We still had plenty of evening left when we got the alarm. There was a new monster coming out of the river, and it was big. Bigger than we’d seen in decades. Its giant head, topped with one long horn, was slowly emerging from the Charles River, followed by a bulbous, muscular body covered in bone plates. The average river monster was about thirty feet tall. This one was estimated to be three times that.
Bluestar 7 should have been on the scene first, but no Bluestar team is ever where they’re supposed to be at any given time. My team was back in Dallas, fighting another swarm of rampaging robots with Bluestar 5. Even if they hopped in a car right away, it would be hours before they got here.
“Hey, you guys have been drinking all night,” I said, “is it really a good idea to go on active duty like this?”
“It’s cool,” Dave said, twirling one of his fancy guns. “I shoot better when I’m drunk.”
* * *
“Minerva, this is a cyclops! Yet another monster from Greek mythology! Whatever is summoning these things clearly knows you’re here!”
“No time for why questions,” Minerva said. “All that matters now is how we’re gonna put him down.”
The monster had emerged from the river at one-hundred feet tall, and DMA drones confirmed that it was still growing, getting taller and wider as it walked, like it was feeding on magic in the air, and instead of going south or west like they usually did, this monster was headed north, straight for a hospital, with hundreds of residential homes on the other side.
The monster still had to walk down a quarter mile of open highway, giving us space to fight him and hopefully stop him before he got to any major concentration of innocent people.
They were already evacuating the hospital, but that process would take the better part of an hour, and this big guy could be there in minutes.
A Bluestar shuttle dropped us in front of him and Minerva said, “Kovak, take primary! Tell us where you need us.”
The biggest monster I had ever seen and Minerva was trying to put me in charge? I hadn’t even been with a team for a full year yet, and she wanted me to try and lead one? But what was I gonna do? Say no, and look like a bitch in front of four veteran heroes?
“Um… Yeah, okay. Dave, go for the legs, try to cripple it or slow it down! Lido, use your air stuff to move the civilians. Pick them up and fly them out of the way if you can! Aaron, you can fly, right? This big bastard’s head is a long way up, and if the real thing matches the mythology, the quickest way to kill him is to go for the eye! Try to get up there and burn it out, but don’t get too close! Those are long arms with big claws, and these things are always faster than they look!”
Then I looked to my left and realized I had forgotten Minerva. “Jane, you know the drill, get his attention and keep it on you! He’s not gonna go down fast, so we have to stall him! Distract him and keep him contained while we give these people time to run!”
And to my surprise, nobody argued, nobody questioned me, and nobody had a better idea - they just split up and started doing their jobs, leaving me alone in the middle of the street, wondering what the fuck to do with myself.
The problem with fighting him on the highway was it left me with nothing to climb. I needed to get up to his eye level somehow, and levitation would make me a sitting duck. There were some secondary buildings off to the west, and a line of hopefully abandoned homes we could steer him into, but there was nothing tall enough to get me where I needed to go.
And if I couldn’t climb a building, the only thing tall enough to get me on top of that monster was…
“I’m shooting damn near full power, but this thing has bone plates all the way down!” Dave said. “Everything’s just bouncing off!”
“Keep alternating damage types until you find something that hurts him!” I said. “You don’t have to blow his legs off, just keep him busy and keep him fighting instead of walking!”
Minerva launched herself at him and seemed to piss him off with a flurry of kicks and punches, but whatever those bones were made of, she couldn’t crack them yet.
“Jane,” I yelled. “I have an idea, but I’m gonna need your whip!”
I ran up and joined her at the monster’s feet as Aaron zigzagged wildly in front of it, trying to get a clear shot at his eye.
“You don’t know how to use this!” Minerva yelled, as she tossed me the brand.
“I don’t have to use it,” I said. “You just have to tell your owl everything I’m about to tell you.”
“I keep going for the eye, but he keeps blocking me,” Aaron said, leaving a trail of fire hanging in the air around him as he tried to shoot.
But while he was hovering in midair, trying to sneak a jet of flame into the giant’s eye, the cyclops lashed out and tagged him, sending him head over heels out of control.
I caught him with levitation and set him down on the roof of a house, as the monster shrugged off Minerva’s punches and Dave’s blaster shots to resume his slow march to the hospital.
The Brand of Athena curled affectionately around my forearm as I ran for the tallest building I could see. The rope was burning with Olympian fire, but somehow not burning me as I leapt onto the roof of a building that only got me about thirty feet up. There was no way around it. If I couldn’t climb a building, I had to climb the monster.
