Coriolis was sitting down, reading a magazine, when an attendant came and got him. The hero sighed. Was it time for him to go back out there already? It had probably been 6 hours since his last shift, but it felt like far less time. He had tried to sleep, but it seemed determined to evade him. He doubted he would be able to rest peacefully until this whole thing was over.
And even then, it probably wouldn’t be all sunshine and rainbows. He, and the rest of the heroes here, would have to deal with the mess that popped up in their absence. Most would certainly have it worse than him. He normally protected a small city, located in the heart of the US. There were certainly villains there, but they tended to stay low key. Plus, Coriolis had a power that was versatile enough that most of them would surrender when they saw him, and those that didn’t were generally easily taken care of.
His protegee was managing the city while he was away, and Coriolis didn’t really know how to feel about that. On one hand, he was generally a good kid. Young, eager, fairly powerful, with a lot of room to grow. In many ways, he was the ideal successor, or at the very least, a worthy student.
The problem was, Coriolis didn’t think he was ready to be responsible for an entire city by himself, no matter how small it was. For starters, Dynamis was fairly new at the business. He didn’t have the people sense that years of being in this type of work tended to give you. Not all heroes had it, certainly, but it wasn’t uncommon to find supers who were unusually good at reading people. Some of it was certainly power adaptation. If you spent years of your life trying to get better at understanding behavior, then your power would almost certainly respond, trying to help make that a reality. That was also why almost all experienced supers were unusually fast or tough, even if their powers normally wouldn’t influence their bodies at all.
Dymanis hadn’t had time to adapt like that. He had difficulty figuring out what made people tick, what they wanted, how they were going to act. Normally Coriolis would be there to guide him, correct him, or even stop him, if necessary. Without that safeguard, the potential for problems was far higher than the hero was willing to accept.
Plus, Dynamis didn’t have much in the way of bedside manner. He wasn’t very sympathetic to criminals. It made sense, seeing as what happened to him. They had found him as a boy, while he was in New York, surrounded by the bodies of the criminals that had broken into his apartment and killed his parents.
That formative event had given him a relentless desire to be a hero, but it also robbed something from him. Some sense of empathy that a normal person might have towards one who turned towards crime. It made Dynamis unrelenting, which was a mixed bag. On one hand, it meant that he didn’t falter in the face of danger. On the other, it meant that he would often end up in fights with criminals that could be talked down.
And, at the end of the day, Dynamis was still maturing as a hero. His powers weren’t as developed as a pro’s might be, and he didn’t have as deep of a well of stamina to draw on as someone like Coriolis did.
These things would likely all come with time, but it did mean that the Hero wished he didn’t have to leave his inexperienced protegee alone for so long. Hopefully, criminals wouldn’t see his absence as an opportunity to take advantage of the chaos, but he suspected that at least one person would try their luck. Criminals would often respect events like these ( at least the ones that would end up lasting more than a few years), but in a field made up almost entirely of deviants, some would naturally have no respect for the rules. It was just the nature of the business.
Coriolis thanked the attendant before getting to his feet, placing the magazine onto his chair. He would either be back in a few hours to put it back in its proper place, or he would be in such a state that nobody would be able to complain to him about leaving it out.
The hero picked up his back from the floor, opening it up to perform one final check on its contents. It was a tall bag, stretching nearly the height of his entire body. It was made of a heavy duty material, and covered with straps and padding.
Coriolis took a brief look at its contents,running his eyes over the 6 roughly bowling ball sized tungsten spheres. This was his last set. Normally, he would have tried to use them only when necessary, but at this point he needed to put maximal effort into what was coming up next. He was glad that his supplies were paid for by his Hero Agency, though. He would have trouble justifying these expenses, otherwise. Being a hero in such a small city didn’t pay nearly as much as most people thought it would.
Once he was confident that his supplies were all accounted for, he zipped the bag back up, and slung it on his back. It was far heavier than an ordinary human could hope to carry comfortably, but Coriolis had years of experience to strengthen him.
