章節 2486: 69
Chapter 69: Promise 7-7
Promise 7.7
"Set! Install!"
My body changed and morphed, my costume rippled and transformed into a blue gown and robe. Blonde hair settled about my neck and shoulders, and a crown of twisting gold sat upon my brow.
Nimue, Lady of the Lake, Queen of Avalon.
At some point while I was reaching for Nimue, Alexandria and Legend had flown up to join the rest of us, so that we formed a line of five people upon the edge of the city. Their teams, I assumed, were somewhere behind us, waiting to join the fray, hunkered down to weather the incoming wall of water. I couldn't spare the time or the concentration to check.
"Thirty seconds until Leviathan reaches the Maginot Line," the voice from the armbands warned.
The wave that carried Leviathan drew nearer and nearer, so close, now, that it seemed utterly enormous. It dwarfed Leviathan himself, easily sixty feet high, tall enough that it would go over most of the buildings that stood around us. Staring it down, it felt as though it would sweep away the entire city when it hit.
"Camelot team!" I shouted over the howling wind and screaming rain.
"Twenty seconds until Leviathan reaches the Maginot Line."
"Now!"
I threw out my hands as though to ward off the wave. Five voices cried out, a chorus of resolve.
Imitation Fortress of a Distant Utopia
"LORD CAMELOT!"
Lines of blue light traced themselves in the air across the bay, etching an eerie, phantasmal replica of the Round Table. It glowed brightly like a distant star, so brightly that I could see it even through the gloom, and to either side, stretching out from one end of the city to the other, the waters of the bay surged and frothed as thick, sturdy castle walls of the same ghostly blue arose from under the surface. Up and up and up they went, rising higher and higher and higher, until they towered over even Leviathan's wave, and still, they kept rising.
Shouts and exclamations of awe came from behind us as the other fighters watched. The walls continued to stretch towards the sky, reaching up towards the clouds, and they kept going and going — twenty feet, thirty feet, forty, fifty, sixty, even eighty. Beyond even my expectations, they just kept growing, dwarfing everyone and everything, and it looked for a moment like they might actually go until they reached the clouds.
They stopped at last at what must have been two-hundred feet tall, easily taller than all but maybe two buildings in the whole city. With the Medhall building half-collapsed from Bakuda's bombing spree, they might even be the tallest.
Leviathan and his wave slammed into them with the crackling tinkle of plexiglass, and I felt the impact as a phantom blow against my ribs — not as pain, but as a sort of jerk, like the lurch of your stomach when your car suddenly jolts into motion. A surprised grunt from Armsmaster and the short burst of air that left Alexandria's lungs told me that they had felt it, too.
I gritted my teeth and quelled any uncertainty inside me.
Of course. This wasn't the sort of barrier where the wielder's life was wagered by its strength. This imitation Lord Camelot was not tied to our health, such that we would be injured as the barrier was damaged. We were in no such danger, even if it were to shatter completely.
However, it drew strength from the strength of our hearts. Each blow it took, then, was not a blow to our bodies, but an attack against our wills. To erode the barrier was to erode our resolve.
"Stay strong!" I called. The words felt more like Nimue's than my own. "Don't let yourself waver, even for a moment!"
Our imitation Lord Camelot held. Leviathan came up against it and was rebuffed, and his wave splashed the surface impotently, like a child playing in the pool.
"Leviathan has reached the Maginot Line," our armbands announced pleasantly.
I know.
For a handful of seconds, Leviathan seemed almost puzzled, like he didn't understand what had happened. Lung had fought him to a standstill at Kyushu and Scion had chased him away in Khepri's version of things, but I couldn't remember him ever having been stymied like this before.
This must have been the first and only time he'd ever been blocked from even entering the city.
He didn't stay puzzled for long; after that moment of apparent confusion, he summoned up a geyser of water, pushing himself up and up, and he managed to lift himself maybe twice his body length, sixty feet, before he tried to dig his claws into the surface of the barrier and scale the rest of the way.
It didn't work.
His claws found no purchase, because they couldn't punch through and give him the leverage he needed to haul his body up, and they made a piercing shriek that I could hear even from so far away as he slid back down and landed in the water with a great, big splash.
He was up again a moment later, and as the seawater pulled back from the barrier, it drew Leviathan back with it, then condensed into a narrower, denser bulge of water. Leviathan surged suddenly forward like lightning, slamming up against Lord Camelot, again, and a moment later, the bulge of water followed behind him, smashing the same place.
I felt the blow again, but didn't give an inch.
Over and over, Leviathan hammered at the same spot, pulling back to get a running start, then racing forwards at ridiculous speeds. Waves came in from further out to sea and aided him, growing larger and more energetic each time, and in between those, he used founts and geysers and blasted wherever his claws and body hit, as though he was trying to wear away at the barrier by shaving it away one small part at a time.
