Alteration 3.2
Uber and Leet arrived later than expected, the Orb clearly struggling to fly at anything more than a walking pace. As I spotted the chest in the middle of the platform, I realized why, and searched the room for red and gold.
"Kid Win!" I called, jogging up to the Ward. He jerked out of whatever headspace he was in, looking like he would've leapt clear from his armor if it were possible. I was glad I was wearing a paintball helmet, because despite myself I couldn't help but smile.
"Sorry to spook you. You've got a workshop in the building, I hope? I think my teammates need to, um, temporarily remand some damaged or unfinished tinkertech into PRT custody."
I was pretty sure he was blinking at me, still processing the words. Finally, he got words out. "Oh, uh, sure? I think we can do that under Truce rules."
"Great. Meet us on the roof? I'll redirect them." Without waiting for a reply, I jogged off, waving to the Orb and teleporting up.
"Jesus fuck!" Leet sputtered as I appeared.
"Pretty sure that's sacrilege," I quipped. "We're headed to the roof, Uber. Leet, please tell me you guys didn't fill the entire Boss Chest?"
He smiled weakly. "We… didn't fill the entire Boss chest?"
"He couldn't decide what to leave behind, so we just started tossing in anything that wasn't burnt-out scrap," Uber said flatly. "Sorry we're late."
"Rat," Leet accused, as we set down on the roof.
-3 PP, 13/16 remaining.
I called on level 1 and 2 telekinesis, and we all hefted the Boss Chest as one. Even with its antigrav weight reduction, the thing was heavy enough to strain the psychic power that could lift a merc in combat armor with ease. It did, however, remove 200 kilos from the amount the rest of us had to carry, and we managed to waddle it over to Win and follow him to the workshop.
"Anywhere in particular that we can make a scrap pile?" Leet asked the Ward as we maneuvered it through the door.
"The testing floor in the back, there," he said, looking a bit confused. We got it over there with two minutes to spare, threw open the lid, and I started floating things out. The air started filling with a loud, familiar, repetitive fanfare as the chest 'celebrated' each item coming out of its spatially expanded storage.
Just 'DUH DUH DAH DAAAH! DUH DUH DAH DAAAH!' over and over, as I passed things to the guys. I really should have removed the speakers when I fixed the damn chest. It'd seemed funny to leave it at the time.
Kid Win, for his part, had a worried look on his face as the piles grew. "What is all this?" he yelled over the fanfare.
Leet called back. "A career of disappointments, little guy! Now come help me sort what we can and can't fix in the next 10 minutes, eh?"
I finally finished unloading just as TK Press flickered out. "Gah, Zelda can stay in Ganon's clutches," I said, closing the Boss Chest with a flick of the mind. I floated over and strapped on my trusty metatool, and started buttoning up anything I saw that I'd already fixed at the shop, sticking to standard stuff because there was just no. "Win, you got any quick-drying silicone caulk around the shop? Gotta waterproof everything I can."
"Drawer by the welding gas, yeah," he said distractedly, staring at the Varia Suit Leet was tweaking some power conduits on.
"I'll get it," Uber said, jogging over and tossing the tube my way, which got caught by telekinesis and flew unerringly into my hand.
"I need a length of 10-gauge extension cord over here," Leet said, and so it went for a few minutes.
We called it quits when Kid got an alert on his HUD, signaling an ETA of less than 15 minutes on the first tsunami. Promising to be good, he reluctantly left us to pack up and get suited in whatever we could.
"Gotta talk to you guys," I said as we stripped after the minor left, picking out gear. "I think I've gotta go with Leet, after talking with the heroes."
Uber frowned, helping Leet into the Varia Suit - it wouldn't fit either of us. "Some kind of issue?"
"You could say that," I hedged, picking out a chestplate from some roman-themed sci-fi game I'd forgotten the name of, connecting its power cable to the hub next to the connection from some exosuit legs that were grasshopper-themed. "The Endbringers like to target sources of stability, guys, and I'm pretty high on that list as of last week. There's concern that if I'm at the hospital, he'll target the hospital, and we're always gonna lose defense."
Uber was too busy sipping off Leet's powersuit boots and forcing his friend into a set of oversized leather work boots to answer with anything coherent.
"That makes sense, as usual," Leet sighed, picking up the conversation. "I don't like our odds out in the thick of things, though. The Orb's not even resistant to more than small arms fire, and the holoprojector would probably burn out before it ate a single attack."
I nodded. "Yeah, I was thinking about that while I waited for you guys. I have one idea we might be able to throw together. The Displacement Suit's designed to detect breaches to the undersuit, right? I was thinking, what if we hooked it up to the Orb membrane?"
"That… might work, actually. We gotta hurry if we're gonna do it, though."
