Ascent 9.3

  2005, August 9: Hyunmu’s Lab, Babylon

  It couldn’t st. No matter how much I wished otherwise, the peaceful days of bickering with my little sister and bribing a wild Lulu with pastries soon came to an end.

  I knew he was coming of course: Leviathan. Literally every country on Earth-Bet tracked the endbringer cycle. He still managed to catch me feeling left-footed though. Then again, could anyone truly cim to be ready to fight a kaiju?

  It wasn’t like we’d sat around with our thumbs up our asses. I’d made more potions than ever. There were close to a hundred hextech drones that would one day become the scales of Project: Gamera’s tail, each equipped with Barrier, Heal, and Teleport. I’d even built a new Nexus, just to keep these guys topped off on mana.

  Eugene had made a small breakthrough on his Stilling technology. His new “all-piercing” ser treated dimensional walls like rice paper, at least for a while. By his estimate, it could pierce a dozen yers of an endbringer’s body, maybe less, without losing any power.

  As a tradeoff for that kind of power, it was extremely clunky, as tall as he was and wider still. He’d yet to figure out how to miniaturize it properly and had been considering reaching out to Colin. Not to mention, the charge time.

  It looked like the way to kill an endbringer would be to hold one still long enough for Hero to deploy, charge, and fire the damn thing.

  For her part, Riley made her idiotproof syringes by the thousands, each carrying a dose of my health potion. Roughly the size of a Pez dispenser, we pnned to give a pack of dozen out to each cape on search and rescue. She wouldn’t be on the same continent as an endbringer if I could help it, but her expertise already made her one of the most valuable capes to the war effort.

  The sirens rang and I looked up from my workbench, nervous but ready.

  “Where?” I voiced into the empty b, knowing I’d be heard.

  “Adeide, Australia, Hyunmu,” Dragon said. She was a constant presence these days. Though she couldn’t fork, a series of lesser VIs monitored Cauldron’s network, ready to inform her when she was summoned away from the Guild. “Shall I brief you?”

  “Go ahead, Dragon. What’re we working with?”

  “Adeide is the fifth rgest city in Australia. The local metropolitan area has a popution of approximately 1.29 million people. The city sources its water from seven reservoirs which collectively provide roughly sixty percent of its water needs in years without drought. The rest of the city’s needs are met by pumping water from the Murray River, Australia’s longest river.”

  “That’s good news at least. The water table? No aquifers in the middle of the city we need to worry about?”

  “No, Hyunmu. Adeide is not considered a soft target.”

  “Thank you, Dragon. I’ll go prepare and meet you there. ETA?”

  “Thirty-four minutes as of four seconds ago. May I take the drones?”

  “Of course. You know you’re authorized already.”

  “Take care, Hyunmu.”

  That was an incredible amount of time we had to prepare. Leviathan was considered the least dangerous of the three endbringers, partially thanks to the extra time provided by Bluesong, my old senior from the Madhouse and Dragon.

  Bluesong’s specialization was wave motion, particurly sound and water. The whale-themed heroine had a prototype sonar device that could theoretically track Leviathan when I first arrived at the Madhouse. And, since she survived and Dragon had fewer restraints, the two had worked together to perfect and implement her warning system on a rger scale. Almost every coastal metro area had a sample of their work nowadays.

  The majority of that time was spent reassuring my mother and Riley that I’d be alright. No, I had no intention of fighting Leviathan directly. Yes, I promised not to wear the Mask again unless absolutely necessary. Yes, I had multiple shields ready and would Door myself home if I got injured. Yes, everyone at Cauldron told me I needed to be on search and rescue.

  I hated this. It felt like saying goodbye.

  X

  2005, August 9: Adeide, Australia

  The rain pounded down on me in a constant sheet, pressing down with a palpable weight like a thick, soggy bnket. I shivered. It had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with the stormy sea.How ironic, that the “weakest” endbringer was the one I dreaded most.

  Cauldron, literally everyone but me, insisted that I stay out of the fighting unless absolutely necessary. No matter how strong I was, I would get stronger. If I had to take the field, it meant risking my future potential for what were ultimately meaningless gains. From their perspective, it was the equivalent of risking the queen for a few pawns.

