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Defiant     Hell has come to New Delhi.

    It's only been half and hour and yet whole tracts of the city have been devastated. The air is thick with smoke and dust, the setting sky lit by the flashes of fire from dragoncraft and heroic powers - and brighter, retina-searing flashes as Behemoth returns fire. The Endbringer's path of destruction continues in one direction, more or less, but beyond that anyd amage he's doing is as indiscriminate as it is phenominal. Great fissures have broken the earth, some spitting magma into the air, and much of the land is burnt black, even blasted down to glass in places.

    But even through the smoke, the forty-five feet monster is a giant shadow, lit by the lights of battle. And the cape forces are losing.

     Behemoth himself, when he comes into sight, is forty-five feet of muscles. He doesn't stand straight, hunched over like some sort of bodybuilder or grotesque bear-human hybrid, possibly under the weight of all the cooling molten rock he carries over his body, occasionally supporting himself on limbs that are less hands are more twisted claws. His muscles are positively rippling beneath thick and leathery hide and his head hangs under colossal horns that resemble black obsidian, growing out of the middle of his face. Yet more horns grow out of his face and curl back over his head. In between the two primary horns sits a single great red eye, malevolent and burning with power. His mouth is a jagged gap in his lower face, a maw of obsidian-like growths that no one could possibly call teeth.

     Around him, various capes do battle - many of the big names -Chevalier, Eidolon, Legend, Alexandria - and a multitude of the lesser known. They're not winning.

     Chevalier is talking, giving orders: "Maintain a distance of one hundred feet from Behemoth unless you have the capability to engage him directly - get any closer and you may not have a chance of escaping if he decides to close the gap! Be mindful of line of sight, and assume that he can and will tag you with a lightning bolt if he gets the opportunity. There's no sugarcoating this, the fact that you're here makes you the biggest damn heroes I've worked with. Hit him hard, keep an eye out for whatever his goal is, and work with whoever it is you work best with. Now go!"
Xiaomu 'Maintain a distance of one hundred feet from Behemoth,' says Chevalier.

Xiaomu doesn't even worry about it. Sure, her build is pretty much the opposite of tanky, and yes, she IS pretty good at a distance, but unless anti-spirit rounds are going to be particularly useful against that overgrown oni-spawn, she might as well have loaded Silver and Platinum with frozen peas instead of iron-jacketed slugs.

"COMING THROUGH!!" the sage fox yells with a glee seemingly bereft of self-preservation as she comes charging through (and occasionally over) the lines, opening up with her handguns as she gets into her effective range, and raining bullets on that single, prominent eye as she bolts closer and closer ...

But rather than get into arm's length, she ejects her empty clips, and kicks them at Behemoth like a pair of metal hacky-sacks before holstering them, pulling her staff off her back, and drawing Suiren before she ends her charge with a leap and a yell of, "XIAOMU BLIZZARD!!!"

... and she attempts to complete her leap by stabbing Behemoth, letting the blade radiate ice magic - enough that she might possibly even encase his ugly mug in a nice thick layer of ice.

Either way, she doesn't plan to stay close to him, and she bolts BACK out of range as soon as her feet touch something solid enough to push off of.
Corona Arclite Here comes the calvary! Or at least that's what they would say back home.

New Delhi was already getting wrecked, but that only presented a minor obstacle for Corona Arclite. Her siege tri-bike was built for rugged terrain and harsh environments, so chunking it's way through the wreckage already left in the behemoth's wake wasn't much of a slow down. What it couldn't drive over, the bladed guards flanking the front treads rammed through.

As they're cruising through the trashed streets to catch up, Corona makes sure her goggles are firmly in one place with one hand. This was just like a siege op, she reminded herself. Just the bunker happened to be huge and moving, abiet slowly. Then glances over her shoulder at her passenger. "Open the back hatch there. I brought some extra goodies along." You don't plan on fighting a giant end of the world monster without packing an extra cache.

Corona cranks the trottle and the seige tri-bike ramps up one of the rubble outcroppings to jump over a massive fissure from the monster's feet and landing on the other side to continue to close in.

"At least somethin' that big is hard to miss..." She squeezes the extra levers on her handlebars, and the ballistic guns hidden under the front platting rattle to life, chucking out a volley of fire at the big ugly.. well it's probably gonna just be nicking and diming at best, but she can't pull out the big guns on this thing while at high speed.
Reina Kinney     o/~ Highway to the Danger Zone! Ride into the Danger Zone! o/~

    That's the type of soundtrack you'd be hearing as a small fighter with the GUARDIANS insignia on it enters the area via portal. At the controls is Reina Kinney herself. Unfortunately, GUARDIANS prohibits the use of music or anything of a similarly distracting nature on missions, so the soundtrack is up the imagination.

    "I haven't brought the Falconess out in awhile," Reina comments, referring to her fighter craft by name. "Sure feels good to get some adrenaline flowing again!" She narrows her eyes as she spots the enemy target. "Looks like I came well equipped!" She pulls the trigger and a blast of vulcan cannon fire, or a laser beam equivalent, shoots at the giant.
Frederica     Frederica's not a coward. A coward wouldn't be here, trying to stop an Endbringer. She is, however, terrified. Not just that this creature could kill her, but that it could use her own power to kill others.

    To do nothing, however, is unthinkable. People could die here, people that might not die if she helps. So she's staying at range. MUCH farther back than the suggested 100 meters, to be sure. She sights in on the Behemoth, waiting. It can control any energy it sees? Well then. She waits her turn patiently. When it is turned away, she brings her hands together before her.

    "Pyro Queen." FireFox chants, gathering her energy into a point of intense flame. "Flame CANNON!" she cries, lancing out with a column of fire that arcs into the air. A fast, hard, accurate shot from a long way back, aimed at the Behemoth's back, tightly focussed to be as much a kinetic impact as a heated flame.

    She then ducks back behind cover, moving, running. If she gets killed by this creature's retaliation, she can't help anyone. It's not fear that's driving her... much.
Glitter Glitter did promise she'd show up if something like this happened.

She just wasn't expecting it here, or now, or... well, any of it. It's a horrible situation, as she can see as she descends. It's her job to try to make it as much less bad as she can manage. Seeing a battle like this disturbs her, if perhaps not quite as much as it would have before Reptilon.

Glitter descends. She came in high, where she was safe and could maneuver at supersonic speeds. She has a new costume today: still black with the bright accents, just differently shaped.

It's also hard to see because, as soon as she gets near a field of radiation, her personal shield starts going nuts. Glitter is surrounded by bright sparkles, enough to illuminate her and conceal her as much more than a silhouette. But at least it's protecting her. Glitter suspected it would since her shielding works on pretty much anything else, from punches in the face to lasers to eldritch beams designed to flay her flesh from her bones; about the only thing it doesn't stop is a purely mental assault. She tested a few weeks ago, and as long as she doesn't get knocked out, it should be fine.

She continues to descend. She's gone around behind Behemoth because she flies and can do that; she picks a spot about a hundred feet over Behemoth's head and perhaps another hundred fifty behind him. Glitter's immediate attack isn't particularly damaging; she might be able to crack that shell but she has a better plan.

Instead she uses her telekinesis to jerk Behemoth's left foot sharply and with enough force to literally drag him along by it if he doesn't brace well and apply his own strength to counter it. This is visible as a brief glittering haze by his ankle, but if he's not looking down he might not notice in time, and she relinquishes her telekinetic grip as soon as she's pulled - it's not a sustained attempt to lift him, because he could counter that, but more like sweeping his leg out from under him and throwing him by it. Ideally.

"This is horrible..." Glitter's gaze sweeps around from behind her shield. She's trying to keep the sparkles out of her face. It is not entirely working, because she needs to protect her face too.
Bitter Medicine      The skies over New Delhi are darkened by the arrival of a large flying craft. Sheathed in a shimmering blue light, an Autochthonian aerial skiff speeds into the city, eight shield-like guidance panels firing bursts of energy as the pilot makes minute corrections. As the craft grows nearer, a panel in the side opens, revealing Bitter Medicine and a crew of ten mortals. The mortals all wear thick, dark-lenses glasses, perhaps the result of permanent light sensitivity. Autochthonia has no natural sunlight--but the goggles are the least interesting thing about the riders. All of them wear black synthleather uniforms, and each one has what appears to be a heavily modified crossbow. "Automatic crossbows fire on my mark."

     The skiff banks, just outside of the suggested range, and the Militate inside the craft ready their weapons. "Fire!" A hail of steel-tipped crossbow bolts flies forth from the craft, as does one entire Alchemical Exalted. Amidst extremely rapid streams of crossbow fire, Bitter Medicine barrel rolls, righting himself into a horizontal pose, and activates his Plasma Thruster Array. Jets of bright purple flame erupt from his jackboots, and the Exalt leaves a trail of ash and cinders in his wake as he hurtles towards the Endbringer.

     Snik-snikt.

     Voidbane's teeth snap out of its body. Bitter Medicine reaches back and hurls the gyroscopic chakram towards Behemoth, the teeth rapidly spinning. The weapon wails, as if witness to some bloody and gruesome murder, screaming its way towards the monster.
Staren EUROPE, NOT LONG AGO

    Staren was ready for Behemoth. He's constructed an arsenal of weapons specifically designed to, hopefully, damage Endbringers, and he's transferred into his super-tough robot body /and/ brought his giant battle robot armed to the teeth with missiles and other weapons.

    And then Behemoth shows up /somewhere else/.

    With a growl of frustration, Staren ejects the extra armor and missile packs added to the machine for this fight, so he can transform. With no concern for a frail human body's weakness to G-forces, the mecha-turned-fighter speeds up towards space, because the atmosphere /slows it down too much/.

NEW DELHI, NOW

    Three large missiles rain down out of the sky on Behemoth. A split-second later, in a blur of motion the Star Hawk flies down from the other side, transforms and lands, cratering the ruined streets around it with the impact, already firing the gatling railgun on its right arm from a kneeling position as it begins to stand.

    Find every opening. Create more. Exploit each one with overwhelming firepower.

    It's time to show Behemoth the might people are capable of when they bend the rules of nature to their whim, the power of SCIENCE!
Dorian Pavus     Endbringers, hm?  Sounds like the Archdemons back in Thedas.  Either way, the threat is likely the same level.  As much as Dorian would love to call the Grey Wardens, the people of Tevinter tend to not be very well thought-of in Ferelden.  Besides that, who can even /find/ the Grey Wardens?  Particularly when they do not wish to be found.

    The only thing he knows for certain is that getting close to this thing is not a good idea.  This 'radiation', from all his rather rushed research, is a remarkably bad thing.  Sort of like the Blight.  So precautions must be taken.  But these heavy suits would slow him down, plus they probably wouldn't stand up to his own fire and lightning spells.  Thankfully he'd managed to find a magical sort of protection from radiation, an amulet on-loan from the owner of the store he'd been trying to quickly acquire a protective suit from.

    Either way, Dorian's in the fight now.  On location, he manages to catch a ride with one of the capes coming in -- possibly by vehicle, or he may possibly have actually been carried; in all this chaos it's hard to tell.  The first thing he does is attempt to shield as many of the capes fighting Behemoth as possible.  they look like they're having the worst of it and could use a little help.
Cory     Cory would like to consider herself brave! But after emerging from a warp gate, flying for miles, and then finally getting an eyeful of THIS THING...

    She's having second thoughts about all of this!

    "WH-WHAT'S... THAT... FREAKY MONSTER?! THAT'S BEHEMOTH?!"

    Stay at least a hundred feet away, huh? Yeah. Maybe two or three hundred would be better.

    "Eeeeyheheheheh..." Her nervous chuckle's thankfully easily heard by nobody else, because those two or three hundred involve FLYING. High in the sky straight over Behemoth. She's dressed for war, decked out from neck to toe in some kind of skintight blue suit with a form-fitting white vest over top of it. It really doesn't look like normal clothing, or even like armor, but it totally is.

    "So what I should do is pelt the guy with the biggest stuff I've got when he's not looking, huh..."

    For THAT to work out, she'd better observe him first. Yeah, observe.

    For now, the Saiyan holds off from any assaults and instead continues hovering. But she doesn't just do NOTHING whilst doing so.

