Greg Veder was trying to pay attention.

  He really was.

  Legend's voice had the kind of baked-in authority that could probably sell insurance to a house on fire—the kind of voice that made you want to stand up straighter even if you were already standing at full attention, which Greg absolutely was not. His spine had decided that today was the perfect day to audition for the role of "question mark with anxiety issues," and no amount of shoulder-rolling was fixing it.

  He tried to track every word coming out of Legend's perfect hero-mouth, but his brain kept yoyo-ing between tactical overclock and panic brain and the low, weird static hum of oh, hey, you might die today that had set up shop somewhere behind his eyeballs. Like a particularly unwelcome tenant that had not only moved in without asking but brought along its entire extended family of horrible implications.

  Focus. Focus. FOCUS, idiot.

  Alexandria. Armsmaster. Eidolon. Glory Girl. Panacea. Lady Bug. He did a fast, panicked mental inventory of the room, like that would help. Like knowing which capes were here would somehow make any of this make sense. It was like walking into an all-star game where half the players might be carried out in body bags by the fourth quarter.

  Too many heavyweights. Too many big names. And—oh boy—a lot of very, very small names. Like his. White Knight, the bargain-bin hero who'd managed to level up his way into an Endbringer fight through a series of increasingly poor life choices and one spectacularly ruined birthday.

  The sweat inside his suit wasn't from heat. It was pressure, maybe, something like the collective weight of every cape in the room thinking variations of oh shit oh shit oh shit in unison. Greg imagined it looked like those cartoon thought bubbles all crowding the ceiling, fighting for space. He rolled his shoulders a little, tried to shake it off, failed spectacularly.

  Legend's words broke through finally, clean and brutal as a surgical scalpel to the cerebellum.

  "One in four."

  Greg didn't even blink as Legend repeated that statistic again. He was used to it now, which was almost worse. Almost.

  Used to the fact that a large chunk of them wouldn’t live past this afternoon. Some part of him wanted to panic, but he knew actual panic wasn’t really possible anymore so there was no point in even letting himself get worked up enough for his brain to shut it down. So he just stood there, numb, while his mind performed unhelpful calculations for the second time in as many minutes.

  That's twenty-five out of every hundred, he thought absently, and I can name twenty capes in this room already. Quick mental math—

  He cut himself off. No. Bad idea. No helpful numbers down that rabbit hole. Don't calculate your own funeral odds, dumbass.

  The mission was simple now: listen. Process. Act. Do not think about the statistical certainty that he or the girl sitting two rows ahead of him or the kid fiddling with his gauntlet might not get up again. Don't think about how his mom or Sparky or Theo would handle the news. Don't think about the unfinished models on his desk or the save file on his computer that would forever show 98% completion. Don't think about—

  Legend was still talking, dropping tactical data like grenades into the stunned silence of the room.

  Leviathan wasn't Behemoth. He wasn't the Simurgh.

  He was fast and he was smart. That was worse, somehow.

  It was easier to think of Endbringers as forces of nature, giant natural disasters with teeth and claws and no thoughts behind their eyes. It was harder to think about them making choices. Watching. Calculating. Planning which capes to murder first.

  He's not a monster, Greg thought numbly, he's a predator. Like if a tsunami decided to go to grad school and get a PhD in "Advanced Cape Dismemberment."

  The slideshow changed. Greg's stomach twisted like someone had grabbed all his internal organs and tried to make balloon animals out of them.

  A map. Cross-section of Brockton Bay. Lines over buildings. Under buildings. There it was, a great, yawning blue pit under the city—the aquifer. Freshwater, deep under the sand, held up by rock and just enough prayers to keep the city standing. And Leviathan? Leviathan was going to stir it up like a soup pot, only instead of delicious chicken noodle, it was going to be disaster bisque with a side of demolished infrastructure.

  Greg's chest felt weirdly tight as he realized a possibility. He's going to drown us from underneath. Like that scene in Aliens where they're checking the ceiling and there's nothing there but then, surprise motherfucker, xenomorphs actually come up through the floor. Only this time it's water. A lot of water. Like, city-destroying amounts of water. His chest eased out and someone to his right shot him a dirty look, Greg blinking as he realized that tightness in his chest was repressed laughter. A birthday to remember. If I live long enough to remember it.