It still didn't work.
A part of me actually wished I could have said that the barrier had started to crack under the weight of his blows, under the pressure of those hundreds of gallons of water slamming into it, because it would have sounded more exciting in hindsight. It certainly felt more tense in the moment, as I pushed all of my worries and fears to the side and hardened Lord Camelot with my resolve.
Finally, Leviathan retreated, skulking backwards and under the water. It looked, for a moment, like he was leaving.
"Is that it?" I heard someone ask. I wasn't sure who it was.
"No," Alexandria answered grimly. "No, it's not."
The waves that had been a steady drumbeat came more frequently, now, and more energetically, and when they crashed, churning the bay, I caught brief glimpses of Leviathan, waiting there, unnervingly still. He wasn't moving. He wasn't lashing out with his claws or his tail. He was just there, staring ahead, as his waves came and passed him by.
In a person, a human being, I would have said he was concentrating.
It took me several long minutes to realize something was different — the waves weren't crashing against the barrier, as they had been before. Instead, they built up, growing taller and taller as they came, and then they crashed down several dozen yards short, churning the water of the bay and splashing meekly against the walls of Lord Camelot. It was no more energetic or dangerous than a ride at the local water park.
There was no sense to it. It wasn't like the barrier got weaker the further down it went, and even if he tried to destroy the castle that gave the barrier its shape, the barrier itself was also a part of those same castle walls. If he couldn't break it up here, he could no more drill into the ramparts of Castle Avalon down on the ocean floor —
The ocean floor. He wasn't trying to wear away the barrier, he was trying to wear away the ground it stood on.
"He's trying to undermine the castle," I whispered.
"What?" Armsmaster demanded.
I whirled around to face him.
"He's not trying to get through the barrier, he's trying to get under it! He's going to try and bring it down by destroying the ground it's standing on!"
"Can he do that?" asked Chevalier.
I turned to him, then back to Armsmaster.
"He's going to try and undermine the foundations, down to the bedrock. If he wears that away, then Castle Avalon will collapse and Lord Camelot with it."
Castle Avalon had been built deep into the sand, as deep as I had felt it was necessary to go, because sand was less stable than dirt was on land, but it could still be brought down if Leviathan dug deep enough and wore away the bedrock at the bottom.
Armsmaster scowled. "Is there anything we can do?"
I grimaced, briefly closed my eyes. I couldn't think of anything.
"Not from up here. Even if I went down there and tried something… The scale we're talking about is too large. I don't have the time or the resources for something big enough on this short a notice."
Castle Avalon was constructed and designed to give large scale magic an ease of use it did not otherwise have, but that only meant it could take the work of weeks or months and turn it into a matter of days or hours, not minutes. By the time I managed something that could actually be of use, Leviathan would already have worn away the ground under my feet and sunk Brockton Bay.
Maybe… But for that to work, he would have to be inside the castle walls, which meant past the imitation Lord Camelot, and in that case, there wouldn't be a point, since we'd be moving on to Plan B.
If I switched to Medea…? No, that wouldn't work. As far as damage dealing went, she just didn't have anything with enough oomph, and Leviathan was likely far too strong to be kept down by her Atlas spell. I'd be no better off than Legend or the other flying artillery capes, blasting away chunks of his skin and leaving behind glowing spots of heat that cooled seconds later in the rain.
I didn't see any alternatives.
"We have to let him in," I concluded.
"What?" said Chevalier. "I thought keeping him out was the whole point!"
"He's going to get in, one way or the other," I replied grimly. "At least if we let him in, we can close Lord Camelot back up behind him and keep him from trying to drown us with tidal waves."
"Take away one of his advantages," Alexandria agreed.
"It'll be risky," cautioned Armsmaster. "If he takes down enough of us —"
"The alternative seems to be letting him bring down the barrier anyway," said Legend. "I'm not sure he's giving us much in the way of options. Unless you have any ideas?"
Armsmaster hesitated. His grip on his halberd — the special one, with his nano-thorns — tightened. "None," he grunted almost reluctantly.
"There's no going back from this," Chevalier warned. "Once we let him in, we can't just punt him back out if things get too hot."
"Warning," said the pleasant voice from our armbands, incongruously calm and even, "anomalous activity detected in the aquifer."
And now, there wasn't a choice. Leviathan had just taken it from us.
Damn it. Damn it. I'd thought, once I realized the aquifer might be a problem, that Lord Camelot wouldn't work. I'd known it was a possibility. But still. Still, I'd been hoping that this could be as easy and bloodless as just waiting behind an impenetrable defense. I'd put so much effort into making sure it would work, even accounted for my own inadequacies, and despite all of that…
So easily my castle falls!
