Wake-up Call – Chapter 79
[Chevalier]
Uncountable figures of light and shadow move around me, their many-jointed limbs reaching beyond my power's sight, bringing out thunder, flame, light, and a thousand things I don't have the words for so that their bearers can wield them.
My blood roars.
And my sword [sings].
Light in my hand like the fencing saber it is, heavy on Behemoth's shoulders like the engineering project it also is, the blade I've finally been granted permission to use a thing so heavy and long that the metal almost collapsed into itself before I could join it with my weapon. And then I reinforced it with a dagger made of palladium glass and sharpened it with a monofilament wire held in a bath of argon so it wouldn't oxidize before I could join it to the other three pieces.
I can flick it with my wrist, my [fingers].
And every time I do, every time I whip the edge between the other attackers unleashing torrents of burning thunder against the Hero Killer, shards of obsidian scatter away in the wake of my attack.
I am wounding him.
I am [killing him].
And I've never been happier.
***
[Thirteen]
The foreigners' plan worked.
I know One won't be happy. That he wanted the glory of us leading the world to the first defeat of an Endbringer.
I know that I will agree with him as soon as I meet him. That I will lament how we lost the initiative today. That I will understand that sacrifices should be made, losses accepted, so long as they will lead the CUI to its place atop the world's leading nations.
I know that what I feel now will be a discordant note. A memory to be walled off.
I know a lot of things.
Yet, as I wield the plethora of powers my teammates allow me, as I set my own forcefield in front of us while angling Thirty-One's lasers around our barriers to cut deep into the abominations stone flesh, as I allow Twenty-Three's borrowed senses to guide my shots, to let me know where each and every single one of the combatants will be at any moment so that no friendly fire can occur in this triumphant moment…
I know joy.
Exultation.
And not even One will take this away from me.
***
[Purity]
He's… thrashing.
Uncoordinated, flailing, stumbling on rubble he destroys just by being near it.
Hookwolf is a half-melted puddle of glowing steel, dragging himself away, crawling pathetically out of the range of the aura I can feel warming the air wafting up toward me.
But…
But Behemoth is [falling].
Everyone is shooting everything they have at him, the barrage of parahuman powers too confusing for me to keep track of, and I yearn to join them, to unleash my own bolts, to add my name to the list of those who will kill an Endbringer today.
I look nervously over my shoulder at Eidolon and Legend floating behind me, and the leader of the Protectorate, still in his light form, shakes his head.
I nod and gather the Sun's burning light between my hands.
As soon as Behemoth blindly gropes for the wall of a collapsed building to his left, I blow it up, nothing but stone dust remaining in his mutilated claws.
It feels as though he looks up at me, but his red eye is now a dull, matte black.
He's blind.
So he won't see my light.
***
[Rune]
She can't be serious.
I look at her, at the black-suited woman with her arms crossed while flying over a roaring river, and my thoughts must be quite clear on my face because her answering, dismissive eye-roll is clearly implied in the way Alexandria's shoulders shift.
"Think of it as power testing," she tells me with the same careless tone she always uses with me. The one I can't complain about being bitchy, but that [definitely] implies some bitchiness.
Look, I've been to juvie. I [know] bitchiness.
Heck, I see it every day in the mirror.
So, trying not to be a bitch while people are likely dying downstream, I look at the… At what I think may be a baby mountain.
And prepare to have my power tested.
***
[Lisa]
There's too much to keep track of.
[Prioritizing of—]
Yes, I know, that's what I've Taylor and you for, but still…
It's hard to look away.
Because every single monitor arranged for my viewing pleasure in Colin's workshop is showing me a mélange of colorful attacks, brief flares of insight sometimes letting me know what the intended effect is before they are used on Behemoth's staggering form, the giant flaring out an occasional wave of radiation intense enough to make the air around him visibly waver despite the nanite swarm feeding on as much of the energy as it can manage as it keeps growing, feeding on the monster's flesh.
I can see the Yangban's coordinated strikes, all thirty-nine beams focused on a single spot right below his hip, apparently trying to amputate his right leg as the red-clad capes fly around, accelerating on the metal shrapnel from destroyed houses below them, turning every dizzying, abrupt change in direction into an impossible corkscrew they somehow transmit to their beams just so they can reach deeper still.
That's the monitor in front of me.