We loaded what we were confident in back into the chest, which was thankfully so light now that I just floated it out. My kludged together costume was humming and whirring in various ways, the kit definitely too heavy to teleport with but maybe enough to give an advantage in the coming fight. Uber went downstairs, to grab three wristbands and drop off a duffle bag with maybe fifty lazpatches, the work of two weeks of manufacturing in our little hovel. Leet had borrowed my metatool and strapped it to the cannon-arm; he was already unbuttoning the psitech device as we walked, muttering to himself as we took the elevator up. I jogged ahead as we emerged, setting the Chest down on one end of the spatially-locked Orb platform and opening up the control post's front.
Tech/Psitech Check(Int): Rolled 10+1 vs. difficulty 10. Pass.
Marrying the two was the work of a minute, once we had the ectoplasmic generator readout feed routed through a data cable. The formerly-spinal-mounted teleport booster was mounted on the inner face of the orb control post with a few quick welds, and contacts run to the joystick on the controls themselves; so long as I had my hands on the controls, it should, in theory, be able to tap into my powers enough to teleport us.
"Well, it's horrible and I hate everything about it," Leet finally declared, "But it should handle at least one jump. We didn't design the thing for this kind of load, man."
I nodded in agreement. "Emergencies only, I swear. I'm not looking forward to the feedback from it, myself, but it'll be better than getting cut in half."
Uber arrived as we buttoned it up, passing us our wristbands, his face grim.
"They're talking about odds down there," he said. "One in four die, on a good day. He's fast, he's strong…"
I put a hand on his shoulder. "One in four? We've only got three members, buddy," I joked. "That means we're invincible, yeah?"
Persuade Check(Cha): Rolled 9+0 vs. difficulty 7. Pass.
I got a small laugh. "I can't believe we kept you around, asshole," he replied. His goggled eyes turned to Leet, who was sitting atop the Boss Chest under the red ectoplasm shell of the Orb, and he walked over.
While they talked, I slipped on my wristband and got it set up, inputting my name and confirming it.
Perception Check(Wis): Rolled 6+0 vs. difficulty 7. Fail.
I turned back to the Orb, and climbed aboard. "Let's get you to the medical staging area," I said as I took the helm. I took off-
The city was swaying ahead of us, like a soft wind in the forest. It took me precious seconds to understand what I was looking at in the murky light and the rain pouring down the Orb's shell, precious seconds that we might not get back. Letting go of the controls, I pressed the button on the left of my wristband, the one for communications.
"Hard override; Wave impacting in five seconds, brace!"
As I pulled up on the controls, there was an echoing roar below us, loud enough to ripple the liquid shell as mass impacted mass all across the wavefront. The PRT building shuddered, There was a moment of silence as it receded.
"Holy sh-"
The armbands beeped. Carapacitator down, CD-5. Krieg deceased, CD-5. WCM deceased, CD-5. Iron Falcon down, CD-5. Saurian down, CD-5…
Face grim, I set course for the hospital.
Running Mass Combat…
Leviathan couldn't die here. I had to remember that, even if I really wanted to kill him.
There were many reasons to keep him alive. If the Bay wasn't a wreck, Jack Slash wouldn't be drawn here to bully the survivors; if Leviathan died in the Bay, it wouldn't be an easy target full of forgotten people. It'd be a shrine the whole world would fight for. If Leviathan died here, new Endbringers would arise before I was ready to track down Cauldron, and what little future knowledge I had would be so much wasted space in my head. If I tried and failed to kill Leviathan, it would make sure the attempt cost us something important, just like the Endbringer had in the first telling of this story. It would be so easy to try; a call for Ballistic and Flechette, maybe hold him in place with Clockblocker or Eidolon, a shot for the base of the tail. But it would trade thousands of lives here for exponentially more later.
Leviathan couldn't die here. As I flew over the wreckage and contemplated the bodies, it was a bitter, sickening thing in my gut.
"Wristband's pointing us a little more north, almost there," Leet said, watching the device. His voice was still hoarse; he'd thrown up about three minutes and two stops back.
I brought the bubble down just above the floodwaters, wishing it could go faster than a brisk jog, and hopped out as the side of the bubble opened. Around us, fliers occasionally swooped in, teleporters flickered in and out of existence. We were getting close to the battlefield, now; I could feel the ground shake occasionally, see it in the water.
Four victims, this time. One was still moving, his legs and right arm bisected at an angle, two were visibly breathing, their gaudy Protectorate-issued costumes rising and falling in short, pained breaths, either unconscious or too broken to do anything. The fourth was my first target, though, the blood from their half-bisected gut still flowing, the smell of shit and copper thick against the salt-and-trash background.
I called forth my power, a pulse of energy flowing through my nerves, to my palm and into their chest. Wordlessly, I moved on. There wasn't even a sense of failure, just the feedback that there was no hope of revival to begin with. They'd died more than a minute ago, and that was as far beyond the veil as I could reach.
20 seconds later, as the conscious cape breathed deep on temporarily un-crushed lungs, I tapped the communicator button. "Three critical but stabilized in need of medical transport at my location. Inform staff as they arrive that the power is temporary, they are on borrowed time, just like the patch victims. They'll need immediate treatment to survive their injuries." I hopped back on the Orb as the wristband acknowledged.
