He was fast.

Fast enough that his clawed hands and feet didn’t touch the road beneath the water – after the initial push, his forward momentum was enough to let him run on the water’s surface.

As long as he keeps moving, at least, but I have a feeling water never particularly hinders Leviathan.

Fast enough that before I could finish drawing in a breath, to scream or shout something or gasp in horror, he was already in the middle of us, blood and water spraying where he collided with the lines of assembled capes, and the armbands were beginning to announce the hopelessly injured and deceased.  Carapacitator down, CD-5.  Krieg down, CD-5.  WCM deceased, CD-5.  Iron Falcon down, CD-5.  Saurian down, CD-5…

Let the bloodbath begin.

No pun intended.

I looked around, saw the other heroes and villains composing themselves, climbing to their feet in the knee deep rush of water.  A few fliers were conveying our ranged combatants up to the rooftops.

Wasting no time, I see.

At the end of the road, downhill, was the Boardwalk, or what was left of it.  From what I could see through the downpour, the wooden pathways and docks had been shattered by the initial wave, to the point that many were standing nearly straight up, or were buckled into fractured arches.  Water frothed and sprayed as it rushed back against the ragged barrier that had been Brockton Bay’s high end shopping district.

R.I.P. the Boardwalk.

I think I’ll count that as a death for tagging purposes, and that’s before considering that it might not have been empty when the wave hit.

He was there, too.  I could see his silhouette through the rain and the spraying water that was the tidal wave’s aftermath, much as I had on the television set.  Thirty feet tall, the majority of him was was muscled but not bulky.

Ah, okay, so he is huge. I had just begun to think he might not be.

He’s not quite as huge as the Lovecraftian monstrosities would’ve been, but still a lot bigger than a regular human.

His hunched shoulders, neck and upper torso were the exception, bearing cords of muscles that stood out like steel cables.  It gave him a top-heavy appearance, almost like an inverted teardrop with limbs and a tail.

Not gonna lie, the comparison to steel cables just made me think of Weld.

So Leviathan has a tail, huh?

…I just realized what a suitable comparison might be. We’ve got a tailed monster attacking a city, with associations to natural disasters, being fought against by the locals and other parts of an organization in this case sort of analogous to the army.

It’s a kaiju movie. Leviathan is like a kaiju.

Although admittedly he’s a really small one compared to even the smallest iteration of Godzilla.

“Kyushu, the night of November second and the morning of the third, 1999.  His sixth appearance.

At least it doesn’t sound like the Endbringers appear super often overall.

Nine and a half million killed when the region was swamped with tidal waves from every direction while Leviathan disrupted prearranged evacuation attempts.  Nearly three million evacuees rendered homeless, a nation sundered.

Brutal.

“These were errors, grave mistakes from defending heroes.  We had but one strategy at the time – to hem him in, minimizing the effects of growing waves and casualties until Leviathan was beaten into a retreat or Scion arrived.

Hm. Does Scion scare him away? Or just kinda pick him up and cart him off somewhere?

These areas, however, were too vulnerable.  Waiting let Leviathan build up the strength of his attacks, and we lost.”

Does he get stronger the longer he fights, kind of like Lung, or is it simply a matter of him building up more… ammo in the form of sea water? Something like that?

He went on, “Were it just that, this fight might still warrant a show of force like what we’ve gathered here.  But things are more serious than that, which brings me to our primary concern.  As much as Dragon and Armsmaster’s advance warning might give us the opportunity to make this a good day, other issues threaten to make it just the opposite.

Hrm. So besides the early warning, things are even worse than usual, huh?

“I spoke of Leviathan as a hydrokinetic.  I can’t state this enough – Leviathan is primarily a hydrokinetic on a macro scale.  There is no better illustration than the days where Leviathan won.

…tsunamis? Floodings? That kind of thing?

Or worse, we stop getting all this rain in buckets and get it in one big droplet?

“Newfoundland,” he spoke.

I knew exactly what he was speaking of, and mouthed the date as he spoke it, “May ninth, 2005.  Nearly half a million dead. 

Rest in peace.

Mondays, am I right?

The Canadian island simply gone, after the shelf of land holding it up cracked in the face of what we now understand were incredible pressures beneath the water level.

Damn.

Welcome to beautiful Newfoundland, Atlantis.