James

I began my work immediately, my powers reaching deep into the ground, consuming earth in order to create the mechanisms that I had been refining for… was it really only a week?

Even so, hundreds of charges worth of Tinker knowledge guided my hand as I crafted a glorified radio antenna.

The Simurgh's telekinesis and precognition all worked on the same principle, a means of studying and directing the evolution of quantum fields in it's immediate vicinity. But since I studied the monsters power, I now knew what I needed to do in order to defend against it.

The creature forced certain outcomes by essentially drawing energy out of desired futures, making them the most likely outcome of the quantum evolution. Not the best explanation. But not wrong, if you squinted beyond the point of being able to see.

My antenna randomly infused energy into the surrounding quantum fields, returning chaos to the evolution of the quantum fields. It was enough to prevent the creature from being able to see the future clearly enough to make make the delicate changes it needed to make in order to use its power.

But that wasn't all they did. The enormous amount of energy being produced by the antimatter annihilation reactions deep within the armoured core of the machine produced far more energy than the jammers needed. Instead, the excess energy flowed into immense telekinetic engines.

My telekinesis was limited by the amount of energy my powers could produce, which was substantial, but not nearly enough to stand up to an endbringer. The hundreds of gigawatts of energy being produced in each of the cores would augment my telekinesis in a way that my powers simply couldn't match, not yet, and not for a long time.

As the creature closed in, I took to the skies to meet it, one of the immense telekinetic engines already beginning to build up inertia as black spires the size of a bus began to move around me.

The engine met the creature head on, the maelstrom of energies launching it into the ground.

I let my expanded area of effect surround me as I bounced off another earth to close with the Simurgh. Minds, each delving into the complex computing systems of my telekinetic engines could see the creature trying to fight back. But as powerful as it was, the system it used was delicate enough for me to mess with. I could see how it attempted to compensate, and I learned.

Even as I swung another blow down onto the creature, I watched how it attempted to brute force things, throwing rocks at me when a more delicate telekinetic operation was foiled, and even as I nudged anything that might hit me away, I optimised my telekinetic engines.

Seconds stretched out into hours as I examined the minutiae of the monsters powers and took it for my own. Some of my enemy's projectiles were captured by my power, transmuted into the materials I needed for upgrades.

A cascade of rainbow energy let me pull away for a moment as my engines were provided with new computing elements, quantum engines that would allow me to take advantage of the monster's own powers to find counter-solutions, more efficiently blocking its attempts to effect the world.

A message slowly reached me through the armband I was wearing. The others had noticed that I was blocking the Simurgh's finer telekinesis.

A shaker attempted to trap the Simurgh on the ground, but the creature broke free, shattering rock as it tried to climb back up to us.

I could feel my mind flagging as I kept tearing at the Simurgh's power, watching as it struggled to pull itself into the air.

The other capes around me hept hammering away at it, even as I continued to work. Hours of progress optimising and improving countermeasures to the Simurgh's powers.

And then came that dreaded warning. Sixty seconds to a wave switch. It made sense. The Scream might have been stopped, but the others didn't know what I was doing. They didn't know that the Simurgh's hold on all of us was gone.

I attempted to reach out into the network, but the communication lines were too busy and my notification was lost in the mess. One of the thinkers seemed to have spotted it, with my involvement being shared through the priority access lanes that I immediately began to break into, my prior experience with Dragon tech serving me well.

Even as I did that, I captured a steady stream of incoming matter, transmuting the very subatomic particles as I prepared my next strike. All I needed was an opening.

The encryption on the priority lanes buckled and broke under my efforts and I called out. "All capes, this is Halcyon, I will be initiating an Antimatter Pumped Directed Blast in five seconds, please close and cover your eyes for light bloom."

Deep within the recesses of my power, A store of antimatter tok shape. Almost two kilograms of the most potent fuel I could make coalesced even as my weapon formed in front of me.

And there it was.

Even as everyone shielded their eyes, a small window appeared - a clear tunnel of airspace between me and the monster.

And so, I lined up my shot and took it.

Two kilograms of antimatter merged with two kilograms of matter, carefully injected to ensure perfect annihilation. The force of the explosion radiated out before hitting the edge of the reaction chamber. Unfathomably hot plasma was redirected by complex alterations of the local space time, Incident energy converted through exotic catalysts to turn the waste neutrinos into something a little more dangerous and even dark matter was turned to destructive ends.

A lance of light, powerful enough to scorch my flesh just from the light bloom of the beam passing through air came down onto the creature like the hand of a wrathful god.

I reached out with my healing to heal myself and any other capes as I stared into the glowing pit, my Target letting me know that while I had hurt it, the monster wasn't dead yet.

But I had made a mistake.

Even with the earth as a backstop, the creature had been thrown over a thousand feet into the ground, enough to get it out of range of my jammers.

I watched as it picked itself up, the broken shattered skeleton of a creature slowly beginning to regenerate as it gathered a shell of molten rock and began to accelerate as much as it could. An attack or some sort of escape plan, I don't know, but I was prepared, a telekinetic engine already on the move as it raced out of the pit.

It exploded out of the ground, sending capes flying. But my jamming had grown stronger with the information I had managed to gather, enough to leave it coasting on inertia.

The speed it built up wasn't enough to stop me from hammering it back into the ground.

But that wasn't enough to stop it.

Even as the shared skeletal wretched form picked itself off the ground, I tried to close in, to finish it off, but as it dragged itself away with every remaining limb a notice sounded for the wave change.

I couldn't risk it. I could see what would happen if I continued to chase them. It would take far more to actually destroy the creature. The most powerful weapons I had would not be enough to completely put it down, and I would have to spend too long in range of the Scream, even if I knew it would be safe, no one would trust me.

So, begrudgingly I let it continue. I watched it scuttle away.

I watched as the other capes closed in, some of the faster capes coming in to try and stop it, but even as I started the process of handing off one of my engines to Dragon, it was too late. I watched as the Simurgh began to pick itself up.

I sighed, teleporting myself beside Amy as I watched the capes attempt to fight the simurgh even as it slowly rose away from them.

I looked at Amy as she stared at me in shock. Before forming a seat out of the rock and collapsing down, the surge of hormones catching me by surprise and nearly knocking me out as the effects of hours of brain numbing focus caught up to me.

A/N: I might come back to this, probably to expand on James's more financial plans, but honestly, at this point, the endgame is too close to matter. James is strong enough to find out about Cauldron, who would probably read him in on Scion, and with his powers, James could attack Scion's true body. It wouldn't be perfect, but he would be able to do a great deal of damage, especially if he's given time to study the damage done to Eden's corpse in order to figure out a way to target them.

I also have some problems continuing the romance aspect. Writing romance is hard for me, and I don't think I can keep up the current one, especially since I feel like it would slow down and I don't think this story could survive the pacing I would need to make this reasonable.