He took one last look at the building he had called home for the last week. They had placed Coriolis in a different building, originally, but the containment borders ended up growing enough that it had been engulfed and subsequently destroyed. Everybody nearby who they could convince to leave had been evacuated, but some were too stubborn to leave. Mostly the elderly, who didn’t have any place to go besides the shelters, and who often didn’t want to abandon the homes they had lived in for years.
Coriolis could respect their determination, but he still found it unfortunate that this resolve had led to most of their deaths. There were a few others who didn’t want to evacuate either, the truly stubborn, or the one who didn’t trust supers. They were all dead as well, for the most part.
Coriolis started to walk towards his destination, no longer able to justify procrastinating. He beheld the reason he had been flown all the way out here, to North Africa, into the heart of Coalition territory.
A large, black sphere dominated the skyline. It was taller than any skyscrapers in the area. The sphere was made up of an unidentifiable material, one that seemed to absorb all light. It was huge, large enough to engulf any stadium in the world 3 times over.
As Coriolis strode down the empty streets, it grew larger in his vision. He felt a sense of foreboding, in his heart. It picked up his pulse. The hero didn’t normally get nervous, but the events of the past few weeks had given him a new perspective. He was able to make out all of the tiny forms around the base of the sphere, medical staff, superpowered healers, etc. There were also hundreds of guards, armed with automatic weapons. As if those would do them any good.
There were dozens of Hero’s laying on the ground, either injured or resting. Those injured were supposed to be quickly hauled off to receive aid, but the constant workload that the exhausted hospital staff was being put under meant that response times were getting slower and slower.
There were other heroes, those that could fly, that were scanning around the dome, checking for any breaks. Coriolis would be doing that later today, but for now, he was on a different job.
The hero’s head turned when he heard a voice, one that was far too cheery, given the present situation, calling out his name.
“Hey Coriolis! How’s it going?”
He traced the voice to a white tent with the letters WSC stitched into the top. Underneath, a man who appeared to be in his mid 20’s. He had short blonde hair, and an expression that appeared quite carefree. He was wearing a white dress shirt, with slightly wrinkled black slacks. Unlike nearly anybody else in the area, he appeared to be unscathed, free of both injuries and dirt. Even the fliers with no combat applicable powers sported cuts or bruises from rescue missions.
Coriolis felt a spike of annoyance. Here he was, about to risk his life, and this arrogant little brat, who had done nothing during this whole fiasco, was trying to distract him. Normally, somebody like this wouldn’t bother the Hero, but the fact that he sat here with a smile on his face while real heroes died inside the sphere just rubbed him the wrong way.
The blonde's name was Take-out, a pun, one that related to his power. Take-out had the ability to summon plates, in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and exercise mild control over them. Coriolis wasn’t even sure why he was here. Probably a nepo-baby, the child of some trumped up executive who’d put him out here to pad out his resume. The kid was a “hero” for the WCS, but as far as Coriolis knew he rarely did anything even in the best of times.
Steeling his expression, Coriolis met Take-out's eyes.
“What?” he asked, struggling to keep the irritation out of his voice.
Take-out smiled, revealing his straight, white teeth. Veneers, probably.
“I’ve seen you around before. Your power’s pretty interesting, you know?”
Coriolis nodded, unsure of where this conversation was going, and frankly uninterested. Take-out spoke again before the hero could say anything.
“Well, I just wanted to wish you good luck out there. It's a hard job, you know?”
Take-out followed up with a brilliant smile. Coriolis only felt disgust.
“It’s not like you would know” the hero intoned, unable to keep the disdain out of his voice. He turned and walked away, deeming the conversation over.
“Stay safe out there!”
Take-out was apparently unwilling to let Coriolis have the last word. Still, the hero didn’t see much need to fire back. Take-out was apparently unbothered by his unfriendly tone. Whatever. He had bigger fish to fry.
