PWP: 7.9 Rise (Patreon)

Rise 7.9

Bryce Kiley
2011, February 11: Brockton Bay, NH, USA

We couldn’t keep this up. In just three minutes, the Simurgh had thoroughly proven that she could pick us apart, no matter how many capes took to the sky. Hell, she hadn’t even built anything yet.

I eyed the bracers on my wrists. Black leather inlaid with gold framed two, identical rubies. Ancient script in the fashion of Chinese oracle bones wove intricate formations that blended seamlessly with the design. It was an absolute bitch to make, but worth every exhausting, sleepless night.

This shen gong wu was special, one of two that gave me the confidence to dare share the same sky as the Simurgh. I could fight her. Winning wasn’t a given, but… a draw? Yes, this wu alone could force a draw against the Simurgh.

The problem was the city below. It couldn’t survive that kind of titanic battle. All else aside, I liked Brockton Bay. After all, I lived here. Pretty much everyone who mattered to me lived here. It’d be pretty fucking ironic if I “saved” the city, only to be left with a pile of rubble and a people with their brains dribbling out their ears.

Xiaolin showdown. I needed to invoke a duel against the Simurgh somehow. I’d expected this, of course. This was always the plan, a battle that spared my city the Simurgh’s concert. But now that I was here, the thought made my stomach flip in a way that had nothing to do with my current acrobatics.

Yes, it’d mean a dimensionally isolated space, but a showdown was a form of ritualized combat. First and foremost, all participants had to physically claim possession of the shen gong wu at the time of invocation. This wasn’t like with the Grand Prix; there was no time nor opportunity for me to pass a wu around. If I invoked a xiaolin showdown, it’d be a duel.

Then there was the matter of consent. It was one of the few ironclad rules of xiaolin showdowns. I couldn’t begin a showdown unless all involved parties agreed to the wager and terms. Getting her to “hear” the words would be simple enough; she was always listening. It was the “agreement” part that was tricky.

I contorted my spine and simultaneously thrust my hips, narrowly dodging out of the way of Alexandria. The Simurgh picked her up and pitched her like a baseball, if baseballs had the impact force of freight trains.

My Walker pistol appeared in my hand. Before I could fire back, a passing pebble slipped inside the barrel at what should have been an impossible angle. The whole thing detonated in my hand, blowing me out of the sky yet again.

Six Muggy Balls hurt like a bitch, Germa suit or not. I felt the shockwave rock my body and I cast a quick Recover to repair the ruptured organs and hairline fractures that lined my bones. It was one of a dozen simultaneous “freak accidents” that happened around the Simurgh.

How did I trick the all-knowing precog?

Or, barring that, how did I convince said precog to accept a one-on-one duel with me in an isolated dimension?

I knew what she wanted. She was unlike her brethren. She had two directives: First, her primary goal was to preserve the Cycle. She’d continue even with the death of Scion. Second, she was to present a challenge for Eidolon.

That… That didn’t help much. But, the ultimate aim of the Cycle itself was data. No Shard could resist the unknown and unexplored; the very idea was antithetical to their nature.

So, what would the Simurgh do when presented with the unknown? What would she do when I threatened her core identity?

“Well, I guess we're about to find out,” I said with a bark of laughter.

“Find out what? What have you found out, Creed?” came the voice of a stern woman, probably a PRT agent monitoring comms.

I forgot that I was still hooked to their network and hadn't muted myself. I checked. Sure enough, I was broadcasting to everyone who picked up a comms bracelet from the PRT, and probably more. I probably sounded insane.

Oh well, this was a good thing. They couldn't bitch later saying I hadn't kept them in the loop. They probably would anyway considering what I had planned, but I’d cross that bridge when I got to it.

“The Simurgh's psionic echolocation is dimensionally locked to the reality she currently occupies,” I said quickly.

“Is that from The GOAT? What do they want here? Why are you still here?”

“She uses her echolocation to gather perfect data about the past and future, but is technically blind to the present.”

