Nidhogg (Worm)

[Tobits]

As the battle grew more and more desperate, Lung grew larger and burned hotter, forcing the attention of the axe headed Titan back. Legend and Valkyrie focused their assault on the immobile form of Titan Fortuna, carving fissures and craters into its flesh. An errant blast exploded and reality broke further. The dimensional crack spread, lancing up Titan Fortuna's body, and tracing the lines of damage before forking up and into the air.

It hit Valkyrie and extended into a fractal bloom. The titan that arose was shadowy and wrapped in what looked like a cloak of black and jade, had a winged helmet with only shadows beneath.

She was bent, hands out and cupped. Within those cupped hands was Eidolon. His colours had been changed around. A black hood with a reflective emerald face beneath, glowing with a white light. The shadow of Eidolon stepped down onto a fingertip and gestured.

Darkness pulsed as the other Titans moved, arranging themselves in a formation around their new centre. Things emerged from the dark. Endbringers. One tall and narrow, of a size to rival any Titan. One small, a knot of formlessness, with faces periodically flashing out. One with a great chrome orb for a midsection, a black, whiskered head, arms, and feet mounted at different positions around that orb. Others continued to take shape and emerge.

And the Simurgh, now perched on Titan Fortuna, the silver edges of its wounds bleeding away into black and gold.

It began with the women in the suit, and now it ended with her.

He scowled. On some level, he was afraid and his power sensed that. It knew that he couldn't win no matter how he escalated.

Even so, he fought, despite the odds, even as reality shattered and-

---

2/11/1999, Fukuoka

-there was no pain. No, that chaotic and peculiar feeling was vertigo, a churning of thoughts and half-remembered fragments forced through a blender and poured into one ear.

From his perch, Kenta could see the area beneath Fukuoka Tower fill up. Teams of heroes were teleporting in every few minutes. The area was perfectly positioned to give them a view of Leviathan when it rose from Hakata Bay, if the view wasn't being obscured by the rainstorm rolling in from the sea. The dense storm was penetrated in a dozen places by a battery of searchlights scanning the waves for any sign of the enemy.

The Protectorate, the Sentai, the Seongjwa, numbers depleted after the attack on Busan, and more. Fifty capes, a hundred capes, with all manners of powers and desires, united under a single banner to fight for a common cause. He blinked, forced himself to focus. There was little time before the battle began. He had to make the most of it.

The memory of a battle that never happened stirred to the forefront of his mind. When Leviathan arrived, he had to prepare for an hour, letting the anticipation of the fight build up his power. Most of the city had been destroyed by then. Once he joined the fray, it didn't take long to reach a critical point, and even as Leviathan tore him apart, he was healing faster, growing stronger, even prevented it from retreating. The beast could not kill him, but he too could not kill it. He had burnt and tore away the Endbringer's skin and muscle, and its blood had long since been boiled away. It wasn't even slowed by his assault. His attacks were ultimately meaningless.

Lung felt anger stirring inside his chest. Not the messy, obscuring wrath of his youth, but a cold, clear rage. He would do better this time. He may not be able to kill the beast, but he can hurt it, force it away before it drowned the entire island. He needed to fight differently, to experiment with his power and diversify. Advice from Marquis, a man he had begrudgingly come to respect.

Suddenly, there was a commotion as some of the gathered capes reacted to the appearance of two arrivals. A child-like figure cloaked in green and black, and a man in a rain poncho. Three spectres surrounded them, and Lung felt confused. This shouldn't have happened. Why was Valkyrie, no, Glaistig Uaine here and not locked in the Birdcage? Eidolon and Hero had moved closer, conversing with them. The madwoman gestured to a shade, and the raging waves of Tsushima Strait were being cut off by a great wall of metal that rose from the bay.

As if on cue, there was an abrupt disturbance in the sea. It struck the wall with an earth-shaking crash. Rivers of water spilled over the edge and flooded into the city.

Scaled hands gripped the top of the wall. Between them was a head with glowing green eyes staring out of four gashes in its flesh, three on the left side and one on the right. The head flicked back and forth in a rapid series of twitches, like an eye in a socket. Scanning the city, the defences, the capes who would soon be dead or dying in its claws.