  And, frustratingly, my inner spirits agreed.

  My control over the Kindred’s power had increased in the month that I’d been awake, but at a comparative snail’s pace. The domain of death colored my soul in a more intimate way than ever before, but my mastery over that power hadn’t increased fast enough to compensate.

  I still vividly remembered Farya’s warning: Farya and Wolyo were spirits with conceptual weight. They’d operated for millennia and had the worship and dread of countless civilizations. I was but a nascent god, one who had yet to fully realize his own domains. If I wore the Mask, I risked losing my sense of self, becoming more like them and less like me. That was doubly true when I wielded their power in a pce with so much death.

  “Would that be so bad though?” I muttered. It would be one way to shed my humanity, to stop the trembling in my bones.

  A particurly rge wave crashed against the wavebreaks, making me flinch in discomfort. I couldn’t help it. No matter what I accomplished, no matter how powerful I became, the sea inspired a unique dread in my heart.

  The sea was my “trigger.” I made the Ymelo, Ahri’s sunstone talismans, as a repository of all my memories. It held a “backup” of my thoughts and “rebooted” me, ensuring that the Red Sands Incident could never happen again.

  It also meant I could never forget the day I arrived on this earth. I remembered being fished out of the freezing waters. I remembered the searing agony of having my eyes gouged out by a whipshing power line. I remembered the bitter cold and the rain that bit down like needles.

  Here, next to the sea, awaiting Leviathan, a part of me wished I’d never made the damn thing. Perhaps, had I not, those memories would have dulled by now.

  I felt it pulse, sending a wave of cleansing foxfire through my body. It set my blood tingling, reminding me of all that had occurred since that day. Really, the Vesani were brilliant.

  I focused on that, allowing the artifact’s magic to center me. I took several deep breaths until the downpour was itself drowned out by my focus.

  ‘There is much death to be had here,’ Wolyo muttered in my mind. He was eager, always happy to reap.

  ‘Not if I can help it.’

  ‘You deny us our hunt.’

  ‘Not forever, merely for the moment. I feel like we’ve had this conversation before.’

  ‘And we will again. Dear Wolf enjoys the chase,’ Farya added with a soft giggle.

  ‘You are too human, Yusung.’ He’d always been like that. Of the two riding along inside my soul, he was by far the more inhuman. He didn’t understand mortal thoughts and troubles, nor did he care to.

  ‘Death is but a change. It is the end, but is it not also a new beginning?’ Lamb whispered.

  And, it was. When souls died on Runeterra, they went to the Death Realm, a section of the Spirit Realm reserved for mortals. There, their beliefs influenced the shape of the realm until they eventually passed on, renewing the cycle of life.

  I’d told the children at Lordsmith much the same. It was not the role of Death to pass judgment, merely move them along on the River of Souls. Perhaps I ought to take my own advice.

  ‘You have already died once, Yusung. Your death was but the start of your ascension. Do not fear its memory; merely recall it as the first, stumbling steps of many.’

  ‘It’s not that simple, Farya,’ I replied with a rueful chuckle. ‘But, one day…’

  I was interrupted from my angsty woolgathering by an aid worker. Legend had given his pep talk and we were rgely just standing around, anxiously awaiting the endbringer’s ndfall. Other than our contingent from the Protectorate and Guild, most of us were local powers from Southeast Asia and Australia.

  I was so caught up in my own thoughts that I didn’t even notice the aid worker approach. She offered me a small smile and a cardboard cup full of tea. The familiar aroma hit me like a hammer, making me take a closer look at her face.

  “Fortuna?” I asked in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

  “Giving you tea,” she replied glibly. “Did I get it right? Dream blossoms are so tricky to work with.”

  “I… Yes, yes you did. Shouldn’t you be elsewhere? Endbringers put your power on the fritz, right?”

  “They’re not the only ones. You’re an ever-growing anomaly, Yusung. Fortunately, you’re also you, quite easy to read.”