“What does that have to do with you?” That was Legend. Our conversation drew the big blue's attention.

“he's going to make a dimensional bubble,” Alexandria said clinically. I wondered if she even felt anything when she got thrown around. “It would buy the city time. How many of us can you take with you?”

“None, there are rules, remember?” I said with a rueful laugh. “Before that, I'm going to buy you a few seconds, so get ready to dogpile her!”

“What are you planning?”

I tuned out her increasingly insistent demands. Instead, I muted the comms and urged SAINT, “Go, buddy. Follow the plan.”

“Gon… Pory-gon, gon,” he trilled. He was pissed. I didn't need to be able to sense his aura to know he hated everything about this.

“I know, buddy, but it can only be you. I trust no one else to pull the trigger.”

“Pory…”

He left my pokenav, zipping off through cyberspace. My late nights weren’t for naught. I’d made several contingency plans. Each took into account where I’d fight her, when, and just what I considered to be an acceptable outcome. This… This was still one of the better contingencies.

I felt awful about it nonetheless. He was a pokemon. His place was by my side. Asking him to leave me as I fought for my life was no different than asking a bird to cut off its wings. SAINT. Sabah. Mom and Sierra. I had much apologizing to do after this.

For now, I put that out of my mind. The Simurgh was jobbing. People like me and Alexandria, the fastest, most agile melee capes, could still occasionally get close. We could weave through her shroud of debris and “fight” her directly. Once in a while, she even let us hit her.

I proved that letting this happen was a mistake. Reaching into my hammerspace, I withdrew the first of my anti-Simurgh wu. Even through her asteroid belt, speckles of sunlight hit its gleaming, silver surface.

Holding it before me, I poured my aura into it and shouted, “Reversing Mirror!”

My shen gong wu did not outwardly react. There was no laser beam or light show. Reality simply glitched as the Simurgh’s defining ability reversed itself.

The Reversing Mirror was, in my humble opinion, one of the most versatile and potent shen gong wu Grandmaster Dashi ever created. It had a simple, but powerful effect: to reverse the effect of anything directed towards it.

That was an important caveat. The mirror could reverse anything, so long as it was first subjected to that thing. It could be a nuclear bomb, the kinetic force of a bullet, or the effects of a shen gong wu.

This included nebulous concepts such as visions of the future. That had been explicitly done before when Chase Young distorted the vision Omi saw in the Fountain of Hui to convince the Dragon of Water that he was an evil overlord in the making destined to conquer and enslave the world.

So, if the Simurgh’s psionic echolocation covered everything within her present dimension, that by definition included the mirror. The moment I took it out, she saw and included its shape into her calculations. And in that moment, because her echo was so all-encompassing, I had her.

She was always watching. Ergo, she was always subject to the mirror’s effects. The only possible out would be if she refused to look at a mystical, physics-defying artifact, and in turn, the one who wielded it. Impossible, because that required that she could calculate the sheer, bullshit mysticism of Grandmaster Dashi’s masterpiece. Because I was pretty sure I was the reason she was here at all.

Even if she could, would she? Could Laplace’s demon intentionally create for herself a blindspot? More importantly, could she do it for the explicit purpose of denying herself data she did not have?

Of course she couldn’t. It went against her nature, the entire reason she’d been created. It was no different than asking a fish not to swim.

And so, the Great Wheel turned. Reality reflected itself upon the mirror’s surface. Under the mirror’s light, her echo faded. She lost her precognition. She lost her postcognition. In exchange, for the first time in her short life, she opened her eyes to the present.

And the first thing she saw was Crown Chimera, descending heel-first towards her face in a corona of azure flames. Fourth gear, with everything I had, “Meteor Impact!”

Her porcelain shell shattered and flaked as I spiked her into the Medhall building at several times the speed of sound. I knew where the core was. That strike, no matter how lethal it looked, was just cosmetic. But damn it, that felt good after being thrown around like a ragdoll for the better part of fifteen minutes.

