CHAPTER 43: LEVIATHAN — AFTERMATH
The water was still rising when I reached the waterfront.
Or what was left of it. The buildings I'd memorized from patrol routes were gone—not damaged, not collapsed, but gone. The ocean had swallowed three blocks of infrastructure and left nothing but debris floating in murky brown water. The air smelled like salt and sewage and death.
My lungs burned from running. The hydrokinetic resistance humming beneath my skin felt like a cruel joke now—fifteen percent protection against water-based attacks, acquired through drowning, useless against the devastation around me.
The armband on my wrist crackled:
"Leviathan retreating. Scion intervention confirmed. All capes proceed to medical stations."
Scion. The golden man had arrived, exactly as my meta-knowledge predicted. He'd driven Leviathan off, forced the Endbringer to retreat into the ocean. The battle was over.
But the dying wasn't.
"Dauntless, deceased. Shielder, down. Manpower, deceased."
The names kept coming. I stopped walking and let them wash over me, matching each announcement against the list I'd memorized from a web serial I'd read in another life.
Dauntless was wrong. He should have survived Leviathan—survived to become one of New Wave's lasting members, to grow into his power, to matter. Instead his name scrolled across my armband like every other casualty.
Manpower was correct. That one I'd expected, and the confirmation still hurt.
"Velocity, deceased."
My stomach dropped.
Velocity had survived in canon. I was certain of it—Robin Swoyer, the red-and-yellow speedster, present through the Slaughterhouse Nine arc and beyond. He wasn't supposed to die here.
Wrong, I thought. The list is wrong.
But the list wasn't wrong. I was wrong. My presence had changed things—rippled outward through the battle in ways I couldn't track. Every position I'd taken, every cape I'd drawn attention toward or away from, every second of Leviathan's attention I'd claimed before dying... all of it had shifted the casualties.
I'd saved someone by being where I was. And Velocity had died because of it.
"Aegis, critical. Medical priority."
Aegis was alive. He should have been dead—crushed by Leviathan's water echo in the version I remembered. Instead he was critical, which meant he might live.
One life traded for another. The arithmetic of butterflies.
The loft was above the waterline, but barely.
Water marks climbed the exterior walls to chest height. The first floor was flooded—furniture floating in murky brown sludge, equipment ruined, the carefully organized space reduced to debris. But the anchor room on the second floor was intact, and that was what mattered.
I climbed the external fire escape and let myself in through the window. The space smelled like mildew and rust, the kind of smell that settles into a building and never fully leaves.
[SYSTEM STATUS CHECK][DEATHS: 8][FRAGMENTS: 3/3][— FIREARM HANDLING: 20%][— METAL-SENSE/REFLEXES: 22%][— HYDROKINETIC RESISTANCE: 15% (ENDBRINGER-CLASS)][ADAPTIVE RESISTANCE: +5% WATER/DROWNING]
The Leviathan fragment was durable—the system classified it as "exceptionally stable," with a decay rate far slower than my other fragments. It would last months instead of weeks. A permanent reminder of what drowning felt like.
I sat on the floor of the anchor room and pulled up the full casualty list on my armband.
Seventeen capes dead. Dozens injured. The infrastructure damage would take years to repair—if Brockton Bay survived that long.
I read the names twice, matching them against my mental list. My fingers trembled as I counted the divergences.
Six names that shouldn't be there. At least two that should be.
Velocity. Dauntless. Stormtiger—
Stormtiger was dead. The E88 cape I'd killed a month ago, whose aerokinesis fragment I'd absorbed and later lost. He'd shown up for the Endbringer fight, as villains did under truce, and Leviathan had finished what I'd started.
That one wasn't my butterfly. That one was just war.
But Velocity... Velocity was on me.
The armband crackled with Brian's voice:
"Anyone have eyes on Revenant? He went dark during the second wave."
I keyed the response: "Revenant here. I'm at the loft. Status?"
"Alive. Barely." Brian's voice was rough, exhausted. "Rally point is the parking structure on Sixth. Can you make it?"
"On my way."
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