LT: 10.3 Inspiration

Inspiration 10.3

2005, November 14: Auckland, New Zealand

The battle began in earnest. As Behemoth took his first steps, so did I. My awareness exploded outwards and I stopped relying on the chips of enchanted ice in my eye sockets. Every life, every soul, was a candle, a flicker of potential shining in my mind’s eye. Be it a cockroach or a human, I could sense the world. And when a flame was snuffed out, I noticed. 

The same awareness that threatened to overload my mind not three months ago became an asset now. I was Death, in all its many forms. I used the demise of a creature, a snail that could not leave Behemoth’s vicinity, as a tether. I reached out and allowed that small instance of death to summon me to it, closer to the endbringer.

His kill aura hit me like a physical weight. There was so much death, not from intentional action, but merely from his presence alone. His ambient heat baked the asphalt and scorched lungs dry. And within his kill aura, even the Manton limit was ignored. Organic creatures ignited from within, flash-cremated by fires hot enough to turn steel into wet clay.

But I wasn’t a creature of flesh and blood alone, not anymore. The Kindred’s power cloaked me like a second skin. A shroud of mana, dense enough to rival even the best of Ornn’s armor protected me from Behemoth’s aura.

I was only one of two who approached after that first cape died. No matter how brave, no matter how resolute, capes weren’t suicidal. There was a bone-shaking terror that Behemoth inspired. Just being in the titan’s looming presence was a feat of courage. 

That hesitation served us well. I heard Hero order everyone back, far past the recommended distance. We didn’t know if it’d work as well on a dynakinetic, but we had to try. Anivia’s Grace, a moment of absolute stillness. The cannons of golden light painstakingly installed onto Gamera’s shoulders. Perhaps, if we were lucky, we could force another miracle.

Isolde lengthened until it was the size of a pickup truck. I brought it down on Behemoth’s shoulder, meaning to bisect the endbringer. Countless darts made from the Hallowed Mist lashed out, finding purchase in Behemoth’s craggy ski. More still scattered around us in seemingly random patterns.

Farya and Wolyo made their own attacks. Being aware of them was a unique experience. They were a part of me, yet distinct. I could borrow their affinity for death magic to kill whatever was immediately before me.

The Lamb’s arrows flew with impossible precision, aimed at the exact location of the core. And where it landed, I felt the local dimension crack from the force of her Authority. It was but a single layer, the least dense of them all, but whether it was the first or the last layer, I knew that no physical density would stop her. It wasn’t the killshot, but it was most certainly a promise.

The Wolf howled. Reality stood still. In that breath, the Mark of the Kindred formed from the last vestiges of Lamb’s arrow, the second we’d ever bestowed on Earth-Bet. A ghostly flame formed over Behemoth’s core, almost like an “X” over buried treasure.

Shards were creatures that sought eternity. That was the whole reason they conducted experiments and ran Cycles. They were not immortal, and neither were endbringers. And if something could be killed, we were the ones who could do it.

And, as my treasured companions declared our unified intention, I raised Isolde in voiceless tribute.

Voiceless, but not wordless. Then needles of spectral energy I’d shot out began to glow. From them formed threads of impossible strength that had once been used to give life to a Sentinel of Light. They now connected to one another, weaving runes in the air in intricate patterns.

It was a three-dimensional spell matrix, the most complex I’d ever woven mid-combat. It towered over us, a cylinder of light forged from spectral threads. The bulk of it was meant to contain Anivia’s Grace to our immediate surroundings, as large an area as Behemoth’s kill aura at most. The days when I had to settle for hundreds of feet of devastated land were no more. My pride wouldn’t allow anything less.

The wind picked up as the spectre of the Cryophoenix descended once more. I felt my mana spread out, establishing a familiar domain of winter’s wrath. All motion crawled to a standstill. All color began to drain away into shades of muted gray. It was as though I had a kill aura of my own. 

And then, Behemoth fought back. Fire and lightning roared out from all around him. Radiation poured out in pulses of searing white.

Despite assumptions to the contrary, Behemoth did not have to shoot lightning from his hands or spit fire from his jaws. So long as it was within those thirty-two feet, he could manipulate energy as he pleased, regardless of the point of origin.

Within our mutual spheres, Behemoth and I reigned absolute. And where our spheres intersected, everything was ripped apart and reforged anew. In the early years of Runeterra, when the world was young and gods walked among men, there was a time when Anivia and Ornn feuded. The siblings tore scars into the land that lasted to the present day. The earth sublimated to boiling rock, only to freeze and fall as comets in the next breath. I imagined it looked a bit like this.

Steel melted into slag, only for it to flash freeze the next second. Stone crumbled away in the wind, only for it to fuse together again under Behemoth’s lightning. Debris of all types were flung out of our clashing spheres, becoming lethal hazards for any who had not cleared out far enough.

