RWD - NO_ROLLBACK: 6.05

NO_ROLLBACK: 6.05

(Armsmaster)

The wind was vicious this high up, shrieking and tearing at the edge of his helmet, droplets of cold rain striking the faceplate in rapid succession. The rooftop air was thick with ozone and the promise of violence. Rain, driven by a wind that tasted of salt and distant catastrophe, slicked the helipad's painted circle. Colin’s gauntlets gripped the haft of his halberd, the composite material cool and familiar against the powered armour. 

He stood with the others a few feet back from the ledge, scanning the distant grey band where the storm clouds met the churning Atlantic, visor overlay feeding him a real-time composite of radar, infrared, and the scattered pings of sonar buoys scattered across the sea.

Despite the storm and approaching calamity, however, Colin’s attention was fixed on Hollowpoint. The cape was an anomaly. Crouched by the ledge, arms splayed out as they rested on his knees. His rifle propped carelessly against his shoulder with its barrel canted toward the angry sky, and he looked for all the world like a man waiting for a bus, not an apocalypse in miniature. There was a stillness to him, an unnerving calm that rankled Colin more than any overt threat could. By every metric Colin’s suit could provide, Hollowpoint was a Thinker, likely with a Mover or Brute rating so low as to be negligible. He was, for all his meticulous preparation and demonstrated ruthlessness, fundamentally fragile. Compared to Alexandria, a stone statue of invulnerability fifty feet away, or Eidolon, a shimmering distortion of power, Hollowpoint was just a man in a bulletproof vest. Yet he carried himself with an assurance that bordered on arrogance, even here, surrounded by beings who could tear him apart without a thought. It was the same audacity that had led him to declare open war on the PRT, Colin mused. A boldness born of either supreme confidence or profound foolishness.

Colin’s gaze slid to the woman shivering behind him. Ambrosia. Othala. The red crosses on her tactical gear couldn't mask the terror radiating from her in waves. She shivered in the downpour, her slight frame practically vibrating with fear. She was a prisoner. He was certain of it, as certain as he was of the Halberd’s specifications. There was no doubt she was there against her will; an obvious data point, one that should have prompted action, but reality was a more complex equation.

Othala was a criminal, and Hollowpoint’s cooperation was, for the moment, a necessary evil. His intelligence, his assets, his inexplicable ability to predict the unpredictable. The political calculus was simple and ugly: Ambrosia’s freedom was not worth jeopardising this alliance. Her fate, as a result, was a footnote in the grander scheme of things. Still, the question lingered: how many others were caught in Hollowpoint’s web? How many more were being exposed to exploitation in the name of the greater good?

He forced his attention back to the man himself. The source of his current, and most potent, annoyance. The declaration that he, a villain, could kill an Endbringer had sent a shockwave through the Protectorate and through Colin personally. It had spurred them all to action; Dragon to rush out her predictive software and Colin himself to accelerate the development of his nanothorns. And for what? To be relegated to a backup plan. Dragon’s models, a marvel of engineering, were now little more than a confirmation tool for Hollowpoint’s own insights. His nanothorns, once a potential silver bullet, were now just another weapon in the arsenal, a contingency. Plan C. The thought was galling. To have his life’s work, his legacy, overshadowed by… this?

An alert flashed across his visor, pulling him from the mire of his thoughts. This was the third in ten minutes. TARGET ACQUIRED. RANGE: 2.8 MILES. VECTOR: 117. ETA: 00:02:24. The signal was picked up by one of the navy’s sonar buoys, a mix of modern assets and relics dragged out of Cold War storage to aid in tracking Leviathan’s final approach. Colin pulled up the battle map, a three-dimensional representation of the bay and the surrounding city. The Endbringer was less than a mile out, a crimson icon moving at some two hundred and fifty miles an hour. Dragon had helpfully tacked on an ETA: two minutes and twenty-four seconds until contact.

He tightened his grip on his halberd, the familiar weight a small comfort. On the map, another icon, this one representing Genesis’s creation, slithered towards the mouth of the bay—an ambush. Hollowpoint had theorised that given Leviathan’s heavy reliance on hydrokinesis, the Endbringer sensory suite might be tied to a sensitivity to water content in its targets. A sound, if unproven, hypothesis. The creature from Genesis was, as a result, to be a test case, its bodily functions sustained by oil-based fluids. A long shot, but in a fight like this, every advantage, no matter how slim, had to be taken.

The timer on his visor ticked down. One minute, fifteen seconds. Below, on the saturated grounds of Liberty State Park, Dragon’s Cawthorne suit began to glow, a faint shimmer enveloping the chassis as its plasma cannon and forcefield generator spooled up to full power. It was an elegant piece of engineering, stripped down and rebuilt for this one purpose. The four autocannon turrets and a high flamethrower and fire suppressant systems had been sacrificed to mount a single, devastating plasma projector and a heavy-duty shield generator from one of her older models. Maximum survivability, maximum single-target damage. A sniper.

A voice crackled over the comms, calm and measured. Hollowpoint. He rattled off a set of coordinates, his tone devoid of any emotion.

