LT: 10.4 Inspiration

Preface

The king has returned (Traveler posted).

Inspiration 10.4

2005, November 14: Auckland, New Zealand

Behemoth was fast. Though he appeared to be clumsy and staggered in his walking, that was a misleading trick of the eye caused by his bulk and stone-like exterior. At forty-five feet tall, his strides were long, covering dozens of feet with each ponderous step.

Then there were the constant explosions and outflows of lava that swept him along. He wasn’t quite like Leviathan, but he did manage a sort of sliding motion that carried him towards his destination. Even flying bricks like Alexandria had to take care, lest they be caught off guard by a spontaneous eruption. Being knocked to the ground meant being buried alive and drowning as pyroclastic waves pulled you under.

I’d long since lost my communicator. It got blown off when Behemoth launched me out to sea, not that it had been much use even when I had it. It was durable, hardened beyond all reason by the best tinkers in the world, but it wasn’t meant for someone who remained permanently in Behemoth’s kill aura.

Besides, because of Behemoth’s constant lightning and radiation, it wasn’t uncommon for the communication network to go down. Dragon and several auxiliary tinkers managed to restore the network each time, but connection was spotty at best. Once or twice, I even saw Gamera falter from the radiation.

No matter, the casualty reports were only a distraction anyway. I knew precisely the number of people who’d died. Eight thousand two hundred fifty-six so far, spread across civilians, international aid workers, the New Zealand Defense Force, and gathered capes.

Now that I was part of the Kindred, I could feel their souls lingering with fear and resentment, waiting to pass on. They each had their own hopes and dreams, desires and wishes that had been cut short. Such powerful emotions flooded the River of Souls, causing it to swell unnaturally. Here, the veil between life and death began to strain.

They were acceptable losses, I knew. Eight thousand deaths was nothing compared to what would happen if Behemoth reached the dams, or worse, the caldera. Still, their presence weighed on me, pushing against the veil and urging me to help them pass on.

“Feeling a lot like a plumber right now,” I grumbled.

I knew one thing that would resolve their resentment. Behemoth had to die, and today. I gritted my teeth and engaged again. If Behemoth could use any form of energy to strike back against us, I’d simply resort to mana, and mana alone.

This time, I took my relic pistol in my offhand. Curtain Call deployed on my left shoulder so as to not get in the way of my primary weapon. It was headed toward obsolescence, proof of my improving mana control.

I could easily overload the relic pistol directly now, outputting more than enough power to rival Jhin’s signature coilgun. However, I still couldn’t “coil” that mana, compacting it in such a way as to mirror a coilgun took a great deal of concentration. Until I could do that mid-combat, the cumbersome contraption would remain on my shoulder.

Each time Behemoth created a geyser of lava and scorching smoke, he spread the fallout for miles. Even with help, Farya and I had a bitch of a time trying to keep the blasts contained. I would have thought lightning bolts would have been harder to defend against, but I was wrong. The sheer volume of debris, and the chaotic nature of it all, made it damn near impossible to stop them all.

It forced us on the defensive. Wave after wave, we defended the city and took what opportunities we could to retaliate. And though Wolf struck at the endbringer without concern for the city, he had to tear through hundreds if not thousands of layers. We were making headway, but not fast enough for my liking.

Then, the opportunity came to break the stalemate. We had several contingencies in place for each endbringer; it was time to enact one of them, Plan B, now that an easy win via Anivia’s Grace was off the table. Gamera’s shoulder-mounted cannons charged fully again. Motes of golden light pooled at the tips of the cannons, drawing my attention.

“Farya, Wolyo, get ready,” I whispered. My voice carried nonetheless, ferried along the immaterial plane.

“A hunter is patient,” Farya began.

“But our time draws near,” Wolyo finished.

Inside, I could see Hero working frantically to keep the cannons’ “multivariate dimensional entropic stabilizer” steady, whatever the fuck that meant. Finally, he was ready. Hero slammed his fist on a big, red button, because of course he insisted on a big red button.

Twin streams of golden light barrelled towards Behemoth. It reminded me of a blastoise using Hydro Pump, but with more than enough power to literally evaporate a hole through the earth’s crust. These weren’t the pencil-thin stream of Stilling that had pierced Leviathan’s core. Each beam was as wide as a house, a silent light that imposed absolute entropy upon all that it touched.

