Agrippa
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Wake-up Call – Chapter 81 – Endings
🕑 Added 2023-04-19 13:01:46 +0000 UTCThirteen
Hold.
We stand together, my field replicated and layered a thousand times over, the green light emitted from the interlocked planes only shifting when we perceive another cape being under threat of attack.
Between the monster and the river it is set on returning to, we stand.
We are not to strike. Not to draw its attention.
We merely have to stand.
Together.
Like we were always told to be.
Except, this time, we want to.
***
Legend
I am too fast to keep moving.
I’ve accidentally left the country thrice already, and I barely managed to be back in time to catch David’s falling body by sheer luck.
He owes his life to the Yangban.
He’ll never live it down.
It’s my job to make sure he—they survive this.
Behemoth points his elongated, almost liquid claws at Armsmaster as another rocket grenade blurs into a solid trail as it leaves the distorted field surrounding him and Hannah, and another bolt shoots out.
I can’t parry it.
His control is beyond what we suspected, what he ever showed, and if I try the Thinker’s trick once again, lightning will only rush up at me and force me to flee.
But… I have to try.
I…
David’s falling body rushes through my mind, his limp arms trailing behind him as he neared the broken ground beneath him, and I flew, desperate to reach him, fast enough, but maybe not delicate enough, and everything but him blurred as I finally, finally reached him, just in time. Just in time to save him after having thrown him away so that we both wouldn’t be roasted alive by Behemoth’s lightning bolts.
I can still feel his dead weight on my arms.
From when I caught him.
From when I threw him.
From when I had to throw him again.
It was the right decision. The only decision. The rational choice to save as many as could be saved.
I’ll never forgive myself.
So I watch the grenade approach, and I know that any advantage gained from its landing will be just a momentary respite, that Behemoth can just replicate his earlier trick and blow himself up. That it won’t win us the fight.
And I watch the tendril of electricity crawling impossibly slowly toward the grenade, about to intercept it.
I am not a Thinker.
Maybe not a hero.
But I still have to try.
My lasers pour in a storm only visibly to me and the monster, ionized channels enveloping the blueish bolt before it bends up, and he shoots it right at me.
What is lightning?
An electrical discharge. A connection between high and low charges. It travels along the path of least resistance.
Behemoth ignores all of that as he directs his attack straight at me along the path of least resistance that I provide for him.
At me, suspended in mid-air, with no charge to draw lightning to me.
I can fly away. I can flee. I can save myself and come back, too fast to control where I’ll end up, but maybe near enough to be in time to do something else, to try something that won’t be futile.
I won’t.
I, instead, drink from the well of my power, the channels no longer pouring down my arms, but raining from my entire body, attacking the forked bolt of serpentine light and spearing through it.
They are no longer a thousand paths thin as individual molecules. They are ten times that. A hundred. A thousand.
And each and every one of them strikes through the snake lunging at me, carrying a part of its charge with them, making the energy bleed.
It still reaches me. Still detonates right against my chest, my light form shaking in a way that makes the world feel as if it’s about to slip away from me.
But I live.
I live, and I can do this again.
The joy from earlier threatens to come back, something exultant bubbling in my chest, intending to turn into triumphant laughter.
And then Hannah’s shot strikes true, and I do laugh.
Hopefully, as much as I’ll laugh at David when I tell him that a Yangban member saved him.
***
Miss Militia
“It’s not spreading as fast as it did before,” I point out, trying not to sound as worried as I feel.
“Behemoth becomes denser the deeper in its body that you reach. The nanothorns should be having issues tearing through so much mass,” he answers, still staring straight ahead, still minutely adjusting the trajectory we ride on to duck in and out of cover that never did any good against Behemoth.
I recharge, the stock of grenades running low.
“What does that mean?” I ask for clarification, already guessing the answer.
He sets the bike on a straight path devoid of rubble and obstacles hanging still in mid-air.
And turns to look at me, his eyes sharp, as intense as they’ve ever been when he’s pushed me against a wall and shown me how much he does want me.
“It means that we do it again. And again. Until it dies,” he says.
