chapter 1
Feb 24, 2011
It's only been an hour since the winged Endbringer had descended upon Canberra, but the city looked like a battlefield. The Simurgh had deployed its favorite tactic: breaking the buildings in its immediate area and turning those fallen architecture into telekinetic debris shield.
Legend dove down, blasting nearly at lightspeed to dodge seven consecutive attacks thrown at him with broken buildings and debris ranging from a supersonic couch to a pinwheeling tower. He cleared the attacks, and stopped only to enter his Breaker form again as he found a literal wall flying at him. The wall clipped his Breaker form, which did nothing, and he finally got a clear line of sight to the Simurgh.
The thing about the Simurgh's debris shield was that it was an omnidirectional telekinetically orbiting debris in a near perfect shape of a sphere. Most of these were flying at speeds just half the speed of sound, and the Simurgh could easily accelerate any of those debris from zero to a hundred without even turning to look.
Getting a line of sight to her?
It meant nothing good.
And just as he thought this, he screamed out in pain when something slammed into his back and hurled him towards the Simurgh. Without even thinking about it, he entered his Breaker state again and flew high up into the air, blasting away from the Simurgh.
He came to a skidding stop and blinked.
Because he was staring at the Simurgh, yes, but he was also staring at something that he hadn't noticed in the battlefield.
There was a drag-
"[Incoming Unknown. Codename Wyrm, Appearance: 40 meter dragon.]"
The dragon abruptly stopped, as if it was aware of being spotted, and raised its body up.
It had a long body twice the thickness of a freight truck. It crawled on its eight legs, evenly spaced out across its body, and
'It's Kyushu all over again,' Legend thought as he stared at the giant creature that snaked out of nowhere into the battlefield, roaring loud enough to shake the world.
The Simurgh whirled around and looked surprised by the dragon's appearance.
"[I need Thinkers on Wyrm, stat!]" Alexandria shouted from his wristband.
"[This is Magarav, Thinker of Protectorate Seattle! Wyrm is about to engage the Simurgh!]"
"[Don't go near Wyrm and Simurgh-!]!"
The Simurgh pulled up the entire of its telekinetic debris shield, and flung it last bullets at Wyrm. With the debris field open, Legend fired down upon the Simurgh.
+++
Alexandria dove in and smashed her fist into the Simurgh, pushing the False Angel back. Simugh's face cracked from her assault, but the Simurgh did not retaliate. She kept her "eyes" glued onto the newcomer, Wyrm. Alexandria flew back for a second, her battleborn instinct screaming that something was coming but also to prepare for another assault.
The sound of rubble and debris breaking and scattering was the first sign.
The slight turn of her head gave her the overwhelming quick blur of gold growing ever so larger was the second sign.
The third and final sign that her instinct, despite how little she used it outside of battle, was right in steering her away.
Because that giant, overwhelmingly fast, and very loud streak of gold slammed into the Simurgh like a missile.
What happened occurred often in parahuman cape fights. The larger and seemingly more powerful cape - Wyrm - crashed into the seemingly weaker and fragile looking cape - Simurgh - and the smaller cape withstands the attack as if it was nothing.
The whole mass of the dragon, which was much larger and longer than the Simurgh, comically piled up vertically midair.
Then what happened caught her off-guard.
The Simurgh blasted Wyrm away, hurling it away like a giant ball of ropes. That's not what caught Alexandria off-guard.
What caught her off-guard was the Wyrm righting itself mid-air, hovering in place for a single second, before numerous bright pinpoint lights of varying colors began to appear with it at the center. Then they fired.
It was like watching Legend's lasers multiplied by God knows how many more. It was a circular curtain of bullets blasting towards the Simurgh, a few spinning towards the Endbringer, others shooting straight, and some zapping across the space like lightning.
For the first time since she appeared, the Simurgh dodged instead of taking hits or shielding herself. The Simurgh danced between the attacks, flying faster than a fighter jet, turning on a dime repeatedly in her attempt to lose the "bullets," and yet this still wasn't enough.
