51

Excavator 3

When Lung finally decided to engage Leviathan, it changed everything about the fight. Everyone's plans went out the window. No longer was anyone trying to team up and for fancy power combinations to strike the Endbringer. It boiled down to a simple fact: either you could take the heat, or you stayed out of the way. It went from standard anti-Leviathan tactics to something more like anti-Behemoth. Instead of a kill-aura, it was a steam-aura. Anyone who couldn't simultaneously survive superheated steam exposure and potential drowning simultaneously was not of any help.

The fight was now like a hurricane that the rest of us was merely trying to redirect. If it dragged on like this for longer, it might not just be a metaphor. The massive clash of hot and cold, fire and water was altering the weather.

Most capes could only stand back and watch. There was no helping Lung or hurting Leviathan. If Leviathan's waves didn't kill you, then Lung's flames would. If you didn't drown, then you got boiled alive. All while blinded because you also needed a power to see through the thick fog of steam. The unlucky ones who got a little too close were sucked into the fight – there was a strong water current pushing people into them, created as the water near Lung boiled away and more water flowed in to fill the void. The massive plume of rising steam told people where the fight was happening, for those who couldn't see it directly. The occasional explosion and bright glow was hard to miss, too.

My bots were capable of surviving more extreme environments than most people, so I was able to keep an eye on things. But even my own vision wasn't great, I could only get vague images because my bots couldn't handle the turbulent air and water, and that was before trying to see through the steam. However, it was enough to tell that Lung was bigger than I had ever seen before. I was mostly keeping track of them by where they were stomping on my bots.

This was no longer an Endbringer battle, per se. It was difficult to completely change strategies mid-fight, and it wasn't always the same types of capes that volunteered for Leviathan that volunteered for Behemoth. Most people weren't ready to jump into a fight where their skin would burn off if they came within a hundred yards of the target.

The city was considered almost a lost cause. If Lung couldn't stop Leviathan, nobody could. For everyone else, it was just an evacuation mission. Just avoid getting cooked while watching two polar opposites clash. The most powerful Brutes and Blasters, the only ones who could still safely participate, tried to steer the fight towards the already-destroyed areas of town, with minor success.

It didn't stop a few more daring capes from attempting one final assault, led by Alexandria. Maybe they thought Lung was on their side. Or that he would be willing to coordinate something. But he was either unwilling, or he was too focused on Leviathan to care. He ignored all calls by the incoming capes for support or any kind of strategy. He trampled through them, their vehicles, and a few buildings without care. Wood and concrete structures crumbled beneath them like sandcastles. Even those that could survive the heat still had to give a wide berth as Lung ripped out streetlights to swing at Leviathan.

The capes gave up trying to work with Lung and tried to hit Leviathan directly. The problem was the two of them were moving too much, grappling, throwing, tripping each other. Each time one fell, so did a building. But Leviathan was fast, and so was Lung. When the other capes attempted to hit Leviathan when Lung was down, the dragon recovered faster than they expected, and got blasted from behind.

That didn't kill him, but it only made him angrier. He roared and let out a massive pillar of flame, probably as a warning to the others. Leviathan was craftier than most people gave him credit for, though. He used Lung to his advantage and quickly repositioned to put Lung between himself and the newly arriving capes. He then sent out a huge wave of water that splashed over Lung, which knocked over the fiery dragon down and flash-boiled the water.

The fliers could dodge by rising upwards, but scalding water was about to crash over the ones on foot. I couldn't let them all get burned to death, so I had all the bots I could muster rise up and form a protective mesh. It wasn't so much to block the water completely, but slow it down and give just a little extra time for them to flee. Lucky for me, as my bots rearranged themselves, they also pulled up a whole lot of cold water up with them like jello.

The superheated wave crashed against my jelly-like mound of bots, some of it flowing through and mixing with the cold. Some boiling water spilled over, but the majority of what hit the heroes was merely hot and not scalding. Some of the other water seemed to slow on its own; apparently a hydrokinetic hero was in the group.

I was glad they knew what they were doing, because I certainly didn't. The water was extremely turbulent, not to mention the wild temperature swings, meant my bots couldn't get near the two of them effectively. I was mostly just protecting everyone else.

Even though Lung was constantly growing bigger, he didn't seem to be gaining any advantage. He started the fight the size of a bodybuilding basketball player and seemed to be on equal ground. Now he was more than double that size and was still at a stalemate. At this point he was still slightly smaller than Leviathan, but he was growing more and more draconic, with more scales and an elongated, lizardlike body that eerily mirrored Leviathan's. It was more snakelike than dragonlike, but I suppose his superpower wasn't specifically to turn into a dragon, just that he used a dragon theme.

