RWD: NO_ROLLBACK: 6.06 

NO_ROLLBACK: 6.06 

(Hibana)

Two weeks ago.

The whine of the powered dolly echoed down the concrete hallway, reverberating dully through the padded structure of the warehouse—his. Greg’s, Greg’s, Greg’s, Greg’s. She mouthed the word like a prayer as she watched her babies—cases of lovingly-packed illegal components, shell-packed warheads, racks of chemical canisters—rolling in through the side door. Brian and Anna muscled the last crate inside, breath hissing in the cold. Outside, one of the dogs barked—Rachel’s. Jody?... No, Judas.

She kept a mental tally. Thirty-four completed devices. Seventeen in progress. Three big projects she’d kept compartmentalised even from herself, passwords written on notebook paper, only now decrypted under Greg’s watching eyes. Everything, everything, finally in one place.

Greg stood by the workbench, arms crossed, impassive. She knew that look—calculating, precise, his gaze crawling over her life’s work with the same analytic detachment he’d use for a used car or a murder scene. The only sign he was impressed: the smallest curl at the corner of his mouth, visible only if you’d spent days obsessively memorising his expressions.

She let herself bask in it. Just for a moment.

Then Greg cleared his throat. “Let’s do inventory.”

Not a question. An order.

He held a stylus in one hand, scribbling inventory onto a slim, rugged-looking tablet. The light from the desk lamp flickered off his welding glasses. She waited for some time for him to say something. Critique her setups. Demand to see the fuses, the warheads, the test logs. Threaten her, maybe. With a gun… No! A knife! That would be so hot.

Instead, he said, “How much time do you need to finish the gravity project?”

Her pulse jumped. “The core assembly’s almost done. I still need to test the field isolation. The micro-Holt—uh, your drive—it’s not totally stable with my interfaces.”

He nodded once, as if this was what he expected. As if she’d confirmed a quiet, unknown truth only he could discern.

“You did good work,” he said, with the flatness of a teacher returning an A+ assignment, not praise so much as confirmation of a baseline. “I have suggestions for the field dampers. You’re using too much shielding on the positive lead. See?”

He tapped the diagram she’d pinned to the back wall—her best draft of the Gravity Bomb’s internals, whiteboard marker cross-hatched with her own scrawl.

Keiko’s mouth went dry. “That’s… that’s deliberate. I was compensating for the resonance. I thought—”

Greg glanced at her, not unkindly. “You’re doubling up the insulation. But you’re introducing inductive lag. It’ll spike the feedback if the bomb detonates near a magnetic source. Try this—” He traced a line with his finger, impossibly precise, swapping two of the module’s contacts. “You’ll need to recalibrate the interface, but you’ll get twice the stability and a higher output yield.”

She stared. He smiled, just a little, and she felt something unclench inside her chest.

Her fingers trembled as she drew out a foam-packed tray: Ice bombs, finished transmutation warheads, a trio of half-complete holtzman prototypes. Greg examined each, peeling back cases, checking fuses, his face inscrutable as a statue.

She tried to ignore the way his hands moved—deft, practised, the hands of someone who knew both machines and people and could take either apart with equal ease. She wanted those hands on her. She wanted them building with her. Or on her. She flushed, heat crawling up her neck. It was… not a thought she let herself linger on, not when he was this close.

He was talking again, almost absently, as if he didn’t notice the effect he had on her. “The transmutation bombs—impressive. Better yield than your old design. Still a little too much scatter on the peripheral shunt. You’ll want to fix that before moving on to something else.”

Keiko nodded, quickly, eager. “I will. I’ll do it tonight.”

He set the tray down before gesturing to his laptop, open on a nearby workbench. “Later. There is something I want to show you.”

She straightened. Her pulse tripped, then raced. “Yes?”

He clicked open a new window, eyes flicking to her as she leaned in to see. It was a data file. PRT headers, decryption in progress, lines of dense technical language blurring past. “The PRT is surprisingly meticulous with their record-keeping,” he mused, his voice a low hum as he perused what could only be a stolen trove. The screen was filled with file icons, each one a neatly catalogued power scan. Keiko felt a surge of avarice so strong it was almost sexual. The possibilities… the things she could build with this data…

He clicked a specific file, drawing her focus. FLECHETTE – WARD, NY PROTECTORATE.

Keiko leaned closer, her breath fogging the screen for a moment. She read, and the world narrowed to the glowing text. Ability to temporarily imbue nonliving material with a power that allows it to ignore most laws of physics… Can pierce virtually any defence… Materialises inside a target, fusing to it at a molecular level… Ignores conventional superhuman durability as if the opposition were ‘warm butter’…

The girl’s power was… elegant. Deceptively simple, yet profound in its implications. The ability to imbue objects with a state of quantum superposition, allowing them to ignore the fundamental laws of physics. To pass through any defence, any material, as if it were nonexistent. Keiko reread it, devouring every technical note, already imagining the applications—warheads that punched through even the most impenetrable of defences, mines that slipped past even the densest shields, charges that could be laid inside their targets and detonated after the fact.

“This effect,” Greg said, his voice close to her ear, his presence a palpable weight beside her. “A projectile, or perhaps shrapnel from a larger ordinance, that can replicate that singular property.” His tone dropped, low, intimate. ”Penetration… Could you do it?”

Keiko’s heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, ecstatic rhythm. She didn’t look at him, couldn’t. She just snatched the laptop from the workbench, cradling it like a holy text.

“Yes,” she breathed, already lost in the glorious complexities of the problem. “Oh, yes. I can.”

***

Present Day.

