Now here we stand with their blood on our hands

We fought so hard, now can we understand?

I'll break the seal of this curse if I possibly can

For freedom of every man

So far away, we wait for the day

For the lives, all so wasted and gone

We feel the pain of a lifetime lost in a thousand days

Through the fire and the flames, we carry on

********

*'Medea's in charge.'*

"Where did the Elden Lord go?" Superman asked, face set. Both Eidolon and Strange flanked him, all three looking non-too-pleased with her husband's disappearance.

She didn't blame them.

She was furious he needed to leave in the first place.

"He's fighting Leviathan," Medea lied, not letting her emotions show on her face. "He left me in charge. We're enough for Behemoth."

"Leviathan!?" They recoiled, Strange floating into the air and summoning a phantasmal image of the planet. A point in the northeast corner of the US glowed a pulsing red as it moved steadily toward Brockton Bay from underground. "I can't find it!"

Scrying, Medea recognized. A highly potent scrying spell locked onto the Endbringers. Probably using their dimensional fluctuations, knowing what she did about the Sorcerer Supreme's specialties and looking at this spell's components. This was why the heroes of this world had so much time to prepare compared to the book.

The Endbringers could not prevent magic.

*'This is a trap.' Mikael mentally said as soon as Artoria finshed talking. 'The Endbringers can't deal with magic. There's no way they can breach some of the greatest divine barriers in the world. Not without being let in.'*

Medea narrowed her eyes as she stared at the map.

Where was this 'Stranger' Endbringer?

Unless the mage was not as good as she expected? Or was Mikael wrong?

"Medea!" Eidolon shouted, shaking the Greek witch from her study of the spell. "Where is Leviathan!?"

"Attacking Thymescria," the witch answered, still puzzling over the new implications. "Mikael can do more good there. We need to kill Behemoth."

"How?" Eidolon urged, eyes also on the red dot on the magic globe as it approached closer and closer. The scrying shifted, drawing closer to the one red dot on the globe and shifting to a three-dimensional view of the state and the earth below. The red dot climbed from below the ground at an angle toward Brockton Bay. "It'll breach in less than a minute."

"No time," Medea snapped, shaking herself from her thoughts. Trying to explain the Stranger effect while they were still under it was a doomed project. "Just follow my orders, and we will kill two Endbringers today."

Maybe three, if they could find this elusive Stranger.

*'I need to go.'

'No, you don't,' Medea insisted. 'These are gods! Let them and their people rot! Summon Robin and Diana! They can't stop you.'

'As much as I do enjoy a good fight,' Scathach joined in. 'Doing as your enemies intend is not a good strategy.'

'I either go there, or we leave this world,' Mikael replied grimly.*

"Batman put the Elden Lord in charge," Superman did not look pleased, but he was resolute. "If he trusted him, and Mikael trusts you, then we'll listen for now. What do we need to do?"

"Get Behemoth to the bay."

*'This is blackmail, plain and simple. I ignored them, and less than twenty-four hours later, my Family is under threat,' Mikael explained. 'If I don't bite the bait, they will escalate. They will stop acting indirectly and start moving actively.'

'It will be a war,' Tsunade realized. 'A guerilla war.'

'These are not common villains. These are gods. Half of us could beat most of them, and the other half? They would need escorts any time they were off the Island, to say nothing of collateral damage. We'd be living in fear. I refuse to put my Family through that when I can stop it. And I'm pissed.'*

"I can't do that," Strange shook his head. "I've tried teleporting the Endbringers away in the past. Leviathan, I can manage if it's careless, but Behemoth has avoided every one of my portals after the first time I sent it into space. The only way we can get it into the bay would be through the city."

"You're crazy if you think we are doing that," Eidolon denied. "Most of the south and east are still being evacuated. It's too dangerous."

"He's approaching from the northwest," Superman remained calm, though his frown did deepen at what she was insinuating. "You're asking us to let it rampage."

"No," Medea's smirk was confident, well used to being doubted. She had prepared for this. "We just need to lead it to where the highway passes through the Trainyard. I've turned those three blocks into a trap. As soon as it steps foot there, it will be teleported to the bay."

Behemoth could avoid Strange's spells because the Sorcerer Supreme essentially opened a door between two spaces. An incredibly cost-effective method of teleportation that was reliable and secure.

Medea didn't intend to give the monster a chance to avoid anything. She was going to teleport it directly.

It would normally be idiotic to teleport something so unbelievably dense, powerful, and massive as an Endbringer without an enormous amount of magical power.

Normally.

Mikael might not have boosted her with a command seal, but Medea was still, technically, a Servant. She could use her 'masters' mana so long as it wasn't more powerful than her Spirit Origin without issue. Combine that with all the materials she gathered from the Island's Phantasmal species and her Element?

Medea was sure she could do it.

She might not be as powerful as Artoria, Raven, Scathach, or Diana, but Medea had complete confidence she could take them all on with enough prep work.

Twenty minutes wasn't enough time for any of her best work, but it was enough to set up such a decisive move, especially since the Endbringers lacked the Magic Resistance that would stop such a simple yet effective plan.

*'Let's all go,' Melina suggested.

'Nay,' Ranni disagreed. 'Should we all venture forth, we shall leave this city without true defenders. To the world, we hath just refused to give these warriors the methods of slaying the beast. We must leave enough behind enough of a force to lay the Endbringer low, lest we be vilified or castigated as cowards.'

