61.9%
Unacceptable.
The numbers burned across Colin's HUD in steady blue text, each digit burning into his retina as he tried not to think about anything past the present. Nearly a full half an hour since Leviathan had wiped out the harbor and boardwalk with that first initial wave and his Cerberus Frame's power core sat at sixty-two percent remaining, something he couldn’t ignore. Not with the efficiency buffer pinging yellow in his peripheral vision, a constant drain on his attention.
Draining power to this level after not even a full half hour… By his standards? Suboptimal.
A simple fact he couldn’t deny.
Not because the system was failing. I should be at seventy-one-point-three percent. Too much bleed from unoptimized attack patterns. Because he wasn't being efficient enough. As optimized as his expectations were for the functionality and battery life of his current suit, those expectations and simulations had not been scaled to an Endbringer battle. An oversight. In this lethal chaos, he was running the suit at maximum to accomplish the most he could, and despite the fact that all his metrics were better than they’d ever been in a fight like this, he knew one thing.
I miscalculated.
The last thought cut through his tactical processing as Colin breathed through his nose, a deliberate, measured rhythm he'd learned years ago during his early Protectorate years the same age as when any other would be in college. Back when his Protectorate file had flagged him as ‘lacking in emotional fluency’ and nobody said what they meant.
Numbers never made excuses. His jaw clenched once, briefly, muscle tension registering on internal sensors before he consciously relaxed it. Control what you can control.
The mental refrain came automatically, Colin realizing the efficiency loss ate at him more than any physical damage ever could.
He adjusted his grip on the halberd, muscle memory and deliberate positioning ensuring optimal leverage despite the suit's weight distribution changes from impact stress. His left shoulder ached, not from injury but from unconsciously holding tension. Something else to correct later when he wasn't busy keeping people alive.
Systems cascaded across his display in organized columns, each and every primary status color-coded for effective assessment.
- Phantom Displacer: 58 seconds remaining on cooldown.
- Sonic Grid: Flickering at thirty-two percent capacity.
- Nanite Patch: Three full units remaining.
- Halberd Edge: Current blade holding steady, 93% vibrational integrity.
- Microswarm Drones: All three deployed and active.
Armsmaster’s eyes tracked the information with practiced efficiency, not so much reading lines as he parsed the rhythm. Red flags, yellow warnings, green confirmations; tension, caution, clearance. Same way you scanned a battlefield; never single targets, always patterns. Each pattern stood out the way he designed it to, Colin nodding slightly as he processed the data stream as fast as the suit could feed it to him.
Fifty-seven seconds until displacement recharge. He counted it down automatically, an internal metronome that had become second nature over years of combat optimization. He catalogued all forty-seven modules in three seconds; cross-indexed two dozen with terrain, discarded forty-four. I’ll need three.
Maybe four if the kid made it back into play.
The nanite patches concerned him most, after being forced to use two already due to Leviathan’s burst of speed that had not been on any calculations for the Endbringer. That speed… was not in the files, not in any record or metric concerning Leviathan. It was fast enough to delete a full 99% of the roster for this battle.
And yet it had only used it against the boy.
Worrying.
More than that, it was a pattern deviation, a choice, not random in the slightest. And it was the sort of unexpected happening that left implications that Armsmaster hadn’t fully had the opportunity to analyze. Largely, because of the two incidents that had forced him to use two entire vials of nanite patches to keep his suit intact.
Three remaining meant three grievous tactical errors or unexpected failures maximum; likely less, if the damage from Leviathan was not direct, but he couldn’t afford to hope for the best. Three more, before he was relying purely on the suit's passive defenses. Insufficient margin. He made a mental note to adjust engagement parameters, maintain greater distance from—
A chunk of concrete whistled past his faceplate, close enough to scrape paint. Armsmaster didn't flinch, simply charging forward as his boots found purchase on debris-slick flooring. The armored Tinker sprinted through a second-floor hallway, each step calculated for maximum stability with minimum energy expenditure. The building had been split by a tidal gouge, structural integrity compromised beyond any reasonable safety margin, but it was the fastest route to his target coordinates.
