"Priority one alert! IT'S BEHEMOTH! NOT LEVIATHAN! Sector CE-7!"

Witches turn almost as one and make the flying equivalent of a sprint for that area.

Sector CE-7 is currently turning into a crater. The creature climbs out, either accompanied by or causing an earthquake, and a few of the nearest capes get burned up from the inside.

The Witches are fast and airborne. They're among the first there. While Dragon's voice confirms that Leviathan has turned and left, the flying artillery capes start firing into Behemoth's skin of obsidian and magma. The subset of front line capes who think they're still front line capes against the new opponent rush toward him. Shoreline defenses are abandoned. Eidolon hangs back, presumably changing out his powers.

These Witches are clearly used to working together, and using their mobility. They ball into tightly packed formations and swoop in to hit Behemoth ten or twenty at a time, from unexpected directions. Most of them use the generic whitish blast, but there are some more exotic blaster specials in there. They prefer to dodge incoming attacks, but flare shields just long enough to block whatever attack comes at them when they can't. It's a shame these shields aren't always strong enough - a couple of them go down, surprised by the sheer force of the first blast of lightning.

After the first couple of barrages most of the Witches pull back, conserving their strength. About half of them are perfectly happy to play courier, carrying blasters into airborne firing positions, evacuating the wounded, or just keeping track of Behemoth's position, reporting what it's doing next. The rest continue their hit-and-run barrages, but Dragon's program should know that they can only keep it up for a few minutes at most.

Gren herself somehow manages to pour enough mana into the combined Knight/Brandish power that the glowing weapon extends almost forty feet as she swings it out. It cuts a swath into one of Behemoth's legs, a chunk the size of a motorcycle. But it cost a lot of mana, a solid tenth of her reserves, and she has to retreat and get healed by one of the visiting Witches afterwards.

(Yvette has decided it's a good idea to tell Tattletale that she's a precog, and discuss tactics.)

Behemoth's leg heals. Not immediately, but fast enough that it visibly makes progress. That injury quickly becomes the most targeted area.

Most of Behemoth's lightning is targeting Witches, if only because that's most of the people in line of sight. But few of them (aside from Gren and presumably Knight) can deal much direct damage. As more capes get to the front, Behemoth is surrounded by barrages of projectiles and the tougher Brutes. Tinkers came prepared for Leviathan, and very few are shielded against radiation. Alexandria flies into Behemoth, and bounces off with exactly the same speed, as if she had been reflected from a mirror. Behemoth starts moving. Slowly, more lumbering than walking, and pausing regularly to zap people or knock over a building. He's moving in apparently random directions, but gradually heads west.


Tattletale's reaction is mostly irritation that they had a precog who can predict Endbringers and only now let her start asking questions, but she immediately starts asking for reactions to "the plan I'm thinking of now" and narrowing down possibilities.

Knight can't extend her weapon nearly as far, and she doesn't dare get close enough to hit Behemoth, blasting from afar instead. There's danger-seeking and then there's suicidal. She's rather annoyed to be fighting an enemy that will kill her just by existing in melee range.

Yvette did not know Tattletale existed until she tried to find the best person-to-plan-things-with, so don't go blaming her! ...After a couple of minutes, one of Tattletale's plans results in significantly less Doom than all the others before it.

Gren makes another pass with her Knight/Brandish combo, aiming for the same spot. She gets closer this time, pulling on Alexandria's invulnurability, so as not to waste huge amounts of mana extending the weapon so far.

Even last time, forty feet was well within the instant death radius. But this is far less expensive than her shields and regeneration.

And tougher, too. She is apparently an interesting enough opponent for Behemoth to bother taking a swipe at. Without checking to see if he hit her he goes back to fighting the rest. One of Legend's beams hits him from above and then erupts from his claws, breaking through force fields and felling a group of capes.

Tattletale jumps on Yvette's steelwing, not bothering to ask first, and points the way to a short girl wearing a doll-like mask. The doll girl is inflating what look like giant stuffed animals and sending them to fight (or at least protect capes from) Behemoth.

There is no rule that cape powers have to make sense.

Gren teleports out of the way of the swipe, appearing some two thousand feet above. She's invulnerable, but her Steelwing isn't, after all. She's back in the fray after thirty seconds to calm down and descend.

