Roger wondered, sometimes, why it had been him.
Looking up at the ceiling of his bedroom, forearm thrown across his face, feeling the gentle rocking motion of the Protectorate's floating base in the Bay, and failing utterly at getting in an afternoon nap before an evening patrol… well, the doubts rose up as they had so many times before.
There wasn't anything special about him before. He hadn't been particularly skilled at much of anything — he'd been muddling through college, three years and five majors into it when lightning struck. Figuratively.
And literally.
At first, after the shock of the crisis had died down, it had been a relief to know what to do with his life. He'd gone into the PRT, declared himself, and spent a long month being written off as a dead end, of interest primarily as the weakest parahuman ever found. He'd tried to explain, how it wasn't about making a taser, how there were these threads that weren't threads, and some he could thicken and others tweak, or attach extra threads, or groom them, weave them, kind of, in directions and dimensions that he didn't have words for, and he didn't know where they came from, or why…
It never came out right. How could they ask him to explain something that he didn't understand either? He knew what he did, and over time they could figure out what kind of results that work produced, but how he was doing it… no. It just didn't make sense. To anyone.
And there it rested. They classed him as a striker one, and set him to working on his imitation taser. When he did finally manage an effective voltage, he'd been given a costume, and sent back to his home town — at his request — instead of one of the bigger teams.
There followed a year where he was considered a slow learner who'd finally figured out how to use his unspectacular power. That hadn't been a bad year, really — he was used to being thought mediocre at school or on his soccer team, and he hadn't seen any reason the Protectorate would be different. And he was mediocre. There were those smarter, stronger, more determined… some who were all of the above, even. He respected them, did his best to learn from them, to support them… but everywhere, he wasn't anything more than second-rate. Not in hand-to-hand, not in tactics, not on comms.
Public relations, he was… ok at. He didn't have the command presence or natural charisma of some, nor the authority that came from sheer power. But he could be patient with people, and sometimes that was enough. It was certainly enough for the brass to shift his schedule, and put him on all the community outreach duties, and fewer of the patrols. Comparative advantage was the phrase used. He wasn't better at it, just least bad.
Roger didn't mind. That freed up the stronger capes to be on the streets. And if citizens were more comfortable, some ways, with a hero like him, someone without phenomenal cosmic powers, with barely enough juice to wear a costume and not get called out on it… well — he could do that. Laugh with them, be one of them.
It wasn't giving them the same kind of assurance, that say, a grieving parent got when Armsmaster said we'll find him like he was just stating an obvious and immutable fact that no one else had realized yet. It didn't inspire the same kind of fierce pride that he'd seen when Miss Militia swore new citizens in — he'd seen people break down weeping after her speech about why she wore the flag as part of her costume, what it meant to her. He'd broken down weeping, hearing it, and not just the first time he'd heard it. But it wasn't nothing, being the guy that people felt comfortable talking with, laughing with, crying with.
And it was comfortable for him to be that guy. That's who he'd been his whole life. Always easy with people, always had a lot of friends, though few close. Being ready with a smile, ready to listen, ready to help… having a lot of friends is just what happened, if you lived life that way.
One of the routine follow-up tests on whether he could manage a stronger shock after some field experience got really weird when he melted the test equipment. And that let to a more detailed set of tests, and the discovery that his lance was constantly getting stronger… if ever so slowly. The PRT Directors had taken an interest, and that led to more time with the men and women in white coats, followed by questions about whether he could do what he did with his threads to anything other than his weapon.
And, sure, he could.
Just hadn't seen the point: it wasn't like the Arclance was anything special. More like a reusable taser than anything else when it had finally been approved. Half the PRT squads carried better tasers, and the other half only didn't because containment foam canisters were heavy.
They pushed him to try it with a shield, for three months. And then six. And then he was given strict instructions to develop his defenses, to find ways to stay alive, to avoid risk to his life.
Because in five years, in ten years… maybe he could make a difference.
