"In a minute I'll want to be airborne so if some loon is trapped on a roof I can grab them and move them. I'll leave you a bot for comms." Her shoulderbot settles on his shoulder.

Vista hops down into the trench, bending space to make the trenches deeper and narrower at the top. 

"Can you loan me one as well?"

"On its way." One zooms out of the city to land on her head.

Vista runs along the floor of the trench, folding space to speed up her movement, deepening the trench as she goes.

Lorica has a message from Dragon:

"Can you hook your bots up to this communications network? We're giving out armbands hooked up to it to to everyone else."

"Let's see if I can do that with field tools."

She can, turns out.

Then she can hear Legend's brief pre-battle speech, as the rain starts beating down on the city.

"We owe thanks to Dragon and Armsmaster for their early alert.  We’ve had time to gather, and that means we have just a few more minutes to prepare and brief for Leviathan’s arrival, instead of jumping straight into the fray as we arrive.  With this advantage, some luck, teamwork and hard effort from everyone, I hold out hope that this could be one of the good days."

Legend is a good public speaker, his tone commanding attention even though Lorica isn't in the room with him.

“But you should know your chances going in.  Given the statistics from our previous encounters with this beast, a ‘good day’ still means that one in four of the people in this room will probably be dead before this day is done.”

“I’m telling you your chances now because you deserve to know, and we so rarely get the chance to inform those individuals brave enough to step up and fight these monsters." Legend says, going over how anyone and everyone can die in an Endbringer conflict and briefly going over the abilities of Leviathan that the assembled capes may have seen in videos, before moving on to provide more information.

“I will tell you what you may not know from the videos.  He feels pain, he does bleed, but few attacks seem to penetrate deep enough past the surface to seriously harm him.  He is like the other two Endbringers in this respect."

“What sets him apart is his focus on water.  You’re likely aware of his afterimage, his water echo.  This is no mere splash of water.  At the speeds Leviathan can move, surface tension and compressibility make water harder than concrete.  He also has a crude hydrokinesis, the ability to manipulate water, and there will be water on the battlefield.  We believe that this is what lets him move as fast as he does when he is swimming.  Faster than he is normally, far faster than any speedster we have on record.”

“Were it just that, this fight might still warrant a show of force like what we’ve gathered here.  But things are more serious than that, which brings me to our primary concern.  As much as Dragon and Armsmaster’s advance warning might give us the opportunity to make this a good day, other issues threaten to make it just the opposite.

“I spoke of Leviathan as a hydrokinetic.  I can’t state this enough – Leviathan is primarily a hydrokinetic on a macro scale.  There is no better illustration than the days where Leviathan won." Legend says, listing some of the worst incidents - where hundreds of thousands or millions perished, multiple cities lost beneath the waves in a matter of hours. Legend discusses the mistakes they made those days.

He pauses.  “We have since classified the locations the Endbringers target as either hard targets or soft targets.  The hard battlefields are where we stand our ground, buy time, wear him down.  The soft ones are locations where we cannot afford to do this.”

“Brockton Bay, this location, is a soft target.  The city was originally founded at this location because of the proximity to the coastline for trade routes and an aquifier that provided the first settlers with access to fresh water.  This aquifier, essentially an underground lake beneath the city, is our weak point.  From the moment Leviathan shows himself, we expect Leviathan will stir and manipulate this underground reservoir to erode the surrounding sand, silt and rock.  Add the tidal waves from above, with the resulting tremors and impacts…”

Legend continues, going over tactics for the fight.

He pauses briefly towards the end of his speech, the rain coming down harder than it would in any natural storm.

“You are doing a good thing.  The greatest thing.  This is why we are tolerated, why society allows and accounts for the capes that walk the streets and fight in its towns.  Because we are needed for situations like this.  With your assistance, we can forestall the inevitable.  Your efforts and, if you choose to make them, your sacrifices, will be remembered.”

It's a good speech, if a little higher on the tangents than she would have gone herself.

She's scared, but - not that scared.

He can't be worse than the Simurgh. The worst he can do is kill her.