    She controls her breathing and digs down deep. Ki flows outwards into a gentle aura. It'll slow get stronger and stronger over a half-minute or so.

    Yeah. While watching the chaos below, she'll power up and focus her energy!
Metal Man Rock if he ever hers about this will either smile, double take or wonder if his speeches actually got through to some of the Wily Army robots in some fashion. Wily Army Transprots are arriving but broadcasting a friendly IFF, drones start to deploy for search and rescue operaitons others go to throw themselves at the enemy to buy time.

"This is Metal Man we reached the combat zone. Let's show the entire multiverse what Wily Robots can do!"

Metal Man isn't alone here. Heat Man, Flash Man, Wood Man, Crash Man, Flash and even Bubble Man are here as they make ready to deploy. For all of Bubble Man's goofy looky form he's acting like some sort of Hardass Naval Captain or a Marine.

"Flash, Crash With Me. The rest of you do what you can on to air others to escapes.

Metal Man dances through the chaos throwing blades and never slowing down. Flash Man seems to be zipping about rapidly when in truth he's overclocking time for himself he'll move to pull capes that are in trouble out of harms way and Crash Man? Well he's firing off micro missiles and other controled explosives at the massive horrot that should not be.

"And so the beast of the land has come."
Theo Morrison Lacking things like super strength, flight or invulnerability, Theo shows up basically at the whims and tactical decision-making of the PRT. He was with them when Leviathan attacked and likes to think he was pretty valuable there, and made sure to be around where Behemoth was /supposed/ to be...

...except he wasn't there. Which is a problem.

Theo has a little extra room on one of the inbound transports, having a little robot buddy, a mostly annoyingly bulky radiation suit, and a tray he appears to be goofing off on. A couple of the capes with him give him a weird look, but word has travelled: this 'Deckmaster' guy has a strange focus object for this powers, so just let him work.

He's /also/ managed to secure a loan: gloves one of the tinker-types was working on for a less-restricting radiation suit for just this kind of fight. They're just as protective, but they're thinner and let you lose less manual dexterity. This is very important to him.

Theo ends up at the edge of the battlefield with the support teams, the capes who can't engage Behemoth in direct combat and need to be used for other things. It gives him some measure of security, and enough range that he can still fight without being over there. He's the mastermind controlling the minions. He doesn't go all-in.

He's also been 'fighting' Behemoth since he spotted him in the air. He's already got a little bit of a board presence setup, with a few desolate-looking land cards laid out in front of him. He turns them all ninety degrees and places something else down, his voice muffled in the helmet and the sweltering heat not helping him much at all.

A figure appears, the shimmering translucent shape of some sort of phantasmal woman. Her skin is pale and she wears some sort of ragged, wispy dress that resembles the night sky. Stars can be seen glittering and shining all across her body -- and in the blades of the two gold-hilted falchions she carries. She strides forward, tilting her faceless head up, perhaps to regard the Behemoth ahead of her.

"It's a start," Theo mutters to himself. Kickotron does not seem concerned.
Rebound     Indeed, Rebound may be one of the best fighters in her world, but even she's not crazy enough to go toe to toe with a fourty five foot tall lava skinned monster. So she opens up the back hatch on the vehicle she's riding on with Corona.

    Inside of the hatch is some of the most advanced weapons that Corona's world can provide. Rebound grabs one out of there that looks like it might be a rocket launcher of some kind, "What kind of warhead is on this thing?" Rebound asks, as she looks up at the Endbringer that they're raprushing towards. She braces the weapon over Corona's shoulder and pulls the trigger, sending the plasma warhead flying up towards their target. Like Corona said, it's hard to miss a target this size.
Defiant      Charging Behemoth head on might not be the brightest idea, but the sight of Xiaomu doing just that seem to revitalise the beleagured defenders. A blast of lightning streaks past Xiaomu, the air stinking of ozone, to strike some unfortunate cape and blast him from his feet. The ice magic encases Behemoth's head and face, running over his horns and down hisneck - but as Xiaomu leaps away, it melts away and Behemoth follows her retreat up with a bolt of lightning!

     Corona's guns open up, drawing Behemoth's attention, and the Endbringer turns. Shells rain down over him, blasting away volcanic rock and taking great chunks out of the thick grey flesh beneath. Behemoth roars, and a great gout of flame explodes out of his maw - if she doesn't dodge, she might drive right into it!

     Reina's lasers make their mark much like Corona's shells - but Behemoth's eye turns on her and the beams begin to lose coherence and power. It's a sure sign he's summoning up another attack - and, in a second, he's blasting away at her too! This does, however, give Rebound a good couple of seconds to nail Behemoth with plasma warheads as the Endbringer summons up the attack.

     Frederica and Glitter manage to drive Behemoth to the ground, the blast to his back impacting and blasting deep between his shoulder blades just as Glitter yanks the Endbringer's leg out from under him. Glitter hurls Behemoth to the side in time for Voidbane to find its mark - and Voidbane strikes deep, screaming as it hacks Behemoth apart, a great line oozing with some sort of ichor down his side. Behemoth roars, going to shake himself free and rise again, just as one of Dragon's dragon-themed aircraft crashes down upon it, holding him down.

     It won't last for long, but it gives Staren a few good seconds of focused firepower. Volcanic rock shatters, flesh breaks under the fusilade of his gatling railgun. Some shots, not impacting Behemoth's skeleton, go right through.

     When Behemoth sucks the energy out of the dragoncraft, it's Dorian who shields the capes who can't protect themselves from the ensuing explosion. But after that, Behemoth rises, burnt and wounded but still moving.

     The various Men are there to harass him, pulling capes out of harms way as Behemoth begins another round of lightning and fire.

     On the ground now, Defiant is there, spear in hand. He rolls between Behemoth's legs and arms, hacking away with his disintegration weapon, like he's trying to hamstring the beast. Behemoth doesn't seem to notice or care.

     A distance away, the support capes glance at Theo, then at the phantom women, and then back at Theo. One of them shrugs.
Frederica     Frederica doesn't entirely know the results of her own sniper attack, having been on the move at the time. The sound of Behemoth falling to the ground, however, gives her a pretty good clue. She smiles, though the smile's grim, and prepares to repeat the tactic.

    Her new attack point is two floors up in a damaged apartment building. Sighting out through a window, she notes Behemoth and the plethora of attackers around him, being vulnerable to his monstrous counterfire. At this range there's nothing she can do about his flame blasts. She'd give herself an aneurysm before she could possibly deflect such a massive attack. Fire is her element of course, but it's HER fire that she controls. Anyone else's fire, she has to be much closer to have any sort of chance of influencing it. Against Behemoth, that would be suicide. She can't even use Salamandra's tanky form to roll in close... because the Endbringer could just control her elemental form.

    This time, Frederica doesn't run away after she launches her attack. She stares out the window, guiding her strike more precisely. She's aiming for the head, looking to engulf it, and to give Behemoth a few moments of blindness, or at least of dazzle, so others have an opening. It leaves her vulnerable, but ... oh well. Hopefully the Endbringer can't turn on her and identify her in that time. And if he does... well, she's behind prestressed concrete walls. She's as well-shielded as she can hope to be in a fight like this.
Glitter Glitter may not be the best fighter, but she's very, very good when raw strength is required - lifting, pushing, throwing. If she wasn't afraid Behemoth could turn it back on her somehow, she'd use her telekinesis to simply hold him up so he couldn't walk; as is, since he can twist energy being used on him (or so she's been told) it seems like a bad plan.

When Behemoth goes over, Glitter follows it up - not with an attack against him but against the ground, directing her power at an angle against the already cracked ground. Behemoth might find it slightly harder to rise as the ground tilts under his feet.

But Glitter doesn't get to do much of that because of an exploding dragoncraft. She doesn't even know if those are manned; her first instinct is to catch and crush it inward so that the bits don't hit her, but that will prevent anyone inside from bailing. As a result what she does instead is put up what looks like a flat plane between her and it; a wall that is only visible because of the flickers of glittering light within it, becoming much brighter to the point of being a solid wall of light when the impacts actually happen. She tries to curve it around Staren, too, to keep him sheltered from the explosion.

Multitasking, Glitter lets the ruins of the dragoncraft down to the ground a lot less hard than they would have hit on their own, and then turns back to Behemoth. He's got a lot of rock on him... Behemoth might start feeling little taps as Glitter uses her telekinesis in tiny pushes to feel around him without actually touching him. It is harmless.

For now.
Xiaomu "YEOWCH!!!"

That's more or less Xiaomu's only comment as she gets zotted by a big fat lightning bolt. And the fight was going so well up to that point, too ... She manages to land more or less on her feet, though - if you count landing in a tumble that she comes back to a standing position from, at least.

... Well. Sort of standing. 'Teetering back and forth like she's drunk or something' counts as 'standing' if both of her feet stay on the ground, right? Lurching a bit, the sage fox manages to turn around to face Behemoth again, then plants her staff next to her - for physical support as much as to help regulate energies - and brings her free right hand up, scraping a couple of words together. "Probably gonna taste vile, but ... DAKKI NO KATA!!"

And she begins trying to siphon life energy away from Behemoth to recover some of her own physical reserves. She usually gets closer before trying this, but she'd just as soon let other people tank for her until she recovers some from getting a lightning bolt practically right up her delicate places.
Reina Kinney     "Oh Falz, you have GOT to be kidding me!" Reina exclaims as the shots come back at her. She tries to evade them as best as she can, but unfortunately, with the speed they're coming at, that's a bit easier said than done. Unless this were the Matrix, which it isn't. The Falconess is grazed by the shots being returned, one of which hits a wing and causes a bit of turbulence on Reina's part. "Son of a De Rol Le... YOU'LL PAY FOR THAT!"

    The good news is that there's no major damage to the wing. It didn't even cause a fire to start. The bad news is that the paint job is scratched, and those things are expensive. Deciding to ditch the standard fire for now, Reina brings up the targetting system on her missiles. OK, so they're energy shots which react similarly to homing missiles. "All right, if you wanna play like that, let's see how you like THIS!" She fires off a pair of rather large energy shots at the enemy, locking on quickly. What might happen if they're reflected though?
Corona Arclite "Well it depends on what it's loaded wi--" Corona pauses as Rebound fires before she can finish and a big ball of plasma explodes towards the monsters. "--Well that was a pulsarium round. Might want somethin' more physical considerin' it's abilities -- Hold on!"

Fire slams down into the streets and Corona has to crank hard on the controls to veer away from the epicenter of the blast. The siege vehicle skims by the edges of the fiery strike, pelting it with splashing flames and fiery rubble. The debris leaves some larger rends in the plating, but being constructed of brimsteel alloy means it is really heat and flame resistant.

Corona is doing her best to avoid the lasers being flung back at them too, but the evasive driving only works so well, and eventually she has to take a short detour down a side road for a bit before coming back to the main fight.

"Try one of the driller rockets!" she shouts over her shoulder at Rebound. "They might be able to bore into that rock coverin' him before explodin'."
Bitter Medicine      Voidbane, a thing of Soulsteel, hungers for the Essence of animate prey, be they mortal, Exalted, or Primordial. The chakram comes wailing and shrieking back to Bitter Medicine, who catches it without even thinking about losing a finger. It must be a learned trick. The Exalt uses the influx of Essence to back off. If atomic radiation is anything like Essence radiation, he can't afford to close the gap. Luckily, his weapon has an effective range just a bit in excess of the suggested range Chevalier mentioned earlier.

     Attacking a mite more tactically, the Alchemical joins in with Defiant, activating a charm to assist the cape in hamstringing the monster.

     "The frailty of flesh is nothing before the grinding teeth of the machine! HUNGRY GEAR TOOTH ATTACK!" Voidbane shrieks, banking in the air as it seeks out the legs of the Endbringer. Like a predator with the smell of blood, it hones in on the wounds being inflicted by Defiant, and sets upon them--but the magic of Bitter Medicine's charm sees the weapon's teeth moving easily /twice/ as fast.
Dorian Pavus     That one explosion is easily able to deplete the barrier Dorian's capable of casting.  Spirit magic is, sadly, not his best magical subject.  But there are plenty of people around here that need it.  Most of them however are too widely-spaced for him to hit more than one at a time, and that would be an inefficient use of magic.  And he'll do no one any good if he runs out of energy.

