Leviathan charged at the frontline forces. With a snap, crack, and boom of my wings and an explosive launch of my limbs, I streaked toward him like a tractor-trailer-turned-ballistic missile. I knocked a few people over as they were exiting the building, sending them toppling over and skidding across the wet pavement. The full force of my wings hitting them was like getting hit face-first by a hurricane.

  I wasn’t as fast as Leviathan. I didn’t have a water echo or hydrokinesis. What I did have was a whole hell of a lot of kinetic energy and some really big fists. I wound up adopting that somewhat silly-looking pose some heroes flew in, with their fists extended all the way forward over their heads, like they were trying to punch air. Leviathan had one arm raised, claws poised to strike someone in front of him down.

  I tucked my wings back and hit him square in the chest with both fists as hard as I could. The impact rattled my body from my fists to the tip of my tail. Luckily, I had the training not to lock my elbows; I think I would have shattered my arms if I had. Hitting him was very strange. He had flesh, and my fists deformed the skin while making contact as I would have expected. But under that flesh was a harder material, his muscles, maybe. That was like punching near-solid matter. Underneath that, there was zero give at all. I might as well have punched the sheer face of a mountain. Rock solid. Scratch that. Far more solid than rock.

  I’d be lying if I said the results weren’t spectacular. He’d seen me coming and had partially stepped back into his echo, which absorbed some small fraction of the impact. I sent him through the back of his echo like a ragdoll, bodily flying straight into a sixteen-story building, which he cratered into. The sound of me hitting him, and then him hitting the building, was deafeningly loud. Like a dozen high-speed car crashes happening simultaneously.

  I scrabbled to my feet and charged him while he was momentarily stuck in the structure of the building. Fenja and Menja were charging in with me, each nearly four stories tall. I saw flyers darting up to the roof of the building and grabbing people.

  The building was horribly compromised and was failing quickly. The roof was already listing, one side a few feet lower than the other, as the structure below buckled and collapsed. Several of the people on top weren’t even upright, rolling and stumbling around as the building rocked and rolled below them.

  Those people were probably going to die in a matter of seconds when the building came down on them. My heart went out to them. I hoped, wished that others could get them out in time. I could save them, but that would come at the cost of letting Leviathan get back up and reorient himself.

  I couldn’t let that happen. Every second he was out and free, more people were dying.

  “Fenja! Menja!” I roared at each of the twins. “Take the back flanks! The building is coming down! Don’t let him escape!” One of the two sneered at me, but they did it anyway. That’s all that mattered. I took the front face of the crater.

  Leviathan was partially immobilized in the building as it was pinching in on him while it collapsed. He’d no more than get one limb free, and in the process, do more damage to the structure that would then re-secure him. It wasn’t going to last. His water echo was dumping so much water into the interior of the building that it was knocking walls loose and blowing out windows throughout the first three floors of the building.

  I got into the space, trying to be slightly aware of not getting myself pancaked under the building. I took the opportunity to pound the living hell out of him with my fists each and every time he tried to move forward. Punching him hurt. It shook my skeleton like an off-balance washing machine. My armored forearms and fists were tingling and going numb with the impacts. I was punching him entirely way too hard for my own good. I knew I was damaging myself doing it. The deep cracking sounds coming from my arms, combined with the chunks of carapace that were fracturing and falling loose with each hit, told me that.

  This wasn’t an endurance battle. This was a no-holds-barred punching match. Every couple of minutes, another tsunami was going to hit the Bay, each one bigger and stronger than the last. Hitting a coastal city ringed around the bay, one that wasn’t prepared or designed for such things to ever hit. The first wave had already hit, and it had obliterated the boardwalk and buildings directly on the coastline. And that was the weakest.

  Fenja and Menja were stabbing their sword and spear through the back and sides of the building, inflicting grievous wounds on Leviathan. But their weapons, like my fists, found no deep purchase. They were carving and flaying skin, but not much deeper than that. Leviathan was bleeding black ichor for blood, not too dissimilar to my own, but thinner. Every second that the three of us hemmed him in, a torrent of all manner of attacks rained down on Leviathan. Lasers, blaster projectiles from tinkertech, force fields flying like guillotine blades from Narwhal.