He finally made it to the edge of the barrier. It was even more unnerving up close, an entire direction consumed by darkness. There was a super at the edge of the sphere, hands pressed against it, sweat dripping down his face. He, unlike most other supers, was wearing a uniform in place of a super suit. It had the letters WCS stitched across the back.
The man didn’t notice Coriolis, too focused on what he was doing, so the hero walked up and tapped him on the shoulder.
“It’s my time to go in.”
The man turned his head, and as much of his torso as he could while still keeping his hands on the sphere.
“It’s kind of a mess in there. Calamity started acting up about an hour ago. We think that we’re in the final week, because the behavior matches up with the typical struggles that mark the end of this sort of event. Regardless, be careful. It wouldn’t do to get killed right here at the end just because you let your guard down.”
The man glanced around, before lowering his voice and leaning a little closer to Coriolis.
“And, between us, we don’t have enough fliers. The higher ups in the WCS are concerned enough about the possibility of a barrier breach that they have an unusual number of fliers canvassing it, and quite a few of the remaining rescuers have taken casualties recently. Calamity’s been targeting them.”
That was great. Coriolis would just have to strive to avoid injury, he supposed, if they had a shortage of rescue staff. He nodded to the man to show that he understood. Seeing his signal, the super scrunched his face, concentrating on something. After a few seconds, he turned his head back towards Coriolis.
“It seems that we’re clear. Calamity is about half a mile deep. I’m going to open the barrier now. Just remember, we won’t open it if Calamity is too close to you, so if you’re injured or need to get out make sure that you put some distance between the two of you. Anyways, good luck out there.”
With that, a small patch of the pitch black barrier turned transparent and dissipated, leaving a rough patch in the middle of the sea of darkness. Taking a deep breath, Coriolis stepped through. The opening quickly closed behind him, leaving the barrier seamless once more.
On the inside, the barrier was just as dark as the outside, but it didn’t block light from coming in. It was a weird sight, a sky that was blacker than the darkest night, sitting over land that was as illuminated as the most well lit movie set. It was incredibly disorientating, and had caused Coriolis some issues when he first had to deal with it. He had gotten off lucky, though. It had affected several heroes so badly that they ended up dying for it.
As for the landscape itself, well, it didn’t look anything like it used to. They were in the heart of Ravenna, one of the biggest cities in the Coalition of Allied states. It was a vibrant city, home to nearly 2 million people.
For everything inside the barrier, it looked like the set of a disaster movie. Distant fires spewed dark smoke into the air, burning unabated, with nobody around to put them out. Most of the buildings in the area were destroyed. There were a few still standing, the lucky survivors. However, even the ones fortunate enough to remain standing often sported heavy damage, with large chunks blown out of walls, or dozens of shattered windows.
And that was just the periphery of the city locked inside the barrier. It got more and more hellish the deeper in one went. There was a nearly constant presence of chunks of concrete, shorn from steel beams with great force. Many of the roads were pitted, with frequent obstructions that would make driving impossible.
Everything was damp, the result of thousands of burst water lines. The local government shut them off as quickly as they could, but the city had about an inch of water in any given location.
There were many abandoned cars on the streets, most smashed to pieces, left by owners who didn’t have time to retrieve them. There were also dozens of personal objects littering the streets. Often, they were badly damaged, but several were still recognizable. Coriolis still shuddered at the memory of stepping over a children's doll, stained bright red, at the start of the whole fiasco.
But by far the worst part of the whole place was the bodies. A surprising number of people had managed to evacuate, to avoid the worst of the calamity. Far more civilians had made it out this event than any other. It was still only about half of the people who had lived here, however. It was worse in the center. When the barrier had gone up, only 20 minutes after Calamity emerged, it had been far smaller than it was now. It had also meant that anybody who hadn’t managed to flee the area was trapped inside of it.
The bodies littered the entire area. Most of them were partially destroyed. Thousands of civilian corpses. It wasn’t uncommon to find a limb sticking out from under the rubble, or to trip onto a severed foot. It wasn’t just civilians, either.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.