A hail of lasers and tinkertech munitions rained down, not at Leviathan but at the water in a wide area around him. The receding wave, the thick rain falling through the air, the water echo he created with his body. The water boiled instantly, turned to a fine mist, and was pushed away from Leviathan by waves of air pressure and telekinetic force.
The lack of water around it momentarily reduced the Endbringer to a fraction of its normal speed and removing its ability to turn on a dime. A piercing screech, and a drilling blast was fired, detonating in Leviathan's face. It knocked Leviathan into the Faerie Queen's wall, which deformed like putty and tried to envelop the lizard. The sea poured around the Endbringer as it broke free, now with enough water gathered to be almost fully protected against water-boiling attacks.

Lung could feel the scales beneath his skin, just itching to be brought to the surface. The fire, too, was warm in the core of his body. Just a little longer until he's ramped up enough to not die before he got strong enough.

Another tidal wave rocked the area, washing away capes that lost their footing. This time, the water reached Lung, sweeping up to waist level and forcing him to hold the windowsill to avoid losing his footing. A flicker, and a woman in a yellow and black Sentai costume had appeared beside him.

"Why are you back here?" the woman that he once knew as Black Kaze asked. Lung remembered the aftermath of her rampage, how the streets were littered with corpses. Hoards of refugees cut down as they tried to escape. Dotted among the bodies were those of heroes, stragglers from the Sentai. He remembered the pain of been cut a thousand times in an instant, again and again by that sword of massacre.

"My power needs time." he answered. "And you should be fighting."

"I can't do anything. My power hurts people, but it doesn't hurt him."

"Then cut me. Injuries make my power grow stronger."

"You'll die from that!" Kenta couldn't help but laugh at that.

"I heal fast. Now, do it."

Black Kaze swung the tinkertech sword she held in a furious arc, and his world burned with pain. That was good. Fear and pain were fuel on the fire, and the flames surged higher and higher yet. His skin was on fire. His breath was scalding steam. The world burned, and at the centre, Lung burned the hottest of all.

He felt his power building and swelling and growing in waves with every slash and stab. This was it. Bit by bit, he directed that roaring river, controlled the direction of its flow. Spikes and scales spilled out from the gashes, stabbing through flesh and filling the gap, layering the surrounding area. Each layer denser and harder than the last. His flesh was made of stone, of steel, of adamant.

It was time.

Lung abandoned his perch and rushed through the flooded streets, towards Leviathan and the others.

As the battle continued, Eidolon's attacks intensified. The hero had manifested his own hydrokinesis, deflecting and disrupting the lizard's water, diverting them skyward or off to one side. He hurled globes of energy the size of small houses at Leviathan, and each one was sufficient to knock the creature away, flaying away the thing's skin and simultaneously slowing it.

The ground was shaking almost constantly, now. The tallest standing buildings were swaying, like fronds bending in the wind. The lasers, Eidolon's strikes, the very impacts of the blows Alexandria delivered, the Sentai's attacks, the barrages from assisting heroes and villains. A cacophony of noise, light and violence.

Another tidal wave struck, barely giving the defending forces time to recover from the last assault. Lung braced himself, felt the water collide with him with a force like a locomotive. His pyrokinesis grew stronger in response, boiled around him, disrupting the water's flow, rendering it to steam.

He struck Leviathan, and was struck in turn. The force of the blow sent him crashing into a storefront two blocks away. His bones broke, internal organs smashed to a pulp. His power did not allow him to die. As a Sentai in purple and green pulled him up, his injuries were already healed. Lung sent a stream of fire, now blue, at the water around Leviathan. The Sentai joined him, adding their ranged fire to his. They had a tinker, Masamune, who mass produced their armour and weapons, each with wrist-mounted laser guns, rifles at their hips. Sixteen or seventeen of them opened fire with both weapons at the same time.