  A stream of literal death that would have vaporized virtually any cape almost instantly, but it seemed to have depressingly little effect on Leviathan. Don’t get me wrong, he was steadily accumulating damage, but it seemed more surface-level than anything.

  He managed to get his tail free and whip it at me. I blocked it successfully with one forearm, but the arcing water echo lashed out and crashed bodily into me. Alexandria wasn’t kidding. It was exactly like getting hit by a solid object, taking a speeding truck to the chest. The impact rocked me back, but I brought my tail down, crushing the street behind me, and used the leverage to send him right back into the building with a right hook.

  That last hit and subsequent impact into the building’s structure spelled the end of the building remaining upright. There was a crackling roar as concrete failed and beams bent and sheared. It was tipping towards me, but not moving too much laterally, thankfully. Several people came tumbling off the rooftop towards me.

  Leviathan was using a burst of speed to try and vacate the building before it fell on top of him. I hit him. He did it again. I hit him again. I couldn’t let him escape if I could prevent it.

  My eyes scanned over the people falling. Five people. Three I didn’t recognize, two I did. Crusader… and Tattletale.

  Fuck. FUCK!

  I had maybe two seconds, less, before both the people and the building were going to hit the ground–and me.

  I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

  I punched Leviathan square in the face one last time. Two dozen tentacles from my hair reached out and snatched Tattletale from the air and rolled her up into a giant cocoon behind my head dangerously fast. I hoped she’d be okay. Certainly better than getting splattered on the pavement. Then all eight of my wings beat a single time, buffeting Leviathan. I was gone. Airborne. The building came down like an avalanche of steel and concrete. The torrential rains contained and dispersed most of the dust.

  My armband, which had been reading out wounded and fatalities, crackled with a new voice coming over, loud and urgent. “Seal him off! Contain him! Do everything you can to keep him locked down!” Forcefields, metal beams, stone formations, and more started to grow and snap into place over, around, and on top of the pile of rubble. The pile was shifting around as Leviathan moved underneath it. He wouldn’t be pinned for long. Water was spraying out like fire hydrant geysers from a dozen locations around the pile.

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  I circled from the air, maintaining a medium distance. Close enough to dive in when needed, far enough away to hopefully be able to react to water jets and waves. I took a quick check of my current status. I was hot. Not super hot, but far hotter than I would have expected to be so early into a fight. I had been going all out, but I suspected it was more to do with my size than that. Flying and the water on my wings were helping.

  Several of the armor plates on my chest had been cracked by blows from Leviathan and from being hit by his tail-whip echo. My right upper fist had pins-and-needles going on, but sensation was coming back. The plates on my knuckles were cracked, split, and missing in places. My left arm had a fracture running up from my thumb over halfway to my elbow. Blood was welling up from the crack, which was an inch wide in places. It wasn’t a clean break; it was jagged and winding, which I was pretty sure was going to work out in my favor.

  I activated my power to grow a dozen large tentacles from the inside of my forearm, and when they’d grown in, I extended them fully, wrapped them around my left forearm, contracted them as hard as I could, and solidified them into carapace. A temporary fix, but it’d have to do. The incredible pressure of the constriction sealed the crack, and the hardened tentacles should hold it together and reinforce it.

  My eyes, forever scanning around and tracking numerous things, caught motion in the sea. The forcefield on the Rig was lit up like the sun and crackling on one side.

  Oh fuck!

  One one thousand, two one thousand–

  I jabbed the broadcast button on my wristband. “Wave! Fifteen seconds! Take cover!”

  There was a group of capes in a parking lot near the collapsed building. No cover within a hundred yards. They were running to the nearest building. They weren’t going to make it. I squeezed Lisa tightly in my hair, and she made a muffled groan.

  I needed her to be secure; otherwise, she was going to get seriously wounded. I was pretty sure I could get to those capes in the open. The problem was that I was going the wrong way to do it, and I didn’t have the time to do a graceful bank.

