"LIVING HERE IN BROCKTON!"

  The words ripped out of him, loud and raw, through giant lungs of metal that carried his voice across the ruined Brockton Bay coast. He rushed forward, the air screaming as he charged out of the water, the ground shuddering beneath every footfall. The air shook and shuddered and so did he. Inside the massive sphere of blue mana floating in the chest cavity of sixty tons of weaponized garbage, Greg hung there, teeth gritted as he tried not to scream. There was nothing else to do, no other option but to focus on what was right in front of him instead of the way tissue paper skin stretched over the live electrical wires he called nerves.

  This feels... fine. Normal. He ignored the way the nail on his thumb was already threatening to fall off, skin fibers loosening in real time. V-very… normal.

  Arms like siege pillars moved with unconscious thought, legs larger than industrial pistons hammered the ground, the whole thing fused together from shipwrecks and cars and rebar and streetlight scaffolds that were probably someone's tax dollars at work before they became his personal Megas. Pieces still floated in orbit around the main structure, constantly coming together, reweaving, remaking, as chunks broke off because he still wasn’t done building.

  The mech didn't walk.

  No, it fell forward, caught itself, fell forward again, motion flowing like water, with all the weight and force and so much less grace. Greg's left foot, the mech's left foot, same thing now, came down. The impact rippled through six blocks of flooded concrete, water exploding upward in near-perfect rings, a twenty-foot geyser that caught the light and looked almost pretty for half a second.

  Then his right foot hit and the pretty moment died along with several parked cars.

  Gahd dammit. Pain spiked through his nervous system, infinite mana eating him alive one cell at a time. Steel plates spun in orbital patterns around the main body, ready to patch damage, car doors flapping, each one its own tiny wing, as they welded themselves into gaps with showers of sparks that probably would make OSHA very, very mad at him.

  "Holy shit," Glory Girl's voice crackled over comms, hovering at what she probably thought was a safe distance, "he’s a giant trash-Gundam."

  Somebody gets it. The second battle cry tore out of him with a laugh as he charged forward, voice booming even louder. "FIGHTING VILLAINS NEAR AND FAR!" Four minutes and twelve seconds.

  The countdown ticked in his head, each second marked by another pulse of fire through his veins. It had taken him three minutes just to build the thing, almost a full one-hundred-eighty seconds alone spent forming the giant mech from all the wrecks around him.

  All that left him four minutes on the timer.

  Which meant only four minutes to save everyone. Four minutes before his health hit the black and his body decided to go with it. Four minutes to make this hurt.

  It was probably going to be the world’s most expensive tantrum, but Greg was feeling pretty fine with that for some reason. "Y-you gotta find…" The song helped, though. As crazy as it was, and he knew exactly how crazy; god it helped so much.

  More than anything else, it gave his brain something to latch onto, something manic, bright and laser-focused right on the thirty feet of evil death wrecking everything he knew and loved.

  Every step sent shockwaves across the ruined terrain, his massive feet punching through asphalt that felt no stronger than wet cardboard. The stumble happened because Greg forgot for half a second that he weighed sixty tons now, human reflexes trying to navigate inhuman mass. His foot went through the storefront, and for a moment he was falling, sixty feet of armor crashing toward the street in what was probably going to be the world's most expensive face-plant.

  Except falling was just another kind of movement and Greg still knew how to move.

  He rolled.

  There was no thinking about it.

  He didn’t have the brainpower or extra focus to spend on calculating angles or impact vectors or any of that shit. No, his world was just rolling and for a split second, he was tumbling off his bike in elementary school, the sky spinning above him as he stared right up into bright blue.

  Except this time, it was dull gray and the entire world shook as he hit the ground. Old cement exploded into dust clouds that probably contained enough asbestos to kill a small town. The mech's shoulder tore a trench through asphalt before his other hand slapped down and arrested the motion, servo-joints screaming under the strain.

  Then he was up again, smooth as silk, like the last five seconds were choreographed instead of barely controlled disaster.

