As much as Armsmaster trusted his instincts, he had long since learned there was very little satisfaction to be found in being proven right, especially when lives were attached to that feeling.
At first, his mind refused to accept what Dragon’s drones were showing him. Entire sections of a city were simply… appearing.
Obviously, that wasn't normal. Buildings did not vanish from one place and reappear somewhere else without any reason, still carrying enough momentum to become weapons.
Then he saw it. A brief distortion in the air had heralded every appearance, bluish-white and gone almost before the cameras could properly notice it.
His blood ran cold.
Professor Haywire’s technology.
For weeks after the Madison attack, the PRT had combed through every piece of equipment recovered from the aftermath, trying to understand how to better use the works of the crazed tinker. They had made little progress, but one fact had become impossible to ignore.
Haywire had never left anything behind by accident.
Every machine had served a purpose.
“No…” The word escaped before he realised he had spoken.
Haywire was dead, which left only one being he knew of who had both the foresight and the patience to preserve technology like this for years before using it.
The Simurgh.
The foreboding feeling that had plagued him since the operation began crystallised into certainty.
She had never left the board; she had simply been waiting for the right moment to make her move.
For perhaps half a second, the aircraft had gone silent. But nobody needed an explanation; the implications spoke for themselves. Then the fliers moved, years of experience ensuring no orders were necessary.
Legend was already gone before the hatch had fully opened, a streak of brilliant light disappearing into the distance. Alexandria followed a second later, the aircraft rocking slightly as she accelerated away. Even Eidolon stepped from the transport without hesitation, descending toward the ocean with absolute confidence.
New Wave moved just as quickly.
Lady Photon barked something to the rest of her family that Armsmaster didn’t quite catch over the sudden flood of communications filling his helmet. It hardly mattered. They were already breaking formation, each heading in a different direction.
Armsmaster was moving before his boots left the deck.
The flight systems engaged with a mechanical whirr, lifting him cleanly into open air. Then, with a muted boom, he surged forward.
There had been a time when that would have been impossible. He remembered countless hours spent chasing the problem, shaving weight from one system only to lose stability somewhere else, compromising power output for efficiency and efficiency for endurance until he had reluctantly accepted that true flight remained beyond the capabilities of his armour.
Then an alien unlike anything he had ever encountered had casually dismantled years of assumptions in a single afternoon, rebuilding entire subsystems faster than he could have explained their original design.
Below, the battlefield had become almost impossible to recognise.
The ocean was no longer just a blue expanse. Water churned around apartment blocks that had no business existing hundreds of metres from the nearest shoreline. Office towers leaned haphazardly against one another, some already breaking apart beneath the waves, while entire sections of road floated among the wreckage like rafts of broken asphalt.
Elsewhere, rooftops drifted upside down. Traffic lights bobbed between overturned buses. A church steeple protruded from the sea at an impossible angle before slowly slipping beneath the surface.
Cars, buses, and streetlights drifted between them, carried wherever the current pleased.
It was a mess.
His display filled with friendly markers almost immediately: Legend, Alexandria, and Eidolon. Three separate vectors converging on Leviathan.
Of course they were.
The Endbringer had never looked more vulnerable. If there had ever been a chance to finish one, it was now.
Armsmaster spared the tactical display only a passing glance before dismissing it.
The Triumvirate did not need him, so his attention shifted to New Wave.
Lady Photon and Laserdream were already pulling survivors from the water. Shielder swept through the flooded streets, using his barriers to hold collapsing structures together long enough for civilians to escape. Glory Girl darted between buildings with startling speed, carrying people toward patches of intact roadway.
A rescue operation had replaced an Endbringer battle almost without anyone noticing.
He adjusted course to Taylor Hebert.
His visor searched automatically, comparing thermal signatures against visual confirmation before narrowing the possibilities down to one.
Far below, the first alien he had ever seen cut through the water with a startling disregard for its nature. She disappeared beneath one partially submerged building, re-emerging seconds later with three civilians clinging desperately to her shoulders. She barely waited for New Wave to take them before diving again beneath another. Every time she resurfaced, more civilians followed in her wake, coughing, gasping, or clinging to whatever remained afloat before they were pulled to safety.
She didn’t pause, didn't once look toward Leviathan, and didn't even acknowledge the Triumvirate’s arrival. Her entire focus had narrowed to the people trapped beneath the water.
Armsmaster found himself exhaling slowly as relief came before he could stop it.
She was alive, and more than alive, she was unharmed.
That alone removed one concern from a list that had grown far too long.
His instincts had been right. The situation had deteriorated, certainly, yet as Armsmaster accelerated toward the flooded district, he found himself believing they had weathered the worst of it.
Surely, from here…
…things could only get better.