But as much destruction as we caused, we were evenly matched. I had an unlimited store of mana to burn, but not an unlimited focus. I couldn’t overpower his dynakinesis, lest I rip through my own spell matrix and cause an even worse disaster than Behemoth ever could alone.

I’d known that Anivia’s Grace wasn’t a sure-kill spell, of course. If it was, I wouldn’t have needed Hero to take the killshot on Leviathan. Even so, I hadn’t expected to be stalemated like this by Behemoth without even getting through his first few layers.

The problem, I surmised, was that Behemoth was the dynakinetic. And that was ultimately what my spell did. It did not simply exert “cold” onto the world. It absorbed all motion, even on the molecular level, and converted that energy into mana, which was then converted into an impregnable shield around myself. That was where the “absolute zero” part came from.

The shield was so strong that during testing, not even Alexandria could so much as leave a dent. But energy was energy. It was motion and heat. And before it became mana, it was the domain of Behemoth, not Anivia. 

He siphoned the heat that I’d been converting to mana. It gathered around his horns in a veritable storm of plasma, protecting his body from my ice. And whatever energy he could spare was sent shooting outward. Though I could not hear Dragon’s voice, I knew by the flickering candles that people were dying.

The most frustrating part of this was that he could move just as I could. Even amidst our clashing domains, he lumbered south like an unstoppable train.

There was no point in maintaining the spell. Ranged attacks couldn’t get through the maelstrom and even Alexandria got batted aside by either me or Behemoth. I wasn’t just not doing damage, I was actively protecting the endbringer.

Fortunately, sensing my frustration, Farya took to the sky to clean up my mistake. An endless stream of arrows flew from her bow. Each found their mark, cleaving a lightning bolt in two with all the irrational power of a spirit god.

That was good, because she and Eidolon were just about the only people who could. Though Legend and several heroes fired “lasers,” functionally no one had the speed or awareness to parry lightning. Even Eidolon only did so with electrokinesis as one of his three powers.

Behemoth’s club-like fists glowed white-hot as he bathed the area in radiation. And though it couldn't affect us, it could affect the other defenders. He slammed the ground, kicking up debris and scattering the irradiated earth further afield.

Wolyo solved that. He appeared from the smoke as if from the immaterial, jaws open wide enough to swallow a school bus. Behemoth caught his bite on his arm and Wolyo wrestled the endbringer to a standstill, keeping him from pounding the ground again.

With each rending bite, Wolyo took more than his jaws physically should have been able to. Jagged, spiderweb cracks spread out from Wolyo's teeth. Those cracks were filled with my friend's power, and they soon ruptured violently, completely obliterating the defensive layer. 

I swore in Ochnun as my spell faded and lunged back into the fray. This time, Alexandria and a complement of the toughest brutes in the world joined me.

Alexandria turned herself into a human missile. Fist cocked, she decked Behemoth with enough force to pulverize a cliffside.

It barely rocked him back a step but I used that momentary distraction to drive Isolde into his chest. I felt my blade sink through several layers, but could not thrust deep enough before he let out an explosive shockwave beneath his feet.

Behemoth was the slowest endbringer. Though this was nominally true, he could move with explosive power when pressed. The shockwave shattered the ground beneath, launching him like a cannonball and twisting himself out of my thrust.

It was scary how much control he had over his trajectory. Such a crude method of propulsion should not have had anything resembling finesse, but he managed. He twisted in the air, neatly colliding with a salvo of lasers and explosives from Legend's artillery crew.

That in turn allowed him to harness that energy, evading the beams of pure Stilling that launched from Gamera's shoulders. Annoying. Those things took time to charge and required Hero’s constant oversight, a tradeoff for their immense, dimension-piercing power.

And when he landed, it was in a mockery of the classic superhero pose, on one knee and fist against the ground. Another shockwave ripped through the battlefield, his kinetic energy converted into a massive earthquake that upended cars and tore houses from their foundations. Shrapnel made of concrete and metal tore through the area for miles, forcing the more fragile members of our subjugation force to hide.

Just like that, we were somewhere new, a neighborhood over three miles from where he'd first emerged. All the while, the massive halo of plasma he’d gathered siphooning heat from Anivia’s Grace had not faded. 

We followed, of course, but he was ready this time. He punched Alexandria out of the sky, and let out a deafening roar. The sonic boom, fueled by the endbringer's power, traveled further than it should. At close range, I heard it could even pop eyeballs and lungs like bubble wrap.

His roar displaced a tinker's floating artillery platform and I saw it careen into a death spiral towards the earth. He'd obviously been inspired by Hero's performance in August, but his gear was nowhere near as durable. The flickering candle of his soul told me that a rescue worker or one of my drones got to him in time.

