Leviathan used his claws to heave Hookwolf off his face, tore the metal beast in half, and then threw the pieces down to the ground, hard.

Welp.

One landed straight on top of Shadow Stalker, the other almost seemed to bounce, rapidly condensing into a roughly humanoid form before it touched the ground again, landing in a crouch.  Hookwolf backed away, the blades drawing together into a human shape, skin appearing as they withdrew.

Huh. Are you sure you’re not Hookworm?

He brought his hand over his head and pointed forward at Leviathan.  A signal for the next front-liner.

Yeah, this sounds like the kind of experience you’d want to switch out after.

“Careful!” the crossbow-girl – Flechette, I took it – replied, loading another shot.

Shadow Stalker timed her advance with a pounce on Hookwolf’s part.  Empire Eighty-Eight’s most notorious killer latched onto Leviathan’s face and neck, blood spitting around where the storm of shifting metal hooks and blades made contact with flesh.  

Nice!

Shadow Stalker ran within twenty feet of the Endbringer, firing her twin crossbows.  The shots penetrated this time, disappearing into Leviathan’s chest, presumably fading back in while inside him.

Oh right, that’s part of her power – the crossbow bolts have the same kind of fading Shadow Stalker herself can do. By getting closer, she made it so that the bolts don’t have time to fade back in before they hit Levvy.

Flechette fired a needle through Leviathan’s knee, and the Endbringer’s leg buckled.  He collapsed into a kneeling position, the knee striking the ground.

Sweet!

Huh, y’know, with how Flechette’s projectiles are consistently described as needles, I can’t help but wonder if Parian’s telekinesis would work on them.

It wasn’t much, I didn’t have many bugs gathered here yet, but I was able to pull some together into humanoid forms.  I sent them moving across the battlefield towards Leviathan.

Nice. Distractions!

If one of them delayed him a second, drew an attack that would otherwise be meant for someone else, it would be worth the trouble.

Yeah!

I looked around, trying to find Brandish, Chevalier, Assault or Battery, or even someone tough.  Someone that could take the Halberd and make optimal use of it.

Hm, good idea, but I have a feeling you’ll end up using it yourself, somehow.

One of crossbow-girl’s shots,

Can somebody tell Taylor this girl’s name already?

like a needle several feet in length, speared under the side of Leviathan’s neck, out the top.  Shadow Stalker’s shots, at the same time, failed to penetrate Leviathan’s hard exterior.

Huh, I guess hers are more powerful.

“Flechette!  I’m getting closer!” Shadow Stalker called out, looking back at her new partner.

Thank you.

All of the ‘stuffed animals’ deflated.

Well, that answers that question.

To be clear, it doesn’t actually rule out the “breath of life” theory, but that needing upkeep makes it less likely.

The girl with the crossbow and Shadow Stalker opened fire, joined by Purity from above.   Laserdream dropped me at the fringe of the battlefield with the Halberd before joining them, flying above at an angle opposite Purity’s, firing crimson laser blasts at Leviathan’s head and face.

Alright, time to figure out what you do with this Halberd in the meantime. Try to stay alive.

Leviathan readied to lunge, stopped as a curtain of darkness swept over him, the majority dissipating a second later, leaving only what was necessary to obscure his head.

Grue! Good to see you!

Well. Not see you, per se. You know what I mean.

That said, you stay alive too, please.

It took Leviathan a second to realize he could move out of that spot to see again, a delay that earned him another on-target series of shots from our ranged combatants.  Grue was here, somewhere.

Nice work.

I had been near here a little less than two hours ago.  The skeleton of a building in construction was in view, a matter of blocks away, an unlit black against a dark gray sky.  Beneath that, I knew, was Coil’s subterranean base of operations.

Well. I guess that construction is at a high risk of having to start over, or never being completed.

Parian had given life to three stuffed animals that lumbered around Leviathan.  A stuffed goat stepped forward, and sidewalk cracked under a hoof of patchwork leather and corduroy.

Huh. That takes some force. Does her power also make these stuffed animals as strong and heavy as their forms and sizes would imply – i.e. as if they weren’t made of fabric and stuffing?

A bipedal tiger grabbed at an unlit streetlight, unrooted it, and charged Leviathan like a knight with a lance couched in one armpit.