And I shudder.
Then I suppress the urge to kiss him once again, and I line up my next shot.
***
Vista
My head is pounding in what I’m pretty sure is my first Thinker headache as I keep mapping over and over the new path I’ve carved for the Yang Tse River and the hundred drainage channels I drove into China’s countryside downstream.
It makes me finally realize why Thinkers are so damn bitchy.
“Almost there. You’re doing great. You’re doing amazing,” Dennis says, still holding me against his chest so that I don’t fall off the damn dam I’ve finally been allowed to return to its earlier proportions.
Meaningless words. Empty reassurances.
I need every single one of them.
The thrum of my power is agony, my temples burning hot and cold at once, stabbing through my skull, reaching through it to my eyeballs, blinding me with tears I fight angrily against.
I’m blind except for my power. Except for the leaves turning in the twisted winds racing through my bent paths. Except for muddied waters cascading and tearing through loose earth until stone is revealed and taken away, shattered and broken with the rushing avalanche of mud and uprooted trees.
I’m blind except for the part of China that I now know intimately, engraved in my mind, burned through my brain.
“It’s incredible, Vista. You are incredible. You’ve saved a country. Half a continent. I’m so proud. So damn proud,” Dennis says, almost babbling, words streaming out of him like water pushing through a web of roots dangling from the new riverside.
“We need to go,” somebody I don’t recognize says.
“What? No. No, man, she’s… not yet. Not like this. I can still shield you. I can—”
“We need to go now,” the man… Strider? Yes. Strider. Strider insists.
“Touch me, and I will freeze you,” Dennis tells him.
His usual joke. Leaving someone frozen in an embarrassing position, putting on a fake mustache on them or something silly like that.
Annoying. Childish.
Never cruel, though. Never a mean-spirited scrawl on their faces, or something with their clothes, or…
Never cruel.
Good guy.
Dennis is a good guy.
I whimper against his chest, the pain stabbing at me with renewed heat, burning through my thoughts.
“Dennis. Let it go,” the Thinker says.
“What? But, the plan—”
“New plan. Get out of there. Now.”
“I—” he tries to protest, but then his arm squeezes around my shoulders, and he sighs in a way that makes his chest move against my back. “All right. All right—fuck!”
I’m blind.
I don’t know what makes him tense so abruptly.
I just—
***
Rune
Beneath me, under the floating baby mountain I sit on, the river splits, half of it returning to the dry bed, the other still going down Vista’s latest flex.
Damn pipsqueak. Always knew she could wreck my day.
“There,” I say, trying not to show the strain all of this is causing to my bitch boss.
New boss, same as the old one.
…
Okay, that’s not fair. At least Alexandria doesn’t feel oily.
Frigid? Yeah, that one fits far more than it did for Kaiser, the man who was in perfect control at all times yet kept twin bikini models in fetish gear as bodyguards.
Some people said they were his nieces.
Gross.
“Move it,” Alexandria says, pointing to my left.
I blink at her incredulously as she holds her hand up near her ear in the universal sign for ‘Fuck off, I’m in the middle of an important call.’
My eyebrow twitches in sheer angry frustration.
And I strain my power to push the damn flying island to where she’s still pointing.
Fucking frigid bitch.
I swear: at the first hint of nephews with fetish gear, I’m so out of here.
***
Clockblocker
“We need to leave!” Strider yells right in my ear, his hand hovering over my shoulder.
I don’t even look at him. I look at Vista, frozen by my power while sitting down on top of the world’s biggest dam, tears streaming down her face in an ugly, angry cry that I never saw from her, but that is precisely what I would’ve guessed she would look like if she was ever forced to show weakness in public.
“Not without her,” I say. Again. Because some people have learning disabilities, and I’m sorry, Chris, that’s a shitty thing to joke about, but I swear the damn glorified taxi is making me very distracted.
“She’s safe! We aren’t!”
“I don’t know how long my power lasts! It’s random! We could leave, and she would just unfreeze right here and now, alone, with Behemoth trying to kill her!” I finally yell back out of sheer frustration, facing the blue-suited man and, apparently, making him take a step back and his hand away from my shoulder.
