Barely four minutes had elapsed since the previous internal checkpoint, Armsmaster pushing past all signs that he needed to regulate as the battle against the watery beast continued. His suit core temperature continued to climb even as the Tinker logged the matter, HUD notifications warning for temperance dismissed with the slightest of eye movements.

  Three?point?nine?meter strides carried him at an accelerated pace, entire body propelled by the painstakingly designed artificial muscle system built into his frame. The street beneath him already resembled a grey river, the heart of it a kludge of shattered masonry and traffic?light skeletons, and if he had the time to even dwell on it, he would have been highly appreciative for the effort he put in to his armor’s design to minimize asphalt shear and reduce bleed. Even now, every footfall sank a minimum of five centimeters, slowing him down and serving as a minor obstacle to his charge as water gushed away, resurfaced, and dragged loose gravel in centrifugal rings.

  Kinematics demanded speed mode for glide strides, but power budgets favored durability for the next probable impact event. With that in mind, he left the lattice in hybrid mode, doing his best to manage both despite the slight increase in power draw.

  Leviathan’s tail speared through floodwaters roughly eight dozen meters south?south?east, mass moving with metronomic confidence, the storm’s keystone. The Endbringer’s mass displaced water like a hull, the action a threat as much as it was an attack. Every motion lifted a skin of seawater, an after?image the volume of the limb displaced forcing powerful waves that rolled down flooded avenues and pummeled storefronts that would better be considered derelict after this.

  Despite its movement, Alexandria grappled the creature high on the right shoulder, flight doing as much as her strength. She bled kinetic energy off Leviathan’s charge by twisting him into the husk of a bus. The vehicle folded and water and steel erupted skyward with enough force to match a geyser.

  Legend hung above, pulses of condensed light striking Leviathan’s elbows at precise joint centers. He estimated conversion efficiency with a single second of thought: single digit percent thermal transfer, negligible structural breach. Acceptable as steering mechanism but unsustainable as damage route.

  All the while, Eidolon floated a hundred meters overhead, generating pressure spikes the suit’s instrumentation still categorized as unknown. That lack of clarity irritated him; unknown equaled vulnerability. He forced irritation back as he put his mind to better use.

  His heads?up display minimized sociograms from the outer ring. Overlapping arcs of color-coded fire formed an inconsistent lattice, a frustrating reality staring him in the face, but not an unexpected one. Effectively every power set available lacked penetration depth; they served only to distract, at best delaying the Endbringer by a second or two. He placed suppression probability at eight percent, their chances of chasing Leviathan off before massive casualties and damage falling by the minute.

  Casualty updates streamed into his system through Dragon’s comm-net, more and more data filtered away as his heuristics designated importance to the capes that would require a change in strategy.

  Thirty?six capes downed or dying, twelve confirmed KIA at this point already. Numbers flickered as new armband pings failed, notification after notification flickering down his HUD. One made him nearly freeze, unexpected as it was; the information nearly enough to disrupt his momentum.

  Velocity (deceased).

  …

  Tail spike through the chest cavity; his system reported back with more detailed information as it detected his eye movements lingering on it. Information he would rather not have right now, but it was information nevertheless.

  Death had been instant; the closest thing to a mercy the beast could give.

  It was recorded, but still difficult to internalize. Armsmaster pushed that aside, focused on the number feed more than the names.

  Krieg (deceased). Unfortunate, but not the greatest loss.

  Rogue Sun (down). Much more worrying. The New Orleans cape might have been the newest of the legacy holders but the Breaker was undoubtedly powerful and his pyrokinesis was undoubtedly useful, especially in addition to his Brute and Mover display.

  Yangtze (deceased).

  Parallaxe (deceased).

  Each notification, death or otherwise, blinked off his tactical board, casualty icons stacking along the left margin until the margin scrolled and Armsmaster pushed forward, too much on his mind and in front of him to bother with pieces removed from the board.

  Three wounded capes—Tetsu, Kintsugi and Terracota—lay prone behind a jack?knifed cargo trailer forty meters to his nine?o’clock, salvageable assets. Chest-level water was only a minor hindrance; Armsmaster bursting into and through it in a dash composed of three simple movements, nothing but simple steps.

  Servo joints did their duty, restricting lateral sway as jump jets burst in quarter?second pulses, raising him just high enough that a vault over the trailer was easy enough. Without a moment to waste, he tagged them, summoning three of Dragon’s nearest med-drones — 007, 012, and 018 — for an airlift.

  He glanced skyward. Eidolon hovered, cloak snapping like torn canvas, emitting radioactive turbulence that somehow registered only as irregular vector shifts in raindrops. HUD algorithms failed to classify. Again.

  To his left, the blaster cordon was slipping east as exhaustion clearly set in, the number of losses weighing on as they failed to keep formation against the onslaught. He saw Mongoose’s fireballs shrinking, K-Nex’s muzzle flashes irregular.

  Leviathan lunged, tail sweeping at bus wreckage. Alexandria forced a collision to divert, tackling the Endbringer with an impact that sounded like a landslide, but the redirected force produced a lateral wave that hammered the blaster line, specifically Purity’s aerial vantage. The Empire 88 meber recovered as she burned a strobing path overhead, forcing Leviathan to dodge a blast that scored through water and asphalt alike.

  He toggled his suit speakers, amping them up to a decibel rating they couldn’t miss even in the storm and chaos. “Rotate firing line. Fresh capes forward. Burnout capes recover behind barrier.”

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  Leviathan pivoted, sending Alexandra flying as it whipped around.