'I'm only taking Scathach,' Mikael said simply. 'The rest of you are to remain here.'

'I shall also accompany you, Sir Bard,' Priscilla joined in. 'Mine Spirit Ashes hath recovered and are counters to the water beast.'

'No,' Mikael insisted. 'Just Scathach. I am expendable. So long as my main body remains, I can recreate my avatar as often as I want, though getting Amy to make another body will be annoying. If it does get down to a fight, and I lose, I can use my Command seals from the Island. I only have three left, so three of you are the most that can be on Thymescria. You shouldn't have any trouble with Leviathan between you, Robin, and Diana.'

'And the amazons?' Scathach asked.

'We'll see,' Mikael answered, simmering rage in his mental voice. 'Your priority is the safety of you three. Anything or anybody gets in the way of that, remove them.'*

"Behemoth is five miles out!" Strange reported, eyes still on the scrying spell, as everyone's cybernetic bracelets chimed a warning to the same effect. "We're out of time!"

"He'll breach any second," Eidolon said, jetting off towards the northwest.

"How certain are you of this plan?" Superman asked, remaining behind but poised to leave the second someone needed rescuing. Just because Behemoth could imitate Kryptonite didn't mean he wasn't prepared to do his duty.

No matter the cost.

"Completly," Medea answered, uncowed by the intense look in the Man of Steel's eyes. The alien was impressive, but he was no Heracles. "Get him to the bay, and we win."

For a tense moment, the shorter witch stared at the tall man flying in front of her. Medea might not be intimidated, but it would make life difficult if he ignored her instructions.

"Dragon," Superman ordered into his communication device. "Order everyone to direct Behemoth to that location."

"All fighters," Dragon's voice rang out from their bracelets. "Priority shifted from defence to leading Behemoth to the designated zone." A holographic map appeared in front of them all, the mentioned street blocks lit red. "The area has already been evacuated. Safety remains a priority. Good luck."

"Thank you," Medea nodded, taking flight herself. The trap would work even without her present, but she wanted to be sure. Nothing could be left to chance when so much remained unknown.

Superman made to follow her but paused, tilting his head slightly as if listening to something only he could hear.

"It hasn't breached yet," he muttered to himself.

'Mikael's gone in,' Emma reported. 'I can't connect to him anymore.'

*'To be honest, even if I wasn't furious, I would need to go there,' Mikael sighed, casting his teleportation spell. At this distance, he would need to use Ranni's version, not Medea's, which took more time to cast. 'We need information. Desperately. Too many things are happening too quickly. Too many coincidences.'

'What do you mean?' Glynda asked.

'Last night, we captured the Faery Queen,' Emma answered instead. 'Right after that, the gods try and forcefully teleport Mikael away. After that, he runs into Valeria Richards, accompanied by a fake Reed Richards. When she asks for help to "save the world."' They could all hear the air quotes in her voice. 'Behemoth attacks the same place that is attacked by Leviathan in the book. Then Leviathan attacks an Island with our Family on it, the same Island controlled by the gods. That is a lot to happen in less than twenty-four hours.'

'We're being kept busy,' Yoruichi said. 'Distracted.'

'Let us not let paranoia create new foes. We had the trip the Thymescria planned for days,' Artoria pointed out.

'And my battle with Ciara was happenstance. A spur-of-the-moment decision. It could not have been planned for last night.'

'I know,' Mikael said grimly as he prepared to teleport. 'Still, ask her about gods. Or anything she can tell us at all about what has the Parlaments scared enough to be working together.'

'You're afraid one of them could be the 'Oppressor' she spoke of?' Medea asked.

'No. I'm afraid that they aren't.'*

Medea's throat tightened, but she continued ascending.

They had known this would happen.

They had a plan.

The plan went wrong immediately.

"Dear god!" Strange gasped loudly, fear and disbelief in his voice, freezing Medea in mid-air.

She whirled, spell circles lighting the plaza a blazing purple.

The threat wasn't here.

On the ghostly globe, the red dot had shifted.

It was right below them.

*'Medea's in charge.' Mikael said right before teleporting, his voice brokering no argument.

'Sir Mikael?'

'I trust you all to know what to do, but Medea has the final say. No exceptions.'

'Why me?' She couldn't help but ask, as befuddled as the rest. 'Artoria or Tsunade would make better commanders. Actually, Ranni or Emma would be better. They have overlooking view of the situation.'

'You are all grown women, intelligent and experienced. I trust everyone to do their best, to make sound judgement calls and not take unnecessary risks. But I trust Medea with what is most important to me. To both of us.'

Mikael looked at her in the eyes and bent down to give her the lightest of kisses.

"Your priority is this Family," he said aloud. "Everything else comes second. Make sure everyone gets home safe."

Then he was gone, leaving her with three confused heroes and an impending Endbringer attack.*

"Everyone away!" Superman shouted, lunging back towards the plaza as fast as he could fly.

It was almost too late.

Behemoth burst from the plaza in a torrent of stone, heat, and death.

If those who remained in the plaza hadn't been the support team, most with mover ratings, everyone would have died.

Only those flying or who had fled as soon as Superman opened his mouth survived the first explosion, as everything within a hundred meters was bathed in nuclear fire.

