RWD - NO_ROLLBACK: 6.04

NO_ROLLBACK: 6.04

(Skitter)

Fluorescent lights flickering in the high ceiling. The low buzz of forced air from vents humming faintly in the background. Rows of plastic chairs, a handful of security booths, the silent, hulking forms of bulletproof glass and dull steel doors with card readers set into the walls.

The lobby of the PRT’s ENE Headquarters didn’t look much like a fortress, at least not at first glance. It was a sterile, impersonal space of polished gray floors and blue-tinted glass. I followed Greg through the double doors, and felt every set of eyes slide our way. A handful of civilians—tourist—staff, and security personnel froze mid-stride, their conversations dying in their throats as we walked in. Bitch, Ambrosia and I fell in step behind him, four figures in unfamiliar costumes, as anonymous as they could be. Still, the effect was... not subtle.

The three dogs on a leash ahead of Bitch did not help.

I felt a tremor of nervousness, a familiar tightening in my gut. This was it. The first time our group, the Peacekeepers, had shown ourselves openly. Not impersonating federal officers or grainy figures on a leaked video, but as… us. I wore my new costume, practical plate carriers over a layer of spider silk, tougher and lighter than Kevlar. The others were dressed similarly; to the onlookers, if you ignored the unconventional masks, we ought to have been nothing more than mercenaries or PMCs. Unfamiliar ones.

Beside me, Greg was a pillar of calm. He wasn’t carrying his usual arsenal, the exotic firearms and blades I’d grown accustomed to seeing strapped all across his body. Instead, a heavy, brutally functional anti-materiel rifle that was almost as long as he was tall was slung over his back. His presence alone seemed to suck the air out of the room. He moved with an unnerving grace, his every step deliberate, confident. Seeing him so unfazed, so utterly in control even here, in the heart of the supposed enemy’s den, settled my nerves. He hadn’t been wrong yet. I had to trust he wasn’t wrong now.

Ambrosia walked on his other side, the Red Cross emblems on her kit a stark contrast to the darker theme of the rest of her gear. Her face was hidden behind a simple rebreather, but her posture was rigid, her hands clasped tightly in front of her. A single Glock was strapped to her waist by a holster. Bitch, flanked by her three dogs, brought up the rear. The animals were still in their normal state, but they paced restlessly, low growls rumbling in their chests, seemingly sensing the tension.

Before the lobby guards could do more than place their hands on their sidearms, a familiar figure emerged from a side corridor. Miss Militia. Her gaze flicked over the four of us, found the rifle, found the leashes, found me. A nod—permission and warning in one gesture. “This way.”

Hollowpoint didn’t answer, which was an answer. He fell in beside her; the rest of us on his heels. People at the edges of the lobby made a corridor for us with their eyes and bodies both. I heard a phone camera chirp. I heard someone whisper, “Who are they?”.

Miss Militia led us through a series of checkpoints, and soon we arrived at what could only be a briefing room. The place was already occupied. Director Piggot sat at the head of a long table, her expression as severe as ever. Armsmaster stood behind her, his arms crossed over his chest, his helmet angled in our direction. Kid Win fidgeted with a device on the table. The rest were local heroes I recognized: Lady Photon and her wards—Laserdream, Shielder, Glory Girl, Panacea—all arrayed in colors so bright it made our tacticool gear look drab and practical.  To their left was a cape I hadn’t met before but recognised, a man in a simple blue and black uniform. Strider.

“Hollowpoint.” Piggot didn’t extend a hand..

Hollowpoint inclined his head. “Director. Time is a luxury we don’t have.”

Piggot nodded curtly. “Everyone is here. Strider, if you would.”

The man in blue stepped forward. “It’ll be disorienting,” he said. “Try not to fight it.”

I braced myself. There was a sound like a muffled thunderclap, and the world dissolved into a nauseating lurch. For a split second, I saw a blur of landscapes, a kaleidoscopic strobing effect of a dozen cities, countrysides and highways, and then, suddenly, we were standing on grass, the air thick with the smell of salt and rain.

We were outside. Liberty State Park, the skeletal remains of a pier jutting out into the grey, choppy waters of the Upper Bay. I’d never been here before. Only seen pictures on the internet—amateur cam footage of the Statue of Liberty, shrouded in mist, rising over the water, fields of grass, and walkways. Today it was something else: rows of tents and mobile command trailers, lines of armoured vehicles parked between battered sculptures and battered trees. 

A staging ground.

My attention was immediately drawn to two colossal figures dominating the clearing. The first was one of Dragon’s suits, a monstrous creation with a squat, segmented body like a metallic serpent, supported by four powerful legs. Turrets and missile pods bristled from its back, all aimed out at the water. It was utterly still, a silent, waiting predator.