“What—that’s even worse. Kid, we can’t just… look, I’m sure she’ll be safe. As soon as she unfreezes and sees we’re not here, she’ll just run. Her power is about as good as mine for a quick getaway. We don’t have to—”
“Behemoth is trying to kill her,” I repeat, just in case those aren’t learning issues, but deafness—still a shitty thing to kid around. Fuck, is there no way to insult somebody without offending someone else?
I mean, other than calling him a Nazi because nobody cares about a Nazi’s feelings, but—fuck.
Purity.
Fuck, fuck, fuck—
“You can’t know that! Look, yeah, he’s thrown a couple of shots here, but—”
My eyebrows shoot up in such an impressive manner it’s a pity my helmet hides the full impact from their intended target.
So I have to supplement them with a wild, fanning gesture with my right arm.
My left still clings to Vista’s shoulders, ready to freeze her as soon as I have to.
“Seriously? Are you being fucking serious right now?!” I ask him as I point to the shattered pieces of rock and rubble dotting the top of the concrete dam, spread around from the impact against the still floating disc of transparent plastic ejected in front of us from the additions Armsmaster worked into my suit.
I owe him my life.
Missy’s life.
Strider looks around him and rushes back behind the cover of my disc.
Just in time for Behemoth to roar.
The dam beneath my knees trembles, the deep vibrations rising up my whole body, my teeth chattering uncontrollably with the strength of it.
Strider lays his hand on my shoulder.
And I freeze him.
To protect him.
And to keep protecting Vista.
I look ahead, through the perfectly transparent disc of thin plastic frozen in time. The one thing that doesn’t shake and shudder with Behemoth’s roar. My shield against him. The one thing blunting off the intensity of his attack, as sound travels through vibrations.
I throw another disc in front of me. In front of us.
The plastic unfurls from the bracer shielding Vista, and I freeze it.
And cross my fingers that both discs won’t fail at the same time.
***
Legend
I can go on.
Another bolt tries to reach Vista on the other side of the dry lake, and I strike at it from every angle I can conceive of, my lasers taking the fork of lightning apart as soon as it leaves a pointed claw.
The nanites are slowly crawling across Behemoth’s chest, around his arms, the lower part of his jaw already a matte black that should reach the crimson eye soon enough.
I only have to hold on that much.
Just that much more.
The last dredges of his attack reach me, exploding against my abdomen, making the colors of my light shape swirl and blur as tongues of electricity rush over me, fast enough that I find them hard to follow even as I sink further into my speed than I thought safe to do.
It hurts.
It tears at something inside of me that can’t be flesh, not the way I am right now, but it is torn nonetheless.
It’s pain. Agony. My body and power telling me to stop. To flee.
But I can go on.
And so I will.
***
Victor
I know my wife.
But, before I truly knew her, I knew her power.
“Get the fuck away and let us work!” I tell the moronic capes crowding around Eidolon.
Her power and her uses.
She’s standing next to the body lying on a stretcher, the unconscious man breathing irregularly, his pupils showing me different sizes after taking off his helmet.
He’s ugly. The muscles on his suit a pathetic subterfuge. The slight paunch an insult to witness.
The most powerful parahuman in the Protectorate. The one man the Empire could have never hoped to match, much less kill.
And I’m going to save him and get him out there so he can save us in turn.
This should get a few eyes off me, at the very least.
Because I could easily mess up and kill him. I could say there’s nothing I can do and let the other capes try, knowing perfectly well that none of them are as perfectly suited to the task as my wife. That none of them are that good with brain damage.
And that trying to heal a brain without being good at it is a very bad thing.
Some of the morons don’t understand what is going on and loudly protest, the other doctors gathered in the temple’s courtyard pushing them back and getting me room to do what needs to be done.
So I stab the IV line dangling from Eidolon’s arm with an adrenalin syringe.
The plunger shoots him full of it, of a dosage that would be dangerous, maybe lethal under any other circumstances.
His eyes shoot open on their own, the pupils narrowing at different speeds.
And he screams.