Lung roared and beat his chest. I think he was trying to speak, but it was completely unintelligible. I wasn't sure if he was trying to talk to the Endbringer or just hype himself up. He roared again, flexed his muscles, and exploded in another massive fireball that flattened yet another city block.

Or maybe he was grandstanding? After all, Lung had originally earned his reputation for taking Leviathan solo, and surviving. The reason the ABB even survived despite having so few capes was almost entirely because of that rep. I suppose it would be a huge hit to his reputation if he had been seen running away for round two.

Which made me wonder how far he would go just to save face.

Would he fight as hard today as he did in Kyushu? Did we want him to fight that hard? I mean, when he fought "for" Kyushu, it basically ceased to exist. It had been somewhere around fourteen thousand square miles. The city of Brockton Bay, including the bay itself, was only a little over fifty. The city would be long gone before either of them got serious.

Maybe Lung would quit after just reminding everyone of his power. Or maybe Leviathan would leave before that. One could only hope. The fight continued to escalate, and now even the Triumvirate was regrouping to figure out a new plan.

Say goodbye to Medhall. Lung threw the Endbringer into the biggest building of the city, and then leaped after him for some follow-up smashing. The two combatants completely ignored several thousand tons of steel, concrete, and glass that fell on top of them.

I wasn't sure if Lung had done that deliberately to spite Kaiser. Even though Max Anders and other Empire members had been quickly booted out by the board of directors after their reveal, Medhall had still managed to earn a reputation as a racist bastion. Although I didn't think Lung actually cared about racists beyond how they could hurt or threaten him directly. Maybe the Medhall building had just been a convenient place to throw an Endbringer.

The two of them didn't exactly burst out of the pile of rubble. Lung blasted all the rubble away with one of his signature explosions. The rubble went flying for miles, and it disrupted my control of hundreds of my brains. Several capes died from the pressure wave alone, and it happened too fast for me to prevent it. I was able to save the ones who had been further from the blast, since I had more time to react.

We now had to evacuate the medical tent. The fight was growing in size, and even if they weren't actually moving towards us, the radius of destruction was uncomfortably close. Debris from that last explosion from Medhall almost sent concrete and steel chunks into the so-called safe point. We were going to have to fall back to a secondary point. That meant even slower and less support for capes at the front line, which meant even fewer capes would want to continue fighting. The city was basically forsaken.

I didn't want to let that happen. And I wasn't the only one. Brockton Bay may have been a small city, but if you took a landmass the size of Kyushu and dropped it on the map of the Eastern USA and centered right here, Boston would be caught within easily, and New York was dangerously close. A lot of people didn't want a huge chunk of the eastern seaboard wiped away; it would be a bigger disaster than Behemoth's attack on New York. The problem was nobody knew how to handle it. At this point, it was almost like trying to fight two Endbringers simultaneously, and people always had enough trouble handling one alone.

To be fair to Lung, he did seem to be trying to push the fight towards the ocean. At times I felt like he was actually trying to protect the city. You might think that pushing Leviathan into the ocean would only give the Endbringer more of an advantage, but it didn't really. The city was already flooded, waves from the ocean were washing all through downtown up to the commercial district, and the rain was pelting down harder than ever. It seemed that Lung didn't care about a little extra water here or there, he was just boiling all of it away with his flames anyway.

Leviathan didn't seem interested in retreating, either. He ran straight back towards the city, while Lung intercepted him with a massive fireball-enhanced punch. The shockwave blew the water away down to the dirt below the bay, digging up a whole new pit within the bay that was rapidly refilled with water. The landscape was rapidly changing as the two of them constantly dug craters and trenches into the ground in their struggle.

However, Leviathan wasn't done. He charged Lung, lifting the dragon-man off the ground and smashing him through several buildings. Lung clawed at Leviathan's back and tried to put the monster into a headlock, but I doubted the Endbringer needed to breathe anyway. Leviathan ended up smashing Lung into the base of the hill near the South Landing.

The scary part was that there was an Endbringer shelter underneath that hill. It was in one of the more densely-populated areas of the city with plenty of signs pointing the way – it must have been filled to capacity. I flooded bots towards it, hoping to protect its air supply and reinforce its structure to prevent leaking or collapse.

Meanwhile, the two titans continued to pummel each other, but Leviathan was moving much more water as well. Instead of merely trying to drown Lung with water, he was now sending water coursing through the ground, digging up dirt and mixing it into mud. Lung was now being buried alive under rivers of mud. Even with his usual strategy of boiling away the water, the dirt that remained was piling on him, all while Leviathan was keeping him held down.

