Fucking ow.

  First coherent thought after… “My nam-”

  After whatever the hell just happened. Greg's eyes snapped open underneath a pile of rebar, drywall and what he knew had to be a crushed fridge. Two blinks later, he felt nothing but regret at forcing them open because wow, everything was the wrong color of red. Oh, wait…

  It wasn’t everything.

  It was just him.

  “BOOST!”

  The flare of power lasted all of a heartbeat and not a fraction of a second longer as the fresh sixteen-year-old exploded out of what used to be someone's living room, rebar and drywall cascading off him. His body still blazed red, the afterglow still bright enough he had to blink it out of his eyes. Steam hissed where raindrops kissed his skin, each droplet turning to vapor before it could properly land as he stood there breathing heavy, body hunched over like he was Tommy Galleti, the kid from middle school with scoliosis.

  Brackish red-stained water rushed past his boots, ankle-deep and rising. The rain hammered down like the sky had a personal vendetta, but most of it just... evaporated. Before it could touch him. Before it could wash away the—

  Blood.

  There was blood?

  His mouth worked silently, confused at why…

  No, there was blood.

  In his mouth. On his tongue.

  Thick and metallic and wrong because it tasted wrong. He knew that it wasn't his.

  Definitely wasn't his.

  If there was one thing Greg Veder knew, it was his own blood. He’d had enough of it splattered across his face and down his throat to know it by smell and taste, nothing else needed.

  What… what happened? His breathing came out slow, too steady, like his lungs were following some script he hadn't read. Too quiet for the rage building in his chest, fury that might as well have been lava in place of blood.

  "M-my name is A-."

  No. Nope. No. Not thinking about that. Not thinking about her face, about the way she looked at him like he could actually—

  Like I could save h—

  Something in his head pounded from the inside out, a vein bulging on the side of his skull as he gripped his skull. Nononono… Pressure built behind his eyes, tight and constant like a balloon inflating in his skull, pushing brain-meat and eyes and everything else out of the way. “Nnghhh!”

  The world blurred at the edges, everything washing out in shades of crimson that made his stomach lurch as he realized that red was a blood vessel popping in his eye.

  Everything was red now. Everything.

  Then he saw it.

  Leviathan.

  A mile away, maybe more, rushed thirty feet of living-nightmare that made every kaiju movie look like a Saturday morning cartoon. Greg's rage stuttered, hiccupped, because the scale of the thing was enough to take your breath away. It wasn’t right, looking up at a moving building that wanted to step on you, a god made of water and hate and very bad life choices.

  Boss fight. Greg remembered now as his brain began to piece everything together after the hit that had knocked his brains around his skull. He remembered doing his very best against the monster they called an Endbringer, and getting smashed half a mile away and knocked out like he was a mosquito. He didn’t want to go up against that thing again, he didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t, he wasn’t…

  "M-my name is Angie.” That little face flashed behind his eyes again, terrified and small and—

  The fury returned. Tenfold.

  With interest.

  Reinforcement snapped on, like someone flipping a switch, but not maxed. Never maxed. That was for emergencies, and this... this was beyond emergencies. This was nothing less than the end of everything.

  "BOOST!"

  The word tore out of his throat, and something deep in his chest answered. Not just answered.

  Detonated.

  Reinforcement exploded in his chest, starting in his heart and pushing itself within a single heartbeat, through the rest of him and stayed there. Stats cranked to eleven, then past eleven into whatever number came after you stopped caring about math as red light flared around his body from the inside out. Greg could feel it, even without looking at the constant red bits in the corner of his vision, that his health was draining away like a hole in a fish tank, literally bleeding away almost forty points per second, which would've been concerning if he wasn't currently sitting on forty-nine hundred.

  After all, bleeding didn't matter when you had that much blood to bleed and could push more into your system if you needed to.

  Then the second layer hit.

  Dragonblood.

  His muscles thickened, tendons and fibers swelling like someone was pumping him full of liquid mercury. His heart hammered against his ribs, each beat sending more and more thickened fire through his veins. Something wet and warm filled his mouth, and when he opened it to breathe, fangs punched through his gums with little pops of pain that felt almost... satisfying.

  Claws shredded through his glove, leather no stronger than tissue paper all of a sudden. His mask hung in tatters around his face, but his eyes... his eyes burned blue fire that narrowed into vertical slits, reptilian and hungry and very much not human anymore.

  A growl rumbled up from somewhere in his chest, and the street beneath his feet started to bubble. Actually bubble, as if someone had cranked the thermostat up to "molten."

  He burst.

  Not jumped. Not launched. Burst.

