Our quiet afternoon view of the city skyline was interrupted by a tsunami.
Literally. It engulfed the city, swallowing the line of shops along the boardwalk and rushing through downtown, carrying cars with it and crashing into and through buildings, water foaming halfway up the shorter high-rises — at which point I lost track of things for a moment, as something lit up like a flashbang sized for a city.
There were a few seconds where I wondered if a nuclear weapon had gone off, it was that bright.
My eyes saw only spots, but my swarms gave me a collectively clearer picture, with remarkable resolution at distances my own eyes could never have managed anyway. The Protectorate's floating base was now on shore, around the middle of the boardwalk, and more or less intact, if tilted almost at a forty-five degree angle. Whatever had made the flash had come from there — some Tinkertech, at a guess.
The wave didn't reach the top of the ridge the farmhouse was on, but it came closer than I was entirely comfortable with.
It was possible that this was just bad luck, an earthquake somewhere in the Atlantic.
Lots of things were possible.
I rose, and donned my mask.
"Taylor!"
Right. Amy.
A quick shift of attention showed that she, too, had been looking at the city when the flash went off.
"A tidal wave just hit Brockton Bay."
It surprised me, how calm my voice was. Particularly since I could see through my insects the water beginning its withdrawal, sweeping wreckage, cars, and bodies out to sea. The death and destruction wasn't the worst part: as the water level lowered I could make out a massive presence moving through the Boardwalk, wading through the immense weight of water going out to sea as if it were so much air.
"It's Leviathan."
Why should the greatest hydrokinetic known find water a hindrance?
He — if 'he' was the word — looked to stand thirty feet tall, top-heavy, with muscled shoulders and arms giving way to lean legs with knees that went the wrong way and a sinewy tail not quite twice as long as he was tall, lashing out behind him to balance his swaying walk. His head had no face, just a flat expanse of scaled skin, with four gashes for startlingly green eyes — three on the left side, one on the right — and it bounced about with constant flicking jerks, in sharp contrast to the rhythmic relentless movement of his gait, graceful in a sort of of swinging way. A lazy seeming swipe of his left hand just missed the facade of a building at his knee height as he passed; the water answering his gesture didn't, and smashed it to pieces. Even as the water from the tsunami withdrew, more seemed to condense out of the air in his wake, following in every movement he made like a liquid afterimage.
An Endbringer.
Here.
Not the kind of enemy I could overpower.
Not the kind of enemy I could get someone else to overpower.
Not, unfortunately, the kind of enemy I could leave be, either.
Well, maybe I couldn't win.
But I wouldn't give up.
The sirens rose up in the city, loud enough that I could hear them clearly here.
"Amy, I'm going into town for a bit. Would you like to come?"
It could go either way, really: she was an unparalleled battlefield medic — and by that very token perhaps too valuable to risk. I was certain her family would have worked out a contingency plan for this.
"I… yes. I can't see, though."
"Take my hand."
I started moving toward the scooter, a swarm of insects bringing out the costume I'd woven for her over the last two days. Incomplete, uncolored, it was simply a hooded white robe over a bodysuit. Still better protection for her than anything else I could offer.
"I was working on a spidersilk armored costume for you. Not finished, but its mostly lacking cosmetic touches right now."
She nodded. The cloud of bees brought it to her, and she changed. It was easy to assist her fumbling sightless efforts by ensuring the bees brought to her exactly what she was reaching for, and afterward they bore away her civilian clothes. She turned to me.
"I'm still seeing spots — can you drive?"
I nodded.
We got on the scooter, and set off. It would be interesting, driving at speed when my eyes weren't working. Assembling swarms ahead as I advanced, getting them dense enough to serve as eyes quickly enough… a challenge. It felt a little like an out-of-body experience, or perhaps like seeing myself through a racetrack camera system, the viewpoint switching ahead with each curve.
Coming off the ridgeline, we quickly encountered debris, and then water.
Twice, I had to change my route into town, avoiding dips in the road that were still flooded. The Vespa had served me well, but it wasn't meant to ford rivers. The roads were nearly deserted going in to town, though a significant number of people had apparently decided to flee the city rather than seek shelter, and not all of them were driving on their side of the road. Under the circumstances, I couldn't blame them for fleeing.
Perhaps that was wiser than trying to get to a shelter.
