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.

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.