Many of the "bullets" fired by Wyrm curved with her, chasing her like guided missiles even as some of them exploded mid-chase. It was a light show of explosions and eruptions of red, greens, blues, and whites. Sometimes they overlapped to form purple and even black, and smoke rose up where a few of the "bullets" fell off-course and landed on the ground to explode with catastrophic results.
The Simurgh flew, zipping across the skies, skirting close to the ground, and even attempting to guide Wyrm's very missiles to it.
The Wyrm would have none of it.
Or rather, it saw through the Endbringer's ploy and let her approach it. When she was close and tried to dive down out of the way of the bullets, Wyrm lashed out with its four of its eight grapplers and held onto her.
The Simurgh's eyes widened in surprise.
And then a thousand and one bullets slammed into her.
Alexandria never saw more than a dozen missiles go off at any one point, so it was a revelation to see what a thousand missiles going off, one after another, on a singular target looked like.
Every quarter of a second, one of the thousand bullets slammed into the Simurgh and Wyrm, and the roar of the explosion engulfed everything everyone heard. For four straight minutes, everyone watched in awe and horror as the high noon sky of Australia grew brighter than the sun itself with each explosion.
As impressed by the firepower that exceeded what Legend would do, Alexandria watched for either of the two combatants to leave the explosions for those two minutes. As the last bullet slammed into the obscured duo within the explosions, everyone tensed. The high winds couldn't blow away the smoke fast enough. Alexandria tensed, a hair trigger away from launching herself up there to fight the False Angel.
And then she saw it.
The Simurgh and Wyrm, still hovering in the sky. Simurgh's own form was battered and cracked, but the Wyrm looked fine even if it was singed and bleeding from more than a few places.
It was clear here that it was the greater of the two.
Alexandria flew up at blinding speed as did Eidolon and Legend and a hundred different capes.
This was it!
If Wyrm could keep her in position, then they could beat her!
But that hope was lost when the Simurgh did something she had never done before.
She telekinetically grabbed Wyrm, and flung him.
Flung him so hard and so far that the initial throw caused Wyrm's skin to burn against the atmosphere as Wyrm found itself flung into the stratosphere. And the Simurgh turned to deal with the rest of the defenders.
Alexandria slammed into the Simurgh's abdomen and the battle begun anew.
+++
I roared angrily yet silently, unable to stop myself despite pushing all of my power into decreasing my speed.
That bitch had thrown me so fast and hard that my golden scales were being melted from atmospheric exit! Worse, I was losing my form without an enemy to fight!
"I'm going to fucking kill Eidolon!" I roared angrily as I finally fell below the clouds, but I was going down too fast! My powers weren't enough to slow me down like this!
I roared as I gathered even more oxygen underneath me to create an air cushion to slow my fall, but it wasn't good enough.
The forests below grew closer and closer, and I curled my long wyrm form up into a ball just before I struck the ground.
I hissed for a second as I felt the bones and muscles flatten like pancakes and then I felt the landing tossed me back up from rebound. The rebound uncurled me, and I slammed into trees and boulders before coming to a stop.
I groaned as I slowly got up on my eight - no, six - legs. I was already losing my transformation. "Fucking bitch-!" I hissed through my reptilian mouth, my snake-like tongue curling and snapping in anger as I trembled upright. My draconic form rapidly shrunk, and I went from six legs to four, going from hundred twelve feet to sixty and then to thirty and then to ten. I lost the draconic features - the reptilian head, scales, and extra body length - and shrunk down even further.
Finally reduced back to my fragile six foot and thin human body, I sat on the ruined forest floor with my back to a broken boulder.
"Fuck…" I hissed as let out a sigh of relief. I creened my head to the side until my neck popped and did the same to the other side. Then I jumped on my feet as if I hadn't been involved in a city-wide battle where firepower measured in tons of TNT hadn't been liberally thrown about.
I stiffened for a moment before growling.
