The Face of Courage 1
Kazuki Minamoto
We appeared in the middle of the park, courtesy of Strider. The rain beat down on my back with a solemn, almost oppressive weight. Each raindrop was a herald, announcing the promise of Leviathan’s arrival.
All around us, the local capes gathered in their respective factions. I’d never met them before, but I knew who they were: Protectorate, New Wave, Empire Eighty-Eight, Undersiders, Travelers, even the ever-distant Faultline’s Crew. Everyone was here, ready to defend their homes.
Next to us, Legend glowed like a lighthouse in the dark. His light was as much an emotional bulwark as it was a physical shine, the light of hope to buoy our spirits. He rose into the air and took charge. He called us brave, but I didn’t feel that way. I just… I just wanted to make a difference. I couldn’t bring myself to sit idle while such a pivotal moment passed me by, not when I could change things.
Real talk? I could admit it to myself: I was scared. Maybe waking up in Worm with a drill-shaped pendant clenched in my fist was supposed to mean something. Maybe there was a reason the Spiral swirled in me, called to me and filled me with ideas of giant robots and space-faring gunships.
But that didn’t mean I felt ready. The first thing I did with the drill was to toss it into a nearby stream, for all the good that did. That responsibility, the burden of embodying humanity’s indomitable spirit, I hadn’t wanted it. Even now, sitting inside Lagann’s bathtub-sized cockpit, I didn’t feel brave; I felt out of my depth.
I separated from the New York contingent. I recognized Jouster and Flechette, Prism and Ursa Aurora. I’d worked up the nerve to come here and rendezvoused at the muster point, but I wasn’t one of them.
Rain ran down my shades, making the world appear like reflections in a funhouse mirror. Still, I didn’t take them off. It’d taken a long time to find the angled, translucent orange that reminded me of Kamina’s. They were my domino mask, a signal to everyone, myself included, that it was time to man up.
Mouse Protector appeared next to me, no doubt having marked Lagann while we were standing so close. She and I were the only two independents who made it to the muster point on time. Or, more likely, we were the only two who were suicidal enough to try.
“Heya, how’s it going?” she greeted. Even had she not introduced herself, I would have had no trouble picking her out of a crowd. The armored, knightly mouse-themed heroine was the most recognizable independent. “I’ve gotta ask, what’s the deal with that face?”
I tapped Lagann’s metallic cockpit and gave her my best cocksure smirk. “Eh? It’s a face. I ride in it. I’m not sure I get the question.”
“Yeah, but… Why just a face?”
“Lagann. Its name is Lagann and it’s supposed to be like this.”
“Oh, because I wasn’t sure if you were finished building this or not. No offense, but… this really isn’t the place to be with half-finished tech.”
“I get you. Thanks for looking out, Mouse. I wish I had something bigger, too,” I admitted, a vision of a robot that dwarfed the very universe filling my mind. Never mind Leviathan, even the depressed, golden idiot wouldn’t be a problem, then.
“Hey, no problem. Us indies gotta stick together, you know?” she said with a cheery wink. It was a little dampened by reality, but she still managed to make it look plucky and earnest. “Between you and me? No one’s ever really ready for their first endbringer battle. I’m not sure I want to meet the kind of idiot who thinks he is.”
“I’ll just have to make do. We can always use more capes for search and rescue, right?”
“Right. How durable is that thing? I mean, it doesn’t look very mobile and you might get hit by a flash flood even if you’re not in the thick of things.”
“Don’t worry, Mouse. Lagann’s as durable as my manly spirit,” I said with a confidence I didn’t really feel. It was true, but that didn’t mean Leviathan didn’t scare the shit out of me.
“That’s not really an answer. Brutes have it the worst in these battles,” she said quietly. “Movers like me? We can run. Brutes can’t. And well, they either take it and walk it off, or…”
“Or they don’t,” I finished for her.
“Right. Uh… That’s kind of a downer, sorry. Be careful, okay, new guy? It’d be a shame to lose a brave one.”
