Brockton Bay stretched out around me, my shadowscape lighting up with acts of evil. There were far fewer of them now, I noted with satisfaction, and began to drift toward the largest –
I paused. Something was happening, something I'd never felt before.
The Abyss was vast beyond comprehension, but its upper layer, the one where my awareness travelled in order to create Lasombra, was a reflection of the physical world. Until now, I'd believed that reflection only covered Brockton Bay, and was the result of my power interacting with the Abyss. But now, I learned I'd been mistaken.
Far, far away, I could feel a spike of terror. Grief, fear, horror : so much of it, it blazed like a dark beacon, visible even through the infinite black that stretched between it and me.
Something was happening somewhere which made all the evil I'd faced in Brockton Bay look like child's play by comparison.
I hesitated, if only for a moment. I didn't know the limits of my projection's range. I'd never tested them. My life was in Brockton Bay, and there had been plenty of villains to fight there without looking further afield.
But I couldn't simply ignore this.
So I pushed my awareness further and further from where my human body rested. I was afraid that something would snap, that the tether binding my mind to my body would be severed, leaving me to wander the darkness forevermore.
But I didn't feel anything of the sort as I moved across the reflection of the land and the sea, and –
Rose.
When the sirens had started howling their warning of doom throughout the city, Agatha had moved immediately. Even as her mind froze with terror, her body had acted, picking up the four kids she'd been taking care of as a full-time nanny and dragging them to the nearest shelter. Fortunately, there was one not far from her home, so they'd been able to get in early, before the rush of panicked people. She had led the children into the back of the vault, as gently as she could – but she knew all but the youngest of them were aware that something was very, very wrong.
One thing she'd learned in her twenty years as a professional nanny was that children were a lot more perceptive than adults believed. Usually, that made her proud, but right now, she had to work extra hard to ensure they followed her.
More people came pouring into the shelter, and they did Agatha heard them whisper, then scream, then wail as more details spread. When she put together what was happening, she wanted to do the same : it was the Simurgh, the False Angel, the defiler of minds and souls who was coming to Australia's capital.
She thought she should've run, but she didn't have a car, and even if she did the traffic must surely be horrendous as everyone who thought they could escape tried to. She'd seen the footage of previous Endbringer attacks on the news : it happened every time, and all it achieved was hinder the evacuation of the most fragile and vulnerable people. At the time, she hadn't understood how people could be so foolish, but now, she understood all too well.
Minutes passed, seeming to stretch into hours. In the crowded shelter, Agatha prayed. She prayed for a miracle; she prayed that the Simurgh would be fought off by the heroes before the city had to be sealed; she prayed that the children clinging to her wouldn't be turned into tools of the False Angel. She prayed that she wouldn't end up strangling the ones whose care she'd been entrusted with by their parents with her bare hands, either because she'd been driven mad herself or to keep them from hurting others because they'd been made into slaves of the winged monster – or worse, because she thought they'd been while they had not.
She prayed, even though everybody knew God didn't answer prayers on Earth-Bet.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
A strange sound echoed through the vault, and a hushed silence fell on the hundreds of people crammed together in the barely-lit darkness. Agatha looked up, and there was a man, wearing black and with a face made of shadows, holding a cane that was the source of the tapping sound she'd heard.
A cape, it had to be. But while Agatha wasn't that familiar with the local cape scene, she felt she would have heard of someone like this one if he were local. Which meant he wasn't, and had come from far away to help – even though it might mean his death, or worse.
What was he doing here, though ? The fight against the Simurgh was outside. Agatha knew that was where the capes were gathering to strike at the Endbringer, not that they would achieve anything – they never did, they could only die in futile battle until the fiend got bored and left, it was all futile, they were all going to die or be turned into monsters –
The head-shaped shadow turned toward her, and spoke a single word :
"ENDURE."
Agatha felt the command wrap itself around her mind, gently smothering her rising panic. She leaned into it, drawing strength from it, and nodded in thanks to the shadow man even as she hugged the children closer.
He nodded back, and then he was gone, walking out of the shelter, out into the city where the False Angel was descending.
And Agatha started praying again, with a hope in her heart that hadn't been here before.
I stood at the threshold of the underground shelter, the last stragglers giving me a wide berth even as they rushed in, and found myself facing an unexpected problem : the sun was up, shining in a sky completely devoid of clouds. I had travelled far enough that it was mid-morning here; also, while my perception of temperature through my perception was wacky at best, everyone I'd seen was wearing summerwear. So I'd also moved hemispheres.
