Wake-up Call – Chapter 78 – Battle

[Hannah]

Do you know what used to give me nightmares, even if only figurative ones?

Grey goo.

I was living in a new country, a new world, and I was under no illusions that I'd been brought here to do anything other than fight, but I still… I still was allowed to be a kid in ways I'd never been back home.

So I…

It took time. Adjusting. Effort.

But I managed it.

I managed to have friends, to [date], to… to lead the kind of life the stories on TV said that I should always have had at my age—or, at least, what all those poorly dubbed American shows told me.

This included mistakes. Lots of them.

Maybe the worst of which was to befriend Mouse Protector.

Because, as obnoxious as Minnie was, as much as she laughed when I didn't immediately realize what her cape name was referencing regarding her civilian identity…

The worst thing she did was lend me her books.

And expect me to read them.

This… This included quite a few science fiction notions I'd never been aware of and that she claimed would be relevant to our chosen profession, given how often Tinkers drew inspiration from popular media.

Note to self: she must [never] meet Colin.

But, yes, among those quite disturbing notions in her disorientingly diverse tastes—and the less said about the time she slipped me some novels I'd never have read if she hadn't taken their incriminating, [lascivious] covers off, the better—the one that stuck the most was grey goo.

A cloud of nanotechnology, of self-replicating robots smaller than a human cell. A hivemind set only to consume and assimilate. A weapon that would feed itself on its victims, that could take away my limbs from me, one by one, and turn them into ever hungrier mouths to devour me with as even the bullets from my power would only make it grow.

When I shared my concerns with Minnie, she all but vibrated with a face-splitting grin before launching into a rant about how [cool] it was and coming up with a few more horrifying notions for me to add to my waking nightmares.

Some of them involved the slow assimilation of my nervous system.

…

I may have terrible taste in friends.

Still, being Colin's second in command for quite some time has led to more than a few chances for idle chatter while waiting for something to happen—this was before the concept of being proactive was forcefully reintroduced to our organization by an allegedly reformed supervillainess I may have unwittingly semi-adopted, you understand. During those chats, as nonchalantly as I was able to, I somehow managed to get him to unknowingly reassure me about the worst of my Minnie-induced nightmares.

At least those that didn't involve views on romance that made me [very] uncomfortable and that I'm just now realizing slot quite neatly with Dragon's usage of Colin's techno-tentacles to bind me in mid-air before he gets behind me and—

…

Note to self: she must [never] meet Dragon.

Anyway! What Colin ended up telling me to finally lay down to rest the vivid images of my body being turned into a puppet for a hive mind from the inside out while I remained a prisoner of my trapped brain even as it was copied atom by atom and replicated over a thousand disembodied, silently screaming, immortal, ever-suffering Hannah's was…

That grey goo is impossible.

You can't store enough energy inside a single nanite to fuel all of the functions that it needs to have to be a functional part of a technological swarm. The density of the battery required for that would just turn them into tiny, microscopic, ineffective explosives.

There are a few more issues with the concept, of course, but… that's the one that stuck out the most to me.

So it is with deceptively steady fingers that I grab the next rocket-propelled grenade and load it into my power to shoot at Behemoth.

The last four have been deflected or destroyed before they landed.

This…

"I am about to shoot," I whisper into the communicator built into my helmet.

And Colin, alone with me in this bubble of time just for the two of us that only Dragon can ever breach, nods.

He… He does [something] over the console of his bulky bike, the one he showed me when I managed to get him to invite me to his workshop after hours. The one I told him we would ride together. Face death together on.

So it is no surprise that he managed to install whatever it is he's done to his bike to get me a few seconds of perfectly steady linear motion, with no swerving or bouncing whatsoever so I can line up the monster in my sights as he keeps tearing off new metallic members from Hookwolf.

Eidolon has shut down his roars.

Legend is parrying his lighting.

And Purity…

Purity is flying low, closer to the fight than she's been from the start after far too many thrown pieces of smashed buildings have slipped past her guard. She's almost right above the Endbringer, already gathering burning light between her hands, ready to make up for her failures, if not her past.

I take a deep breath, my chest expanding uncomfortably inside this armor Colin has built for me, one that is synchronized with the navigational computer of his bike, that steadies my movements, reinforces me, compensates for any deviation as my HUD is perfectly locked in the center mass of Behemoth's swollen chest, Lisa's information reassuring me that trickier shots aiming at weak spots are no longer required.

