VT - Chapter 48 : Cauldron's idiocy, Anti-Endbringer strategies & Hoping for the best... (Patreon)

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Somewhere on Earth Bet

–Simon–

He knew that sending out Noelle was a big risk, as she was someone who could bring about a disaster, both in terms of optics as well as the actual casualties, that would be just a step below an Endbringer attack if she was allowed time to ramp up and given the opportunity to mass produce evil clones with undying loyalty to her. 

If he recalled correctly, there was no cure to her condition or the cloned capes, as far as the canon timeline was concerned, so the best thing to do with her was to just kill her and be done with it. A cold choice, true, but one that was the most effective in removing any risks associated with her. Alas, he was not yet decided on that and, as such, had kept her alive, since keeping her in confinement until he had exhausted all his options for his own peace of mind seemed like the best course of action.

Then, Leviathan happened, and he had to send her, as well as the other capes, away. There was a risk of something happening, and when he had seen the alert of the two Quinjets as well as their escorts being unresponsive, his mind had immediately jumped to Noelle.

Oh no! An Endbringer-lite potentially on the loose while an actual Endbringer is in front of me!

His hands had flown across the terminal as he had tasked Ashley to check in on that, as he sighed before focusing on the task at hand. Worse case scenario, he could just glass that area and kill Noelle before she became too big of a problem, and then explain his actions later on. He still had that level of firepower scattered around the Bay, and some was on its way as well, but not another Helicarrier.

He was not going to commit another Helicarrier just to push Leviathan back until the evacuation happened, which was almost done, by the way.

The thing about Arc explosions was that they had none of the nuclear fallout that was present with traditional nuclear bombs. It was just a ton of energy, heat, and light, and with the size of the Arc Reactor, and the way he had tuned the energy release, it was more akin to a constantly blaring omnidirectional energy wave instead of a single explosion.

Which is why even after seconds of the explosion happening, the sky was not clear, and was totally white, almost making it feel like the sun was up. 

The very nature of those reactions meant that no matter the sensor suite, he couldn’t really look into what was really happening. All he knew was that Leviathan had not escaped the energy field. The waters around the place were pretty shallow, and with all that water rushing in to fill the void, only to be vaporised by the heat, it would have been impossible to miss a Leviathan sized hole in the water flow data.m 

All he could, and all the others gathered here, could do was analyse the space around that explosion, which was slowly but surely contracting, and hope that the explosions did much more damage to Leviathan, even though he was not sure of that.

All the damage he had done so far seemed to be surface level only. He also knew that Leviathan could rapidly regenerate as well, an ability he hadn’t shown so far. Leviathan could go as far as regenerating entire limbs and chunks of its torso, as long as the core in its body was intact. That was the crux of this whole situation.

No matter how much power he threw at Leviathan, unless he was willing to crack a continent in half, he was not going to get anywhere near the tiny core at the centre of all of this. He was going to need something like Flechette’s power for that, and he was saving that for Scion/Zion, so all he could do here was keep Leviathan occupied until the people were evacuated.

In that sense, he had already won, unless Leviathan acted way out of line and began chasing the evacuated people on land instead of staying in and around water, like it had been its MO ever since it first appeared.

There was zero communication possible with the Helicarrier, as most of it was gone in that wave of light and heat, and he ignored the dozens of calls from Dragon, PRT, and everyone else as he focused on Leviathan’s ass that was being bombarded with energy, not that he could actually see it.

As he waited for the timer to count down, which was an estimated number, his thoughts went back to the killed capes.

Killed by a bullet to their heads. It was so blatantly Cauldron that he couldn't think of a more overt way they could have done this. This was intended as a message to him. Why? He did not know.

All he knew was that they chose to break an Endbringer Truce, doing so by killing capes who were being flown under his protection, and leaving without any trace. The manual connection told him that Cauldron had done something that kept the original directives in place but just killed off anything that could be used to communicate with the rest of the cluster, and also killed all the camera feeds, motion sensors, thermal sensors, and even esoteric energy sensors that were present in every single Quinjet sensor suite.

Opening portals inside a moving plane sounded like something that only the unholy combination of Doormaker and Claryovante could do, with Contessa being the one to pull the trigger to make sure the bullet hit all of them right in the head, at seemingly the same angle. The portal likely also moved to make sure that everyone was hit in the same spots.

