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.

My swarms were in place, which left me having to decide where to hide.  The carport was too in the open, none of the eaves left me a good enough escape route, and as for the space under the rain barrel on the roof, well, I wasn’t that stupid, and I’d already dismissed the roof as an option anyways.

Hmm.

I started toward the rusted van.  I was halfway there when I reconsidered.  As comforting as it might be to have the safety of metal around me and to be more or less concealed, it posed some of the same problems as the rooftops.  If things turned sour or if an unexpected situation arose, I’d be trapped.

Yeah, and it doesn’t protect against the wave.

After a moment of tense consideration, I reluctantly decided on the carport, hunkering down in the gloom and hoping the shadows there would help conceal me.

Fair enough.

It offered me an escape route – around the back of the building, or through the side door, it gave me cover from the rain and any debris, and it gave me concealment.  I’d have to cope with the lack of cover from any incoming waves or Leviathan himself.

Yeeah, I suppose it’s time to make compromises.

The problem with waiting on Scion was that the guy wasn’t exactly in touch with the rest of us.

get a damn phone

There was speculation he had at least one human contact – someone that had given him clothing and a costume, at least – but he never bothered to stop long enough for anyone to pass on any requests, to tell him to go to X place when we gave him Y signal.

Too busy saving the day to be asked to save the day.

He rescued people twenty-four-seven, three hundred and sixty five days a year, handling crises only as they came to his attention, which meant that sometimes an Endbringer came and Scion was wholly occupied with saving sinking ships, stopping landslides and putting out housefires.  I wondered what he was doing now.

I mean, you’re doing good work, but priorities, man.