  Tactical orders rattled off from mouths that he couldn’t track, Protectorate capes already moving with Wards sorting into assigned formations. Group C, he vaguely heard someone tell him, again his brain couldn’t focus on who, but he focused on that, the words. That was important. Group C.

  Villains huddled closer to the doors, like maybe they'd have better odds by cheating gravity when the sky fell in and they got to relive the Titanic. Greg clocked the people who stood up and the ones who didn't. Kaiser stayed seated, all sharp edges and calculated indifference. Panacea let out a strained sigh, looking like she was mentally preparing to stitch heroes back together for the next twelve hours. This was not going to be a good fight, he knew that much. No matter how much he liked getting into shit, this was going to be a literal hellstorm.

  Something jagged flickered through his brain—recognition, resentment, admiration, who the hell knew—and vanished like morning mist under a hairdryer as he tried to deal with the fact that all he had left was something that felt like anticipation mixed with dread. I need so much therapy, don’t I? The metal-skinned kid—probably Alloy? Or Ironclad? Or, like, Bronzeboy? Greg's encyclopedic knowledge of capes always seemed to short-circuit when he actually needed it—handed him an armband and Greg slid it on automatically, feeling the cold weight of it against his skin.

  The screen flickered awake, showing a position grid for a split second before it flickered away and the thing asked for a name instead.

  He hesitated for a second too long as "Greg" hovered on the edge of his fingers. Then he remembered—secret identities were still a thing, even during apocalyptic water lizard attacks.

  Especially during apocalyptic water lizard attacks.

  He paused a moment later, then sowly typed in: W-H-I-T-E K-N-I-G-H-T. The white letters blinked green and with the gentlest of dings, they flickered away to show another screen. Approved.

  And then—

  Then the shouting started.

  One large cape yelled and then so many more costumed started moving like a human flood of their own and, right in front of his blue eyes, he got to witness an army of forcefields blooming into life like deadly flowers in a time-lapse nature documentary.

  Greg jerked his head toward the windows just in time to see it—just in time to feel it.

  The windows imploded. Not broke, not shattered—imploded, like they were being pulled inward by some irresistible cosmic force that had decided glass was now optional. Glass, steel, brick—all shredded into airborne shrapnel by a wall of water so thick and fast it looked like a living thing. Like the ocean had developed sentience and decided its first act would be murder.

  Greg didn't scream. He just moved.

  He flared his reinforcement, his body kicking into overdrive as he did his best to avoid getting diced by the water-based version of a vegetable slicer. Greg ducked low, twisted sideways through the sudden chaos, felt shards of broken world whip past him with the kind of velocity usually reserved for fighter jets and really angry wasps. Something heavy slammed into the ground inches from his foot—a table maybe? A person? He didn't look back to check. Looking back was what got you killed in horror movies, and this was quickly becoming the most expensive horror movie ever made, with the worst possible audience participation.

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  The screens fell. Static burst across them in flickering frames—coastline smashed to splinters, boardwalk snapping like a toothpick in an ogre's hands, a blur of gray and green muscle moving through the mist.

  He saw it.

  Leviathan.

  For half a second. No more.

  Too fast. Too big. Proportions wrong in every direction, like a crocodile and a nightmare had a baby and gave it jet skates. Like someone had taken every scary water monster from mythology, put them in a blender, hit purée, and then asked H.R. Giger to make it worse.

  He didn't process it.

  He didn't have time.

  Because he flared his body red and launched himself away the instant a wave of water shot toward where he was.

  Despite breaking the sound barrier, that still wasn’t fast enough.

  Flash. Crack. Pressure like a shotgun shell to the spine.

  Greg's world turned inside out, flipped sideways, and landed him hard in a foot of saltwater running down a ruined street. It was like being shot out of a cannon, only the cannon was a lance of water moving faster than water should ever be moving and the landing pad was a disaster zone.

