit of her ammunition was spent.
Higher.
Like an eruption, the blue light pierced into the heavens, peeling them layer by layer as it rose further.
As far as she could push.
For as long as she could! Until at long last the figure of the Simurgh was nowhere to be found. Rather, Taylor kept shooting until she could no longer feel the Simurgh's presence in the atmosphere.
"And don't… come back." She croaked out, giggling madly, clutching at her chest, swaying the massive source of energy she had unleashed inside of her flickered away. Taylor herself barely held aloft by Focalors asserting a desperate flicker of control on the water clinging to them.
Off in the distance, the Tinkertech weapon shut off. A violent shuddering sound heralding the arrival of a massive ice crystal just as she began free falling. Tumbling, wind rushing in her ears, she watched as the Simurgh was launched up and away from Earth as a glowing rain fell alongside her.
Falling, spread out, her back to the ground, all she saw was the sky, free from clouds or light pollution, and the stars shining above.
'I feel… weird.'
She thought through the fog of her mind, the sky growing farther away.
And then she saw no more.