As jaded as it was, Coriolis was used to seeing dead civilians. He didn’t like it, but in his line of work, it was inevitable that he would encounter at least some. Supers with a certain level of power tended to be too destructive to take down without somebody dying. Generally, villains tried to avoid getting civilians killed, because it would significantly lighten their sentence, but accidents happened all of the time. Which meant, as tragic as it was, seeing a mother or brother laying dead in the rubble just brought on a sense of deep sadness.
It was the corpses clothed in brightly colored clothes, ones far more resilient than any normal material, that distributed Coriolis. He had never gotten used to seeing dead supers. Almost nobody was. It just didn’t happen enough, to make it something you could get used to. Supers had so many advantages over normal people, in terms of staying alive. The fact that they often wore protective clothing, the fact that their powers would often bolster their durability, keep them alive and let them heal from things that would kill or cripple a normal person. The fact that they were trained, competent, experienced. That they had supernatural powers, able to bend the rules of reality. They had people, waiting to rescue them if things got dire, medical staff on standby.
And even with all of that, here, it often wasn’t enough. Coriolis spotted a yellow and blue clad figure, lying on the ground, hands wrapped around a 15 foot steel pillar that just so happened to be sticking through their chest. He recognized the corpse. It was Guardian.
He had been one of the primary heroes for a larger coastal city, Gullsrest. It was unnerving, to see him like that, the helpless expression on his face, the lifeless eyes, the dried rivulets of blood that surrounded his mouth. He had been strong. Extremely so. Coriolis had watched him engage with Calamity twice, and he always seemed to be on top of his game.
Last he had heard, Guardian had been flying rescue, while he recuperated his stamina. Coriolis could hardly reconcile the sight before him. Two and a half decades of service and strength, obliterated in a moment.
Coriolis pressed on, continuing towards the center of the barrier. He stumbled over debris, occasionally tripping, falling onto sharp concrete or dirty water. If he weren’t a super, he would have probably been scraped up by now, covered in cuts and exposed to incredibly unsafe water. Even as a super, his progress was slow.
He could have made the trip faster. Coriolis could fly, in effect. His power let him do so. While it wasn’t what people would traditionally picture in their mind when they thought of flying, it worked to a very similar effect.
He restrained from doing so, however. If the fact that fliers were getting killed in the sky wasn’t enough to deter him, the memory of Guardian's corpse certainly was. It wouldn’t do anybody any good if he got himself killed on his way to the battlefield. The risk wasn’t worth the few minutes he would shave off.
As he got deeper and deeper towards the center of the sphere, he started to hear the sounds of battle. He was probably still a quarter mile off when the noises first reached his ears. It started off as the occasional loud bang. Things that sounded like explosions, or someone crashing through concrete at 300 miles per hour. As he got closer, though, he was able to make out more sounds. The impact of flesh against concrete, flesh against flesh. What sounded like lasers. Screams. Calls for help. And a sound that sent chills down his spine, no matter how often he heard it.
It could technically be classified as a scream, he supposed. But it wasn’t a scream like a human could make. It was far worse. It was inhuman, shrill, grating, but also full and deep. It was loud, as well. Far louder than any person could yell. And it conveyed a different message than a normal scream. Pain, yes, but also rage.
He was probably a tenth of a mile away when he first caught sight of the battle. There were 5 or 6 heroes, surrounding a dark figure. One of the heroes stood back, blasting bright gold rays of energy at the figure. That would be Starshine. He wore a yellow orange costume.
Two of the others, ones that Coriolis didn’t recognize, were busy waiting for the figure to be distracted. When that happened, they rushed in, landing blows that aimed to destabilize the figures' long limbs. They would often succeed, knocking it off balance, causing it to stumble. Sometimes, however, they would mess up, and it would lash out at them. When that happened, one of the other heroes, the one standing on the backlines, would rush forwards in a blur, to pull them away.