People stopped moving for a long second. No one expected that to work, not after the eighteenth time a flying brick tried to deck the bitch. Hell, this was the cleanest strike anyone had ever managed against her.

“Now! I can’t seal her precognition for long! Fucking jump her!” I roared into my comms. 

That shattered the silence. Every cape with anything resembling a blaster power fired towards the Medhall building. 

Eidolon dropped some kind of localized star a la Sundancer. Legend’s lasers curved around countless others to strike her with pinpoint precision. Alexandria barreled through that hell, just so she could wrestle her in place. It was the single most vulnerable the endbringer had ever been.

Rime’s fractalized glacier collapsed an entire floor. Purity’s laser obliterated another. Within seconds, the entire top half of the skyscraper effectively ceased to be architecture under the fire of every flight-capable blaster worth mentioning in North America.

“Simurgh insurance” didn’t exist because there was a good chance that the policyholder, presuming they survived to collect, would be bat-shit insane. Somehow, I got the distinct impression that Max Anders was going to be quite a bit poorer.

I laughed. It was a really stupid thing to think about right now, but I couldn’t help it. I’d never been good at reining in my intrusive thoughts, anyway.

“How long will that last, Creed?” I heard. Someone was talking to me, not through the chatter, in person.

Turning, I found Lady Photon and Laserdream. They added their own powers to the ceaseless barrage, not that they were contributing much. Truthfully, only the Triumvirate and maybe Myrddin had enough firepower here. Still, A for effort and whatnot.

They were hurt. Lady Photon had a gash across her forehead that dripped blood into her left eye. One arm hung limply from an obvious break. Laserdream comparatively only had superficial scratches, because her mother would rather die before something got past her.

I made sure I had the right gloves and gently took her hand. “I don’t have the time to scan you properly, but I can at least do the basics. Hold still, please.”

“How long, Creed?”

“Wrong question. Better question: How long will the Simurgh put up with this?”

“But without her foresight, she’s–” 

“Still the greatest telekinetic alive,” I said blandly as I cleaned the blood from her eye. “If I blind a tiger, will you suddenly have the confidence to stick a hand in its mouth?”

Before she could respond, a massive psychic pulse hurled Alexandria into the air. One moment, Exalt, Eidolon’s right hand, was building a massive gale after seizing the very atmosphere around Brockton Bay. The next, he became a cloud of red mist as the Simurgh turned the brickiest brick into a cannonball.

That raised the cry for shields. Myrddin protected several of the fighters by temporarily yoinking them to another dimension. Eidolon phased into some kind of gaseous form, reappearing as Alexandria passed him by. Legend was the only one who could keep firing on the Simurgh and that lull allowed her to escape.

I kicked into the air. The pressure wave I left behind sent the Pelhams sprawling, but that was a good thing since it kept them out of the way of the endbringer’s retribution. 

All of this had just been a way to draw her attention. The Simurgh wasn’t stupid. Even blinded to the future as she was, there was only one possible target she could have at this time. 

I was counting on it.

“Come get me, bitch,” I grunted as I entered the fourth gear once more. I was running low on stored reserves of dicyanoacetylene, but that was what alchemy was for.

All sound save her song faded, outpaced several times over by the greatest expression of After Burner I could manage. As she chased, psychic blasts assaulted me, threatening to interrupt my run. Each strike sent my shields sparking. Protect was up nearly constantly, tinting my vision in flashes of translucent gold and green.

Even then, I was no true match for the Simurgh. Contrary to what I told Lady Photon, I hadn’t blinded her, not really. I’d replaced her favored form of sight with another, its direct opposite. Like a man groggily grasping for the light switch after just waking up, her telekinesis was sloppy. I could, with great effort, slap her “hands” aside to escape between her fingers.

And yet, she was the Simurgh, a living supercomputer. She did not know how I’d reversed her precognition, but she did not need to. She was perfectly capable of taking in extant data and accepting her present circumstances and limitations.

In a word, she was adapting. I had seconds at most before she adjusted to this, new form of sight.