Yeah, I was frustrated. I thought I had that battle in the palm of my hand. Clawed palm. Paw. Whatever. I lost a battle, and that irritated me. I needed to vent.
…
Well, I saw where I was going to land when I was high in the air. I knew that I was somewhere in North American east coast. Considering that there were a lot of forests and hills, I had to be in New England.
'When in New England and lost, walk east because the coast was where people lived in New England.'
With that little tidbit of self-made fact about New England, I began to walk, completely ignoring the six football field sized devastation and crater I made with my landing.
I rolled my shoulders a bit as I walked through the forest.
'Did I land on my shoulder?'
I brushed that thought away when the stiffness disappeared, leaving me comfortable in my own skin.
What began to take over my mind, though, was the fact that I was in a fictional universe. It was one thing to wake up naked in an alley - an experience I haven't had the pleasure of having before - but it was another thing to discover superhumans fighting angelic kaijus.
What really nailed it in was the fact that my body began to change when I perceived the threat. Along with the change came the knowledge of how tough I was and what powers were in my possession as well as a rough instruction on how to use them.
Considering that I made the Simurgh blast me away rather than continue to fight me head-on, I thought that I did a pretty good job for my first super-fight.
+++
?, 2011
Pushing a branch of the pine tree out of my face, I looked upon the beginnings of a suburban residential district.
"Finally," I growled. "Civilization."
I walked forward, unafraid of anything. After all, I fought Simurgh and threw her down with enough force that she opted to toss me out of the ring rather than continue to fight me, not even the Triumvirate got that kind of treatment.
So what did I have to worry about from this place?
I walked forward, uncaring of my nudity. I walked past the first house, next the first block, and then traveled deeper into the city. Slowly, people began to notice me, and some of them were shouting at me and pointing at me.
I didn't care. They were sheep. They were inferior. They were weak. Why did I have to care for the opinions of the sheep?
"You some kind of a freak?"
I stopped and turned my head towards the one who insulted me in my face.
It was a white boy - a teenager - with a shaved head and weird black and red tattoo beneath his eye. He stood at the center of a group of other shaved heads.
I blinked and stared at him for a second, then I grinned happily. "Oh! Am I in Brockton Bay, then?" I asked giddily. The knowledge that I had to be in Brockton Bay - because where else on Earth Bet were there English speaking idiots so brazenly approach someone out in the open - triggered something inside me.
A desire to claim this city as mine. My power told me that it was the price for receiving its gift: to be a dragon, I must act like a dragon.
My sudden question took them off guard. They stared at me for a second before one of the stoogies, the dumbest looking one with his mouth open and small eyes, responded to my question.
"Uh… Yes?"
I changed my toothless smile into a very toothy grin, showing them the shark-like rows of teeth.
"I always wanted to curbstomp some Nazis."
As I said this, my body began to grow and scales grew over my forearms and hands, culminating in all of my nails changing to claws.
"Oh shit-!" the lead E88 gangster shouted before I swiped at him.
The bystanders screamed when the lead gangster died in a spray of pulverized blood.
The gangsters screamed in shock and horror.
I screamed in ecstasy as I started the process of claiming the city as mine.
The other gangsters quickly turned on me with their fists, some bats, and a crowbar.
I laughed as I took a hit to the face, but my regeneration kicked in and my jaw healed over in an instant. I laughed, blood spraying from my lips as my face grew longer. My longer neck allowed me to snap out and bite down on the crowbar gangster, and he screamed as I ripped his shoulder and neck apart with a rip.
People began to run away, and even a few of the gangsters did too. I let them go. I needed them to call out their leaders.
My laughter became guttural as my vocal cord changed with my body. It became screechier, deeper, and echoey.
I bit the head off the last gangster on site, and spat it out. The head struck the ground and rolled away for a bit, coming to a stop before two armored people. I met eyes with them. A hating knight and a metal wolf.
By this point, I was more of a beast than a human. It was the unfortunate side effect of my power; it made me a beast that sought to kill my enemies mercilessly.