  His hands hit pavement. His knee scraped jagged concrete. Pain registered like a voicemail he wasn't ready to check yet. New message from your nervous system! Your body is currently experiencing extreme distress! Press 1 to scream, press 2 to vomit, press 3 to curl into fetal position and cry!

  He coughed, spat brine, blinked the world back into place like an old TV trying to find the signal.

  The sky was black. Not dark, not cloudy—black, like someone had taken a giant paintbrush and just gone to town on the firmament. The rain wasn't falling—it was hammering. Like a waterfall tipped sideways and thrown at them by an angry god who was sick of subtlety and decided to skip straight to the "biblical punishment" portion of the program.

  He tried to stand. Failed. Tried again, mentally cursing his body for betraying him at the least convenient moment possible. Get up, you useless meat puppet. Now is not the time for pratfalls.

  Heroes stumbled upright around him. Flyers took off, awkward and rushed, like startled birds trying to escape a forest fire. He caught a glimpse of New Wave—Glory Girl punching skyward like a rocket with better hair—Skidmark (Skidmark? Seriously? Who invited him to the end of the world?) flailing to stay on his feet in the current like a drunk man trying to ice skate uphill.

  The Boardwalk was gone.

  Just—gone.

  Like someone had taken an eraser to reality and just scrubbed it out of existence. Broken wood and twisted steel jutted out of the flooding street like snapped ribs. It looked like a war zone. Or a failed LEGO set abandoned by a particularly destructive toddler. Maybe both.

  And then—

  Then he saw him.

  Thirty feet tall. Muscled like a shark that took steroids and then took more steroids to deal with the side effects of the first batch of steroids. No mouth. No real face. Just eyes—slits of radioactive green carved into gray skin, glowing like toxic waste in a Saturday morning cartoon, only infinitely less funny.

  He moved with a weird, rolling, pendulum gait, arms swinging low, tail carving the air behind him like some kind of obscene metronome. Water followed in his wake, a perpetual echo of destruction trailing every movement.

  The afterimage was real. Greg could see it, feel it—a smear of liquid violence trailing every movement, compacted into something denser than concrete, moving with the same delay as a bad special effect in a low-budget movie, except this special effect could and would absolutely kill you.

  Leviathan was moving toward them, casual and predatory, like a cat stalking a mouse it wasn't even that hungry for yet. Like playtime was just starting, and he had all day to enjoy himself.

  Move.

  Greg realized he hadn't moved in almost ten full seconds. He'd been standing there, as if this was a car crash and he was an idiot driver, while the literal end of his fucking world seemed to stroll it’s way toward him.

  Legend's voice cracked through the chaos, somehow audible over the roar of rain and destruction and fear.

  "GET READY!"

  Greg barely heard it.

  Because Leviathan dropped to all fours and charged.

  Not across the ground. Across the water.

  One second he was twenty meters out.

  The next—

  The next he was in them.

  Greg saw the first line of capes shatter like paper dolls in a hurricane. Bodies flew through the air, trailing red mist that was instantly washed away by the deluge. Blood. Water. Screams. A cacophony of destruction that overloaded his senses like someone had cranked every dial to eleven and then broke off the knobs.

  The armband buzzed. Emergency alerts scrolling fast enough to blur, each one a life changed or ended in the span of seconds.

  Lacuna down, CD-5. Cytox deceased, CD-5. Quant down, CD-5. Frenetik down, CD-5.

  Names kept coming. Names Greg didn't know. Names he didn't want to know but couldn't stop reading, like the world's most horrifying Twitter feed.

  Greg moved. He wasn't thinking anymore. Thought got you killed when reflexes needed to take over. He boosted forward, water splashing up to his knees, slipped under a flying body (someone in a bright yellow suit he didn't recognize—not a good day to be a highlighter), skidded toward a half-broken streetlight and threw himself behind it just as another wave smashed across the intersection like the world's most violent street cleaning.

  Someone was screaming.

  Someone was laughing.

  It might have been him.

  He didn't know anymore. Reality had taken a sharp left turn into a nightmare, and his brain had decided that all emotional responses were equally valid when facing the watery apocalypse.