I might have considered what that implied for my projection's range, but I had more pressing concerns. I tentatively extended a tendril into the light of the sun, and winced as it immediately burst apart. It appeared that, not only did sunlight burn me far worse than Purity's blasts had, but the pain was much sharper when I was using a projection instead of wrapping the shadows around my human body, like what had happened when I'd fled Coil's underground base.
I couldn't fight a bunch of drunks like this, let alone the Simurgh – and it was what was happening, I knew it from the whispers I'd heard and the wailing of the sirens. There were very few people on Earth-Bet who would mistake the meaning of the Endbringer sirens.
Frustration grew inside me : I refused to believe I had come here only to be unable to do anything. There had to be something I could do – yes. Yes, there was, I suddenly realized, the knowledge appearing in my mind just like every other use of my power had done before. There was a way I could fight here, but doing so would draw a lot of attention to Lasombra. Until now, I'd been known mostly in the Bay; this would put me on everyone's radar. Assuming I survived, which was never a given in an Endbringer fight.
Because this was wasn't a villain, or a gang. This wasn't Lung, or Coil, or Kaiser, who at their worst had only terrified a single city and its surroundings.
This was an Endbringer. One of the three monsters who had been dragging Mankind ever closer to the end for nearly two decades. And of them all, the Simurgh was the worst. Hopekiller, we called her, and it was a name she had earned a thousand times over. The other two murdered cities; the Simurgh turned them into seeping wounds on the surface of the world that bled poison in the form of her thralls.
I thought of the woman I'd seen praying in the shelter, of the children clustered around her. I thought of all the other places in the city where similar scenes were taking place. Through my shadowscape, I could distantly perceive it all – the choking fear, the horror, the despair of hundreds of thousands of people cowering in the dark, knowing one of the monsters who'd tormented the world for years had come for them.
With so much at stake, could I justify doing anything less than my best ?
The answer was obvious. No. Of course not. I would do everything I could, and to Hell with the consequences.
I heard the doors of the shelter close behind me. Good. Nobody should be near me while I did this, of that I was certain.
I raised my cane, called upon the vast power of the Abyss, and slammed it down.
"ALL WILL BE NIGHT," I declared, and forced my will upon the world to make it so.
Standing atop a building outside the effective range of the Simurgh's song, Legend watched a curtain of darkness spread across the sky with impossible speed, until it appeared to cover the whole of the heavens from horizon to horizon. It had begun at the sun itself, like an eclipse, before the circle of darkness had spread further and further, swallowing all the light that had come from above.
He could hear panicked shouts rise up from the capes gathered below, and he well understood why. Was this some new trick from the Simurgh ? She had never displayed that kind of ability, but every attack by the Hopekiller came with some new trick they could never prepare for. A quick call to the members of his team still in New York reassured him that, whatever it was, it was at least restricted to Canberra. He didn't want to think of anything or anyone capable of blocking the sun across the entire world, apart from one particular individual who might have that power.
Public lighting turned on across the Australian capital – whether automatically as some mechanism detected the drop in luminosity or because some spirited public servant who'd stayed at his post despite the Endbringer sirens had seen what was going on, Legend didn't know.
The Simurgh continued her descent, but she looked … surprised. Her head was turning this way and that, as if searching for something. Of course, given it was the Simurgh, who knew whether she was actually surprised or merely wanted them to think she was.
Legend scanned the skyline of Canberra, looking for anything out of the ordinary, and – there. In the distance, climbing the buildings on long black tendrils like some kind of monstrous, titanic spider, was a humanoid figure. It moved up, up, up …
… and punched the still-descending Simurgh into the chest with – was that a cane ?! Whatever it was, it sent the Endbringer flying backward and crashing all the way through a nearby building before slamming into the ground.
Legend watched, mouth gaping. In all the times he'd fought the Simurgh before, nobody had been able to punch her like that. Some attacks had landed, but always ones she'd simply ignored : whenever Alexandria or another high-tier Brute had tried to punch her, the Endbringer had always dodged, or blocked, or arranged something that had forced the cape to abort their attack. That was one of the problems with fighting the greatest precog in existence.
Not that the attack had done much damage : already the Simurgh was rising from the rubble, looking little worse for wear. But the cape was moving in, dodging the projectiles the Endbringer was throwing at him with telekinesis, and he punched her again, and again.
"Who the hell is that ?!" shouted someone, and Legend was surprised to realize it had been him. "Dragon, do you have a visual ?"
"I don't know," replied Dragon, sounding as surprised as Legend felt. "I don't know what's happening, Legend. I can't … I can't see anything ! All my eyes on the Simurgh have gone blind !"