  The building around him exploded outward as he kicked off, concrete and steel and everything else that was the west side of that apartment disintegrating to damn-near-nothing. Zero to two-hundred in under two seconds, then faster, because two-hundred was for normal people and normal people didn't have dragon blood and anger management issues.

  Air compressed around him, unconscious aerokinesis smoothing the drag and making him even faster. Bright orange-red cones of flame flared from his hands and feet, propelling him faster, rocketing him forward with no brakes, fury and steam trailing behind him in the world's most violent contrail.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  "LEVIAAAAAATHAAAAAN!"

  The word ripped out of his throat; half battle cry, half death wish, and 100% a very loud way of announcing his intentions.

  Capes scattered beneath him, some getting out of the way of his approach, the rest barely registering the blur until he was already past them. Someone shouted something that might've been his name, but the wind ate it.

  Legend's head snapped toward him. "What the hell—"

  Alexandria burst upward, cape billowing as she dodged a Leviathan swipe that would've pancaked a major building. He could hear her, as he got nearer, his senses focused her way and on full blast with his Reinforcement. "Armsmaster's pet project. He's alive."

  Pet project. He bared his fangs, lips running red with blood. Oh, fuck off.

  Eidolon's powers shifted, what looked like marbles of bright white light in the form of electricity orbiting each finger independently before he sent them flying into Leviathan, each one going off like mini-bunkerbusters against the Endbringer’s skin. "He's also going to get himself killed."

  Greg didn't even look at them as he rocketed past, all fury and flame and very poor decision-making skills. "LEVIATHAAAAAAAAAAAN!"

  The blond in the battered and bloody knight costume twisted through the air above what used to be a city street, nothing but violence on his mind. His hand stretched out, fingers clawing at nothing, as reality tore open. Blue pixels scattered around the entrance to the fractured rift in space that was his inventory, and Greg’s hand tore itself back out.

  Gram materialized in his grip, the familiar weight of his bastard sword settling into his palm.

  The blade usually glowed golden when he pumped Reinforcement through it, soft amber warmth that almost sang when he swung it. Now, though?

  Greg saw scarlet.

  Jagged crimson light crawled along the steel like someone had switched its alignment in a universe and time almost forty thousand years in the future. He wanted to make a joke, he could feel it on his lips, but his brain didn’t seem to have the focus or the energy to actually form it into words, something that somehow made him even angrier.

  Growling, a set of blue slitted eyes locked onto Leviathan, still distant but closing as it darted away from and around the flying forms of the Triumvirate. You’re dead. The sight of that thirty-foot nightmare sent something cold and sharp stabbing through his chest. Something that tasted like copper and rage and the way Angie's voice had cracked when she said her name.

  Bloody teeth bared themselves again. "Let's fucking go, fishstick."

  His free hand curled, fire condensing in his palm, tighter, denser, more concentrated than anything he'd thrown before. The fireball compressed to baseball size instead of basketball, wrapped in cyclone-tight wind that made the air around his fingers scream. He pushed it tighter, in a knot tight as rage itself, three times hotter than anything he’d ever dared and six times more pressurized. Go on, bitch. Eat this.

  The projectile left his hand like a guided missile with anger management issues.

  Impact.

  Leviathan's flank erupted in steam and flame, the detonation tearing across scaled hide like a shaped charge designed by someone who really, really didn't like sea monsters. The Endbringer went flying, actually flying, thirty feet of living tsunami tossed backward like Greg had just bitch-slapped physics itself.

  Steam billowed upward, the white cloud thick enough to hide a city block, and visibility dropped to near-zero in a heartbeat.

  Greg followed it in.

  Car roof to streetlight to empty air, aerokinesis bursts turning atmosphere into his personal springboard system as he leapt dozens of meters at a time. The world blurred past him in shades of red-tinged gray, his vision cutting through steam like a thermal scope cranked to maximum murder settings. Each leap carried him higher, faster, closer to something that could step on him and not even notice.

  Without warning, he met Leviathan mid-dash, collision course locked and loaded.

  The Endbringer pivoted faster than something that size had any right to, tail whipping out in an arc designed to turn Greg into a very messy pancake. He ducked, felt the displacement of air above his head like a freight train passing overhead, and opened his mouth.

  Fire belched out in a horizontal spray that would've made a flamethrower weep with envy, tearing across flooded asphalt and catching Leviathan across the chest. Water flash-steamed around them, the air suddenly thick enough to choke on.

  Greg blurred in, the world vanishing at the edges of his vision, and brought the blade down with a wordless roar.

  Gram cut deep, a red blur streaking across Leviathan's thigh as Greg put everything behind the strike, every ounce of enhanced strength and dragon-fueled rage compressed into one perfect moment of "fuck you and everything you represent."