  “Get out of here. If you get caught out–”

  “Don’t worry, I will. My job’s done here anyway.”

  So saying, she wandered off, muttering a few quick words to various heroes and aid workers as she went. It was amazing. I couldn’t hear precisely what she said thanks to the downpour, but each person she talked to stood up that much straighter and went about their tasks with a little more vigor.

  Had… Had she come just to give me magic tea?

  I sipped at it, allowing the familiar aroma to soothe me. The mana inside was diluted, all but gone, but its featherlight touch pooled into a soothing warmth in my stomach.

  It was the fragrance of dreams, possibilities that had yet to be realized. I allowed it to draw me from my past, and towards my future.

  X

  Battles with Leviathan did not have a clear beginning. I supposed the moment he made ndfall could be considered the beginning, but casualties began long before that. Waves crashed down with ever-increasing force, drawing away some of our best defensive capes. Eidolon took charge of them, assisted by Bastion who’d recently become head of the Boston Protectorate.

  I too added what magic I could. Anivia could make Bastion’s force fields look like a door made of rice paper with her Crystallize, but that was beyond me. Instead of making a singur wall of ice around Adeide, I opted to make several, three-side pyramidal structures, stout and firm.

  It was a matter of structural integrity. Anivia might be able to generate True Ice at will, but I still required mana crystals, snow, and more time than I had, not for the quantities required. A wall of regur ice would eventually colpse when struck by repeated tidal waves all along its surface, becoming miniature icebergs and projectiles for Leviathan to hurl at the defenders.

  By making a pyramid, I made it so the force of the waves would be deflected somewhat. It was akin to a ship’s prow cutting through the waves. It wouldn’t fully stop the waves, but so long as most of the force could be blunted, the rest of the defenders ought to be able to handle them. And, the spikes had the added benefit of creating fewer shrapnel when they broke.

  “Tasmanic down. South Wind down. Lion’s Mane deceased,” Dragon read off. “Leviathan is arriving in sector A-5.”

  I put the casualty report out of mind. Casualties were unavoidable no matter how much I prepared. Instead, I found myself a perch atop a nearby hotel roof. I didn’t know what it was called, but it looked ritzy, with marble fountains and sculpted hedges. The fourteen story building gave me a clear line of sight over much of the coastline.

  Dragon had divided the Adeide metropolitan area into twenty-five sectors, A-1 through E-5. For support purposes, each sector was overseen by several of my drones and volunteer capes. Towards the center of the city, said capes were movers who felt confident in their ability to read a map.

  The goal wasn’t simply to track down drowning capes and civilians, but to keep an eye on Leviathan. With the constant rain and flood, Leviathan was just small enough to disappear between skyscrapers or dive underwater for a moment, only to emerge at the worst possible location to tear apart an unsuspecting row of bsters.

  I watched as Leviathan made ndfall. He weighed roughly nine tons according to observations. It sounded absurd. By my estimate, he should weigh at least several millions of tons, not a paltry nine. The dimensional striation effect of its Shard was just that effective. It was like the Shards were mocking humanity, leaving just enough mass on this dimension to give us the hope that we might be able to stop him.

  The endbringer barreled through one of my ice spikes like the Kool-Aid Man. He turned the subsequent ice shards into projectiles, ferrying them along a column of water into a group of defenders. They blocked the ice easily but could not avoid Leviathan as he bore down on them. Soon, the water ran a reddish brown.

  It was almost enough to make me regret making those wavebreaks. But then again, there was no structure that wouldn’t become a weapon in Leviathan’s hands. So long as they worked everywhere else, those men were acceptable losses.

  I grit my teeth in frustration at the thought. I held out my right hand as the mass accelerator attached to my shoulder unfolded behind me like a cybernetic wing. Each “feather” was a canister of hyper-condensed mana that could convert the light bullets of my relic pistol into pure psma. In front of me, the hextech contraption expanded to brace my right arm, further steadying my aim.

  I felt the hum of my coilgun as my dragonfly drones finished spreading out across the coast. My vision expanded to cover the entire coastline.