Maybe he could hurt an Endbringer. And if delaying that day for a year — or five years — was necessary to make sure the day did come in the end, then that's what he was ordered to do. To work on his mobility, for the things that a forcefield just wouldn't help against. Eventually, to work on his armor, make it tougher. Make it heal him. Everybody had ideas, but most of those ideas would take months to begin to test. The big Thinkers and the big thinkers narrowed it down and handed him a program, which he followed.
And just like that, he wasn't seen as mediocre anymore.
Three years ago, now.
The Arclance had become something far more formidable than a taser: flexible in range and effect, something that served as energy or matter as he chose, strong enough to take down all but Brutes, and even some of those. And yet he'd spent the least time on it, over the years. More had gone into his shield which, well — it worked as a shield, but maybe it was more that it worked on the concept of a shield, or that it was a tool with which he could manipulate patterns of the light that wasn't light, that you could touch… simplest to say it did forcefields. The shoes were the most recent, things that let him leap tall buildings, stand on air, or teleport in a flash of lighting. Or at least something that looked like lighting.
None of them were done, he could feel them, feel ways he could tweak them further, make them stronger… but the guys upstairs wanted him working on his armor for now, for the hits he couldn't block and couldn't dodge. And when they thought he could survive an Endbringer fight, they'd let him return to the Arclance, shape it over slow years into something that could split the heavens.
And then?
That was the kind of question everyone asked him, and he always had the same answer. "I'll just have to do my best." People thought he was being humble. He'd had Glenn Chambers, the man who was said — only half in jest — to run two thirds of the PRT (the PR part), tell him that those public shows of modesty played well, and urge him to keep it up even if he didn't want to. Roger had nearly laughed in his face.
That wasn't an act, that was the cold truth, and if he smiled when he said it it was to keep from throwing up.
It had been comfortable, being the friendly one, the approachable one, the one people liked.
Being the guy people hoped would save the world was fucking terrifying. Because, when you got right down to it, a weapon is only as good as its wielder. And Roger knew that there were people smarter, stronger, more determined than he. But no one else could use the things he imbued. They'd tested it — he insisted — and like some parody of the story of the Sword in the Stone they'd come, the greatest heroes of the Protectorate, to see if the Arclance would live in their hands. They'd even tried PRT agents, on the theory that it was the presence of other powers that was interfering.
Nothing.
He could have told them that beforehand, the way the threads or hair — or whatever it was that he did — worked, it was all routed through him. But he'd wanted the results to be different, had hoped to pass this responsibility to another. With the results the way they were, he trained instead.
And improved painfully slowly.
Maybe whatever capacity he had for personal growth had been channeled into his power… but he'd had two left feet before he triggered, too. Years of training in personal combat and tactics, and the best he could manage was a straightforward block-and-jab offense, and on tactics… well, he could follow orders. Roger trusted his team, and if they sat down afterward, he could usually follow why someone had shouted something to him — and sometimes it was just self-explanatory, like when someone shouted 'duck!' just before a blast went by overhead — but in real time?
All too rarely.
As it was, without powers, he lost every serious sparring match. With them, either he used enough force to put them down with a glancing touch… or he lost. Against many, he always lost anyways — Armsmaster and Miss Militia were both good enough to avoid ever getting hit, Assault was too tricky, and Velocity was just too fast.
All of his wins came from strength, and not skill. But he did have that strength, and it kept growing.
The burden kept getting heavier.
And it was a burden.
When you got right down to it, there were only a handful of capes whose power got stronger. Almost every parahuman on record had the same power their entire career. Alexandria, Legend, even Scion or Eidolon were, to all analysis anyone had been able to do, exactly as powerful now as they ever had been or ever would be. They could get more skillful in the use of their powers, more clever… but the Endbringers were like natural disasters given form.
Clever wasn't enough.