To many, the warning came too late.

The lucky ones died quickly.

The unlucky ones lived for a while.

An enormous knarled limb of obsidian rock pulled the beast from the chthonian depts. Heat haze shimmered in the air, smoke choking the skies as the Endbringer rose in a waterfall of fire and stone. Behemoth towered over the burning city at nearly fifty feet tall, like a rocky fusion between a human and a bear. Grey skin rippled with rocky crags, jagged spikes and cooled lava, an enormous red 'eye' glowed amidst the flames set on something that looked more like an obsidian porcupine than anything resembling a face.

Around the monster, Brockton burned.

Electricity crackled around the beast, lances of energetic destruction that tore through buildings and people alike.

Superman carrying two young heroes in his arms, flew from the blast, fire singing his cape as his speed slowed, the kryptonite radiation weakening him quickly. Lightning speared at the fleeing trio, but Superman wasn't so weak yet that the electricity did anything more than cosmetic damage to his back.

"Behemoth at the plaza! Zone 4B," Dragon reported from the bracelets. "Kill range at seventy-seven metres. Safety distance increased to hundred and twenty metres or more."

"How!?" Strange shouted desperately, protected by enchantments and shields from the worst of the fire. "It's never been that fast! It was still miles away!"

Even as he talked, he was already in motion, casting spell after spell with a speed Medea would have appreciated if her mind wasn't in frantic conversation with Emma and Ranni.

'Moscow! Beijing! They're under attack!' Emma called to the group.

Medea rose higher and higher in the air, magic circles blasting down a Rain of Light at Behemoth.

Even as chunks of rocky flesh fell away, more heroes died as the Sorcerer Supreme's portals could not teleport them out fast enough. They burned from within, disintegrated by the heat kindled in their bodies.

'Villains? Endbringers? What is going on?' Artoria asked.

Medea didn't have time for this, her limited Observation Haki gave her enough warning to dodge a blast of lightning as she flew higher in the sky. Dozens, hundreds of magical purple circles covered the evening sky as the witch gave up any pretense of holding back.

Anybody who was near Behemoth was already dead anyway.

Her staff pointed at the beast, Rain of Light fell in a torrent of magical artillery blasts, decimating the area and Behemoth, carving further chunks the size of cars from the Endbringer's flesh.

The monster was not still. Tree trunk-sized arms raising to protect its body, it sent a tide of destruction toward the flying magicians. Beams of fire, lightning, and more unidentifiable forms of energy blasted skyward in an instant.

There was no delay between the launch of the attack and it lancing through where they had flown. The pair would have died without Haki or the protective enchantments alerting them beforehand.

'Another Endbringer is attacking Moscow!' Emma reported. 'The fat one!'

'Khonsu,' Medea said, dodging another lance of lightning. She was never so glad as now to have Haki, her C rank agility unable to keep up with the speed of the attacks without the forewarning.

Suddenly Eidolon was in the sky with her, his green cloak shimmering with a forcefield against the heat and radiation. A beam of energy lanced down at the Endbringer, dissipating into nothing as it approached.

"I don't know what happened," the hero reported as he shifted powers. Blades of folded space fell like guillotines, not dissipating as they approached the monstrous engine of destruction. "It was there, then it was gone."

Medea filed that away as she cast her spell.

Behemoth froze as Atlas anchored him in place, foot half raised to shift out of the way of Eidolon's attack. Grey blades carved through silicon flesh, a house-sized fist falling with an earth-shattering rumble.

'Two more have besieged the Chinese capitol.' Ranni continued. 'The tall one, 'Bohu,' makes the city a maze of death.'

'And Tohu?' Medea asked urgently.

'Nothing. It floats above its other, taking no action.'

Medea clenched her fist, frenetic energy sending her mind racing a mile a minute.

*'Make sure everyone gets home safe.'*

More and more grey blades fell upon the Endbringer as the Greek witch focused on keeping it in place, and Strange continued to teleport people away with the reprieve.

Though frozen, Behemoth was still able to send out more lighting, the sound deafening the ears as it shot skyward at the attackers or carved through buildings. Entire blocks of the city disappeared in tides of electricity, and anyone trying to hide or flee burned to death by the heat and the blast.

A spacial blade sliced off an arm. Another carved Behemoth's head in half. A third removed the jagged claws from its remaining fist. None of the wounds healed.

Despite everything, the surprise attack, the destruction of the city, the larger-than-normal output, and the short time of the attack, the combo of Medea's control magic and Eidolon's attacks were tearing through the monster.

They were winning.

Then Behemoth... reset.

One moment Eidolon's blades were tearing it to pieces. The next Behemoth was back in one piece, all separated body parts reattached, completely uninjured and free from Medea's spell exactly where it had breached the ground.

"It healed," Eidolon shouted, shifting his aim and switching powers.

Medea cast Atlas again, and again Behemoth froze. But this time it only remained bound for a heartbeat, violent energy rippling out from it in an explosion that covered its entire body in flames.

The explosion forced all three fliers higher in the sky, and the shockwave aborted attacks and rescue attempts.

The frenzied battle paused momentarily as they tried to reorient their senses through the haze and smoke.

Hundreds of meters below them, in a rubble-strewn circle ten blocks wide, Behemoth's red eye glared up at them, the monster completely uninjured.