Either way, this meant that it took longer to get into town: the same fifteen minutes that should have put me downtown left me skirting around to try Oak Street in the hopes that it wouldn't be blocked or flooded. Not that I was sure where to go when I got there. Normally, capes would rally on the Protectorate's base if there was one in a city. We'd had a floating base instead of one downtown near the PRT offices, something about the politics and expense of condemning a full block of downtown, if I remembered correctly.
Right now, lacking their facilities, hardened and designed for contingencies exactly like this, looked a lot more expensive.
I was heading for the PRT building — that was the next most logical place for a rally point, if it survived — and we were mere minutes away.
Still, the water was almost completely gone from the city, and I could see the beach again.
In fact…
I pulled into an alley, stopped the scooter, and grabbed Panacea.
"Come on!"
I could see with my eyes again, though a purple blotch in the center of my vision remained, and I thought she should be able to likewise.
I led her at a run into the lobby of the adjacent office building, deserted now, and strewn with sodden wreckage. We hit the fire stairs at a run. Second floor. Third. Fourth: the stairs started being dry again. I kept running. When we got to the tenth floor, I paused, breathing deeply.
Amy leaned over and threw up.
I patted her on the back, lightly.
"What…"
"Too little water, too much beach."
Getting off the Vespa, moving more slowly, had given me time to gather multiple swarms and use them as an array telescope again, get a panoramic view of the city from the height of this building's spire, and its neighbours' roofs.
Leviathan had moved mostly north from where I last saw him, toward the Docks and the Scar. I could see some of the Brockton Bay Protectorate fighting him.
Or maybe retreating from him would be more accurate, launching a series of pinprick attacks and falling back to fresh positions to repeat.
On foot, Dauntless jabbed with a spear of white fire, and then vanished before the retaliatory tail-whip could catch him; two roofs further north, Assault held an I-beam balanced on one palm like a javelin sized for Behemoth while Battery crouched beneath the far end, the lines on her costume glowing so brightly it was hard to make out her figure. Without detectable movement from the hero, the I-beam launched itself forward, and Battery did something as it passed her, accelerating it further. It struck Leviathan, crumpled, and bounced off, crashing through a nearby building. Without waiting to see the result, Assault snatched Battery up, and they changed roofs northward barely ahead of a wave of water.
Leviathan followed after, unhurried, his path drawing level with Triumph. The hero shouted and the building facade behind Leviathan shattered… but there was no visible effect on the Endbringer. Worse, Triumph's scrambling rooftop retreat wasn't fast enough and, as the sound of his shout reached us — audible even across that distance — a whip of water caught him across the waist and he was flung clear to fall to the next street over in two different places.
Leviathan continued toward Assault and Battery, still fleeing but losing ground, only to be interrupted by Armsmaster swinging in on a line and going to melee. A blur moved toward where Triumph fell, and then away — Velocity?
In the distance, I could see it: another tsunami was coming.
Leviathan was still moving in that slow, swaying gait, seemingly unharried by any of the attacks, content to follow after and swat the heroes like flies. Was he concentrating on bringing more waves instead of the fight?
They'd seen the oncoming wave, too. Armsmaster did something, faked Leviathan out cleanly, and rolled clear before using his grappling hook to reach Assault and Battery on the the roof of the old Transatlantic Shipping building, the tallest in the area. Dauntless joined them in a flash of white fire.
And Leviathan changed gears, and leaped, moving faster than I'd yet seen him move, coming down on the grouped heroes claw first.
I felt my fingers tighten into fists.
Assault leapt to meet him, open hand outstretched in some ludicrous parody of a high-five… and launched Leviathan skyward and away with a touch, sending him hundreds of feet into the air. Assault smashed back down onto… no, into the roof, cracking it with the impact, and though Leviathan had been thrown back, the water that followed him like his shadow hadn't.
A torrent poured down on the heroes, collapsing the roof beneath their feet and I lost sight of them as the tsunami swept in. Above, Leviathan flipped himself around into a perfect dive, landing in the wave's wake and vanishing without a ripple.
Not long afterward, the wave struck the building we were sheltering in, reaching higher than the last one: the sixth floor, perhaps.