    His offensive options /seem/ limited.  The beast drains energy, and it uses fire and lightning -- the two things Dorian is most experienced at using.  So he has no choice but to fall back on his Winter school abilities.  Dorian raises the staff over his head, even as he does a cold fog begins to flow from his hand.  The staff is spun over his head briefly, and then the end of the weapon is brought down upon the ground.  The resultant explosion of ice is aimed underneath one of Behemoth's feet, hoping to at least slow it a little.
Rebound     Right, so that's not really working. Driller rockets do sound rather interesting, though, as Rebound tosses the launcher she had and grabs another one, loaded with a rocket that appears to have an oil drilling bit on the end of it, "Wow, this looks sick. Next thing you'll tell me you have a rocket powered chainsaw in here." She says to Corona, holding on tight during the evasive maneuvers.

    Once they swing back around into the main fight, she sets up the launcher again and presses the fire button, the drill bit spinning up before the rocket itself fires it's payload. Presumably a warhead like this is designed to drill inside of a target before it explodes.
Staren     Staren's eyes widen in surprise as his shots... /knock flesh off/? Some even /shoot clean through/? Leviathan was more resistant to damage than this, wasn't it? Clearly Staren needs to damage the skeleton. Why, it's almost as if the volcanic 'flesh' isn't even a real defense at all...

    Okay, new plan: Expose the skeleton.

    The shockwave of the dragoncraft's explosion washes over the Star Hawk, but he's staying away as instructed. And... he's not sure what happened to that dragoncraft. He thought he could take anything Behemoth can throw, but did it... /suck the energy out/? /That/ could be a danger to him...

    Well, right now it's time to start Plan B. The Star Hawk briefly transforms to hybrid mode, a plane-with-arms-and-legs, to fly around behind Behemonth and then bombard it with weaponry, railguns and explosives, now focusing on trying to blow as much 'flesh' of as possible and expose the 'bone' -- so his allies can get a clean shot at it!
Cory     Yeah, all that stuff is NOT lending much confidence to Cory. She grimaces in the air. "... Thing's built like a truck..." But she's not gathering all that power for NOTHING. Just as she's hit the limit of what her body SHOULD be able to handle...

    "KAIOKEN... TIMES... TEN!"

    The thick white Ki re-ignites, shifting into a hazy crimson. It's an ENORMOUS strain. All of Cory's muscles throb and twitch, every bone in her body aches, and her heartbeat's SURGING. A feedback loop of Ki's pulsing through her at tremendous levels.

    LIMITS?! What are LIMITS?!

    Kicking hesitation to the curb, she DIVES down and behind Behemoth, lands on the pavement about a hundred fifty feet away and... "Surprise, freak! KAME...HAME...HAAAAAAAAA!!"

    It takes no time at all to gather the power between her palms and hurl it forward. A colossal beam thick as a redwood tree's unleashed, casting an intense EVERY WHICH WAY.

    If you're behind Behemoth? EVERYTHING is cast in bright blues and whites as the Kamehameha Wave passes... right for Behemoth's backside!
Metal Man Metal Man is doing a very good job at harassing the horrific monster. He keep smoving as Defiant moves to go after it? He lends what he can the the make up of his blades render them immune to the heat that the end bringer is giving off so they just might connect and give Defiant some support as he goes.

Flash Man is still resucing capes as he goes so. Crash man has held his fire for a moment to not catch Defiant in the blasts of his crash bomber.
Theo Morrison Theo ignores the weird looks and the shrugging. He just plays through.

The Ghostblade Eidolon stays in a defensive position. Theo needs it to cover him, even if it doesn't look like the ghostly woman will be able to do much against something so... /enormous/. Rather than dwell on that, he draws a card and puts one down, adding another land to the pile with a muttered, "Plains," and then examining his hand.

He's got some options, here. The big problem is, how do they stack up to something like Behemoth? He doesn't exactly have a numerical value for its power or toughness; he just has a rough guess in the form of a gut feeling on whether or not it will straight-up trample him to death or get stopped by a quasi-divine ghost-lady. He's gotta say, his gut is feeling pretty pessimistic today.

Theo scans the battlefield and makes a decision. He taps two of his Plains and throws down a card, looking across the battlefield at a friendly Alchemical Exalted. "Felidar Umbra!"

Bitter Medicine will probably feel a tingly feeling right before the growing green aura explodes into sight around him. It coalesces into another monstrous creature, this one an enormous leonine creature with a crest of antlers that looks like they /might/ be some kind of metal. The entire thing is maybe twenty or thirty feet high and translucent green, with Bitter Medicine floating inside. He'll get the feeling he can will it to move like an extension of himself, that he can pass through it as he wishes, and that it will negate a certain amount of terrible punishment before it vanishes.

Not bad for two mana, Theo thinks.

"Maybe I can slow it down," he says to himself. He taps another land for mana, drawing the energy out of the broken landscape around him. He puts a second enchantment down at the far edge of his table space, declaring, "Oppressive Rays!"

The sun suddenly breaks through the dust and smoke, a seemingly concentrated beam of supernatural sunlight beating down on Behemoth. It's strong enough to blind it and drive it back with the sheer concentrated heat and glare, making it harder for it to fight through it and concentrate on much of anything. Theo doesn't think this world has anything like real magic, so he's pretty sure this will work...
Defiant     Somehow, Chevalier - in his gleaming knight armor and with his massive cannonblade - has ended up in front of Behemoth. It's a bad spot and Behemoth is already summoning a lightning blast around his horns - but when Frederica blinds him, Behemoth shakes his head and arcs the lightning up into the sky. It arcs between two orbiting dragoncraft, sending them to the ground as flaming wrecks.

    Glitter might be relieved that there's no sign of anyone actually inside the dragoncraft that Behemoth had exploded, just wreckage. They must be remote-controlled. Time to reflect on that later, though - Glitter feels around. Volcanic rock, thick hide, wounds, ichor... Hmm, the deeper the wound, the more resistant the flesh she finds there feels. The bits of exposed Endbringer skeleton seem to be the most dense, the toughest... that's probably what they need to hit.

    Xiaomu begins to siphon... something from the Endbringer. It's some sort of energy, sure, although it doesn't feel /normal/. Animated, but maybe not truly alive? Whatever the exact means, there's more than enough energy there to patch up some wounds and regain energy and balance.

    Even blinded, though, Behemoth continues to stomp forwards inexorably. Unable to see anything, he directs his blasts wherever he pleases. Reina's homing 'missiles' streak in, find their mark, and stumble the Endbringer, exposing great rends in his flesh and revealing wide sections of an obsidian skeleton. He manages to - somehow - redirect one, right towards Chevalier. The cape slaps it back in Behemoth's direction with his titanic cannonblade.

    With Voidbane, Defiant, Bitter and Metal Man open up gaping wounds in Behemoth's legs and arms. Into them, Defiant hurls javelins - and they detonate with the grey field of a nanothorn field. Behemoth's flesh just vanishes under the grey haze... but the skeleton seems untouched, and Behemoth seems to have no trouble standing on the 'wounded' limbs.

    Dorian's ice fares better. The mystical energy creeps up Behemoth's feet, forcing the Endbringer to redirect one of his attacks away so he can free himself. But that buys time, and that's the goal. It allows Staren and Rebound to hammer Behemoth while he struggles to free himself. The Endbringer is wounded, flesh hanging off obsidian bones in great tatters - at least on his arms and legs. Rebound's drill warheads whirr themselves into place in Behemoth's torso and detonate, exposing ribs, sternum...

    And Cory's blast strikes true, right on Behemoth's backside! The kamehameha wave burns through thick Endbringer flesh and buffets against the skeletal frame underneath, passing over it to penetrate torso, neck and shoulder. Steam rises from the hole and Behemoth staggers, growling. After a second, the ground /shifts/ and it becomes clear that Behemoth may be growing angry - if Endbringers feel anything at all.

     He's summoning up an attack, sucking in all the energy he can get like a vortex.

     And then Theo's Oppressive Rays slam down onto Behemoth's back, sundering the dust and smoke and casting the Endbringer into garish light, reflecting off exposed obsidian bone. Blinded again, Behemoth is driven to the ground, held down! If they can just keep him there-!

     "Pendragon on station," Defiant remarks, "Primary cannon is preparing to fire. Keep Behemoth there! Keep him down! This thing only has one shot and we must make it count!"

     The Pendragon, Defiant's personal dragoncraft - like a mechanical dragon clad in green and black armored barding which was, along the line, crossed with a fighter jet and a huge imposing cannon - has settled down between Theo and the fight (Flash Man has been placing the rescued caps around here, out of the line of fire, so, it might seem like an audience is growing around Theo, too). A low whine begins to build and the dragoncraft settles its four limbs and braces itself...
Frederica     This ... is probably going to suck. But hey, it's worth a try. So long as Behemoth is concentrating on her, he can't do anything about the dragoncraft energy cannon. He might be relatively immune to her attack, but that's okay. She's not about to do this simply to hurt him.

    Releasing a pent-up breath, Frederica turns her eyes upwards. "Pyro Queen!" she calls out, leaning forward and slightly out the window so she can see more of the sky. "Fire rain!" she cries, releasing a continuous stream of fire upwards, creating a rainbow arc made entirely of yellows, oranges and reds.

    The arc of flame is superheated, carrying very little kinetic component. As for the heat, well, it's hot. Not hot compared to the fires of the earth Behemoth naps in, but hotter than a midsummer's noon. It probably won't hurt Behemoth, and it might not even concern him at all. What it should do, if Frederica's plan works, is pour plenty of heat into the ground at his feet. Pavement should bubble and melt. Even soil might begin to liquefy at this temperature. It's aimed mostly at the Endbringer's feet, so the ground near the giant monster will heat up but shouldn't become hot enough to liquefy. She's keeping the heat as closely-focussed as possible.

    The goal? Well, Frederica's not trying to hurt Behemoth. She's only trying to slow it down by making the ground under its feet a little more unstable. If she's really lucky it'll liquefy and trip him up. If she's not lucky, well, then he might lose some time and effort dealing with her attack, hopefully giving someone else an opening. Win/win situation for her really, unless of course Behemoth decides to try to kill her.
Bitter Medicine      The sudden surge of power from... somewhere causes Bitter Medicine to cut off his Plasma Thruster Assembly. With such a formidable means of travel at his disposal, dedicating Essence to a less potent means is simply inefficient. The Exalt thinks of running as his weapon returns to his waiting hand. Behemoth must be stationary, and he gets the idea that this Charm is some sort of ablative affair. This makes the matter of containing the Endbringer a simple matter.

     Bitter Medicine thinks of running, and the spectral beast around him obeys. Giant clawed feet pound against the pavement, clawing out chunks of earth. The Endbringer appears to be preparing for some final attack, which is a coincidence. The Exalt is, too. Bitter Medicine's glowing green steed leaps into the air, running sideways across the face of a building. It lands with a crash directly behind Behemoth. The creature rears up on its hindlegs. Its paws wrap around the Endbringer's midsection. It's a perfect position to maul, but that isn't what Bitter Medicine seems to be trying to do.

     "Earth Shattering... Sky Shaking..."

     "SUPLEX!"
Glitter Glitter doesn't have perfect sensory capabilities through her telekinesis, but she can tell what gives and what doesn't when she pokes it, and why. She gets an idea, though it'll take all her focus. The glitter field starts to spread along Behemoth's back, barely a touch - he'd never feel it through the rock, yet, and she's keeping it away from his front where he might notice.

But then she gets other orders. They want it held still. Well, this is something she's uniquely suited for.

Glitter lowers herself to about five feet above the ground. She's still a ways back, but she's closer; she needs to be closer, not because she can't do it from further away but because her control is better closer in. Eighty feet, no more, and at an angle so that she can take off in a hurry without being dead in the line of fire. She raises one hand, gathering her power. The glittering field momentarily vanishes from Behemoth, though her own defensive one remains.