All his muscles contract, and I manage to restrain his left arm only by virtue of leverage as he flails around, kicking and punching at everything around him.
Othala steps away.
She has touched him.
Her job is done.
“Listen!” I say to the man with a hooked nose. “You’ve got regeneration, but you need to activate it yourself! Focus!”
He stares at me uncomprehendingly, his eyelids already heavy with fatigue and what I easily recognize as one of the worst Thinker headaches I’ve ever seen.
His chest is bare. Precisely because I expected this.
So I press my knuckles on his sternum and violently rub up and down, and he once again screams at the pain of all those nerve clusters being violently crushed.
“Focus!” I order again. “Save yourself!”
Something snaps inside the man, and his eyes gain a new clarity, the pupils finally matching one another, the irises no longer a different shade brought about by uneven contraction.
He’s doing it.
I lift my hand off his chest, and the angry red line over his breastbone fades away as soon as I do, Othala’s regeneration as fast as it’s ever been as Eidolon focuses on healing himself of everything that the other healers couldn’t take care of.
He never stops looking at me while he does so.
And then…
Then he looks away.
At the courtyard.
At the busy healers taking care of so many other capes who aren’t famous enough to gather this much attention. At the screaming ones, the whimpering ones, the crying ones.
The quiet ones.
Eidolon takes it all in, his breathing uneven due to something other than his injuries.
“Not myself,” he mutters. “I shouldn’t be saving myself.”
My own eyes widen as too many pieces of a puzzle I wasn’t trying to solve slot in place, and he looks at me again.
Hard.
Unrelenting.
Hopeless.
“Not enough. Never enough,” he whispers like a prayer and a curse.
And, without taking his helmet or his fake muscles with him, Eidolon shoots up and away, straight toward Behemoth.
Toward what he’s not enough to face.
***
Armsmaster
Hannah is being impeccable.
She always was.
But…
“You’re running out of ammo,” I mutter into my helmet.
“Just three more shots,” she confirms, her voice surrounding me.
Reassuring me.
I never thought a woman other than Dragon would make me feel like this just by being there. By having her words accompany me.
I just… I almost want to make an armor that lets me feel her arms wrapped around my waist, the comforting presence of her body behind me, fighting by my side, trusting her to attack in my stead as she trusts me to take us where we need to be.
The gauge I’m keeping an eye on goes from red to orange, and I slide us deeper into our time once more, everything around us slowing down to the point that I can see the bolts of lightning crawling up toward Legend’s immobile form as he takes yet another of them.
And then, there’s green lightning.
Eidolon is there, by the side of his comrade, a web of energy spread in front of him, wrapping around the blue bolt and tinting it in the shade of the cowl he’s discarded during the fight.
Turning it away.
A rush of adrenalin tries to overcome my best judgment as the pieces are once again in place. Legend and Eidolon can shut down his lightning by working together, the nanites are already spreading, long-range blasters can take down the projectiles Behemoth can throw in the time it has before being blind once again, and his roars—
Behemoth glows.
Red crackles over his form, the color of blood spreading over the battlefield, over the capes still gathered near him, over the fallen houses, the fallen heroes, the…
Everything.
Hannah fires behind me, hoping to take advantage of the obvious opening or maybe trying to disrupt the monster’s focus, but it’s unlikely to be enough.
I slow time down further, nearing the absolute safety limits I tested on my lab rats.
Hannah’s grenade looks motionless in mid-air, and Eidolon’s green lightning shimmers rather than move.
Then, once again, Behemoth explodes.
It’s not his body that is blown away this time, but this red aura that I can’t identify, that my sensors haven’t yet registered. It grows fast even from my perspective, and rubble is blown up and away at its passage.
Legend and Eidolon flee.
Others are not so lucky.
I can see them being engulfed in the red light before disappearing inside of it, costumes set on fire, flesh… flesh far enough away that I can only infer what happens to it.
Hannah shoots once again, the trajectory of the new projectile far apart enough that, even if the two shots are almost simultaneous, they won’t be parried with a single move.
Assuming they just don’t explode when they hit the red aura.
