ZFighter18

The sky cracked apart in front of him, air a white wake before he cleared the docks. Windows rattled for a second time today, a chunk of the city likely fearing a familiar threat, but Greg couldn’t give a single shit. Faster! Red covered his body as he screamed inside his own head. Faster! No roofs

The side door refused to open, Greg huffing a quiet breath as his hand slipped on the panel a whole second time. Blood, glass dust and whatever else that still stuck to his hand at this point was making this harder than it needed to be. It wasn’t that his fingerprints were ground beef or anything, c

"-ear you, I hear you, Suze. I do, it’s just…the Nine in your city. It’s… it’s just…” A deep voice rumbled low, a familiar half-laugh still present. “I mean, it’s a hell of a thing to hear from CNN, you get me?” “Well, Ro…” Eleven minutes of holding the phone against her ear had left it warm, her ja

A car went flying, a gray sedan rocked apart by a glowing green grenade launched at speed; the sound of gravel-baked laughter somehow louder than the explosion. “MORE!” The words were chest-deep, bass-filled and wet with growls beneath the syllables, three different speakers playing over each other

Sparky could fight. And — here was the thing — he was pretty damn good at it too. Uncle Tito hadn’t given him knuckledusters as a birthday gift just to be the ‘cool uncle’. He never took boxing classes, sure, but you didn’t need those when you knew how to move well enough. And Sparky could move befo

“-uckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckf-!” Concrete was a blur under him, yellow soles racing over the cracked gray smear of the Brockton Bay pavement. Tearing down back and side streets fast enough to keep pace with any car in a school zone, he was thankful for the yellow goggles strapped tight over his eyes. H

“Do not allow him through.” Rory nodded, barely turning his head as he hoped Armsmaster was somehow talking to someone else, anyone else. But the plaza around them was mostly medics, medics and civs and troopers in need of an evac; one of the PRT field agents propped against a wall with his hand cla

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 cut

The next volley sailed clean over where Greg’s head used to be, his best impression of a dropped anvil saving him from hundreds of shiny needles ripping through smoke. The sudden drop let gravity take him, freefall doing all the work as he let himself go full dead weight — no fight in it, total ragd

Not natural wind. His wind was far from natural. Natural wind had systems, pressure gradients, and fluid dynamics in a way he’d never have understood a few months back. He might not have understood it, sure, but Theo probably would have. No matter what he understood, his wind barely had any of that.

Screams filled the room as loud as the explosions as glass ceased to be a complete solid in one half of a heartbeat. In the second half, the newly renovated conference room became light. Not good light. Not anything clean or holy or useful. Just a million-billion little sparkling edges, each one hyp

"The Slaughterhouse Nine are in Brockton Bay." If Director Piggot ever wanted a job reading audiobooks, horror had to be her first stop because the way she said that made Greg’s stomach drop further than it ever had before. Like the contents of his guts, the room shifted. Not loudly. Not at first. T

“I appreciate your attendance today.” Piggot’s voice came out a grumble, the words low and clipped, the Director of the PRT managing to make all that ‘appreciation’ sound like it was being pulled tight through a pasta strainer. The phantom vibration of a cell phone buzzing against his thigh was a pe

Two days. Forty-eight hours and change since the infirmary floor had been mopped down with enough industrial bleach to probably violate some kind of EPA or OSHA or IKEA regulation, and the phantom smell of old pennies and stomach acid was still stuck somewhere in the back of his sinuses. Or maybe it

“Boss, this your personal?” The smell of blood — fresh and dry — was thick around him, somehow managing to cover up the stench of a body that definitely hadn’t known a good shower in at least a week. It wasn’t bad enough to make him breathe through his mouth but Greg still forced out an exhale as th

The popcorn ceiling of his bedroom might as well have been a map of the world. Just ridges and bumps staring back at him as the late July sun started bleeding out to the night sky through the horizontal slats of his window blinds, tinting out from orange to purple. Map or not, Greg Veder was perfect

Greg knelt on the edge of the tar-paper roof, red leather of his gloves creaking as his fingers dug into crumbling concrete. New England wind bit through the open top of his helmet, whipping bright blond hair around his white lenses. The backstreet Greg had tracked them to was a dead end, following

The itch at the base of Greg's skull flared up, Danger Sense buzzing like a cheap phone on the lowest setting as it told him what he’d already guessed. Analyze. The world hitched for a split-second as a translucent blue box — visible to a grand total of one person — flared into existence. It hung in

The basement beneath Casa De La Veder had been spared of the oceanic onslaught that was Leviathan. All the buildings this far inland had, honestly, so it wasn’t all that special. Even still, geography was a bitch and a half to deal with. Being built on the coast was convenient and all — if the ocean

Her mouth opened wide in a yawn, arms stretching above her head as she woke up to a song loud in her ear. The same one this city had been screaming for weeks now. Honestly, it was the best vintage she’d tasted in years, thick and layered like someone had redone a classical piece with the expert hand