  His heart was beating so fast it hurt, like a hummingbird trying to escape his ribcage via brute force. He couldn't tell if the roar in his ears was the ocean or Leviathan or himself. It all blended into one continuous wall of sound, the soundtrack to the end of everything he knew.

  Get up. Get up, idiot. Heroes don't hide behind lampposts. Well, smart heroes might, but you're not supposed to be smart, you're supposed to be brave. Or stupid. Often the same thing when you're wearing spandex.

  Greg forced himself upright, hands shaking so badly it looked like he was trying to communicate in some obscure sign language that translated roughly to "I am absolutely losing my shit right now." He wasn’t sure if it was nerves or just primal human instinct, but it certainly wasn’t bad enough to be paralyzing fear, he fucking knew that much.

  Far off past the walls of water and the roiling wreckage, Greg saw the floating form of Eidolon descend from the sky, green cloak plastered against his body by the rain, as if he was the world's most waterlogged wizard. Nearby, Alexandria punched through a wave with the kind of casual disregard for physics that made Greg both jealous and a little bit excited.

  Narwhal excited.

  Oh, you idiot, he almost slapped himself. You’re gonna die and you’re making horny jokes. The world was ending, and they were supposed to stop it. The world was ending, and Greg was just a kid in a home-made suit with powers he barely understood, standing ankle-deep in rising water, trying to remember how to breathe properly.

  Some birthday.

  His armband buzzed again, and he looked down to see a message scrolling across its screen:

  GROUP C, CONVERGE ON EIDOLON'S POSITION. SUPPORT AND CONTAINMENT.

  Group C. That was him. That was me. He was Group C. He remembered that much of the briefing, not too busy having an existential crisis to at least track that much while Legend or whoever else was assigning tactical groups.

  Great. Perfect. Fantastic. Just go stand next to the second most powerful cape on the planet while he fights the murder-lizard. What could possibly go wrong?

  His legs started moving before his brain fully committed to the idea. Splashing through water that was now knee-deep, pushing against the current, navigating around debris and—oh god, was that an arm? He didn't look. Looking meant knowing, and knowing meant feeling, and feeling was not something he could afford right now.

  The rain kept hammering down, so hard it felt like thousands of tiny fists punching him continuously. His vision was blurry, limited to maybe ten feet ahead in the downpour, the sky not dark enough to make his Darkvision worth shit.

  Another wave hit—smaller this time, but still enough to knock him sideways. He stumbled, righted himself, kept moving.

  In the middle distance, flashes of light filled the sky in all sorts of insane colors and Greg didn’t have to do any real brainwork to realize that it was Legend doing his thing. The shining rainbow man of the Triumvirate firing those lasers of his that could cut through steel like butter. Eidolon was not too far away from him, the green-cloaked uber-cape surrounded by what looked like miniature stars, tiny suns orbiting him like he was the center of some improvised solar system, each one launching towards Leviathan and exploding like a giant grenade each time. Narwhal darted back-and-forth crystal forcefields slicing through the air, trying to corral Leviathan into a kill zone.

  It wasn't working. Nothing was working. Killzone for Leviathan, come the fuck on. The Endbringer was too fast, too strong, too... inevitable.

  Group C. Support and containment. What the hell does that even mean? What am I supposed to do? Stand there and look intimidating? Flash gang signs at the giant murder-crocodile?

  But he kept moving toward Eidolon's position anyway, because what else was he going to do? Run? Hide? Wait for the city to sink beneath the waves with him still in it?

  The armband buzzed again. Three more names. Three more lives.

  Greg took a deep breath, tasted salt and fear and something metallic that might have been blood and he really wasn’t sure whose it could be.

  He had no idea what he was doing. No plan. No special insight. Just a confused, terrified teenager with powers he'd stumbled into, trying not to die on his birthday.

  But maybe that was enough. Maybe just being here, just standing, just refusing to give up—maybe that counted for something.

  Either way, he was moving forward. Toward the danger. Toward Eidolon. Toward Leviathan.

  Toward whatever came next.

  Happy birthday to me.