Less than a minute had passed since it first burst from the ground, and already half of this district of the city was destroyed.

That was when the first attacking force of heroes reached the battle.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

Blasters rained attacks on the Endbringer. Brutes or Shakers who could resist the heat and immolation launched themselves at the beast, pummeling it with fists and weapons.

Most did little to nothing.

Cyclops' beams curved and hit other heroes as Behemoth redirected their energy.

Starfire's bolts rained harmlessly on its rocky shell.

Green Lantern's constructs barely seemed to hamper the monster's rampage.

Iron Man's missiles fell like rain with no effect from the shockwave or heat. His plasma beams fell like rain but only had the effect of water droplets.

No sort of physical attack not backed by magic, where fist or blade did any damage as the murder machine negated the kinetic force of their blows.

That wasn't to say nothing they did had any effect.

Iceman was instrumental in keeping the Endbringer occupied, the mutant working overtime to counteract the immense heat of the area.

Zatanna forced the monster into increasingly absurd situations with her magic, whether freezing it in place, transforming its attacks into rainbows, or altering its jagged spikes into mounds of flowers.

Eidolon continued to shave pieces off the monster with his grey blades of folded space-time.

It was Stephan Strange, however, that most impressed Medea now that he was freed from rescue duty by the arrival of the other heroes.

The Sorcerer Supreme lived up to his title.

He was everywhere. Dimensional clones refracted over the surface of reality, dozens of them filling the skies with blasts of magic, barriers deflecting and diffusing lightening, muting blasts of sound, or warping reality to hamper the Endbringer's movements.

Watching the battle below her, Medea could understand how these heroes had managed to stave off the Endbringers for so long. If this were a normal attack, they would probably be winning, driving the monster back with every second that passed.

But this was not a normal fight.

Strange cast a spell that ripped the beast's head from its shoulders.

Behemoth reset.

Eidolon shifted powers, transforming into a silhouette of multitudinous light that was painful to look at, and blasted his body through the monster's chest.

Behemoth reset.

With Iceman's aid, Myrddin separated a leg that sent the Endbringer toppling.

Behemoth reset.

Any time Endbringer accumulated significant damage, the monster would revert to its previous state. It wasn't healing, but making it as if the damage never happened at all. If it was trapped, banished or at a dead end, it would be repositioned to an earlier location.

It was like loading a save file in a game, completely undoing any progress made.

The heroes, however, acted as if it was healing and continued to tear into the monster over and over again, losing more and more comrades every second.

They were accomplishing nothing yet did not know it.

Behemoth, not needing to waste energy on regeneration, could spend its power on attacking.

Bolts of lighting turned a half dozen Brutes to ash.

A mighty leap brought a group of flyers within its expanded kill range, and they all turned to charcoal instantly.

Its massive body advanced, steady and unstoppable, deeper into Brockton Bay.

Medea watched it all from the sky, firing the occasional Rain of Light when she could as she tuned out the screams of the dying and the cacophony of sounds.

Too much was happening too quickly.

She needed to think, to plan.

Before anything else, it was obvious they had underestimated the Stranger Endbringer. They had expected it to only focus on keeping the other Endbringers alive, protecting the cores and keeping them from any instant kills.

It was clear it was much more involved than they expected.

Medea understood the logic now that she could see it happening with her own eyes.

The Endbringers focused on attacking and dealing the most damage in the shortest time. The Stranger concentrated on defence, keeping the murder machines going in this much more dangerous world that contained dozens of beings able to possibly kill them.

The division of labour allowed both sides to maintain energy output at a relatively low level, kept the Endbringers safe, and fulfilled their goal as conflict engines.

Medea could practically hear Mikael's voice in her mind, joking about it being an assembly line of death.

The actual voices in her head were much more feminine.

'What's the call,' Emma asked. 'We're still looking for the Stranger. Should we do something about the other Endbringers?'

'Kind of have our hands full with this one,' Yoruichi snarked back. She was working with the Flash and other speedsters on rescue operations for the injured, bringing them to the healer's tent where Tsunade, Melina, and Panacea were. 'Why hasn't the command center reported what is happening there? Some of the people who can't fight here would be good against the others. Let's get the Kryptonians to punch Bohu.'

'The Stranger might be blocking them from outside interference,' Medea hypothesized. 'It would explain why nobody noticed Leviathan moving towards Thymescria despite the close watch this world keeps on the Endbringers.'

It all kept coming back to the Stranger. That was key to this battle.

'Then we must confront them,' Artoria insisted.

Medea flew higher, retreating further from the fight and trying to copy Strange's scrying spell.

'As much as I wish to aid more,' Glynda chimed, voice steady as she concentrated on manipulating rubble with her Semblance and Haki to intercept as many of Behemoth's blasts as possible. 'Worrying about other cities in this situation is beyond us. We already face two Endbringers in this battle, directly or indirectly, and another faces our sisters. We must not bite more than we can chew.'

'I understand the issue, I do,' Artoria continued. 'Attacking them would stretch us thin. No matter my wish to save people, I would not sacrifice any of you to do so. I do not believe it to be a good strategy or wise council to start new battles while one is still being fought. But something urges me. Some instinct warns me that we shall regret it most dearly if we leave them be. Something does not sit right about this whole situation.'

Medea's mind went into overdrive.