  Down below, Alexandria arrived with the crash of thunder. She punched Leviathan hard enough to make the nine ton beast stagger, his forward momentum completely halted by the closest thing to an immovable object in Earth-Bet.

  “Curtain Call,” I whispered as my finger closed around the trigger.

  It was deafening. Jhin, the Virtuoso, was a brilliant monster. In the pursuit of the “perfect masterpiece,” he crafted a handheld coilgun, a weapon so advanced that it put the best of Piltover’s hextech armaments to shame, never mind anything on earth. Hell, it wouldn’t lose out to most weapons in sci-fi settings.

  The st time I used it, I’d worn the Mask. I’d relied heavily on the Kindred’s strength to take potshots at the tinkertech the Simurgh had been hijacking in the Madhouse. Though Curtain Call had been crafted to make the recoil manageable, it still left my body trembling like a leaf in a storm.

  I’d not aimed directly at the Simurgh then because of her precognition. Though the projectile was impossibly fast, more than six thousand miles per hour out the muzzle, I knew she’d never be struck by a ranged attack unless she wanted to be. Her older brother didn’t have that kind of foresight.

  Leviathan recoiled in “pain” as my attack pierced deep into his dimensional yers. I knew this wouldn’t kill him, very few things could, but that wasn’t my aim today. Today, I just wanted to get him to fuck off.

  I pressed the trigger as fast as my gun would allow. Two. Three. Four. Every shot struck with the force of a missile, cratering his crystalline flesh.

  Below, I saw the brutes move in, taking the chance to encircle Leviathan. I knew it wouldn’t st, but it was a valiant effort nonetheless.

  Then, a surge of condensed raindrops spped my dragonfly drone out of the air, crushing it to scrap against the side of a building. My vision wavered for a moment until new drones flew over to take their pce.

  I had plenty more where those came from, but I’d need to keep that little trick in mind. Leviathan was the hydrokinetic and we were currently in his pyground. My ranged options would only be viable for so long.

  Save Alexandria, one other brute stood out. He was a giant of a man, standing almost half as tall as Leviathan himself. The man was completely naked, with not even a token nod to decency. Between him and Narwhal, I was starting to wonder if exhibitionism was a requirement for some capes.

  He was also utterly hairless, like Gollum’s even more grotesque giant brother. His skin was a sickly pallor, as if he’d lived in a cave all his life and had never so much as dreamt of sunlight. His arms and legs were disproportionately long, with cws that extended as long as a grown man was tall.

  Regardless of his appearance, I couldn’t deny his courage. He snarled fiercely, showing off an impressive set of fangs. He sshed at Leviathan with a reckless ferocity that not even Alexandria could match. His arms extended like rubber as I watched, shaving the first several yers of Leviathan’s flesh. He was quite literally skinning the endbringer alive.

  And when a hasty swing allowed Leviathan to catch his arm, he simply tore it off himself. Even as I watched another arm regrew, and this time with noticeably thicker cords of muscles. A second ter, he was right back at it.

  I reloaded swiftly, recharging each “feather” before taking aim once more. I remembered the briefings about him. He was Baihu, one of the Four Saint Beasts, a group of four warlords who emerged out of the ashes of the CUI following the Simurgh’s Shanghai concert.

  Technically speaking, the CUI still existed. The emperor was a figurehead who ruled over a loose confederacy of independent territories, but said confederacy was still a regional power in its own right. That said, it’d be a lie to say that the CUI had recovered from their bout of suicidal stupidity.

  Following what was now called the Shattered Pearl of the Orient, over a million residents of Shanghai fled into China proper, many of them Simurgh bombs. They assassinated local and regional officials with almost systematic coordination, leaving much of the country reeling. Sure, only about a third of those attempts were successful, but a government couldn’t lose a third of its most senior officials and not suffer major consequences.

  The Yangban did eventually manage to restore order, but not until an estimated five million died in the subsequent riots, famine, and uprisings. That number was still rising, what with the bird bitch being the plotter she was.