This speedster was familiar. He wore a white costume, with a golden wing on his chest. Hermes. It looked like he had been putting the work in. Whenever the figure got too close to landing a hit on somebody, he would rush in and move them out of the way.
It looked like he was reaching the end of his ability to do so, however. Whenever he wasn’t running, he was standing there, bent over, with his hands on his knees, breathing hard. Further evidence of his exhaustion was his speed. Coriolis had seen him run before, and he was normally far faster than what was being showcased right now.
Coriolis finally got a full view of the dark figure. It had long limbs, in a shape that sort of suggested humanity, but any sort of closer inspection would reveal that the veneer of familiarity was less than surface level. It had anywhere between 3 and 15 limbs at any time.
It looked like a bodybuilder gone wrong, with sickly gray skin stretched too tight over large muscles. They rippled and slid in a way that was honestly sickening, with how deeply unnatural it appeared. There wasn’t any fat to be found, and where muscle waned bone stretched the skin even farther. The ridges of its spine stuck out nearly a foot from its back, looking like they would burst through the minimal flesh that covered them at any moment.
The creature, in place of eyes, had deep dark crevasses that dotted its head, pointing in every direction. They were thin, and let out no light, looking as if they were thin portals into the void. There was no way to tell if it was looking at you. Most likely, it could look at everyone around it at once. It always seemed supernaturally aware of where everyone was.
All in all, it was a deeply unnatural creature. Most would call it horrifying, and of those that wouldn’t, many were lying. It was also, according to public knowledge, supposed to have been killed nearly 60 years ago.
Calamity. The being responsible for killing the Peace-Keepers. The single most dangerous entity in the world. Coriolis felt that its reputation was well deserved.
Calamity possessed a laundry list of powers, some confirmed, many speculative. At its full strength, it was faster, stronger, and more durable than all but the strongest supers. It possessed a regenerative capability that was unrivaled, allowing it to recover from any injury it sustained within the minute. It had, of course, a limited shapeshifting ability, and astronomical stamina.
While it had many more minor abilities, there were two that made it such a great threat. First, it could adapt to powers. It was a slow adaptation, at least at the start, but the more an ability was used on it, the less of an effect it would have. This increasing negation was very rarely absolute, but with how strong Calamity was in the first place, having powers become less and less effective against it meant that any prolonged fight was a struggle of titanic proportions.
Its second power was even more troublesome. It was the power that had kept it fighting for 60 years. Calamity had been killed before, multiple times, even. But eventually, it always came back. Nobody understood how. There were only two or three humans who had powers like that in the entire world, and their secrets were so closely guarded that very little was known about how they worked.
What they did know about Calamities immortality didn’t help them prepare much, anyways. Once killed, it would reappear somewhere else between 5 and 25 years later. There wasn’t a way to tell how long it would take for it to re-appear. It certainly didn’t correlate to damage. One of the shortest times to re-appearance was after its complete vaporization by Helion in the 90’s.
There also wasn’t a way to tell where it would re-appear. It seemed to be more likely to appear in about a 300 mile radius from where it had been killed than anywhere else, but this wasn’t a hard and fast rule.
All in all, the time periods and distances at which it could come back made predicting it a mostly fruitless endeavor, at least so far. There were still several researchers trying to figure out how its powers worked, but given how relatively infrequently it appeared, it was almost impossible to derive any data from it. Even superpowered intuition could only tell you so much.
Rookies, when learning about Calamity, often asked why hero’s like Helion didn’t just vaporize it every time it re-appeared. Indeed, Coriolis had felt the same way when he had first learned about the situation. It seemed like such a waste of time, man power, and lives, to send hundreds of hero’s to fight it.
The more senior hero’s, when asked this question, always had an answer. Some took the time to explain it to their more naive colleges. Others, like Coriolius’ old mentor, had simply handed him two incident reports.
The first detailed the first re-appearance of Calamity, in the late 70’s. Helion had been active for about 7 years at that point, and the people in charge had the same thought everyone else had: “Why not use these heros’ incredible power?”