"Can't keep doing this forever," she tells her armband, "I've got maybe eight, maybe ten more passes in me." Most of the rest of the Witches are tiring out, too. (A few more have died.) Only about two dozen are still blasting away, most are instead focusing on shields and moving people around.

Yvette doesn't bother asking questions. Not in the middle of a battle. She streams over to Parian. More Witches are ready and waiting if her master plan needs other people moved around.

The Witches are a large force, but the capes are experienced too. They step up. Behemoth is wracked with explosions, most of which he casually shrugs off. During sustained barrage he starts falling over, only to launch a blast of something downward and let the opposite reaction right him. He claps his hands together. The thunderclap rocks the air the fliers are flying in, and some of them lose their stability. Then the lightning resumes.

Tattletale is very much in favor of having people do her bidding. Her own team is only marginally effective here; at least Grue can offer some protection against the monster's radiation. She sends some Witches to collect two parahumans, using her armband to notify them. She and Parian fly off toward the fourth while Behemoth is busy hammering through one of Eidolon's violet force fields.

Tattletale outlines her plan. The doll girl, a man in bulky armor and a square mask, a girl in a deep purple costume with a visor, and Clockblocker.

Behemoth's current tactic is ordinary temperature. Well outside his ordinary kill radius capes are fleeing or dying, armor is melting, and (to those without enhanced perception) the monster himself appears to gimble in the wabe. Anything nearby that wasn't already on fire is now on fire.

Tattletale asks Yvette to say when, and on her word threads launch toward Behemoth almost as fast as a speeding bullet. They curve around him. Some freeze in place. Others bite into his flesh, charged by the same power that made them heatproof. Behemoth roars, not the weaponized roar that liquefies anyone standing too close but an ordinary roar. He starts concentrating lightning at the group that caught him.

Large chunks of Witch-generated ice (which quickly become steam) dull the thermal attack in at least one direction. Only one Witch is still fighting Behemoth directly. She's glowing in a rapidly shifting rainbow of color, which probably has something to do with how she's not dead. All the steelwings exposed are getting pretty badly damaged. Lots of Witches abandon theirs and seek sufficiently sticklike debris to flee on.

When Behemoth strikes back, Citrine Mage aka Grendyne teleports in front of the little group and puts up the widest, toughest shield she can manage. Not very impresive compared to Eidolon, especially with so much mana already spent, but there's something to be said for response time. The other Witches start dodging and weaving with their passengers, only holding still long enough to let them launch a new set of strings every once in a while.

Without Yvette telling them exactly when to fire, some of the close combatants get hit in the crossfire. Parian's control is good, but she can't be looking everywhere at once. These are Brutes capable of going toe to toe with Behemoth and getting back up, and now some of them have puncture wounds.

But it's a very effective weapon. Behemoth slides himself along the frozen threads, as close to the source as he can go until one launched from a different angle bars his way. Legend and Eidolon are blasting him from above, trying to bash him into the frozen threads. Alexandria hangs back and rescues the injured, not trusting even her invulnerability against whatever the cape in purple is doing.

After stopping, Behemoth opens his maw and inhales. Much more air rushes toward him than he could plausibly be sucking in, and the effect is that anything not tied down gets pulled toward him. This includes combatants.

Starshine, the one Witch still fighting Behemoth up close, gets sucked into his mouth. A few other Witches, mostly those who've lost their Steelwings or who were trying to save others, also end up inside the instant kill radius.

The Witch carrying Clockblocker takes a flying cinderblock to the head. She dies instantly, and her, her body, her Steelwing, and Clockblocker fly towards Behemoth as well. Gren attempts to teleport in, to save him before he gets too close...

But she's dangerously low on mana. The teleport fails. She retreats.

Clockblocker stops in midair. Others aren't so lucky.

Behemoth isn't moving. Everything and everyone is being pulled toward him. He stops sucking in air, or whatever he was really doing that gave that effect, but the pulling continues. People and things start falling sideways, in exactly the wrong direction. He's still taking damage, especially from Parian and Flechette when they can coordinate enough to get off a shot, and and barely defending himself. But he's passively causing more damage and casualties than a typical attack does.