Then it comes back, slamming straight down. It doesn't last very long; once it has pushed him down, or not, it vanishes, so that Behemoth has a harder time turning it back on her. Glitter repeats this a moment later - and then, when Behemoth is hopefully looking up for the third strike, she grabs his legs and feet with her telekinetic force, pushing down so he can't lift them. With all her strength, trying to hold him just long enough for the cannon.

All her several thousand tons of telekinetic strength.
Corona Arclite "... No," Corona replies about the rocket powered chainsaws. "But I am entirely taking that idea for later."

Looks like the drill rocket did some good work though, exposing portions of ribs and other icky looking stuff. And Defiant wants the monstrousity held down for something big, though it sounds like others are working on that already.

Reaching a reasonably open portion of road not tore up by Behemoth's tantrums yet, Corona fishtails the siege tri-bike into a one-eighty to get it facing the monster once more. "Just keep the pressure on 'im!"

Grinning prehaps a bit more than she should be Corona pulls one of the larger levers of her controls. With the ratcheting clatter of gearworks the heavy plated wheel guards angle backwards and then slam down against the large studded wheels, anchoring them in position. The front treads spin in place for a bit to dig in until their blade guards hook into the pavement for additional anchoring. Because this going to pack a lot of recoil.

Case coming into clarity as the smokestack-like exhausts swing forward to rest atop the bull horns extending from the decorated front piece, the apetures spiraling open wider as clockworks within rearrange components to turn the two large cylinders into a pair of rather large mortar siege cannons.

"Say hello to my not so little friends!" Corona can be heard cackling as she slams down the triggers. Even with the anti-recoil bracing the siege vehicle rocks a bit when it fires the cannons several times in alternating fashion, bombarding Behemoth's position in what was as much suppression fire as it was trying to blow off more of that protective exterior, considering his sheer size.
Dorian Pavus     Good!  Behemoth is down!  The ice seemed to work last time, so as the Endbringer is pressed into the ground Dorian gathers his energy again, more this time, and casts ice the Endbringer's way again.  This time the glacial explosion is likely to be much bigger, since Dorian's putting more energy into this one.  He bares his teeth, his brows drawing down into a frown of concentration, as he channels all the energy he can possibly muster into an ice spell big enough to try to freeze the Endbringer to the ground.

    ... It's too much energy, it turns out ...

    The first sign that something's wrong is a chuckle in his ear.  That's not a nice chuckle at all.  Worse, no one can hear it but him.  And he knows it.  No one can hear the chuckle, or the whispers that begin to rise, or feel the presence around him.  It's like something has crept up behind him and has begun to whisper into his ear.  He scowls, trying to will the voice, the presence, away.  "... Kaffas, not /now/ ...!" he hisses.

    But his voice trails off almost immediately after, and he just sort of ... falls over, sitting down hard on the ground.  His eyes are unfocused, his head lolling forward.  He's unresponsive where he sits.  On the bright side, he's out of immediate danger.  Unless the Endbringer gets up and heads in his direction.  Because it doesn't look like he's going to be able to move for the time being.

    Hopefully the ice will be enough...
Xiaomu While Xiaomu is distinctly a supernatural being, her birth and her origins *do* trace back to the natural world. And as she siphons energy away from Behemoth, she finds that her prediction that it would taste bad is ... relatively true.

Because that energy IS NOT natural. Even the biggest and most monstrous of oni still have something resembling a connection to the world, an origin which 'belongs' somewhere in the natural order of the universe, or a supernatural branch thereupon. This ... isn't. Somebody created Behemoth using cruder methods, ignoring the natural order.

And it almost scares the sage fox.

Still, she's not going to help win the fight by turning tails and skedaddling off the field, so once she feels a little better, she releases the Dakki no Kata and turns her attention to a more complicated technique, one which she developed based on the signature move of the Arisu clan whom she befriended generations ago (human generations, at least). She grounds her staff more firmly, trying to draw on whatever ambient power flows through the ground beneath her feet, and takes a deep breath while raising her right hand anew.

"Senko Youjutsu, Kimon Fuuji!" she calls out - a phrase which the Multiversal translation effect parses as 'Sage Fox Sorcery, Demon Gate Seal'.

Mystical power gleams in her upraised palm, and a magic square 'draws' itself on the ground around Behemoth, whether he's on his feet or not at the time. A bubble of magic forms around the giant monster as well, the active and most obvious part of Xiaomu's binding spell - only a short-lived containment measure, really, but if she can buy her allies the time to deal a decisive blow to the monster, it'll be worth how much this drains her.
Cory     Well it wasn't the bigest blast she's ever made, but the fact that Behemoth soaked that and just seemed to get MAD leaves the Saiyan woman shivering where she stands for a few moments. "No way.. that's some hefty injury, but it JUST MADE IT ANGRY."

    A few backflips later and Cory's soaring further and further away just in case Behemoth TURNS AROUND on her. She rises skywards too, once again building up Ki while her body screams at her under the strain of Kaioken. She'd be displaying some rather colorful bruises already were her armor not covering all of it.

    "Well if the first Turtle School technique didn't work, guess I'll have to try the other one."

    But it'll take a few moments to gather her focus. During which... she ends up STARING at Bitter Medicine's approach, dumbfounded. "Some people... just not paying attention." Isn't getting close BAD?

    She's pretty sure getting close is BAD.

    Which is why Cory's fighting from a distance. "OKAY THEN! Let's see how it handles THIS!" Breathing deeply and raising an arm high over her head, Cory once again focuses her Ki. But this technique's much, much more difficult.

    Yellowish Ki crack-sparks around her arm, then RISES up towards the sky as a thick band. Once it reaches her palms it flattens... and only then does how quickly it's SPINNING become so apparent. Because it's buzzing much like a saw, filling the air with a high-pitched *WHINE*.

    And the effort simply to contain this has beads of perspiration rolling down Cory's face. "Focus, control the spin... wait for my chance..."

    Of course, Bitter Medicine just gave her all the distraction she'll probably need.

    "HYAH! DESTRUCTOOOOOO DISK!"

    With one hell of a hurl, she sends the thing straight for Behemoth.

    Better not get in that thing's path. Seriously.
Reina Kinney     When the shots hit their mark, Reina grins, then scowls a little as if she expects to get a counterattack. Realizing she's not going to get one, but that the behemoth is definitely planning something else, she decides it's time for the last ditch attack. She steadies her aircraft a little, before checking the weapons systems. "If this backfires, I'll have to eject and my craft will be a smoking wreck."

    The special cannon fires a special kind of beam that is known for inflicting major damage against large enemies. Unfortunately, it causes her craft's systems to heat up fast, and if it's done incorrectly, she could end up doing more harm than good. "I hope this works!" Reina says as she pushes the button which fires the beam.
Metal Man SO many people are fighitn this Behemoth is living up to it's name. It takes so much power to even just /do this/ Metal Man keeps now throwing the blades which hopefully will contiune to cut into it. Crash Man however fires a crash bomb into one of the wounds hoping to make it wors as it will lotck it self into place.

Drones show up to add firepower to the assult, Sniper Joes mostly which rapidly fire bursts of energy and use the certatiumn shiel to hopefully parry counter attacks.

"This thing is aptly name but it will fall! Come monster your end is today!"

Okay maybe Metal's getting a bit too into things?

"You will fall before the power of a Wily Robot!"

Okay maybe not /that/ into it.
Staren     Okay. That's a lot of bone exposed! Staren was planning to use the RAISER rifle on it now, but... Defiant calls for holding it in place. Staren considers for a few precious seconds... if he gets in close, he'll be drained. Others seem to be better suited to close combat with Behemoth. And if they're going to all the trouble to hold it still...

    It's now or never.

    Staren transforms again and lands, only a few hundred feet from Behemoth. He doesn't have time to go far, or set up an ideal sniping point. The pack behind the Star Hawk's right shoulder expands and unfolds into an oversized (even for the mecha) sniper rifle, mounted on the shoulder with a foregrip to steady and aim it. Those with sensitive hearing can hear the high-pitched whine of electronics charging.

    ANTI-WIRELESS RAILGUN 15%Inside, capacitor banks charge, the feet take a steady stance and use lasers to drill into the ground and deploy stabilization pylons...

    ANTI-WIRELESS RAILGUN 40%

    Panels with stabilization thrusters open along the barrel, and Staren takes aim, keeping a reticle over the intersection of some bones.

    ANTI-WIRELESS RAILGUN 60%

    "C'mon... you can do it guys, keep him still..." Staren mutters under his breath.

    ANTI-WIRELESS RAILGUN 80%

    Those who can sense such things might sense magic on the massive railrifle -- the entire weapon has been enchanted, magic joining science to pack as much power as possible and to exploit the weaknesses of the weapon's original target. Inside the chamber sits a most unusual round -- instead of the usual 'magic bomb' warhead, this one is a protoabstractum, a construction of metal and crystal imbued with the concepts of penetration and violently delivering all its energy into the target's body, without overpenetration or just knocking it around. Powered by 'resonance', the ripples in reality given off by the workings, the movements, the actions of elite beings, it will sacrifice itself to amplify and channel that power.

    Staren hopes it will be enough.

    ANTI-WIRELESS RAILGUN 100%

    Staren doesn't need to worry about breathing or jittery nerves messing up his aim. With mechanical precision, he pulls the trigger.

    The Star Hawk's thrusters fire to hold it stable and counteract the force of the railcannon. All that electricity is dumped in a tiny fraction of a second to produce incredible current and incredible force. The enchanted railgun transfers not only kinetic energy, but magically-enhanced power and accuracy to the warhead that's launched straight up into the air at several times the speed of sound. The round moves through the air so quickly that there is nothing to see but a streak of fire and smoke, like one long explosion, and a great boom. And, of course, if the warhead operates as planned, there should be... well, honestly, Staren doesn't know /what/ to expect. A large section of Behemoth's bones blowing to bits would be nice, but who knows?

    He hopes he'll like what he sees when the smoke clears, whatever that is...
Rebound     At least Rebound can manage to inspire the engineer with new and better equipment. She keeps the launcher in hand and then loads up a different warhead. This one looks like a long spear with a tip designed to fold out after it penetrates it's target, "Why would you need a rocket launched grapling hook? Nevermind."

    She takes aim as soon as the vehicle comes to a position where she's steady enough to fire it, and takes her shot, intending to spear the Endbringer's hide and the cable that trails behind it to hook into one of the buildings that's nearby. Hopefully this will help keep the Endbringer pinned down, like they're trying to do.
Theo Morrison The Felidar Umbra goes up and Bitter Medicine goes for the suplex.

Huh.

"That worked out way better than I hoped," Theo remarks to himself, just before what seems to be a crowd gathers around him. He looks up and around, blinking behind the clear visor of the radiation suit. He feels simultaneously under- and over-dressed. Some of these capes are dressed pretty impractically for a giant radiation-sweating monster fight, but here he is in a dorky yellow suit...

Theo shakes his head. Draw, play a land, tap all of it. He puts down another card, this one clearly older, brown-bordered and a bit worn. He can't hold Behemoth down, though the Oppressive Rays are persistent, so he's building up a new offense... just in case. "Thran Golem!"

With a cloud of wispy Aether, a golem rises. It must be about seven feet tall, solidly built with a heavy-browed face carved into the apparently-wooden body. It has a number of what are either stunted branches or enormous thorns growing off of it in every direction, making its arms end in what looks like spiked clubs instead of hands. It stands there, still and silent, directly between Theo and Behemoth... just in case.

Then he hears something odd on the radio. He lifts the PRT-issue wristband and calls up Dorian's position with some creative wording about 'the wizard guy' since he never got his name. A minimap on his connected Ecto gets a ping. He shows it to the faceless Eidolon. "Hey, go here and check on this... Dorian guy. If he's down, bring him back."

The Ghostblade Eidolon nods, turns, and runs off into the smoke and dust. She moves at a tireless sprint, heading for Dorian's position and intending to retrieve him. It might be startling if he comes to in the arms of a sorta-spectral faceless woman made of stars. Hopefully he won't react with fire and lightning.
Defiant      Pressed into the ground as he is, there's plenty of asphalt and rock for Frederica to heat and melt, to bind Behemoth with. The area liquifies and Behemoth, for all of his strength, finds himself stuck. He'll pull himself free, eventually, but it becomes all the harder as Bitter grips the Endbringer and /suplexes/ the monster squarely into all that melted, burnt terrain.