And that was the scary part, the part that convinced me that Hero was so very close to Scion’s own mastery. Not the destruction, the silence. There was no earth-shattering bang, nor the “pew pew” so common in movies and video games. No pressure wave that preceded a nuclear detonation. The Stilling, when used to perfection, was a completely soundless weapon.

At the distance Gamera was at, barely forty feet away or so, the impact was almost instantaneous. Almost.

But “almost” was never good enough, not where an endbringer was concerned. Between the very first, golden mote and the absolute obliteration unleashed by Hero’s magnum opus, there was less than two seconds total. Fast, but an eternity in combat.

Behemoth did what he always did. A titanic explosion bloomed with his right foot at the center, allowing him to force his cumbersome body to jump. He couldn’t avoid all of it. Two, house-sized holes appeared, one over where the right lung would be on a person and the other just over his left pelvis.

Ichor flowed from wounds I knew didn’t matter. His core, at the base of his throat, was the only point of vulnerability. Everything else was purely cosmetic.

We were waiting for him. For a brief instant, Farya and Wolyo merged back into me. A ghostly aura overtook my body as the Hallowed Mist marked my silhouette against the sky. Isolde extended until it was the tallest thing for miles, a blade so steeped in conceptual death that reality strained to contain it.

It would have killed. It should have. We were the Kindred, beings who imposed finality upon others. No amount of dimensional layering would have been enough to stop it. 

So he didn’t try.

Behemoth could control all forms of energy within the range of his kill aura. His control in this was absolute, to the point that he could generate any sort of energy, from anywhere, at any intensity, in any direction. Typically, he used it to burn people from the inside out, or maybe fire a few ranged attacks from ridiculous angles.

That wasn’t what he did. He was already in the air. Blasting himself out of the way like he usually did would have been impossible without the ground to brace against. Or, perhaps, flight-via-explosions was against some arbitrary rule as mandated by the endbringer’s programming.

No, he didn’t simply propel himself away. The fucker blew himself up. Literally. He generated such a powerful explosion from within his own dimensional layers that he shattered his left leg from his pelvis down.

And why not? Hero had already carved a hole through it anyway. It was like a lizard leaving behind its tail, except infinitely worse.

The blast was akin to a small nuclear bomb. The city, everything within a six mile radius, was flattened instantly. Hundreds of lives were snuffed out. The number was only so low because so many brave souls prioritized evacuation. Even then, I felt the spirit realm roil like a bubbling pot.

Of those capes brave enough to dare fight Behemoth directly, we had a surprisingly good survival rate. A handful were fine, durable enough to merit their place here. The majority were teleported away to the furthest medic station, more than seventy-two miles away thanks to Gamera and Eidolon. Judging by the remainder, I estimated a twelve percent casualty rate among our finest.

The pressure wave passed through me. My companions temporarily phased me out of the material plane, shielding me from the bulk of the blast. It still hurt like a bitch, but I couldn’t exactly die anymore, especially not in this state, so I simply materialized again, teleporting to the place with so much concentrated death.

Despite Behemoth’s best efforts, my attack continued unabated. Isolde came down but Behemoth’s core was nowhere to be found. My sword cleaved through where his heart would be, cutting the endbringer clean in two.

“Fuck! Will you sit still?” I roared in frustration, voice tinged with a fire that was only partially my own. Countless souls raged in my mind. I couldn’t not be aware of them, as in tune with the Kindred as I was right now.

“Take your own advice, Yusung,” Farya chided. “Steady your mind. Your blade will follow.”

I forced myself to take a deep breath. She was right, as usual. But it wasn’t just the recently dead that grated on my focus.

I felt the spirits of those around me, those who survived Behemoth’s self-detonation, soar with triumph. They could taste it. Victory seemed so close to them. No one had ever just cut the first endbringer in half before. He’d been hurt of course, but not like this, never so fatally.

I knew better. I tried to follow up, but Behemoth had already landed. And, like every other time he’d been sufficiently injured, he burrowed into the earth.

No, that wasn’t quite right. Behemoth did not “burrow.” Nor did he “swim” with the finesse of a true geokinetic. No, the best way for me to describe it would be to say that he was sucked inside. Dynakinesis on Behemoth’s scale was absurdly versatile, versatile enough to form sinkholes at will and treat the very bedrock like a whirlpool. And, of course, a titanic eruption of earth and lava was left in his wake to deter pursuit.