I dub thee Sir Tony.

The third, an octopus, ran interference, disrupting Leviathan’s afterimages before they could strike capes and wrapping tentacles around Leviathan’s limbs if he tried to break away.

Nice work!

Parian was gathering more cloth from the other side of a smashed display window, drawing it together into a crude quadruped shape, moving a series of needles and threads through the air in an uncanny unison that reminded me of my control over my spiders.

I guess she has some power over needles, cloth and threads to help make the stuffed animals too. Neat.

She gave me a look, I turned my attention to her armband, tried to discern where Leviathan fell on the grid.  Around the same moment I figured it out, I felt him halt.  “BX-8 or very close to it!  He’s downtown, and he just stopped moving.”

I wonder if there’s any particular reason why he went there in particular, or if he just destroyed in whatever direction he felt like.

Also: It’s pretty clear that Leviathan has some interest in actually causing mayhem directly. If he only wanted to destroy the city, and to do so with certainty, he could hide out of sight while messing with the aquifer, but instead he’s attacking in person, allowing people to fight back. Either he’s not smart enough to think of that, or he has his reasons for this course of action.

I’m inclined to think those reasons are that it’s fun, in whatever twisted way whatever contains Leviathan’s apparent consciousness defines “fun”.

Alternatively, maybe Endbringers feed on misery and death somehow.

“You sure?” came Chevalier’s voice from the armband.

That confirms it: Those who aren’t moderated in the chat don’t have their voices replaced. Makes sense, though.

“Ninety-nine percent.”

“Noted.  We’re teleporting forces in.”

Laserdream didn’t argue with me.  We arrived at the scene of the battle a matter of seconds later.  Familiar territory.

Here we go.

“He’s at or near BZ-6, heading south.”

The area we were entering had been further from the heroes with the forcefields, where waves hadn’t had their impact softened or diverted by the the PHQ’s forcefield or the larger, heavier, blockier structures of the Docks.

Oof, so this place was probably wrecked far more than everything we’ve seen.

Entire neighborhoods had been flattened, reduced to detritus that floated in muddy, murky waters.  Larger buildings, what I suspected might have been part of the local college, were standing but badly damaged. Countless cars sat in the roads and parking lots with water pouring in through shattered windows.

At some point, a road stops being a road and becomes a river.

Not sure how that interacts with parking law. Are you allowed to park your car in a river? Does it make a difference if you parked before it became a river or after it? Lawyers, get on it.

Laserdream changed course, to follow Lord street, the main road that ran through the city and downtown, tracing the line of the bay.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“The wreckage goes this way,” she responded.

Hm, but it sounds like Leviathan didn’t, according to Taylor’s power?

I looked down.  It was hard to tell, with the damage already done, the water flooding the streets, but I suspected she was right.  One building that looked like it should have stood against the waves thus far was wrecked, and mangled bodies floated around it.  It could have been the tidal wave, but it was just as likely that Leviathan had seen a target and torn through it.

Yeah, but did he tear through it with his body, or with a blast of water?

“Maybe, but he might have been faking us out, or he detoured further ahead,” I said.  I pointed southwest.  “That way.”

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too.

What spooked me was that I’d been through the Weymouth shopping center more than a hundred times.  It was the closest mall to my house.

Ahh, shit. Yeeah, we might’ve seen the last of that house – in liveable conditions, anyway.

Damn, what if Tattle was wrong and Danny stayed home due to his concern about Taylor taking precedent over his own safety? It would be a stupid decision, but panic isn’t exactly the kind of thing that makes people make smart decisions.

When I sensed Leviathan turning south, towards downtown, I didn’t feel particularly relieved.  There were enough shelters and enough space in the shelters to handle virtually every Brockton Bay resident in the city proper.

“Virtually” is a scary word sometimes.

From what I remembered, not everyone had participated in the drills that happened every five years or so, choosing to stay home.  It was very possible that some shelters near the residential areas might prove to be over capacity, that my dad, if he arrived late, might have been redirected to another shelter.

Hrm.

One closer to downtown, where Leviathan was going.  I couldn’t trust that he was out of harm’s way.

Yeah, no, that was never a certainty.