Glam talks to Armsmaster about the possibility of maybe being given access to confidential files on the Slaughterhouse Nine and is, somewhat predictably, completely shut down, on grounds that the rules are there for a reason. They try sharing their strategies, Armsmaster thanks them for it and assures them he'll look into the raised matter, but they still need to wait until they're a full member of the Protectorate to take advantage of these resources.
And is that supposed to make them more likely to want to stick around? Ugh.
The three following weeks are fairly quiet and peaceful for a change. No major engagements, the Empire Eighty-Eight has been keeping quiet, the various Asian gangs reduced once more to fighting each other, the Teeth haven't yet rebuilt. Blasto, Lung, and Oni Lee are still awaiting trial, though it's likely the tinker will be given a lighter sentence in some parahuman containment center while the other two will be sent to the Birdcage.
And then, somewhat earlier than would normally be expected, telltale seismic activity is registered in Pretoria, South Africa. The capes wishing to help must make their way to New York, to depart in an hour—small aircraft is waiting at the PHQ for the trip there.
(As well as the New Wave capes, Armsmaster, Miss Militia, Velocity, Transit, Dauntless, Rewind, Glimmer, and Silica—a.k.a. the Brockton Bay heroes who can help one way or another in an Endbringer fight—and eleven minor capes from nearby towns, including three rogues and one villain.)
"Okay. Are you ready? I'm ready. I'm not ready. I hope it works. Will it work? It won't work. It'll work. Will it work?"
Glam starts to go under. Slooooowly at first, they're very not-calm, but it'll take about three hours for the plane to arrive at their destination, so there's time.
Glam may not be in the best headspace to immediately answer. Or notice that a question has been asked.
And Lorica flies with Glam to a safe hang-back space while her bots swarm out to provide eyes and ears. Some of them carry the gun. (Everyone expects that if three bots cooperate on lifting a thing their builder just helped assemble it will turn out to be light enough for them.)
An Alexandria package cape who was in the plane offers to help carry the gun.
Alexandria, however, seems to have taken this momentary pause in the need for an Alexandria package to fly over to where they're standing. "...are they alright?" she asks Lorica.
"That's customizable, if there are advantages to particular strategies," says the bot. "Starting inside an evacuated building, running outside, jumping Behemoth, and energetically shredding him is probably the default, but she can appear somewhere else and do something else."
(Behemoth claps in the distance, liquefying half a dozen capes.)
"It's probably best if she does look like the real deal so people know what's going on. Estimate for ninety-nine percent?" A sonic boom destroys all the windows around the beast, and she turns around. "We can continue this conversation via comm," she says, and takes off to go after Behemoth again.
He repeats the warning a few more times, and so does Alexandria in a few different languages. Legend then says, for Lorica's benefit only, "Whenever you two are ready."
The Siberian slowed down a bit while the copybots weren't looking, but there's a Siberian-claw-shaped gouge along Behemoth's left forearm. The Endbringer tries throwing lightning at her, and she's completely unaffected by it, of course. She jumps into the air and tears through Behemoth's right leg, taking a chunk of meat off him.
That, or perhaps the expectations of the hundreds of other capes watching the engagement are shaking out to this outcome. She continues digging, this time in the direction of Behemoth's center of mass, so the Endbringer digs into his own flesh with his claws so he can take the Siberian off him and throw her at some poor unwitting capes. Then arc lightning, jumping from cape to cape and not immediately killing, just burning them enough that they'll have slow, painful deaths.
She sure will try! But Behemoth will also choose that moment to leap and get a dozen capes within his kill aura, a hundred feet from where the Siberian was. She looks around as if she's confused and then follows after him and grabs his arm. And hugs it. His arm is thick enough that she can't immediately deprive him of it with the hug, but now it's hanging by half as much mass as it was before.
—five hundred feet from the predicted location, amidst the thickest cluster of people. Some twenty capes are incinerated from within, and another thirty are variously injured by this sudden appearance.
And the Triumvirate are on him.
He manages to get rid of her again and burrows once more. This time his path is very easy to predict, as he starts causing explosions and small volcanic eruptions along his way across the city.
And then he emerges again, and the Siberian's on him, and off with his arm, and off with one of his leg, and he falls much more heavily than a thing his size and mass ought to fall.
Now that he's down, the Siberian can actually turn him into a paper weight, completely limbless (even if for less than thirty seconds given his regeneration rate near the core), and he starts demonstrating his ability to cause damage without limbs. He can create lightning out of anywhere, apparently, using his claw was only for show, and the hundred-feet limit to his kill aura was apparently an entirely self-inflicted limitation, as its radius starts expanding. The Siberian continues tearing through him, and he continues causing more damage than he ever has, demonstrating gravity-manipulating powers no one ever suspected him of having and dropping capes around him like flies.
Radio silence. The Endbringer fried all electronics around, much farther than he usually does, and has started glowing ominously while the Siberian continues clawing his flesh off, covered head to toe in his ichor, shrugging off the fire and radiation and everything he tries to throw at her.
—Scion appears—
—a second too late, as the Endbringer goes off in a mushroom cloud detonation, consuming everything in a rapidly expanding radius—
—not rapid enough for Scion to fail to contain it then, the blinding glow of the explosion being reduced to stillness, the sonic boom reduced to silence, the radiation quickly decaying.
And even with Scion's help, a crater centered where Behemoth was, a swath of emptiness and desolation, with smears where people who didn't get cover fast enough had been standing, and the Siberian right in the middle.
Scion looks at her, and she disappears. He flies away.
"I'm—I—I don't—I mean, you were right to want to kill him. Fuck, even if the Slaughterhouse Nine decides to try to kill everyone Behemoth would've killed, they won't actually succeed. But I just—keep thinking I could've planned better, should've figured out he'd escalate, that's what they do-"
And in Sadde's room, they go lie on their bed and don't unmask.
"Yeah, what actually worries me most is that - there used to be only one of them, I don't know if 'three' was the maximum or if we can expect any skipped scheduled smackdowns when there's two. But I don't think not killing the fucking things because we're timid is the right call."
Snuggle. "I'm reminding myself as much as anything. We don't know how they respond to what we do; so we have to decide independently of that; and I am in favor of deciding to make the fucking things blow up. Considering Scion was on hand to contain it I would even describe the explosion as 'satisfying'."
Overall, mysterious and not forthcoming with a lot of details and letting quite some space for wild hypothesizing.
"I mean, I've been mulling over this and all these possibilities and there was a part of me that didn't want to do the Behemoth thing because then I'd need to do it to Leviathan and the Simurgh and then there'll be the Nine and there's everything else and by that point my brain is dividing into a million."
"I didn't sign up to save the world from literally everything except I kinda did and this is taking an unexpected toll on my mental health. I was not—nearly as prepared as I'd thought I was to the logical consequence of low cape life expectancy with respect to my social circle."