Greg stood in front of the PRT HQ, slowly getting more and more drenched in the rain, cape flapping around his shoulders like a… a… beach ball someone forgot to deflate before stuffing it in the lost and found.
A deep frown crossed his face for a split second, blue eyes narrowing behind his mask. I’m… wow… I’m not good at wordplay.
Shaking his head, the blond boy looked back at the PRT building, eyes locked on six stories of miserable concrete and tinted windows as it loomed over him. It was the kind of ugly brutalism that screamed "government building", which was weird because the PRT wasn’t even government.
Fed or not, the thing squatted on its stupid grassy hill like it thought height would save it when the apocalypse came rolling in from the bay.
The parking lot stretched between him and the front doors, four black PRT vans clustered together near the side entrance, all facing different directions for some reason. Beyond that, the waterfront churned, the thing a pot of boiling soup—roiling, turning, and just as grey as the cloud-covered bloated sky above it.
This would be so soooo much cooler if I wasn't probably about to get curb-stomped into pasta sauce, he thought, shifting his weight and trying not to feel the growing pit in his stomach trying to drag him through the asphalt. He swallowed thickly, which only made it worse.
Yesterday he’d had his brain scooped out of his skull at ballistic speeds by some guy who he couldn't even remember. Literally, painted the ground with it, he'd doublechecked when he got back, when his braincells had healed enough that his IQ started nearing the triple digits. Pollock probably would’ve cried if he saw it.
Somewhere between before that and now he’d fought people, maybe even won, though honestly most of it was a big screaming blur his brain hadn’t filed properly. For better or worse, his survival instincts had torn off their nametag and walked off the job.
He was stronger now after all that, that much he knew for sure; all at once too, as if somebody flipped a stat slider they weren’t supposed to touch.
Sure, he’d scored a stupid amount of cash too. Ronin-level cash, not that he didn't already have that. But this time, it was enough cash that he could probably wave it in front of his dad's face and make him regret leaving.
Whatever. It honestly didn’t matter.
None of it fixed the fact that everything that had led him here still didn’t make sense.
The last clear thing he remembered was stumbling back into the warehouse, half-dead and dripping seawater out of every hole in his body, head still squishy from a sniper round that went through his skull and gray matter with barely any resistance.
Then—skip cutscene—his birthday.
Today.
Sixteen.
Because why the fuck not, right?
Why not stack the existential horror that was the fact he wouldn't be young forever on top of hormones and JFK-level head trauma? Why not add more to that with the very real fear that was a fuck-mothering Endbringer?
And of course it wasn’t just any Endbringer. Noooo. It had to be Leviathan. Mr. Natural Disaster in a Scaly Jacket. The City Killer here to eat his ass like it was Sunday dinner. Happy birthday, Greg. Here’s a tidal wave and the fear of death, served cold and very, very wet.
He huffed a breath through his nose. “Life’s a joke, and I’m the punchline,” he muttered, not even trying to hide it from the wind snapping at his cape.
Far to the left, Dragon’s mechanical suit crouched two vans tall, four legs braced wide, a single massive jet engine behind it still trickling clear smoke into the sky. Does that thing have shoulder cannons? Either way, the whole thing was humming low enough he could feel it rattling in his ribs, while Dragon herself was staring straight at the bay. Didn't move. Didn't blink.
Good. Because if she blinked first, they were all dead anyway.
Greg hugged his arms tighter around his body, half from the chill, half to hold himself together. He scanned the growing crowd of capes, all bright costumes and glowing effects, bodies lined up; all of them extras in some doomed anime final arc. Everyone looked too small against the sky.
Even the big ones.
And there—he caught it—Armsmaster, staring at him. Not a friendly stare. Not a hey-good-job-on-surviving stare. A measuring one. Like he was already subtracting Greg from the battle plan in his head.
Greg gave him a lazy salute. White Knight, right? Polite. Courteous. Roleplay the bit even if no one was playing back.
Armsmaster didn’t so much as twitch.
Awesome. Real welcoming committee vibes. He could practically hear the silent disapproval radiating off the guy like wifi.
Guess yesterday didn’t win me any brownie points.
It hadn’t. Even he knew that. Villains knew who he was before he even figured it out himself. The PRT definitely knew. Hell, at this point they probably knew how many times a day he flossed and what color of socks he preferred.