“I don’t feel very brave right now.”
“Yeah, that's the secret. Me neither.”
We fell into a companionable silence. Gone were the jokes and childish puns. This wasn’t Mouse Protector, the silly joke hero with her own children’s show. This was the inaugural Ward and veteran cape who’d been at this for well over a decade. She stood with a steadfast presence that helped ground me.
Soon, Aegis came along. He had a box of armbands he was handing out. I studied the boy, a year or so my junior. I knew this story. He was supposed to die here. I wasn’t sure how exactly, and this battle was likely to be very different from the one I’d read about, but his death was one of many things I hoped to change today.
I watched Mouse take one with a familiar, bittersweet smile. Copying her, I began the registration process.
Dragon’s voice, gentle with a slight, Canadian accent, came from the armband. “Please state your name.”
I took a deep, fortifying breath. Unbidden, my hand went to the pendant now lodged inside Lagann’s ignition. It returned to me no matter what I did to lose it, as if it was telling me that only I could fill Simon’s shoes. I imagined that I could feel the spark of evolution, that infinite Spiral, coursing through me.
Kamina was the bravest man I knew. He never gave up. He never backed down. He was someone who made the impossible seem possible, purely through the strength of his personality. He once said that men had eyes in front so we could see the horizon, so we could chase distant dreams.
Yet, he died. He passed his dream on to Simon the Digger, a boy with a quiet strength bellied by doubt. Lagann. Spiral. They were the stuff of fiction. And yet, was I not in a world of fiction? Who was to say there wasn’t more to the multiverse than I knew?
I breathed out. Slowly, intentionally, as if to stoke a fire within. As I waited for Leviathan, I dearly wished I could inherit a bit of their courage. I cast out my doubts and smiled.
“Touki. My name is Touki.”
X
The battle began with a tidal wave. I was told this was a normal thing.
However, I didn’t stick around to see it. I closed Lagann’s dome as a thruster formed from the ass end of the gunmen, lifting me into the air.
Search and rescue was the order of the day. Gurren Lagann could kill an endbringer. Dimensionally folded, hyper-dense crystal lattice flesh? What was that compared to a mole-boy and his drill fixation?
But I didn’t have Gurren Lagann. I had Lagann, admittedly the more important half of the titular mecha, but still just half. At this point, I didn’t fancy my chances against the Godzilla knockoff.
So, I set off inland. Brockton Bay had a population of over three hundred fifty thousand people. Wildbow described it as a small city, but it was still a city. Half an hour wasn’t enough time for that many people to find shelter, not even close.
The endbringer siren drove everyone into a survival panic and focused the entire city’s population on a few dozen, cramped shelters. Some people were fortunate or paranoid enough to have private shelters, but that wasn’t the case for most. And in this panic, the heroes were obviously otherwise occupied. Was it any wonder that people were still stranded in the middle of the streets?
I worked my way up. I found the lowest elevation I could and landed atop a car, crushing its roof under Lagann’s weight. Lagann’s stubby arms grabbed two of the elderly, people who had zero chance of moving themselves. I then opened the cockpit and stretched out the arms, allowing as many people as possible to squeeze in and on the gunmen.
Finding a closer shelter that wasn’t full, or hadn’t prematurely closed its doors, was too time-consuming. I skipped the congested streets, flying them directly to Captain’s Hill. Leviathan wasn’t interested in them; the threat was from flooding and trampling. Hopefully, the higher elevation would keep them safe.
I repeated this a few more times, sparing a nod for the other capes I met along the way. We paid attention to Dragon’s callouts, if only to keep away from the sector with Leviathan. After what felt like forever but was likely only a few minutes, the streets were mostly deserted. People either found their own way to safety or had been assisted by another cape.
Before I knew it, I’d moved closer to the action, or the action had moved closer to me. I found myself responding to downed capes more and more often. As a flyer who had no trouble carrying another person’s weight, and with a high-end sensor suite of my own, I was in high demand.