Outside our bubble of time, the monster, the heroes, and the villains move slowly enough that I can catch every single detail. Every shift in motion or expression.

And so I glimpse a new limb from Hookwolf sprouting behind Behemoth, gathering mass, thickness.

I look at it. Stop aiming at the monster's center of mass.

I slowly release my deep breath.

And I shoot at where he will be.

***

[Colin]

Hannah's grenade roars above my shoulder, only the electronic noise cancellation of my helmet turning the projectile's passing into something impressive rather than deafening, and I immediately disable the inertial stabilizer before the circuits overheat and we end up on a far more eventful ride than we signed up for.

Then…

Then I watch as the rocket exits the radius of my temporal distortion, slowing all at once rather than being sheared by unequal forces thanks to, no matter what Lisa and Dragon may say, a perfectly adequate amount of testing.

And I keep watching as it moves slowly enough for me to track it without the use of my HUD, just following the trail of burning fuel left in its wake as it approaches the Endbringer with a payload that should inconvenience it far more than anything I ever used against it.

It—at the very last moment, Behemoth tears off another tendril from Hookwolf's already unrecognizable shape and flings it aside, almost dismissively, straight at the rocket.

Purity's beam shoots down, the helicoidal, burning white blast of light so fast that it crosses the distance immediately, and not even from my vantage point slightly aside of time do I see any delay.

Because it's light. This shouldn't be a surprise. In fact, I should be testing if there're any hints of a redshift as—

Right as I manage to brace myself against the incoming Tinker fugue, something happens.

That something is Regent's puppet striking against Behemoth's back hard enough to make it stumble a single half-step forward.

Barely anything of note. An unremarkable strike against something that is the very incarnation of an unstoppable force.

But that unstoppable force just crashed against Hannah's rocket.

"Yes!" she yells from behind me, loud enough that my HUD signals my electronic noise cancellation triggering.

And then, in the middle of a fight against an Endbringer, riding a bike that is going, to outside observers, fast enough to make bullet trains feel as inadequate as Velocity, Hannah grabs my head, pulls me back, twists my neck almost painfully, and smashes her lips against mine before shoving her tongue down my throat.

…

It's a good thing the navigation console is working as intended.

Because I don't feel like interrupting her.

***

[Lisa]

"Yes!" I yell, standing up and pumping my fist, my absurdly comfortable chair reeling away from me due to my violent betrayal of our peaceful coexistence.

Suck it up, Chair. I've done worse to less deserving targets.

[Lisa Wilbourn's denial of self-designation 'Sherlock'—

You] are most definitely [not] an undeserving target! Also, I love you, love you, love you—

[Lisa Wilbourn's exuberant show of—]

You're damn right I'm exuberant! I'm outright [vivacious]! Flamboyant! Dancing like nobody's watching—

"Liz!" my fiancée, the one girl who's [always] watching, intrudes on my arms-waving victory rite by grabbing my shoulders and forcing me to stare into the featureless, citrine lenses of a stupid mask that covers her mouth and I can't kiss her through.

So I pull it up and kiss her nonetheless.

Taylor's panicked response to my celebration turns most definitely non-verbal as I grope every non-carapace-covered surface of her suit as my tongue aggressively pushes past her lips, which are of a perfectly adequate thickness, before she seems to surrender and wraps her arms around my neck, pulling me down against her as she leans back, and—

"I would like to remind you that the battle is still ongoing," Dragon chides me from above us in the kind of tone that conveys both fondness and exasperation.

I flip her the bird.

"Well, that's not nice," she mutters.

And I get a flush of maybe embarrassment, maybe guilt, as I realize that, yes, we're [still] fighting a hero-killing machine, and, even if Taylor can keep an eye on every available video stream from Dragon's bird's eye drones, maybe this isn't the time to test precisely what the limits of her multitasking are.

… My best bet is they lie somewhere between 'None at all' and 'Fuck you and your computational sciences.'

[Likelihood of computational sciences' tenets regarding solvability of P versus NP problems—]

Awww, look at you, gushing over your sister-in-law!