The one above it, in one of its quadrants, shows me Battery glowing in almost blinding light, the woman taking longer and longer between strikes, testing the limits of her power and her husband's beyond what they've ever managed before, the boulders that the bulky ward sets for them melting from sheer air friction before they plow into Behemoth's chest, cratering it as the monster stumbles back.
To the left, the monitor showing me the healer's camp tells me it's still thankfully underworked. That the teleporters set around key spots in the battlefield have yet to evacuate any injured fighters other than the few unlucky capes who got wounded when Purity first failed to parry the debris thrown around by Behemoth.
Under that, I see more massed Blasters. Most of their powers are ineffective, relying on heat, light, electricity, or any of the things under Behemoth's purview. But, sometimes, one of them manages something unexpected. Something that I can make use of. That we may get a win out of.
That's when I make a note and assign them their own quadrant, ready for a new plan to spring out of unforeseen connections, from things Dinah and I had no way of learning before this started.
There's a man wearing a condor's mask that makes loose pieces of rock around him shoot out fast enough to deafen careless capes too near him. He's a Mover, so his power is acceleration, and—specializing in small objects? How small? Does water count as a single object? Does he fly by rushing individual air molecules against him? How would he fare against Leviathan's echo?
Another quadrant shows a woman wearing an Artic fox's mask and what looks like a kimono's jacket over grey leggings, her white, waving tail moving far too naturally to be a prosthetic, so she's either a Changer or a case 53. She wields silver flames, but they don't burn.
They [devour].
She's cleared the field around her allies from any rubble obscuring sightlines, limiting herself to that because she needs to touch the target, but how all-consuming is her actual ability? How much damage could she do against [any] Endbringer if we could get her to safely affect them? Would the power stop at any given layer, the material too dense to disrupt or whatever it is that she does? Would she affect them at all?
Would she kill the Simurgh?
I keep an eye on her, Power straining to give me the answers I ask of it even as I value the risks of involving Othala and a brief burst of invulnerability, and keep looking.
At all the others.
At all the unexpected hopes shining on the battlefield. All the unfulfilled promises for a better, brighter tomorrow that may finally be within our reach. All the [heroes].
I feel like crying.
It's only, in part, due to my skull-splitting headache.
And to Taylor's hand tightly grasping mine whenever I stop writing a sporadic revelation for Dragon to join me in cunning planning and heart-wrenching joy.
***
[Colin]
This is the most intact city I've ever been in during a fight with the monster.
It's almost safe to drive in.
Hannah's arms still are tightly clasped around me as I swerve around the obstacles in our path, speeding up as much as I can, the navigational computer cut off from any external support and having to interface with my armor so that my HUD, my movements, and the bike's systems can work in flawless unison. So that I'm fast enough, agile enough.
So that I am [enough].
And this is from inside our bubble. From the distorted time keeping us away from the slow-moving attacks landing on the monster I just helped Hannah doom. The monster Lisa guided us into slaying.
From outside? We are nothing but a blur as I force the time distortion field to the utmost limits I tested to be safe on living specimens.
On rats.
Yes, lab rats.
… I may have named one of them Brain after I was pretty sure he would survive without ill effects. But mostly because it kept glaring at me.
So I keep an eye on the road ahead of me, on the map being updated in as close to real-time as Dragon can manage through our delayed connection, and on all my instruments' readouts, waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something to fail in that way all Tinker inventions are apt to doing when it is more dramatic, and less convenient, for them to do so.
I swerve to drive around a tiled roof falling in slow motion in front of me, grey pieces of slate dispersing away from the splintering wooden frame like lazy seagulls taking flight.
Purity vaporizes all of it, only a glowing spot on the black pavement of the street to mark the brief passage of her power, and I correct my course with a hard pull that shortens my unwanted detour.
The red dot in my HUD's map blinks, and I switch the deployment mechanism with a brief eye movement that my armor belays to my bike.
Then I speed up to the next dot.
There's no savage grin in my mouth. Not now. Not while there's still a chance that it will all be for nothing.
My shoulders hurt with accumulated tension, my fingers dig into my gauntlet's padding with a strength that my servos stop me from transmitting to the carefully calibrated sensors in my handlebars, and my stomach feels like it's burning from the inside out.
My temples pound.
My palms sweat.
But there's a woman I love hugging me, waiting for me to succeed after she's done her part.
