Garrick woke from his stupor, pulled himself upright from the computer desk he smashed when he landed, and surveyed his dark surrounding with his gauntlets at the ready.

The building groaned under the strain of what it had been put through. This floor itself was the torn-up scene of a previous battle, with ice clusters and scorch marks abound.

Above he remembered as he looked up for a sign of attack. He snapped a blast to the creak he heard behind him only to freeze a cabinet. Loose wires sizzled with open currents. He turned on night vision, then thermal vision.

No, the target only needs to escape. He may have left the building by now, in fact, he could use their teleportation to leave easily.

How long had Garrick been unconscious? To stay here might be a waste of time. His connection was still severed from communicating with drones and Knights, but the direct link to the FatMan was still intact. With some concentration, it could be used as an envoy to the outside while the LittleBoy remained inside so that Garrick could be in two places at once. Then there was still the vigil and Tartarus—

The Gator burst out of the ground to uppercut Garrick into the ceiling, caught the suit his the shoulder, then body slammed Garrick through this floor and the next, deeper into the building where the light could not reach.

The Gator stood up to dust himself off while the LittleBoy spun onto its feet. At this close distance, the LittleBoy's gauntlets opened their coils, shimmied with electricity, and launched a jab that was caught by hand followed by another that met the same fate.

Under a grasp now, the gauntlets unleashed their full energy to break free. Torrents of lightning lit up the room, but rather than stun the target, the thrashing light painted a demonic visage.

The Gator began to crush the gauntlets. The metal splintered and cracked. The coils sputtered out. Garrick buckled to his knees in pain. LittleBoy diverted the energy to prime the core, but as it began to fire, a rising knee to the bevor sent the laser aiming up to form stalactites on the ceiling.

Garrick stumbled back into a water cooler. The Gator broke off the largest of the stalactites. It held the ice under its arm like a lance and drove the spike straight into the LittleBoy’s core. It shattered on an impact that launched LittleBoy through the cooler and wall into a room with windows.

The LittleBoy stammered back on its feet again. Wet. Shaky. Core cracked. Gauntlets busted. All that, and Garrick still stood back up.

“Good. That is the way. Rise as many times as you must. No matter how painful it gets.”

Garrick threw a hook that The Gator avoided with a turn of the cheek. Garrick attempted more ragged hooks and swings, each of which missed by a hair. One last tired punch was deflected. The hand that did so slid up Garrick’s arm to deliver a chop to the nape that rattled his whole body. Garrick was about to fall over but was caught by his gauntlet.

‘ Imagine you’re trying to swat away a swarm of mosquitoes. They’re biting you all over, and you’re just flailing trying to get them. Then you get hit by a car. ‘

I should have taken Hannah’s advice seriously. Forget a car, this guy is—

Garrick was pulled up to be hit with a cross that blew half his helmet away.

—stronger than a titan.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

The LittleBoy landed on a desk, metal splinters and glass shards lodged in Garrick’s numb face. He was pulled up by his greave once again and tossed across the room into the window frame which bent in its breaking to barely support his weight. Once more, he was half outside the building and a running dropkick tossed him out entirely into freefall.

What rocketed out of the building down to meet him was the Fatman suit which opened up to catch the LittleBoy. Fully locked in now, Garrick flew back up with the boisterous rocket thrusters and primed the Fatman’s full arsenal.

I underestimated him. That thing can’t be allowed to escape. I need to stop it here.

Every bullet, bomb, missile, and rocket in the Fatman’s vast arsenal was unleashed in a volley. Salvo after salvo of munitions dumped in a deafening cacophony that would demolish an entire towering building to ensure the death of one man.

As lumbering as it was, the Fatman had always acted with as much precision and efficiency as it could afford. A barrage like this, however, came from fear. The beacon of Olympus, the seat of his power, was torn apart by like a gangrenous limb being amputated.

Spinning through the air out of the crumbling ruins was an axe that struck into the Fatman’s breastplate, piercing through it into the LittleBoy, and gashed into Garrick’s ribcage. The volley was stopped dead but the damage was done. The tower began its collapse into rubble. The Gator bounded across falling chunks to make its leap onto the FatMan.

Together they plunged into a hellish landscape wrought by hailing debris and rising ash. The FatMan skid across the grass to a stop. The axe was pulled out to be tossed aside. The layers of breastplate were torn open and Garrick was wretched out of his armor.

Behind the Gator was the destruction of Garrick’s own doing. Garrick was turned around to be forced to watch something worse: the first two entities returned on a rampage, backed up with reinforcements. The Immortals had strange carbines that spat red lava. Bullets barely staggered them. A new entity, an ebony statue with unholy wings, used its feathers as knives that slit throats with romantic deftness. That one must have been the devil itself.

“Look, Wasi’chu,” said the Gator, “you’re world is dying.”

The ebony devil came to Garrick, its feathers still at work behind it. From its own flesh, it dragged out a scroll with unrecognizable inscriptions.

“They’re having trouble in Tartarus. Shouldn’t we just kill this guy and get going?” asked the ebony devil.

“We are here to teach,” said the Gator as it wrapped the scroll around its knee, “The best lesson we have to offer,” it raised Garrick above its head, “is humility,” and dropped his back on its knee. The inscriptions faded off the scroll in a puff of smoke to engrave themselves on Garrick’s broken spine. He could not even muster a scream.

“We got a problem student coming up real fast,” said the ebony devil.

GalvanGal bolted down with thunder in her wake. Garrick was thrown towards the fighting and she course corrected from the pair to catch Garrick in her arms.

She hurried to set him down around the corner of a garage and checked his pulse. It was slow, but it was there. She was no healer, but she gave some of her energy to stabilize him until he could be brought to Aaliyah. For now, she would have to stop this chaos.

She rounded the corner of the garage to see a golem charge at her. She brought her arms up to block, but her footing was pulled out from under her by a blue tail. The golem tackled her through the wall and crashed into a humvee hard enough to knock it into a second vehicle. The golem rose up and readied its fist.

“I’m sorry to do this to you, GalvanGal,” said the Golem. It brought its hammer punch down only to have it caught by a hand that crumpled the bone gauntlet. Amethyst eyes glared up at him.

“I’m sorry too.” GalvanGal’s other hand turned to pure energy and jolted in and out of the golem’s iliac. She looked at her hand to find that she had torn away bone fragments and a clump of the black flesh armor that all the other enemies had been wearing.

The golem shuffled away from her. Its actual flesh beneath all the armor was seared where she struck. GalvanGal remembered a second thing had attacked her and rapidly waltzed back to Garrick who was unharmed—not further harmed at least.

She could hear the fighting and shooting dying down on the base. She returned to the garage to find it empty. The attackers had retreated as quickly as they came, and she was left with Garrick’s battered, unconscious body. If that was the case, then getting Garrick to Aaliyah was the best thing she could do right now. She brought up the situation with one of the Knights then picked up Garrick to fly him to Aaliyah.

“His mission is to retrieve Deimos. You realize it, too, right, Hannah?” Aaliyah had said. Of course, she realized it. She pushed it to the back of her mind down to the last moment. But what she saw was undeniable.