Blue, by the way. Thanks for asking.
He hadn’t bothered watching the whole footage yet, but he’d managed to catch glimpses on the news. Enough.
Enough to know he’d looked barely any different from a rabid superpowered raccoon the other day, flinging himself against cars and ragdolling them like someone left the physics engine on debug mode. Not exactly great PR.
He didn’t blame them, honestly. If he were in their shoes, he’d also be real skeptical about trusting the kid who looked half a breath away from snapping and dragging the whole building down with him.
Greg pulled the cape tighter, feeling both an idiot and a target all at once. Sorry for getting your boss killed, Mr. Efficiency.
A sound like muffled thunder cracked through the air, slicing right through whatever half-coherent brain-noise Greg had been generating. One second he was calculating how badly he'd get his ass kicked by the king of the ocean himself, the next—bam—there they were.
Just standing there.
Holy shit, that's Alexandria. Like, for real. The heroine herself stood there in three dimensions, stitching on the cape, zero Photoshop. Not that she needed it at all, because damn...
The Library of Alexandria herself looked exactly like all the posters and documentaries and leaked battle footage showed her off as. Tall and graceful, towering perfection, a woman built to knock a jet out of the sky with one hand and carry the population of a burning hospital out of the wreckage with the other. Her costume gleamed black and gray, the tower emblem punched dead center on her chest. The cape snapped around her legs in the rising wind, slow, heavy, somehow majestic-looking and it just wasn’t fair.
It was enough to make a guy feel self-conscious about his own cape, honestly.
She didn’t even have to try.
The woman just was.
And gravity—God, the gravity coming off her. Not literally, you know, but the kind you feel deep in your chest, like standing too close to the tracks when a freight train barrels through. Part of him wanted to salute. Part of him wanted to run.
Most of him was frozen.
Behind her came the rest of the LA Protectorate, scattering out in casual little clumps like they weren’t superheroes, just coworkers clocking in for another nightmare shift. Greg clocked maybe three faces he recognized and promptly blanked on all of their names, brain buffering uselessly.
Somehow even from across the lot, he could feel the tension dripping off every cape here, heavy and quiet. None of them looked around. None of them needed to.
One guy stayed behind after the group broke toward the building—blue-black uniform, goggles, some kind of high-speed hat situation. Strider, he knew that much. The teleporter. One of the best in the world, according to literally every ranking list Greg had ever wasted afternoons doomscrolling.
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Strider did a slow 360, making sure no one else got splattered mid-jump, then popped out with another little crack of air displacement, quieter than the first.
Getting more reinforcements. That's good, right? That means they're taking this seriously. He nodded to himself like that helped. That means we’re not already doomed. Right? He knew Endbringer fights were bad, but apart from the DMCA'd footage Uber & L33T had taken of a Behemoth fight a couple years back, no one outside of the capes who fought really knew how bad.
At least, the public definitely didn't.
Seconds later, another group dropped in—same thunderclap, same stomach-drop feeling—and these ones were kids. Bright costumes, shiny masks, a lot of exposed arms and legs like somebody forgot to explain ballistic trauma to them. Wards. Probably Chicago, if he had to guess. They looked nervous, which meant they were smarter than average.
Greg had this sharp, sudden flash—they’re my age—and almost laughed. God, he probably knew some of these idiots by screenname. Might've flamed one of them on a forum once for hot-taking that Alexandria could beat Eidolon one-on-one.
Maybe he owed someone an apology. Later. If they all lived.
And then—light.
Not regular flashbulb light. Not anything with warmth or human softness. It was more like the shadows peeled themselves off the concrete and ran screaming, leaving nothing but a clean, brutal afterimage stamped into his eyeballs.
Eidolon.
In the flesh, the man himself cloaked in deep green, and floating inches above the pavement like the universe itself hadn’t dared to fully reattach him to the ground.
Greg’s brain bluescreened. Full stop because fucking Eidolon was in front of him. Eidolon. Breathing the same shitty pre-storm air as him. Existing on the same patch of godforsaken earth.
Okay. Okay. Yep. Cool. That’s Eidolon. No biggie. Just the best goddamn cape on the planet standing fifty feet away. It’s fine. I’m fine. My organs are not melting inside my body. It was honestly insane. Greg had thought he'd gotten over all his hangups, but apparently, he was still the same fanboy on the inside. That was kinda comforting... a little bit, at least.