     The Endbringer struggles, planting one claw on the ground and /pushing/ up - but Glitter hammers him once, driving him back down, driving him down again, and then seizing him by the legs.

     Whenever Behemoth goes to get a claw on the ground, to try and get some leverage against the powers and the Rays and the combined effort of Elites and capes, Corona is ready to blast away with her siege cannons. The Endbringer rocks under the impacts, unable to make even an inch of headway. Dorian's ice spell freezes Behemoth into the morass of molten rock and metal, Xiaomu contains him in a magical square, Rebound harpoons the Endbringer to one of the ruined buildings...

    And Dragon fires.

    The beam is too bright to look at, the result of the two Tinkers, Staren and his abstractum engineering a cannon designed to kill titans. The last thing anyone sees before Behemoth just /vanishes/ under the bright light is Cory's energy disk seperating the Endbringer's left arm at the shoulder. The blast is an eternity of light and sound. Capes like Eidolon and Narwhal throw up forcefields, protecting anyone from being blinded or, if they're too close, flat-out killed by the shot.

     Into the conflageration, Staren pours his railgun, a deafening thump-boom signalling the impact. Reina's cannon streaks along a similar path, vanishing into the blinding light. It seems to go on for an eternity.

     Eventually, however, the light fades. A great fissure has opened in the earth, annihilating much of the city behind Behemoth. Silence reigns. Capes stand still, wondering if they had managed to flat out vaporise the Endbringer.

     And then, the ground rumbles.
Defiant      After a moment, the ground is shaking with so much force that some are having trouble standing.

     And just like that, the landscape /shatters/.

     Fissues lance out in every direction, disappearing out to the horizon and secondary fissures gape open between several of the major ones. As far as the eye can see, the terrain is shifting - hills moving, skyscrapers collapsing like card houses.

     Ground zero is the Pendragon. Behemoth emerges from beneath the earth, just a dark skeleton now, and even some of that - feet, claws - have been partially burnt away. His eye is missing. Lightning lances from his horns, blasting the Pendragon apart - blasting /Dragon/ apart inside. Capes, thought safe from the battle, fall inside his instant-kill range and lightning arcs between them - bodies reduced to ash, costumes to slag. He doesn't seem to have noticed Theo, but given that he just went after the thing that hurt him, he might be coming right for the man who slammed him into the ground in the first place. Behemoth roars his victory and the audio energy behind it is deafening. Some capes, unprotected, die if they're too close, others are deafened, perhaps permanently.

     But how does Behemoth know who to target?

     The possible sense of victory turns to despair. Many capes are flat out routing. But Chevalier, Defiant, Alexandria, Eidolon and others, all stride forwards. This is it.

     On the horizon, a second sun comes into being. Bitter might recognise it.
Xiaomu In the wake of the binding and the seemingly overpowered assault, Xiaomu lets out a breath as her Kimon Fuuji fades, and she leans more heavily on her staff, gripping it with both hands as she gasps for breath. And then ...

Behemoth breaks back out of the charcoal tomb he'd just been sealed in. And he **ROARS** - in fury, in pain, Xiaomu can't tell, and she winces hard at the roar, her ears twitching back so hard, you might think that the force of Behemoth's roar blew them back all on its own.

Xiaomu says something over the radio - not entirely snarky; she really DOES need some healing ... and it's only with the lack of a response that she can hear that she starts to realize. A trickle of blood down each side of her head, peeking out from under her vulpine ears, would be the proof for any outside observer: she just got her eardrums blown out, at the very least. The only way she can tell what anyone else is doing at this point is to *look*.

Or she could just run. Second form is nice, but - well, if this WERE a video game she were playing, she'd have serious questions about whether the boss fight was balanced to account for two consecutive forms (at least) without giving the party fair time to rest, heal, and recharge before taking on the second stage. There's no level-grinding in real life, though, and she knows she can't handle any more of this fight.

So Xiaomu turns and starts hobbling off the field as well as she can, given she still needs to prop herself up with her staff. It's kind of a three-legged shuffle until she gets some of her strength back into her legs.

Or until somebody scoops her up and carries her bodily.
Frederica     Pouring out a continuous rain of fire is not exactly exhausting, but it does take a lot of concentration. Frederica is exposed, hanging halfway out of the second floor window of an apartment building. Behemoth is too busy to target her, so she's safe... or so she believes.

    The earthquake is what gets Frederica. Behemoth's retaliation strike isn't targeted, it just radiates outwards, striking everything. The girl, already in a precarious position, falls. Fortunately for her, she's only one floor up. A fall from that height may hurt, may even break bones, but surely it won't kill her. Unfortunately for her, the earthquake continues... and even skyscrapers are coming down.

    The pyrokinetic shrieks, in terror as she falls, then in pain as she hits and as rocks come down around her. Her shrieks cut off abruptly though. Not with a drawn-out sound that might suggest unconsciousness, but with a brittle cut-off as the circuit cuts out.

    Anyone looking Frederica's way should be able to see it. A massive ball of fire bursting upwards from ruined ground. Shattered structures rain down around it and on it, but the blaze isn't extinguished. It seems to physically resist the debris, pushing the lighter debris aside, and being pushed around by the heavier concrete and steel.
Bitter Medicine      Theo's protective spell shatters--but even with its benediction, Bitter Medicine is hurled back as if propelled by the very heavens themselves. Perhaps it's three walls he's thrown through, or perhaps four. As he lies amidst a pile of rubble in a crumbling office building, it becomes evident that a stray beam or stubborn piece of rebar has conspired with extreme velocity to rob him of his right arm. Nearly so, anyway. It's hanging on by perhaps a tendon, and hurting like a son of a bitch--but pain is a very efficient motivator.

     Bitter Medicine grits his teeth, looking at the black liquid which serves as his lifeblood. They say that the blood of an Alchemical is luminescent. Bitter Medicine doesn't think so, and he should know. He's seen plenty of his own, in his ten years of service. If there was ever any doubt that he was a member of the Soulsteel Caste, one need only look at this stuff--it seems to drink in the very light around it, in a way that gives only the /illusion/ of luminescence. The arm is just dead weight, now. The Exalt sucks in a breath and releases it. In one fluid /yank/, the tenous attachment to his body is broken.

     Someone reports over the radio that Behemoth's down an arm. "So am I," he says dryly. Blood in his mouth, maybe. Got to get up and get out of this building before the Endbringer's temper tantrum sends it crashing to the ground. Easy enough. Just activate his...

     PLASMA THRUSTER ASSEMBLY OFFLINE

     It takes more than that to stay the fury of a Scourge of Autochthon. The one-armed Alchemical sprints through the Exalt-shaped holes in the wall, activating a different charm--Personal Gravity Manipulation Apparatus. As he clears the final hole, a second sun appears in the sky. "SCION!" Bitter leaps from the hole, and promptly /shifts/ as if Gravity itself changed its mind about his destination. The Exalt runs up the sheer side of the building, even as it threatens to collaps.

     "Help us kill Behemoth! HELP US KILL IT!"
Staren     The Endbringer-Killing weapons... destroyed it completely? Is that how it works? Staren intuitively feels like Behemoth being blown apart should be more likely, but... the weapons /were/ designed to spend all their energy on destroying Behemoth...

    And then there's no more time to think about it -- Behemoth's back, partially destroyed. Staren takes to the air, undeploying the pylons and transforming to hybrid mode, the 'sniper rifle' spewing a cloud of vaporized coolant and folding up again. His machine puts in a burst of speed and charges. He has to keep Behemoth busy while the capes evacuate. The Star Hawk returns to humanoid mode and reaches out with its left hand, trying to grab and hold onto Behemoth while his right hand points a finger at the Endbringer's spine -- and the finger 'opens' to reveal some kind of small energy weapon the size of a humanscale rifle, which fires all of its stored energy as a projectile that behaves much like the protoabstractum warhead he fired earlier, smaller and weaker but still an incredible amount of power.

    It worked once...

    He hopes someone can figure out how to finish Behemoth off after, though...
Reina Kinney     Meanwhile, Reina's craft has been seriously damaged, and the systems have gone to code yellow. "Falz it, NO!" She screams, trying to bring things back under control, but it's not easy. "Why didn't I just stay back and give a lecture to the recruits instead?!" She wonders aloud as she struggles to get things stabilized again. "I can't even attack, my weapons are down!"
Glitter As she thought before: Glitter is not the best at fighting. There are people more clever at it than she is, who use weapons or powers or their own body; she doesn't know how to organize a military, lead a unit, or even get into any of the finesse of one on one combat.

But when you need raw telekinetic strength, there's not a whole lot of people better. She holds Behemoth down until the last moment before the cannon fires, and then she takes off again. She lifts up, covering her ears - her barrier makes the sound less deafening, but she feels it across her body like a physical force instead as her shield diffuses it, a rhythmic pulsing that makes her dizzy.

The light clears. For a moment, Glitter thinks they've done it.

They haven't.

The explosion of Behemoth coming out of the ground doesn't throw her around because she's flying too high up, but that doesn't mean she doesn't feel it. Chunks of flying rocks bounce off her shield, deflected or losing some of their kinetic power and dropping straight back down. She can feel heat even through her shield, and electricity arcs across it - she felt that, recoiling upwards automatically to get out of the pain.

Reflexively, she picks up Xiaomu as well - if she wants a lift, she's getting one. It feels like getting grabbed and then hefted away from Behemoth, because Glitter might have /powerful/ telekinesis, but it's not always real refined. That's barely an effort for her compared to holding the shield up in the face of Behemoth's rage and also attacking.

Because she /is/ attacking. There are already falling rocks and buildings; with a grunt of effort, Glitter literally telekinetically hefts an entire building that is collapsing to Behemoth's side and half-throws, half-drops it on him. It makes her sink to the ground with the effort, almost invisible behind a solid shining barrier - she looks like a sparkling silhouette of light. Glitter can't even really see anymore; half-blinded, she grabs almost wildly, throwing heavy objects in Behemoth's general direction.
Corona Arclite It's down! The monster is down, blown into a molten pulp in the ground and--

Corona's ears splay back as a FUCKING MONSTER SKELETON rises from the sundered ground. Her eyes are probably wide, but the goggles make it impossible to see. "Oh scrap me sideways."

You just had to be right about the boss having multiple forms, Xiaomu!

Behemoth's tantrum throughs the land into upheaval. Which is really unfortunate for the fact that the seige tri-bike is locked in place. Several jagged chunks of rock rip into the undercarriage as the ground underneath it churns at an angle, threatening to dump the vehicle on its side under the rubble falling from collapsing buildings. "Time to bail out, Hoppy!" Good thing kangaroos are really good at jumping!

Corona jumps out of the toppling vehicle, using the steam-jets strapped to her boots in place of spurs in spurts to try and get clear of the monster's tantrum. But there is rubble crashing down -everywhere-, even as quick and nimble as she is, she can't avoid all of it. It's just fortunate she manages to get to the fringes of the insanity before a crashing pile of what might of been a wall at one point crashes down, knocking her down beneath it. A pile of concrete and rebar piles up on the spot. A few tiny final pebbles clink down the side.

Then everything is still.

Up until a dull thrumming can be heard, and the side of the rubble pile detonates into dust. And, while bruised and battered, Corona crawls out. She'd used her special mining hammer to smash enough of a crater in the ground to get below some of the building framework that fell, and then dig her way out afterwards with it. Said hammer is tucked into her belt, and then she wipes some blood off her muzzle with the back of a gloved hand.

"Well that was a terrible ride. Let's not do that again." Corona stooped down to pull her hat out of the wreckage, shake rubble off of it, and put it back on her head. Adjusts the reinforced brim, pulls off the busted headlamp and tosses it aside. She's hurt, pretty roughly.

But she's also really pissed off. "So how do we finish off this cactus-thumpin' shaft-jackin' pile o' slag?"
Zwei     Two thousand kilometers out, a percussive thump rumbles out over the surface of the Arabian Sea, a brief vapour cone forming in the sky above the shifting waters as something crosses the sound barrier.