  At the same instant, water mass equal to an olympic pool rolled from its shoulders, hammered the street, converting debris into so much shrapnel propelled at deadly speeds. Colin pushed from cover with a directional burst from his jump jets; pavement cracking under the sheer force of his sudden movement. He landed beside Dauntless, anchored his feet, and raised the halberd in guard position. “Tail sweep coming left?low in seven,” he said to the other man in gold, voice terse from tension and less from annoyance as usual.

  Dauntless’s helmet jerked in a nod, not a word said.

  As expected, Leviathan’s tail swept low a full second later, water blade riding its edge. Colin leapt above the arc, jump jets firing on half?thrust, and planted the halberd spike into the tail’s second bend, vibratory edge engaged.

  Darting up Leviathan’s tail, the blade skittered through Endbringer flesh until Armsmaster forced separation, not willing to risk any more. He nodded at the result. Surface cut depth: two centimeters. Expected.

  Arrows of dull-gray light, denser than anything of that luminescence should ever be, surrounded the Triumvirate member cloaked in green; Eidolon preparing another wave of a yet-unknown ability. Two heartbeats came and went and they all went loose, nearly two dozen dozen balllistae of what seemed to be raw force flying loose and rocking into Leviathan’s torso with all the tempo of an accelerated twenty-one-gun-salute.

  Good window. Colin triggered strength mode, dumped power to arms, and shot forward as his jump jets roared to life. Alexandria’s descending fist forced a pivot, the armored Tinker moving aside as the super-strong member of the Triumvirate made landfall with a thunderous impact, a shockwave of force and power rocking the thallasic monster aside for a split-second.

  Not one to waste an opportunity, Armsmaster shifted gears and mirrored the motion with his own kinetic payload; halberd slamming down on the creature’s exposed clavicle with an explosion of its own.

  Night (deceased), Fog (deceased). A pulse of frustration beat at the back of skull as his forward-facing jump jets flared, the Tinker retreating Leviathan’s counter even as the news threatened to skew focus. Any loss at this point was a small disaster on its own.

  Legend darted, and delivered a triplet of lasers at new angles. Leviathan’s left forearm lost skin thickness measurable on sensors and Eidolon’s swirl of energy turned violet before the hero let it fly.

  Colin toggled visor to maximum attenuation a fraction before the world white?flared. Radiance stung sensors, even through compensation. When clarity returned, Leviathan still stood, a layer of skin chipped aside on one arm, but the beast already had its retaliation as the zone was entirely flooded, street geometry rewritten: cars pancaked, lamp poles uprooted, and a sinkhole where an intersection once was.

  Leviathan turned, water cloak swirling as the Endbringer’s eyes seemed to glow in the dim lighting, their asymmetry unsettling even to him no matter how many times he had joined in on these fights. Without warning, the beast rushed forward in a direct charge, tail snaking.

  Armsmaster’s eyes widened as he tracked the target vector: west barricade where capes attempted shield layering.

  Speed Mode engaged itself almost without thought, Armsmaster already moving as he threw himself forward in a halo of jet burner wash. Pavement shattered upon arrival and shockt traveled through his ankles and up his spine, the sensation enough that he nearly regretted the action.

  Focused too much on his actions to do much of that, the hero stabbed his halberd into the ground, blunt end piercing asphalt and activating the anchor claw, while the blade launched out with a wordless command, a cable pulling at Leviathan’s rightmost limb.

  “DRAGON!” He raised his voice, the action a rare one at that magnitude. “RAIL!”

  His HUD pinged in response. Heavy impact rail shot inbound T?minus 5.

  Leviathan reared, a water surge bursting to life as the cable tore from his halberd, and the sky split. A tungsten rod screamed through the air from Dragon’s suit a mile above, trailing plasma.

  The Endbringer shot forward but it hit anyway, the rod impacting where torso met tail.

  Concrete cratered.

  Overpressure slammed Colin sideways; the force of it sending his suit tumbling away from the flooded intersection, his armor plating shedding sparks as it skid across the ground. Gyros fought and the suit adapted, allowing Armsmaster to roll, and regain his stance.

  Diagnostic? Right elbow actuator damaged, arm ninety percent mobility.

  Leviathan emerged from smoke with a dusting of ash on its back and only the slightest scarring to its flesh, but it was obvious that locomotion was unimpaired. Deviance less than one percent. Orbital strike effect minimal. He filed disappointment, and quarantined away all his frustration in place of focus.

  Alexandria streaked from above, striking exposed tissue with a tremor that rattled the thing’s sternum. Good; even minimal impact bought seconds.

  Another explosion soundd off and Armsmaster’s head snapped right, HUD automatically zooming in. A half-kilometer northwest, a collapsed apartment building complex came apart like a cardboard box in a hurricane. Concrete chunks sprayed outward, steel beams twisted into corkscrews, and then—heat. A column of red-orange fire erupted from the wreckage, bursting fragments of rebar and building material into the air.

  Colin's HUD automatically zoomed, tracking the figure that shot free from the inferno. White and blue armor, gold trim, sword sheath glowing with residual heat. The readout flickered: White Knight.

  Spirals of fire and hardened air rocketed behind him, a contrail of force and fury with temperature readings around him climbing past 1200 degrees Celsius. Under this much rainfall, he should have been surrounded by steam clouds thick enough to blind a satellite. Instead, the vapor simply formed neat thrust cones that did nothing but push him further and faster.

  Three verdant eyes snapped toward the approaching heat signature, water already beginning to shift in response as the Endbringer’s attention focused, gaze seemingly locked firmly on the new threat and no one else.

  "LEVIATHAAAAAAN!"