So when I saw those two, I just rushed them with m roaring open maw.
By this point, I was fifteen feet long.
The metal wolf lunged at me, and I brought my maw down upon it, and screeched when the metal wolf blurred within my mouth, breaking my teeth and cutting me all across the roof of my mouth and tongue. My regeneration kicked in, but I was bloodied nonetheless by the wolf first.
I launched it away with a snap of my head, and faced the knight. It said things to me, but I understood none of it. I just roared and lunged at it again, but metal spikes came out of the ground and its body, forming a barrier.
My body crashed into the barrier and tore through it, but I slowed down significantly because of it; I went from lunging fast enough to clear the four lane avenue we were fighting on in a second to taking three seconds to reach him.
The knight jumped away multiple times, laying down more and more of the iron spikes.
Angrily, I roared with my healed mouth and unleashed my electricity. Balls of electricity cracked to life around me, spinning around me lazily, and all of those balls turned into arrows and fired.
Electricity cracked down, searching for positive charges, and found them in the iron knight's metals.
The knight screamed as my lightning arrows struck his metals and electrocuted him.
Stunned, he was a sitting prey.
I charged at him again, only to be halted by the metal wolf crashing down upon my head from above.
The metal wolf, much smaller compared to me now then when I tossed it aside, pushed me down into the ground with how hard it landed on top of my head, and I felt the scales on the bottom of my jaw scrap against the asphalt road.
Then I promptly flicked my head back and watched in satisfaction as the wolf flew away.
Not wanting to be bothered by the small fry, I created ten more lightning arrows and hurled them at it. The bolts screamed as they burned through air, and then slammed into the wolf with enough physical force to send it flying further even as he was electrocuted.
I turned back to the iron knight, only to receive a giant spear to the temple of my draconic head. I growled and slid around the spear, showing the foolish knight that he had done absolutely nothing to me.
I roared and charged him again, and he raised his barriers again. This time, I was too big. I plowed through them, and the squealing of violently bending metals reverberated throughout the street.
Then I was upon him.
The knight screamed as my maw came down on top half of his body and clamped down.
The sensation reminded me of a grape squelching as it popped in my mouth. I threw my head up, opening my jaw, and the body of the knight flew high up into the air with my motion. As the knight ragdolled in the air, I relished in the screaming coming from the knight before …
Well.
Dragon breath.
Fire erupted from the base of my throat and burned everything in front of my mouth. The knight took the fire and his screaming was instantly drowned out by the roaring inferno. I trailed the knight down as he fell, and stopped burning the knight just before it struck the ground. I saw the knight splat on the ground with his melting armor, but the knight remained silent.
He was dead.
I huffed in disappointment.
The Smirugh fight had been exciting. This … this was disappointing.
The metal wolf was back, but remained at the edge of my current striking range. I turned to it, and blew out a twin jet of smokes from my nostrils.
It growled … and then retreated with its tail between its legs.
I lifted my head up and roared in triumphant, shaking the glasses of all of the buildings around me.
+++
I didn't stay there after that. I stalked deeper into the city, borrowing the somehow unburned and not bloodied clothes of first group of Nazis I killed.
With a hoodie, a pair of jeans, and a pair of boots too big for me, I walked right past the PRT troopers, their vans, and their Protectorate heroes rushing towards where I was before.
I chuckled as I thought about where I would set up my territory, ignoring the chaos and the bewildered stares of people looking towards where I'd come from but not at me.
As I walked away though, the only thing I was thinking about was where I would settle down.
+++
Taylor Hebert, April 8th, 2011
After a long day of dealing with her asshole bullies and indifferent classmates and coming to an empty home, she finally had enough. She did done all of the preparations she needed to take, and the only delay was her will.
And she was done dealing with bullshit. She wanted to be free. She wanted more than what she had.
She would become a hero tonight!
So that had been the plan.
