Project ROWDY 2-17 (Patreon)

"OMNIPOTUS REMAINS UNBROKEN!" The air outside Chicago trembled. So did the ground, because apparently Omnipotus couldn’t say his own stupid name without making tectonics everybody else’s problem. 

Also his breath smelled like spoiled milk. Somehow. 

“OMNIPOTUS REMAINS UNBENT!”

Maybe it was cosmic halitosis. Maybe the air was actually rotting. Hard to tell when the nightmare in the middle of the fight kept messing with physics like he was the only one around to care.

Either way, Brick didn’t have the luxury to think.The redhead ducked under a backhand the size of a minivan, the force of it tearing past enough to rip the roof of a barn a half mile out. Omnipotus was no longer twelve feet — more an easy eighteen — and his strength had grown with it."YOUR STRUGGLES ARE THE TWITCHING OF CRUSHED GNATS!"

Brick didn’t bother talking back either.

His brothers took care of that for him. Hell, he could hear the two of them still doing that right now; both insults and named attacks flying free from Butch and Boomer.Talking wastes time.

The leader of Team Trinity burst through the air, dodging a downward stomp that turned frozen tundra into frigid desert — snow falling on sand — and redirected the giant’s descending elbow  with a hard shove.A grunt spilled free, massive kinetic energy pushing him backward, but he forced through anyway; body blazing red as he burnt aura to push harder. Goddamnit, Cecil. As much as he appreciated something to use his powers on that wasn’t mindless chaos — because that got boring quick when you weren’t five anymore — he wished the GDA director would use some of that infinite budget to stock more heroes he couldn’t swat with both hands tied behind his back and blindfolded.

Because this is an alien god, Cecil. Brick roared as he blazed forward to keep pace with a rushing Boomer, both of them delivering twin bicycle kicks to an omnipotent jaw bone. Why the hell is Dupli-Kate here?!

He stayed in the pocket anyway, keeping his tempo and forcing the ugly exchanges because stepping back meant giving the ‘World-Devourer’ room to breathe, and Brick refused to give a single goddamn inch.With a yell,  he drove a perfectly chambered hook directly into the floating ribs, blazing knuckles twisted at the absolute second to get every inch of force out.

He might as well have punched a tectonic plate.

The shockwave snapped out from his fist, fire and force exploding outwards to flatten the stalks of corn into dust, but Omnipotus barely even shifted his weight.

"OMNIPOTUS FEELS NOTHING FROM I-”

“SHUUUUUUUUUUU—!” A roar that could only come from one person shattered the space to Brick’s right as Butch broke every sound barrier in his way with body and voice both; radiating raw energy and pure forward momentum. “—T UUUUUUUUUUP!” The jade missile slammed directly into the giant’s kneecap with a headbutt that had to blow out at least a few sets of eardrums, Brick immediately locking both arms as far as they could reach around the massive joint. 

Mid-air impact turned into a mid-air grapple as Butch pulled as hard as he could, moving like he was trying to tear the leg free more than anything else.Omnipotus stumbled, purple armor groaning around him. “INSECTS!”

The god-giant brought a fist down to crush the green nuisance on his leg, but a blue buzzsaw blurred across his vision before the strike could land.

“Take that!” The youngest Rowdyruff twisted into a wheel-kick; heel snapping into the side of the giant’s helmet with a burst of blue lightning that lit up the sky. Boomer didn’t stop there, following up instantly with a sweeping low kick to the knee, then a rapid-fire flurry of Taekwondo aerial strikes that chained into each other as he planted furious feet into the giant’s skull-face from ten different directions at once. 

"Take! The! Hint!” Boomer yelled with every successive impact, breathless and frantic, his voice cracking on the last word. “You! Ugly! Purple! Freak!"

A final crescent kick spun and landed flush against the skull-mask. “OMNIPOTUS WILL NOT BE MOCKED BY DUST!”

The giant pulsed, reality glitching around him as the snowy desert twisted upside down till a sandstorm rained down on an ice-covered landscape. Gravity exploded with the shift around Omnipotus’ crown and Boomer went flying backward like a skipped stone, his blue body cutting a snowy trench that stretched for nearly a mile.Red lances tore free from Brick’s eyes, enough heat to slag a skyscraper forcing a laughing roar from Omnipotus. I know you feel it. Brick grit his teeth and pushed harder, jaw tight. Stop pretending like you don’t.

"Die already!" Butch roared again, hands raised with both palms drawn back. “CRUSHER CANNON!” A dense green beam, as wide as Butch’s entire body, shot out; the entirety of the thing crackling with power and filled with as much hate as his brother could force into it.