Eidolon drifted toward the building, easy and slow, moving like a man that had all the time in the world. Greg’s feet moved without his permission, legs jerking into motion as if he was some low-level escort NPC who’d just locked onto the player character.
Inside the lobby, folding chairs had been set up in crooked, hopeful little rows facing a trio of massive TVs, big enough you could probably see the pixels if you squinted. The windows stretched behind them, showing the storm rolling closer—this thick, black wall of moving water and anger, swallowing up the ocean inch by inch.
The place was already packed. Protectorate, Wards, random independent heroes, even full-blown villains shoved shoulder to shoulder with the good guys like the world's weirdest middle school assembly. Empire 88 goons in their jackboot cosplay. Flying Dragons with their flashy red armor. Sky Triad guys looking like they’d wandered in by accident but stayed for the apocalypse.
Nobody talked above a murmur. Not fear, exactly—more like nobody wanted to be the one to break the spell. Maybe if you said anything too loud, the world would notice you trying to survive and correct the mistake.
From the corner window, Dragon’s mech suit loomed, too big to fit inside, her shoulders hunching slightly as if even she could feel how close this was getting. Her exhaust systems hissed soft and constant, like a breathing giant posted just outside the glass.
More Guild capes arrived in another blink-and-miss teleport, and then—
Narwhal.
Everyone noticed Narwhal.
Even Alexandria turned slightly, just enough that it felt close enough to permission for the rest of them to react.
Narwhal didn’t look like a person pretending to be something bigger. She was bigger. Seven feet tall if she was an inch, her body covered in a million microscopic crystal scales that caught every ugly scrap of storm light and split it into faint rainbow shards. No costume, no armor, no weapon beyond her own mutation—just standing there, silent and glimmering, like she'd been sculpted out of the first sunrise that ever existed and decided clothes were beneath her.
A single horn spiraled up from her forehead, three feet of polished death angled down so she didn’t skewer the ceiling. She moved slow. Careful. No swagger. No flash.
Greg felt his stomach clench weirdly. Like he wanted to cheer. Or kneel. Or back away and apologize for existing. Or even take out his phone and take a bunch of pictures that might have been NSFW.
She wasn’t trying to impress anyone.
She was just... that cool.
His attention snapped sideways as movement flickered at the edge of his vision—Glory Girl, waving at him like they were buddies or more instead of two people who, objectively, had zero business sharing air.
For a second, Greg wondered why she was looking his way, or waving at him at all then...
Oh, holy fuck, I did save her from Lung, didn't I? That was something that had happened. He had literally princess carried her out of the line of fire and then did a Henshin transformation like a fucking nerd. It was still sick, though.
Confusion fading away, Greg's hand jerked up before he could stop it, performing what he could only generously call a wave, the motion so awkward he wanted to saw it off at the wrist before witnesses could identify him later.
Gallant stood beside her, arms folded, giving Greg a look. Not outright hostile, not friendly either—more like the expression you give a loose wire sparking next to a puddle. His mouth was a tight, unhappy line.
Whoa, angry boyfriend alert. Greg gave an extra little waggle of the fingers like hey, yeah, I’m harmless, look at my totally non-dangerous hands and immediately wanted to crawl inside himself and die.
Panacea stood just off to Glory Girl’s right, arms folded across her chest like a human barricade, eyes locked onto him with the kind of scowl that could sterilize instruments.
And yeah, sure, that stung a little. He wasn't even sure what he did to her to deserve that.
But she had saved his mom, had literally dragged her back from the brink when Greg hadn’t been fast enough, strong enough, smart enough to do anything except stand there like a prize idiot. So he smiled at her too, smaller, less idiotically, like he wasn’t actively dying inside.
She didn’t smile back. Hell, she didn't even blink.
Note to self: do something nice for her. Like, actually nice. Maybe she'd like me better if I gave her a hundred G's. While Greg took the time to wonder if that counted as a bribe, his gaze wandered, scanning the Wards.
It didn't take long at all before he caught Lady Bug looking his way, her mask slightly tilted like she wasn’t sure if she was allowed to. Greg lifted a hand—slower this time, more controlled—and she, after a heartbeat too long, mirrored the motion.
His heart did something dumb and fluttery.
Wait. Did I...?