  The armor flowed with him, every single foot of steel, iron, and copper responding to him.

  Geo-Armor kept pulling in new material to replace what got scraped off in the fall; manhole covers, fire hydrants, someone's motorcycle that was parked in the wrong place at the wrong time, anything with enough iron content to matter. All of it to power-up sixty-something feet of a jury-rigged death machine that responded to his thoughts the way his actual limbs used to, back when those still existed and weren't floating in the world's brightest lava lamp.

  He didn't pilot it.

  No, every breath he took, the armor breathed with him. Every spike of pain in his dissolving nervous system fed back through haptic sensors that shouldn't exist but did anyway. When he clenched his fist, sixty tons of metal clenched with him, and when he took another step forward, the impact rippled up through his legs as if he was still five-eleven instead of a walking natural disaster.

  This is either… the coolest… thing I've ever done or the… stupidest. His mouth opened wide in a laugh, blood spilling out and boiling away to nothing in seconds. Probably both.

  “YOU GOTTA FIND FIRST GEAR!” Greg's voice boomed across the battlefield, amplified until they could probably be heard in Boston proper. "IN YOUR GIANT ROBOT CAR!"

  His skin was peeling off layer by layer. Four minutes and eight seconds. But he didn’t care.

  Four minutes and six seconds

  Close enough to forever.

  Close enough to make this count.

  Water sloshed around his ankles, the mech's ankles, and somewhere close, an Endbringer was about to learn what happened when you fucked with a sixteen-year-old's emotional support sword.

  Let's do this.

  Blood filled his mouth, even with all the healing he'd managed to squeeze out before building his very own sixty-foot death machine. Pain was distant now though, pushed down under layers of manic energy and the kind of absolute focus that came from knowing you had exactly four minutes and two seconds to make this hurt count for something.

  Giant robot, check. Giant monster, check. Theme song at maximum volume, double check. This is it. The moment every Saturday morning cartoon prepared me for. If he was gonna die, at least he got to do it with style points.

  More metal swirled toward the mech like iron filings drawn to the world's angriest magnet. Street signs, manhole covers, pieces of Dragon's damaged suits that had been scattered across three city blocks. The bus hit his shoulder and just... integrated, yellow metal flowing in to reinforce joint connections, adding mass to his frame. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Greg wondered if there were kids inside.

  There weren't. He could feel that somehow. Good.

  The armor kept growing because the armor was hungry and Greg was feeding it everything he could see. Stop signs became finger joints. Car chassis became shoulder plates. A hot dog cart got absorbed into his left knee and somehow that seemed perfectly reasonable when you were running on infinite mana and very poor life choices.

  The fleshy parts of him were still mostly intact, his healing working as fast as it could... but still not fast enough. Still, the mech had two arms, two legs, and enough raw fury to punch through a city block. Fair trade.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Capes scattered as he charged forward, proving that even people willing to fight an Endbringer had a healthy sense of self-preservation. Purity banked hard left, voice cutting through the chaos: "What the hell is that thing?"

  Kaiser tried to redirect his metal walls, panic bleeding through his usual nazi composure. "He's pulling from my constructs!" Hookwolf, in full metal form, nearly got caught in Greg's gravitational pull and was forced to dig into the ground for traction to avoid being sucked into the world's most violent arts and crafts project.

  Legend flew overhead as Alexandria wrestled with Leviathan and Eidolon threw purple blasts of some kind of dark energy, the New York hero’s crackling over comms with the kind of authority that made people listen: "All units, unless you are high-rated Brutes or Movers, give White Knight room to operate."

  The Endbringer turned from Kaiser's maze, those alien green eyes locking onto the approaching mech with what might've been curiosity if curiosity could level city blocks. For a moment that stretched like taffy, boy and monster stared at each other across a flooded intersection that used to have a coffee place and probably a cell phone store.

  Water began swirling around Leviathan, all three of its remaining eyes staring with green focus as its tail lashed behind it.