She knew Artoria better than anyone else here. The King of Knights might not be the most intelligent or creative of the Family, but when it came to fighting sense, only Scathach, Diana, or Mikael matched her. While the Lancer and Ruler parts of her might not possess the skill, her aspect as the Goddess Rhongomyniad had Instinct at Rank A. It was a sense of intuition so strong that it bordered on clairvoyance when it came to battle.

They would be idiots to ignore her advice.

'We're still being distracted!' Medea realized. 'They only showed up once Mikael entered Olympus. That is way too suspicious.'

'Then what is their true target?' Glynda asked. 'Mikael? Us? The cities they are attacking? What is the goal of all this?'

'No matter what it is, it is not to our benefit,' Artoria said. 'Even if we know nothing else, we can be certain they are acting against us. Whether it is the gods, villains, the Endbringers themselves or some third force we are unaware of, they are conscious of our Family and have taken steps to mitigate our threat to their goals.'

Still trying to recreate the spell, Medea allowed half her mind to fall into memories.

What happens when two paranoid people are given fourteen 'superweapons' in a world filled with heroes, villains, and kaiju?

You better bet they are going to war-game the shit out of anything and everything.

Realization hit Medea with the force of one of Heracles' punches.

A bunch of ideas, plans, theories and 'what-ifs' suddenly came to mind. Who can beat whom? Who is their worst threat? What do they need to fear?

And in a world filled with Endbringers, which ones could they take?

Behemoth was ranked in the middle. Easier than Leviathan and one other but harder than the other three.

'They messed up,' Medea told the rest of the Family, a plan coming together based on many nights with Mikael. 'To spread our forces thin, they did the same. The Endbringers are tough, yes, but not unbeatable. Not when the Defences or we counter everything some of them can do. If we go all out, we can not only interfere with their plans but also get the Stranger.'

'It won't be able to work with them all for long,' Yoruichi followed the train of thought. 'If we can deal enough damage to them, it will expend too much energy resetting them. We will be fighting it without fighting it. It will either have to retreat or give up on some of them to focus on others.'

'That is probably why only five Endbringers are active,' Tsunade postulated. 'The Stranger can only protect five at once. If we kill these before it, there is a good chance more will come online. Ones we do not know about.'

'What is the plan,' Melina asked.

'Safety is still our first priority, but we need to stop holding back as much for fear of collateral. Most of the city has already been evacuated. Tsunade, Glynda, Melina and I will remain here. Artoria, Emma, and Ranni, your roles remain unchanged. Yoruichi, you have Khonsu.'

'Got it!'

'Raven?'

'Yes,' the umbrakinetic answered, speaking for the first time.

She, for all she was one of the most powerful of the Family, had been the most passive in this fight. Raven's role was a trump card in this fight since Behemoth hard-countered most of what she could do. Her job was to teleport the Family if things went bad or finish the job on the core if they managed to reveal it.

'Leave your clones in our shadows for an emergency, but I need you to deal with Bohu. Distract it. Rescue people if you can. Your call if you can attack it or kill it. But your priority is your safety.'

'Understood.'

'What of the other twin?' Melina asked.

'Nobody is to engage with it at all,' Medea ordered, her mental voice deadly serious. 'Until we kill the Stranger and the others, it will be left to its devices as much as possible. If it attacks you, Raven, avoid it. Return to the Island if you need to.'

Thanks to their abilities and the Defences, the Family could fight all the Endbringers with much less difficulty than most heroes, even if the monsters were not holding back.

Tohu, however, was the only one Mikael genuinely feared.

Medea agreed.

*'Medea's in charge.'*

For once, her fate rested in her own hands.

She would not let anyone or anything wrench it from her grasp.

********

Nobody knew what was going on.

A combination of the early morning hours and the winter weather meant most of the streets were deserted. Most people would still have been asleep if not for the ongoing attack by Behemoth and the Endbringer sirens that had called many of their heroes away to fight the monster.

In the grey skies of the morning, the lack of witnesses meant that few saw the grey circle that appeared on the ground surrounding the Duma. The guards and staff there that early only had a heartbeat to wonder what was going on before the seat of the Russian government was engulfed in a cylinder of grey light that stretched from below the ground to the stratosphere.

Outsiders looking into the prison of grey light saw time pass in fast forward.

In less than an eye blink, everyone inside had dehydrated, starved, died, and become emaciated corpses.

Their bodies rotted and turned to bones in the second blink.

The third blink saw them wither to dust.

The fourth blink and the State Duma collapsed into rubble as the ravages of time undid its careful construction.

The fifth blink, and nothing remained but rocks and dust.

The cylinder of grey light vanished, and above what was once a symbol of Russia floated the monster.

Few survivors in the area saw what happened and lived to tell the tale, but the innumerable cameras that surrounded the area caught the appearance of the Endbringer.

It looked like a fat, malicious feral Buddha of black and white.

Smaller than Behemoth but larger than Leviathan, Khonsu was broad and menacing. Its face was a snarling mask of jet black, teeth glimmering with silver-white light. From its chest up and waist down, its body was a series of jagged black waves and curls, with jagged spikes and fins jutting from its limbs and interspersed with stripes of white energy that curved around its body like a tiger's stripes.

Its torso was a perfect sphere around which the upper body rotated, and six circles of grey energy, each at least three meters in diameter, floated lazily.