One such rescue was Velocity, a local member of the Protectorate. The red-suited man gasped for air as I dragged him out of a shallow pond that had formed.
“You good?” I asked as Lagann took us into the sky.
“Fuck, my leg,” he groaned. I glanced over and saw that his knee had popped off its joint. “Flash flood. Car hit my leg when I was trying to get someone out.”
“Are they okay? Do I need to go down there?”
“No, she… she didn’t make it.”
“Got it. Let’s get you to the medics.”
“Thanks, man. It’s bad. Even with the Triumvirate. Leviathan’s gone. The fucker’s damn near impossible to track underwater and he keeps moving sectors.”
“We’ll get you back in this. Hold tight, Velocity.”
X
The medic tent was set right outside Brockton General Hospital. It probably made it easier on local responders. Nurses and volunteers ran over as I landed. Truthfully, there were more PRT than nurses, many doing what they could with their limited expertise. I hoped they were making some damn good hazard pay for this.
They carried Velocity away on a stretcher. Priority treatment for Panacea, which was probably a good thing. As one of the fastest movers around, he could put eyes on downed capes or help track leviathan.
Then, as I was turning to leave, I heard someone shout, “Leviathan incoming!”
At the same time, Dragon’s voice rang out in chorus from our armbands. “Leviathan at the medic center. All capes, please respond.”
I had no idea where the hell he’d come from. A thirty foot tall lizard had no business being that quiet. And yet, here he was, emerging from the curtain of rain like a ghost.
The worst part was that the fucker had no heartbeat, or electrical impulses, or any other way for Lagann to pick up his presence. Lagann could adapt to a need using spiral energy and my willpower, but that at least required me to recognize a need in the first place.
We were caught flat-footed. Too many capes were injured and asking the unpowered troopers to do anything was like asking a hamster to kill a tiger.
“You can FUCK OFF!!!”
The deafening clang of metal filled the parking lot. A shower of sparks covered my vision. I’d moved before I knew what I was doing. Lagann’s fist was morphed into a drill, gouging rivulets of faux blood in the endbringer.
Someone was shouting. Belatedly, I realized that was me. My hands were clammy with sweat. My arms trembled; I could barely pilot Lagann. There was something inexplicably oppressive about an endbringer, a creature so powerful that it sank Kyushu and Newfoundland and was still holding back.
My shout turned into a laugh. It was a hysterical thing, born more from desperation and undeserved battle-high than true courage. I kept laughing anyway, loud and long. I probably sounded like a demented lunatic but I couldn’t help it. I laughed because I was terrified of what I’d do otherwise.
Still, I urged Lagann forward. I was the only one who could right now. None of the capes here were brutes or shielders. If they were, they were here because they weren’t good enough. Like Mouse said, a brute either walked it off, or they didn’t and that was that.
The spiral gauge lit up, an ammonite shell that filled with green-white light from the center outward. With strength I did not have before, I held my ground. Lagann responded to courage and willpower. It seemed my half-assed, fear-soaked desperation was just barely enough. It was the drill that could pierce the heavens, so what was Leviathan compared to a gunmen?
As things stood, holding my ground for a minute or two was as much as I could manage. Lagann was a bathtub on legs. Simon was not a tall kid, but even he was taller. At thirty feet tall, Leviathan towered over the gunmen. I couldn’t even reach the beast’s torso, not that anything but the core mattered.
He swiped me with his tail. I leapt over it, only to land with twin drills that spun in opposite directions. I pinned his tail between them in an attempt to tear it apart. I had to give that up as a bad job when he slammed his claw onto my position.
I leapt back, doing my best to parry the blows. The water echo followed Leviathan’s attacks, but that was one good thing about Simon’s drills. They were always spinning, and so always dispersing force away from Lagann.
I slammed my thrusters forward. No matter what, I couldn’t let Leviathan pass me. My drill found his torso, but his claw found Lagann. The single slash was enough to send me bouncing away like a basketball. I rattled around in the cockpit, teeth clenched so hard I feared they might crack.