Any of that crowd of cars I'd seen on the way in who hadn't already reached the ridgeline weren't going to make it out untouched. If he kept this up, he'd eventually flood the shelters, too: they could be sealed against flooding, and they had systems to deal with what water made it through… but they couldn't keep the doors open through this amount of water. And there was no way that everyone had already reached their nearest shelter.
Nothing to do about that that I wasn't going to do already.
Still needed to work on the details, though.
I nodded, and tapped Panacea, still bent over and breathing deeply, on the shoulder.
"The tsunami's hit and the water's rushing back out again. We might as well start downstairs."
She groaned, but followed me into the stairwell. No point going too quickly, when we'd then have to wait for the water to withdraw enough to use the streets again.
In the distance, I saw the Transatlantic Shipping building crumble and collapse, Leviathan surging out of the seething waters where it had stood like a shark breaching.
A flash of white fire on the roof across the street marked the survival of Dauntless.
I couldn't say one way or another about the others.
We emerged on the ground floor, wading through calf-deep water.
I checked for my scooter — I'd been careful to park the Vespa in the lee of the building — but… nothing.
It was gone, and I wondered for a moment why that hurt as much as it did.
Nothing for it. We'd just have to walk.
I started slogging toward the PRT building, Panacea a half-step behind me.
In the distance, Dauntless was fighting the Endbringer alone, if fighting was the word.
He was teleporting constantly, often to stand on thin air, always moving a little bit further north… and despite everything was still taking hits. So far, he'd managed to catch them on a forcefield made up of the same white fire. His own return strikes, the Arclance leaping forth like the lightning it resembled, turned water to steam and cleaved concrete… but left no mark on Leviathan. Watching Leviathan's lazy pursuit, I thought of cats and cruelty.
Maybe I was anthropomorphizing it. Leviathan's desires, like its schedule or its origin, might be unfathomably alien.
Those questions didn't matter today.
Getting through the afternoon with my city intact was the only thing that did.
There were limits to Dauntless' mobility and shield both. A water whip, one just like the dozens of others he'd dodged or blocked, shattered his shield and knocked him to the ground below. Leviathan lifted a clawed foot, elongated in a way that looked wrong, and a dark thunderbolt took him in the chest, plowing him into and through the road, leaving a trench two blocks long. The figure rose into the air just ahead of his counterstrike, resolving into a woman in a dark costume and helmet, lighthouse emblem on her chest, cape flowing behind her.
Alexandria.
Leviathan's attempt to stand was met with an eye-searing column of white force from the heavens that hammered him back down, and then froze his water shadow into an icy prison. Lasers couldn't normally freeze things, but then they couldn't normally turn corners either. Legend's lasers could do all that, and more. The man himself dropped from the sky, meteoric, to hover beside Alexandria, his bright blue bodysuit embellished with white zig-zagging flames a sharp contrast to her more somber style.
Behind and between them, the air wavered and Eidolon shimmered into being, his blue-green bodysuit and hooded cape completing the set.
It was a scene fit for a painting, the Triumvirate hovering above a frozen Endbringer, claw reaching up in defiance, the ruined city about them. Even the darkening clouds above conspired to let down a shaft of light upon the scene, and for the first time that day I felt hope join itself to my determination.
The moment couldn't last.
Leviathan shattered the ice explosively and a massive waterspout reached up in answer to his clawed gesture, the three heroes scattering out of its path.
I couldn't help but notice that, for all the force directed at the Endbringer so far, he had yet to be scratched.
Above the PRT building, I could see three flares go up in succession, forming a triangle of white stars against a sky dark with clouds. That would be our rally point, then.
From different quarters of the city, other fliers rose into the fight.
To the north, I could see Purity, glowing like a nova against the dark sky, trailed at a distance by a man with a long spear, borne on the shoulders of ghostly duplicates of himself. From the southeast, I saw three figures in New Wave's distinctive uniforms rise. In the north, but nearer, I saw a giantess loom above the low-slung houses, jogging toward the fight, a steel wolf sized to match running at her side.
Each afraid to challenge Leviathan directly, they were all rallying now to fight behind the Triumvirate.
Atop another roof, running toward the fight, I could see Armsmaster's distinctive silhouette, two of his Halberds crossed on his back, and a burst of white fire by his side meant Dauntless wasn't out of it either.
The battle for Brockton Bay wasn't over yet.
We were just getting started.