Taylor's plans were simple: patrol around the Docks South, which was where her home was. The internet had a lot of detailed analysis of patrolling and their effectiveness, so she had chosen one "proven" method of patrolling used frequently by independent heroes and vigilantes. Instead of appearing out in the open, she needed to stay hidden. This was part of the reason why she had gone for her dark costume. It let her camouflage.
That much, she had done well. The actual patrolling was going nowhere.
She knew the new big thing in Brockton Bay: Wyrm.
He was first spotted in Canberra, Australia, and he fought against the Simurgh. Someone actually recorded a Simurgh fight and released it on the internet. There was initially a fear that the Simurgh might be able to Master someone through "memetic" effects, but it turned out to be false.
What turned out to be horrifying was the fact that another dragon cape had appeared to fight an Endbringer, and the Endbringer opted to toss him far away from her rather than fight back against him.
She'd thrown Wyrm so far that he landed in New Hampshire after completing a full orbit of the Earth.
That cape came to Brockton Bay, and his first act as a cape outside of his Endbringer battle was to kill a bunch of gangsters of the Empire Eighty-Eight, the local white supremacy/Neo-Nazi cape gang, and then fought Kaiser, the leader of the E88, and Hookwolf, Kaiser's cape lieutenant, before roasting the man to death.
His death had been catastrophic for the bay. The Empire broke apart after Krieg fought with Hookwolf over the leadership of the gang. This fight split the gang into two: those who followed Krieg and those who followed Hookwolf. Thanks to the new bad blood between their two leaders, Krieg's "Aryan Supremacy Party" and Hookwolf's "Fenrir's Chosen" fought more often between themselves than anyone else.
Outside of the E88, people feared that Lung, the leader of the Azn Bay Boyz, would use the opportunity to expand his territory, and he would have if he didn't run into Wyrm. Apparently, some kind of accord was made between the two dragon capes, and Lung opted to expand northward instead of deeper into the city.
And Wyrm, the killer of Kaiser?
He came to reside in Docks South.
'And it's probably why there's no gangsters here,' Taylor thought dejectedly.
Wyrm made his claim to Docks South very loudly, not just vocally (roaring as a hundred feet dragon tended to make things very loud) but also on the internet.
His letter to Brockton Bay, posted on Parahuman Online forums, was very clear and concise.
[Stay the fuck out of the Docks South if you are a cape or PRT. It's mine now. -Signed, Wyrm.]
He even took the moniker that people have been calling him by.
… It was stupid of her to be patrolling here, wasn't it? But this was the only place that she could patrol and not be late to be back home for even just a few hours of sleep for tomorrow.
"... kill those children."
She froze, and when she did so, she finally heard a sound that had been in the background.
It was a slither of a very large creature. The asphalt growled with the passing of ten million scales, and Taylor found herself horrified.
Wyrm.
It had to be Wyrm!
Wyrm was right next to her!
… And he was going to kill children.
Taylor felt her shoulders droop, and her head tilted just a bit up into the air.
… Could she just run away? Save her own skin?
She thought about it very hard.
No.
'I would hate myself for it. I am not them,' she thought to herself, thinking about her indifferent classmates and the worst ones, those who pitied her but did nothing to help her. She would not be like them.
She tilted her head back down and took in a deep breath.
'Oh God. I'm going to die,' she thought to herself before reaching out with her insects. This brought her another bone-chilling fact; Wyrm was already forty feet long.
Despite possessing a very similar power compared to Lung, Wyrm outdid the older Asian dragon when it came to all aspects of his power. He regenerated faster and more thoroughly, he controlled more "elements," but ultimately, he grew larger faster from the same stimuli.
She gulped. She was already at a disadvantage. The video recording of Wyrm's fight with E88 made it clear just how powerful his mass was in a cape fight.
After all, all it took for a forty foot Wyrm to remove Hookwolf as an asset on the battlefield was just flick his head back hard and Hookwolf got thrown far away. Like a whole block away.
She had to … she had to hit hard and dirty.