One by one, the threads holding him in place unfreeze. He leaps up, catching some fliers within his range. The remaining frozen threads carve off pieces of what passes for tissue.

The Endbringer doesn't land. Alexandria strikes him in midair on his way down, launching him up and away from the capes who can flee the least. Eidolon, Narwhal, and lesser force field creators try to hold him in place while flying artillery strikes from above and grounded combatants strike from below. One armored cape fires a sword at Behemoth. No one said cape powers had to make sense.

Nothing the capes are doing can hold Behemoth in midair for long, he is huge after all, but a few attacks hit and capes scatter before the barriers shatter and the people who put them there are left reeling. Alexandria slams Behemoth into the ground.

Those Witches who can still fly start search-and-rescue. This is also something all of them are familiar with. The Witch healers present are not as good as Panacea, and they're also low on or completely out of mana. All these injured people will have to rely on ordinary care for now.

Grendyne is unconscious for much of the post-battle cleanup, and wakes up some hours later in one of the field hospitals.

When she wakes up, the news is mostly good. It was the shortest battle in a long time, with a much lower casualty rate than is normal against the Herokiller. Scion showed up after the fact, and removed a bit of radiation, but on this battle he was thoroughly outdone by the heroes. And the civilian casualty rate was unprecedentedly low for Endbringer attacks on cities, but that was primarily because of the evacuation. They couldn't have had an ordinary level of deaths if they had left the city alone.

Some reckless volunteers stayed behind in the shelters, and are being deployed to fix the city. Clearing up debris, helping manage hospitals, theoretically marking off what areas are too radioactive to be safe but that mostly just boils down to confirming that Scion handled it.

It's not entirely good. Everyone lost a friend, a teammate, even a nemesis. But it was a victory, the best they could hope for.

Everyone includes Gren, too. Knight is dead. Opera was badly wounded, radiation damage, and lost her magic. Sparky is considering retiring, her mana level isn't what it used to be and it cost some cape their life when she failed to shield him at a critical moment. Thirteen witches out of ninety-seven died, in total.

She notes that the Endbringer fight finished a charge of Dauntless's power. She puts it into her amulet. She cries for a while.

Then she gets up, ignoring the steadily receding burn up one leg and the closing puncture wound in her shoulder, and reports to Aegis that she's ready for doing whatever needs doing, though she'll be low on power for a few days.

Some of the Witches are willing to stick around for a few days and carry things around. Most just want to go home. They're given a few days off and bonuses out of the money the Protectorate promised to the UDF in exchange for their help. The families of the dead Witches get more money.

One Witch buys out her enlistment contract and would like to become a freelance healer in Earth Bet and/or join the Protectorate. (She's 19, and one of the better healers available, but not the best)

Gren helps out with resettling and emergency relief, feeling rather empty about it all. She visits Clockblocker to apologize for failing to catch him in that last attack, and speeds along his recovery a little. Not too much, mana is a bit tight.

This world is insane, and has very high-stakes emergencies. Neuroi, though unpredictable in their exact tactics, at least go down more easily than that thing did. She hopes Dauntless's power will build up to a big enough advantage, over time.

Days pass.

Dauntless' power is increasing the amount of mana she can hold, but she only has so much to go around.

Over the next few days, the city goes back to normal. It's worse in every way, of course, but getting worse is also Brockton Bay's normal.

Most relevant to the Wards is that gang membership is going up, now that there are so many displaced people. The Merchants especially are benefitting, but the city is still standing and functioning enough to be worrying about relatively mundane problems like a higher crime rate.

The unofficial cape truce gradually ends, and the ABB remember their grudge against literally everyone else. Lung isn't rampaging, at least, but there are frequent fights between him or Oni Lee and other villains. The unpowered minions are frequent opponents of the Wards; those fights are generally pretty easy.

Yes, those fights are pretty easy. She tries to use as little mana as possible. Sometimes merely showing up is enough to scare the minions into submission. Her command over the powers she's borrowed recently gradually improves.

One day she asks Aegis, "How the hell are they going to take down Lung, anyway? I know Wards aren't supposed to go up against the big names, but he's regularly getting into fights and killing people. It doesn't sit well."