The Endbringer floated above the city for a long moment as if daring anyone to come to challenge it.

Six circles of grey energy lit up.

Columns of temporal power lanced out for miles, carving swirling paths of destruction and ruin wherever they passed. Buildings crumbled. Cars disintegrated. People died.

By the thousands.

Like a demented disco ball of death, Khonsu carved his existence into the world atop the dust of what was once a great city of mankind.

To Russia's credit, even with the surprise attack, it only took what heroes remained a few minutes to reach the fat Endbringer and try to lay siege to the monster.

They all died.

Trapped in cylinders of accelerated time, nobody survived long enough to lay a hand on the monster destroying one of the most populous cities in the world.

It wasn't their fault.

They were all that was left.

Their hardest hitters, toughest Brutes, and fastest Movers were all half a planet away, fighting for humanity as a whole. Upholding their duty even though they were trapped in schemes and powers much greater than them.

More than that, the defenders were fighting blind, unaware of what they were dealing with and the specifics of Khonsu's abilities.

The worst of Endbringer attacks was always when a new one first appeared. Heroes were unprepared, needing to learn how to fight a new threat, so deaths rose disproportionately compared to later fights.

Ignorance kills.

Knowledge is bought with a currency of corpses.

Moscow was paying that price.

********

Yoruchi Shihouin ran.

She had left Brockton Bay, Behemoth and the east coast behind in less time than it took to blink.

Shunpo was an advanced shinigami technique that focused on maintaining the fastest speed possible in the fewest steps needed to maintain that speed and control directional changes.

Yoruichi had earned her title of Flash Goddess by being the fastest Shunpo user in her world.

Within ten steps and a fraction of a second, Yoruichi was halfway across the Atlantic.

When she had first fled to the human world a century ago, Yoruichi had timed how long it would take her to run around the globe. Using all her techniques except those with side effects and running along the equator only took her thirty-six seconds.

But she was not the same Yoruichi she was a century ago and a world away.

After the first ten steps, the former captain transformed.

Black fur covered her back and limbs. Black scales linked like armour over her hands, feet and chest. Black wings formed, like segmented blades, not along her back but linking her arms to her side in a manner similar to a bat made of swords. A long, sinuous, barbed tail covered in spikes and jagged fur sprouted behind her. Her face elongated into a draconic snout, eyes glowing with white light as she crossed through the night under the glow of Ranni's Dark Moon.

Between the tenth and eleventh steps, Yoruichi had transformed into her dragon form.

She was the smallest dragon of the Family and one of the only ones that could not fly.

But Yoruichi didn't want to fly.

She preferred to run.

And she had plenty of experience running on all fours.

But, even as she reached Europe with her eleventh step, she still was not done.

Her power gathered around her, Kido condensing around her so densely that it entered the visible spectrum as crackling white electricity. She wrapped it around herself, further enhancing her speed with the familiar energy of her Shunko technique, a mastery-level ability known only to her and her disciple.

And Yoruichi still wasn't done.

Unlike most of the Family had spread their time training on the Island to various disciplines. Either sparing, getting a handle on their aura enhancements, learning their semblances, or getting ideas or knowledge from the massive library.

Not Yoruichi.

She might be a booze hound, a cat in heat, and an irredeemable prankster, but she was also one of the Family's deadliest.

She had devoted all her focus to one subject.

Haki.

The twelfth step placed her over Russia.

Black Armament Haki solidified over her scales. The white lightning of her Shunko flared with black energy as Yoruichi imposed her Will on the world.

The thirteenth step landed her in Moscow.

In sight of her target, Yoruichi finished her preparation as her Shunko lightning, already half-dyed black by Haki, condensed around her in her ultimate technique, a combination of her natural abilities, her expertise in Kido, and her speed.

The black dragon became more feline as the lightning formed her body into that of a beast.

Shunryuu Kokubyou.

A beastly goddess clad in lightning.

There was no fourteenth step.

********

A black-clawed fist wreathed in black-white lightning crashed through silicone flesh, the snarling face of an angry Buddha collapsing into nothing as Khonsu was punched downward.

KABOOM!!!!

With the force of a bomb, the Endbringer slammed into what was once a seat of the Russian government, cratering the city with the force of its bulk and the power of the attack.

The impact was cataclysmic, sending dust and debris flying as the entire city shook with the shockwave.

Yoruichi did not let the success of her first strike slow her down for even a moment.

Lightning crackled along her claws as she let loose an absolute flurry of blows that drove Khonsu further and further into the ground, deepening the crater and shaking the city with each impact.

Every punch, claw, or kick carved deeper and deeper into the sphere that surrounded Khonsu's core. Layers of defences, alternating physical material and glowing forcefields were pulverized as the shinigami tore into the monster with enough force that neighbouring cities recorded earthquakes as high as 5.2 on the Richter scale.

Shockwaves spread closer and closer to the Endbringer's core as Haki emitted in waves, destroying the layers of defences from the inside even as her punches decimated the outside.

Even the denser and denser layers of the Endbringers could not stand up to the force exerted by the combination of draconic power, advanced Haki usage, and Yoruichi's Shunryuu Kokubyou, all impacting it over and over again at sub-lightspeed.

She wasn't Speedforce fast, too low Tier still to match the Flash at his best, but she was damn close.