The hallway tilted at seventeen degrees. Manageable, though his inner ear protested the unnatural angle. He ignored the sensation, already designing stronger vertigo mitigation protocols for the next suit iteration, all the while his armband rattled off names in steady, clinical precision:
Brandish (down)
Trickster (deceased)
Stormtiger (down)
Oros (deceased)
Balaclava (down)
Crusader (deceased)
The feed scrolled past his peripheral vision in steady text blocks. Names became data points, each casualty logged and categorized without conscious emotion processing. This was how it had to be. How it worked. Sentiment was a luxury that got people killed when you needed clear tactical assessment.
Still, something twitched behind his sternum when "Oros (deceased)" appeared. He'd spoken to the young man during a Protectorate briefing three months prior. New York cape, crystal Breaker/Blaster specialty, dry sense of humor that had almost made Colin smile during an otherwise tedious logistics meeting. Twenty-three years old.
He pushed the thought away before it could stick, before it could compromise his processing efficiency. The man was gone and the data was what mattered now, data that could still be useful in a way that grieving simply wasn’t. Even still...
Triage probability overlays updated themselves in his head, Colin unable to stop himself from comparing casualty rates to projected models he'd run before the engagement. The dead versus the merely downed after thirty minutes of active Endbringer combat. No Endbringer fight was ever good when it came to preserving human resources, but statistical analysis suggested that today…
Well, today would be the closest it came. More than that, he had to admit to himself that when he saw how much worse it could be, all Armsmaster could think to himself was one thing.
...Not the worst numbers.
The thought carried little comfort, but even that little was tempered by the simple fact that the fight was far from over. His HUD pinged and Colin's grip shifted on the halberd, pulling his attention away from death, pushing numbers aside the way he had the names.
Pain was temporary. Poor resource management was a character flaw.
Glass shattered against the Cerberus Frame as Colin threw himself through what used to be a window, brackish spray and rain hitting his faceplate like someone had opened a fire hose aimed at his skull. Downtown Brockton Bay spread below him in chaotic geometry, his cameras automatically tracking... too many targets. Priority sorting. Threat assessment cascading across his HUD faster than—
Kaiser.
Three dozen iron barriers, massive things cutting through a city block like someone had built a hedge maze. Smart. Tactically sound, as well. The wall placement forced Leviathan into... side-collisions, deceleration, energy burn. The man might be reprehensible but he understaood battlefield geometry. Mathematical elegance from a Nazi. Ironic.
Hookwolf launched himself wall to wall, bladed mass that shouldn't work, pure undisciplined aggression with no regard for... anything. Collateral damage. Tactical sustainability. Combat coordination. None of it mattered to the villain. He was all instinct and rage and the antithesis of everything Colin represents and it was working because Leviathan hadhas to react to the chaos, allowing others to attack in the moments it couldn’t.
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His jaw clenched.
Othala and Victor stood behind defensive positions, the former applying her power to nearby parahumans. Tactical support. Useful. Even from them.
Villains from out of town were not far behind the Empire, singular threats coordinating their efforts with... surprising professionalism. A woman in a silver robe — Tempestra, he noted, a villain from New York — that was both somehow skintight and voluminous at the extremities created updraft vacuums, wind speed analysis showing forty percent reduction in hydrokinetic projectile velocity. Useful.
An amber-armored man standing at least a few inches taller than he did — Cardinal Breaker — was actively molding golden energy fields, each one of them slowing and stabilizing building collapses. Even in a matter of seconds, the man had already saved half a dozen civilians, something of a commendable effort, even if he had assistance.
Several others, all villains; Deadw8, Chax, and Mal-E, managed to actually do their part in slowing Leviathan, blasts of force and energy fields somehow slowing and trapping the Endbringer for at least the second or two it was caught in them.
Colin privately loathed working with them all, their existence a galling threat to his city and his mood. Still, he logged every contribution.
All useful.
All temporary. All ultimately insufficient against an Endbringer. Regardless, they were buying time and time allowed for adaptation. Colin was already adjusting his own engagement parameters to complement their efforts, doing his best to find the mathematical happy medium where individual actions created emergent tactical advantages.