I was counting on that, too. Without her precognition, she would reach for me. She would catch me without reservation, like a child eagerly picking up a frog out of the muck.

And catching me was the whole fucking point.

“I declare a xiaolin showdown. All that I’ve made, all that I am, I bring to bear to face you,” I declared for all the world to hear as I felt her unbreakable hold close around me. “The contest shall be a duel to the death. The victor shall claim ownership of the Reversing Mirror. With the Samsara and all the world as our witness, let our final dance begin!”

And, like the half-blind, data-starved orphan she was, she accepted.

Once more, the world broke.

X

Sabah Azimi

“–The contest shall be a duel to the death. The victor shall claim ownership of the Reversing Mirror. With the Samsara and all the world as our witness, let our final dance begin!”

“No, nonono,” I stammered, frozen as I heard Bryce’s declaration.

He wasn’t the only one who’d had that super-spy specialization. I’d long since patched myself into the PRT channels. It was useful for keeping out of people’s way, and for the rare updates on the fight happening above.

So, I heard everything. Every. Fucking. Word. I heard Bryce somehow hurt the Simurgh in a major way. I heard him call for everyone to dogpile her. I heard the robotic callout of Exalt’s death. And I heard someone I loved like a brother challenge the Simurgh to a duel to the death.

I was in a shelter, teleporting people out, when I paused to listen. I thought that he’d failed his act of lunacy. For a brief second, nothing happened. There was no way he could get an endbringer to touch a shen gong wu, then accept the terms of the xiaolin showdown… right? Endbringers weren’t supposed to have that kind of awareness… right?

I was proven wrong as the world stilled. There was something that pulsed through everyone. It stirred something deep inside me, and I belatedly realized that this must be that qi stuff Bryce talked about. But even the civilians around me could feel that something momentous was happening above.

And, in the span of a breath, that “above” came down to us. The earth trembled so violently that it felt as if a giant toddler had taken hold of the shelter and shaken it like a rattle. I hovered in the air as my charges fell in a tangle of limbs.

Even then, the concrete walls did not crack. Not one grain of sand or grit fell to the earth. Not because the shelter was of such superb make, but because the magic of the xiaolin showdown had other plans. I watched helplessly as Bryce treated the world like taffy yet again.

The walls peeled back. Bleachers arose like in a stadium. The open sky greeted us. As we watched, the entire city underwent the same transformation. Soon, we were but one, miniscule section in a gigantic, city-sized, donut-shaped stadium.

Altogether, this new stadium overlooked a lake. It was the city aquifer, which had been raised up to the surface. Its water had stilled, polished to a mirror shine.

Up above, the very heavens bent to accommodate Bryce’s insanity. Or maybe, we were all inside the dimension. 

I wasn’t sure. I recalled Bryce’s exact words: “With the Samsara and all the world as our witness.” It seemed the magic took that literally. For all I knew, the entire world had shifted and us Brocktonites just got to have the ringside seats.

Time seemed to pass in fast forward. In seconds, the sun set and the moon rose in the sky. And, just like before, it turned, until a grinning face was reflected upon the still lake. The dark side of the moon had a face, and it was just as terrifying as the first time.

“Helloo, Earth Bet~” he roared his greeting. All around, I saw the heroes amble around like headless chickens. “It is my utmost pleasure to be your emcee once again. In the blue corner–Wait, no, this won’t do. That shameless attention whore said he wanted an audience. Here, let me fix that.”

So saying, he sucked in a titanic gulp of air. Then, he blew onto the surface of the lake. The localized hurricane stirred the water, creating a titanic splash. But rather than descend, it all rose into the air to form a massive bubble.

Or rather, a crystal ball. Inside were two figures, Bryce and the Simurgh. They’d been sealed off in their own force fields, awaiting the start of the duel.

The arena inside was… strange. It looked like an endless void dotted with countless stars. Here, asteroids laden with various fragments of the cityscape floated freely. There was not a soul in any of them, as if a copy of the city had been rendered into a husk just so the Simurgh would have something to throw around.