"Priority override," chimed Legend's armband. "This is Armsmaster. The cape who has engaged the Simurgh is Lasombra, an independent from Brockton Bay. His powers include a Stranger effect that makes it impossible to record his image using technology. Me and Dragon have been trying to find a way around this, but have yet to succeed. We weren't aware he was here."
Keith frowned and pressed his own armband. "This is Legend. Armsmaster, do you mean you didn't see him when Strider came to collect you ?"
"He wasn't there, Legend. We knew he had a Mover power that let him teleport across town : it seems his rating may need to be … re-evaluated."
Legend blinked. Capes who could move across the globe on their own existed – Strider was the most well-known, but the Triumvirate was also capable of such – but they were very rare, and mostly specialized Movers as well. Yet such was obviously not the case of Lasombra.
"Could he have snuck along without you noticing ?" he asked.
"Unlikely. Ironically, his Stranger power would make him very noticeable in the PRT building. The camera system would have –"
"It doesn't matter how he got here," Alexandria cut in. "What's important is that he's here, and he's actually holding his own against an Endbringer. But does he know about the time limit ?"
"I … I don't know. It isn't like we make the details of Endbringer fights public …"
Legend's blood ran cold as he realized what Rebecca was implying. Lasombra didn't have an armband to keep track of how long he'd been within the range of the Simurgh's Song. He had to know about the Simurgh's ability to warp the minds of all those close to her, but if he overestimated his own resistance …
"Fuck," he said feelingly.
"Priority override," another voice called out. "I'm seeing movement in the city that's not us or the civilians."
Legend looked down, and saw what the caller was talking about. A swarm of creatures was bursting out of the ground, half machine and half biological. No two of them were identical, but they all were carrying things which could only be weapons, and began laying waste to their surroundings immediately.
This had to be the Simurgh's original plot, before Lasombra's interference. He'd seen her work enough times to take a guess at the pattern : a Tinker had been working in secret, not knowing that they were being manipulated in a thousand subtle ways until the Simurgh showed up to take control of their creations and unleash them upon the city at the worst possible time.
If nothing was done, the monsters would break into the shelters and slaughter the people inside, and that was if they were lucky – and on the day an Endbringer attacked, they were never lucky.
The mystery of Lasombra's presence would have to wait. They had a job to do.
"Any non-fliers, focus on the Tinkertech beasts on the ground," he ordered. "Keep them from reaching the shelters. The rest of us will assist Lasombra in the air. If you get a chance, tell him about the countdown and make sure he knows to withdraw before she gets to him. Let's go !"
And then it was time to fight yet another desperate, impossible battle.
The Simurgh's mouth was open, but I didn't hear her screaming.
Which was weird, because I could definitely hear the noise of our fight as we tore through the city (a flying signpost had told me we were in Canberra, and billboards for tourists had informed me that was the capital of Australia – which was weird, because I'd thought that was Sydney).
I knew that anyone who was exposed to the Simurgh's scream for too long turned into her puppet, a 'ziz-bomb' as they were commonly referred to, which was why the cities lost to her were quarantined with their population trapped inside. And her scream was how she spread that madness, everyone who heard it slowly becoming her pawn in the precognitive Rube Goldberg machines she created.
That scream must not be physical but use some kind of power that wasn't working on me because Lasombra was just a projection. At least I hoped so : there were entire graveyards and insane asylums full of capes who had thought they were immune to the Hopekiller's manipulations because of their powers.
With the sun blotted out by the vast shadow I'd conjured (and wasn't that going to be something to explain to the Protectorate if I ever managed to open a line of communication with them), Lasombra could fight without issue. And it was only now that I was engaging an actual Endbringer that I realized how much I'd been holding back, even when fighting the likes of Hookwolf and Lung.
I could hear the air screaming every time I threw a punch, as if reality itself was struggling to process the awesome strength of my projection. I'd never realized just how strong I was before, never had reason to go all-out like this, and I was glad of it, because every punch was doing tremendous damage to the surrounding buildings simply due to the air pressure it caused. If I'd fought like this in Brockton Bay, there wouldn't have been much of the city left by now.
And yet, despite all this, I was only inflicting superficial damage on the Simurgh. I could tell that the cracks in her marble-white body my punches were creating weren't slowing her down whatsoever. But even superficial damage could add up over time, and the goal of any Endbringer fight in the last ten years hadn't been to win, but to force the monster to back off.
I tried to bring her toward the sections of the city that had been fully evacuated by the time she'd shown up. Even with the Endbringer sirens and the constant drills that had become the norm in every big city on Earth, getting hundreds of thousands of people into the shelters took time; but my shadowscape also let me know where there were less people, and I punched the Simurgh in that direction.
