A hand seized the pole of the Halberd, heaved me up, changed its grip to my right wrist and pulled me up and free of the waves.

Ooh!

I’m gonna guess that this is Grue.

When I blinked my eyes clear of water, Laserdream was above me.

Ah, no. Alright, Laserdream’s good too. Better, in fact, as far as Taylor’s survival goes.

She faced the epicenter of the growing depression in the ground, flying backwards.  Her other hand clung to an unconscious Parian.  It seemed like the two of us were too much for her to carry alone, because she hurried straight for a nearby rooftop, carefully lay Parian down.

Is she going to be in any way “safe” up there, though? It’s only a matter of time before the sinkhole takes the building too.

We hadn’t set down for more than ten seconds before the building shuddered and began to collapse.

See what I mean?

The ground beneath the building cracked and tilted, no doubt because the underlying soil and rock was being drawn away by churning water.  The flooding in the streets was diverted into the deepening bowl-shaped cavity Leviathan was creating, filling it.  It was almost a lake, now, three city blocks across and growing rapidly.

Another piece of damage that’s gonna be hard to repair. If Brockton Bay survives, they’re probably gonna have to live with having a new lake downtown, at least unless they find some highly powerful terraforming parahuman.

Only fragments of the taller buildings in the area stayed above the waves; some buildings were already toppled onto their sides, others half-collapsed and still breaking apart as I watched.

Should’ve invested in house boats.

Some capes were climbing out of the water and onto the ruined buildings, with the help of the more mobile capes.  Velocity and Trickster were working in tandem, Velocity running atop the water’s surface to safe ground, trickster swapping him for someone who was floundering, rinse, repeat.

Cool!

Trickster’s kind of a dick as far as we’ve seen and heard, but his power is neat.

The Endbringer descended, and the area around him quickly became a massive indent, ten, fifteen, thirty, then sixty feet across, ever growing.  The force of the water pouring into the crater began to increase, and the ground underfoot grew increasingly unsteady as cracks spread across it.

I have a sinking feeling about this.

That top-heavy body of his toppled forward, and it was only his right claw, slamming down to the pavement, that stopped his face from being driven into the ground.  The impact of his claw striking the ground rumbled past us.

The rumble didn’t stop.

Shit.

Shiiit.

I have a feeling he’s not just pulling up the storm sewers again.

“Run!” I shouted, my cry joining the shouts of others.  I turned, sloshed through the water to get away, not sure where to get away from, or to.

Leviathan and the ground beneath him sank a good ten feet, and water swirled and frothed as it began pouring to fill the depression.

Yep.

It begins.

He used his arm to shield himself as Purity fired another blast from above.  As the ground beneath him continued to sink, the water lapped higher and higher around him.

So is he trying to escape down into the aquifer by staying in the sinkhole?

Briefly blinded, he shook his head ponderously, using his afterimage and one swipe of his claw to clear his vision.  He scampered back as his sight was obscured yet again by one of Grue’s blasts.

Hmm. Attacking the eyes might actually be the best bet here. Leviathan doesn’t seem to have any other external sensory organs, except maybe touch. If you can blind him on a slightly more permanent basis, he’s in trouble.

That said, he can probably still sense the positions and movements of water around him like Taylor does with bugs.

He lunged forward, stumbling into and out the other side of the cloud of darkness.  A swipe of his tail batted the metal-skinned boy away.  Another strike dispatched Brandish, who was moving in to attack with a pair of axes that looked as though they were made from lightning.

Brandish down, BW-8

Ooh, summoning electric/elemental weaponry? Cool.

Flechette fired one needle into the center of Leviathan’s face, between each of his four eyes.  It buried itself three quarters deep, speared out the back of his head.

In your FACE!

Literally.

He reared back, as if in slow motion, stumbled a little.  His face pointed to the sky.  He teetered.

Yeah, no.  Much as I’d like to to be, there was no fucking way it was going to be that easy.

Nah, he ain’t dead. Hell, you might not even have as much of an upper hand as it seems. Just look at how he acted in the fight against Arm(s)master.

The boy with the metal skin formed one hand into an oversized blade,

I’d be saying the same thing about Weld as I did about Flechette just a moment ago, but thankfully we readers learned his name in Interlude 7, so my frustration over Taylor not knowing it isn’t quite as high.

I’m sure she’ll learn it in time, one way or another.

as long as he was tall, managed a solid hit at Leviathan’s injured knee as the Endbringer whirled around to face Flechette.

Good. It seems like people are generally attacking the knee now, having identified it as a weakened spot. Which of course is helpful, since the more his movement is hampered, the better.

Leviathan slapped the teenage hero down, swiped at one of my swarm-people, then was forced down onto all fours as Purity struck him square between the shoulderblades with a column of light.  A metal shelving unit shot from the interior of a store, Ballistic’s power, I was almost positive, and made Leviathan stumble back.

