Greg Vs Raid 9-38 (Patreon)

Shatterbird’s scream was weaker at the tail end, what remained past the peak serving as after-effects more than a weapon on its own. Yet the absence of shrapnel in the shape of shattered silicon didn’t imply a lack of danger even still.Thankfully, his dampeners were active; riding that tail and cutting the high band down to something his inner ear could tolerate. It might have meant listening to the street around him as if he was underwater — everything below 4 kHz arriving thin and flat; sound stripped of its low end.

It was only a small loss, though. A few minutes of degraded audio over a ruptured cochlea and a month of vertigo was a trade he had made before and would continue making.

Frankly, that degradation was already his fault. Something to work on. The Aural Range Mitigation System had been geared for expected threats, more common occurences; sustained gunfire, explosives, even the pressure wave of a collapsing building a hundred feet away. Sadly, whatever frequency Shatterbird dumped into her scream was far from lesser.

The dampeners were still catching up, but they were catching up; even as the ringing in his ears remained. Biological failure, not a mechanical one.The curve of his mirrored visor lit up, Armsmaster’s head sweeping from side to side as his HUD stitched the world together. Pulses of LIDAR, thermal bloom and expected optical input expanded his ‘line of sight’ as a section of curb resolved in front of him. A flipped sedan stood out under the wireframe overlays, the Protectorate leader mapping structural collapse; starting as close as the PRT headquarters and then far further down. Bodies within two-hundred-forty square meters, immediate range of operation? Sixty-one.Forty-four or those he was willing to consider upright and mobile. Considering a third of those were interpolated from partial scan returns, he’d have to lower that number to thirty. Unfortunate.

Shatterbird's scream slowly began to cease, his dampeners lessening as more sound began to properly return; the sound of screams and sirens coming with it. An expected outcome, but far from a good one. A silent Shatterbird meant she had only stopped screaming, and said nothing about whether she had disengaged, and it certainly did not mean the Nine was finished with their opening. 

More often than not, the silicon-manipulator often staggered her attacks.

Which meant people were going to make a set of decisions that were understandable, albeit stupid.

Silence in a situation like this would lull the normally wary into standing up and out of cover, and that included every surviving officer and health professional within the city. That alone was going to cost a few dozen people a femoral artery within the next quarter-hour.

Again, understandably stupid.

"Medical to the interior. " His words went out on the general band, Armsmaster intent on filling the tactical vacuum before things could possibly get worse. "The plaza is exposed on three sides. If movement is necessary, utilize service hallways along reception desk. Route all wounded into PRT HQ. All other units, hold positions until further orders."He blinked for a moment, nothing but static meeting his words. “...confirm receipt.”

Several channels came back, acknowledgements received and filed away. Several more gave him nothing at all, nine out of fifteen entirely silent, which could mean any or all of several things; none of them good. No matter the reason, the distinction mattered far less than the result.

Armsmaster bit down his own frustration as he made his way through glittering debris, glass everywhere crunching under the feet of his frame. With every step, something else was compacted under his sole plates; over two hundred kilos of his Cerberus striding atop shattered silica.

It took a thankfully short period before he caught sight of his second-in-command, Miss Militia’s visual just forty yards north-northwest. Braced behind a hard-ruined concrete barrier, the green of her weapon was mid-configuration; sniper and automatic rifle — belt-fed as well — fighting for dominance in the same shade of vibrant green.Regardless, she held it high and readied; the near line organized behind that same barricade and following her lead with their own weapons. 

A flash of purple drew his attention to the leader of New Wave already managing triage on her own, Lady Photon with a wedge of hardlight beneath the wounded; three officers and an unmoving woman in PRT branding. Another field of color was held above her head, a half-dome catching debris and sending it aside.Dauntless stood not too far from and between either woman, his own ArcLance angled low and with that constant lack of commitment to his own actions that niggled at Armsmaster in a way he’d been trying to let go of for months. 

Triumph stood apart from that triangle, nearer to the ruined entrance; upright and not favoring anything. Despite nearly being the second casualty to Leviathan among their number, the young man was firmly on his feet now; gold breastplate caked with dust and shoulders square.

TRIUMPH [PRO-ENE-008]OBSERVED CHANGE: PHYSICAL + SONICWHITE KNIGHT INTERACTION: UNRESOLVED

The flag threw up across his vision for a moment, Triumph’s appearance a trigger on its own due to how often he’d pulled it up over the last few weeks. A glancing hit from an Endbringer had left the boy with more wounds than he’d been expected to survive, brain damage included. Yet they hadn’t lost him like they had Velocity.

He had a hypothesis for exactly that and the variable behind it… It was far less of a frustration than it had been back in the spring, to consider at least. The actual results — and said variable — would always be varying degrees of maddening. Even still, no matter how much time and effort he put into thinking about it, the other boy raised more questions than hedid answers, every single review returning to the same sentence in the medical summary — anomalous biological material, purged.

Four words that only made things far more complicated.

Later. A single eye-flick sent the document summary away and — no sooner had he done exactly that — the parking lot chose that moment to explode.

The guest lot blew apart as a far row of cars were shouldered aside, sedan folding around something. That same something did not stop in its charge, an inhuman shape that could be classified more as a mass than anything else.

Crawler.

A hatchback rolled twice in the wake of the cape, landing on its roof as another folded around a light pole. Crawler was through the gap and onto open asphalt, the sound of gunfire ringing out loud from Miss Militia and the men beside her.  Hers were louder, her green gun something with a caliber along the lines of a fifty-caliber and built to pierce armor. Muzzle flares strobed the white dust around, the first entry wounds opening acros the carapace no bigger than a divot and already closing by the time the fourth met body armor.