She fought back with her telekinesis, throwing cars, lampposts, and chunks of the pavement at me. I smashed the biggest aside with shadow tentacles, and tanked the rest.
For all the destruction our battle was causing, neither of us were inflicting any real damage on the other. The moment she realized that, she would stop fighting me and redirect her attention to the other heroes and the rest of the city.
I had to do something to prevent that, or all my coming here would have accomplished was wreck a lot of the city before the Simurgh did whatever she'd come here to do anyway. I propelled myself toward the Simurgh again, dodging her projectiles with manoeuvres that would have reduced a human body to pulp, and punched her again, hurling her into a skyscraper and following her through the hole she'd made.
The Simurgh was already straightening herself, surrounded by broken computers, chairs and desks – this building must have been an office of some kind.
"MARCHOSIAS !" I roared, pulling on my link to my familiar.
The great Abyssal wolf leapt out of the shadows behind the Simurgh and clung to the Endbringer's back, savaging her pale flesh with her teeth and claws, which were infused with power beyond the mere physical.
Now I heard the Simurgh scream, in pain and shock. Before I could feel any satisfaction, however, she whirled around at impossible speed, the centrifugal force ripping Marchosias off her. Then she raised a hand, and a bolt of telekinetic force struck the wolf, sending her flying, tearing her own exit out of the skyscraper as she did so.
I winced mentally as I felt Marchosias crash almost three kilometers away. Through our bond, I could feel that she was still alive (if such a term even applied to her) as she slipped back into the Abyss to lick her wounds, but badly hurt and wouldn't come back anytime soon.
I didn't let that stop me. The Simurgh had turned her back to me, and I teleported myself closer, slamming into her back and punching her again and again and again. Every blow sent the two of us further down the building, ravaged floors passing by in my peripheral vision as I focused on beating down the Hopekiller.
Then she struck back, and she wasn't probing or holding back any longer. What felt like the entire building smashed against me.
For the first time I could remember, my projection had actually been hurt by brute strength, instead of fire or light like what Lung and Purity had used. I teleported out blindly, slipping in and out of the Abyss and emerging laying on the ground of Canberra, in a street surrounded by broken cars.
In the distance, the Simurgh pulled herself out of the wreckage of the skyscraper we'd levelled with our fight, and began drifting closer to me, ignoring the attacks from the other capes who'd gathered in Canberra's defense – including those from the Triumvirate. They had finally gotten off their asses and joined in – but no, I was being uncharitable. I was the one who'd attacked the Simurgh before everyone else, and the fight had only lasted a handful of minutes, for all that it'd felt much, much longer.
In any other situation, I would have felt giddy at fighting on the same battlefield as such heroes, but right now, all I could think of that was much it hurt. It wasn't pain, not exactly, but now that I wasn't fighting, even for just a moment, the mental effort of fighting at such a high level while taking damage and repairing it repeatedly was catching up to me. The temptation to drop my projection, to withdraw my consciousness back into the Abyss and then to my body in Brockton Bay, was becoming more and more difficult to resist.
Surely … surely that was enough, right ? Nobody could say I hadn't done my best. I had come, I had fought, and it hadn't been enough. Thousands of capes had done the same since Behemoth had first appeared and shown Mankind that it wasn't at the top of the food chain anymore. It was only pride that had let me think I was different somehow. I had hurt the Simurgh, contributed to whatever damage threshold needed to be reached before the Endbringer would leave. Maybe enough that the people of Canberra wouldn't need to be quarantined out of fear of them having been turned into ziz-bombs. I doubted anyone but Scion had ever done as well as I had against her, and for all my power, I knew I wasn't Scion …
I heard a sound close by – a strangled intake of breath. I looked up, and saw that there was someone standing close by. A man in blue and white spandex, with some kind of weird energy field around his hands. A cape, whether local and taking a stand to defend his home, or who had volunteered to come from further afield.
He was terrified, I could feel it. Scared almost out of his mind, his terror radiating through the shadowscape. But he was still standing there, between me and the approaching Endbringer. Shielding me from her with his body, with whatever power he could muster.
The Simurgh cocked her head to the side as she looked at him for a couple of seconds. Her mouth was open, and he shook his head in denial. Unlike me, he was hearing her scream, digging into his head to warp him into something else. From where I laid unmoving, I heard him begin to say something – then something heavy slammed into him, and he was gone.
"Blue Knight, deceased, C-12," said a tinny voice. Slowly, I turned my head, and saw that it was coming out from a speaker on …
… on the cape's arm, which was all that was visible of him, along with the pool of blood spreading from under the boulder that had crushed the rest of him.
