Brockton Bay's Marvelous Mage - Chapter 102

We arrived at the previously agreed upon location, meeting Glory Girl, Laserdream, Lady Photon, and Manpower in a parking lot just outside Empire territory. Alya stayed dispersed, but I did explain to the others that she had had a bit of an epiphany with her powers, so they could expect her to be participating more. She whispered a hello to everyone, promising to appear more in private settings, but since she was still one of the final aces I had up my sleeve, she would remain a secret publicly... at least for now.

After vague greetings to my nebulous partner, they explained that Glory Girl and Manpower had been on patrol with their golems, while the mother-daughter pair had been waiting in the wings if they needed support. So far, however, the Empire had remained silent. 

"I don't like it," Glory Girl said with a frown, floating a few feet off the ground with her arms crossed. "They should be stuck in a frenzy after what you guys did! Instead, they are quieter than I've ever seen them." 

"It is concerning," Lady Photon agreed. "I'm worried that they are planning another ambush. This time with more capes than we could handle. They still overwhelm us with numbers."

"Unless you include the guardians and their golems," I pointed out. "I can call Smokey in at any time, or another group if they aren't available."

"Right… That would even out the numbers… Still, if they bring Fenja and Menja in, we are going to have a hard time." 

"I haven't seen them fight, or even heard about them fighting since I started going out as a hero," I said. "Is there a reason they haven't been coming out often?" 

"Their powers are strong, but they cause a lot of collateral damage and civilian casualties," Manpower explained with a frown. "They grow up to just over three stories tall, and their durability scales with their size. Their strength does as well, but not to the same degree, mostly just from their increased mass and leverage."

"But being that big and strong means breaking everything they come in contact with," Laserdream continued, picking up when her father paused. "Including the buildings with white people in them, which is a bad look for a group pretending to be 'there for the people' and all that crap. So they spend most of their time acting as bodyguards for Kaiser."

"They are also a final threat that keeps him from being targeted as well," Lady Photon explained. "As long as he remains unthreatened, the building-sized racist valkaries stay under seven feet, barely a nuisance at all." 

"How durable do they get, exactly?" I asked with a frown, looking between them.

"The only time I've fought Menja, I managed to knock her to the ground with a full-power punch," Glory Girl said, pride creeping into her voice. "That was with everything I had and flying as fast as I could."

"She also got up pretty fast," Laserdream pointed out, Glory Girl sticking out her tongue at her cousin. "I've never been able to do anything other than singe her a few times. Usually, it takes someone like Assault to take them down, since he is basically immune to their attacks and can send them right back at them."

"What about Lung?" I asked with a frown. "They sound powerful, so why didn't Kaiser just send them out to stomp on him? Take care of the biggest threat to his gang in the city." 

"They did fight a few times…" Manpower responded with a frown, trying to recall an old memory. "But never for very long… I don't quite remember why. They don't leave Kaiser's side that often, so it's only happened once, maybe twice. They destroyed a few buildings and Lung burned down three more…"

"And then the Empire retreated," Lady Photon continued with a thoughtful look on her face. "Kaiser claimed it was because they were concerned about collateral damage and casualties, but he doesn't actually care about things like that, especially not in a place like the Docks." 

"What are you thinking, Arc?" Crow asked, nudging me a bit. "I know that look." 

"I don't know. It's just that Kaiser doesn't seem like the kinda guy who would just sit on a solution to one of his problems," I pointed out with a shrug.. "You guys would know his MO better, but if Fenja and Menja were so tough, it sounds like they could curb-stomp Lung pretty hard…" 

"Your vision on Lung is skewed cause you took him down so easily," Lady Photon pointed out. "He grows stronger the bigger the threat is, so presenting him with those two got him growing fast."

"But the way you describe them makes them sound too resilient for him to hurt. Glory Girl, was Lung ever flat-out stronger than you?" 

"Uh… not whenever I fought him," she responded with a shrug. "His threat was his claws, fire, and regeneration. Sure, he got big enough to throw stuff, but…"

"The first time the Protectorate attempted to get rid of him, he grew immensely big," Manpower pointed out. "He was throwing around cars like toys at that point, so his strength was probably past Glory Girls at that point." 

"Right, but did he ever get that big with the twin giants?" I asked, watching the heroes rack their brains.