Rabid, euphoric joy filled the feline dragon as she dug further into her prey.

Had Khonsu been alone, Yoruichi might have killed the monster by herself in the first ten seconds.

But Khonsu was not alone.

As Yoruichi carved through a third of the sphere body, her prey vanished below her.

Khonsu was reset, floating above the massive crater that once housed its rotund body, completely uninjured.

A circle of light fell.

A grey cylinder rose from the crater, trapping the former captain in a zone of accelerated time.

Yoruichi gave a lazy, feline stretch, arching her back and eyed the outside through the wall of temporal power.

To her eyes, it looked like someone had clicked pause on the outside world. Motes of dust were frozen in the air, the clouds were stationary in the sky, and Khonsu did not move in her vision. No sound but the crackle of her lightning permeated this frozen world.

It should be noted that Khonsu is, to most, one of the most dangerous Endbringers when not holding back its full powers.

Unless someone had some way of halting their ageing process, a Breakers state or the equivalent, that could be maintained indefinity and had no need for food or drink, anyone trapped in one of the cylinders of accelerated time would die as decades passed in seconds.

Time claims all eventually.

Shinigami were no exception. They might live much longer than most mortals, but age and time would ravage them eventually. It was what made Baraggan such a threat during the Winter War in Yoruichi's home world.

To the Family?

Khonsu was an annoyance at best.

Those bound by the Catalogue did not age and did not need food or drink. Mikael could move without restriction, so he didn't even need to worry about being trapped and bored. Neither did anyone else if Diana was in the area as she used her Element of Freedom on those around her.

But Yoruichi was not a Dragon of Freedom.

She didn't need to be.

Khonsu was no Baraggan, and no Shinigami would fear being trapped in one of its accelerated time chambers. The dead did not follow the rules of the living.

Any material that lacked a spiritual component had no way of trapping those whose bodies were spirits.

With an idle scratch, Yoruichi simply stepped through the wall of grey light, fazing through it as she could any wall not made with spiritual or magical construction.

Sound returned, the screams of the citizens of Moscow, the rumbling from the aftershocks of Yoruichi's opening attack, the sirens, the wails, and the crackle of black-white lightning.

If Endbringers could feel emotion, Yoruichi liked to think Khonsu was staring at her in stupefied surprise. In her mind, its mouth fell open in exaggerated shock, its eyes bulging from its face with cartoonish astonishment.

Not that it had time to be surprised.

No sooner had she stepped free of the zone of accelerated time than she was pummeling the Endbringer once more, a second crater forming from a new impact site as she beat the monster to smithereens.

Khonsu reset.

Four of its six fields of accelerated times shined on it as it sped up its own time to try and keep up with her.

It was not enough.

A third crater.

This time Yoruichi focused on trying to spread her Haki deeper into the layers of protection, bypassing the defences to try and attack the core directly.

Khonsu reset.

And fled.

Yoruichi yowled in anger as her prey disappeared from the skies above Moscow.

'The Vatican,' Emma called in her mind.

With a blast of black-white lightning, the dragon disappeared from Russia and appeared over the remains of the world's smallest country, carving a massive chunk from Khonsu with her claws.

It reset and teleported away again.

'London.'

Yoruichi crashed the Endbringer into the Thames River.

Reset. Flee.

'Mumbai.'

A massive angry Buddha crashed through the dust of what was once the Shree Siddhivinayak Temple.

Reset. Flee.

'Seoul.'

The city shook as an enormous body cratered Namsan Mountain Park.

'Toronto.'

'Find that damn Stranger!' Yoruichi called back mentally as a lance of grey energy turned the bottom of the CN Tower to nothing, sending the sky-scraping edifice tumbling to the city below.

Draconic legs kicked the Endbringer into the sky, clouds parting from the force of the impact.

Reset. Flee.

'We're trying!' Emma answered urgently. 'Just do what you can. Cairo.'

Desert turned to jagged shards of glass as black-white lightning ravaged Endbringer flesh.

'Any clues yet?'

'I'm recreating one of the Sorcerer Supreme spells,' Medea answered, interrupted briefly by Emma telling Yoruichi of the Endbringer's appearance in Los Angeles. 'It locks onto their dimensional signature. I thought I could find it since I wasn't impaired by its protection, but it's not showing up anywhere on the planet.'

'Istanbul.'

Yoruichi tore gouges meters long in silicone flesh as Khonsu crashed through a freight ship into the sea of Marmara.

Reset. Flee.

'Rio.'

'Either this Endbringer is the only one who managed to deal with magic,' Melina said. 'Or it is not on the planet.'

The most deadly race in history continued across the world.

Khonsu would teleport somewhere and have enough time to get off one or two attacks thanks to its accelerated time, then Yoruichi would be on it again, ripping it to shreds at speeds most could not even see, let alone react to.

The individual attacks were not debilitating to any one place, certainly not to the degree the Endbringers usually caused, but to humanity, as a whole, it was like death by a thousand cuts. The death toll mounted with each passing second, each new city, every new tragedy.

Yoruichi had never been faster, able to circle the planet in seconds, but even she could not destroy the fat Endbringer fast enough to prevent the thousands of deaths. The delay between losing sight of the Endbringer, Ranni or Emma finding again and reporting it to Yoruichi was simply fatal to a world unprepared for this type of quick, deadly, hit-and-run warfare.