  Quite a few people triggered as a result, of course. Many of them took on the role of local leaders, usually making things worse. They carved out fiefdoms for themselves, with little to no oversight from a Yangban that was already stretched thin. For a while, the CUI became a nation made out of a thousand petty kingdoms.

  In the end, four parahumans emerged. These were, as the CUI referred to them, the Four Saint Beasts, heroes of the empire who united disparate provinces and quashed rebellions. They’d featured prominently in Fortuna’s brief covering the new CUI.

  Though they were nominally under the authority of the “Son of Heaven,” that is, the emperor, in practice, they were effectively free agents, warlords who ruled mid-sized counties in their own right.

  I continued firing. Leviathan would occasionally try to destroy my drones so I moved them every so often.

  Baihu, their White Tiger of the West, was here. I wasn’t sure why I was surprised, but I was. This was Australia, after all, a mere stone’s throw from Chinese territory. By all accounts, he was the most bloodthirsty of the four. Much like the tiger he supposedly embodied, he was a beast in human skin who’d do anything for a good fight.

  If nothing else, I couldn’t fault his dedication. He was getting the battle he craved, and for a good cause, even. His brute strength, monomolecur cws, and regeneration allowed him to hold his own in that deadly mosh pit. Hell, if the reports were right, and they always were, Baihu was a Lung-lite, an escating changer whose limbs would grow more durable the longer he stayed in combat.

  But Leviathan did not sit still. His tail shed out like a whip, splitting one of the local capes in half. The echo surged after him, breaking the leg of a woman who’d been too committed to her assault to dodge.

  A fsh of teleportation got her out of the line of fire. Hopefully, she’d be back ter; she’d been doing a decent job of keeping him distracted so Legend and Hero could wail on him.

  He then took that momentary vulnerability to escape, running over two more men who risked it all to dey him for even a second longer. I added my fire to Legend and his bsters’ but none of it mattered. Leviathan barely acknowledged the hits as he crashed straight through a building, making most of us lose track of him.

  “Leviathan is headed northeast. Sectors B-4, C-4, get ready.” I said, knowing Dragon would pass the message on.

  I growled in frustration as I took to the sky on Wukong's White Walkers. Even despite the dozens of drones and Riley’s convenient syringes, casualties in an endbringer battle were inevitable, but that didn’t make the reports easier to hear.

  Given Leviathan’s speed and the pouring rain that hid him from view, my ability to perceive anything regardless of obstacles was vital. If I could not fight Leviathan directly, I was determined to never lose sight of the bastard.

  At least he was moving innd. The further I could be from the tidal waves, the better.

  X

  We’d been at this for fifteen minutes now and those fifteen minutes felt like an eternity.

  Behemoth targeted energy centers. Dams, power pnts, coal lines, and major pipelines were all fair game with him. The Simurgh was the trickiest, but she typically focused on people, individuals who were pilrs of society or beacons of progress. Leviathan usually targeted cities altogether by using the groundwater to sweep entire sections of ndmass into the sea.

  We were no closer to determining Leviathan’s objective this time around. Usually, our SOP was to figure out what the endbringer wanted, and then use that to deny them by baiting this very objective and then causing enough damage to drive them back. I should know; I’d helped Becky write the damn pybook.

  But that wasn’t what was happening here. Adeide had no major reserves of groundwater; it wasn’t a soft target despite being on the coast. The rgest source of freshwater was to the east, the Murray River. Hell, it didn’t even have any major capes that Leviathan might have been targeting, nor had it recently suffered from societal upheaval as Brockton Bay had with Bakuda and the Empire riots.

  In short, there was no clear reason for Leviathan to be in Adeide. That meant the fight didn’t have an easily accessible “win condition” this time. There was nothing for it but to slug it out until he decided he’d done enough.

  “Rime down. Boomerang Man down. Rainbow Snake deceased. Dreamsong deceased. Starlight deceased. Roo Jack deceased. Leviathan has left D-4. Expected trajectory: E5,” Dragon rattled off.

  I started at that. Rime, an up and coming heroine from Phidelphia. Not only was she a hero often celebrated for her power, she was a serious, sincere woman who attended almost every A and S-css crisis she could. Though she seemed taciturn, I remembered her files saying she was a woman who led by example.

