I’d cleared enough ground that the angle of the hit didn’t throw me straight into the side of the building.  I was thrown a distance, rolled on my side, on top of and over my probably-broken arm.

As if that arm hasn’t been through enough.

Although to be fair, that’s peanuts compared to what happened to a lot of the corpses lying around.

Pain consumed me.  I writhed, my good hand pressing on my bad arm.  I gagged, pulled my mask up to throw up, as if my body was trying to find some way to rebel against the pain. 

ew

I tried to climb to my feet, but I was too weak, dizzy, and my good arm gave out.  I landed face first in dirty water.

Shit. For all we know, Leviathan is still after her. Lying face down is not a good position to be in under those circumstances.

Hm, maybe if I first radiate some sleet and then radiate with that sleet, I can choose what sort of radiation it makes. If I can make some sort of radiation that hurts Leviathan significantly without hurting myself, then that’s worth giving him just a little more ammo on top of the huge masses of water he already has.

Today’s powers: “scrape (with) popcorn”, “radiate (with) sleet”, “signal (with) income”.

Well, I doubt scraping popcorn or telling Leviathan my non-existent income via Morse code are going to be very helpful. Sleet rays could be useful against other enemies, but sleet is water (and far less solid than ice), so he could probably just turn my rays back at me.

Looks like I’m not gonna be very useful today either.

Anyway, let’s get back to the chapter!

I didn’t have another second to worry – Leviathan was extending one claw in my general direction.

Shit.

“I know you’re there.”?

The water that had pooled shallowly beneath the carport trickled his way, as if it were moving downhill, gathered in a rising bulge of water on the street in front of the carport, swelling to five feet in height, fifteen feet across.

Oh, good, he might not have noticed Taylor after all. He just found another source of water.

Unsure what to do, I remained absolutely still.

A movement of his claw, and the bulge broke, spilled to one side as an onrushing wave.  It swept beneath the rusted van, suddenly rose to heave the vehicle in Leviathan’s direction.  

Good thing you weren’t in there, huh?

The van rolled once, skidding toward the Endbringer, threatening to strike one leg out from under him.  He stopped it by punching it through the roof, into the front end of the van.

It seems like he was expecting someone to be there.

Either that or he wants to wear the van like a glove.

He stabbed the other claw through at the same point, tore the van into two halves that he tossed to either side of him.

This behavior shows that he’s clearly searching for more people to kill.

Aegis would have been covering an aerial route, keeping Leviathan from heading to the rooftops, which meant Leviathan went up.

I keep forgetting that Aegis could fly.

I had the mass of roaches ascend, trying to get a sense of his location.  I tried to use my armband to help gauge the direction he was traveling, but since I couldn’t move my arm, it was difficult at best.

I wonder, if Taylor had removed the armband and put it on the other arm, would the lack of a pulse during the transition lead the armband to believe she was deceased?

Fenja down, CC-6 (sic).  My head snapped up.

I wonder how big she’d gotten, considering Leviathan was escaping from above.

I found them.  Fenja and Menja were duking it out with Leviathan.  Both were nearly as big as he was, which was saying a fair bit.

Not bad.

I knew their power warped geometry to make them bigger, simultaneously reduced the effective size of incoming attacks by an inversely proportionate amount.  Six times as tall and a sixth of the hurt, on top of the benefits of being bigger.

Huh, interesting. “Warping geometry” seems like a good way to get around the square-cube law.

Secure in the amount of bugs around me, I collected the ones that could go out in the rain and manage reasonably well.  Primarily roaches.  I sent them out in the general direction of where Leviathan and the others were.  The better a sense I had of any imminent encounters, the better I could react.

Good call.

Manpower deceased, CD-6.  Aegis deceased, CD-6 (sic), my armband spoke, at the same moment my bugs reached the area around where Leviathan had been.

He was awake again.

Taylor stole what I was gonna say.

Here we go.

…also it looks like Leviathan actually found a way to get past the mind-numbing redundancy of Aegis’ eldritch biology.

Oh, and that’s another New Wave man dead. I’m pretty sure they only have women left now, at least out of the members we’ve met, and none of those are going to be particularly happy after this.