Khonsu could not even fight, let alone kill Yoruichi, but neither could she slay the beast when every injury was reset to nothing. She had done enough damage in a minute to kill any Endbringer twelve times over, but nothing lasted more than a second as the monster fled to the next target.

A battle of attrition was being warred in the skies of the planet. Every second that passed, more energy was drained from the Stranger, even as more of the earth, of humanity, was bled by each successive teleportation.

And so, the most deadly game of cat and mouse passed in flashes of grey, black, and white between the Endbringer of Time and a Dragon of Speed.

********

Unlike Brockton, trapped in the throes of twilight, or Moscow, beset in the early hours of a winter's morning, the sun was high in Beijing when the twins attacked.

Like Moscow, the people living there were unprepared and taken by complete surprise.

The first indication that something was wrong was when the earth shook in a ripple, expanding from the Forbidden City to cover the entire city in a twenty-mile diameter.

Twenty million people stumbled.

It wasn't an earthquake, an explosion, or the aftershocks of an impact.

It was the feeling of the ground under your feet falling a few inches.

From that tiny drop in height, unsteady buildings collapsed, cars crashed, and people fell to their deaths.

The screams were starting well before the population saw the Tower.

In Worm, the key to defeating Tohu and Bohu was to stop them before they ramped up. Preventing escalation was paramount to keeping the death count down when fighting twins, as the Tower progressed through four fazes, each more deadly than the last, and its sister, the potentikinetic, chose different superpowers one after another till it maxed out at three.

Bohu did not ramp up.

As soon as it appeared, it built its body drawn from the surrounding city. Root-like structures at its legs pulled the stone from below one of the world's largest population centers, sinking it lower in an outgoing ripple even as it tore apart the Forbidden City, one of humanity's most famous monuments, to build its body.

In seconds Bohu, the largest Endbringer the world had ever seen, towered over Beijing at five miles tall. It was humanoid in appearance but only as a character of humanity. Like someone had taken an already tall woman made of stone and stretched her well past the point of what was acceptable, her head five times as long as it was wide.

Blank stone eyes loomed over a doomed city from above the clouds, as tall as Mount Everest.

Tohu was a speck in the blue sky. The world's smallest Endbringer did nothing but float above the towering form of its sister, three heads still clear of any indication it had chosen powers to copy.

The shadow of this monster, so massive as to blot out the sky, sent the city into a teaming frenzy of fear, shock, and panic. Screams filled the sky as people called for aid, shouted for help, or stared in silent wonder and awe at a monster so giant their minds could hardly grasp the reality in front of them.

The quick-witted tried to flee either on foot or in cars.

It was already too late, though.

The first change, after the initial rumble and fall that built the Tower, was the walls.

Massive, fifty-foot edifices of stone, ten meters thick, surrounded Beijing ten miles from Bohu in every direction trapping its population in a cage.

Then the city started to move.

Walls shifted. Ceilings bent. Glass shattered. Buildings folded. Apertures were blocked. Streets were rearranged, shuffled, tucked over themselves and scrambled in such a chaotic melee confusing enough to make an M.C. Escher painting look like a child's crayon drawing.

Like Moscow, some Supers had remained behind for defence or because of incompatibility with Behemoth.

They, too, were trapped in Bohu's maze of death.

The vast majority still lived, trapped in sepulchral halls, narrow confines, claustrophobic buildings, streets wrapped like pretzels on themselves, or in long tunnels of darkness.

The screams continued, but no sound escaped the tombs of stone and steel.

In five minutes, the Tower stood in the center of a city as silent as the grave.

Every second, thousands died.

Crushed, smashed, smushed, suffocated, impaled on stone spikes, fell into pits and deadfalls or slipped on ground artificially made supernaturally smooth.

Panicked people scrambled desperately for escape, for freedom. They threw themselves against doors that didn't move, windows blocked by stone, and walls that closed in on them. Bloody fingers from cracked nails scraped over cement, searching for any way out as ceilings fell.

In a testament to the power of an Endbringer unleashed, Beijing and its twenty million inhabitants would become a graveyard in under an hour.

The once proud and beautiful city would remain a monument to the helplessness of man against the might of these machines of death and destruction.

But in that city that had become a tomb, Shadows stirred.

Hidden from Bohu, who perceived the world through tremors and vibrations, darkness spread through the depths.

Those who noticed the encroaching wave of pitch-black redoubled their screaming, scrambling against the walls for an escape that would never come.

In the face of the encroaching dark tide, none who lived escaped.

Occasionally, very rarely, some survivors would swear they saw four red eyes in the dark, alight with hellish power and malevolent amusement as they were swallowed in a sea of pitch.

********

On an island hidden in the Mediterranean, a war for survival was being fought by a people abandoned by the gods.

In an evacuated city, blind heroes fought a war with the first of a host of monsters.

The world's deadliest race was run through the planet's skies, a war of speed and attrition.

From the depths of the largest grave the world had ever seen, a war of shadows was fought for the lives of millions.

All these battles, all this death and destruction, all the hopeless struggles against a doomed fate were but the death throes of a dying world.

For only when one world ends can another be born.

And the new world's first infant cry was two words spoken by the Goddess of the Chill Moon into the mind of her twelve sisters.

'Found it.'