So far this chapter is going pretty well. No one’s died yet, except for Sir Tony and the other stuffed animals, and not that many people are down.

Let’s hope I didn’t just jinx it.

We had the upper hand, but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.  More than once, in the past hour alone, the Endbringer had demonstrated that any time the fight was going against him, he’d pull out all the stops and do something large scale.  A tidal wave or tearing up the streets.

Right.

We did not have what it took to withstand another wave.  No forcefields, no barriers.

Aren’t you at least somewhat in from the coast? I’m not sure, but if you are, that might help a little.

I had one of my gathered swarms explode into a mass of flying insects as they got close enough to Leviathan, make their way against the drenching rain to rise up to Leviathan’s face.  Many clustered in the recessed eye sockets that looked like tears or cracks in his hard scaled exterior.  Others crawled into the wounds other capes had made.

Nice! I don’t think there’s much they can do there, other than maybe blinding Leviathan or making it easier for you to track his precise movements, but nice.

Shadow Stalker down, BW-8.

Ah, yeah, taking half of Hookwolf to the head doesn’t sound pleasant.

I didn’t recognize the next cape to charge in to attack.  A heroine in a brown and bronze bodysuit.  She flew in low to the ground, gathered fragments of rock and debris around her body like it was metal and she was the magnet, then went in, pummeling with fists gloved in pavement and concrete.

Cool!

You could tell, almost right away, the woman didn’t have much training or experience.  She was used to enemies that were too slow to move out of her way, who focused their attention wholly on her.  Leviathan ducked low to the ground, letting the heroine pass over him, then leapt for Flechette.

“Here, let me let you through…”
“But I wanted to hit you.”
“Oh, I can’t let you do that.”
“Rude.”

In the very last fraction of a second, the girl flickered, and was replaced by the brown-suited cape, who took the hit and stumbled back, fragments of rock breaking away.

Trickster?

Flechette dropped out of the sky where the cape had been, landed hard.  It took her a few seconds to recover enough to fire another bolt at Leviathan, strike him in the shoulder.  Trickster had just spared brown-suit from making a fuck-up that got someone killed.

Nice.

Leviathan used his claws to heave Hookwolf off his face, tore the metal beast in half, and then threw the pieces down to the ground, hard.

Welp.

One landed straight on top of Shadow Stalker, the other almost seemed to bounce, rapidly condensing into a roughly humanoid form before it touched the ground again, landing in a crouch.  Hookwolf backed away, the blades drawing together into a human shape, skin appearing as they withdrew.

Huh. Are you sure you’re not Hookworm?

He brought his hand over his head and pointed forward at Leviathan.  A signal for the next front-liner.

Yeah, this sounds like the kind of experience you’d want to switch out after.

“Careful!” the crossbow-girl – Flechette, I took it – replied, loading another shot.

Shadow Stalker timed her advance with a pounce on Hookwolf’s part.  Empire Eighty-Eight’s most notorious killer latched onto Leviathan’s face and neck, blood spitting around where the storm of shifting metal hooks and blades made contact with flesh.  

Nice!

Shadow Stalker ran within twenty feet of the Endbringer, firing her twin crossbows.  The shots penetrated this time, disappearing into Leviathan’s chest, presumably fading back in while inside him.

Oh right, that’s part of her power – the crossbow bolts have the same kind of fading Shadow Stalker herself can do. By getting closer, she made it so that the bolts don’t have time to fade back in before they hit Levvy.

Flechette fired a needle through Leviathan’s knee, and the Endbringer’s leg buckled.  He collapsed into a kneeling position, the knee striking the ground.

Sweet!

Huh, y’know, with how Flechette’s projectiles are consistently described as needles, I can’t help but wonder if Parian’s telekinesis would work on them.

It wasn’t much, I didn’t have many bugs gathered here yet, but I was able to pull some together into humanoid forms.  I sent them moving across the battlefield towards Leviathan.

Nice. Distractions!

If one of them delayed him a second, drew an attack that would otherwise be meant for someone else, it would be worth the trouble.

Yeah!

I looked around, trying to find Brandish, Chevalier, Assault or Battery, or even someone tough.  Someone that could take the Halberd and make optimal use of it.

Hm, good idea, but I have a feeling you’ll end up using it yourself, somehow.

One of crossbow-girl’s shots,

Can somebody tell Taylor this girl’s name already?

like a needle several feet in length, speared under the side of Leviathan’s neck, out the top.  Shadow Stalker’s shots, at the same time, failed to penetrate Leviathan’s hard exterior.

Huh, I guess hers are more powerful.

“Flechette!  I’m getting closer!” Shadow Stalker called out, looking back at her new partner.

Thank you.