"I don't think so. He got big, but not that big," Lady Photon answered, Manpower nodding in agreement.

"Hmm… in that case, I have a few ideas if we have to fight them," I responded after a moment of thinking. "It's a bit of a stretch, so I would prefer some time to work on something specific for this instance."

"Go get Troy and design something as we walk," Crow said with a shrug. "I can keep an eye on things while you focus." 

I frowned and thought about it for a moment before nodding in agreement. We finished the brief meeting, ending with Glory Girl and Lady Photon heading out to take cover somewhere out of the way, where they could swoop in and support us if we were "ambushed" while Laserdream and Manpower left to their own obligations. Meanwhile, I bounced back home, grabbed Troy, and teleported back, hopping onto his back as we made a patrol through Empire territory. 

It might not have been the smartest choice to bury myself in complexities of spell creation while walking through enemy territory, but my hunchs required poking, and could ultimately give us a way to fight two of the Empire's strongest, something that would go a long way to making this process easier. 

As long as one of them worked. 

When I had finished the spells, I drained a few of my spell storage crystals, as well as two of the crystals on my staff, filling them with the new spells. They were… well, one of the spells at least, was frankly pretty brutal. Depending on the situation and what I did with it, it could be very, horrifically lethal. I just needed to be careful with it and not cast it in a way that I couldn't control. 

By the time I had finished spellcrafting and putting the spells into my stones, we were slowly making our way through the last quarter of our patrol. It was later in the afternoon, as we had started much later than usual, and the sun was just starting to descend. Alya was keeping a close eye on the area around us, but so far, nothing had tripped her focus. She did notice a few people watching us too closely to just be fans, many of them calling people immediately or even already on the phone.

Unsurprisingly, not only was that not something we could act on, but trying to do so would tip our hand that we had such good surveillance around us. Besides, we already knew they were keeping tabs on our location, now we just knew how.

"It looks like this is another bust," I said, shaking my head. "We need to hit a few more places, put more pressure on them." 

"Maybe we should step it up?" Crow suggested. "Hit a few places at once with the guardian's help?"

"That… yeah, that would definitely up the impact…" I admitted, tapping my chin. "I'm a little worried that if we push too hard, they might try to do the same thing that Lung did and hit the dock community."

"How many golems do they have now?" 

"They have eight wood, six stone, and six metal," I explained. "I should really just replace all of them with metal…"

"Probably, but even if you didn't, that's more than enough to give them time to call you for backup," Crow pointed out. "Plus… as much as I hate the Empire, they aren't stupid. With how you slammed them down the first time they tried, and how you took down Lung when the ABB tried to fuck around, no one is going to be looking to find out."

"I hope you're right." 

Eventually, we called the patrol over. We notified our New Wave support, who thanked us and went home, while we went looking for Smokey and Piper, who were on their break patrol in the heart of the city. We discussed working together to hit multiple targets, hitting the Empire hard and forcing them even further back into their corner. 

I was also starting to look for any information that could lead to picking off any more of their capes. Not only would snagging one or two as they went about their gang business make the eventual final confrontation significantly easier, but it would also serve to push the Empire back even better than hitting their assets. Capes were the real source of the gang's power, so taking them away was really hitting them where it hurt. 

We discussed it for a while, finally deciding we would hit three separate targets, all located by Alya. Piper and Smokey would hit a drug stash while another group of guardians would be hitting some sort of vehicle workshop, where they were fixing and reinforcing vehicles for drug trafficking and what looked like their own raids. 

Their targets were specifically chosen to be as close to the outskirts of their territory as possible, making it much easier for the guardians to rush in relatively undetected. They could then disable the guards and destroy anything even remotely useful before teleporting out, hopefully avoiding any reinforcements.

Meanwhile, we would be hitting one of the Empire's most infamous money makers, the dogfighting pits, which were much deeper in their territory. Alya had just managed to spot it as we were on patrol, and considering it was Hookwolf's personal pet project, the chances of running into him there were high. 

  The next round of raids would probably be on the fighting rings they were rumored to have, also run by Hookwolf, though we would have to find them first. 