Drywall dust and stale coffee coated the air of the PRT ENE HQ like a thick perfume; the smell of both hitting your tongue the second you stepped inside and took a breath. Heavy and gritty, the taste of it somehow managed to crawl down the back of your throat after a few minutes and stayed there all

Sliding into the warehouse from the skylight was a different feeling than normal. It was already more impressive than most everything else around it for blocks, honestly. A place where the air conditioning actually worked and the Wi-Fi was fast enough to stream 1080p without buffering, and the floor

White lenses hid his eyes behind his mask, the polycarbonate a brighter red than the blood beneath his feet. Thin streams of it flowing down around the shattered street, pooling around bits of white bone and gray brain. What he could see was nothing compared to what he could smell; his senses better

Chapter 15: The Hunted Écho. Two soft syllables for something so… so… complexe. A wave of sound and substance folding back through space, carrying its own aftertaste, and refusing anything like a clean death. An arrogance in that, unexpected for something that was just the relapse of a memory. Heari

Chapter 14: Interlude - Something Something Something White Mage “-ot asking for the impossible, Amy, I am asking you to do your job!” “I am! I was there all morning!” “You left before noon! Your shift wasn’t over. That’s not a full day. That’s lazy.” “I wasn’t feelin-” “You are never ‘feeling well.

Arc 9, Chapter 13: A Bad Taste Jesuuuuus Christ, One bad sniff and his nose reminded him why he hated how good his new senses were. I mean, fuck me, man. Sparky didn’t hate the city he called home, but goddamn, he wished the city air tasted a lot less like rust, piss and a heap of rotting fish. AKA,

Kayden's apartment was... beige. A simple two-bedroom place, large enough and expensive enough that his father wouldn't feel like the alimony was going to waste, but not so big that his ex-stepmother was exactly happy about it after years of living in a mansion. The furniture was aggressively inoffe

It was weird how news anchors had a certain look to them. At least the white guys. Maybe it was just the way the newscaster voice required you to speak when you delivered the news to cut out any trace of accent, and it eventually made your jaw and face shape change to kind of all blend together or s

The Dallon living room felt like stepping into the set of some rich people reality show, all clean lines and furniture that probably cost more than Mom's first car (the one Dad crashed driving drunk before they even started the divorce). It was a wide open space, with one wall nothing but floor-to-c

“-ne question echoes from the rebuilt streets to the halls of power. The miracle has a name, a face seen in blurry cell phone footage and praised by the heroes who fought alongside him. Everyone in Brockton Bay is wondering… What is White Knight doing now?” The television clicked off with one manicu

The main conference room inside the PRT building stank of industrial bleach and something else, something metallic and rank. Joy. It was no great secret that Leviathan was hell on infrastructure, the Endbringer deserving the title City-Killer of course, but it was apparently an unmentioned fact that

C&C National News, Special Report: “The Brockton Bay Miracle” C&C National News maintained its somber blue graphics as Anchor David Shaw adjusted his tie, the man nothing but dead-serious. "Experts are baffled, Maria. Unlike anything we’ve ever seen or heard from an Endbringer defense, made possibly

He slapped on top of the shattered rooftop, wet flesh and bloody muscle splattering across cracked ground. His giant mech form fell apart around him, tons of weaponized scrap metal crumbling back into constituent parts while he lay there steaming, mana pouring off him in visible waves like a massive

"All barrier units, tsunami protocol!” Legend's voice cut through the comms, and Eric froze as his chest hitched, vicegrip squeezing as the countdown went off in his head already. “Thirty seconds to landfall! Maximum barriers!" Thirty seconds. His hands shook as he stared up at the wave, ears poppin

I… hate… He wasn’t sure exactly what he hated right now, but Greg was pretty sure pretty high at the top of the list was the constant pings and dings and pop-ups that were his power, trying it’s very best to get his attention. Hate… While he still had a mouth, Greg was doing his very best to keep fr

His jump carried him up a hundred feet, robotic legs amplifying his strength as he leapt high and hard. The world almost seemed to slow, Greg’s brain working as fast as his skin was sloughing off. Need range. Mana twisted by instinct, a flood of energy focused on his four arms, and their forearms. A

"LIVING HERE IN BROCKTON" The words ripped out of him, loud and raw, through giant lungs of metal that carried his voice across the ruined Brockton Bay coast. He rushed forward, the air screaming as he charged out of the water, the ground shuddering beneath every footfall. The air shook and shuddere

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

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

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 hea

"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 building

Greg is floating inside his mecha in a sphere of boiling mana as he pulls on as much mana as he can for this. Skin nearly seared off—just sinew, muscle, and pure Will. He knows he barely has more than a minute left of this before he drops to nothing. Limitless mana doesn’t mean free. The infinite ma

(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

The hospital room existed in the kind of sterile perfection that money could buy. White walls. Polished floors. Equipment that hummed softl The hospital room existed in the kind of sterile perfection that money could buy. White walls. Polished floors. Equipment that hummed softly with the efficiency

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 plat

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 recirc