Brick knew the move.

It was something Butch had been working on since Omni-Man.

Brick also knew it was just his version of the Galick Gun, aka something designed to hit ‘tough fuckers hard’.

Either way, it did something Omnipotus couldn’t ignore, the giant screaming as the blast rocked his skull backward.The ground buckled. 

It turned to glass, then ocean water, then to solid asphalt marked with white lines and parking cones as Butch poured every ounce of raw power into the energy beam. The muscles in the green boy's arms bulged as he kept the blast going, teeth bared with feral joy.

A giant hand surged out and green eyes went wide the instant before a pale palm sent him flying. A split-second later, Butch crashed into the ground, a crater the size of a city block all around him, bouncing twice before burying himself in a pile of re-melted pavement tar.

Brick kept his breathing steady as he ducked another sweeping strike from Omnipotus, red eyes melting a chunk of flying debris. We’re hitting him with literally everything! Enough force to crack the moon apart a few times over, at least, and the thing was just getting annoyed. How did Omni-Man beat this thing?

A massive ring of yellow light flashed behind Brick, the red Rowdyruff whipping around at the sight of more teleportation signatures.

"Backup.” The comm link crackled as Cecil drawled over the line, enough tension in the man’s voice to tell Brick he was inches away from a coronary. "Try not to get in their way."

Haha, Cecil.

A man stepped out of the first flash. 

Tall and built like someone who drew a bodybuilder from memory, he had short blond hair spiked up over a grin that looked plastered on. “Hey, big guy.” The heavily mutated former surfer hit the ground running, oversized arms outstretched as he threw himself at Omnipotus with a bare chest and too-tight board shorts.

Oh great, the Hunk. He felt sick just thinking the name.

The giant swung a foot without even a word, kicking The Hunk squarely in the chest. The blonde man flew, smashing straight through a building that appeared out of nowhere on the shifting landscape, body snapping through metal like wet paper.

Great backup. One red eye twitched. Really helpful, Cecil.

But a second later, the rubble shifted as the Hunk stood up.

Chest caved in and bleeding heavy, the mutant looked like he was out of the fight, but Brick only needed a second to see the muscle fibers in his body already shifting and knitting themselves back together. Boulder shoulders swelled larger, biceps visibly expanding as the rest of his muscles bulged with them.

"That hurt." The Hunk grinned, fully healed as he charged forward, tearing a massive chunk of bedrock out of the shifting ground and hurling it at the giant's head.

Two more figures dropped from a GDA gunship hovering in the distorted sky above. 

Both agents Penrose — Brit and Britney — hit the ground, both wearing basic GDA meta-suits in different colors and carrying plasma canons that were each as tall as Brick himself, each one glowing with high-yield energy cores strong enough to nuke a city block.

"Legs first.” Brit raised his gun.

"Always the legs.” His sister nodded.

They didn't flinch as they squeezed the triggers, feet planted as twin beams of blinding white plasma thicker than tree trunks hammered into Omnipotus’s open kneecaps. The giant bellowed, turning his attention to the artillery, and sent a chunk of snow-hardened lava rock shattering directly on top of the siblings hard enough to crater the ground.

A few seconds later, Brit and Britney both crawled out of the sizeable crater, both more annoyed than injured as they reracked their cannons. “That all you got, ugly?”Brick slipped back into the fray, dodging blasts of varying elemental and energetic natures as he drove a knee into the giant’s spine while his brothers, the Hunk, Fight Force and several others distracted him. He darted back, a yellow energy beam from Robot’s giant mech-suit searing the same spot he just left with barely a mark left behind.

Another flash burned yellow into Brick’s eyes; this one closer.

"Boys, I strongly advise maintaining a perimeter!"

Donald Ferguson made landfall, dropping out of the sky the instant the ground under Brick’s feet turned to a volcanic riverbank. Perfectly pressed suit already singed from the lava, he raised his left arm as it fully split open; synthetic flesh retracted to show off a cluster of heavy plasma emitters shifting into place and already charged to full with blue power. “Target acquired.” 

A volley of blistering blue blasts peppered the giant’s chest plate.

"OMNIPOTUS WILL MELT YOUR TOYS!"

The giant raised a hand, a sphere of volatile energy dark as the void of space held high.

Before he could throw it, another flash of yellow flared high above and the sky glitched.

Red eyes shot skyward, Brick’s face pulling down into a deep frown. What now?