witch's cape, not hat

[characterquarry]

Grendyne groans and starts pulling on her boots when the alarm goes off. Again. She quick-marches to the broom hangar, sits on her machine and is handed a plethora of loaded weapons by attentive corporals.

"Two flyers in one day? They're getting way too common."

"It's worse," the commander informs them, "South Karlsland got hit with three at once. We're taking Lytee's express and sleeping there. You can sit out if you absolutely need to, but Freya's still recovering so we could use you as a comms relay."

"No, I'll come. I just reserve the right to complain about it."

The 42nd United Forces Witch Wing takes off and assembles into a perfect synchronized formation as Lytee charges her teleport power.



...This is not South Karlsland wilderness.

[note: halfway through this thread I created a unique account for Grendyne. Do not be alarmed by the change in account. -Rockeye]

Comments

[neuroihive]

And the swarm of little ones starts destroying those satellites that the Simurgh didn't deem worthy of its time.

They also engage Ziz herself, mostly as a probing attack to judge its capabilities.

[whole_new_can]

This is a terrible idea. The Endbringer wakes up. The small Neuroi get swatted, of course, and it's not even necessarily a very accurate idea. The Simurgh hits exactly as hard as it needs to to squish each individual drone. And then it changes course.

[neuroihive]

There are a lot of small Neuroi. They try very hard to slow the Simurgh down. A few large ones join in, firing beams mundane and exotic from ranges measured in dozens of miles.

The gate reappears a hundred miles south of Cuba, where the gigantic Neuroi currently is. An enormous storm starts to form around it.

[whole_new_can]

The capes are mostly just panicking. A new worldwide threat is the worst news possible, but it's unfortunately not unprecedented. A new worldwide threat that provokes an unscheduled Endbringer attack, that is. But the Simurgh is moving at her ordinary speed, not appearing to aim for anywhere, defending herself and taking damage as if it were an ordinary fight.

[wormcan]

And then Leviathan joins the fight. He's a speedster on a global scale; the surprising thing isn't that he's fast enough but that the Endbringers are openly working together.

He doesn't appear next to the Simurgh. He appears about a hundred miles south of Cuba, and tears his way toward the largest Neuroi. The storm gets thicker.

[neuroihive]

The Grand Neuroi Core ascends hundreds of miles in less than a minute.

Leviathan and the Simurgh are both being pelted with everything the Neuroi have. New Neuroi form spontaneously out of air. More Neuroi keep coming through the gate. The invulnerability-piercing tentacle blades come out again from a dozen different directions, trying to hurt Leviathan.

[wormcan]

They take damage, plenty of damage. Skin stripped away, ichor pouring from places where the more powerful weapons cut into them. It doesn't seem to slow them down.

The Simurgh keeps flying toward Cuba, accelerating but not quickly. And Leviathan launches itself into the air and keeps ascending, with no obvious means of flight. Water crashes down from around it much faster than usual, both in quantity and in speed, as if however much the Neuroi hurt the monster it only gets converted into more water. The cascade does slow down to terminal velocity after getting distance from Leviathan, naturally. Once in the air, Leviathan strikes at the nearest opponents and maintains a shield of water around itself. It does not ascend enough to reach the Grand Core, not yet.

[neuroihive]

In addition to withering fire, freezing Leviathan's water as much as possible, and using space-warping to turn the Simurgh around and around, they try the trick that killed Eidolon: Teleporting drones' cores in such a way to intersect pieces of the Endbringers that are likely to be important. Head. Center of mass. Joints.

[whole_new_can]

Attacking Leviathan's water is actually effective. The less liquid water there is the more subject the monster is to gravity. Space-warping against the Simurgh is useless; it casually moves through the most direct path and prioritizes the space-warping Neuroi for fatal collisions.

The drone suicide attacks don't slow them down either. What it can do is provide information: the bit that intersected this part of the Endbringer did as much damage as if the flesh were twice as tough as steel, that part four times, and so on up through "off the scale." They can get a pretty good sense this way of where the Endbringers are most and least indestructible.

[neuroihive]

The Neuroi steadily move into high orbit. What they're probably going to have to do shouldn't be done anywhere near the planet, if they want the planet to continue being a planet.

[wormcan]

The Endbringers follow. (On this scale, they're far enough away that the Simurgh didn't have much of a head start.) They're joined by the other one. How Behemoth managed to deal with gravity is anyone's guess.