“Air assets, Grids 7-4-Delta through 7-9-Delta,” Hollowpoint’s voice was calm and clear over the comms, devoid of static or stress. “Designate priority strike. Alpha One: You are cleared to drop.”

On Colin’s visor, a red bar appeared, superimposed over the churning waters of the bay, like a line drawn in sand directly in the path of the approaching tsunami.

Fifty-four seconds. The wave was visible now, a monstrous wall of gray water cresting as it hit the edge of the continental shelf. Eidolon and Legend lifted off, straight into storm-dark sky. As they rose, the first of the C-130s, flying at an altitude of some twenty thousand feet, opened their bays and released their payloads. Pallets of guided Tinkertech bombs, provided by the Peacekeepers and mass-manufactured by Dragon, tumbled towards the sea.

Fifteen seconds. Leviathan broke the surface, a lithe, horrifying figure riding the crest of the wave. Colin’s targeting software locked on instantly. A moment later, the Cawthorne fired. A blinding white line that crossed the mile of churning water in an instant. The effect was biblical. The water in a thirty-foot radius around the Endbringer flash-vaporised. The resulting steam explosion was a concussive blast of white energy, a violent detonation that punched Leviathan clean out of the tsunami and sent it tumbling through the air.

The wave, robbed of its rider, rolled on. But the plan was already in motion. Eidolon, hovering a thousand meters above the bay, thrust his hands downwards. Geokinesis. The seabed buckled, plunging to form a massive trench directly in the wave’s path, just as Hollowpoint had suggested after the other cape’s power selection was confirmed.

At the same time, the first bombs reached their targets. The initial wave of ordinances was gravity amplifiers, which, upon detonation, created localised wells that pulled the water down into the newly formed trench. The wave’s momentum was broken, its energy dissipated into a churning vortex. The water that survived the gravity well was met by the second wave of bombs. Cryo-charges detonated, flash-freezing millions of gallons of seawater into a solid, jagged wall of ice that stretched for hundreds of meters. A city block’s length of ice, pressure cracking and reforming as what was left of the Tsunami crashed into it. It wasn't a perfect shield. Colin could see tons of water surging past the barrier, flooding the streets below their skyscraper perch. But the city had been spared, at least for now.

With the immediate threat of the tsunami dealt with, the true battle began. Legend was already a streak of light, shooting off to engage the Endbringer. Far above, Eidolon continued to sculpt the seafloor, gouging out defensive trenches before he inevitably switched to a more combat-oriented power. Colin had a bare moment to register the tactical shift before a hand clamped onto his collar with the force of an industrial vice. Alexandria. Without a word, she leapt, dragging him and Chevalier into the fray. Behind them, the Cawthorne had already engaged its thrusters as it manoeuvred to acquire a new firing solution. Hollowpoint remained perched on the skyscraper with Glory Girl and the terrified Ambrosia as he awaited an opening to make the supposed kill shot.

They landed on the newly formed ice field, the impact jarring even with his armour’s inertial dampeners. Alexandria was gone as soon as their feet touched the ice, a blur of motion as she charged the Endbringer. Her first punch landed with the force of a freight train, staggering the creature. Its retaliation was instantaneous. A tail, forty feet of whipcord muscle and scaly armour, lashed out, catching her mid-air and smashing her through the ice wall they had just created. Before it could press the attack, another lance of plasma from the Cawthorne slammed into its side, slagging the outer layers of its torso into molten ruin. 

Legend’s lasers followed, carving smoking furrows across its back. A wall of water instantly rose to meet the assault, exploding into a thick curtain of steam that obscured the Endbringer. Through the haze, Chevalier fired a blast from his cannon-blade at the still-visible flank, but Leviathan was quicker, wrapping itself in a vortex of churning water that ablated the shot into vapour before it could land.

Barely a moment had passed when the Endbringer erupted from the steam cloud, charging towards the two targets within reach. Colin's response was a single, synchronised action guided by his combat algorithms: he fired his grapple laterally while activating his nanothorn. A molecular cutting field bloomed to deadly life along the halberd’s edge. As the cable pulled him clear of the Endbringer’s massive claws, Colin swung and felt his weapon bite deep, carving a furrow along his target’s flank.

Chevalier’s response to the still barreling monster was more direct. He met the charge head-on, his cannon-blade growing in size until it was a twenty-foot-long, fifty-ton heavy behemoth of a weapon. Without ceremony, he brought it down with a force that cracked the ice beneath them, the molecular ceramic cutting edge biting deep into Leviathan’s shoulder and stopping it dead in its tracks.

For a moment, the Endbringer was trapped, struggling against the immense weight of the blade and its lack of leverage on the slippery ice. Then, even as it managed to crawl free, another plasma bolt struck, detonating the water echo, shedding of its form and sending it tumbling across the glistening field. As it was forced to once again hide behind a curtain of water, Colin allowed himself a sliver of hope. Maybe, just maybe, they could do this. Even without Hollowpoint’s so-called silver bullet.