    Six hundred kilometers out, sirens go off in Surat's military airspace, warning of a fast approaching, high altitude inbound vector, going straight overhead and angling down ever so slightly. The windows shatterV in the control tower as it passes over, well before anyone can so much as pick up the transmitter.

    Vadodara, Kota and Jaipur receive similar lidar warnings. Something screaming overhead at mach 80. Mach 120. Mach 160. Its vector is visible as a streak of flame cutting across the day sky, like a comet burning up on an almost horizontal trajectory.

    Fifty kilometers out, Asche has burned two terajoules of energy in under a minute just from thrusters alone, and an order of magnitude above that employing his personal interdiction field to displace the air ahead of him, forming a near perfect vacuum through which he can accelerate indefinitely, affecting the rules present in outer space.

    At ground zero, a billowing streak of roiling plasma fire slices through the air at such a speed as to appear instantaneous, splitting the horizon with a burning orange line that vanishes out of sight. The air quakes in a violent, rumbling fit, followed by the ground itself as the hypersonic shockwave hits the earth, cracking the barren earth and glassed soil where it strikes like a hammer. The carbon black blurr that is Asche is too fast to be visible to the naked eye until he strikes dead on into the center of Behemoth's back, surging forward with a single physical blow with the equivalent force of a small nuclear bomb.

    Zwei is suddenly present, and today it is clear that they aren't fucking around.
Dorian Pavus     Oh Dorian's down all right.  He's sitting down on his rear on the ground.  Still conscious, though, or so it seems.  His eyes are open, he still has hold of his weapon, and he looks like he could just get up and keep fighting.  Except he doesn't.  The only thing that's really amiss is the expression on his face.  Because there /isn't/ one.  His face is impassive and he stares straight ahead at absolutely nothing.

    As one might imagine, he doesn't put up too much of a protest to being picked up.  He does keep hold of his weapon.  But aside from that, Dorian seems to have stepped out, at least mentally.  Given his words on the radio it's probably an unplanned trip, but beyond that it's anyone's guess.

    Unless someone near him happens to have some magical senses, that is.  Then it may become more apparent if these senses are focused on him -- there's a magic that's not Dorian's own that's trying to do something.  Probably not something good, given his state.

    Then again, in all the sudden chaos, just keeping the more-or-less helpless mage out of the line of fire is going to be hard enough.  Having time to figure out what's the matter with him might be a luxury they don't have ...
Rebound     "Oh for the love of.." Rebound never gets to finish her sentence as she's forced to bail out, leaping to the side, ditching the launcher she had with her and trying to find safety. There isn't much safety to be found as the world tears itself apart around them. She takes another leap, plants her feet on the side of a collapsing building and kicks off of it pushing through to try to reach the next building.

    Unfortunately for her a chunk of street roars up in front of her, and she crashes into that instead, going down hard as the building she had pushed off of falls down around her. Somehow she manages to roll under a peice of broken concrete and keep from being crushed flat, but she's going to have a hard time pushing her way out of this huge pile of rubble without any help, "Well..Everything hurts..So I guess I'm not dead.." She mutters to herself, trying to push herself out from under the rocks and broken rubble.
Metal Man Metal Man watches a heck of a lot of fire power brought aginst his horror it's going to crack the surface of the planet. He thinks right, hudnreds of Wily drones are annhilated in the chaos of the the sundering but some still act saving some souls who might otherwise have been lost. Metal is commanding the drones in thie back of his mind, but he pays little attention. He's got ot deal woith the Behemoth.

Flash Man already knows what he's got to do, anyone with the abilityt o sens things with time would be picking up a temporal distubrance from. He knows what he's got to do now and he unleahses it while laughing like a maniac.

"Your time us up for the very force of time turns /against/ you!"

Flash Man knows he can't keep it up for long but he will slow down time for the horror making it's responses more sluggish, it's going to be hell for it to respond for a a bit and this might give them an opening.

"NOW! HIT HIM WITH EVERYTHING WE GOT LEFT!"

Flash man focuses on keeping up the temporal antics, Crash Man opens every wepaon port in his body, he's got a missile launcer in his feed, head, torso, everywhere the missiles and crash bombs fly.

Metal Man just unloads all the Metal Blades he can in an storm of mono edged metal trying to bring this horror down.

Wood Man meahile holds the ruin of a building from hitting a number of civilians.

"Go towards the ship...I can not hold this much longer."

Heat Man for all his love of fire is horrifed at this level of destruvction and he moves to get back to work, along with Bubble Man.
Theo Morrison The Big Guns fire. Theo has to shield his eyes, the brightness is so immense. He can't look right at it, or even near it; he doesn't see what's happening, and instead just gets buffeted by hot air he can't even feel. Weirdly, his cards don't go flying everywhere. Maybe his sleeping Abstractum's presence has something to do with that.

When he looks up, he feels elated. He thinks the fight is over. He --

His spells haven't worn off.

Theo hits the deck just as everything goes to complete pandemonium. Behemoth surges up practically on top of him, instantly vaporizing capes he thought were safe on the back line with him. The roar is so loud he feels his teeth and his bones rattle. He tries to keep his head down, but he gets stepped on for it, the sudden routing of whatever capes are left near him making them rush over and past what they assume is a body.

He starts to get up. Theo's vision wavers. His whole body aches. He looks down, seeing his tray table on top of a pile of hot metal slag. He grabs it and pulls, freeing it from the twisted remains of what was, until a moment before, Kickotron. He's having trouble breathing. He can't take his eyes off it. Maybe he can summon another Servitor to fix it, he thinks. Maybe --

Another impact and another shockwave, practically on top of him and definitely on top of the monster. Theo is flung backwards, catapulted into a low, partially-collapsed building. He hits the front window and stops, head snapping back against the plate-glass. The helmet of the radiation suit keeps him from cracking his skull. He falls forward, landing with his left arm out and wrenching it when he settles on top of it. He groans, but he's only hearing ringing.

The Deckmaster manages to turn over and drop someone bent from his hand. He makes one more play, perhaps hoping it'll be enough to keep him alive.

The Thran Golem strides out of the wreckage to stand over Theo's fallen form. Mana suffuses it, the thorn-branches on the golem's body writhing and growing, suddenly enwrapping it as it increases in size. It triples its height, getting enormous, and a pair of bigger, stark white branches erupt from its back. The other branches sprout what look like feathers, forming enormous wings. They beat once as it opens and closes its newly-formed fists, fingers seperating from the club-like masses to form real hands.

The Golem does not move to engage the Endbringer. If it comes towards Theo, it will show it what it can do.
Cory     Just as the arm's severed, a fit of GLEE goes through Cory's gut. Unfiltered, raw GLEE. TAKE THAT! ... She'll have to tell Krillin later, right? Maybe?

    In the next moment, ALL IS PAIN AND CHAOS. "HYAAARGH!"

    So much NOISE AND LIGHT. Simply covering her ears and closing her eyes is NOT enough. She's sent blindly backwards through the sky, wandering around with... no sense of direction. So it is that she ends up slamming into a building hard.

    A few moments later, the ceiling collapses on her courtesy of Behemoth.

    She can't see what's going on, but she CAN feel the power signatures vanishing out there outside of the wreckage... and it fills her throat with bile.

    She hates it when death strikes so SENSELESSLY. There's no reason for this, and all everyone's out to do is protect their homes.

    Something she desperately wished she'd been able to do...

    There's ANOTHER great explosion, this time from the pile of debris Cory was buried under. The Saiyan woman emerges, filled with vengeful rage. Her hair's a mess, her outfit's torn in places and where it is, there's plenty of blood. She's still walking a little lopsided from the ruination that's been done to her inner ears, but...

    Hundreds of lives just snuffed out. Some of them were helpless civilians caught in the crossfire. Some were heroes, gone in the blink of an eye.

    Did her mom vanish like that when her world shatered too...? So helplessly...?

    "WHY YOU... BEAST!!!... LEAVE THE CITY OUT OF IT!! YOU WON'T HAVE ANY MORE!"

    A very angry teenager now has a target for all of her pent-up anger. "ENDBRINGER... GO TO HELL!"

    Like a supervolcano going off, Cory's aura tears up the land. Huge chunks of debris fly upwards and outwards, scattering away from the Crimson Ki that just engulfed her! "KAIOKEN... TIMES... FOURTEEN!"

    Her whole body visibly RIPPLES with the power, but in the depths of desperation great things can happen.

    Both palms cup at her waist, encompassing a swiftly-growing ball of purest white-blue Ki. Just as before, she's focusing power... but the staggering VOLUME makes the previous attempt look silly.

    The power grows so immense that her hands have to eventually part a foot away to contain the expanding sphere and keep it under control.

    "KAAAAAA... MEEEEEEEE.....HAAAAAAAAAA..... MEEEEEEEEE.... HAAAAAAAAA!!!"

    THIS time the unleashing of power goes off like a bomb. The sphere EXPANDS brightly to several times its size - easily reaching both sides of what's left of the street- before it's focused back down into the beam that would make a redwood proud. It pulses and shimmers, arcs of what looks like electricity curling around it and periodically destroying debris.

    This is not from excessive power. It's from lack of control. It's wasted energy going off in whatever way it pleases. Still, most of it gets where it's going.

    This is bigger than anything Chikorri's ever attempted before, and what's more..

    It's being SUSTAINED, not over in a flash.

    If this doesn't bring him down... there won't be another of these coming, that's for sure.
Defiant     
    Do or die. Chevalier engages first while Alexandria and Eidolon seem to go to work trying to pry off Behemoth's other arm. Chevalier steps under Behemoth's sternum and swings his cannonblade with all of his might. There - is that Behemoth's core?!

     The moment it tags the centre of Behemoth's chest, however, Chevalier's giant weapon falls to pieces.

     The armored cape barely has a moment to shout out in surprise before Behemoth kicks him aside and blasts him with lightning, fusing his armor with the ground. So, that's it. Even this close to victory, the capes just can't do it. The deck is stacked against them.

     Behemoth turns away from Chevalier and towards Theo's position. He takes a step but Alexandria grabs him by the ankle, pulls him back. Glitter adds her telekinetic firepower, driving Behemoth back, pushing him away from Theo's position. Defiant is busy trying to get Chevalier free, hacking his armor and the ground around him to pieces with his spear.

     Nearby the Elites, where the fighting had been thickest, Scion lowers himself to the ground, his golden hair fluttering softly in the wind, his aura bathing the area in a golden glow. And where the light touches, it /heals/. Flesh and bone and material reknits, fatigue vanishes, those blinded or deafened find their senses return, despair turns to resolve. He turns to Bitter, seems to /listen/ and then leaps into the sky. It's hard to say, Bitter might not have gotten a good look, but he could have sworn that just for a moment that Scion didn't look sad - but angry.

    Asche's arrival is like the cavalry appearing. The survivors gasp, cheer, shout. Over that, Asche might hear a distinct /crack/ from within the Endbringer. Driven to the ground, one-armed, skeletal and angry, Behemoth roars again. Behemoth catches a blast from Eidolon and redirects the energy, augmenting it with his own lighting, and trying to /fry/ the new arrival with a bright blast from his horns that sweep over his back - the energy is immense, like Behemoth is drawing it from somewhere else entirely. Still, there's something slow about it - if a blast of lighting can be slower than normal - thanks to Flash Man's powers. Asche had fought Leviathan and this is different. Behemoth isn't fucking around. If Endbringers had psychology, it seems almost like...

     ...fear.

     Staren, also on Behemoth's back, gets a similar version of events. The energy begins cutting into Behemoth's spine. If he can just hold it... just concentrate all of that energy onto a single point for a few more moments...

     It's about that time that Scion streaks in, lands before Behemoth - and shoots him in the face with a beam of golden light. Behemoth shifts his head aside at the last second but the golden light seems to creep through part of the obsidian skull and annihilate it, along with one of his horns.

     Scion extends his hands and that golden healing glow sweeps over Theo's local area, too, bringing with it relief - physical, mental, emotional.