… [Anthropomorphizing of parahuman abilities' interfaces—]

"Not. The time," a very neutral-sounding Taylor says against my wet lips, pushing me away with both hands on my cheeks as the insects keeping guard around Colin's workshop seem to buzz in anti-Thinker tactics.

I smirk at her.

She keeps blushing without emoting absolutely anything like she's in one of those time-stop doujins, and I never really saw the appeal, but now I'm getting [ideas—]

"The fight [really] isn't over," Dragon insists.

All right, ideas postponed.

Mental note taken, though.

[Lisa Wilbourn's access to actual time-stopping technology—]

Eww! Eww, eww, eww! You had to go and make it creepy!

"All right, sorry about that! The euphoria of a plan coming together, you understand, I'm sure. Also, I may or not be a bit of a motormouth when an adrenaline high hits me, and—"

And Taylor just slapped a hand over my still-moving mouth.

Rude.

"This is the Lung thing all over again, I swear…" she mutters before flinching when I lick her palm.

"The… The what?" Kid Win asks from the corner where he'd been pretending not to exist.

With some non-marginal success. Huh. A Stranger sub-rating may be in the cards.

Though, given that he's currently withering under the concerted stares of three parahuman women, he may need to work at it a bit more.

Ganbare, Kid Win-kun! I believe in you! Also, believe in the me that believes in you or however that tortured sentence went.

Second note to self: get Taylor a sniper rifle, hot pants, and a flaming bikini top.

Hmmm…

"You're drooling," Taylor mutters, her lips actually thin as, I believe, she tries to glare at me through her mask.

"You're all impossible," Dragon says, with maybe a tad of sincere exasperation.

Kid Win nods in agreement, and my traitorous chair joins him on his side of the workshop, finally rolling to a stop when it reaches the forces aligned against me.

And I…

I take a quick look at the monitors, reassure myself that everything's still going according to plan, that nothing stupidly dramatic has happened, and go back to celebrating that the hardest part of it is finally over.

Also, to masking my still ongoing panic under the most obnoxious I can be while going through an adrenaline rush that is about to turn into an adrenaline crash soon enough, but, well, that's a problem for future Lisa.

[Lisa Wilbourn's ongoing connection to parahuman ability—]

Right. Also a problem for you.

I'm glad we're going through this together, Power.

[Anthropomor--]

Yeah, even like that. Still glad

***

[Dragon]

'We're all mad here,' I believe is the appropriate quote.

Because…

All right, almost everybody participating in the battle is unaware of the full picture, but for those who know what just happened? For those who understand?

This is…

This is unbelievably good.

Colin's work with nanothorns was always inspired, the closest the two of us had ever come to an actual anti-Endbringer weapon, but they needed to be kept in too-stringent measures to be easily deployed, the magnetic fields in his halberd the best method to do so that we had come up with.

And then comes along a Thinker seven fully collaborating with a Thinker yet to be rated, and she asks us about something that makes us think about something else, and…

And it turns out that Behemoth doesn't see with light.

No, he sees with [energy]. With all energy.

He sees with his power.

And, as it turns out, his power can't penetrate Grue's darkness, so that led her to ask how effective Colin's signal-shielding tech would be. How would it fare against the world's greatest dynakinetic.

Perfectly.

It would fare [perfectly.]

Colin's signal-shielding is a blind spot to Behemoth.

But we can't just throw a blanket over him and hope he's too stupid to throw it off like some sort of intelligence test for puppies. We need to use this information in some actionable way.

And Lisa suggests grey goo.

Ridiculous. Science fiction at its worst. It could never work.

Except it doesn't have to.

No, we don't need a perfectly self-replicating swarm; we just need good enough. We just need a few minutes.

And Colin's nanothorns are good enough to carve away the first few layers of Behemoth's body, turning them into more nanothorns as they feed themselves with its perpetual output of energy much like they would normally be fed with Colin's halberd's magnetic field, and any and all nanomachines that fall away just stop working after they get far enough from the Endbringer, quickly destroyed by the oxidization they are subjected to with mere air.

This already would be devastating enough. A way to injure Behemoth more than it has been before some retreats. But he fights harder the higher the stakes are, and the Three Gorges Dam is… something that could depopulate a good portion of Asia if he really did what Lisa and Dinah guessed he intended to do.

So… There's a second layer to the attack.

Me.