I'd been frustrated to see as we dropped Uber off that several patients with a lazpatch on were getting treated as if they were magically fine with their limbs severed or organs ruptured. It seemed the staff, too rushed to take the time to read the labels, had taken vitals, seen stable readings, and not checked the diagnostic readout on the patch itself. It was frustrating - understandable, but dredging up memories of malpractice that had ultimately cut my own grandpa's life a decade short.
"Shit, there he is!" Leet cursed, as we rose above the rooftops.
There he was, indeed. Leviathan was a dark blur a few blocks down, lit by flashes and explosions. The moments he was still were like flashes from a disaster movie, punctuated each time by the wristband declaring the deaths or disabling of a few more people in the meat grinder. He wasn't easy to make out from so far away, obscured by spray and a deluge of water that flooded out from his form, too many Blaster effects on him at once to ever really get a clear view. As I watched, a massive mechanized suit, Dragon's work, dove in, glowing brightly, and exploded in the monster's face. a smaller, almost human-sized suit spun out of the blast, landing somewhere out of view as a barrage of blue-white lasers lanced into the cloud of smoke and steam.
The scale of him surprised me the most, really; Leviathan was certainly huge, but in the scale of a city, he wasn't even three stories standing upright. He was tall enough to be terrifying up close, but small enough to be lost in an urban jungle or even a moderately forested suburb. If the Bay had more hills, you could go without even knowing there was an Endbringer in town from a block or two away. It was terrifying on a whole other level. These kaiju weren't Godzilla-types, towering over cities like forces of nature; they were something far more personal, the stalker in the forest, the monster in the maze.
I gunned it, achieving a blazingly fast 'hurried jog in a seedy neighborhood' speed towards the fight.
"You ready for this?" I questioned.
"Not at fucking all," he said, throwing open the Chest behind me and digging through it. "What should we use first?"
"Dealer's choice."
The chest jingled a few times as he brought out some items, and Operation Kitchen Sink began.
We hovered a hundred feet above the street, on the edge of the rough line of capes playing containment to the west of Leviathan. With a little bit of work for custom commands, I opened whiffle-ball ports over the surface of the left side. Leet crouched, his stance determined, the red and gold of the Varia suit shimmering in the dappled red-or-grey lighting and the flashes of the battle below. He passed me a gnarled faux-wood staff with a giant glowing crystal on the end, and we opened fire.
It must've been quite the intimidating or inspiring sight, to the people below. An ominous translucent red orb glowed dimly in the cloudlight and rain. The battlefield was a mess. Just absolute chaos, really. There were a lot of things going on, and that alone wasn't all that notable. Then, a storm of plasma bolts rained down, forking in triplicate as they flew. The attack caught Leviathan in the back as he cast a small wave at a group of capes that had drawn his attention back where he'd come from, and immediately he was on the move, his back leaking ichor from a hundred small steaming wounds. Then-
Rolled 17-2+5=20/20. Hit.
Rolled 3d10+0, 19 damage.
-a man-sized purple fireball roared down with the plasma bolts, and caught the Endbringer in his arm as he started to climb a building on the north side, burning a wide scar down the forearm as it turned the hundreds of gallons of water from the echo into steam. The staff was cast aside as it needed precious tens of seconds to recharge, and I grabbed another item from the pile.
Leet stopped too, shaking his arm. "If we survive this, gotta work on the gun cooling system," he explained, and I grunted an affirmative.
I still had one hand on the controls, but the other was now leveling a golf club like an absurdly long pistol, training an infrared laser on Leviathan till it got a lock. The abomination cleared the top of the building and kept going, momentum carrying him into the air. I flipped the driver over, pressed a button on the handle, and because of course it was built into the device's function, yelled "Fore!" A 'ball' of what I could only estimate to be mostly magnetically-bottled electrons appeared at my feet, and I hit it with a one-handed swing.
I couldn't imagine what golf game they'd based the damn thing on; the ball essentially turned into a bolt of lightning that could melt through four inches of concrete and still deliver a nasty shock. It was also homing. Some kind of fighting game with a golf cameo, or something?
Rolled 1+2+5=8/20. Critical Miss.
I only realized my mistake after the backswing. 'Leviathan was the middle child. Not as strong as Behemoth, not as intelligent as the Simurgh, but somewhere in between.'
How did I forget that he's a fucking combat Thinker? I thought, as he slashed with his tail, the water echo smashing Legend right into the path of the ball. The hero briefly flashed to energy from the first impact, only to have his Breaker form punched through by the golfball in a spray of swirling atomic sparks.
Legend down, CD-7.
Leviathan crashed onto the rooftop, heedless of the firepower glancing off his hide, and moved.
"Meta, get us moving!" Leet warned, shrugging on a Proton Pack as fast as his single hand would allow.
"Got it!" I growled, and jammed the altitude control as far up as it could go.