“You’re getting butter on the keyboard,” Lisa said, her voice flat with disapproval.

Keiko ignored her, licking a smear of grease from her thumb before plunging her hand back into the bowl of popcorn. The warehouse was quiet except for the gentle hum of fans and the buzz of Lisa’s control centre. She’d, over the span of a few days, colonised half the main floor with monitors—big, thin, expensive. The air stank faintly of ozone and solder. Lisa hunched at her desk, hunched the way only someone who’d been awake for thirty hours could hunch. Paige sprawled on a battered couch with a tablet, attention worriedly flickering between the tactical feeds.

Keiko curled up in a threadbare rolling chair, feet tucked beneath her, eyes glued to the central display: drone and satellite feeds, data overlays, a digital battle-map painted with icons for every cape, every vehicle, every ordinance. Her ordinance.

Her babies.

Outside, in New York, it was hell. Rain coming down in sideways sheets, wind howling through shattered windows. On the wall of screens before them, a dozen different angles of the fight played out in a chaotic, mesmerising ballet. Feeds from their own rocket-launched sub-orbital sensor packages, from PRT drones and US military aircraft, from tiny camera modules pre-staged on perches overlooking the predicted battlefield, and even from the body cams of Greg and the others on the front lines. They saw more or less everything.

Things were going, more or less, exactly as she expected them to. Because Greg expected them to. There were setbacks, of course. Art required a little improvisation. The heroes were bloodied. Chevalier, his cannon-blade shattered, had been pulled from the fight after he took a pretty hard hit. Dragon’s Cawthorne suit, its primary plasma cannon torn away by the Endbringer’s claws, had fallen back to a support role, its massive frame and forcefield a bulwark against the monster’s relentless advance. Legend, after being caught by a water echo when he’d foolishly strayed into melee range, was down for the count. Even Armsmaster’s glum voice had crackled over the open channel moments before, his much-vaunted nanothorns proving ineffective against the Endbringer’s deeper, denser layers.

But the plan accounted for failure. Eidolon, his trench-digging duties complete, was now a whirlwind of ice, flash-freezing the water around Leviathan and hampering its hydrokinesis. Genesis, her monstrous, non-aqueous creations a match for the Endbringer’s own terrible strength, had managed to bind the creature long enough for Chevalier to sever its right arm before he was ultimately forced off the field. And the artillery team, a distant, unseen force, had begun to rain down a storm of projectiles, poor substitutes for Legend’s and Dragon’s prowess at the start of the fight, but welcome ones nonetheless.

No deaths. Not yet. A first, for a fight this deep into an Endbringer attack.

A new telemetry overlay appeared on the main screen. A flight of C-130s was dropping another payload of hypersonic missiles. Keiko watched them streak towards the battlefield, her expression souring as they detonated in billowing clouds of white. Containment foam. Boring. Utilitarian and distasteful. She knew her own, more exotic munitions were too valuable to be wasted, but it still rankled to see such crude tools being used in place of her own.

She let her eyes drift to another screen. It showed the interior of a nondescript van parked somewhere on the outskirts of the city. Inside, Grue, Regent, Scribe, and the little ghost girl, Imp, sat in full costume around a large titanium tub. Hoses and wires snaked into the vat of murky oil within. Keiko knew her former leader, Lung, was floating in that glorified sarcophagus, sedated and helpless. Plan B. The thought was amusing. The great and terrible Lung, reduced to a weapon in Greg’s arsenal. However, even that was no longer amusing. The novelty of his defeat had worn off days ago. He was just a caged animal now, another piece on Greg’s board.

Another salvo of missiles was launched. Keiko almost looked away, but then she saw the tags on the telemetry data. Two of the six were hers. A thrill shot through her. She leaned forward, popcorn forgotten. On the main screen, Leviathan was once again tangled with Genesis’s construct. The six missiles slammed into the wrestling titans. The first two were her gravity bombs.

The effect was instantaneous and brutal. A localised gravity well erupted, pinning both Leviathan and the oil-snake to the ice. The four containment foam missiles that followed detonated perfectly, engulfing the immobilised pair in a mountain of rapidly hardening foam. A brilliant gambit.

It almost worked. But Leviathan’s water echo, that damned shroud of perpetually generated fluid, acted as a lubricant. The Endbringer slipped free just as the foam solidified, leaving Genesis’s construct entombed and forced to begin to dig its way out from beneath the ice.

The melee resumed. For a time, it was a brutal, grinding affair. Leviathan was adapting, its movements becoming more efficient, its strikes more lethal. It finally claimed its first victim, a hero named Exalt from the artillery team, who was too slow to get out of the way.

That, apparently, was the trigger the suits in command needed. With Leviathan now making a beeline for the mainland, the fear of collateral damage was outweighed by the need to inflict critical damage. Another missile launch. Her transmutation bombs.

 They didn’t explode in fire, but in a wave of shimmering, transformative energy. Layers of Leviathan’s body, everything caught in the blast radius, turned to brittle, crystalline glass. As the Endbringer moved, the glass layers shattered and fell away, exposing the un-transmuted flesh beneath to the next missile in the barrage. It was beautiful, but there weren’t enough. The last of the transmutation warheads was spent before they could reach the core. The final missile in the salvo was a stasis bomb. It hit the heavily damaged Endbringer, and the monster froze, locked in a shimmering field of temporal suspension.

A moment of stillness descended on the battlefield. Keiko held her breath, her eyes wide.

And then, Greg’s voice, calm and clear, cut through the quiet. It was on the private channel, the one reserved for them.

“It’s time.”