Purple light burned bright and hard, a section off Crawler’s face smoking under Lady Photon’s sustained beam. Carapace boiled away, something underneath visible and glistening as something like broken glass and gravel in a blender sounded out loud over gunfire. Lady Photon shouted forward, her energies shining harder enough to force Crawler to the side a half-step as the monster continued laughing.

The tissue was already back by the time Crawler shook his thick head, heavier at the margin of the burn and with another layer of plating on the top. 

He’d read all the files; nine in totality, margin notes of his own added to a full six. Contributing several addendums had been a task of his own and one he’d taken to eagerly simply because of the subject matter. Despite all of that — all his research, all his work, and all his effort — none of it mattered in the face of the specific obscenity that was Crawler and his regeneration. 

"Fall back!" His second-in-command barked over the line, shouting loud enough for her voice to travel across the plaza. “Fall back!”

A shield-arm of surging gold burst forward, Lady Photon suddenly pushed aside by Dauntless as the younger man caught a strike from a charging Crawler. One of six limbs — each one the size of a full-grown man — struck the shield, a sound like a bank vault slamming shut and a white-gold flare on contact all the warning before the hoplite-armored cape was sent off his feet and across the asphalt. 

A spray of grit behind him, Dauntless flew twenty-thirty-forty feet before he caught himself and came up again, shield bright as ever as he stood between the van-sized man-beast and everyone else.…idiot. 

Armsmaster’s eyes twitched behind his visor, halberd already out as he made to charge forward on his own. He didn’t mean that — not entirely — but it was a stupid move. Crawler was at best a containment problem and that was only because he was far from a problem you could meet with force. No, the villain was best described as escalation writ large, and the rate of said escalation was a function of how hard you hit him.

A paradox worth studying in a lab, but one that in practice would get half of Brockton Bay’s heroes served as a dinner to a monster.

“Dau-!”Armsmaster’s order died as something white moved along the lot's edge.

Wrong proportions and gait too inhuman to properly follow, Mannequin crossed one end of the guest lot in segments; limbs deploying in a manner closer to Hookwolf’s movement than anything bipedal. Articulation knew no standard direction and the joints rolled as smooth as you would expect from skilled Tinker artifice.

Dozens of meters of open ground were crossed in seconds, the Tinker villain striding past several PRT officers without even a glance. All of Armsmaster’s assumptions died, any expectation of attack dashed, as Mannequin charged right past them — across Crawler’s flank and toward the south side.

It only took a quarter-second for Armsmaster to track the actual target.

The black-and-yellow shape vaulting off the top of a half-crushed sedan turned on its side had Manequinn’s firm attention and — for a moment — it had Armsmaster’s.

Apex. 

The boy — Axel, per the surveillance file he was not supposed to have — was moving fast enough to confirm his Mover rating; already kicking off the side of a maintenance building, and gone between the structures in between breaths.

Unsurprisingly, Mannequin went after him, a targeted pursuit that took him past every easier body on the field.

Not merely a rampage. Mouse Protector had mentioned as much. Confirmed, then. Crawler was loud and in the open, a magnet for chaos and attention; willfully drawing in everyone that could be bothered to look his way.

Not a small number.

Shatterbird's opening had already made sure to damage a good many avenues of communication. Most likely unintentional, but effective nevertheless. 

A panel van tore through the middle of the lot, half-airborne and spinning. Purple hardlight caught it, the field flickering for a moment until it…

Lady Photon let out a shout as the van tore clean through, the cape dropping to the floor with a clear look of confusion as she stared down at herself. Another cape tried to leave the ground and came down hard on broken glass while a third produced nothing but a handful of sparks from her own hands. Friendly after friendly, cape after cape, suddenly began showing signs of visible power failure, the cause clear.

Armsmaster was already turning and in-motion before a large mass of ruined flesh fully made his way out of a cloud of powder. 

Hatchet Face.

A room-sized radius, no more than thirty to forty-five feet according to reports. Definitely softer at the margins and — from the looks of it — possessing some additional level of interference at least a third past that distance. Still, room-sized was nothing in a proper open field but in a congested plaza with sixty people between asphalt and entrance… 

That might as well have been the entire space.

Hatchet Face clearly knew that, if he knew anything.

Clearly possessed of some intellect, the gray-skinned villain came down the lane with an axe hanging off one hand, no moe than a walking pace to his gait as his field did the work. It only took a second or two more for the powers to go and then the habits built on top of those to prove their deadweight; confidence evaporating at a rate roughly proportional to how long someone had gone without being ordinary.

Dauntless took a step past him, the hoplite in gold gripping his spear tight. “No.”The man turned back to him, a question on his face and past his lips. “No?”

“No.” It was as much a denial as a command. “Assist Miss Militia and Lady Photon.”

"But Hatchet Face —"

"Is a local problem. Crawler is not." Something came apart in the lot behind him, the massive cape in question grinding out another laugh not worth the word. "Go."

Dauntless didn’t waste a second more, not a word more of complaint as he took off toward the guest lot. As the man finally disappeared into the chaos, five digits adjusted their grip down the haft; Armsmaster stepping forward armed with engineering he had built himself. “Triumph.”The young hero watched Dauntless’s back as he stepped forward at Armsmaster’s call, dust caking into the gold of his costume and helmet already scuffed as the boy's head finally came around.

"I require your range." The haft settled into his gauntlet with an honest weight he’d designed himself. "Keep him occupied."