He was dead. Just like that, someone with the courage to stand up to an Endbringer was gone, another hero murdered as casually as swatting out a fly. The Simurgh had already dismissed him, as if he meant nothing to her – because he hadn't, I knew.
Just like hundreds, thousands of others over the years since Behemoth had first appeared and taught Humanity we weren't atop the food chain anymore, and all our hopes and dreams of a better tomorrow were only so much ash in the cosmic wind. Just like millions of ordinary people whose lives had been destroyed by the Endbringers, again and again and again, only for the monsters to depart and leave us to pick up the pieces.
Their victims didn't matter to them.
But they mattered to me.
I forced my fatigue and my distress down, and forced Lasombra to his feet before looking up at the feathered bitch, who was staring down at me with that same hateful expression of utter tranquillity on her too-perfect features.
"YOU WILL PAY FOR THAT," I promised, and pushed myself off the ground with my tentacles in imitation-flight once more.
I didn't bother with my cane anymore. I leant into my rage, and fought with all the subtlety of a wild animal, punching and kicking, using my tentacles to force the two of us into close-quarters.
The Simurgh met my assault head-on, and I found out that she'd figured out how to hurt me after all. She hit me back with balls of concentrated air, molecules forced so tight that they glowed like plasma. Every such projectile burned a hole through my projection, but I ignored the pain, even as it made me want to scream.
More. I needed more ! More strength, more power ! I drew on the Abyss more deeply than I ever had before, pouring more of its energies into my projection, repairing the damage the Simurgh was inflicting and strengthening it even further. Every blow made the air tremble : in the edge of my field of view, I saw windows shatter under the shifting air pressure, broken shards raining down onto the empty streets below. Even the capes who were bombarding the Simurgh with their own attacks were forced to retreat to avoid being caught in the backlash, except for a few like Alexandria and Eidolon whose powers were mighty enough to withstand the onslaught.
The longer we fought, the more my hold onto Lasombra's form slipped. I had realized some time ago that the suit-and-cane look I'd been using all this time wasn't necessary : it was simply a remnant of my first subconscious use of my powers. By then, the look had become part of my brand, so I'd kept using it; but now, I had no problem with making my projection look more monstrous if that was what it took. I didn't know what exactly I looked like right now, but I knew it wasn't anything pleasant.
Some distant part of me felt that it was appropriately ironic to fight the False Angel while looking like some shadow demon dragged out of the darkest pits of Hell. It was only right. The darkness was mine to command, for I was Lasombra.
I was the Shadow; I was Laza Omri Baras; I was Lau-Som-Bheu; I was –
I was –
Something broke inside me, and then I was drowning in memories that were not mine, yet were. They were out of order, broken shards of glass that bit into my mind with agonizing, merciless viciousness.
I saw a castle full of pale monsters in the clothes of medieval aristocrats, who looked at me with terror, adoration and envy, its walls covered in painted portraits and the trophies of a thousand conquests.
I saw a village, half its people turned to corpses at my hand as punishment for some perceived failure, and a young man walking out of the ruins to kneel before me, offering absolute loyalty without asking for anything in return.
I saw the world drowning in a Flood sent from the Heavens to punish me and my kind for our depravity. I felt my teeth sink into the flesh of my brethren, devouring them under the water so that I may survive.
I saw war across the streets of an ancient city, as me and my kindred rose against our makers, hungry for their blood and their power.
I saw a man, with a severe face and a dark beard, standing in judgment of my siblings and I for our crimes as we all cowered before him, our hands and teeth still red with the blood of our sires. His eyes were hard, and above him was a Mark that blazed with power –
I screamed, for even the memory of that Mark was enough to terrify me more than anything. More than the Trio, more than Mom's death, more than the Locker, more even than the Simurgh herself. The Mark was power, and wrath, and the Judgment of the One Above rendered into a form that could not be denied or ignored by any who gazed upon it. To look upon it was to know that God was real, and He hated me for what I was and what I had done –
Too much. It was too much ! I couldn't make sense of the flow of memories, couldn't tell between those that were mine and those that weren't. My perception flickered between the battlefield of Canberra, the depthless darkness of the Abyss, my room, and the memories of an impossible past that I knew was nevertheless true.
But even so, I kept fighting the Simurgh, my created body moving on instincts which weren't my own, which I only now realized hadn't never been the result of a combat-oriented Thinker power but the result of millennia of battle and plundering the skills of my own descendants to bolster my own.