I swore even as people began to cheer. It was victory, technically, but I wasn’t satisfied. Neither was any other member of Cauldron. The plan was to kill him today. Every projection of the future got so much worse if we let him live. Recovery, real, sustainable growth, depended on his death today.

Swearing, I shrank Isolde and ran, tracing Behemoth’s underground path from above. He was fast, far faster than anything that big or that injured should be, especially underground. Dozens of miles vanished in minutes. Not for the first time, I wondered if Behemoth’s powers really were just dynakinesis. At this point, I felt a geokinetic classification would also be fair.

Occasionally, I took probing jabs at his core, extending and retracting Isolde like a heron pecking for frogs in a pond. His core, marked by Farya and Wolyo, was as visible to me as ever. But he was sinking deeper by the second, deep enough to make aiming difficult. 

Alexandria flew by and tossed me a communicator. The moment I clipped it on, I heard Dragon and Hero barking orders to the remaining defenders.

“Behemoth has left the theater of operations,” Dragon said. “My seismic detectors do not range that far.”

“Hyunmu, Gamera isn’t fast enough to follow,” Hero reminded me. “It’s not built for pursuit.” 

“We need to end this now,” I replied, still in the language of souls. “You know the projections. You know we can’t let him leave.”

“Fine. I’m on my way. Do you have any way to force him to surface?”

“I’ll… I’ll figure something out,” I said with a frustrated growl. Picking off a fucking mole that could dig deep enough to reach the earth’s mantle wasn’t exactly something I’d planned for.

“No need,” I heard Eidolon say. “I think I’ve got it. I asked for something to keep the fucker still, one of my old favorites. I probably have a few shots at most, though.”

“Understood. Let’s make it count.”

“I”m going to need help aiming. I can’t see through bedrock like you can, Hyunmu.”

“Follow my sword. I’m hovering right above him.”

“Got it. Don’t die.”

I laughed at that, a sound that echoed across two realms. “No worries there; Death is my soulmate.”

I tried to recall the powers he rolled for this battle: There was the electrokinesis halo that attracted the lion’s share of Behemoth’s lightning bolts. The second was the teleportation power; he’d used it to save people from the endbringer’s radiation and eruption.

The third… I wondered how many charges he really had. Normally, Shards had more than enough energy for a cape to use their powers with impunity, but he’d called it an old favorite. That meant the Shard had been tapped dry before. I’d have to finish this as soon as I could.

Eidolon emerged with the loud pop of displaced air. But he hadn’t come empty-handed. For a moment, I almost froze at the sight. He held his arms high above his head, carrying a purple-black orb more than thrice as large as Gamera.

“What the actual fuck, Eidolon?” I muttered. I couldn’t get a good look at the orb. Space visibly distorted in a way that reminded me of endbringer flesh.

“Layered singularity,” he grunted back. “Can’t hold it for long. Where?”

I quickly shifted my position. Then, Isolde lanced out, a piercing thrust that drew a literal line straight towards Behemoth’s hiding place.

With a final grunt of exertion, he tossed the orb down. Though I wasn’t really killable anymore, I had no desire to experience a black hole firsthand. I blinked out of the way and waited for my moment.

Watching Eidolon’s attack unravel was like watching a work of art, if that art was of Hiroshima. One by one, the layers of spatial distortion that locked the singularity in place dissolved like locks unlatching. I couldn’t literally see distortions, but the increasing clarity and the growing, sucking pressure told me enough.

The impact… There was nothing else in the world like it. I understood now how my friend developed his messiah complex. It was like watching a star descend. Aurelion himself would have found nothing lacking. Or at least, he would have bitched less and called it an “admirable attempt, for a human.”

There was no smoke. No explosion, either. Instead, the all-consuming spatial anomaly ate away at everything in its path, leaving no debris to hide its majesty. The singularity widened, devouring the world for miles on end.

Had we still been in Auckland, it likely would have killed more of our own allies and civilians than Behemoth ever had. As it was, even sixty miles out, the release of pressure caused by the erasure of so much bedrock caused the earth to heave and shake. They probably felt that as far as Australia. North Island would never be the same again.