With a wordless shout, I rushed in again. I didn’t know how long I traded blows with Leviathan. Seconds? Minutes? It all blurred together into a confusing mess of bone-jarring impacts and screeching metal. All I knew was that I was losing. The sound of tortured metal, the shouts of pain and death from the water echoes I could not disperse, they told me that much.
“Tidal wave incoming,” Dragon said. It was an odd mix of telemarketer voicemail and genuine concern.
“Fucking knockoff Clippy! I can see that! Tell me something I don’t know!” I hollered as Lagann barely ducked beneath another claw swipe. With a thruster-assisted leap, I aimed twin drills At Leviathan’s face. “Oraa! EAT SHIT!!!”
I couldn’t escape in time. The wave was so much closer than I thought it was. Judging distance in the rain, amidst combat, was damn near impossible.
I was swept away; my mini-mecha just didn’t have the mass to ground itself. Before I could reorient, Leviathan was on me. He slammed down with his full weight and I could see a visible dent in Lagann’s dome.
The water echo followed. Time seemed to slow. With a detached calm, I watched as my death approached.
Then, I was elsewhere. I looked down from atop the hospital building as Leviathan’s echo crushed an HVAC unit like tinfoil.
“Shit, that was pretty impressive for a guy in a Mr. Potatohead,” came a voice to my right.
Lagann’s dome retreated and the wind and rain hit me like a sheet. Gasping, I tried to steady the hammering in my chest. That had been far too close.
Turning, I found a young man in a red and black suit, top hat, and a fully covering mask. I recognized him, not because I’d met him before, but because I fucking hated him when I first read the story. Trickster, Francis Krouse, Noelle’s emotional support human and generally an asshole.
“Thanks for the save,” I said gratefully. We’d likely be enemies, sooner rather than later. But whatever else may be the case, he saved my ass in the moment.
“Yup, that’s what I do. What happened to the rest of the mecha?”
“Lagann’s all I’ve got today.”
“Yeah? Well, catch your breath before you do anything else stupid. You bought enough time for everyone else.”
“Not everyone,” I said quietly. Down below, Alexandria was engaging Leviathan with fire support from Legend.
“Eh, can’t save ‘em all,” he grunted. Leviathan lunged for a blaster. Trickster swapped her out for Alexandria, saving the girls’ life.
“Need a lift?” I offered. “I could reposition you if you need a better view.”
“I’m good. I can swap myself.”
Nodding, I flew off the building. Meeting him jogged a lot of unpleasant memories. If Trickster was here, that meant the rest of the Travelers were, too. Noelle was probably in Coil’s bunker, praying things went well for her boyfriend. Dinah was too, praying for something entirely different.
I paused. An intrusive thought wormed itself into my mind. Leviathan was beyond me and Lagann, at least as we were. That much was pretty fucking clear. I could either go back to search and rescue, or… I could go “search and rescue.”
Why shouldn’t I take care of a few problems?
I could kill Coil. And save Dinah. I roughly knew where Coil’s bunker was. Hell, Lagann once belonged to Simon the Digger. Finding precise life signs in miles of dirt wasn’t exactly a challenge.
Or, maybe not? No, that wasn’t right. As much as I’d like to, Coil couldn’t be killed right now. He was Noelle’s hope, the one giving her a reason to fight. Taylor killing him was a big part of what set her off in canon and I could imagine no scenario in which adding Echidna to a Leviathan fight made things better.
But Dinah? Her, I could save. With any luck, I could even pull this off as a stealth mission. It wasn’t like anyone was paying attention to me over the fucking gecko. And without his pocket oracle, he’d hopefully be much more manageable in the future.
There was the question of the endbringer truce, of course. It established a nonaggression pact between heroes and villains for the duration of the battle. The truce was broken several times in Earth-Bet, by endbringer-worshiping lunatics in the past, or in canon, by the Yangban in New Delhi. The results were never pretty and everyone tried to make examples of violators.