The other monster was coiled in the grass and gravel like a length of living river, and if I hadn’t watched Genesis gestalt before, I might have mistaken it for a creature you could page through in a fossil book. Muscular head with crushing mandibles that worked against one another slowly, tasting the drizzle. A torso forty feet long with two pairs of muscular, lean, clawed arms folded along a body that was more fish than lizard, more nightmare than animal. Instead of legs, a massive, finned tail, easily seventy feet in length, coiled like a serpent’s on the damp grass and ended in a forked fluke. Its body was covered in an exoskeleton of armoured, scaly plates, the skin between them the colour of wet bronze. Three fire trucks were hosing it down, water sluicing off the armoured plates, and the row of visible gills pulsed slowly along its neck into the mud. 

Inside the temporary command centre set up in one of the park’s buildings, the scene was one of organised chaos. PRT operators and military personnel were in the final stages of evacuating critical assets, their faces tight with urgency. On the large screens that lined the walls, I could see feeds from across New York City, showing the last of the civilian population being herded into underground shelters. The city was a ghost town, waiting for the monster to arrive. Sirens blared in the distance, and helicopters carved lines through the cloud cover, bearing away heavy equipment.

As the mundane personnel cleared out, the capes began to arrive in waves, each heralded by Strider’s thunderclap. The Triumvirate. Protectorate teams from across the country. Independent heroes and even a few villains I recognised from PHO. The room filled with a low murmur of conversation as old rivals and complete strangers found themselves standing shoulder to shoulder. Greg and Armsmaster broke away, deep in conversation with Legend, Alexandria, and Eidolon.

Eventually, the arrivals stopped. The room fell silent. Legend stepped forward, his presence commanding. "Thank you all for answering the call," he began, his gaze sweeping across the assembled capes. "I know many of you travelled great distances to be here. Some of you have fought Endbringers before. Some of you are here for the first time. Regardless of your experience, regardless of which side of the law you typically stand on, today you are all heroes."

"We have approximately forty minutes before Leviathan makes landfall,” he continued. “Dragon's predictive models, combined with intelligence provided by the Peacekeepers, show he'll emerge in the Upper Bay. His first likely target is Manhattan Island itself."

A projection appeared on the screens behind him, showing the bay and surrounding areas, with probability zones marked in different colours.

"You know the statistics. You've heard them before, but they bear repeating. In a typical Endbringer fight, one in four participants dies. That's not a worst-case scenario. That's the average. On a good day, when we win, when we drive them off, one in four of the people standing in this room won't be going home."

The silence was absolute. I could hear my own heartbeat through my helmet.

"On a bad day," Legend continued, his voice softer but somehow more intense, "we lose half. Or more. Kyushu, November 2nd, 1999. Forty-seven capes entered the fight. Nine survived. Nine and a half million civilians dead."

He straightened, and his voice grew stronger. "But today is different. Today, we have something we've never had before in a Leviathan fight - real advance warning. Hours, not minutes. We have coordination between agencies that typically barely tolerate each other. And we have new intelligence that may finally give us the edge we need."

Legend gestured to Greg, who stood perfectly still with his rifle slung across his back like it weighed nothing.

"Some of you know of Hollowpoint by reputation. Some of you may have... strong opinions about his methods. Today, those opinions don't matter. His organisation has conducted the most comprehensive analysis of Endbringer biology and behaviour patterns to date. Information that may save lives. Information that may let us do more than just survive." Legend stepped back. "The floor is yours."

Greg moved forward with that signature measured pace. He didn't hurry, didn't hesitate. When he reached the front of the room, he stood for a moment, letting the silence build.

"Leviathan is going to kill some of you today," he said, his calm voice cutting through the room like a blade. "That's not pessimism. That's statistical probability based on seventeen years of data. But dying to Leviathan and dying to ignorance are two different things. I'm here to eliminate the second option."

He gestured, and the screens shifted to display complex diagrams.

"My thinkers and I have modelled the Endbringer’s physiology from historical imagery and the few deep injuries they’ve suffered. With this information, much of which was helpfully provided by the PRT, we can credibly state that everything you think you know about the Endbringers is wrong. According to our analysis, the Endbringers are constructs, their bodies composed of onion-like layers of matter that exist in folded space, with mass distributed across dimensional boundaries. What looks like a thirty-foot-tall creature weighing nine tons is actually a galaxy's worth of matter layered and compressed into a localised space-time distortion."

"Two hundred layers, approximately. Each one twice as durable as the last. The outermost layer—what most of you will be hitting—has the consistency of aluminium alloy. By layer fifty, you're dealing with something harder than the material at the core of most medium-sized planetary bodies. By layer one hundred, you've exceeded the durability of any known material. And at the centre..."

He paused, letting the implications sink in.

"However, things aren’t completely hopeless. We have reason to believe that at the heart of this layered mass is a vital core. This is our target. This is its only true vulnerability. As long as this core is intact, Endbringers can be expected to regenerate indefinitely, effectively fighting at peak capacity. Hence, to kill Leviathan, you must simply destroy his core."