A bare handful of capes had had second triggers, a one time increase in power or flexibility. Those could be a big deal: Narwhal had gone from being the finest user of forcefields in the world, a support specialist of flexibility and skill… to someone who could manifest her forcefields inside people.
Explosively.
But no second trigger had been strong enough to make the difference against the Endbringers, and no-one had ever seen a third trigger.
That left the few whose power itself was to grow in power. Lung took time to build up in a fight, and given that time he had proved capable of defeating Leviathan… but not killing him. Given that same time, Leviathan was capable of sinking Kyushu and inundating most of the rest of Japan.
Not exactly a victory.
Lung hadn't shown for another Endbringer attack since. Maybe he'd do better in a second engagement.
The Thinkers weren't optimistic.
Crawler's power was to heal from any damage dealt him, permanently incorporating some new change that made him stronger and addressed the source of damage, a sort of adaptive regeneration that had left him far more monster than man, a beast with far too many eyes and limbs. He had joined the Slaughterhouse 9 in an effort to subject himself to more damage, to make himself ever stronger, and slaughtered people in the hope of drawing heroes who would, in trying to kill him, make him all that much stronger. PRT consensus was that throwing him at an Endbringer could only make the things worse: if he were to defeat an Endbringer, then the world would have traded a periodic natural disaster for a continuous rampage of unconquerable murder.
Glaistig Uaine — he'd seen the sealed files, there wasn't much closed to him when he was looking for ideas about how to get stronger — had been able to take powers from capes, killing them in the process, and use their 'ghosts' in concert. The powers she took didn't get stronger, but the possibility of a power combination was tantalizing. Unfortunately, she was completely insane: thought she was a Faerie Queen. A particularly clever PRT Director had gotten her into the Birdcage by offering her an extended vacation under a hill; she'd taken him up on the offer for the next three hundred years, following which she had invited him or his descendants to an event that — depending on the interpretation — would be something between a tea party and a genocide. Everyone was hoping that she wouldn't still be alive then, but even if she were… someone else's problem, by then.
You take the wins where you find them.
Scion might be strong enough already, or he might be one of the ones who got stronger. The first parahuman to appear, he had only spoken once in recorded history — giving his name in response to a question. Which made it hard to tell what he was doing, or why. He didn't seem to strategize, he just flew across the earth saving people wherever he found them, twenty-four hours a day three hundred and sixty four days a year, without a care for whether they were in a house-fire or beneath Behemoth's descending foot. Some thought he was a living rejection of utilitarianism; others that he'd gone mad. Either way, he was always welcome when he showed, but not exactly reliable.
That left Dauntless himself. Could he get strong enough to end an Endbringer? How could anyone know, when no one had ever killed one? Even Scion and Eidolon, fighting together and backed by heroes and villains from the world over, massed hundreds strong, had only ever driven them into retreat. Those victories, such as they were, were purchased at staggering cost. Typical casualties among the capes who fought in a victory ran from 25% to 60%; civilian casualties ran into the tens or hundreds of thousands directly, and far more indirectly.
And those were the good days.
The defeats didn't bear thinking about.
Each of the three had their own brand of terror.
The first to come, Behemoth, was perhaps the most straightforward — a juggernaut's challenge to meet strength with strength, directed against a target too dear or dangerous to abandon. The resulting carnage among the capes who fought him had earned the dynakinetic the name of Herokiller. Mass destruction was Leviathan's domain: the waters above what had once been Newfoundland and Kyushu bore silent testament to the scale of his devastation when he could not be brought to bay quickly enough. At the opposite end of the spectrum lay the endless paranoia born of fights against the only true telepath known: the Simurgh. She — if that was the word — was also the most powerful known precognitive and telekinetic, and used those abilities in concert to make those who fought her her precision guided weapons. She killed the least in open confrontation, but months or years after each attack reaped a bloody harvest of madness, war, and despair through her unknowing pawns. Doctrine now called for the quarantine or execution of those exposed to her beyond the briefest periods — even knowing that this doctrine itself might be one of her plans, no better alternative had yet been found.