So they did. Helion, who was weak enough at the time to stay in Earth's atmosphere without risk, was dispatched with a backup squad of heroes, to eliminate Calamity. It was the easiest anybody had ever defeated calamity. 15 minutes of blasting, and then it was time for the cleanup squad to come and fix all of the radiation damage.
It had been the second incident report that had answered Coriolis’ question. The higher ups had been thrilled with the success of Helion, so the next time Calamity appeared, you can bet that they sent him right back out, same as the last time.
Except this time, it wasn’t nearly so easy. Calamity didn’t go down within the first 15 minutes. Nor the first 30. In fact, after about 45 minutes of taking the power of a star to the face, Calamity nearly managed to push through the blinding energy and grab Helion. The hero, realizing his power wasn’t having the effect he wanted, doubled down, blasting the abomination with all of his might. It was too late, then, however.
Helion caused immeasurable damage, but Calamity had adapted to his power. It was the most adaptation that had been seen from the being to date. Scientists theorized that it was able to resist Helion’s powers to such a high degree was because he was the one who had killed it before.
Regardless of the reason, the results spoke for themselves. Calamity managed to badly injure Helion, before moving on to massacre the blinded backup team. They were all dead or disabled within 15 minutes, at which point Calamity started moving towards the nearest city.
Local heroes came to respond. Most of them had only very briefly been briefed on what Calamity was capable of. Several didn’t know anything at all. It had been nearly 30 years since its first appearance, and most of the hero’s at the time thought it was long dead.
They were massacred. Out of the three heroes that protected the local city, only one survived. Naturally, hero’s from surrounding cities came to assist. They were often similarly unprepared.
Over 150 hero’s died that day, before they were finally able to gather enough supers to put calamity down for good. The incident took place in South America, down by what used to be Argentina. The resulting crime waves compounded the damage from the fight, causing many of the local governments to collapse.
Currently, a weak federation controls the land down there. Not that there was much to control. Helion’s power had left behind a massive irradiated crater, nearly a dozen miles wide. The worst part of it all was, despite a decades long effort by ecologists and supers from the WSC, it was still tremendously dangerous to people nearby.
There was one positive note to the incident, at least. Figuring out Calamity's ability to adapt helped them plan around it for all future appearances. In fact, that knowledge was an essential part of their current strategies.
The higher ups had scrambled to change tactics after that incident. Now, instead of 1 extremely powerful hero obliterating Calamity, it was tasked to a team of hundreds of weaker heroes, who constantly rotated to wear the being down. One or two extremely powerful heroes would wait nearby, in case of a worst case scenario, to obliterate the monstrosity. They would only act if the majority of assigned heroes were taken out of commission, or if a catastrophic containment breach occurred. Neither of these events had happened, so far, but if Calamity kept coming back, the worst was bound to happen eventually. Coriolis hoped he wasn’t around to see that day.
The public was mostly unaware of Calamities continued existence. There was certainly a fringe group who thought it still alive, but they were mostly regarded as conspiracy theorists and loons. Great efforts were taken to make them appear that way, second only to the effort taken to keep Calamity a secret.
Coriolis knew several heroes who vehemently disagreed with keeping the public in the dark about the matter, but he understood why it happened. The entire system was built on the impression that hero’s were always in control. In reality, it wasn’t quite so simple. The truth was, there often weren’t enough heroes in a city to completely control its villain population. The only thing that kept them from taking over was the threat of other heroes, ones from neighboring cities and those in international teams, coming in to deliver justice. Ultimately, it resulted in an uneasy armistice.
Hero’s had to appear infallible, unopposable. It was important that they were, for the good of everyone. A minority of those with powers were actively involved in the Hero/Villain scene.