  The blade bit. Barely. But it bit.

  First blood.

  Except there wasn't any blood.

  Just superheated tissue and the sharp smell of ozone, like someone had decided to barbecue a thunderstorm. The wound didn’t seal, it didn’t heal, but it was far too small for him to be anywhere close to happy, or even satisfied.

  Fuck it, more to cut.

  Before he could make good on that, Leviathan retaliated, claw swipe coming down like a sedan-sized flyswatter aimed at his face. Greg crossed his forearms, Reinforcement flaring bright enough to hurt his eyes, and the impact hit him like every bad decision he'd ever made all at once.

  He held.

  Barely.

  The force sent him skidding backward fifty feet, boots tearing furrows in flooded concrete, but he held. His arms felt like someone had tried to turn them into modern art using a sledgehammer, but he held.

  Plus, they were still attached, which counted as a win in his book. Even still…

  Motherfucker! The sixteen-year old stopped himself with an air burst from his heels, concrete cracking beneath him, and launched back into the fray with the kind of reckless momentum reserved for the suicidally insane.

  "Dash Straight!” He roared the words like a bat out of hell, his voice sounding barely a step away from gargling glass with a microphone in front of him. “Weapon Charge!"

  The skills activated like muscle memory even though it had been a while, power flooding through his legs and into Gram until the sword hummed with enough energy to cut through tank armor a dozen times over. He slammed into Leviathan's chest like a freight train with a sword and serious commitment issues.

  The monster stumbled.

  For one heartbeat, thirty feet of Endbringer stumbled backward, the watery beast rocking back onto the ground, and Greg felt something that might've been pride if his heart wasn’t about to explode.

  A wall of light in a dozen different colors seared through the sky and punched through the opening Greg had created, beams of concentrated fuck-you carving smoking lines across scaled hide. Spikes of something dark-purple and dangerous looking slammed down from Eidolon above, each lance of energy distorting space around the Endbringer's position and grinding at its flesh.

  Leviathan righted itself, slower than before inside Eidolon’s field. But it was still moving, still fighting, still very much not dead enough for Greg's taste.

  "I can't hear my sisters anymore."

  Angie's voice echoed in his head, small and terrified and gone, and Greg's attack pattern faltered. The dragon-state wavered, power fluctuating like someone had knocked a cable loose in his internal wiring.

  Leviathan's tail lashed out, faster than thought, catching him across the ribs with enough force to crater a building. Reinforcement cracked like glass under pressure, red numbers flooding his vision as four hundred health points evaporated in a single hit.

  The pain brought clarity.

  Not tactical clarity. Nothing that organized or useful. Pure, crystalline hatred, the kind of rage that felt like swallowing molten metal and asking for seconds. Dragon blood surged stronger, muscles expanding beneath his costume, claws lengthening until they punched through what remained of his gloves.

  His next roar actually made nearby capes stumble backward, the sound carrying enough raw fury to make reality flinch.

  "Raging Combo!"

  Greg vanished.

  Not invisible. Just too fast for the human eye to track, his form blurring into a storm of motion that turned the space around Leviathan into a hurricane of steel and rage. Slashes, stabs, strikes, each one landing with the precision of a surgeon and the subtlety of a nuclear warhead.

  Seventy-two hits in under a second.

  Sparks and steam exploded from every impact point, Gram's scarlet glow painting the battlefield in shades of violence. Capes nearby froze to watch, as he kept cutting and cutting, Leviathan pushed back as he sliced faster than the speed of sound, sonic booms and streaks of fire licking off his sword as they sliced deeper and deeper into Leviathan’s body, a fraction of an inch at a time, but still going strong.

  Leviathan reeled but didn't fall even by the time he was done, but neither was he.

  Greg lunged forward again only to nearly slam face-first into something, his Danger Sense going off down his back as he flipped off a hastily-made Mana Platform. Fuck!

  Metal spears erupted from the flooded streets, one right where he had just been, each one thick as a telephone pole and sharp enough to gore through concrete. Half a dozen caught Leviathan's feet, pinning the Endbringer in place for a split-second.

  Before Greg could surge forward, a giant fist burst out of nowhere connected with Leviathan's face, forty feet of Neo-Nazi muscle wrapped in Valkyrie armor sending the Endbringer flying backward with a sound like a building falling over. Menja, because apparently Greg's day wasn't complete without Nazi intervention, her oversized ass only wasting time and pushing Leviathan back without hurting it.

  Greg spun around, snarling through fangs that felt too sharp for his mouth, eyes narrowed to reptilian slits. "THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING, YOU GIANT BITCH?"