The rain intensifies and waves began to approach from the ocean - breaking apart as they flow into Lucien's trench system and away from populated areas. For now.

Even if Lorica can see through the storm she won't easily find any civilians still outside.

One of the things she was prototyping for seeing through Grue's darkness incidentally works great on rain! But yeah everybody is in their bunkers or holing up indoors. Even someone who didn't hear the sirens or notice any warnings since then would need to be crazy to go out in the weather. Her bots let her know when there are things to do, consolidating debris that could slam into somebody on the tide, repairing a broken down van full of what are probably illegal migrant workers trying to get out of town because it's faster than trying to convince them they'll be safe in the shelter.

Lucien uses his power to dig water out of his trenches as they fill with rain and sea water. He focuses on maintening them as best he can while still expanding them along the coastline - farther than he'd gotten permission for earlier, beyond the city limits. Anything to spread out the impact of the growing waves.

A single gigantic wave spikes out of the ocean, only a few dozen feet across but at least a hundred feet in height. Lucien's trenches do little to stop the solitary wave as it collapses onto the building where the heroes gathered.

The van is jumpstarted and sent on its way to Providence. May it find any such thing.

Now that he's here Lorica expects to spend the fight grabbing injured heroes out of the water before they drown and bringing them in for Panacea.

Forcefields protect the building as the capes evacuate. Lucien's trench digging pauses as he's moved but resumes shortly afterward.

Leviathan is illuminated by a flash of lightning for a moment, near the docks, before leaping into an assembled group of heroes. Messages of capes down or dead start streaming in. One of the capes is backhanded by Leviathan, sent crashing into the muck half a block away, alive but down.

Half a block isn't enough margin but Leviathan will, if he's going in nearly any direction, be out of there in two seconds, which is more time than it takes to drown. Lorica hangs back.

Leviathan stays and fights, at least for a few seconds, moving away but slowly - a block, then two...

What is the point of being a speedster if you are going to take multiple seconds to get down a block?

When he's two blocks away she drops down to grab the downed cape.

Leviathan breaks away soon after - darting further in the city and away from Lorica.

There are other capes downed by the skirmish, buried under rubble and mud. At least a dozen. 

Fortunately Leviathan had the courtesy to fucking leave, so she can haul them all, first out of the water and then in several trips to the infirmary.

Minutes later a call goes out on the communications network - Leviathan is near a cache of Bakuda's bombs which they're priming for detonation now. Keep him there if at all possible but make sure you're at least a block away whene they go off in 85 seconds - a countdown will notify you if you're in the blast zone. It's unknown what durability would be enough to survive it.

Force fields, lasers, and waves of distorted space barrel down towards Leviathan to try to pin him down.

Lorica gets a message to be prepare for the area to be unsafe for her to enter for search and rescue even after the bombs go off.

Understood. Her bots clear out of the area too.

With 60 seconds still to go until detonation, Leviathan seems to realize something is up. He starts trying to press forward through the crowd of capes, tanking more of their attacks rather than dodging them. It's slow going for him, with some combination of capes working together to turn the air into a viscous fluid around him. Still, h won't be in the blast zone at the end of the countdown at this rate

Lucien is teleported in by Transit - a 50 story tall office building the only thing between them and Leviathan.

He reaches out to touch the side of the building, his palm pressed against the brick and mortar.

Fissures crack open in the outer walls as his power traces the perimeter of building. A few of the furrows break through windows and into the building, branching to dig scores of paths across the first floor, each of the furrows branching further to race up pillars and supports inside the building. 

As more and more of the buildings support is decimated by his powers he focuses on the side of the building near Leviathan, weakening it in particular. Capes, informed by the armbands, back away as the building starts falling on Leviathan. Transit teleports Lucien away moments before a thunderous crash reverberates through the city.

Leviathan is buried beneath the rubble.

Oh well done Lucien! And Dad! She doesn't clutter the channel with it, though, just keeps up the search-and-rescue for people who thought their water-handling solution was good enough and it wasn't or who have floated out of the blast area.