Don't have to like them to work with them.
Professionalism transcended personal opinion, his 'operational philosophy' he had developed years ago when he realized half the Protectorate annoyed him on a personal level.
Office politics pushed aside, Armsmaster fired the anchor cable in his halberd with pneumatic precision, tungsten-tipped grapnel biting into reinforced concrete a hundred meters away. The line went taut and magnetic boots disengaged in perfect sequence as he swung across the gap between buildings.
Not flying, not that he couldn’t manage that if he needed to.
But no, this was applied physics with style, as Assault had once said, an attempt at a joke that Colin hadn’t humored. The Rig's training course — Section Seven: Advanced Urban Mobility — was something he had designed and constructed, not that anyone but him ever bothered to use it regularly. Clearly muscle memory and calculating trajectories were entirely useless in this line of work.
Armsmaster landed in a crouch, knees absorbing impact through servo-assisted compression, the roof shuddering but still holding beneath him. His calculations accounted for structural integrity but he knew well enough that reality didn’t always... Sixteen-point-seven percent margin for error. Acceptable parameters.
Leviathan moved closer to him like liquid death, thirty feet of impossible anatomy that defied every principle Colin held dear. Non-human, with no life signs of any kind, and not even a single logical weakness he could exploit through any method he could think of.
It offends him.
He swung the halberd as Leviathan swept past within range. A perfectly timed cut delivered with the force of his powered armor and two-point-nine megahertz vibrational assistance. He knew his blade would carve through steel like butter and it had done as much. Against Endbringer hide, it barely... scratched the surface.
Colin felt the impact through weapon feedback systems, HUD automatically cataloging tissue density, kinetic absorption, structural composition. All data points that might eventually yield tactical advantages. Eventually.
If he lives long enough to analyze them properly.
He aimed the halberd, firing as targeting systems locked on in a split-second. The round that left his weapon past the speed of sound was large, almost elephant-gun worthy, a specialized piece of ammunition he’d designed for nervous system disruption of non-human targets. As soon as Armsmaster fired, the hook-shaped drillbit of a round embedded itself successfully in Leviathan’s thigh, automated systems drilling as far deep as it could go before it went off in a burst of electricity bright enough to risk blindness at close range.
No reaction. Armsmaster’s lips turned down at the sides.
Leviathan ignored him and his round, the Endbringer fixated on Empire-made walls, as if Colin didn’t even exist. As if over a decade of tactical training and expert Tinkering amounted to little more than... background noise.
Frustrating.
He slung another disruptor round into a minor wound Kaiser's barriers forced open. One could only hope for internal bleeding, maybe nerve damage. Leviathan would never be so kind and it refused that kindness here and now, its behavior not changing for even a single moment as it charged forward again.
Part of him... wanted to waste time wishing the boy was here. White Knight's actions, reckless as they were, still undeniably useful. Closest they've ever come to actually damaging Leviathan. The Endbringer's missing right arm clear for all to see, visible proof that sufficient force applied correctly could achieve results.
Morale boost.
As much as one could hope for in this sort of situation. The boy had demonstrated something Colin's decades of preparation couldn't. That Endbringers weren't completely untouchable.
Just... mostly so.
Where is he now?
The thought intrudes before he can stop it, Colin's grip on the halberd tightening involuntarily as his tactical assessment began bleeding into something uncomfortably close to... concern. Which is unprofessional. Inefficient. The boy chose his engagement parameters.
Down. Not deceased.
Wave incoming, trajectory analysis complete in point-three seconds, Colin's boots fired jets with pneumatic precision as he leapt up and back, hydraulic assistance launching him clear of the surge while his HUD calculated splash patterns, debris scatter, optimal repositioning angles for... his combat analysis module flared red, warning cascade flooding his visual field before conscious thought caught up.
Higher. Need to go higher.
Jets flared brighter, more power, emergency boost protocols engaging as Colin forced himself up another dozen meters while his targeting computer tried to... Leviathan's tail whipped in a tight arc, except the strike went vertical instead of horizontal, a pattern his predictive algorithms had logged as less than one percent probability.