He projected a schematic onto one of the main screens. It showed a labelled cross-section of Leviathan's form, a bright point of light at its centre.

“The challenge now is reaching it,” he stated, his gaze sweeping across the room. “Conventional attacks are almost useless. However, our analysis suggests that their dimensionally layered physiology makes them disproportionately vulnerable to attacks that exhibit spatial, temporal, or reality warping.”

He named the capes in the room he believed could do real harm: Chevalier, Flechette, Eidolon, Armsmaster. And then he included himself. “My rifle is loaded with munitions designed by one of my Tinkers to exploit this vulnerability. The rest of you,” he said, his tone leaving no room for argument, “The rest of you have a different, but no less critical, role. Your objective is to hinder it. Distract it. Create openings for us. Every second you buy us, every attack you force it to dodge, every wave you blunt, is a second closer to us reaching and destroying its core.”

He detailed Leviathan’s hydrokinesis, its speed, its water-echo, its possible Manton limits. He laid out tactics, reminded everyone that, contrary to the norm, New York would be designated as a hard target.

Armsmaster's voice broke the silence over the speakers. “We are distributing Dragon-designed armbands. Slide one on and tighten it at your wrist. The screen displays a grid map with your position and Leviathan's last known location. Use it.

“There are two buttons. The left is for communication. To eliminate unnecessary chatter, a program from Dragon will screen messages from non-veterans, creating a three-to-five-second delay. If you must bypass this filter, say ‘Hard Override’ before your message. Abuse this feature, and your communication privileges will be revoked.

“The second button is an emergency ping. Use it if you are injured or in immediate danger. For non-urgent assistance—like needing transport or seeing a tactical opportunity—press both buttons and state your request. Dragon’s program will prioritise your needs and provide direct assistance if possible. The armband monitors your vitals and will send a ping automatically if you are critically injured or unconscious.”

I reached a folding table where a woman in PRT blues and a medical mask fitted an armband over my sleeve, cinching it tight. The square screen lit up with a satellite view of our building, the parking lot, and the beach. A prompt blinked: ‘State name’.

I pressed the communicator button and spoke. “Skitter.”

My cape name appeared on the display, with ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ prompts over the corresponding buttons. I confirmed it.

That done, I joined the capes dispersing toward their designated staging areas. As I stepped back outside, I watched Genesis's massive construct uncoil with disturbing grace. For something so large, it moved with an almost liquid fluidity, its segmented body rippling as it slithered down the embankment. It entered the bay without ceremony, without splash - just a smooth transition from land to water, and then it was gone, leaving only the faintest ripple to mark its passage. Dragon's suit remained perfectly still, weapons arrays tracking some invisible horizon, light rain now beading and running off its armoured hull.

I turned my attention to Rachel. She was on one knee, her hands pressed flat against the skulls of her dogs, her fingers splayed wide. A low, subsonic growl escaped her lips, and the animals began to change. They grew, their muscles bunching and twisting, their forms elongating. But this was different from their usual transformation. Following Greg’s instructions, they weren’t becoming the bulky, armoured behemoths I was accustomed to riding. They were lean, sleek, built for speed and endurance. Raptorial. Their purpose today wasn’t to fight, but to serve as mounts.

Leonid—the cape with the audio-sensory power—approached hesitantly as the transformation neared completion. His costume was flamboyant—a mask with a lion motif, a black skintight sleeveless bodysuit, and loose-fitting pants, leaving some skin exposed. "These are... safe to ride?"

Bitch glared at him, and he wisely shut his mouth.

The PRT trucks had finished their drop ten minutes ago: several tons of tiny crustaceans—krill, mostly, with shrimp, crabs, copepods, and a scatter of other locals. They'd been sourced from nearby fish farms and dispersed throughout the bay, specifically selected at Greg’s behest for their sensitivity to vibration and pressure changes. I was already extending my influence, feeling them spread through the water like a living sonar net. Thousands of compound eyes and sensitive antennae creating a three-dimensional map of the underwater battlefield.

I sent a cluster of them after Genesis's construct, working them into the gaps between the armoured scales. Through their senses, I tracked the creature's descent into the bay—twenty feet, forty, sixty. It moved through the water silently and was rather hard to keep track of, despite this section of the bay being saturated with senses I could borrow. 

Bitch, Leonid, and I mounted the now monstrously large dogs. As we rode towards our initial position—an elevated overpass that would give us clear sightlines across the battlefield—I saw it. A storm cloud on the horizon, darker than the rest. It hung over the water, an opaque curtain of rain descending from it. And it was getting closer.

The air grew heavy, charged with ozone and dread. The faint drizzle thickened into proper drops of rain, fat and cold. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic drumbeat against the rising roar of the wind and waves. I took a deep breath, the damp air filling my lungs, as I felt the adrenaline kick in. I was terrified. My fingers tightened on Angelica’s spurs, feeling the bizarre play of muscle and bone beneath me.

Leviathan was here.

Showtime.