"We're moving on to Plan B," said Alexandria.
"Everyone, get ready!" Legend shouted, both to the people behind us and into his armband. "We have to use Plan B! Take your places and make sure not to get caught off guard!"
Alexandria turned to me. "Apocrypha?"
My lips pulled tight.
I wanted to say no. I wanted Lord Camelot to still work. I wanted there to be some method I could use to force him away, to deny him the aquifer and the city both.
But there was nothing. Nothing, because I hadn't considered something so obvious as a source of water beneath the city.
My mouth formed the words almost against my will. "Plan B."
I took a deep breath and a second to steady myself, lifting my hand. From here on out, our success would depend on me not screwing up before the starting line again.
"I'm letting him in," I announced.
And then I dropped a small section of the barrier, just wide enough for Leviathan to fit through.
I'd barely done it before he surged forward and raced through the gap, moving so fast that a normal person wouldn't have been able to see anything other than a vaguely green blur. Water was pulled up in his wake, gathering into a wave — even though I closed the barrier back up the moment he was through, he just pulled more from the bay and the rain, dragging it along behind him in a massive wall.
"WAVE!" someone shouted, even as I stepped back.
But he was too fast. Way, way too fast, crossing the bay at ridiculous speeds. I wasn't going to have time to switch out, not before he made landfall, not before that wave came in and —
A broad beam of light scythed through the air above my head, letting out a low, thunderous hum as it passed. A moment later, a coruscating pair of beams swirled around each other and followed in the first's wake, so bright that they were hard to look at.
Purity. That had to be Purity's power. So, she was here, after all.
One after the other, they slammed into Leviathan. The first did almost nothing, because Leviathan sped through it as though it wasn't even there, but the wave behind him sizzled and burned and evaporated into steam until it was maybe half its size. The second set, however, struck like a hammer blow straight into his chest with enough force to make him stumble, and as he lost the momentum of his dash, he tipped back and into the bay. The wave he'd been trying to bring with him collapsed and splashed back down.
It wouldn't be that easy. A hit like that was nothing to Leviathan. That he'd even been knocked back had to be some kind of ploy, Leviathan playing with us, even now.
What are you waiting for, you idiot! They just bought you the handful of seconds you needed!
I gave myself a mental slap and dropped Nimue. The imitation Lord Camelot stayed, because it was self-sustaining, now, or at least it would be until the fight was over or it broke.
Trust the others and stop getting distracted!
I pulled on the hero I'd chosen for Plan B, reaching out and through myself and into the vast halls of legend.
"Set. Install."
My body shot up, and in an instant, I was something like eight feet tall. My muscles swelled and bulged, went from the lean of my real body, shot clearly and rapidly past muscular and powerful, then came to a stop just shy of grotesque. My hair shortened, but not by much, and the soft curls I had inherited from my mother became a wild, flyaway tangle.
My gloves and bracers and even my boots became metal-studded bands that wrapped around my wrists and ankles. My pants became a skirt, armored with plates of metal, and a pelt of lion's fur that wrapped around my waist. My vest shrank and expanded simultaneously, hardening into a sculpted leather cuirass with a snarling lion's head in the center that outlined, contoured, and showed off every single one of the considerable muscles underneath it.
In one massive, meaty hand, I held the Hydra's Bow, a beautifully crafted thing that looked like it would dwarf an ordinary man. It was not nearly the only weapon I could call upon.
It was an imposing physique, towering and lined with impressive muscle. I now stood head and shoulders and then some above everyone else, with the exception of the monstrously huge Leviathan, and the only one who came anywhere close to my height was the seven-foot-tall Narwhal. Even she had to look up at me.
This was not the body of a mortal man (or woman). It was the body of a god, or something so close to it that the distinction was hard to grasp.
I took one long, deep breath, and any trace of fear evaporated from my head.
Stand strong. Don't allow the beast an inch.
"Make ready," I said in a voice that boomed like thunder. I allowed myself an internal grimace around Herakles' tongue and reoriented myself. "That won't keep him down for long."
As though summoned by my words, Leviathan rose from the bay, water pouring off his limbs and down his chest. This close, now, I could see the glow of his four lopsided eyes and the thick cords of sculpted muscle that lined his neck and chest. If I focused, I could even see the glimmer of each individual scale.
He was moving again a heartbeat later, dashing so fast that he ran across the water of the bay as though it was solid ground. The others, the people around and behind me, even the likes of the veterans who had had the chance to see Leviathan in action, they wouldn't be able to react fast enough, not to something moving at something approaching Mach speeds. It was simply too fast.
I could.
My bow was already up as Leviathan reached the halfway point between Lord Camelot and the shore. I had already nocked and arrow along the bowstring, already begun to pull it back, to draw the bow to its fullest extent. By the time he drew closer to the Boardwalk, still a whole hundred yards away, the tension had reached its highest point and the string was cutting into the meat of my fingers, a minor sting.