  “Brace, Lisa!” I shouted.

  She stiffened, and I used my entire body and the leverage of my tail to flip a total one-eighty in the air, and beat my wings as hard as I could to reverse direction. The reversal was hard g-forces. The muscles in my back were screaming and burning in protest. I used gravity to assist, pulling up before flipping around, and then using the assist to accelerate forward. It was a brutal maneuver, even for me.

  I dropped out of the sky on a downward arc. “Line up abreast!” I shouted down at the fleeing capes. Several looked over their shoulders, tripped, and fell. Several skidded to a stop. Once again, there was more than I could save. I’d risk killing the ones who fell by scooping them up with asphalt. Between getting hit in the head with chunks of pavement and the deadly claws I’d have to use to grab them. It just… wasn’t worth the risk outside of having no other choice.

  I’m sorry…

  I reached out with four arms and snatched four people up. I grabbed a fifth in my tail. I didn’t have the luxury of time to make decisions on who lived or died. I grabbed whoever I could reach along my course. I did my best to grab them in a way that lessened the impact of my scooping them up. I wrapped my hands around them, letting my arms fall back to my side with some resistance to spread the acceleration out over time. Even doing what I could, I imagined it felt like getting launched out of a slingshot, or one of those jet catapults.

  I just… I didn’t have the luxury of choice at the moment. If I slowed down, I couldn’t get to them in time and get them clear. Three of them I recognized. Night, the Neo-Nazi member of E88 that turned into some kind of shadowy nightmare demon creature when people didn’t look at her. Narwhal, the leader of The Guild who could deploy and shoot forcefields that weren’t Manton-limited. The last one was… Bulletface? Bullethead? The guy from the Travelers who looked like a linebacker and who could shoot things like they’d been shot out of a gun by touching them. I had no idea who the other two were.

  I pulled up hard from where the tips of my wings and my claws had been skimming the ground and took to the sky once more, and without seconds to spare. The wave smashed through the parking lot less than a dozen feet below me. A chorus of cries and groans came from my hands and tail as I pulled another intensive maneuver.

  The water was almost pitch black with all the soil and sediment it had picked up when making landfall, and it was filled with wrecked cars, chunks of building material, trash, and all manner of other hazards. I imagined that it was basically the equivalent of falling into a blender to get submerged in one directly.

  Narwhal shouted at me from my right upper hand. “Put me up top, I need to see what’s going on!”

  I went to move her to my neck when the wave smashed into the pile of rubble that Leviathan was buried in. The impact shook something loose because hunks of concrete flew up and out as he burst out from underneath. Most of the force fields had gone down while people were taking cover from the waves. He jumped to his feet and looked around.

  Then his head locked directly on me as I circled a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty feet off the ground.

  Oh shit.

  He climbed a six-story building by running on all fours up the side of it, hard and fast enough to tear gaping hunks out of the building with each hand and foothold, and launching himself thirty or forty feet into the air over the top of the building. He spun in the air like some kind of monstrous ballerina, tucking his limbs and tail in tight. Then his tail reached out like a bullwhip, shooting an arc of water aimed at my midsection like a blade shot out of an artillery cannon.

  I had just enough time to shout: “Hold on!” while twisting in the air and ferociously clawing at the wind and rain with my wings. Spinning, rolling, and folding myself nearly in half, I managed to dodge most of the shot. It clipped my lowest left wing and sheared it clean in half. It hit the bottom of my tail as well, where I’d had someone held in my claws. The impact shattered my hard armor and battered my soft armor and muscles.

  My nerves lit with agony for the briefest fraction of a second before losing sensation. I looked down at my tail, fearing the worst.

  There was just… a strip of bloody cloth left wrapped around one claw on the end of my tail. Nothing else remained of the hero or villain who had previously been in my grasp.

  I wanted to cry, to scream, to fly down and pulverize Leviathan with everything I had. But I didn’t have the time, and now I had a whole roster of people directly in my care at the moment.