Nobody told me to build grenades to be durable.
But I can at least give her as much of an edge as she may need.
I once again flip the switch that will set us in perfect linear motion without any disturbance to detract from her perfect aim—
And Behemoth looks at me.
At us.
My mind whirs as I try to process the possibilities, but, really, I already decided what I’ll do even as
I consider all the (meager, inadequate, unacceptable) alternatives.
I’m trapped in this time. In this trajectory.
And Behemoth, lazy to my eyes, blindingly fast outside my bubble, points at me.
Lightning gathers in the tip of his claw.
His maw spreads in a grin so wide I can see it from over here, blocks away from the monster.
And I send a quick, hurried message out of the bubble of time to the only person waiting to receive it.
“Hannah,” I say. “Forgive me.”
“Wha—” she says.
And I break our promise.
I look at a single icon that’s been hovering near the edge of my vision since the battle started, and it finally responds to my silent demand.
The seat behind me explodes up and away, carrying Hannah out of our shared time.
Because… ‘Together. We’ll face death together,’ she said.
But I’ve always been a bit greedy.
My halberd leaps to my hand from the side of my bike, already unfolding into the configuration I demand from it, the tip splitting into angled, chrome tubes that point in as many directions as it is feasible for them to do, my eyes inputting variations to the preprogrammed routine that come straight out of the data I gathered during this fight, my combat analysis program having profited extensively from the extra time it’s been allowed to work in.
I twist my left hand, and time stretches slightly past the point that could make this permanent. That could have parts of me frozen and torn out of my body by what still remained in motion.
It’s enough that, from my perspective, time runs out on the linear motion I had locked myself in.
That I can tilt to the left.
Toward the monster.
I charge ahead.
Toward the lightning that threatened me. Hannah. Us.
The lasers set on my halberd shoot forward, intercepting Behemoth’s bolt as it nears me, as the barrage of blue light charges before the roar of superheated air it carries.
My helmet shifts, the lower part of my face fully shielded, the noise insulation as flawless as I can make it until only my steady breath and frantic heartbeat remain in a silent world.
The lasers keep moving, carving paths in mid-air for the currents to follow back down to Earth, to ground the attack before it reaches me.
My bike shifts under me, the deployable Faraday cage I designed precisely for something like this tracing a second frame of glimmering silver around me, like a 3D mesh of the very vehicle I’m riding.
Together.
I never wanted us to face death together.
***
Hannah
I tumble through the air, and I curse the impossibly stupid man that—
Thunder.
Thunder comes from my side as airbags explode open around me, scraping the exposed skin as they quickly cover all of me while I keep moving, bouncing around the ground, crashing against something that finally stops me.
And, all the while, thunder roars.
I can’t even breathe, not with the way my heart pounds, not with how not even my armor—Colin’s armor is strong enough to quickly tear apart the restraints of his fucking ejection seat—
The white fabric of the airbags deflates.
Falls away.
And I’m sitting down against a broken wall, staring up at a monster that glows red everywhere but where Colin’s nanites are still eating at it in matte black.
He doesn’t look at me.
He’s still pointing.
At a broken, shattered, burning bike and the armored man lying still beside it.
I cry out, my power shifting into a glimmering tanto blade, slicing through my restraints before I’m even aware of what I’m doing.
I scream and run forward, the blade hesitating, trying to become something that can reach the monster or Colin, that can do something.
The grinning monster turns toward me.
Points at me.
There’s a spark of blue on the tip of a grotesque, elongated finger, and I know what comes next, and if it had to come, if it had to end like this, it should’ve been together—
There’s a blur of black, and I see no more.
Absolute darkness except for the green light of my glimmering knife pressed against another blade.
“Minnie?” I ask, incredulously, of the woman wearing a ridiculous, mouse-eared helmet, parrying my strike, and enveloping the two of us with an opaque cape. “What the Hell are you doing here?”
She frowns at me like she sometimes did when I asked something she never thought could be asked. Things that she took for granted and that she needed months to understand were anything but normal from where I came from.
It’s a look I missed, no matter how aggravating she could be with her answers.