  "Yeah, it’s me. I’m back and bigger than ever," Greg said, voice coming out loud and clear. Three minutes fifty.

  His consciousness flickered again, pain and blood loss making his thoughts stutter, the world a skipping DVD. For a split second he saw Angie's face, terrified and alone. Then he saw Gram shattering against Leviathan's fist, bits and pieces of his first and favorite sword scattered across the bay like deadly confetti.

  His teeth grit tight. "Remember how you BROKE MY FUCKING SWORD!"

  The words tore out of him with enough force to crack his vocal cords all over again, but it didn't matter because the mech had a voice and the mech was angry.

  Greg didn't think about it. He didn't plan angles or calculate force vectors or any of that smart-person shit. He just moved, the way he'd always moved, except now his body was sixty feet tall and built from the dreams of every eight-year-old who'd ever wanted to pilot a giant robot.

  The tackle happened at the speed of thought.

  One moment he was standing in ankle-deep floodwater, the next he was airborne, shoulder-first, flying toward Leviathan. The mech moved the way he moved, smooth and natural and inevitable as gravity.

  Contact.

  Three minutes forty-five seconds.

  The impact. God.

  The angriest thunderclap, a giant belly flop, and every action movie explosion compressed into one as it cratered the air, water shuddering from the force of it. One perfect second of power sent manic energy spiking through his dissolving nervous system, pushing back the pain.

  A split second after, shockwaves hit everything at once.

  Windows blew out in expanding rings, as car alarms that hadn’t yet gone off chose now to sound their horns. The convenience store beside them disintegrated, concrete and steel and someone's morning coffee all becoming one big cloud of flying death.

  Greg felt it through his frame, through bones made of seaworthy steel and bad decisions. The impact traveled up his arm, an electric shock through his nerves, but instead of pain it just felt right.

  This was what his fists were always meant to do. This was what his body was built for. This is what happens when you make little girls cry.

  Leviathan struck back, darting forward with a shouldercheck that turned into a backhand, the force behind it and the water echo that followed its own thundercrack of force. The mech staggered, nearly toppled, caught itself against a water tower that crumpled under his hand like an aluminum can. Greg didn't mean to grab it that hard, but everything he touched turned fragile when you stood sixty feet tall.

  Oh my god, physics is mean.

  Inside the mana sphere, what was left of his body tried to laugh and mostly succeeded, throat screaming raw as blood dissolved to nothing as it left his lips. Mana burned through him, every single vein and artery slow roasting him from the inside out as he burned through every mote of his original mana supply every second.

  Part of him wondered if this would have even been possible if he didn’t already have this much mana already; if he’d had only a thousand instead of almost three, would he be only twenty-feet tall or would it be even smaller?

  Was there a ratio to it? He wasn’t sure, math hurting his brain and his focus both. "IN YOUR GIANT ROBOT CAR!"

  But the song helped. The song always helps.

  It kept him grounded, kept him focused on what he needed to be focused on. A massive hand gripped the back of a giant gray head, a half dozen tons worth of knee slamming right into the Endbringer’s face and rocking him back.

  Leviathan countered with a spiral of high-pressure water, a freight train made of liquid hate hitting him hard and fast. Greg barely saw it coming, a blink and suddenly he was flying backward, weightless for a moment that felt like forever before his back met the parking garage and physics was once again a complete bastard about everything.

  First floor: concrete supports snapping under every single one of his sixty tons.

  Second floor: His frame punched right through reinforced beams probably rated for earthquakes.

  Third floor: collapsing down on top of him like the world's worst blanket made of rebar and regret.

  Cars rained down, a Civic, a pickup truck, someone's minivan with soccer ball stickers still on the windows. They hit his armor and stuck, Geo-Armor automatically integrating them into his frame, conscripting every single one into the robot war for a good cause.

  More mass. More material. More Greg.

  He roared up from the wreckage, trailing concrete dust and rebar as the damage was already healing, more and more material integrating. Every broken piece became part of him, every dent got filled with new material pulled from the wreckage around him.