  She’d done one of her flybys, only for Leviathan to retaliate by throwing the signpost like a javelin. I found her buried in deep water, a section of the city having colpsed to form a pool of seawater. The signpost had pierced her through her stomach, pinning the flyer to the earth below.

  I set several dragonfly drones on Leviathan and dipped down to save her. She’d be Alexandria’s second-in-command one day; I didn’t want this to be her end.

  I’d opted for quantity over quality when I built my rescue drones. Sure, they had the ability to cast three spells back-to-back, but they weren’t the most robust things I’d ever made. My drones weren’t built to operate in total submersion.

  It wasn’t a big problem. The vast majority of people who died in a Leviathan fight didn’t drown, they were struck by debris, fell from height, or killed by the endbringer himself. Besides, humans floated. Left alone, they’d rise to the surface, making rescue possible.

  But seeing how Rime got herself impaled to the ground, that wasn’t an option.

  I didn’t think. I couldn’t afford to. I dove down into the water as the rain pounded all around me.

  Icy currents embraced me, far warmer than the True Ice eyes embedded in my skull, yet almost heart-stopping in the panic they inspired. The water was only about seven feet deep here, but it felt like I’d dived into the ocean directly.

  The Ymelo bzed, a spiritual fme stoked by my memories and emotions. It swept across my body, setting my blood alight and giving me crity of purpose.

  I extended Isolde until it was half as long as a light pole, stabbing it deep into the street below. Then, I shrank it again, using the embedded sword to overpower the currents and drag me towards the depths.

  Once I reached Rime, I forced mana into Anivia’s Grace. The True Ice embedded in my armor answered, glowing brightly with a sapphire light that illuminated the darkness. A bubble of ice formed around us in a protective shell as my feet touched the ground.

  I could see her eyes flicker with recognition. Her heart beat, however weakly. The Kindred reached out, but I tugged them back. I knew with a soul-deep certainty, this wasn’t her time. Perhaps one day, but I wished to watch her story for a while longer.

  Then, assisted by the buoyancy of the ice around us, I heaved, kicking off with enough force to wrench the signpost from the ground.

  We broke the surface a moment ter. I quickly tore the signpost out of her before stabbing her with Riley’s syringe. She could hardly swallow anything so this was the way to go.

  I left her on a nearby rooftop, gasping for breath. She’d be fine once she collected herself.

  “Dragon,” I said, already done with today.

  “Hyunmu.”

  “My drones can’t handle underwater rescue. Direct all such targets to me.”

  “Will you be okay?”

  I felt a wave of foxfire bze behind me. Everyone died, that was reality, but I refused to allow my hesitance to be the reason their lives were cut short.

  I firmed my resolve and dashed off towards the sea.

  “I’ll deal.”

  Author’s Note

  I’ve made it, my second endbringer fight this fic. Weird, huh?

  This means that I can finally drop this story after Leviathan, right? It’s tradition.

  Leviathan weighs only nine tons. A school bus weighs ~7.25 tons. Considering its obscene mass, Leviathan’s weight doesn’t make any sense, one more thing chalked up to it being a dimensional onion.

  The Worldstone Network does not extend past the US, Canada, and a few rge cities in Western Europe at this time.

  Yes, this means there are now two “bck turtles.” In Chinese, the “Bck Turtle” is Xuanwu. In Korean, it’s Hyunmu.

  Facts? Sure. Green sea turtles do not have green shells. They’re called that because they are primarily herbivores and eat seagrasses and algae. The pigments build up in their bodies, coloring their cartige and fat with a greenish tint.

  You are what you eat. Unreted, my cousin used to be part of a breakdance crew and called himself B-Boy Kimchi. Him, and probably one in twenty guys in LA’s K-Town, lol.

  Thank you to everyone who paid for my groceries. I have a Patreon and Kofi with dozens of chapters written across my various stories. If you’d like to read ahead, receive more frequent updates, vote in monthly polls or even commission a chapter directly, check them out.

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