That was my suspicion, anyways.  The heroes didn’t exactly dish out the full details at press conferences, afterward, so I could only make an educated guess.

Yeah, fair.

Either way, it was a delaying tactic.  Holding off the damage, in the hopes that we could end this or get reinforcements before Brockton Bay became another Newfoundland.

Honestly, at this point, it’s probably more accurate to call it Newlostland.

We were hoping for Scion.  The first cape, the golden skinned man.  The guy that could go toe to toe with an Endbringer and win, if things hadn’t already gone too far south.

Considering how incapable over a hundred capes working together have turned out to be against Leviathan, Scion’s abilities – beyond what we heard of in Interlude 1, which was fairly standard stuff, though still impressive – must be off the charts.

If Behemoth hadn’t already turned the area into a radioactive, magma-ridden wasteland.  If Leviathan hadn’t built up enough momentum with his waves.  If the Simurgh… Ok, the Simurgh was different, I had to admit.

Fire, water and (presumably) air! Called it!

But what’s different about the Simurgh?

The issue with her wasn’t so much winning the battle.  It was what came after.  Win every battle against her, lose the war, more or less.

That’s… ominous.

Maybe the Simurgh isn’t all that strong of a fighter, but due to her manipulative abilities, she causes a lot of conflict between the people? Or maybe some of her powers have delayed effects?

So I gathered more than one smaller swarm, clustering them in areas where it was dry.  The interior of the rusted van, under eaves, in doorframes and on a roof, under a large rain barrel.

This way she gives him multiple places to attack before he finds her.

Then, struck by a little inspiration, I condensed the nine swarms into human-ish shapes.

Eyy, the ghosting trick again!

Black silhouettes crouched, stood tall with arms akimbo, leaned against walls, leaned partially outside the driver’s side window of the van.  In the gloom, through the rain, it was deceptive.  Deceptive enough?  I couldn’t be sure.

Depends how perceptive Leviathan actually is, I suppose.

I felt the bite of cold air.  A chill breeze, going straight through the soaked fabric of my costume.  When I looked down to where the long road sloped to the edge of the water, I saw the reason for the chill.  Eidolon was flying at the coast, focusing blue rays on the water around the shattered boardwalk and debris at the water’s edge, hardening the waves into irregular sheets and glacier-like formations of ice.

Hm. But if that doesn’t go all the way down to the sea floor, doesn’t that just give Leviathan more to throw at the coast?

Dangerous.  I could remember seeing on TV that they’d tried something like this a few years ago.  A Tinker using an ice engine, I think.  I didn’t know exactly how or why, but judging by the fact that they hadn’t used the tactic again, I got the impression It had turned out really badly.

I guess maybe Eidolon missed that?

Perhaps it’s time to use the communicator and hear what’s up.

My guess was based on the notion that hydrokinesis was the movement of water, and ice was just water in another form.

I mean, fair. My reasoning was based on the ice being simply more hard debris floating in the water unless solidly attached to the sea floor.

It wasn’t that Leviathan would levitate the chunks of ice.  Nothing so blatant.  Rather, when a tidal wave did break through the ice, rolled up onto the battlefield with frozen shards and chunks caught up in the current, Leviathan might move those chunks a little faster in the wave’s passage, make them hit a little harder, and give them a tendency to strike where they could do the most damage.

So essentially, it’s resicetant, but he still has influence over it? Or at least that’s what Taylor thinks.

As they began gathering under the carport, my mind returned to that notion of being successful ‘prey’.

When I’d originally designed my costume, I’d picked the darker colors, made sure that the varieties of chitin I used to make the armor were spaced out so the individual shading would retain some ‘speckling’ after being painted, all for a reason.  Camouflage.

Nice.

And for once, she’s up against an enemy that can’t smell her or – presumably, since I don’t recall Leviathan having any ears – hear her.

I’d known I’d have my bugs all around me.  I’d known I would be standing in the midst of them while they gathered into swarms, would have them crawling on me from time to time.  So I’d picked darker colors and made my armor mottled to blend in with the bugs that were, obviously, specks.

Damn, that’s clever.

Just hiding inside my swarm wouldn’t be enough.  Too easy for him to attack just the one cluster, tear through me.

Hm, yeah. It’d maybe help against a human with a smaller-scale power, but Leviathan is a monstrosity with wide-hidding abilities.

I wiped the beads of water from my lenses with my glove, which only seemed to divide each of them into a mess of smaller droplets.  

Anyone who wears glasses knows how difficult this kind of thing can be.

Leviathan was bigger than me, stronger, faster, tougher.  I had to think like a mouse who might run into a murderous cat at any moment.  Like prey.  Use my small size.  Hide.

Sounds like a decent plan, but from there you still need to work on figuring out how to help. Hiding is what all the civilians are doing.

I needed a position that kept me out of sight, gave me a good vantage point, but left me free to make a run for it.  A spot where I had an escape route if things got bad.  To top it off, in the event Eidolon couldn’t stop the wave, I could also do with cover.

Sounds like you might want some height, but too much height makes it hard to have an escape route. That’s what got Tattle killed.

It was the sort of street you saw often enough in the Docks.  Large buildings lined either side, like giant boxes made of concrete or brick.  I could have maybe found a fire escape to climb up, in the hopes that I’d be out of reach of the wave, but my experience with Lung back on day one had taught me better.