Me broadcasting a signal that spreads over the nanothorns, that induces a resonance effect that mimics Colin's best attempts at a deployable Faraday cage for the monster, that turns the nanites into replicas of his signal-shielding tech.

A frequency being broadcast by every single one of my drones as they keep surveying the battlefield.

So Behemoth is blind.

By my hand, the Hero Killer is blind.

And I'll never admit this, but, at this moment, I really understand Lisa's need to jump up, shout, and cheer.

We're all mad in here, after all.

And I'm here, so I must be mad.

***

[Brian]

"They did it," Alec whispers, his eyes wide as he stares at where Behemoth keeps struggling with Hookwolf.

"What?" I ask, leaning forward on my knees, trying to see what he's talking about.

"They… I don't know what Lisa was cooking, but they did it. He… Behemoth is… He's [flailing]. There's… He's [blind], Brian. Behemoth is fucking blind!"

"Wha—haven't they taken out his eye before? I… It's a [big] target—"

Thin, possibly malnourished hands grab my leather-covered shoulders and force me to stare at a manic French Canadian.

"I don't know. I don't know what they have done in other battles. But I am wrestling with an Endbringer, [and he's panicking!] We may yet get out of here and get gay-married, you beautiful son of a bitch!"

I consider kneeing him in the groin.

Then I stand up and hug him as fiercely as I can.

He shakes against my chest, and I…

I really, [really] hope Aisha and him never, [ever] meet.

***

[Assault]

"Fire!" Dragon's cheerful voice yells from my bracelet, the woman for once having [some] inflection during one of these travesties against all that is fun and campy in superhero fights.

So I take it upon myself to solve the issue by being the lovable rogue that I am and turn toward my at least equally, if not more, lovely wife with a charming smile firmly in place.

"Well, you heard the lady, love," I tell the currently glowing woman.

Her eyelid twitches, breaking the paralysis her power demands from her when charging up, and that's the only warning I get before she hits me harder than she ever has.

Harder than [anything] ever has.

I fly down the hill where the temple with the healers is located, the two-story white buildings with red roofs rushing past me, and I decelerate just enough that I can clearly see both Behemoth and the boulder Battery aimed me at, one that a rather bulky Brute that claims to be a Brockton Bay ward set up for us.

Then I manage to orient myself by bouncing off the particles of dust suspended in the air around me, and step on the ground below me.

With each step, I go [faster].

Fast enough that even the superspeed Othala—excuse me, [Mysterious Lady Cape X—]just granted me is barely adequate for my senses to keep up with.

Then I reach the boulder, and three powerful parahuman abilities combined result in me transferring the greatest amount of kinetic energy I've ever gathered into a boulder that shoots straight at Behemoth without its trajectory curving in the slightest as it turns into glowing shrapnel mid-flight.

He's thrown back, a good chunk of his left shoulder smashed into nothing, exploding into shards of obsidian along with half of the single claw that was in the way of my attack.

I grin.

I grin the kind of grin I haven't allowed myself since the last time I smashed apart a Birdcage prisoner's convoy.

Then I tamp down on the glee of attacking an undoubtedly deserving target and turn around to jump up a hill and do it all over again.

Below me, more and more capes gather, each of them brandishing their own kind of bullshit.

And all of us are eager to give Behemoth[ a very bad day].

==================

This work is a repost of my most popular fic on QQ (https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/wake-up-call-worm.15638/), where it can be found up to date except for the latest two chapters that are currently only available on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true)—as an added perk, both those sites have italicized and bolded text. I'll be posting the chapters here twice weekly, on Wednesday and Friday, until we're caught up. Unless something drastic happens, it will be updated at a daily rate until it catches up to the currently written 93 chapters (or my brain is consumed by the overwhelming amounts of snark, whichever happens first).

Speaking of Italics, this story's original format relied on conveying Power's intrusions into Lisa's inner monologue through the use of italics. I'm using square brackets ([]) to portray that same effect, but the work is more than 300k words at the moment, so I have to resort to the use of macros to make that light edit and the process may not be perfect. My apologies in advance

Also, I'd like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon: Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, Xalgeon, and aj0413. If you feel like maybe giving me a hand and helping me keep writing snarky, useless lesbians, consider joining them or buying one of my books on https://www.amazon.com/stores/Terry-Lavere/author/B0BL7LSX2S. Thank you for reading!