I took a breath, sighted my target. Lessons taught to me — to Herakles — by Chiron floated in the back of my head, ensuring my posture and my technique were both perfect, flawless. Memories of perfecting this skill, of conceiving of it and applying it in the fight against the Hydra, danced alongside them, guiding my hands and fingers. The act, now, of releasing the arrow itself was mere formality; in my mind, the trajectory had already been calculated and the attack had already occurred. In my imagination, the head of my arrow had already hit.
Now, it was just a matter of proving it to the world.
In a voice like gravel, I spoke.
Shooting the Hundred Heads
"Nine Lives."
My fingers uncurled and released the bowstring. The sound barrier shattered. The wind cracked and howled. The backblast sent those closest to me stumbling as all those within thirty feet yelped and slapped their hands to their ears. Somewhere nearby, I heard glass windows break.
My arrow flew like a rocket, a streak of barely visible color moving so fast that it outpaced Leviathan several times over. Almost the moment it left my bow, it fractured and split into nine different lights, each one racing towards a different part of my target's body. It reminded me — the me that was me, rather than Herakles — of Legend's lasers.
Nine Lives: Shooting the Hundred Heads. Herakles' technique, a style of martial art he could apply to each and every weapon he owned, from bow to sword to lance. It was a skill specialized for monster slaying, an anti-monster technique that delivered punishing final blows in rapid — or even simultaneous — succession, killing the target over and over again, no matter how many times it revived.
I held out no hopes that it could kill Leviathan, nor even that it would be enough to force him to retreat. The Lernean Hydra had been the first victim of this technique, and its heads had been chopped off one after the other after the other, no matter how many times they regrew or how many sprouted in their place. But that was a monster that could be killed, to whom wounds mattered, and Herakles had eventually discovered the secret of its defeat. Leviathan was an altogether different kind of monster, such that Nine Lives would do little more than superficial damage.
A flesh wound, against a creature that attached no meaning or importance to its flesh.
But…I wanted to be sure. I wanted to prove to myself, both that Khepri's knowledge, the things that she had taken as fact, and that my own powers were correct. Herakles could not kill Leviathan outright — my power had indicated as such. Khepri's knowledge said much the same. With enough time and effort? Maybe. Almost certainly. But with one blow? The answer had been no.
And now I would find out if it was true.
The nine rays of light struck Leviathan at once, each one targeting a different part of his body — his neck, his shoulder joints, his hips, his chest right in the center, his head, his neck, his belly, just below where the navel would be on a human. They struck with force and with power equaling, no, surpassing the twin beams of searing light Purity had struck him with, carving into the facade of his flesh and gouging away enormous chunks. Crystalline flesh, glittering scales, and black ichor flew through the air, landing in the water of the bay, and the enormous, echoing splashes told the story of exactly how deeply he'd been wounded.
Leviathan reeled back as if in pain, and my mind substituted a furious roar for his eerie silence. He lost balance and skidded on the water, stumbling and rolling along the surface like a car spinning out on a wet highway, and eventually came to a stop less than thirty feet from the shore, collapsed face down into the sand and the bay.
I let out a breath through my nose, grimacing.
The beast lives.
There was no way that had been enough. Not a chance in hell. If it was that simple to undo an Endbringer, then they would all have been slain years ago and the world would not be living in fear of them. We could have laughed them all off as mere monsters and gone about our lives.
And sure enough, after a long few seconds of tense waiting, Leviathan pulled himself to his feet. He was close enough, now, that he touched the bottom and still stood above the surface. In the spots I had hit, more of that ichor oozed, running down his body and seeping into the waters of the bay. His chest and shoulders were mangled messes. A large chunk was missing from his stomach, and the injuries to his hips gave his legs and even more comical and lopsided look. My strike to his head had gouged out one of his four eyes.
But they were already healing, pushing flesh out from his insides to replace what had been carved away. The deepest wounds in his chest, his throat, and his stomach were already filling in at a rapid pace — not enough that he would be fully healed within ten minutes, but enough to make it clear that what I had done was a mere annoyance.
He lifted his head, looking over at those of us assembled against him, and his eyes seemed to meet mine.
Fine then, I thought, smiling grimly. The real battle started now.
— o.0.O.O.0.o —
Not entirely happy with how this chapter turned out. Every time I thought about how to make Leviathan trying to smash the barrier more exciting, though, I ran into the same problem: he's about two miles out from shore, at least, the rain is coming down so hard it's hard to see ten feet in front of you, and he's behind a translucent barrier, so almost nobody should be able to see what he's doing clearly.
Oh well.
EDIT: Whoops. Forgot to change the BBCode out.
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