     Slowed, crippled, the Endbringer hampered and broken and with the heroes revitalised - it's time to bring out the big guns. It's time to end this.
Xiaomu Given the lack of speed she's pouring on, it doesn't take Xiaomu THAT long to realize that while there's no shortage of people trying to retreat from the battle, most of the Elites are noticeably NOT among them. On the other hand, the sage fox has also burned through a lot of magic, her ears still aren't working, and while she's too far away for any of her usual weapons or methods to be viable, she really, REALLY doesn't want to turn around and get any closer to Behemoth again.

As Xiaomu is contemplating her options, her gaze comes to rest on something resembling a beam rifle - one of the 'Resonance Rifles' that Staren was talking about earlier, possibly. She picks it up from the corpse which no longer has a use for it, glances around for a suitable chunk of still-intact architecture ...

Then she starts clambering (awkwardly) up the broken edges of what used to be the corner of a building, having picked out a suitable sniper perch. She's never been that much on rifles, mind you - Reiji is the longarm specialist in their pairing - but she knows the basics, and the trigger is pretty obvious on her 'borrowed' rifle. She settles in, lining up her shot as best she can - if it doesn't have a sniper scope, she'll have to just judge the rifle's aiming as best she can without ...

And she pulls the trigger.

The rifle she grabbed only has a single shot, so she's hoping this is going to count as much as Staren figured it would.
Dorian Pavus     The whispers in Dorian's mind finally take shape, into words he can understand.

    "...You want to help them, don't you?  You fear for their lives."

    "Don't be ridiculous."  It's his own voice.  Before he knows it, he's standing on a ... well, it looks like a rock floating clouds of green nothingness.  Definitely not the same as the last time a demon had spoken to him.  Nonetheless he forges on, "It was an emergency job that came through Syndicate channels.  Do you have /any/ idea how much that job paid?"

    "But it wasn't the money, was it?"  The chuckle was low and sultry ... as the voice of a Desire demon should be.  Echoing around Dorian as if the demon were everywhere, even though he could see the the demon right in front of him.  "I have power.  So could you.  Enough to save them all.  To end the threat alone.  With plenty left over to take back the Tevinter Imperium.  Reform it.  Make it work the way /you/ see fit.  I could give you power enough to unify all of Thedas under your banner if you so wished.  Peace for all the Maker's children ..."

    Dorian scowls.  His next words come out with a biting, ascerbic wryness.  "Let's not get ahead of ourselves, hm?  First, I have to survive /this/.  Which I can do /perfectly well/ without your 'help'.  Then there's the Breach to seal.  /Then/ I can worry about Tevinter."  His eyes narrow.  "And /you/ can stick your 'offer' right up your 'reformations', good sir."  He uses the term 'sir' because, despite the fact that the Desire demon before him appears female, it has a distinctly male voice.

    "But you need me to survive," the demon counters.  "Without me -- alone, as you are -- you will die in this mayhem."  The demon's smile widens as it notices Dorian's hard swallow.  "That frightens you, doesn't it?  Then accept my offer.  I know you don't want to die.  I will give you power, and ask nothing but that you let me accompany you."

    Dorian hesitates.  Maker help him, he hesitates.  He /is/ scared.  He doesn't want to die.  And this is an archdemon-level threat.  After this, Dorian probably won't feel so frightened of facing them in Thedas.  But at what cost?  No, he knows what this 'help' will cost him.  He physically and mentally squares his shoulders.  "Then so be it."  He raises his staff, and the serpentine dragon heads begin to crackle with lightning.  His voice is low and dangerous, barely above a whisper.  "I won't say this again.  Get.  Out."

    Suddenly the world around him seems to unravel, the demon disappearing like sand blown away in the wind...

    Just in time for an impact shock to jar him to full wakefulness again, and he emits a surprised grunt.  The Eidolon carrying him has disappeared, perhaps having fallen prey to Behemoth's final fit.  He stands, taking a moment to stop his hands from shaking.  That was too close ...

    He has the presence of mind to see what's going on however.  Seeing last-ditch efforts to stop the skeletal creature that he recognizes as Behemoth, he begins casting lightning in the beast's direction.  Not a lot of energy at once, but as many regular lightning bolts as he can manage.  He does /not/ want to call that demon back...
Frederica     She'd been beaten down, battered, abused. Half a building had fallen on her. Well, not on HER precisely, but on Salamandra. Same effect really. Any damage done to Salamandra, Frederica feels, and some of the material was heavy enough to batter her even through her shielding. She was suffering some serious damage... but Psion's effect has reversed that.

    Salamandra tears out through the rubble, loosing a roar into the sky. The roar is utterly silent, but it still causes ripples in the dust thrown up by all the city crumbling. The great elemental's eyes, hollow pits of darker flame within its features, lock onto Behemoth.

    Frederica too looks down on the Endbringer, her jaw set in grim concentration. There's too many of her friends there for her to strike. There's too many of her friends there for her NOT to strike! She just... she can't miss. That's all. Focussing, she commands her flame one final time. "Salamandra!" she cries out. The great flaming beast opens its mouth impossibly wide, gouting out a column of solid flame straight at Behemoth. Aimed carefully, of course. Not at the back; that's where Staren is. At the skull, aimed for the same point where Scion's energies are hitting. A small target, but she has to be precise with her strike anyways. Small targets are for the best.
Bitter Medicine      'Give Behemoth everything you've got.'

     He can do that. With the roof of the building unsteady ground at best, the time comes to find new purchase. Like a springboard, his legs carry him dozens of feet through the air, landing with a thud against the roof of a neighboring building. Using his one arm as leverage, Bitter Medicine vaults an AC unit and sits atop it, in a one-armed version of the lotus position. He sheds his tattered trenchcoat and slips off the topmost portion of his jumpsuit beneath it, baring his pallid chest to the open skies, as well as his heavily augmented synthetic musculature.

     The Exalt readies Voidbane and closes his eyes. The weapon, his will, and his target align. A deep breath is released, and so is the weapon. "Thousand Wounds Persistence."

     Essence channels from his raised palm to the flying weapon. Wailing on its hungry path, Voidbane attacks, and attacks, and attacks, as relentless as the Exalt it belongs to.
Reina Kinney     Surprisingly, Reina's craft is fixed by the powers. The systems are back online, and it's time for one final assault. "Give it all I got!" She notices Ryulikon, her MAG, is bobbing up and down beside her, and she can sense they're synchronized. "It's worth a try." Reina steadies her craft with one hand, then places the other hand on the weapons panel. "Time to see if my Photon Blast will actually work!" A strange symbol forms... outside of the craft! Then lightning begins to form, and then it shoots at the enemy! Apparently, the Photon Blast, Reina's super attack, can be used in more ways than one!
Glitter Glitter prepares another building, her glittering field creeping over it, preventing the thing from falling immediately (though it sags dangerously, because she's not /really/ holding all the weight up... just getting her telekinetic mitts all over it).

She doesn't need to before Scion shows up. Glitter feels better for it, though she still can't see, because that's not being blinded so much as her personal field going half-opaque from everything it's absorbing - radiation, kinetic damage, heat. But she feels a little steadier, and so she forces the visible glitter away from her face, leaving her shrouded in bright sparks otherwise.

Glitter doesn't know this world very well. She volunteered to help because she felt an obligation, as she does with threats like this, and a desire to help. But looking at Scion approach, she has one name for who he reminds her of:

Centurion.

Glitter takes heart. She rises up again, flying, and holds her hands in front of her. With Behemoth distracted by Scion, she feels more comfortable surrounding his body with her sparkles (she abandons her 'grip' on the building to do it). It's a harmless light show for about five seconds as Glitter focuses, trying to do something she's never done before. She felt him before, figured out a little bit how he was put together... and even as a skeleton, he's disturbing.

But Glitter doesn't like killing people. Even monsters. And for a moment, she hesitates. Only a moment, but it's a moment that Behemoth has to counter, if he notices - because when Glitter makes up her mind to act, she acts.

Glitter simply tries to pull the remaining limbs off of Behemoth, with a grunt of effort as her field intensifies along the lengths of the skeleton. Even if she can't get them off, being pulled in so many directions ought to hold him still.
Corona Arclite And there comes hope just when everything seems hopeless. Not to mention a wave of healing alonge with it. "Don't know who the golden hombre is, but the pick-me-ups appreciated."

The first thing Corona does is glance back in the direction of her vehicle, which has been busted in half, and the back end stuck cockney up in the air from the way it's wedged in the rubble. Oh good, that end is still mostly intact.

The foxgirl takes off running, using her nibleness to hop and parkour across the jagged upheavals of pavement rubble to get to the vehicle wreckage. Landing on the upturned backside of the wreck she knocks off what remains of the back cover, revealing a blue-green glow from within. Corona tugs her safety gloves to make sure they're on fully, then reachs inside to pull out the cylinder containing the glowing crystals -- the pulsarium power core that ran the vehicles steam-engine and weapons -- out of it.

Corona shoves the core into one of the mortar cannons, and kicks it to get the weapon angled in Behemoth's direction. Sliding down next to it, she pulls the wrench off her belt, wedges it on one of the pressure regulators, and busts it off entirely. It doesn't take long for the entire weapon to start trembling from the building force in the now uninhibited machinery.

Then Corona takes out her Breaker, expanding it to full size and charging it up as she winds back with it.

"FIRE IN THE HOLE!"

As soon as she swings the hammer into the over-pressurized chamber it detonates, launching the pulsarium core hurtling through the air at Behemoth. The casing won't break until it actually hits the monster, upon which it detonates from all the energy stored in the core. Pulsarium generates TREMENDOUS amounts of energy when triggered without proper regulation, causing a very violent chain reaction explosion releasing all that power.
Rebound     The golden glow is enough to get Rebound enough power to kick out of the rubble that's on top of her. She rolls out of the pile of it and lands on the ground with a thud. Okay. So she really, really is starting to hate having to fight these things that are way bigger than her. She likes fighting goons that go down after one or two punches. Still, as she rolls onto her feet, she finds that launcher again, and one more driller round. She looks up at Behemoth, where everyone is laying into it, and opts to help.

    Loading up the launcher, she takes a knee to make sure she doesn't miss It may still be huge, but a skeleton is a smaller target than he was before, so she aims for the biggest part of the skeleton, the skull.

    "Alright you giant son of a bitch, you're going down this time, once and for all. Now die and stay that way!" She cries out, as she presses the launcher, sending the driller round screaming towards the Endbringer's dome.
Metal Man Metal Man gets they have to unload everything they have now, it's their only chance and he darn well knows he's not got more than his blades but he keeps throwint it at the horrible monster. He keeps using what he can do against it he keep throwing his blades. Crash Man keeps firing his bombs they are powerful but they are in the presence of even more power thing and then he's got an idea. Grabby Copters, a whole swarm start to decend upon the monster attemping to pull it's skeltal form /apart/ directly.
Zwei     Were it not for Flash Man, there's a good chance that Behemoth would have hit. A lightning bolt slowed down by any significant amount however, is a lightning bolt too slow to keep up. Asche's vernier thrusters go off in a flashing blossom of white hot fire, applying an absolutely sickening sideways momentum to his arrow straight approach. The blazing path he draws across the air diverts sharply by several dregrees, as if it had deflected off of something, swerving almost out of view, way off into the horizon, where it sharply jerks almost straight up, rocketing up off the ground where it soars hundreds of kilometers into the air, disappearing completely.

    Having fought Leviathan, gathered its data, and seen the destruction it had wrought in the face of the Multiverse's finest, is exactly why Zwei is taking the rare occasion to go all but all-out. During the ascent, Asche arms the Type-16Z braced over the opposite shoulder, unfolding from his heavy back mount and collapsing together in several pieces, One of the handful of physical shells he has actually brought with him is loaded into the charging socket, giving off an almost silent electrical whine as a band of golden light completes a full spiral around its length. The white body circuit munition is just about the only kind of physical ammo an Armiger will ever carry into battle, existing solely because of its ability to store more energy than is possible to push through a focused array.