He was one of the lucky ones. We had almost half an hour of forewarning, but a city of one and a half million people could not be evacuated so quickly. People were dying in droves, from panic, falling debris, and as a simple consequence of Behemoth’s sweeping attacks. 

My drones, Gamera's scales, were doing good work, but they couldn't be everywhere. They had limited energy and could teleport four or five people to the evacuation points before returning to the serpent's spine to dock and recharge.

I blinked to Behemoth again. The plus side to all this death was that there was an abundance of resonance. The line between the spirit and material planes was being crossed constantly, and each instance became a beacon to my senses.

Isolde already raised, I cut down with all the intentionality of the headsman’s ax. Simultaneously, Wolyo ripped into one arm and Farya’s arrows rained down from above.

And then, his orange gaze landed on me and that stupid halo exploded. A beam of obliterating light thicker than a house consumed me. My vision was filled with white-hot plasma and radiation. It was everything he’d gathered while skimming from my first spell, returned to me with singleminded focus.

The Kindred were not physical beings. They were spirit gods, and the “spirit” in their title was quite literal. They were tied to an anchor, me, and were otherwise completely invulnerable in the mortal plane. The spirit plane too, for that matter.

I was not. As much as I’d formed a trinity with them, I was still human. Even wearing the Mask, I at least had to pretend to pay lip service to the laws of physics. And confronted with so much raw energy, I did what every other sorta-indestructible object would do: I flew. I flew like a comet through New Zealand, hundreds of miles passing by in a pale blur.

The pain could be ignored. The radiation did nothing. But the sheer distance I covered made for a thoroughly disorienting experience nonetheless. And worse, the rest of the Kindred came with me. I was their anchor, after all. 

Clouds formed beneath my feet. I righted myself as my two friends appeared around me. We found ourselves over the Pacific Ocean, so far away that the land faded behind the horizon.

No matter. Behemoth stood out like a beacon of death. The battle would have been unmistakable even had we been launched to the north pole.

We blinked back, just in time to see what our momentary absence cost Auckland. Behemoth had continued on with his lightning storm, but rather than a singular blow meant to take me out of the fight, he focused on speed and quantity.

The sky was filled with a veritable swarm of lightning bolts, each making the air crackle and buzz like a billion hornets. They launched out in all directions. At this point, he wasn’t even aiming at anyone in particular. The raw destruction caused by the attack would be enough to kill most capes even if they got caught in the outskirts of the blast. 

Eidolon stepped up. He was in good form, better than he’d been in a decade. By draining his less useful Shards, he’d learned how to revive some of his more useful powers, the kind that, once upon a time, allowed him to stand against Behemoth on his lonesome. He wasn’t quite as impressive as in his heyday still, he now knew the value of conserving his Shards as much as possible, but he could afford to splurge.

He hovered about two hundred feet in the air, well away from Behemoth’s aura. Behind him was a halo of electricity that silhouetted him against the sky. He raised an imperious hand like Zeus commanding the heavens. I could clearly see the point at which Behemoth’s dynakinetic control waned in favor of Eidolon’s electrokinesis. Every nearby bolt, hundreds if not thousands, arced towards him as those below watched in awestruck silence.

But even then, he couldn’t cover the whole city alone. Some bolts curved towards him but were too far away and were merely flung in a different direction. Others never felt the pull of his power at all. More candles were snuffed out.

The most notable of them was a man named Irawaru, which I understood to be a Maori name. He could turn into a bus-sized, black hound. Though he’d lacked the power to stand on the frontline, he’d volunteered to defend his home anyway, shepherding his people towards evacuation points and finding trapped civilians with his enhanced sense of smell.

He died when a barrage of lightning bolts struck a nearby building. The strikes ignited a propane tank, sending shrapnel in all directions. He’d stood between the explosion and his charges, shielding them with his own body.

His soul danced in my hand, a blue-green flame bright and resolute as if he refused to believe his duty was done. I cast it across the veil with a whisper. “I will remember you.”

Behemoth got a second strike off as we re-entered his kill aura. A bellowing roar shattered eardrums for hundreds of yards as he formed yet another lightning bolt in his maw. This one was aimed squarely at Eidolon, with every intent to overwhelm the hero’s defense.

Whether it could or not, I’d never know. Gamera interposed itself between them just as the massive cannon of lightning fired.

Gamera, like most turtles, had thirteen hexagonal scutes on its back. Other than the two at its shoulders, which housed Hero’s cannons, every one of them were high-powered force field generators that could project their force fields in defensive layers around the mecha.

The blast ripped through the first as if it didn’t exist. Then the second. The third shattered with the roar of an exploding skyscraper. The fourth held for a moment, but eventually crumbled away. It would take several minutes for the generators to recover, but I felt pride bloom in my chest. My mecha stopped an attack that could have razed an entire city to nothing with shields to spare.