With our plan for the night set, I teleported us back to the forest, where we basically killed time. Well, Olivia killed time, working to get a better grip on her enhanced strength, speed, reflexes, and durability. She was honestly impressive to watch, her power working to streamline the change, perhaps somehow enhancing her ability to adapt. While I still occasionally struggled to judge how my strength and speed scaled to my movement and actions, she seemed to have already mastered it. 

While she was running through the forest, playing tag with Kali's wolves, I settled down in a chair, pulled out a notepad, and started thinking about my upcoming charges. Time had truly slipped by for me, to the point where Alya had had to remind me that my next cycle was coming up and that I needed to figure out a few options for what I would be spending my points on. As always, I would wait for my free random-not-random addition before making my final choices, but it didn't hurt to come up with some vague options first.

"If my goal is to stop the Endbringers… What's the best way to do that?" I asked hypothetically, running my fingers through my hair. "The obvious answer is a big fuck-off powerful combat spell. A disintegrate spell or some sort of rampant conversion spell could work, even if they are both pretty dangerous…"

"How many charges would they take to unlock at a usable level?" Alya asked.

"I have no way of knowing, but I have a strong feeling that anything that can even scratch an Endbringer is not going to be cheap," I pointed out. "Plus, it's likely not just going to be 'energy blast flavor twelve' or 'fire control level two.' The Endbringers shrug off all but the most powerful or esoteric effects. Just look at the Simurgh fight. Everyone was shooting at the thing, but only Eidolon and Legend were doing any real damage to it."

"So you need something exotic or something overpowered?" Alya surmised.

"More or less. Unfortunately, esoteric effects will most likely be costly charge-wise," I pointed out. "And while I could push one subject high enough, or push my spell crafting high enough to create a devastatingly powerful spell... That would be like trying to use a nuke in close quarters." 

We spitball a half dozen ideas before it became apparent that the solution was likely to be a mix of the two options. Between the Triumvirate and the multitude of capes that fought them, hundreds, maybe thousands, of different powers had been thrown at the Endbringers. Everything from lasers and electricity to even crazier things had been tried, but none of them had really worked.

However, sometimes, certain powers did seem to work better than others. It was often hard to say what these powers were, since the people using them frequently died, or people couldn't figure out who made the attack, but there are definite reports of certain powers having greater effects than others. Three of them were well-known and even openly advertised to encourage people with abilities in that vein to come forward and fight. 

The first was armor-piercing. Any ability that punched through outer layers of armor seemed to do a better job at penetrating the deeper layers of an Endbringer's body, where normal attacks quickly stopped doing damage.

After that was matter annihilation, a rare but powerful concept that was very infrequently seen. Eidolon seemed to have a few abilities based on the concept, and a few others did as well. While their effectiveness did drop off the deeper you penetrated the Endbringer, it was at a much slower rate than other sorts of energy or physical attacks. 

The third effective power type seemed to be time-based effects. While not damaging them directly, the Endbringers seemed just as vulnerable as anything else to time-altering powers. Unfortunately, those sorts of powers were even more rare than matter annihilators, with only a few ever being recorded fighting the Endbringers, though each time they let the surrounding capes do significant damage to them. 

It was a horrifying thought that Grey Boy, a now-dead member of the Slaughterhouse Nine, could have potentially been a death sentence to the Endbringers if he hadn't been absolutely insane. 

Equally horrifying was that Clockblocker, a local Brockton Bay Ward, could potentially affect an Endbringer as well, but he would have to physically touch it.

"Not to self, work on enhancing and improving Clockblocker until he could be safely effective against an Endbringer..."

I trailed off, realizing that, in reality, that would actually be a pretty good idea. I was no doubt earning a reputation as someone who could hand out some serious firepower in terms of gear. If I got in touch with the right people, they could likely connect me with Parahumans who would be effective against the Endbringers, whom I could then upgrade...

Very quickly, the outline of an idea seemed to settle into my mind. I didn't need to come up with some sort of almighty spell, something that I could use to destroy an Endbringer in one blow. Something like that would likely cost dozens of charges and would take months to fully unlock.

But a more negligible magical effect would take significantly less to unlock. And while it wouldn't kill the Endbringer in one strike, they would let just about anyone be at least a minor threat to the city-destroying abominations.

And what if I multiplied that threat by a hundred? By a thousand?

"Well... I think that I might have something of a plan," I said after a full minute. "I'm going to make an Endbringer killing army."