    AUSSTERBEN PATTERN 1 - RAISER MUNITION: CHARGED AND ARMED

    The shell is launched with enough electromagnetic force to render someone deaf, but as the firing takes place up in the thermosphere, there is no real air to transmit the sound. There is only a tiny, easily missed point of light dropping through the stratosphere, and then the space a hundred meters above Behemoth explodes, not into a fireball, but into a hexagonal pillar of of phase-shifting, iridescent light, so focused as to be barely visible despite the utterly enormous amount of energy it possesses. The discharge crashes down on Behemoth with over a megaton of force, igniting where it comes into contact with him like a shaped charge, atomizing the air for meters around just with the stray bleedoff, causing miniature nuclear fusion reactions to pop off like fireworks. The total yield of an ICM is focused completely into a narrow channel designed both to negate the risk of friendly fire, and to overload a single point in a defense. Were the Endbringer not in the way, it'd penetrate completely through the Earth's crust.
Theo Morrison Theo isn't sure what's happening. He doesn't want to look. He's pretty certain, actually, that he's going to die. It's because of this that he starts to take hold of... /something/. The world, maybe? He's starting to pinch the fabric of space where he lay.

Then Scion shows up. Light passes over him, and he suddenly feels totally fine. His fear and despair wash away like shadows banished. He doesn't know how to explain it, just that he's been restored.

"No hard feelings for the banishment thing, I guess?" Theo says as he gets his feet underneath him. He got the impression he didn't make a good one when he last met Scion.

Behemoth, though, is still there. Theo looks up and staggers back a step, then rapidly grabs his next card plays a pair of them without so much as a second glance. It's practically on top of him. "Hero of Iroas Eidolon of Countless Battles holy shitshitshit-" He's booking it. It's almost comical.

The Golem gains a sort of shadow. It looks like an armored figure clad in bronze materializes behind it. It pats it on the shoulder, heedless of the thorns; then, it seems to step into it. The Thran Golem is wreathed in starlight and armored in bronze, the Eidolon bestowing its power on the construct as it faces down the Endbringer.

A man best described as 'shirtless Greek hero' stands next to him. He taps his fighting gauntlets together, then glances at the Endbringer and the Golem. He jerks his head towards it. "You can have this one, my friend."

The Thran Golem leaps into the air, beating its wings and taking off like a rocket. It grows even larger, its fists covered in bronze plates that gleam in the continually-falling light from the Oppressive Rays. It charges the Endbringer, heedless of the 'kill zone' and apparently unconcerned with it, leading with a colossal punch and following with a second. It acts like a gigantic humanoid jackhammer, wholly focused on punching the Endbringer until its skeleton is reduced to dust and shards of what passes for bone.

Then, it's going to keep hitting /that/. Golems are not exactly known for getting tired of doing one thing for approximately ever.
Staren     The RAISER rifle isn't a constant thing -- it fires discrete shots. In this case, Staren's firing one.

    When Chevalier exposes the core, though, Staren switches targets, using his one shot to try and explode the core the same way his and Dragon's resonance weapons exploded so much of the body moments ago...

    Hit or miss, though, that's it, he's out of his biggest guns.

    ...Or is he?

    Something comes in fast. Staren glances at it. How is it so fast? Is it friend or foe? A new endbringer?

    It's... Asche? That's good... RAISER weapons should work well on this thing.

    Staren still has lots of little weapons. From the missile pod's storage rack under the right arm, a constant stream of armor-piercing and high-explosive mini- and micro-missiles start pouring into Behemoth. Sixty more mini-missiles streak into the sky from his back -- and then the collective's superweapon goes off, "Holy shit!" Staren exclaims, wondering what that was and how it works -- no, no time now! The missiles turn to rain down on Behemoth. And the other shoulder pod opens, Staren drawing a massive... revolver? like an oversized, chromed handcannon with a triple-M monogram, each shot firing two 4-inch-diameter shells supercharged by the mad science of a god of madness and inspiration who crafted weapons to fight abominations like this that threaten humans with supernatural power...

    One weapon after another after another after another. Staren will try to break Behemoth with everything he has, one weapon of great power after another...
Defiant     Evidently deciding that Scion is his biggest threat, Behemoth tags the golden man with a blast of lightning. Scion doesn't even flinch. He draws his fist back and uppercuts the Endbringer, shattering the monster's jaw in a flash of golden light. The bits of black material, glowing softly, disintegrate like golden dust on the wind.

    The wrath of over a dozen Elites falls on the Endbringer amidst the broken and shattered lands of New Delhi - it will never be a city again, maybe never even habitable, but Behemoth won't be able to threaten anyone else ever again.

    Bitter Medicine's Voidbane strikes again and again, howling as it slashes against Behemoth's skeletal form. One leg, seperated beneath the pelvis drops away and Behemoth, unable to balance on two limbs, drops onto the ground. And yet he still continues to fight, firing off a blast in retalition - Scion bends the energies into the palm of his hand and vanishes them.

    Reina's Photon Blast crackles to life and rips into Behemoth's chest, into the vicinity of his core. The Endbringer thrashes and lightning pours into his body. He can hold a phenominal amount of energy, but even the Endbringer must have some limits...

    Alexandria is still gripping Behemoth's remaining leg, pulling against it with all of her might, but it is Glitter whose power field seperates the Endbringer's second leg from his pelvis, his remaining hand, his horns, his ribs...

    The Cerebral Bore punches right through Behemoth's skull, right through the empty singular eye socket, and nothing comes with it. It's not hollow, either. This thing, whatever it is, was probably never human.

    Maybe it's the sheer simple defiance skill behind Xiaomu shooting at the Endbringer with a rifle - as impressive as it is but the simple shot is a good one. Xiaomu's bolt strikes amidst Reina's lightning strikes and, with a deafening crack that seems to part the air itself, Behemoth's core /cracks/, opening the way for what comes next.

     And then, beneath Corona's improvised power core explosive, Cory's phenominal super kamehameha, Crash Man's bombs, Asche's incredible Type-16Z weapon, Frederica's fiery roar, Staren's fusilade of missiles and cannons. The Endbringer just vanishes entirely, blasted down into a crater by firepower that's probably beyond the ken of a lot of people, probably the most that has ever been brought to bear on an Endbringer. Maybe more than the first cannon shot from the Pendragon.

    As the smoke clears, Theo's Thran Golem clambers down the side of the crater. After a second, there's a heavy, repeated, almost rhythmic thumping.

    At the bottom, smoking and glassed, There's not much of Behemoth left. Thinner than a skeleton, remnants of half a skull, some ribs, a few vertebrae, a shoulder, bits of an arm. Weakly, the Endbringer swipes its broken arm at the Golem. And then, perhaps sensing its inability to prevail, Behemoth begins to /glow/. It can't summon up much energy, but it's still a final act of spite. Behemoth detonates.

     The crater shields much of the Elites from the blast. Scion, standing on the lip of the crater bends the rest of the energy away and sends it elsewhere.

     Just like that, it's over. Silent.

    Slowly, the surviving crowd takes up a cheer. A cry of victory from anyone with breath to spare. An Endbringer kill - the first of its kind.
Corona Arclite Corona Arclite just slumps against the wreck of her machine. Even with Scion's healing wave just before the last hurrah, she just -feels- utterly exhausted after all that. She takes off her hat with one hand and runs the other's fingers through her hair. Not that any amount of smoothing is going to work right now, it's just habit.

"I'd say dump a few tons of explosives in that hole and bury it, -just to be sure-."

The bastard got up once. No reason to not take chances to be sure it still doesn't somehow do so.
Xiaomu Given that Scion is demonstrably on the capes' side, Xiaomu does not try to dodge a bolt of golden light that gets flung her way. She's also too focused on Behemoth, and the way her rifle shot plus Reina's lightning cracks the core open is pretty satisfying.

The sound of the explosions from all of those blasts converging on a single target is a low rumble to the sage fox, more felt than heard at first ... but after Behemoth is actually blown out of existence, and the cheering starts, a bone-weary Xiaomu finally gets to her feet. She's too tired to actually cheer ...

But she DOES raise her staff high over her head, shaking it enough to make the rings jingle merrily - her contribution, of sorts, to the cheering. It's as good a victory pose as any, she figures.
Staren     Staren starts thinking about what weapons to use next. He's not going to hope that this is the end, simply plan for it not to be. Keep fighting, until there is nothing to fight...

    ...But it turns out, this is the end. Behemoth's blasted into a crater. Defiant announces the kill, but the Star Hawk steps up to the edge of the hole, looking down, scanning to make sure.

    It's... over? It really is.

    Staren puts the Annihilator back in its case and looks around, scanning for life signs. It looks like anyone who wasn't killed outright, was healed by Scion. So there's nothing more to do here.

    Well, okay, there's a destroyed city to recover, but there's nothing more to do /immediately/.

    The mecha stands there while Staren takes it in. Then he realizes he's hearing... cheering. His machine raises a fist in victory, for any people in the distance who can see it but not the crater.
Zwei     Far away from the resulting death throes, Asche deccelerates steadily on his drop through the upper atmosphere, slowly letting down the interdiction field to allow air resistance to aid in bleeding off speed. When he settles down, it's with the whisper quiet burn of ancillary thrusters and a dull thump of a ton of carbon allotrope settling into the scorched earth. The multi-stage, shoulder-mounted, variable macro-cannon folds back into its back mounted configuration, letting off a blinding hiss of sublimated hydrogen. His bloody red optics focus wholly on the mile deep crater, peering into its blackened bottom as if he sees something only he can.

    "Rest in peace." is all he says, his voice a low, scalding rumble.
Reina Kinney     "We finally did it!" Reina says with a slight smirk. "We did good," She says to Ryulikon, before bringing the craft back to a steady level and preparing to check things over before heading back to base. If anyone needs evacuation for medical purposes or otherwise, she's ready to lend a hand.
Defiant      Leaving Chevalier with other Protectorate capes, Defiant turns his helmet towards the broken wreck of the Pendragon, smoking and half fused to the ground. He sets off in that direction, silent and alone. To check for survivors.
Glitter Glitter sags downward once she's done... it. She still feels vaguely guilty even though, ultimately, she realizes it was them or him, and even at the end he destroyed himself rather than do anything else.

She touches down. But they /did/ it. That's worth a smile... but that's all she can manage. She feels kind of worn down, as much emotionally as physically. There's a lot of dead and damaged that she couldn't do anything about, and for what? That wasn't a monster. That was a (super)natural disaster.

Glitter looks up at Scion. She starts to speak, but can't think of the words, so she falls silent instead. She doesn't really want to cheer because there's too much death for that. They lost a whole city. But it could have been worse.

She does not go near the crater. Glitter kicks off the ground again, hovering just a couple feet over it.
Dorian Pavus     Dorian flinches away from the light of the explosion, raising a hand to shield his eyes.  Between the crater and Scion bending the energy away, no one appears to be harmed by the explosion.  Thankfully.  When the cheering starts, Dorian finally breathes a sigh.  Did they kill it?  If so, good.  There will be no Blight here, hopefully.

    Heading over to the first brightly-costumed person he sees, Dorian says, half-sarcastically, "I don't suppose that fellow would be on-hand for assisting with off-world threats?"  Thedas could use that kind of power in another Blight comes around...
Corona Arclite All the cheering aside, it sounds by the radio like the work isn't done just yet.

Corona pushes herself back to her feet, and pulls the flask out of her jacket to take a good long swig from. A little top-off to make her forget about being wore out, at least for the time being. She tucks it away afterwards, and once she's clamored down from the wreck of her machine, snaps open her CPAD to transmit a request to her ship.

A few moments later a couple of metal cubes are beamed down to her, which unfold with the hiss and click of steam powered clockworks to produce piston driven legs and flexible clawed arms, as well as gaslamp search lights in lieu of 'eyes'. The automatronic constructs would of be useless in the fight, but they're perfect for search and rescue afterwards. Being both strong enough to remove rubble yet dexteritous enough to handle people without hurting them farther if need be.
Metal Man Metal Man watches as this whole thing plays out he's done what he could. Metal Man calls out a warning as he detects the energy spike. Flash Man is not fast enough and he's too drained from his eariler effort si sent flying. Metal and Crash fair better as they start to cheer with everyone else. They have killed the unkillable it seems and he'd not in all his time in the multiverse seen anything /quite/ like that.

"Good Riddance, Metal Man to all Wily army forces, go into full search and rescue operations. I want the nurse Janes deployed out into the city itself now.."

Metal mand oesn't stop to cheer much more he's already getting back to work.