“You are here,” she says as if talking to a slow child or to a foreigner who had only learned about America from badly dubbed TV shows. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
I stare at her, at the face lit from below by my unsteady power still pressed against her mockery of a sword.
And I realize that what is covering us is one of Colin’s signal-shielding cloaks.
That lightning and thunder haven’t reached us.
That Colin has, again, saved my life.
And that he isn’t here by my side.
So, again, after many, many years, I hug Minnie, my oldest living friend, and cry against her because of a stupid man.
***
Taylor
“Liz…” I start without knowing how to continue.
Her eyes move over the monitors, taking in everything that is still going on. Everything that has to do with Behemoth.
Yet she keeps looking back at Colin.
I hold her hand, and her nails dig into my flesh without her eyes turning to me for even a second.
“Now,” she says as she touches something on her headset.
She keeps looking at the screens, waiting for something that I can’t decipher.
And I only know that she’s found it when she turns around and pulls me to her, embracing me, her face buried in my chest as she shakes and sobs with wordless sadness and pain.
I hold her, unable to cry like she does, still in too much shock at what I just saw happen. At everything that has gone on through the long, arduous battle that she has been such a big part of.
“Kill it. Kill it. Please, please, kill it,” she babbles, desperate, trying to get some meaning out of what just happened. Trying to make it make sense.
Silly Liz. Life makes no sense. It never has.
That’s why you’ll always be a Thinker six.
***
Alexandria
Rune screams in my arms.
Or, well, in my arm. Singular.
Actually, on my shoulder.
I can admit to a certain level of pleasure as the obstinate teenager tries and fails to squirm while being folded over me, her chest on my back, as I keep accelerating faster and faster.
Pushing the heaviest thing I’ve ever moved.
Something I can only do because of Rune’s power holding it together.
I could never lift such a heavy thing without tearing through it due to its sheer weight. And thus, I could never leverage my speed the way I should have been able to.
I just had to rely on my fists, my reflexes.
I was never artillery.
But now, an angry, screaming, terrified teenager is finally giving me the chance to hit Behemoth back with something on its level. With something of a magnitude that shall appear on seismographs the world over.
With something that it will feel.
I keep a close eye on the world below me.
And I speed up.
Rune stops screaming, no longer able to draw breath in.
I’ve got precious little time to push this even faster.
So I do. I pour everything in. Every bit of my strength. Enough of it that it feels like, for the first time since I drank from that damn vial that saved my life, I am straining to do something beyond my grasp.
Then my hands sink into rock, and I know that Rune has fainted.
I decelerate just enough that there’s now some distance between me and the granite wall I was about to push through, the body of the young girl sliding down from my shoulder.
But if she falls right now, her momentum will carry her all the way to Behemoth, so I carefully turn and adjust her trajectory so that she will shoot away from the fight, right toward the temple filled with healers.
I see her fly away in a downward parabola that is almost straight.
Her parachute automatically opens.
And I go back behind the boulder.
Veins of glowing red shoot through it, and that’s the only warning I get before a burning beam spears through it and right at me, melting my helmet in the moment it takes me to turn aside to take the blow with my shoulder as I cover my communicator with my indestructible right hand.
It’s the only thing that matters right now.
Most of the projectile still reaches Behemoth, making him stumble and fall as the world explodes around him, grey clouds rising up and swirling with the heat of rock being pulverized and molten as the booming explosion throws my hair back, and the monster is momentarily trapped in place by the subverted Yangban rewinding any of its attempts to dodge after its shoulders have laid on their barriers.
It may be enough.
But I won’t take that risk.
I fly down, punching through its crimson eye with my left fist pointed in front of me as it tries to crawl out of the crater I just made under it, the coating of nanites that covered only half of the glowing orb flaking off and raining over the rest of the smooth body tortured into convulsions by time itself.
The red aura springs again, gathering strength for another explosion that may surpass whatever exotic defenses the Yangban collectively have.
I could leave this to them. Trust that they will manage. That they will survive.
I could.
I won’t.