But, between the two, there was a crucial difference. It was a lot harder to become a hero, than it was to become a villain. Hero’s had to take classes, receive certifications and training, and were subject to near constant oversight. Villains, on the other hand, could be anybody with a power. If Joe Schmoe awakened the ability to shoot fire from his hands, well, he could start his career as a villain about 20 seconds later. While such a hasty move might mean that said career wouldn’t last long, the fact remained that, even if 70% of supers wanted to be heroes, the amount that would actually make it would be nearly even in number with the amount of villains produced by that remaining 30%.
That was the reason it was so important for the forces of good to project the appearance of strength. Without it, those who were intimidated by the long hand of the law before might find themselves developing unsavory ideas. If that were to happen, even if the Hero’s won, it could mean open warfare in the streets, with potentially hundreds of thousands of dead. It had happened to more than one country who wasn’t firm enough.
Coriolis unzipped his bag, pulling one of the tungsten spheres. He reached over and flicked his radio on.
“Coriolis, here to reinforce. I’m going to blast this guy from back here before getting closer, so you better try and stand back. I think we’d all rather avoid me pasting any one of you.”
The radio briefly crackled, before a voice answered.
“Roger that. Hold fire as we try to move out of range.”
Starshine glowed, letting out a stream of energy that pushed Calamity back, eliciting a frustrated roar from the creature. Coriolis let out a grim smile. He held the Tungsten sphere in his hand, towards Calamity, and felt the motion of the Earth, spinning beneath him. He borrowed some of that, using his power to pull it away, infusing it into the soon to be projectile in his hand.
The momentum begged to be unleashed as he packed more and more of it in. Eventually, he could add no more power to the sphere. Taking a brief moment to make sure his aim was correct, Coriolis let the power loose.
The ball disappeared from his hand. Seconds later, a series of colossal cracks rang out through the air, as the ball was accelerated to dozens of times the speed of sound. A gale force followed in its wake, the violent wind lashing at debris on the ground.
When the tungsten missile struck Calamity, a flash of light briefly took Coriolis' sight away. When it returned, he started to search for the impact wound. It wasn’t at center mass, where he had aimed. Instead, Calamity was sporting a hole in its shoulder, about ¾ the width of a bowling ball.
Coriolis let out a stream of profanity. That wasn’t good. Calamity wasn’t as tired as he’d hoped it would be. If it were still able to dodge something like that, then it had energy to spare. Even more worrying was the impact wound. It was starting to heal already, but he had gotten a good look at it, or more specifically, a good look at its size. It was smaller than the ones he was able to make during his first rotations fighting Calamity.
Were it just its adaptation at play, Coriolis would have said that this was an expected result. But the thing about powers was that, the more you used them, especially in high stress situations, the stronger they got. While he might be long passed his initial two month’s of easy growth, the situation he was in right now was just about as good as it could get in terms of potential for improvement.
Plus, your desires shaped how your powers grew. And Coriolis had been focusing hard on growing one aspect of his ability: its power. Every shot, he tried to make faster, have more impact. He would spend nearly as much of his time off meditating as he could, trying to improve the amount of momentum he could borrow. During his entire time here, he had been intensely training his ability to be more dangerous, and nothing else.
Coriolis had even skipped out on making his body stronger, or more durable, or faster. It probably would have given him a better chance to survive a hit, but he wasn’t planning on being hit. No, he had one goal: To push for the maximum destructive power he could. It was only by inflicting maximum damage that Coriolis felt he could truly contribute.
And it worked. He was more powerful now than when he had come here. That last shot alone was proof enough of that. It had been far faster, and far more destructive than anything he could have done two months ago. Here, in such a high stakes situation, he had grown faster than he normally would in half a decade. His hard work had paid off. Hell, that attack could probably level a building.
But it had done less damage than before. Calamity was adapting fast enough to outpace his focused growth. And if it had outpaced him, then the others were certainly doing far less damage than before.
Coriolis had a feeling that this situation wouldn’t be wrapping itself up anytime soon. It would be another few weeks of peril, it seemed.
With a grim look on his face, the hero reached back into his bag, pulling out another tungsten sphere.
Well, there was nothing to be done about it. Coriolis would just have to make these last few shots count.