It was a show of phenomenal skill with their powers, and a message as well. They wanted to frame him with the deaths of those capes. That much was clear. They wanted to do something to discredit him since it was becoming pretty clear that his Helicarrier, as well as his rescue efforts, were the only thing needed to actually push Leviathan back, or even in the worst case scenario, have an Endbringer attack happen with such minuscule casualties, both in terms of capes and civilians.

He could try and argue that they were all inside the Helicarrier when it was destroyed, but it would not work since he was the one who had actively directed the Helicarrier towards Leviathan, to create that chain reaction that was still ongoing.

If Leviathan had managed to mount a surprise attack and destroy the Helicarrier, then maybe he would have had some leeway in the deaths of these capes, and even then, he would have been questioned about them not being transported in the suits, or the Quinjets or the rescue bogies he had in place.

No, there was no getting away from the fact that 9 capes had died under his watch, all because Cauldron wanted to send a stupid message to him. This didn’t even accomplish anything significant, at least not from where he was seeing the whole thing. It was not like he was worried about public support or anything.

Sure, he needed the world’s support for killing Scion/Zion, but that was hardly going to be questioned when he could just threaten to withdraw his support and release all the information to the world all at once. That would destroy any chances of Cauldron surviving, no matter what tricks they pulled.

So, he wasn’t really worried about the endgame there. Cauldron would have to offer everything they had to fulfill the whole purpose of their organisation.

No, this was likely done for some other reason. The only problem with that was he couldn't see exactly why. The options that came to his mind sounded really stupid and did not fulfill the sly, almost perfect plans he had come to associate with Contessa and her Path to Victory.

All this did was piss him off, potentially to the point he might do something to irrecoverably tarnish the reputation of one of the Triumvirate. Hell, for this alone, he was not going to tell Eidolon about his power and why it was slowly being drained.

The only plausible reason for this was public support. As in, they were more worried about the PRT losing credibility than they were about him gaining more public support. Sure, both of those were connected, but as long as the PRT was able to paint him as some kind of slightly evil guy, they could get away with a lot of stuff. 

The common man was easily led astray anyway.

The common man might just think that breaking an Endbringer Truce was just as serious as Grand Chariot singlehandedly saving an entire city. 

Arguments about the feasibility of sacrificing something as massive and powerful as that Helicarrier for every single Endbringer attack might be called into question. They did not know how long it took for him to build a single Helicarrier. They might think that it was a one off item that could take years to rebuild. Whereas the Endbringer Truce was important for every Endbringer battle.

All the news channels and social media hammering the same thing over and over again, whilst trying to diminish the value of saving everyone but not the city and creating a refugee crisis, might just work.

All of it depended on Leviathan’s condition and what it did after getting out of the Arc Reactor energy attacks. 

Even the slight amount of data he had gathered from the sensor suites of the flying suits as well as the Quinjets had given him tons of ideas on how to better the whole thing, but he was of the mind that he was going to retire the Helicarrier, atleast for Endbringer battles going forward.

Or even if he did, it was not going to be the centerpiece of his Anti-Endbringer strategy. The idea of multiple humanoid robots armed with self destruct parts, as well as a modular platform floating nearby, akin to the one that Ashley had named Puppy, would do swimmingly, not to actually kill or destroy the Endbringers, but to hold them in place.

The idea was to aim for stalling the Endbringers, and make sure that the people were out of the cities before the Endbringer could reach the city. Of course, that strategy might work on Leviathan and maybe even Behemoth, but he could definitely see Simurgh being a tricky case.

He would have to come up with something that could resist her telekinesis. Sure, he had forcefields that could keep all the forces at bay, but it all depended on her particular brand of telekinesis.

Did she manifest hands or other shapes to exert pressure? Or could she just manipulate matter anywhere in a given range? Manton’s Limit told him that Simurgh could not just manipulate the heart of a person and kill him instantly, or do biokinesis. There were limits, but once again, his ships were not living beings.

He would have to create AIs that piloted specific ships for them to be considered living beings for Simurgh to be unable to influence them directly. 

He sighed before focusing on Leviathan, as well as the energy beams that were rapidly contracting, likely because the power cores had depleted themselves.

Juggling between a few things he could do here, he realised that all of it depended on Leviathan’s response here.

It depended on whether it would see a losing battle and retreat deep into the ocean, or would it push ahead to at least destroy the city, or would it go beyond that and chase the evacuation sites?

He just hoped that it was not the third option.

That scenario would suck the most and make people all over the world lose morale.