Because I’m tired. I’m tired of hard men making hard choices. I’m tired of taking the pragmatic way out of things. Of carefully picking among the lesser evils.
I fly around a grasping claw, once again plunging straight through its regenerated red eye, and I remember Legend. I remember the charismatic, good-natured face of the Protectorate as he told me that he was letting the Siberian eat a hostage alive because it was the right thing to do. Because that way, as she tortured a long, drawn-out death out of an innocent woman, she wouldn’t be killing anybody else.
I remember the burning indignation. The fury I felt at the monstrous reasoning.
I remember the flames dimming with every choice that came after until only ashes remained.
And no, this isn’t me discovering that there were embers buried under the ashes. This isn’t me remembering a younger Becca and trying to make things up to the girl who wanted to make the world a better place, to save others as she’d been saved.
This is me wanting to make all of this, all the petty cruelties, all the monstrous choices, all the wrongness my life has become…
Make sense.
I punch down on top of its head, making it stumble forward and away from the Yangban’s layered barrier.
A mistake.
I should be punching it against the ropes, not awayfrom them.
But, as I realize my mistake, I meet Thirteen’s eyes. The one who rebelled. The one Lisa Wilbourn discovered could be turned.
A man who’s been forced to fight again and again, convinced at every step of the way that there was no other way. No other choice.
That he was a slave that could never do anything but follow the path set for him by necessity rather than choice.
I meet his eyes through the red mask, the brown irises never wavering as he looks straight at me despite the molten metal stuck to my skin.
He has made his choice. For the first time since he was captured and enslaved, he has made his choice.
Fuck parahuman feudalism.
I can choose as well.
“Velocity, now,” I order through the communicator carefully protected by my cupped right hand.
***
Velocity
Somebody tugs on the string tied around my ankle.
As fast as I can, wading through the dark mists surrounding me, I get out.
The city is no longer what it was when I arrived. I usually see the whole process, the buildings falling apart and the roads exploding up as I race to try and reach those that an indifferent voice coming from a bracelet tells me can still be saved, even if that is usually a lie.
I’ve spent a long time inside a pocket of Grue’s power, thinking about what I could be doing, about what else I could be contributing to the fight rather than hide safely tucked away into Behemoth’s blindspot.
The truth is? Not much.
Because as fast as I can be, as often as I reached those fallen capes, there’s very little I can do when I get there.
But, this time, getting there is all I need to do.
And so, I run.
The string around my ankle tears, and only my thin suit and the card Colin gave me to tuck into the sole of my right foot remain to tug at my power and slow me down that infinitesimal fraction.
I’m not wearing my helmet nor my shirt, and it was a struggle to decide on whether to also drop my pants while I waited surrounded by darkness, with only a camping stool, a lamp, and the photographs of the battlefield that Grue kept giving me to study keeping me grounded in the moment as nerves and anticipation did their best to drive me insane.
‘I may not be needed today,’ I kept thinking. ‘Behemoth can flee at any moment, either when he’s damaged enough or when we take away his objective.
‘I may not be needed.
‘I may go home without fighting.’
It was a guilty, happy thought. A hope that I wouldn’t have to risk my life against something unstoppable yet again. That I could safely skip this one battle, and it’d be all right because that had been the plan from the start. That I wouldn’t be guilty of cowardice for, this one time, not being there to stare at people dying, leaving them behind to race at others who may still have a chance.
I’ve saved many.
But far too little.
And all these thoughts rush through my head as I run down the small hill that the temple sits on, as light itself becomes grayer, the colors muted as nothing stirs around me.
Behemoth’s red aura glows around him, precisely the same size now as it was when I emerged from Grue’s black mist.
Alexandria’s fist is extended in front of her, aimed at the cracked red eye.
Legend and Eidolon fly over the battlefield, side by side, far above enough to be safe from what’s about to happen.
And I reach my first goal.
The black box sits in the middle of the road, right where the pictures and constantly updated map said it would be, carefully placed there by Colin and his tank-like bike.
I step on it with my right foot, the one with the thin card tucked into the sole, and I let my speed dim for just a moment as the cover becomes transparent and green light pours from inside of it in a flash that no one but me will be fast enough to catch.