And then, when it reached Behemoth, it grabbed the endbringer right out of the bedrock. The struggling endbringer was glued to the orb like a coin to a magnetic rake. He’d regenerated quite a bit while he hid underground.

At my signal, Eidolon pulled with a grunt of supreme exertion. The spatial distortion ripped itself from the ground and began to ascend, leaving a perfect hemisphere of destruction that looked as if a god had taken an ice cream scoop into the earth. As it rose, it began to shrink, focusing down to a singularity again.

I did not waste this chance. Who knew how long Eidolon could keep this up. No matter how far Behemoth had regenerated, I had to make this final moment count. 

“Farya, Wolyo, please,” I whispered quietly.

They did not answer verbally, but I felt our connection deepen. My vision faded. The world blurred with sights that should not exist, like paint running down a canvas and mixing into a brand new hue. It was beautiful and mesmerizing, an aurora composed of the material and spiritual that only I could see.

I wasn’t in the mortal realm anymore, not fully. The spirit realm, and all that it entailed, called to me. Farya, dancing to a tune only she could hear, bow drawn and taking aim. Wolyo, prowling around her with gnashing fangs and a hunger only the Void could match. I could feel them like they were extensions of my own soul. I could see the River of Souls just as clearly as I could see Behemoth struggling against Eidolon’s singularity.

And, most of all, I could see Behemoth’s end. It was a literal thing now, a tangible line of fate that I could trace directly to the Mark of the Kindred. The “concept of death” was made manifest here, as much a part of Isolde as the Kindred were a part of me.

Behemoth was a truly worthy opponent. He’d been doing a phenomenal job of avoiding the killing stroke for so long. He’d struggled mightily, but there was no escaping this kind of finality. Wolyo was thrilled, for once completely satisfied in the conclusion of this hunt.

As I neared, time slowed to a crawl. It did not flow so linearly across two realms and the world came to a standstill. What I saw made me curse even as I wracked my mind for a way out.

WIthin his many layers, Behemoth’s inner torso had begun to glow. A brilliant, eye-searing white light emanated from the endbringer as he primed his last resort. He was turning himself into a bomb, one last “fuck you” for the world.

In canon, Phir Se generated an explosion that destroyed roughly eighty percent of Behemoth’s body. According to him, it would also have destroyed much of the Indian subcontinent had it been fired indiscriminately.

Behemoth was not a parahuman. He had none of Phir Se’s limitations. Scion stopped him from detonating himself, but there was no doubt in my mind that his last resort would have been just as catastrophic, if not more so.

I glanced down at Isolde. An ethereal thread wove around it. It circled my favored weapon and wrapped itself around the Mark, around Behemoth’s core. I knew instinctively that if I wanted to kill Behemoth before he could fully arm himself, I had to cut this thread.

Speed was of the essence. Farya and Wolyo were necessary. And that meant we could not pause Death as I’d done in Washington. Even if I did, the explosion would be so disastrous that the few seconds I could buy would never be enough. The entire Oceania region would likely cease to exist. People would survive the blast, only to immediately succumb to radiation, heat, drowning, or any number of other tragedies.

There would be no Lamb’s Respite today.

My sword reached out, expanding even as we thrust it forward. We’d make it. We’d avert the worst case disaster.

But a bomb was a bomb. Scion imposed Stilling. The Kindred imposed Death. Similar in concept perhaps, but we were nonetheless radically different. Just because we killed someone didn’t mean matter ceased to exist. If anything, the lack of a “driver” would only make the bomb destabilize.

I was desperate. I did something I told myself I’d never do. I voiced my desperation in the language of souls and called out to the spirit realm, to all those who’d yet to travel down the River of Souls. I called to the lost and the broken, the ones filled with regret, pain, and hatred.

It was a single word. It was neither a promise of salvation nor the rebuke of judgment. The Kindred made no moral justifications. Good. Evil. Neither side mattered. Death was death, simple as.

“Come,” I implored.

And the souls of the recently dead answered. Not all of them, some simply lacked the strength of spirit. Others lacked the desire to linger. But enough. Behemoth had certainly inspired enough resentment today.

And each one that arrived, I shaped. I molded them by the strength of my soul. With Ochnun, I imposed my will upon them, subjugating them utterly. They were not minions, even that implied more agency than they possessed. They were tools, materials upon which I could build an empire. As another, foolish warlord already had.