The parahumans are staying well away from this one. One enemy killed Eidolon and the other is the Endbringers. Instead, they're trying to shield populated areas from falling pieces of Neuroi and sudden flooding from Leviathan. When the battle moves high enough, they let the atmosphere handle that and hope that the Neuroi and Endbringers somehow kill each other.

[neuroihive]

The Neuroi keep drawing the Endbringers away. Their space-folding is not very effective outside of an atmosphere, and they stop generating new Neuroi quite so quickly.

If the Endbringers keep following, once the Moon is between them and the Earth, a black hole with approximately the same mass as a truck appears right next to the Simurgh. It near-instantly dissolves into a cataclysmically energetic soup of particles, creating an explosion orders of magnitude larger than all of Earth Aleph's nuclear weapons could manage combined.

[wormcan]

When the dust re-forms from subatomic particles and settles, the Simurgh and Leviathan are skeletal. Flesh stripped off them, some bits of Endbringer hanging on to the cores wherever those were between them and the blast, with most of their volume evaporated.

They start regenerating.

Behemoth, meanwhile, began absorbing radiation as soon as it realized what was going on. It converts the energy into kinetic, leaving it less damaged than the others, and rockets straight through the largest Neuroi.

[neuroihive]

This time the black hole is in what remains of the Simurgh.

The gigantic Neuroi takes heavy damage. What remains of it retreats in the general direction of Jupiter, accelerating at several tens of thousands of meters per second squared. None of the other Neuroi follow, or at least not at such speed.

[whole_new_can]

They trusted the Moon to shield Earth from that weapon. Setting it off inside an Endbringer has no visible effects.


Leviathan and Behemoth resume shattering Neuroi. Pieces assemble themselves into a copy of their method of transportation. Scaled up. And Endbringers are smaller than the gigantic ship, at least apparently, and they have a cheap source of reaction mass with most of it stored in another dimension. That combination leads to being significantly faster than the usual top speed for this kind of contraption. They speed off after the target.

[whole_new_can]

Everyone is paying attention. The explosion on the Moon, the apparent disappearance of two apocalyptic threats. No one knows which will come back.

But some people have a good guess.
"Door to Earth Gimel."

Contessa steps through, and apparently stands alone in midair in the center of the storm.

[witchwatcher]

There is a gigantic Neuroi high above her. (There is not much air here.)

[neuroihive]

Eventually a human-shaped Neuroi approaches and regards her silently.

[whole_new_can]

Enough air to breathe and speak for long enough, or she wouldn't have come.

"One of your Grand Cores is currently being destroyed by a mutual enemy of ours. It will probably escape. I'm here to tell you about a different mutual enemy that threatens to destroy all the earths."

They're listening. She knows they're listening, and doesn't need to wait for them to say so. "Scion. You've heard of him from your allies in the other world. You don't know what he really is."
She tells them.

[neuroihive]

They listen carefully. One through Ten, as well as Twelve and Thirteen (Eleven is busy), discuss.

Then the drone Contessa spoke to screeches out, "EVIDENCE."

They listen to the evidence and discuss some more.

"SOLUTION?"

[whole_new_can]

"You have interdimensional travel. Ours is specifically blocked from reaching the world where his real body is hidden, but if you can detonate the weapon you deployed against the Endbringers on that side of his defenses, he can be destroyed."

[neuroihive]

"NO. IT CREATED THE BEASTS. WE NEED MORE POWER TO BE SURE OF DESTRUCTION. WE WILL NEED TO SEE HIS PROJECTION. WE WILL NEED TIME AND A STAR TO CONSUME. TO PREPARE."

[whole_new_can]

"The nearest star not in use is four light years that way," she points in a direction. "The projection I can show you now. Door."

A rectangle opens behind her. She turns around and hovers through it, then steps down onto the ground. Scion is visible in the sky.

[neuroihive]

"WE CAN FIND THE ORIGINAL. WE WILL NOT YET. WE ARE CAPABLE OF SUPERLUMINAL TRANSIT TO AN APPROPRIATE STAR. IT WILL TAKE APPROXIMATELY FOUR MONTHS TO PREPARE A SUFFICIENTLY THOROUGH ATTACK."

[whole_new_can]

"If the Endbringers turn on us while you're gone and they fight to eradicate, we might not have four months. Leave a drone behind, on either world or a third, and we will be able to communicate in an emergency."