Between them, the Reversing Mirror shone. It sat atop an ornate pedestal, like the trophy to be claimed at a great sporting event. It was sickening, the representation of everything I feared for. 

Several heroes, the Triumvirate included, attempted to pierce the bubble to join in the showdown. They only managed to make the surface ripple before bouncing off. So we were still in Earth-Bet; it was just the Simurgh and Bryce who had been moved elsewhere. Even so, seeing the city itself reshaped like this was awe-inspiring.

“There, much better. Now, once again, welcome to the second ever xiaolin showdown hosted by yours truly, Announcer Moon!” he said, voice filled with bombastic laughter. “And we are fighting for… the Reversing Mirror? Hahaha, holy shit, now there’s a wu worth dying for. Armsmaster got scammed.

“Ahem, sorry, let’s see here… duel to the death… Reversing Mirror…” the moon turned to the smaller of two sealed figures. Somehow, his voice carried across dimensions. “You do realize that the effects of the mirror go away once the duel begins, don’t you? You can’t use a wu that’s being contested within the contest itself; that wouldn’t be fair.”

The orb of water zoomed in on Bryce, Creed’s, face. He nodded and adjusted the clasp around his cape. “I’m aware. ‘All that I’ve made, all that I am, I bring to bear.’ I know what I said, Moon. If the mirror is excluded for the duration of the xiaolin showdown, so be it.”

“Heh. Ballsy, I like that. Well, then, let’s get started.” He floated a little higher. Clearing his voice, he let loose a shout that I felt in my bones. “Welcome, one and all, to this one of a kind spectacle, a duel to define the age! You have the rare privilege of witnessing the titanic clash for the Reversing Mirror!

“In the red corner, we have the reigning champion of mind-fuckery, the angel of death herself! You know her as Israfel! Ulama! Ziz! The Hopekiller! Raise your voice for the SIMURGH!!!

“And in the blue corner, we have the challenger, the creator of this xiaolin showdown, the Storm Rider, the King of the Mirage Road who dares to share the same sky as an endbringer! Give it up for the ballsiest mortal alive, CREED!

“Two have stepped onto the Gate of Samsara. One will move on beyond the Gate. One will return, triumphant. Fighters, are you ready?”

“I am,” Bryce nodded. Across from him, the Simurgh remained silent, only offering a tiny incline of her chin.

“Very well, then. The terms have been declared. The stage has been set. I have but three words for you: Gong!”

The Simurgh’s wings rustled. Up above, the Reversing Mirror ceased its glow. I knew then that whatever Bryce had done to hamper the Simurgh earlier, she was free of it now.

From this point forth, Bryce was on his own. And he’d face her at her best.

“Yi!”

Bryce noticed, too. He made no complaints. Nor did he tremble at what was, by any reasonable person’s understanding, a fate worse than death. Then again, he’d never been reasonable.

Calmly, he tossed aside his bag and cape and brought his forearms together. Even as Announcer Moon declared the start of this awful contest, he declared, “Moby Morpher!”

“Tanpai!”

And then, the world bore witness to the most bullshit of all tinkers.

Author’s Note

Congratulations to the people who guessed the final two shen gong wu. The Eye of Dashi was crucial as a source of limitless energy. The Third Arm Sash was a relatively cheap wu he made to test the workings of a xiaolin showdown.

But the Moby Morpher and the Reversing Mirror? These were made specifically to contend against the Simurgh knowing that she’s next.

Animal Fact: Bola spiders are spiders that hang upside down with a “bola” made of silk. At the end of this silk is a viscous, sticky droplet of modified silk fluid. Instead of spinning webs, they hang, wait, and snag moths as they fly by, kind of like that carnival game where kids “fish” with magnets tied to strings.

And, just to add to the long list of “ways Mother Nature likes to cockblock her children,” they emit the pheromones of female moths. To a male moth, getting laid is like going on an epic quest for the Holy Grail.