Alexandria was the one to come to Lung's rescue, smashing Leviathan off of Lung. The two tangled with each other as they tumbled northeast, rolling through the already-annihilated Downtown area. It gave Lung a chance to explode once again, pushing all the dirt away. He roared again, then caught up with the fight just as Alexandria was caught by Leviathan's tail around the neck. The monster shoved her underwater.

Lung made no move to rescue Alexandria, but just growled at Leviathan. The monster just stared at him, expressionless.

Lung was the first to attack. He charged Leviathan, and then promptly fell through a hole that suddenly opened up under his feet.

Leviathan was doing his most infamous technique now. He was eroding away the land at a rapid pace. Water was seeping into the dirt and bedrock underneath the city, shaking and vibrating and breaking everything apart. A steam geyser opened up, blowing away huge chunks of dirt. Lung attempted to crawl out of the hole, gasping for air. Leviathan used the muddy water to smash him back down under. Lung managed to grab Leviathan and attempted to use the monster as leverage to crawl back up. Instead, Leviathan dove down, which happened to free Alexandria.

"He's using the aquifier! He's going to sink the city!" Alexandria's voice came through on the armbands. "Anyone who can't fight underground, evacuate!"

There weren't any who could as far as I was aware. Moleman wasn't in this fight and even if he was, he certainly couldn't stop Leviathan alone. I saw Eidolon turn intangible and fly straight through the ground. He may have been strong, but I really wondered if he had a power that could intervene in a fight between Lung and Leviathan, while underwater.

There was no more hesitation. No more last-ditch protests of heroic efforts. The city was lost, and everyone was just going to evacuate now. But there was still that itch to do something. Like Vista, who insisted she could still help. And, to be fair, I had the same thoughts.

The worst thing was the Endbringer shelters. The city had several of them. For a smaller city, it had a disproportionately high number of them, mostly because Fortress Construction had been based here. That meant a whole lot of people were going to be trapped inside them, underground. They had limited power, limited air supply, limited food.

And there was no way to safely evacuate thousands of people through a dark, flooded city while the ground beneath them was crumbling and the local dragon might just boil them alive as he passed by. The alternative was to just abandon them. It was a lose-lose situation.

Unless I did something about it.

Most of my bots had already taken the injured to the medical or designated fallback areas. They didn't need my help to escape the fight; most capes had been gradually abandoning the effort once Lung got involved. That meant all the bots I had spread around the city didn't need to be on transportation duty any more. Now it was time for civilian rescue.

I had a hard time understanding what Leviathan was truly doing to the city until my bots got down into the dirt. I rarely had a reason to dig deep underground before, but I had done enough to realize that something was wrong. The dirt was moving too quickly. It was far too wet, far too loose.

On the surface, people probably wouldn't have noticed, especially not with the flooded land. But underneath, I could sense dirt being washed away by the water. Buildings didn't crumble or fall right away, because they were often fairly stable until a large chunk of their foundations disappeared. Then they toppled rather suddenly. I only realized that more of the city was beyond saving than I had hoped after my bots were already down there. At least I could concentrate more bots into the remaining parts of the city to save what was left.

While I couldn't stop Leviathan himself, maybe my bots had the power to stop him from sinking the city. I knew that tree roots prevented erosion, holding dirt and preventing landslides. Could I possibly do the same with my bots? Did I have enough of them?

My bots started interlinking themselves to create a mesh, net-like structure through the ground. I had to play around with the size of the holes between them as well as the thickness of the chains of bots. I needed to optimize how much of the earth I could actually hold together given the number of bots I had.

Of course, Leviathan himself wasn't done. Underground, he was still fighting with Lung and Eidolon, causing massive earthquakes. Some parts of the city I just wouldn't be able to save; the shaking and forces were too intense.

But it seemed to be working. The ground underneath the city was eroding more slowly, if not outright stopped in some places. It was taking all of my bots at the moment, so I could no longer see anything on the surface except near my actual body. But the dirt was holding tight, and no more buildings had crumbled in the past minute.

Except the Arts Centre, but that was directly above where Leviathan and Lung and Eidolon were still brawling. I think Lung managed to get another breath of air at the cost of a few more city blocks sinking into a hole.

"Tsunami warning. Incoming tsunami detected. All capes, evacuate to fallback zone 8," Dragon warned us all through the armbands.