I wasn't alone : other capes joined the fray, heroes and villains alike, bringing mighty powers of their own to bear against the False Angel. I saw the Triumvirate, who had fought the Endbringers more than any other living human being; I saw a score of Alexandria packages; I saw Tinkers wearing flying power armor, their visors crudely removed or adapted so that they might see me with their own eyes.
In the distance, I saw the Dragonflight, carrying ordinance that was too dangerous for the living to come close by as they let loose upon the Simurgh's creations, wiping hundreds of them out in a single flash of heat and light. Further out into the city, I felt the fear and defiance of dozens of capes fighting the minions of the Hopekiller to keep them from breaching into the shelters.
Yet for all their efforts, they could do nothing to the Simurgh, who even as she seemed to remain focused on Lasombra-that-was-me continued to block or dodge all of their attacks. I alone, it seemed, she could not predict with her infamous precognition, the one power that had poisoned Mankind with paranoia, making us all wonder whether our choices and deeds were but part of one of her plots.
And it wasn't enough. But I refused to let this stand, and – there. Amidst the torrent of Lasombra's memories, there was something I could use. I didn't hesitate, didn't pause to think of the cost or consequences. Amidst the flow of alien, disordered, monstrous thoughts I was drowning into, the only one I could be certain was mine was my desire to end her.
I kicked the Simurgh away, threw back my head and, screaming like a demon out of Hell, clawed at the thin skin that separated Creation from the Abyss.
Eidolon watched as the world was rent asunder.
He had seen portals be opened before, more times than he cared to count. Doormaker's powers were crucial to Cauldron's activities, and Eidolon himself had wielded similar abilities often.
This wasn't the same thing at all. The hole Lasombra had created – and it could be no one else – led nowhere. It swallowed the light, the air, everything around it. He would have called it a black hole, except he'd actually conjured those before, using a power he'd lost the ability to call upon years ago, and even they felt less hungry that the … the Gate before them.
David looked through the Gate and he saw –
He saw –
He saw –
The beginning and ending of all things. Power beyond measure, beyond knowing. Beasts so great and terrible, it made him and everything he had done and ever would do seem insignificant by comparison.
He gasped as he tore his gaze away from the Gate. His heart was pounding in his chest, he was covered in cold sweat underneath his armor, and he felt abjectly terrified in a way he hadn't since gaining his powers.
Then he saw that Lasombra (who, since he'd rejoined the fight, had stopped looking like a man in a black suit and instead was … some kind of humanoid shadow beast that in any other circumstance Eidolon would have attacked on sight) and moved behind the Simurgh in an impossibly fluid motion, and was pushing the Endbringer toward the Gate. More importantly, he saw that the Simurgh, who had taken the shadowy cape's punch head-on and let herself be sent through buildings, was pushing back.
Eidolon didn't hesitate. Casting all but one of his active powers away, he called for new ones, and – yes. Flight, kinetic redirection, and an energy barrier. Exactly the combination he needed right now.
He slammed into the Simurgh, and felt more than saw Alexandria follow his lead. Soon every flying Brute had joined in, adding their strength to Lasombra's as together, they pushed the Hopekiller into the darkness. Others formed around them, protecting them from the projectiles the Endbringer was throwing at them with telekinesis. The part of him that had gone through these fights so many times before noted that there was something different about the onslaught – as if the Simurgh was panicked and flailing about, using everything she could to just stop them rather than playing her usual games.
That thought was only intensified when the Simurgh started to twitch, then to thrash around, striking at them with her actual limbs instead of her telekinesis. Eidolon watched a flier whose name he didn't know go down, head turned into pulp by the Endbringer's punch, but he kept pushing, as did all of them.
Again, Lasombra screamed, loud enough to drown out the Endbringer's own shriek, and with a push that reverberated through his tentacles and caused several of the buildings he was using to anchor himself to collapse, hurled the Simurgh into the black just as the Gate closed with the sound of the world's ending. Eidolon barely reacted in time to revert his trajectory before he followed her through, and he caught Alexandria and Legend catching those capes who hadn't reacted in time, keeping them from falling through the Gate.
The hole in the world closed right on the Simurgh's neck like the universe most terrible guillotine, and before the eyes of Eidolon, the rest of the Triumvirate, and a gathering of the world's mightiest capes, the Third Endbringer was beheaded, her head falling off as the rest of her body disappeared into the darkness.
Her scream silenced forever.
The Simurgh was confused.
Her attack on the city of the host-species had been as carefully planned as her every action since her activation. Striking here would cause a collapse of societal order across the entire landmass, providing numerous opportunities for fresh Triggers which would increase the overall conflict level across the experiment.