The signal that it’s working, that the plan is still proceeding.
That I have to run.
I do, Behemoth’s aura having grown a tad brighter, a tad deeper in the instant it took me to make sure that the frequency coming from Colin’s card disabled the signal-shielding tech protecting the box and its contents.
And I rush to the next spot.
The next set of memorized photographs that correspond to a red dot on a map that kept being updated as Behemoth’s attacks made the earlier one obsolete.
This box is near a pile of rubble, right next to a crushed man wearing glowing, medieval armor frozen amid a fountain of unmoving sparks.
I know he’s dead. That he was dead five maps ago.
I step on the box and feel the familiar pang of leaving behind somebody I can’t help.
Rush to the next one.
In a frozen world, with nobody else around me to hear my ragged breathing, to see the sun shimmer on the sweat running down my bare chest, to see just how tired I am. How exhausted.
I could walk.
I could walk, and it would barely make a difference.
But Behemoth’s aura is that much brighter right now than when I emerged from the black mists, the disturbing, eerie thing clinging to my ankles as I fought my way out of it.
The glow of the deep red reaches me. Bathes the road I’m meant to follow.
Alexandria’s fist isn’t any closer to the cracked eye in front of her.
And I’m running out of time.
So I pour my everything into circling them, into going around the path Colin rode through while deploying his back boxes, the things invisible to Behemoth’s senses and so hard to miss to me after having studied them again and again while I stretched minutes into hours so that I wouldn’t make any mistake when they called for me. If they called for me.
As good a distraction as any.
Only two more red dots on the map. Two more black boxes that will glow green when I step on them.
I vault over half a fence and deviate from my path, ignoring the splinter that just went through the ball of my right thumb in my attempt to save myself a few steps. A few vital slivers of a moment.
The next box is there. Waiting for me.
I step on it, slowing down the bare minimum for green light to bathe me.
The crimson glow overwhelms it.
I reflexively pull all the way into my power, into my speed, and my lungs burn as I rush, almost staggering as I struggle to keep proper form, to balance my weight just slightly forward, the impact of my feet on the ground uneven, not even plumes of dust deigning to sink as my weight and impact on the world around me gets further dimmed until I have to fight through the air in front of me to get where I need to be.
The last red dot on the map.
The last box.
I reach it. Step on it.
Let time take a hold of me.
Green flares up, and it’s joined by all the other boxes answering in kind at once.
No. That’s wrong.
I’m still fast enough to see the cadence. To see how every single dome of green shoots around one box I recently left behind one after the other, not set off by any radio communications that Behemoth could have sabotaged, but by an infinitesimally short timer that I started with the thin card set on my sole.
Colin told me to run away as fast as I could.
I try not to waste my breath on cursing and obey the last order my team leader gave me before riding away with Hannah behind him, my shins tingling with each renewed impact on the cracked flagstones.
I can see the red glow racing me, overcoming me.
And then I outpace it.
I stumble and roll down, a patch of grass mercifully on my way so that my skin remains uncut as I finally slip inside of regular time, the world around me regaining sound and color as—
I look behind me, to the boxes I left behind, to Behemoth glowing red, Alexandria punching forward, the Yangban holding their barrier, and nobody else around them.
Not a single other cape trapped in the area of effect.
The green domes coming from Colin’s boxes are now vibrant as they touch one another in sequence, melding, flowing into a more vertical shape until they reach the last one, the one I just left behind.
And they become a pillar.
A pillar of green light reaching up to the sky, thrumming with enough power to make the air tingle against my bare, soaked skin as it rises and rises with Behemoth in its midst.
And then it’s no longer there.
Only Alexandria and her fist, the Yangban and their barrier, and Behemoth and his glow remain.
But the red light no longer reaches past the threshold of the absent pillar.
I let go of my power entirely, fully rejoining time itself.
They don’t.
There’s only a monster, the heroes that face it, and crimson light that doesn’t move past an invisible boundary.
We did it.
Colin did it.
We have defeated an Endbringer.
But I’m far too exhausted to celebrate.