Each soul burned like a flickering flame, full of bitterness and regret, courage and conviction.

Each flame hardened into a sphere of ethereal jade, a nugget of human potential condensed and enslaved to my will.

Each jade darkened into midnight-black steel, made all the stronger by their regret.

Each orb of steel flattened out until they resembled the hexagonal scutes of a turtle. 

“I swore I would remember. I swore I would be the one who bears witness to your story. So help me,” I pleaded. Was it an apology? An oath? I wasn’t sure anymore. “Help me defend the living. Help me forge a legacy worth remembering.”

The instant that was an eternity came to an end. Time resumed its flow. Behemoth’s finale accumulated more and more energy. And, as I’d known it would, Isolde severed his core.

Titanic shields shimmered into view. Plates of soul-metal covered us in overlapping layers, forming an impenetrable sphere around me and my target. The endbringer and I were plunged into a world of lightless void, cut off completely from the outside world.

Behemoth died. A final roar accompanied the detonation and the blast eclipsed anything he’d done before. It crashed into the walls of our shared prison, but I refused to yield.

That was what turtles did, after all: We endured. 

I poured out an endless stream of mana, enough to literally stop time and then some. I repaired every minute fracture the instant one formed. It was agonizing, but how could I do anything less? Every soul that made up these shields, my shell, was precious beyond words.

They hadn’t volunteered for this torment, to literally be used as shields against an endbringer’s last hurrah. I’d enslaved them with all the authority of an uncaring god. That was why I couldn’t back down. I owed it to the dead to endure, to let them see this through to the end.

So not one scute would break. Not one soul would shatter because I refused to let it happen. To do so would be to spit upon their legacies, to tarnish the domain I’d chosen for myself.

After what felt like eons, Behemoth’s last gasp ended. Piece by piece, scute by scute, the shields detached.

I fell to the earth below, completely spent. I buried Isolde into the cooling lava to brace myself. Looking up, I saw the shell that I’d made, a barricade denser than any material object could hope to be, an unbreakable shield that stopped an endbringer cold.

I saw what I’d wrought, and felt a profound sense of melancholy. There was something fundamentally wrong about this, about the dead entering the mortal plane again. However necessary, it was anathema to my nature as a god of death.

Still, who could I blame but myself? 

Respect was due. And, an apology. It was wrong. The dead should rest and I’d broken that creed to cover my own inadequacy.

Slowly, one by one, I dismissed each soul by name in Ochnun. I unraveled the spell I’d cast on them. Black steel took on color. Bright flames lit the world anew, before they returned to a rest they so richly earned.

“Thank you,” I whispered. I hoped that Behemoth’s death could grant them a measure of peace as they flowed downstream.

Over the molten ruins of a battlefield, Death bowed.

Author’s Note

Fun fact: The Simurgh is not an onion… mostly. Her human body is actually hollow, a decoy to hide her core. On the other hand, Behemoth is indeed a big, chonky onion.

Auckland sits on North Island. Yes, that’s its actual name. It has a Maori name as well, Te Ika-a-Māui, which Google AI tells me translates to “the Fish of Maui.” I’m sure there’s a reason for the name, but Andy doesn’t know it.

Power of friendship for the win… I guess…? Is it still PoF if Andy enslaves their souls via Ochnun? It’s okay since he let them go after, right? Right.

Anyway, feel free to submit obligatory PHO questions. Let’s assume videos are available, primarily from Gamera, but a few shaky snippets from people who are smart enough to not get too close. You know, assuming they were also lucky enough to evacuate before the big nukes came out.

Animal Fact: Everyone knows Australia’s got the weirdest animals, but not all of it’s scary-weird or lethal-weird. Sometimes, it’s actually kinda neat. Introducing the magnetic termite:

They’re a type of termite found down under that build their mounds in the shape of razor blades, perfectly aligned north to south. Because the “flat” of the blade is facing east to west, these hills are positioned to catch as much sun in the dawn and dusk hours while minimizing exposure to the midday sun. The mounds also have ventilation, because these little fuckers mastered HVAC before it was a concept to us monkeys.

The interesting part of this is that usually, animals that are sensitive to the earth’s magnetic poles are wanderers. Some birds, whales, and fishes for example. These termites are completely stationary, but developed this specific sense to build in this specific way.