“The fuck are you doing, you giant bitch?!” The words tore themselves out of Greg’s raw throat with a mouthful of blood pouring down his chin. Voice cracking somewhere between a scream and a roar, he watched forty feet of Aryan wet dream send Leviathan tumbling head over heels through three buildings. Buildings she had…
White Knight (down) Glory Girl caught herself mid-tumble, the shockwave still ringing in her ears as her forcefield shed debris like confetti. The announcement cut through her armband’s static, clinical and cold, and her stomach dropped somewhere around her boots. No. By the time she snapped her head up, breathing harder than she wanted to…
00:26:34 63.9% Unacceptable. The numbers burned across Colin’s HUD in steady blue text, each digit burning into his retina as he tried not to think about anything past the present. Nearly a full half an hour since Leviathan had wiped out the harbor and boardwalk with that first initial wave and his Cerberus Frame’s power…
No gasp when his eyes opened, because gasping required lungs that weren’t… whatever the fuck had happened to his lungs. Oh… oh noooo… A breath left him choked, ragged and rattling, as if someone had taken the things that let him breathe, smashed them with a sledgehammer and then put that through a blender set…
(This took me forever to get back in the groove of. The whole arc is plotted out.) Fucking ow. First coherent thought after… “My nam-” After whatever the hell just happened. Greg’s eyes snapped open underneath a pile of rebar, drywall and what he knew had to be a crushed fridge. Two blinks later, he…
00:03:21 had elapsed since the previous internal checkpoint. His suit core temperature continued to climb even as Armsmaster logged the matter, only to quickly dismiss the HUD notification with the slightest of eye movements. He advanced five steps—three‑point‑nine‑meter strides propelled by an artificial muscle system, weight distributed as well as he could manage to minimize…
The Cerberus Frame struck Wainright Avenue, the composite armor and servo muscle transferring kinetic energy into the street in a single calibrated pulse, and the street failed exactly to predicted tolerance. Rain hammered his body in horizontal sheets, each droplet ricocheting from hydrophobic plating in atomized halos that diffused infrared returns. Visibility: 3.2 meters unaided,…
Shelter Five had been designed by civic engineers who, in glossy pamphlets, called it the Brockton Bay’s safest basement. It felt like a giant coffin. Concrete walls four feet thick pressed closer every time the ground shuddered, and each tremor funneled another layer of stale air through the recirculators, carrying sweat‑salted chill beneath the fluorescent…
There was nothing. Then there was pain. Then there were numbers, floating like persistent pop-ups in his field of vision. -542 -173 -139 Greg’s first thought when he woke up was that his brain had been swapped for a malfunctioning engine—too loud, too clunky, grinding against his skull. Second thought was that his spine had…
Greg hit the ground like a meteor, but way less impressive and way more soaked. Hurled away by Leviathan’s watery explosion, he really had no choice but to go flying. He only wished he had more choice in the landing, though. The pavement didn’t appreciate the faceplant, and he was pretty sure his jaw didn’t…