So Leviathan was now eroding the ground and calling in a tsunami while smashing through the city. I didn't know if he really hated Brockton Bay for some reason, or just had a huge grudge against Lung.

A tug on my arm made me realize that things were happening with my actual body, too. At the medical tent and command posts, the heroes were packing up and evacuating. The battle was effectively over. Panacea healed up as many people as she could while they passed by, and I did the same. Vicky and her family came and helped carry people away, but I couldn't lose connection with my bots.

"Come on, Eunoia, we have to go!" Glory Girl insisted as she pulled me along.

"I'll be fine! There's something I need to do," I said. "Abyssal will get me out of here if it gets dangerous."

"The city's gone! Didn't you hear Dragon? The giant wave is coming!" Glory Girl grabbed me by the arm. Her extreme strength meant I had no choice but get lifted into the air.

"Wait, wait! Don't fly me too far! I need to be close!" I shouted at her desperately.

"Close for what? What are you doing?" she said, slowing down. We were fairly high in the air, but at least I was still in range.

"Leviathan's trying to erode the earth. I'm stabilizing it," I said. "I think I can save part of the city. It's not totally a lost cause!"

Glory Girl stared at me incredulously. "Since when did you have earth powers?"

"I don't. I'm using my nanobots."

"The ones you use for medical work?"

"Yeah."

"How?"

"It'll take a while to explain, but the basic answer is… using all the bots I have, I'm gripping the city's foundations and holding it together," I told her.

The ocean started to rise upwards once more. This time there were even fewer capes trying to help us create temporary levees or hydrokinesis to block the incoming wave, as everyone was abandoning the fight. So much water was coming that it seemed more like the city was sinking.

Dirt and foundations continued to loosen, and my , their foundations shifting under the softened earth. I focused even more on my bots to move to the sections that needed the most reinforcement.

I didn't even really know why I was trying so hard to save Brockton Bay. I had lost my house, and New Wave had lost theirs as well. Dad didn't have a job here any more. I hated Winslow. The city had nothing left for me.

But I supposed that it was a bit of a sunk cost fallacy. I had invested so much in this city. I spent months expanding the coverage of my bots until I could finally clean up the gang situation. I had nearly managed it, too. I didn't want all that work to just be washed away.

Flooded buildings could be repaired, as long as they were still standing. Flood waters would recede. The only thing I really needed to make sure of was that Leviathan didn't erode the land away completely. Downtown, the Docks, the Trainyard... all those places would have to be sacrificed if necessary to save the people who were hiding in the shelters. Most of Brockton Bay's most iconic districts would be gone; the city would be a shell of its former self once this was over.

Top priority was the Endbringer shelters. They were underground bunkers, not meant to be underwater for very long. While they were heavily armoured and could likely withstand the quaking right now, thousands of lives would die slow deaths by suffocation if they got washed out to sea.

I didn't have a map on me for the current Endbringer shelters around the city, and admittedly they had been a low priority for me. I didn't think my dinky little city would have been a target. I mostly went by memory of emergency evacuation signs – signs that had mostly been forgotten as background noise given how little I had needed them before.

"Message to Dragon. I need a map of Brockton Bay's Endbringer shelters," I said into the armband.

"I have it here. How shall I deliver the data?"

"I have your brain-machine interface device in some of my brains. Just send over a basic bitmap on wifi from one of your drones," I said.

I received the image in one of my brains not too long afterwards. I organized my bots and quickly sent them to all the ones I missed. It was then that I noticed something odd.

I had incidentally found one more Endbringer shelter close to Leviathan and the underground fight. I was only trying to prevent the forces from the fight from spreading too much to the rest of the city, but my bots found an underground structure that was almost exactly the right size, shape, and composition as the other Endbringer shelters.

"Dragon, was there ever a record of an Endbringer shelter built at the corner of Balsam and 22nd Avenue?" I asked to confirm.

"Searching – there is a record of a permit application but it was put on hold for some reason. No record of completion or inspection."

Maybe an incomplete one, then? I suppose there probably wasn't anyone inside. I probably couldn't save it anyway. It had already sunk far deeper underground, its ventilation and everything else must have been cut off long ago, and its structure must be leaking water inside, mainly because it was the one closest to where Leviathan and Lung were fighting.

"That's all the time we have, we're going now!" Glory Girl shouted as she yanked me up into the sky.

The tsunami had arrived. I could only hope I did enough for the people in the shelter.

Some people thought a tsunami was just a really big wave. It really wasn't, and Leviathan was capable of doing far more. When we had arrived, the entire town was under several feet of water. This would put Captain's Hill under. It wasn't just a single big wave, it was like the entire ocean was swelling and sea level itself was suddenly a hundred feet higher. My bots could feel the rise in the water, there was no back of the wave visible where the water level came back down.