And another waiting for me to return to her time.
So I lean to my right, pulling my bike out of its current path and to a street that isn't blocked by a fallen house.
And then I straighten up and speed back toward the next red dot.
***
[Legend]
I am doing it.
I am parrying every single bolt of lighting, I am saving lives, I am being [a hero].
I am helping all of them, all of those who trust me to fight for them. I am doing what I should always do.
Ten lasers shoot off, one from every one of my spread fingers before they each fork into another ten as they travel down, and those split into yet another ten when they reach Behemoth's frantically waving claws enveloped by a cloud of swirling electricity that he aims at where the beams cutting into his thigh are coming from.
The Yangban members are already moving, already dodging away without stopping their attack as even the rock dust they extract from the black, matte shape of Behemoth's-nanite-covered body is reabsorbed into Colin's swarm, devoured into something that we can use to attack the monster with.
His attack shoots off, leaving behind cracked, broken, or missing claws.
Each beam splits ten times more as they envelop the bolt of lightning.
And I redirect it into the ground below the monster, into the crater littered with the broken remains of the house Hookwolf held him in, right beneath his paw, making him stagger even as the booming thunder is reduced to almost silence by Eidolon's power.
We are doing it.
We.
Me, my friends, and the heroes we lead.
We are [finally] saving the day.
Laura, Martin, Anne, Ivan, Marie,…
For you.
We are doing it for you.
And I won't stop until it's over.
***
[Dragon]
I should've always had this.
A network of drones monitoring the whole battlefield rather than the insufficient data from the bracelets we always hand out at these fights. A view of everything that happens supplemented by Colin's wondrous work in miniaturizing exotic sensors, each new reading allowing me to tweak what to look out for, what to be aware of.
Could I have deciphered the Simurgh's cry by now? Could I have muted the singing harpy?
Not now. Lisa's the one whose power works best when she allows intruding tangents to guide her thoughts. I need to be focused, to be—
Fuck, [yes!]
I mean…
Oh, gosh, I'm pretty sure I didn't blurt that out loud—
"You can't be embarrassed by cussing. You've killed people, Dragon; you can [swear]," the blonde mind-reader accuses me from beneath the swiveling monitor in Colin's lab.
I try to glare at her disapprovingly, but, given the unimpressed eyebrow she shoots my way, she doesn't seem to buy it.
… Note to self: disable blushing when talking with Lisa Wilbourn.
"As if," she mutters in a way that I [hope] is just her using her cold reading tricks to appear as if she knows more than she actually does.
"Yeah, keep thinking that," she tells me with a beaming grin that is, thankfully, interrupted by Taylor poking her ribs and making her cry out in a way that has Kid Win become suddenly interested in his work with the communications array.
"Moving on," I tell her [magnanimously], "did Colin really just—"
"The circuit is complete, yes," she interrupts me, the grin back at full strength despite the signs of exhaustion, despite the trembling of her fingertips, her shivering lip, her…
She's almost a child. Barely a woman.
And she's putting on a brave face [for me].
I shake my avatar's head, the fond smile seeming to come out of its own volition, and—
"Evacuate! Everyone, back away from Behemoth!" I yell through all the old bracelets and new communicators as the readings on the Endbringer's kill aura show a sudden, unexpected change.
Something I've never seen before.
Its disappearance.
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This work is a repost of my most popular fic on QQ (https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/wake-up-call-worm.15638/), where it can be found up to date except for the latest two chapters that are currently only available on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true)—as an added perk, both those sites have italicized and bolded text. I'll be posting the chapters here twice weekly, on Wednesday and Friday, until we're caught up. Unless something drastic happens, it will be updated at a daily rate until it catches up to the currently written 93 chapters (or my brain is consumed by the overwhelming amounts of snark, whichever happens first).
Speaking of Italics, this story's original format relied on conveying Power's intrusions into Lisa's inner monologue through the use of italics. I'm using square brackets ([]) to portray that same effect, but the work is more than 300k words at the moment, so I have to resort to the use of macros to make that light edit and the process may not be perfect. My apologies in advance
Also, I'd like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon: Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, Xalgeon, and aj0413. If you feel like maybe giving me a hand and helping me keep writing snarky, useless lesbians, consider joining them or buying one of my books on https://www.amazon.com/stores/Terry-Lavere/author/B0BL7LSX2S. Thank you for reading!