  I grew tentacles out and brought Narwhal up to straddle the back of my neck. I also unraveled Lisa and stuck her basically sitting on Narwhal’s lap like a little spoon. She was shaky, hair matted to her face, but seemed to be intact. The others would have to wait until I had an opportunity to drop them off.

  Leviathan spun and ran off to attack another group of capes who were attacking him. I gained altitude to try and prevent another air attack.

  “Not too high! As long as I can see them, I can shield them!” Narwhal called out to me.

  “Narwhal, I need glasses or lenses or something! I can’t see with the wind and rain!” Lisa, this time, shouting over the combined racket of the city-battering battle below, the whipping rain, howling wind, and constant rolling chop of my wings.

  Lisa got her glasses. She looked like some kind of retro-futuristic action hero with a glowing trapezoidal shield over her eyes like tacky sunglasses. She looked patently absurd; I would have laughed my ass off in any other situation.

  Narwhal was tracking the fight below, shooting out a constant stream of flat, two-dimensional force fields that flew through the air like bullets. She’d direct them down to intercept attacks or provide cover for someone; they’d get shattered like glass by Leviathan and dissipate. They seemed capable of largely negating a hit, either direct or a water echo.

  Leviathan was still tearing through them as fast as she could make them and deploy them. Which was incredibly fast. I dropped us a bit lower to try and help with her response times. It was a solid increase in her effectiveness. I circled overhead, dropping behind buildings and taking cover each time Leviathan sent a jet or whip of water at us. He was getting fairly pissed off by my tactics, from what I could tell, taking more opportunities to direct attacks at me.

  The net result was that forces on the ground had marginally less pressure on them to focus on defense, and they could instead focus on attack. Alexandria, Chevalier, Myrrdin, Eidolon, Dauntless, and Legend were hitting him with devastating attacks. I wished in the moment that I had a fraction of their ability and experience. When he turned to fight them, I popped up, and Narwhal gave them cover. He’d send an attack my way, and I’d duck back into cover.

  Miss Militia was flown in and dropped off by someone with a flight power, and she started firing grenades at Leviathan, aiming at his legs and feet to keep him off-balance. Fenja and Menja also moved in, and the two of them, along with Chevalier and Alexandria, were locking him down fairly effectively at the moment.

  I felt like I had a free second. I came down low, half a block away from the battle, in cover from Leviathan-for now. I brought my hands up and shouted at my passengers: “Tell me now, staying or going?”

  The remaining unknown cape and Bulletman shouted back: “Drop us!”

  I started to move to do a drop-landing. Night hesitated, then shouted, “I am useless with others around. Stay, drop me when he is alone or obscured!”

  “Staying!” answered both Narwhal and Tattletale.

  I gently crashed down on top of the street, landing with two feet and my tail. One of my feet went straight through the street and into the sewers below. I tottered, but kept my balance with a twist of my midriff and flap of a few wings.

  “Fuck!” I shouted and dropped off the two who wanted to go. I transferred Night to my upper back and strapped her into place. Coiling my legs, I jumped and took to the air.

  “Apex! Narwhal! I have information and an idea!” Lisa was yelling, looking like a half-drowned rat on my neck. “We’re doing better like this, but we’re not doing any real serious damage! He gets denser the deeper you go. Nothing we’re doing is going more than a couple layers deep!”

  “What is the plan?” Narwhal asked.

  “We need two things. Someone with an offensive ability that hits hard. Like, ignoring physics level hard. And I need to watch him more. The way he’s moving and positioning, he’s got some weak spots at the shoulders and hips, but there’s something else. Maybe a core? I need to watch more before I can find it!”

  Narwhal started relaying the information to her armband using the broadcast feature. Lisa put her request into the processing system. I got us back into motion and flying around, dodging attacks and being a general annoyance and distraction for Leviathan.

  Lisa’s armband had downloaded a data pack, and she was furiously flicking through it, speed reading and looking for candidates for her idea. Narwhal was keeping up a damn fine defensive response for the heroes directly engaging Leviathan.

  Dragon’s voice sounded on all of our bands simultaneously.

  Wave inbound. ETA 60 seconds. Seek shelter immediately.

  We can’t catch a break with this asshole!