The interference of the High Priest and his allies had been expected and planned for. But the anomaly that had joined the engagement was not. It wasn't part of the Cycle, wasn't connected to either of the progenitor entities, and displayed powers that defied even her vast understanding of the universe's laws.
The anomaly had to be studied. Her purpose was to provide a challenge to her creator, and to maintain the Cycle. The anomaly may hold the key to the first, and threatened the second. But very few of her senses had been able to grasp the anomaly, and then only by tracking the effects of its actions. She couldn't predict the anomaly's actions, nor could she read its past. That had made the engagement more difficult than any she'd previously participated in, but the damage she'd sustained had been minimal.
Even the injuries inflicted by that canine form the anomaly had conjured had been minimal, though the brief shutdown of her perceptions that had accompanied them had been beyond expectations. The sensory feedback, before she'd shut it down and removed the canine form from the battle, had been most unpleasant.
And now … now she could perceive nothing at all. The loss of what the host species would have identified as the seat of her cognitive center didn't affect her : it had only ever existed in order to play upon the preconceptions of the host species.
Her postcognition detected no flow of time for her to follow back into the past; her precognition could sense no motion of the cosmos she could anticipate. And all her other senses returned nothing, even the ones so finely tuned they could read the motion of particles and the flux of quantum waves.
There was nothing around her. The only conclusion she could reach was that somehow, the anomaly had transported her forward in time to beyond the heat death of the universe, that which the progenitors sought to escape.
She was wrong.
For all her power, for all the fear and despair she had inflicted, the Simurgh remained nothing more than a very elaborate machine. Devoid of feeling, of love, of the merest shred of empathy : it had no more soul than a very sharp and dangerous rock. Its manipulation of humans had only ever been the result of brute-force calculations, not true understanding.
It was a thing of pure matter and energy, devoid of spirit, and such things could not exist in the Abyss.
And so, banished within the Abyss, the existence of the Third Endbringer came undone. There is no time in the Abyss, for it lies outside of all Creations; but if there was, then even the meanest animal would have lasted longer, would have been able to maintain its existence better than the Hopekiller.
For what felt like an eternity, the battlefield was silent. Then a ragged cheer rose from the capes who'd survived the battle. Around them, the city center of Canberra laid in ruins, the air choked by the dust of felled skyscrapers. And yet, this was still a momentous victory, one that Alexandria still couldn't believe had happened.
The death toll was low, even compared to other Simurgh attacks, which were – no, which had been, she corrected herself – the least immediately devastating out of all the Endbringers. They had lost capes, good ones, in the fight against the Simurgh in the air and her Tinkertech beasts on the ground, and at least a few hundred civilians who hadn't made it to the shelters in time had been ripped to pieces in the streets. And of course, with how many buildings the battle had brought down, the property damage would be in the billions of dollars. They'd probably have to evacuate Canberra just to keep people from breathing in the dust and pulverized glass and concrete.
Yet still, this was an undeniable miracle, and Alexandria wished she had the luxury of savor it. Sadly, her responsibilities prevented her from doing so, but it was a testament to how shocked she was that it took her several seconds to stop simply flying in place and start looking for the cape who'd made this miracle happen. Finding Lasombra only took a moment : he was on the ground, laying down amidst the rubble of one of the buildings their fight had toppled, his back resting against the flank of his great wolf (a female, if Alexandria was any judge, remembering a documentary she'd watched years ago, while laying down in bed and waiting for her cancer to kill her).
Alexandria had known about the mysterious cape who had appeared in Brockton Bay a bit more than a month ago and promptly proceeded to wipe out every major gang in the city single-handedly. He hadn't really caught her eye until killing Coil while also stumping all of Watchdog's attempts at figuring him out. Cauldron had decided to keep their hands clear of the situation : the emergence of a powerful cape imposing order was one of the potential results of the Terminus project – in truth, it'd been one of the most optimistic ones.
She hadn't expected Lasombra to show up at the Endbringer fight, though, and she definitely hadn't expected him to do what nobody on Earth-Bet had managed to achieve and kill one of the three monsters. But while the death of the Simurgh was good news, it also brought a lot of questions.
They needed to know where Lasombra had sent the Endbringer, and if she could come back. Alexandria didn't think she could : she'd only glimpsed at the … the … the Gate, but she had a feeling nothing could come back from it. But they needed to be sure.
And they needed to know more about the cape who could create such a thing. They needed to bring him under their control, or, if he turned out to be another ploy of the Enemy, they needed to destroy him.
"Lasombra," she called out as she descended. "I am Alexandria. We need to talk."