The problem was we were already at the highest point in the city, and everywhere we were trying to evacuate was going to be flooded in a few seconds.

Glory Girl saved me and Panacea. Panacea rode piggyback while I was got dragged up by an arm as the water rushed through, washing away the medical and command posts. Not everyone could get away fast enough. Not everyone had a flying friend to lift them up.

I did the best that I could – I created floaties using my bots, knitting them together into an airtight pod. I even altered their colour so that they would end up highly reflective and easy to see. It was a cheap and quick way to save the most lives with the fewest bots, since most of them were still underground trying to stop the entire city from being swept away. They'd get wet, but at least they would float and breathe. Some were able to grab on themselves, but most were too panicked to notice them. For those capes, I just stuck the bots to them when they passed by.

Some capes were standing on rooftops and praying that the buildings they took shelter on could withstand the water. I think they must have misunderstood how huge a tsunami really was, expecting just another one of Leviathan's big waves. I had more bot-floaties ready for them just in case, but it didn't seem necessary.

Meanwhile, plenty of other capes were helping with the evacuation. Vista especially. She warped space to allow the isolated capes to hop from roof to roof to safety. Sometimes, water would flow uphill as heights were warped too, letting people run away safely, though awkwardly.

"How long can you hold on, Amy? Are your arms getting tired?" I asked.

"Maybe ten minutes," she said. "The ride home from the hospital is usually pretty quick."

"I'm going to make us a boat," I told them. We had no idea how long the tsunami would last – it could be anything between minutes to hours. I knew Glory Girl could hold up the both of us in the air that long, but it was Amy and I that would get tired first.

Call me a bit vain, but I used more bots on my boat than I did for the floaties I made for everyone else. The bots formed a reasonably sturdy but lightweight rowboat-sized spot for us to sit in. My bots acted as microscopic bilge pumps as well, keeping the inside from flooding despite the waves and rain. After we landed in it, I also added more bots to create a cover. It did have room to expand, and whenever we came across a drifting cape, I pulled them into our makeshift life raft.

I wondered if Lung was still fighting. The rushing water made it too chaotic and noisy for me to sense the ground vibrations. I assumed that Lung himself still needed to breathe, and even underground and underwater, he must have run out of breath by now.

I got my answer by way of the largest geyser I had seen yet. It had to have been Lung. Steam quickly turned to fog, blocking our view of what had happened.

Seconds later, there was an extremely bright glow in the sky. I assumed that was the strongest and brightest that Lung had ever been, and that the dragon man was only getting angrier. But the fog immediately cleared out. The light wasn't the reddish-orange of a flame, but a golden glow that seemed almost divine.

Scion was here. The fight was over.

He shot a beam of golden light straight into the water. A second later, the ground bulged out, almost like he was yanking a plant out of a garden. The mud and dirt fell away to reveal a thrashing Endbringer. He tossed Leviathan towards the ocean, sending several more energy blasts at it, one of which severed part of its tail before it landed in the water. Chunks and chunks of its body were being carved out by the beam even as it retreated.

I watched in a bit of envy as I noted how much work we had put into the Nanothorn for so little effect while Scion went so much further just by pointing his finger. But that wasn't important.

Brockton Bay had been saved. Mostly. It wasn't completely destroyed, and thousands of lives had been lost. But the hard part was over. Now we could focus on recovery. Everyone began cheering, shouting at the original hero.

As usual, Scion ignored them. He did hang out for a few seconds, staring at the ground near where he had pulled Leviathan away, close to the unmarked Endbringer shelter. Lung was unconscious and human again, and Eidolon seemed to be extremely tired and bloody – it looked like the fight had managed to overwhelm both of their regenerative Brute abilities. Scion did nothing to help them. Then he simply zoomed away. Weird guy.

While I could be bitter that he didn't come earlier, everyone was far more glad that he had come at all. The world had more or less gotten used to the world's first cape having ADHD or something like it. I wished I had the chance to actually see inside his mind, see what was wrong with him, but not now. Brockton Bay was in ruins, most of the business district and a large chunk of the residential areas were completely destroyed by the tsunami. We needed to save lives and rebuild.

Author's Notes:

- I feel like I didn't have enough Kaiju action here, but honestly at the same time I have a hard time writing that kind of action in this scenario without being too repetitive... there are only so many buildings that can be smashed and Lung knows Leviathan is nearly invincible anyway.