Heh, yeah.

The higher ground was an advantage, sure, but if your opponent could get up or down from that location faster and more easily than you could, that stopped being an asset really damn quickly.

It suddenly becomes a trap.

If there was anything that was going to be useful, it would be on ground level.  I saw a rusted van that had sat in front of an old workshop since I’d first passed through this area, all tires flat, windows broken, interior gutted.

Hm. If not for the broken windows and Levvy’s way with water pressures, it could’ve made a decent wave shelter, but no.

A chain link fence stretched between two buildings, but someone had cut the wires that connected the fence to the frame, so half of it was curled back and waving slightly in the wind and rain.

The Docks really are a mess.

I was hurting, too.  The only thing keeping the throb of my arm from consuming my attention was the fear.  It was a kind of grim cycle:  the pain reminded me of why I should be scared, but the emotion and the adrenaline kept the pain as this intensely unpleasant background chatter in my brain, where it might have crippled me otherwise.

A pretty basic survival mechanic. Pain and fear are good for alerting you to danger, but it doesn’t help if it prevents you from doing something about that danger.

It was a teetering balance that had me on edge in a way I’d never experienced to this degree.  There were probably people who lived for that hypervigilant, heart-racing, brain-going-in-overtime experience.  I wasn’t one of them.

Yeeah, not really Taylor’s style.

Priorities.  Back to what I was thinking about – there obviously wasn’t anything to be found here that would win me a fight against Leviathan or even hurt him.  Ridiculous to think that way.  Any advantages to be gained would be ones that kept me alive.

That’s the first step towards winning a fight, anyway.

That’s an oddly hopeful way of saying she’s abandoning hope.

She isn’t, really. What she’s doing is abandoning hope that Leviathan will be Somebody Else’s Problem, hope that the others will defeat him, and putting that hope on herself instead. She knows, logically, that she’s not very fit for this battle, but she’s holding on to the hope that she can find a way to help nonetheless.

She’s not abandoning hope, she’s redirecting it.

Stuff I could use…  hardly.

Naturally.

It wasn’t like there was any weapon I could deploy, no feature of the terrain I could use to deliver the critical blow.  This was Leviathan.  

This was Leviathan and your power is to make insects do your bidding.

A creature that had killed more people in the last 12 years than I had even seen in my entire life.  Seen in person, anyways.

Nah, I think that holds true even without that qualifier.

Hell, you could swap out “the last 12 years” for “one day” and I still think it’d hold true. I doubt you’ve seen nine million people in total over the years.

…that said, I’m saying that as someone who lives in a minor town in a country of about five million.

I was scared.  A huge part of me wanted to just close my eyes and hope Leviathan didn’t come, that I wouldn’t have to deal with him.  It would be nice to join the three hundred and fifty thousand other Brockton Bay residents that were trusting the heroes to handle things, find a peace of sorts in surrender and helplessness.  Except I couldn’t.

Unless Taylor gets incredibly creative, she’s practically without powers here, but her heroic instinct forces her to do whatever she can to help nonetheless. Even though she’s nominally a villain, and even if it turns out she’s not able to save anyone except Clockblocker, just the fact that she’s still trying under these circumstances… that makes her a hero.

I’d seen firsthand how Leviathan had taken down some of the strongest capes.  I couldn’t find refuge in that kind of trust anymore.  My mental and emotional resources were better spent on figuring out how to help than they were on hope.

Yeah, that’s fair enough.

Beyond those first few moments after Leviathan woke up, it woul (sic) be anyone’s guess.

Then round 2 will be on.

Taylor mentioned orders. Where is she supposed to go, and what is she supposed to do there?

I hurried away from the site Armsmaster had indicated to me, my right hand on my left elbow, keeping my arm from moving too much.  Sector CC-7, a block and a half South, a block West.

Alright, well, that answers the first question, I guess.

So strange, to think that this was an area I’d walked through a dozen times, on my way to or from the Loft.  Now I was looking at it as a battlefield, trying to figure out what routes Leviathan would take.

Sometimes, home becomes a battlefield.

It sucks, but it’s the reality of it.

What things I had to watch out for – the grates leading down to the storm sewers, the rain barrel on top of one of the buildings that might or might not be intact enough to retain any water in it.  Puddles.

I wonder how much the storm drains have been able to do against Leviathan’s water echo and waves. Probably not all that much.

But they’re still threats. Sources of even more water for Levvy to fling around.

Too many others were capable of delivering the hurt, but were too fragile: Browbeat, Shadow Stalker, Lady Photon, Purity, Laserdream, Brandish and others I didn’t know.

The Ward with the crossbow, some guy with crimson skin.

Have I learned what Brandish’s power is? I don’t think I have.

There was a light show in the sky above as Kid Win teleported in pieces of the cannon he’d had at the bank robbery, manifesting them onto a hovering platform set directly in front of Leviathan.

Yesssss

The Tiro Finale is back, biches!

He’d get anywhere from a few seconds to a minute’s worth of concentrated fire with the gun firing on the highest settings, directing a beam through a gap in the bars to where Narwhal’s razor sharp forcefield had opened a gap in Leviathan’s neck.

Hell yes.