He turned his head in her direction. His entire body looked … frayed, for lack of a better world. He was much smaller than he'd been at the battle's apex, but his suit hadn't come back, leaving only a humanoid shadow. Wisps of black smoke rose from him, as if he were dissolving, unable to hold his form. What little physicality he'd left was shuddering, as if he was freezing; or perhaps 'glitching' was a better word. The wolf wasn't looking much better, looking up at Alexandria with black, soulful eyes.
"EXHAUSTED," he said, and his voice was much weaker and less terrible than when he'd threatened the Simurgh to her face. "WOUNDED."
"We can get Panacea to look at you – " she began, but Lasombra shook his head.
"POINTLESS. INHUMAN." It was difficult to tell, but Alexandria felt she could hear grief in Lasombra's voice, even as the word sent a shiver down her spine that was entirely inside her head. "HERE."
He tossed something at her, and she caught it by reflex before looking down and realizing that she was now holding the head of the Simurgh. Despite everything she had endured, everything she had done, she nearly dropped it out of sheer … what ? Shock ? Fear ? Disgust ?
She looked up from the macabre trophy, and saw that Lasombra and his wolf were gone. Above, the shadows blotting out the sun began to fade, and light returned to the devastated city.
"Thank you," Alexandria whispered under her breath, before taking to the skies once more.
There was much work to be done to make the best use of this victory they had been given, before she could take a trip to Brockton Bay.
Danny Hebert was woken up by the sound of his daughter screaming. Before his brain had even fully registered what was going on, he was out of bed and running through the house.
"Taylor !" he shouted as he barged into her room, slamming her door open and all but smashing apart the light switch with his fist, heart racing.
The light flickered on, revealing his daughter thrashing on her bed, screaming in pain and clawing at her face. Around her, the room was full of writhing black tentacles, tossing books and clothes and school supplies around randomly.
"Taylor !" Danny shouted again, even as he tried to force his way through the tentacles to reach her side.
"D-Dad ?" Her head snapped toward him, eyes wide and completely black, but Danny barely registered that. Her voice was so, so weak. It reminded Danny of how she'd sounded in the hospital bed, less than two months ago, and the thought gave him another burst of energy.
Danny pushed forward, but the press of tentacles was too strong. Wherever they touched his skin, he felt colder than he'd ever felt, but he ignored it, desperate to reach his daughter. But the tentacles were too strong, and he wasn't nearly as fit as he'd been in his youth. They weren't trying to keep him at bay, but even as he ignored the pain from their glancing blows, he still kept being forced back, step by step by step.
"Taylor !" This time, he was screaming, in anguish and grief and impotent rage.
He couldn't reach her – he couldn't get to her – he couldn't be there for her, he was going to fail her again, just like he had failed her at school, just like he had failed her for years, just like he'd failed the Docks, just like he'd failed the Bay, just like he'd failed Annette –
[DESTINATION]
[AGREEMENT]
Suddenly, arms that looked to be made of the same shadow-stuff as the tentacles erupted from the floor and walls. They clashed with the tendrils filling the room, pushing them aside : while the tentacles were individually stronger, the arms were coordinated, several of them working together to overcome one single tentacle. Danny didn't question where they had come from, too focused on crossing the distance between the door and his daughter's bed – a distance which had seemed so small, yet now felt so vast.
He reached out with his hand, and Taylor did the same, her arm trembling and wreathed in blackness. But just before they could grasp each other, the lightbulb above sputtered and died, and the shadows of the room closed in, swallowing them both.
When the shadows retreated and the bedroom returned to normal, now lit only by the starlight filtering through the window, it was empty. Of Taylor and Danny Hebert, there was no sign.
AN : If you're wondering how the hell I wrote this chapter so fast, it's because I started writing it weeks ago, and it was almost complete by the time the story caught up with it.
As to how it is that Lasombra is immune to the Simurgh's scream, think of the Hopekiller's power as her reaching out into the brains of everyone in range with many hands. Inside everyone's head is a Rubik's cube, and if the Simurgh solves it, then she can do ... whatever she wants to the poor bastard.
But Taylor's metaphorical Rubik's cube is still in Brockton Bay, so the Simurgh's fingers are scraping against the glass of the lens through which her consciousness is puppetting Lasombra.
Does that make sense ? I swear it did when I thought of it.
There's going to be a pause of a couple of weeks before the next chapter, so that I can write some of my other stories as well as figure out the details of what's going to happen next. Yes, I know, I'm evil.
Also, the next chapter (or the one after that, depending on how I end up arranging things) will contain a PHO thread reacting to the Simurgh's demise, which may or may not take inspiration from the comments on this chapter. So, you know, go nuts.
As always, I hope you enjoyed reading this chapter, and look forward to your thoughts and comments.