  "Good news... the armor fixes itself," Greg said, voice carrying across the flooded street. "Bad news... I think I just destroyed someone's F-150."

  The truck in question was currently serving as his left elbow, solid and reassuring like armor should be. He could feel it there, engine block and chassis and everything else, all of the material far more than he needed.

  What I need… The reshaping happened without conscious thought because Greg needed more hands to grab Leviathan, so the armor gave him more hands. Simple. Natural as breathing, almost.

  A car chassis spun through the air, following a dozen others, all of them slamming into the mech's shoulders with thunderous impacts. Metal flowed no different than mercury as car and truck frames stretched and bent and became arm bones, camper vans became shoulder joints.

  The whole process took maybe two seconds but it felt like coming home. "If two arms are good... four arms are better. That's just math."

  Greg's hands, the new two, found their targets. Giant fists clamped down, hydraulic force locking tight on Leviathan's tail and the lizard’s only arm, feeling muscle tense and writhe under his grip.

  Water built around the contact points, trying to pry his grip loose with high-pressure jets that could cut through steel. It didn’t matter. Greg's grip was stronger than steel now, stronger than anything that wasn't pure concentrated fuck-you. "Come here, you overgrown gecko... We're gonna have words."

  His other two arms swung, pounding and pounding into Leviathan’s chest, sledgehammers weighing five tons each going to town at speeds fast enough to blur; each hit enough to snap steel beams three times over. Greg clamped down harder, feeling Leviathan's struggles through his fingertips like he was wrestling with the ocean itself.

  This is happening. This is actually happening.

  An especially hard blow landed, wind-up and impact meeting with the sound of thunder having an argument with a building. Greg's free hands blurred as they hammered into Leviathan's torso, each impact carrying the weight of his entire frame behind it.

  It was pure.

  It was raw.

  It was violence.

  "YOU! DIG! GI-ANT! RO-BOTS!"

  The words tore out of him like battle cry, like prayer, like the last thing he was ever gonna say and he wanted to make it count. The song was everything now, the only thing keeping him focused through the white-hot agony of infinite mana eating him alive from the inside out.

  "I! DIG! GI-ANT! RO-BOTS!"

  Every syllable met with another blow as Greg scream-sang at the top of his lungs, each word hitting with raw force as his fists moved in time with the song, each punch landing with the rhythm of the world's most violent percussion section.

  "WE! DIG! GI-ANT! RO-BOTS!"

  Inside the mana sphere, what was left of Greg grinned with bloody teeth at the best-worst thing that'd ever happened to him, consciousness flickering between human awareness and something that was gonna put this giant water lizard down.

  Waves and lances of water buffeted the giant suit but whatever damage they managed to inflict found itself repaired almost immediately, Geo-Armor pulling in debris from blocks around to patch and reinforce and grow.

  "CHICKS! DIG! GI-ANT! RO-BOTS!"

  Each punch shook the ground for blocks in every direction, seismic shockwaves that probably triggered car alarms from here to Boston proper. Leviathan thrashed, water exploding outward with each and every impact, the harbor even more chaotic and wrecked than before. Greg's mech staggered with each hit back, feet tearing trenches in asphalt as it held firm against an Endbringer having the closest it ever did to a terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad day.

  "Stay still! I'm trying to beat some sense into y-!"

  The tail strike came out of nowhere, fast as lightning and twice as mean, and slammed into his knee joint.

  For a split second he was falling, crashing through a warehouse wall no tougher than paper.

  When he came up again, all four fists were already moving, already swinging, already aimed at the exact spot he knew where Leviathan would be.

  Four-point impact. The sound of the world ending.

  Athirty-foot missile in gray-scale flew back, the monster tumbling and tearing right through storefronts, sidestreets, and someone's parked car that was definitely not gonna be covered by insurance. Greg didn't let it get away, couldn't let it get away, because this was his moment and he'd paid for it.

  With blood and pain and a sword that meant more to him than it should have.

  He leaped.

  "OH NO, YOU DON'T!"