I had taken exactly three lessons in calf roping as a boy, and those lessons had been thirteen years ago, but I wound up and tossed like Mister Braddock had shown me, trusting the rope to guide itself, and make up for any deficiencies in my technique.
But there was nothing to worry about. Minerva’s owl was controlling every inch of that rope, and the brand could apparently be as long or as short as we needed it to be. Hopefully long enough to get me all the way up to the monster’s head.
The giant’s body was covered in helpful targets, as I latched the rope onto a protruding spike just above his waist.
I remembered that I used to be scared of heights, as the rope reeled me in toward the cyclops, close enough that I could smell magic and the cloying scent of river moss coming off him, but there was no time to be afraid. No time for anything but to plant my feet in one of the ridges along his torso and throw the rope again, trying to make my way onto the giant’s shoulder as Aaron dodged and weaved in front of it, trying to keep its attention off me.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
I made my way up to its shoulder and watched it get bigger in real time, a weird surge of magic that seemed to enlarge it by ten percent in one go. By the time it got to the hospital, this damn thing would be three hundred feet tall.
I stood on the giant’s shoulder and realized just how badly this next part was gonna suck. I had to get myself dead center in front of that eye, and that meant I would be primary target for this thing for however long it took me to do… whatever the hell I was about to do.
I wrapped one end of the glowing Olympian rope around the cyclops’ towering central horn, wrapped the other end around my waist, and swung myself in front of it, coming literally eye to eye with the big bastard.
My aim wasn’t perfect, but I hit it with an artillery spell and heard a satisfying roar. But whatever that eye was made of, my spell hadn’t been strong enough to burn it or pop it out. And now I was dangling in easy reach of a two-hundred-foot monster that looked like it had just walked off a movie set.
The cyclops reached up with one giant hand, plucked me out of the air and threw me to one side with incredible force.
The brand couldn’t hold me in place without ripping me in half, so it uncoiled from the monster and trailed behind me as I pinwheeled through the air, straight into the side of an office building.
“Fuck!” Lido yelled. “Kovak’s down!”
“No, he’s not,” Minerva said calmly. “Everybody hold position, he’ll be fine.”
“Jane, it threw him through a building!” Lido said.
“Yeah,” Minerva said, snickering a little. “Tim’s gonna be pissed. You guys are gonna see some fireworks when he gets back!”
* * *
And, as she expected, I was good and angry by the time I got back, after cutting myself on three different grades of plexiglass and bouncing off a support column on my way out the other side.
I came back soaring through the sky with the brand in one hand, swinging from flagpoles and lampposts on my way back to the highway. Then I just trusted the owl to extend the rope as far as I needed it, tossed a loop over the horn on top of the giant monster’s head, and let it yank me up to eye level, almost fast enough to make me throw up.
With the brand wrapped around my waist, I cranked up my strength stuff, got right up to the cyclops’ eye, and jammed Cecilia Hardy’s knife in the center as hard as I could.
* * *
Denise Hardy was napping on the couch at B2 Headquarters, trying to ignore the grunts and laughter of her teammates as she waited for the next call, when a sharp, sudden surge from the Hardy knife jolted her awake and brought her to her feet.
Apparently her mom felt it, too, because Cecilia buzzed through on her phone and yelled, “Did you feel that? What the hell is he fighting?”
Denise knew how it felt when Tim stabbed demons with their knife, she had felt that a hundred times, but this was something new, and whatever it was, it was big.
She looked around and noticed her teammates, Blaze, Nitro, and Hunter, clustered around a TV screen, watching something on the news. Minerva was pounding on a giant cyclops while a hero she didn’t recognize was peppering it with laser blasts. Some fire guy was zooming around trying to keep the giant’s hands busy, and some idiot was dangling from a rope right in front of… oh no.
“Please don’t be Tim,” she mumbled. “Please don’t be Tim. Please don’t be… Fuck!” Denise grabbed her Bluestar jacket and yelled, “Dispatch!” into her phone. “Get me a priority shuttle back to Boston, code red!”
Her teammates were still just standing around, watching the fight on the news.
“Hey, this is a huge monster fight like, right next door to us. Any of you assholes want to help?”
“Sorry, honey,” Blaze said. “I got warrants in Boston.”