Except, was what I was doing even a violation? I wasn’t attacking a villain, merely saving a civilian. One could argue that this was fully within my “search and rescue” duties. On top of that, Coil wasn’t a participant in the endbringer battle in the first place.
It was a gray area, rules-lawyering at its finest, but I thought I could count myself in the clear. Besides, what was Coil going to do? Bitch about how someone rescued the kidnapped little girl from his basement?
And that was only if I was discovered. Dinah could be convinced to keep her mouth shut. So long as no one else saw me, I’d be fine; my reputation was nothing to brag about.
I was an independent hero, a nomadic tinker who drove around in a glorified golf cart. No one knew what Lagann could do because I’d been avoiding Brockton Bay and canon characters like the plague. The most I’d done was reject an invitation by the Adepts in New York and talk shop with Toybox.
Isolating Dinah in Coil’s bunker, rescuing her through multiple feet of reinforced concrete, that was the kind of thing that required information and planning. It was the kind of thing that went so far outside my demonstrated expertise that it’d be hard to point fingers at me. Maybe Tattletale could connect the dots, but that kind of accusation wouldn’t hold water either legally or publicly.
The more I thought about it, the more I felt like this was worth the risk. As Kamina once said to Rossiu, “If you want to do something, do it. If you don’t want to do something, don’t do it. It’s that simple.” And right now, I wanted to save a little girl. I wanted to make a difference.
I headed out to the far edge of the city, away from everyone and Leviathan both. Ideally, no one would see Lagann drill like a mole. Sure, I used a modified drill bit against Leviathan, but this was something different.
Lagann’s thruster twisted and closed, forming a drill that burrowed into the ground like a hot knife through butter. There were dozens of endbringer shelters in a city like Brockton Bay. Some were tiny, only as large as a basement, while others were fully fledged facilities in their own right. One thing they all had in common was that people were crammed inside like sardines.
Coil’s territory was near the center of town. I vaguely recalled something about the Forsberg Gallery, the blocky, postmodern building I’d passed a few times in the air. From there, identifying the biggest hollow space with paradoxically the lowest concentration of life signs was easy. That had to be his base, a “decommissioned” endbringer shelter occupied by just him and his mercenaries.
Dinah was twelve. Maybe Coil employed a midget, but I doubted it. Given she was either suffering from horrific headaches or in a drug-induced stupor, I’d bet anything that she was the smallest, weakest life sign in the whole bunker.
And… bingo. Canon? What canon? Neither Simon nor Kamina would allow themselves to be held back by something like that, so neither would I.
I laughed like a loon as Lagann closed in.
Author’s Note
Yes, Gurren Lagann. This is getting its own collections/thread because I imagine it’ll be short story, probably will stop at the Leviathan fight. This was a commission by the same guy who brought you Stumbling into Victory, my Worm/Yugioh snippet.
I based the MC off a blend of Simon and Kamina. KAzuki MINAmoto, because I’m not very creative. I think early Gurren Lagann works because Kamina’s gung ho attitude plays off Simon’s more grounded personality. A single MC who’s always as over the top as Kamina wouldn’t be a good MC, but nor should he be a sniveling coward.
I decided to start in media res. I usually don’t like to, but jumping right into the action is very on-brand for Gurren Lagann. Besides, Leviathan can’t be the fic-killer if we start with Leviathan first. And at this point, I’m kinda used to writing endbringer fights, lol.
Yes, we’re diving straight to Dinah. He’s playing up the Kamina-esque act. Because… why not? Consequences? What consequences?
Animal Fact: Have one more for the drunk animals list. Chimpanzees in Guinea have been found getting tipsy off fermented palm sap.
On an unrelated note, there is a drink called birch beer native to the Appalachian region of Pennsylvania. It’s basically like root beer, but made with birch bark and sap. It’s not alcoholic and absolutely delicious. I’m kinda addicted to this stuff.