Less than one percent.
Less than one percent becomes absolute certainty.
The failure hit him harder than the physical blow would. His systems didn't just break, they lied to him, predictive models that he'd built and programmed and trusted with his life suddenly proving themselves worthless when it mattered most. When had he made the error? In the base calculations? The behavioral modeling? The assumption that Endbringers followed any kind of...
Trust was the error.
The tail strike moved faster than human reflexes, faster than conscious thought, faster than anything had a right to move while maintaining that much mass and kinetic energy. Colin's body responded on trained instinct, halberd rising to intercept because that's what twenty years of combat conditioning had taught him to do when something large and hostile approached his center mass.
The impact transferred through composite materials into servo joints, through servo joints into synthetic muscle bundles, through synthetic muscle bundles into his bones. Physics demanded payment and physics always collected with compound interest.
His faceplate shattered in a starburst pattern radiating from the impact point, Colin registering the damage in his peripheral as emergency sealant began deployment. System warnings cascaded across his HUD while his body went airborne, backward flight across the rooftop feeling like slow motion though his chronometer confirmed only one-point-three seconds elapsed between impact and...
Tuck. Roll. Balance.
Colin landed on his feet as he recovered because that's what you did, that's what the training was for, gyroscopic stabilizers fighting the slick brick surface while his left ankle throbbed with what felt like a minor sprain. Manageable. The suit's medical systems began automated treatment, micro-injectors releasing anti-inflammatory compounds while diagnostic subroutines assessed structural damage to organic components.
Internal diagnostics scrolling past his vision: "CRANIAL SHIELD LEVEL 1 COMPROMISED. BUFFER EIGHTY-TWO PERCENT STABLE."
Eighty-two percent.
He rose from the crouch, tasting blood in his mouth and spitting it out because that's what you did when you bit your tongue hard enough to draw blood. The taste lingered, metallic and warm, reminding him that underneath all the servos and synthetic muscle and advanced materials, he was still just... flesh.
The world flickered between clear resolution and digital static, Colin blinked reflexively even though it served no functional purpose. His organic eyes couldn't affect mechanical sensors, but old habits died hard and some reflexes ran deeper than conscious control.
His camera sensor blurred to the right as something massive moved, the displacement too large for debris, too purposeful for random destruction. Sound reached him through multiple input channels, auditory sensors and vibration detectors and tactile feedback from his boots against the rooftop. Thunder, but wrong. Too focused. Too... intentional.
The ground shook. Not from Leviathan.
Not from Leviathan.
The armband alert chimed with simple, clinical efficiency, three soft tones that cut through combat noise like surgical instruments through skin.
White Knight: Active.
For zero-point-seven seconds, Colin experienced something he rarely allowed himself.
Relief.
The boy lived. Against all tactical probability, through structural collapse and Endbringer violence and what had looked like certain death, Greg Veder had somehow... survived.
How?
Then his sensors registered the power signature.
Colin pivoted with servo-assisted precision, his entire combat-frame rotating to face the disturbance while his targeting computer tried to acquire a lock on... whatever this was. Rain and wind created visual interference but thermal sensors pierced the storm to reveal something rising from the bay, out of the water and into the skyline, a massive signature that his instruments couldn't quite...
Calibration error? Sensor malfunction?
No, the light was wrong too. Not the warm orange-red of White Knight's usual fire effects that he'd cataloged during previous encounters. This burned blue-white, bright and searing, intense from over a mile away.
What did the boy do to himself?
A voice half-roaring, half-singing sounded out across the city, carried by wind and amplified by... something. Armsmaster's helmet filtered out reverb and background noise, audio processing systems isolating the voice from the storm...
"LIVING HERE IN BROCKTON—!"
Greg Vs is currently on Chapter 12 of arc 9, a full 20+ chapters and a whole arc ahead.
If you want to read my original novel (Shattered Ladder, Book 1: Empty) ahead of time before it lands on Royal Road, it's currently free to all members on my
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