Then, Gamera returned fire with an overcharged Smite from the cannon in its jaw. It struck from above, its extended neck curling over Behemoth, largely so the Smite wouldn’t hit anyone behind the endbringer.

That wasn’t to say Gamera’s breath attack wasn’t devastating for anyone nearby. Behemoth could not manipulate raw mana, but he sure as shit could manipulate the kinetic energy generated from the impact. There was no getting around it. If we wanted to attack Behemoth, we’d just have to live with having some of our own energy used against us.

He sent the impact in a roiling shockwave. The earth, down to the bedrock, shifted and cracked. It rose up in oscillating waves as tall as grown men with Behemoth as the focal point, not unlike ripples on a lake. Such was the force that trees and cars were tossed clear into the air for a dozen stories.

One brute, Antaeus, burned up with a shriek of agony as his feet left the earth. He was a hero from Greece and had been named for a mythical figure, a son of Gaia who was invincible so long as he was in contact with the ground. He’d handled himself well even in Behemoth’s kill aura, but lost his invulnerability due to the bouncing ground.

In the chaos, more lightning shot out. Half of them were deflected or absorbed by Eidolon, but the other half reached Legend’s artillery crew. I saw one die and four more be evacuated via my drones. For all that he could become light, Legend’s human brain simply couldn’t think fast enough to defend them all.

Farya, Wolyo, and I retaliated with a vengeance. With every strike, we stripped away several layers of Behemoth’s hyperdense flesh. It was like hacking through an entire mountain range with every strike, each dimensional layer holding us but for a moment before we began to cut away anew.

We fell into a steady, but frantic rhythm. I refused to be caught off guard again. The precious few seconds it took for me to return to the battlefield had cost the defenders too much.

“Blood” that wasn’t quite blood dripped down Behemoth’s body as we flayed him alive. Though he never succeeded in launching us out to sea again, he released strategic explosions to blast himself away and keep us from getting a solid hit at his core. At this point, Behemoth was running away from us as much as he was marching towards Lake Rotorua. 

Then, he switched tactics. Between Eidolon’s electrokinesis and Farya’s arrows, the lightning storm wasn’t effective anymore. Instead, his exposed skeleton glowed a searing white that hurt to look at. His steaming blood stood in stark contrast against crystalline flesh.

Every veteran knew what this meant. I heard Alexandria sound a retreat as the area around us was bathed in intense radiation. It was quite a bit harder to block than bolts of lightning. Eidolon’s second power kicked in, blinking himself and anyone nearby out of the irradiated area.

I supposed he couldn’t find one that stopped radiation directly in time. That was the trouble with power roulettes: He could describe a need, but he didn’t get to choose the specifics. I just hoped his third draw was as useful.

Behemoth decided to make life even more difficult for all involved. Each footstep shook the earth. Each crack in the ground bubbled and roiled, spewing spouts of overflowing lava. Combined, his powers worked to leave behind a trail of irradiated fallout.

Technically, radiation wasn’t supposed to work that way. When a nuclear bomb went off, the surrounding ground was dangerous not because the ground itself gave off radiation, but because irradiated material had been spread throughout the blast area and mixed into the soil. Uranium. Plutonium. All that stuff that so many countries pretended they didn’t want to stockpile. That stuff stuck around like microplastics.

Behemoth, who fired bursts of ionizing radiation directly in the form of alpha and gamma particles, shouldn’t have left any fallout. He didn’t need fissile material to shoot radiation. There were hypotheses that Behemoth’s power drew upon geothermal channels to bring those fissile materials to the surface, but that couldn’t account for the sheer quantity of the stuff he left behind.

As usual, endbringers told physics to go fuck itself. His “dynakinesis” dimensionally materialized radioactive molecules all around him. Fidelity to the laws of physics as humans understood them wasn’t the point; human suffering was.

I grunted in annoyance as I engaged again. Irradiated ground. Swamps of lava. In the end, even if a brute could withstand Behemoth’s kill aura, they wouldn’t be able to keep up in the ever-shifting terrain, not unless they were also capable of flight.

I gave chase with Farya, Wolyo, Alexandria, and Gamera. We were a fraction of the force that had volunteered, but I supposed we were the ones who counted.

At least no one else would have to die.

Author’s Note

Not much to say. I hope Behemoth feels as powerful as he should be. Andy’s head and shoulders stronger than he was in DC, and definitely more than most capes, but he still can’t be everywhere.

Animal Fact: Snakes don’t have eyelids. They often get confused with legless lizards, which do have eyelids. Other ways to tell a legless lizard apart from a snake is by their tongue and ears. Legless lizards have fleshy tongues that do not fork as well as visible earholes, whereas snakes have forked tongues and no external ears.

Or, you could just let one bite you. Legless lizards do not have venom so that’d be a good clue. You know, if you were feeling really curious.