And now, of course, the cockroach of a thought was back. Crawling up the back of his mind with grim little feelers. Taylor. Lady Bug. Same awkward body language, same not-quite-right posture, same big-ass curly hair. He’d dismissed the idea before, just swatted it away as conspiracy theory tier bullshit.
But the cockroach was persistent.
Should I...? he wondered, pulse hitching.
Instinct fired—[Analyze] queued itself up on reflex, a familiar blue flicker tingling behind his retinas. All he'd need is whisper the Skill and that would set it ready to fire through the back of his brain.
And Greg almost, almost hit it.
Almost.
No. Not here. Not now. Focus, idiot.
He clenched his hands until the flicker dimmed out, chest tight in a way that had nothing to do with Endbringers or battle briefings.
Just as Legend strode forward, easy and casual and terrifying in the way only people who’d seen the worst things and kept walking could be.
The room quieted instantly in a way that Greg wished he had the skill to pull off, just control a room with his presence. No PA system, no shouting, no fireworks. Just Legend existing and the world adjusting its volume accordingly. I wonder how much CHA I'd need to copy that. He shook his head a half-second later. No, focus, man. F-O-C-U-S.
The shining figure of the Triumvirate stood straight, shoulders squared, every inch the polished statue of a man who made it his job to protect the world with every conscious moment. His hair was stupidly perfect, his jaw could probably cut glass, and he looked like an action figure come to life; his costume a skintight bright blue broken up with jagged stripes of white that looked like someone tied to capture lightning in fabric and did their job right.
That’s how a hero’s supposed to look, Greg thought, stomach twisting with something dangerously close to reverence. Like hope with pecs.
"We owe thanks to Dragon and Armsmaster for their early alert," he began, voice smooth as a knife dipped in honey. "We've had time to gather, and that means we have just a few more minutes to prepare and brief for Leviathan's arrival, instead of jumping straight into the fray as we arrive."
The crowd visibly relaxed, a ripple of tension somehow bleeding out from all of them, Greg a little surprised to realize that he was one of them.
"With this advantage, dedicated teamwork and hard effort from everyone," Legend continued, the man speaking with absolutely calm and certainty like the ocean wasn't about to swallow them like the world’s hungriest hippo, "I hold out hope that this could be one of the good days."
Greg felt something tight in his chest start to unwind. See? It's fine. There's a plan. Plans are good. Plans mean someone smart is steering the bus and all you have to do is sit in the back and not puke on anyone.
He was even smiling a little.
Then Legend kept talking.
"But you should know your chances going in."
Greg's stomach dipped.
"Given the statistics from our previous encounters with this beast, a 'good day' still means that one in four of the people in this room will probably be dead before this day is done."
The words landed like a punch right under the ribs, stealing whatever breath he'd thought he still had.
For a heartbeat, Greg thought maybe he’d misheard. That Legend had glitched like a corrupted audio file. Maybe he’d said one in forty? One in four hundred?
No.
One in four.
Math. Numbers. Statistics. Cold, precise, merciless. Greg tried to ignore how good his brain was at math right now, because a large percentage like 1 in 4 was so simple that it was outright insulting.
He swept his gaze around the room, counting capes without meaning to, brain supplying numbers like a traitor.
One. Two. Three. Dead.
Four. Five. Six. Dead.
Oh. Right. His smile wilted on his face. This isn't the cool part. This is the part where people die.
Greg's excitement evaporated so fast it was like someone jammed a hole through his soul and left the vacuum running. He turned toward the windows, not because he thought it would help, but because staring at the storm felt safer than looking anyone in the eye.
The waves outside churned viciously, slamming against the far rocks hard enough that mist blurred the edges of the horizon. Water boiled up over the seawall, spattering the parking lot with angry foam.
And they hadn't even seen him yet.
Gregory Lucas Veder
Student
Level 40
Title: Dragonbane Knight
XP: 0/100000
Age: 16
HP: 4510 (+400)
MP: 1772
Will: 1884 (+30)
STR: 252 (+10)
SPD: 154
VIT: 279 (+20)
INT: 95
WIS: 22 (-70%)
CHA: 34 (+9) (-90%)
Unspent Stat Points: 60
Unspent Perk Points: 15
Cash: $5,726,825
SPECIAL BONUSES (from Title):
+ 10% Physical Resistance
+ 10% Resistance to Fire
+ 100% Damage against [Dragon]s