And one of them struck every three to four months.
The world was slowly dying beneath that irresistible pressure, and had been for almost as long as he'd been alive. And the PRT was deliberately holding him back from those fights, from any serious fight, out of fear that he might be the irreplaceable path to victory against the Endbringers.
He sighed. No wonder he'd been having trouble sleeping.
Maybe he should get up, go and talk to someone. About anything, or nothing. The whole team was on-base right now: Assault, Battery, and Velocity were on ready alert, but Wednesday afternoons weren't exactly prime time for crime.
He stood, and began walking to the break room. Velocity would be happy to talk about baseball, and Assault was always ready with a joke.
Halfway down the corridor outside his room, he felt dizzy. Blood rush? He was swaying to the right, almost falling.
No. The corridor was tilting. What…
The tilt reversed, more suddenly than it had come, and Roger was thrown to the ground. He grabbed a handrail, tried to stand, felt the pull of acceleration. What was going on wasn't clear, but crisis response had a very clear step one: survive to get to step two. A thought, a crackling flash of white absence, and he was clothed in his armor, spear and shield in his left hand. Another thought, directed at his shield, and arcs of white lightning surrounded his body.
Moments later, he heard the distinctive hiss-crack of forcefield generators failing (the base's?), followed by the whining, groaning crunch of metal crumpling. His shield's bubble held, though he could feel the force it had absorbed.
Roger stood, releasing his own forcefield, looked out the window now at knee-level, and saw the bedraggled ruin of the Boardwalk. The base was on shore.
Whatever it was, this would call for everyone. He broke into a measured run, making for the briefing room, ignoring the crazy angle of the corridor by stepping on air. The ominous sounds of metal continuing to settle, a slower screeching crunch than the impact, seemed to chase him down the hallway.
What he found when he got there was reassuring: most of the rest of Brockton Bay's Protectorate had assembled in the tilted wreckage of the briefing room: Assault simply standing as if the floor weren't tilted past thirty degrees, Battery cradled in his arms; Miss Militia and Triumph were using shelving as makeshift seats, and Velocity was fidgeting blurrily at the room's base. Armsmaster was at the top of the room, supporting himself from the doorjamb of a broken door which let in a shaft of light — even the grey afternoon outside was brighter than a mostly windowless room without power.
"This is a worst case scenario." Armsmaster moved his head, the blank visor meeting everyone's eyes in turn.
"Leviathan is here and is already ashore. We can expect no support for minutes, and no support in significant numbers for what may be an hour or more. Whatever we do, this is going to be a very bad day."
A pause.
"Miss Militia, you are to make your way to the PRT building and take charge of such Wards as volunteer for service. Hold them there and provide a rallying point for reinforcements, at least until sufficient force arrives to make seeking battle advisable."
She nodded, pulled up her American flag scarf up to cover her mouth, and turned to go, the knife by her side shifting itself into a long spear she used as a walking stick.
"Velocity, you're on recon, and recovery as needed. Go."
The speedster nodded, and vanished in a humming blur.
"Everyone else — with me. We will attempt to engage Leviathan. Our primary goal is distraction. The alarms did not sound until Leviathan was already ashore; every minute we buy saves hundreds or thousands of lives as people make their way to the shelters. Our secondary goal is positioning: if we can lure Leviathan to the Scar, it will further lessen the collateral damage and loss of life. Our tertiary goal is force preservation: we need to remain a force in being and in contact long enough to guide reinforcements in on top of him as they arrive. Of us all, treat the survival of Dauntless as priority."
Roger flushed as everyone turned to look at him.
Why did it have to be him?
"Move out." With that, Armsmaster released his grip and slid down the floor, tumbling through one of the shattered windows onto the beach beneath and coming up running.
Maybe today was the last day that question would haunt him.
One way or the other.
Dauntless hefted his spear and followed his team through the shattered window and onto the beach.