Bitch howled, a primal, raw sound that must have hurt her throat as much as it hurt to listen to.  She moved forward, pulling me with her, lifting me up.  When I sagged, she gave me a startled look.

Poor Bitch. This must hurt so much to do, to watch, to know the inevitability of the losses…

I looked down.  My legs were there, but there was no sensation.  Numb wasn’t a complete enough term to explain it.

At least paralysis can sometimes be temporary, unlike complete amputation. It’s not guaranteed to be, but it’s a possibility, and while wondering about that, you don’t have to worry about bleeding out.

“Back’s broken, I think,” the words were weak.  The calm tone of the words was eerie, even coming from my own mouth to my own ears.  Disconcertingly out of place with the frenzied, savage tableau.

Heh, yeah.

Something splashed near me.  A footstep.

I was hauled out of the water.  I felt a lancing pain through my midsection, like a hot iron, gasped, sputtered.  Through the beads of water on my lenses, I couldn’t make out much.

There we go. So who’s come to Taylor’s rescue?

Bitch, I realized.  She wasn’t looking at me.  

!!

That’s just about the last person I was expecting. What are you doing out here?

Her face was etched deep with pain, fury, fear, sheer viciousness, or some combination of the four.

Oh jeez. Did Leviathan mess with her dogs?

I followed her gaze, blinked twice.

Her dogs were attacking Leviathan, and Leviathan was attacking back.  He hurled two away, three more leapt in.

That’s… more than usual.

Is this why Rachel wasn’t present at the meeting? Did she go off to the doghouse and bring every dog she could even remotely trust in battle?

After all, if there’s anything that warrants using even the untrained dogs as hellhounds, it’s an Endbringer.

Even so, when I opened my eyes, looked through those lenses for their original purpose, all I could see was mud, grit, silt.  Black and dark brown, with only the faintest traces of light.  It disappointed me on a profound level, knowing that this might be the last thing I ever saw.  Disappointed me more than the idea of dying here, odd as that was.

Heh.

“What a shitty last sight. I couldn’t get to go while looking at something neat? Was that too much to ask?”

Through my power, I sensed Leviathan turn, take a step back toward the shelter, stop.  His entire upper body turned so he could peer to his left with his head, turned the opposite way to peer right.  Like a dog sniffing.

I wonder if he has some kind of power relating to his eyes. Like detecting lives to snuff out… actually, no, that’s the one eyesight power we can tell he doesn’t have, unless it counts insect lives.

He dropped to all fours, ran away, a loping gait, not the lightning fast movement he’d sported when he first attacked.  Still fast enough.

Hm. What did he spot? The reinforcements?

My chest lurched in a sob for air, like a dry heave.  I managed to keep from opening my mouth but the action, the clenching of every muscle above my shoulders, left my throat aching.

Eugh.

Two seconds later, it hit me again harder.

Two blocks away, Leviathan crashed down into the water.

…hm.

Another lurch of my throat and chest, painful.  My mouth opened, water filled my mouth, and my throat locked up to prevent the inhalation of water.  I spat the water out, forced it out of my mouth, for all the good it would do.

Of all the ways to go, I’m fairly sure drowning would be one of the more unpleasant ones.

I’d left the fat cape to die like this when the wave was coming.  Was this karma?

Back then, you didn’t have a choice. I don’t think this is how karma works, even by the pop culture definition.

My breath had been knocked out of me at the impact, but some primal, instinctual part of me had let me hold my breath.  I lay there, face down in two or three feet of water, counting the seconds until I couldn’t hold my breath any more, until my body opened my mouth and I heaved in a breath with that same instinctual need for preservation, filled my lungs with water instead.

Well, this ain’t healthy.

Is this when the cavalry comes and pulls Taylor out?

The lenses of my mask were actually swim goggles, it was a strange recollection to cross my mind.

Hah, that’s fitting.

I’d bought them from a sports supply store, buying the useless chalk dust at the same time.  Durable, high end, meant for underwater cave spelunkers, if I remembered the picture on the packaging right.  Tinted to help filter out bright lights, to avoid being blinded by any fellow swimmer’s headlamps.  

Huh, interesting.

I’d fitted the lenses from an old pair of glasses inside, sealed them in place with silicon at the edges, so I had 20/20 vision while I had my mask on without having to wear glasses beneath or over it, or contact lenses, which irritated my eyes.

Ahh, smart.

I’d built the armor of my mask around the edges of the goggles so the actual nature of the lenses wasn’t immediately apparent, and to hold them firmly in place.

Nice.

I’d either been torn in two and couldn’t feel the pain yet or, more likely, I’d been paralyzed from the waist down.

The latter also has a higher chance of Taylor believably surviving this Arc. If she’d been torn in two, she’d have to contend with bleeding out on top of everything else.

Oh.

Not like I really should’ve expected any different.  Neither case was much better than the other, as far as I was concerned.

…as I was just saying, the latter is marginally better. More survivable, even if Leviathan’s presence and current status of “actively out to kill Taylor specifically” mean it’s only a slight difference in her overall chances.

Water crashed into me, hard as concrete, fast as a speeding car.  I felt more pain than I’d ever experienced, more than when Bakuda had used that grenade on me, the one that set my nerve endings on fire with raw pain.

Yikes.

It was brief, somehow more real than what Bakuda had inflicted on me.  Struck me like a lightning flash.

I plunged face first into the water.  My good arm on its own wasn’t enough to turn me over – the road just a little too far below me.  I tried to use my legs to help turn myself over.  Zero response.

…Taylor is rapidly losing the use of her limbs. At least so far they’ve stayed attached, which is better than Armsmaster or the ghost of Kaiser can say about theirs, but I say this without knowing the exact reason why Taylor’s legs aren’t responding. It could be temporary lameness, or but it could also be that they just kinda… aren’t there anymore?

That said, I highly doubt we’ll have Taylor sitting in a wheelchair for the rest of this story.

I suppose Tinkertech prosthetic legs are an option, though…

I climbed to my feet at the same time he did, but I had a clear route up the back of the shelter door while he had to squeeze through the opening.  I was on the street and running well before he was up out of the stairwell.

Nice work, you lured him out! Now what, though?

I gathered my bugs to me, sent some to him, to better track his movements.  As he climbed up, I gathered the swarms into decoys that looked human-ish, sent them all moving in different directions, gathered more around myself to match them in appearance.

A false clone technique, nice. Which is the real Taylor, Levvy?

With the effects of my slash of the Halberd combined with the damage Armsmaster had already done, Leviathan didn’t have the mobility with his tail he otherwise would.

Excellent.

When he attacked my decoys, he did it with slashes of his claw and pouncing leaps that sent out afterimages to crash into them.  A swipe of the claw’s echo to disperse one swarm to his left, a lunge to destroy one in front of him.  Another afterimage of a claw swipe sent out to strike at me.

Uh oh, he found you.