Leviathan turned, claws swiping, and he intercepted the blow. The hit connected, and he noted one side of his chest cavity was torn open from sternum to lower rib. Water poured into his punctured lungs. Alexandria drove the monster back, bought Lung purchase. He rolled over, shaking, and reached armoured hands into his open chest cavity. He sunk clawed fingers into his flooded lungs without hesitation and ripped the organs out with an agonized jerking motion, allowing a new pair to grow. As the snapped spears of his ribcage reconfigured, he stood back up and charged back into the fray.

Flames, more plasma than fire, concentrated and expelled from the spear-like growths on his back, propelling him upwards. He found handholds in the wounds on Leviathan's back and shoulders. The abomination moved, and the watery echo that followed its movements crashed into Lung. Not enough to unseat him.

He was almost half the height of the Endbringer now. Leviathan was still hitting harder, but Lung healed faster. Every second the beast focused on him was a second spent not attacking a less durable cape. Lung roared, burning away the surrounding water as he clawed deeper still. He focused on the heat, on that aspect of his power as he kept it from spilling forth and burning the other capes.

His power expanded in tandem with his will. The heat and the cold became visible to him. It wasn't just sight, not really. He felt the temperature exactly in a way that was impossible to describe. Lung held on tightly to the heat, controlled its flow, guiding it even as Leviathan struggled. The heat compressed into a scorching star within his maw, now a blisteringly hot flower of sharpened scales than anything recognisable as a mouth.

He roared and a beam of blinding white shot out, burning through several layers of the Endbringer, revealing charred bone. More importantly, it also cleared the area of water for a moment. Glaistig Uaine appeared in a crack of displaced air beneath him and four massive, spike-studded, crystalline plates shot out of the ground, pressing against the four sides of Leviathan's lower body, their spikes digging into its flesh to anchor them in place in his legs and lower torso. Leviathan crouched despite the pressure of the plates and prepared to leap to escape its confinement, only for Alexandria to crash down from above, pining it down.

Eidolon glowed a brilliant blue, taking on the form of a living field of distorted space that dove into Leviathan's wounds, then expanded. Vast areas of flesh were erased. Other capes fired away, and the battlefield crumbled further into ruin. Zones of altered time, gravitational fields, lightning storms, projectiles so hyperdense their gravitational fields ripped up debris around it. Lung saw how heat warped and entwined with motion, and as Leviathan smashed through its restraints, he met it, leaching the motion of it's blows to strengthen his own. Heat gathered and detonated along his four limbs, acting like pile bunkers as they drove Leviathan into the ground.
Legend held up Hero as the tinker's armour shook, a keen sound ringing out as he charged an attack. Below, a monochrome shade was summoned, and bubbles of grey engulfed Leviathan's legs. Lung could sense that the end was near. A tsunami swept from the Endbringer, but he boiled it away just as quickly, wrapping all four arms around the beast. The cape in the raincoat, previously taking shots from the backlines, swept in. A loud crack, and the lizard's tail broke free from it's bodies, shattering along unseen lines. A beam of silver burst from Hero's gauntlets, and the Endbringer's torso flaked away, the blast drilling deeper and deeper, unveiling scattered patches of a black core.

A crack, and the ground parted, water rushing up from beneath to fill the void. Leviathan's speed multiplied, and it took off, retreating back into the bay. But Lung did not let go, and as he roared in defiance, his power burned like a star within him. The sea was boiling away around them, and as his taloned feet found purchase, Eidolon appeared on his shoulder. A wave and the sea was banished, water held back by massive wide range telekinesis. A storm of rainbow erupted from the torn ruins of a building, swelling as it subsumed the material. Legend and Alexandria battered the beast, and Lung joined their efforts, forcing it in that direction. Metre by metre, it was pushed into the storm. Flesh sloughed off, and the core of the beast ripped itself from the rest of its body. A lake's worth of water poured out in an instant, surrounding the core, and it became a blur, shooting out into the sea with an ear drum shattering boom.

The sea rushed into the remains of Fukuoka. Only a handful of buildings stood at their full height, where there had been a city only an hour ago. The rest of the island was safe. It still wasn't enough, he still wasn't enough. The fight was absent, and Lung now had nothing to fuel his power. He sank, too dense to float, growing wearier by the second as his power left him. Alexandria found him in the depths and brought him to the surface.