She gathered her swarm of bugs, gathered them behind buildings, and … stepped out of the shadows.
She found herself staring right at Wyrm.
Her legs trembled as she took in the sight of the cape that even Simurgh did not want to fight.
"Hmm? A cape in my land?"
"S-Stop!" she demanded. "Or I will be forced to stop you!"
Wyrm's draconic head stared at her before he reeled back began to screech loudly …
Was he laughing at her?
"I'm strong!" she shouted at him. He just kept laughing. "W-What is your-?!" she growled before deciding that enough was enough. She brought out her entire swarm. "Surrender!"
Wyrm looked down at her, coiling himself up like a snake. His front most two arms/legs crossed like human arms, and the look he was giving her. It was telling her that he was very unimpressed.
Before she could open her mouth again, she felt a whoosh as the wind picked up. Her hair blew backward, but she stood her ground on trembling legs and spine.
Then she noticed it.
Her swarm began to die.
"W-What?!" she looked around.
Her entire swarm just … dropped dead.
She was alone. Weaponless. Powerless.
Alone with a dragon.
Then the dragon was upon her. It lunged forward and struck with a single hand from his second set of arms. Its index finger struck her with the tip of his claw on her chest and she gasped once and then choked out a scream when her back and head struck the ground together.
The claw on her chest remained, and thankfully, her costume hadn't torn open.
Instead, she felt the slowly mounting pressure.
She quickly latched onto the claw that was as big as her head and tried to move it.
Nothing.
She shouted and grunted but nothing happened.
The pressure began to transition into pain, and she screamed.
She was going to die.
She was going to die.
She choked on her sob even as the pressure continued to rise.
"I-I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" she shouted when the pain began to unbearable.
The mounting pressure halted.
Wyrm slowly began to change, becoming smaller. The pinning pressure was still on her chest but it was nowhere near as painful as it had been.
The worm-like dragon was now humanoid, having shrunk to ten feet tall. He had a tail, but he was definitely draconic. He stood over her, pinning her down with what used to be his second set of arms, which were now legs.
"It sucks being a big dragon," he crooned. "Lose a bit of my sanity and reasoning, you see."
She shuddered.
"It's the price of my power. The bigger and more powerful I become, more beastly and uncontrollable I am."
She didn't say anything.
"Now, I believe you said a few very stupid things to me," he said as he reached down and grabbed her mask. Then he pulled it off her before she could stop him.
"No!" she tried to shield her face with her arms.
"... I've seen you before. You were with that balding man."
She froze.
"He must be your dad?" he asked, and she felt him smile. It was a shift in the atmosphere. "He is your dad, isn't he?"
She trembled beneath him, and started to sob. She made a very bad mistake. Dad was going to be dragged into this!
"I could kill you here and just be done with it, but no. I would get nothing out of this. I was supposed to be chasing the bandits that stole from me. Teenagers like you. Children. I'd been thinking about whether I should kill them but you came and distracted me." He leaned down. "I want you to compensate me."
"B-But y-you're a v-v-"
"Are you really in a position to argue with me?"
She fell silently.
"W-What do you want?"
He cocked his head to the side before he looked up and down at her.
"A lot of things but mostly territory, women, and family."
She stilled. "N-No."
"Yes. Remember, I know who your dad is."
She shook her head and sobbed. "N-No, please, no no-!"
"Is that your final answer?"
She cried. She should have just stayed home. She should have been smart.
He let her cry for a few minutes before he upped the pressure on her chest. She hiccuped and gasped as she grabbed onto his feet.
"Is a life as someone's woman really that bad? Is it worse than death?"
She glared at him, but without her glasses, she couldn't see much details, especially in the dim light of the abandoned street.
"Fine," she spat out.
"Excellent. I've been rather frustrated. We can get started right away." With that, he removed his foot from her chest. Instead, he reached down and picked her up by her waist before tossing her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
"To your home, of course. I want your dad's blessing for our marriage."
Huh?
Huh?!
WHAT?!