Anyone else might have been staggered in the face of several tons of water moving forward at the speed of a locomotive.  Alexandria intertwined her fingers, swung her arms forward as though she were holding a baseball bat, and cracked her hands against the image a second before she disappeared headlong into it.

Didn’t we see her do this in 8.2 or Interlude 8 as well?

There was a sound like a bomb going off, water spraying everywhere, followed by an earthshaking crash as Alexandria used the crook of her arm to catch Leviathan around the neck and heaved him backwards and onto the ground.

…damn

Let’s just say I understand why nine-year-old Taylor liked Alexandria so much.

She’s wrestling the mini-kaiju. That’s badass as fuck.

Our progress was agonizing.  Move too slowly, and we fell behind, move too fast as we waded through the trash-ridden water, and we risked falling, lost precious time.

And lives.

Had to find the middle ground, and we weren’t moving fast enough even if we did find that sweet spot.  Hell, it would have been kinda difficult even without my burden.

Yeah, this is a pretty vulnerable situation.

Chubster down, CD-5. Good Neighbor deceased, CD-5.  Hallow deceased, CD-5.

On some level, I feel like Wildbow is getting less serious with these cape names. 😛

Sham, Harsh Mistress (probably has gravity powers), Woebegone (healer?), Chubster, Good Neighbor…

It was Alexandria who speared forward to confront Leviathan.  He saw her coming, ceased his onslaught to rear back and then lunge ahead to meet her.  When they were only fifteen feet apart, he stopped, let his water echo rush forward to meet her.

I don’t fully get how he can do this. If the water appears in the space he vacates, then he’s in the way of it. You could argue that it appears in front of him due to rearing back as he stops, but that water should have backwards momentum, just like the parts of him that rear back, right?

I wanted to apologize for not having a better power to help this person, but the breath would have been wasted.  It was hard work to help him along, to slog through the water.

Maybe if Taylor had found someone with the power to make animals grow or shrink to team up with, she could control a swarm of giant bugs to pick up wounded or fallen capes.

The fight was ongoing, with a dozen heroes in Leviathan’s vicinity, more than twenty others shooting at him from range whenever there was a clear shot.

pew pew pew

Yet more were on the fringes, to keep him from slipping past the combatants and to take the place of the fallen.

Ah, yeah, there’s been a bit of an “only a few at a time” mentality going on here.

It wasn’t enough – the damage we were doing was negligible and his long strides were advancing him further and faster than the rest of us could back away through the water.  Trash and debris threatened to trip us up with every step we took.

Water is notoriously slow to move through, especially when it’s getting above your knees.

He forced a fighting retreat, moving quickly and often enough to avoid being caught by any concentrated fire.

Coddamn speedsters…

“What can I do?” I asked the bird-costume.

“Leg,” he said, voice strained, “Help me stand.”

His left leg, I realized, was smashed into pulp from the knee down.

Ouch.

I crouched, helped him get his arm over my shoulders, and used my legs to heave both of us into a standing position.  The bird-costume was below average in weight for a teenage guy, but it wasn’t exactly easy.  He was wearing armor.

Historical armor is supposedly lighter than one would expect, but it’s certainly not weightless. Besides, this is probably not historical armor.

I might not have been able to get both of us up to a standing position like that if it weren’t for my weeks of running.

Hey, training is paying off!

He leaned on me heavily with each step forward, and we retreated from the front lines.  Someone with the ability to fly landed not far from me to pick up the man with the gaping wound across his torso, flew off with him.

Good to know he’s at least being taken care of by someone.

Two seconds later, a teleporter blinked into existence near us, touching two fallen capes, and disappeared with them and a bathtub’s worth of water.

Beep beep, the hearseaporter’s here.

Lashing out with tail and claws, he was advancing steadily through the ranks of defenders.  The occasional strike from a strong hero or one of the ranged combatants slowed him, made him stumble, if it hit in the right spot or pushed him off balance.

Stumble, but not much more, huh?

I hesitated to get closer.  I hated myself for doing it.  I was here for a reason, to do something.

And you found something to do, but damn it’s a scary something.

Legend fired a salvo of lasers at Leviathan, and the beams turned at right angles to strike Leviathan in precise areas, knocking his feet from under him, slamming him down into the road, catching him under the chin.

Shooting lasers around corners is such a silly idea for a superpower. It’s also awesome and I love it.

Leviathan raised a hand, and a geyser of water rose to block more incoming lasers.

Hm… fair enough. The transparency of water will only get you so far.

Legend’s lasers simply turned at angles to circle around Leviathan, strike the Endbringer from behind.  They left Leviathan so hot that his flesh glowed a yellow-orange around the areas they struck him.

Ooh! That’s the closest I’ve seen to Leviathan actually getting wounded so far.

As tough or invincible as a given cape might be, most were still hemmed in by the restrictions and boundaries of physics.

Arguable, but go on.

Getting hit by something that weighed nearly nine tons sent men, women, boys and girls in costume flying, if it didn’t kill them outright.

Oof.

Leviathan’s echo added surprising quantities of water to the battlefield.  Every step and movement he made, he filled the space he’d just left with water.

I don’t find it all that surprising. There are three main factors to how much water he leaves behind: how he moves, how fast he moves, and how big he is. As a huge and quick being, he’s gonna leave behind a lot of the stuff.

How much water did it take to displace something as big as he was?  However much it was, he created something like three times that amount when he took a single step forward, when you accounted for the space his body moved through.

And given how quickly he can take steps forward…

A hard amount to eyeball, because it had the same momentum his movements had, and some of it crossed great distances as he lunged and clawed his way through the front line of capes.

This is kind of odd, though. If he creates water behind his movement and it moves as quickly as he does or faster in the same direction, won’t a lot of the water just hit him in the back? That said, I get how claws can get out of the way by swinging, leaving the water to act like he’s throwing it.