Hunter looked like he really did want to help, but he shook his head. “The three of us can’t leave Manhattan. Instant parole violation. Say hi to Dave, though. I think we worked for the same guy in Brazil.”
* * *
I hung there while the cyclops writhed and raged in front of me, oddly remembering something Harrison Moore had said to me when this whole thing started. “The card is laminated because you guys get doused in fluids a lot.”
At the time I had laughed, but now I was holding on for dear life as a torrent of blood, pus, and ocular jelly threatened to drown me in midair, splashing like a gooey red waterfall all the way to the ground.
I got a grip on the brand and swung myself into the hole where the giant’s eye used to be. I punched and kicked and tried to dig, but I couldn’t find a way inside.
“The eye socket’s not deep enough,” I yelled to my team. “I gotta go in through the mouth.”
This probably only worked because I was angry, but I used my feet to push off from the giant’s face and let the brand swing me back and forth, dropping me down and building momentum until I was almost swinging over the cyclops’ head.
I gave one last scream of frustration and terror and hurled myself through the monster’s teeth, counting on my wards and my momentum to carry me through. The monster’s jagged fangs shattered and fell away as I tumbled into his mouth and landed on his squishy pink tongue.
It didn’t smell great, but it didn’t smell nearly as bad as it should have, because all the other smells were muted by the overwhelming coppery ozone scent of magic.
I knelt down and felt it when I put my hand on the monster’s tongue. There was an incredible amount of raw magic flowing through this thing, and all I had to do was…
My aura lit up the monster’s head from inside, turning the whole thing into a glowing red jack o’ lantern, with raw white light shining out a pinpoint in his eye socket as I brought the magic in, sucking in every bit of power I could, pulling it, not from the air, but straight out of his body through his tongue.
I reached maximum capacity, and my body started to surge off excess magic in perfect concentric circles around me. Whump! Whump! Whump!
On the ground, Minerva looked up and shouted, “Everybody switch to crowd control, he’s about to kill it!”
“What the hell is he doing?” Aaron shouted, leaving a trail of fire behind him as he dove to the ground.
“No idea,” Minerva said, “but that light show means he’s about to kill it!”
I poured everything I had into an artillery blast and punched it right out the top of the monster’s head, creating a massive column of white fire that splattered blood and meat and shards of bone in all directions, before I jumped out of the monster’s mouth and levitated gently to the ground.
* * *
“Holy. Fucking. Shit,” Lido said, appearing beside me in a woosh of cold air. She turned to Minerva. “Jesus, Jane! You didn’t tell me his KMP score was four fucking digits. I hope you know what you’re doing.”
The media descended on us before the monster’s remains started to fade, with police and camera drones swarming from all directions once they got the all-clear.
I was hanging back trying to make myself look small, and they really only wanted to take video of the others anyway, as Minerva put her arms around her friends, even risking a hug or two, proving that she was getting better at controlling her strength, with or without my spell.
It was the first time I had seen her deeply, sincerely happy, and it filled my heart to watch her, standing there in her jeans and Ronin t-shirt, with her black motorcycle jacket covered in blood and monster guts.
A reporter came up beside me and said, “You look really happy for her.”
“You bet,” I said, smiling into the camera. “Nobody asked my opinion,” I said, gesturing at the four reunited heroes, arm and arm on the highway, “but if I was in charge at DMA somewhere, I would make these guys a team again. And I hope somebody makes a collectible of Minerva in that civilian outfit. I would buy a dozen of those.”
* * *
Two hundred miles away, at the top of HDI Tower, Kyle Cavuto was watching a direct feed from the scene, standing behind a desk with half a dozen other execs who outranked him.
My comment to the reporter would never be allowed on real TV, of course, but these guys could see everything uncensored.
“That cheeky son of a bitch,” Clark said. “Who the fuck does he think he is?”
“It’s not a demand, sir,” Kyle said. “He’s making us an offer. If we give them what they want they’re gonna help us make money off it. A lot of money.”
* * *
Minerva and her friends were still milling around talking to the press when a shuttle touched down and popped its doors open, revealing Denise Hardy.
I ran forward to hug her, and she whispered, “Careful! We’re on camera!”
Embarrassed, I aborted my hug and came around to stand beside her instead. We stood there awkwardly for a moment, then I turned to her and said, “Oh! Did you know you could absorb power directly from a magical creature if you’re standing inside it?”
Denise blinked. “No, Tim, I did not know that.”
“It was pretty cool.”