Chapter 51: End's Beginning

Guardian

a Worm/Destiny Crossover

Chapter 51: End's Beginning

This is how it starts.

A – let's call it borrowed – hotel conference room packed near to bursting with people; the larger-than-life figures of parahumans stood shoulder to shoulder with the intentionally homogenous in military dress. Against the walls were a plethora of rumpled, exhausted reporters replete with cameras and tablets full of questions. There were even, though they were few in number, some older men and women in dark, carefully groom suits that could only be politicians.

Taylor was by far and away the youngest person there. She was eternally grateful that her new armor had a full facemask. As she stood, trying to vanish into a shadowed corner by staying as still as possible, she wondered why exactly she'd been invited – told, really, who says no to a PRT Director? – to something as important as this.

This being the mission brief and planning of the assault on Ellisburg. She really had no business being here. She had a good vantage point from here, too. Could see the entire room. She found it comforting. Or maybe reassuring. She could keep an eye on things from here. After a few minutes everyone began to find their way to seats at one of the many round tables scattered around the room. As they did, a large projector screen descended from the ceiling to drape in front of the back wall. She heard the projector whir into life and someone begin to walk towards the podium.

By their footsteps, she took them to be a man. By the utter silence that followed them, she took them to be important. By their broad shoulders, impressive height, and most tellingly their blue-and-white bodysuit, she took them to be Legend. As he approached the podium, she felt...something. A mix of awe and the emotional equivalent of ' where have you been, all this time?' . Resentment, maybe, that he only bothered to show himself now?

That wasn't true, though. He had been there. Right from the start. He just hadn't been where she'd fought, bled, and killed. Part of her held that against him. Maybe if he'd been there in the stadium, in the city, all those soldiers wouldn't have died. If he'd been there, what would have happened to the people he'd saved?

He reached the podium as the projector cast the satellite image of a walled-off city onto the screen. When he spoke, his voice was deep and carrying; a warm bass rumble that called for attention. "Thank you all for coming. Let's begin."

=+= Chapter 51: End's Beginning =+=

The film was taken from one of the many, many aerial surveillance vehicles above Ellisburg. The detail wasn't great; if anything flew lower than two thousand feet or so they would be shot down. Not by the military or by Dragon, but by these huge, conical, flora-like constructs that fired spikes the size of school buses at near-supersonic speeds. So by that circumstance, what film they could get wasn't quite capable of great detail. What was being shown did not require viewing in great detail.

"What you're seeing took place over the course of five minutes. The anomaly occurs in the last half-second." Legend's voice echoed in the silent room. On screen the mutated, neon-colorful, Seussian city was first ringed by a circle of what looked like gray stone. The angle changed, showing the stone rise up and curve inward. It changed back to overhead as the stone closed into a dome over the center of the city. True to his word, in the instant before dome fully formed there was...a number of different things.

A single frame of static.

A ripple of unease down Taylor's spine.

A flare of green light.

A fractional image of something, and the dome closed. The sequence of events played out again in frame-by-frame, now visible to those without enhanced senses. Legend continued. "This sequence has been subjected to painstaking analysis by, frankly, everyone. The only point of similarity they could find was in the work of the by-now infamous Tinker Professor Haywire. For those of you unaware, Haywire was sentenced to life in the Baumann Facility for attempting, and nearly succeeding, to open portals between dimensions. It is because of him that we are aware of alternate Earths and that the Yellowstone National Park is now irradiated. Needless to say, the comparison was not well received."

From the weight of the silence in the air, Taylor judged it not being well received here, either. The information about Haywire, while not exactly reassuring, wasn't what weighed heavily on her in those moments. No, that dishonor went to that little flare of green light. More specifically; its familiarity. There was a part of her, that part that was all instinct and Light, that knew the meaning of that flare.

It meant 'Enemy'. Capitalization intended.

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The assault on Ellisburg would be carried out in three parts. The first; bombardment. Taylor watched it happen from the hotel's roof. She and a half-dozen other parahumans bore witness to the fact that while they may be able to bend, skirt, or otherwise violate the laws of nature, those laws still held considerable potency. The false thunder of artillery rumbled and falling shells howled as they descended on the dome. Even here, five miles from the wall, the explosions were visible. Seconds later, the roar of detonation washed over them.

"Is it working?" A man peered at the distant, dimming flare. He wore a bespoke suit and a domino mask. At his side was a long, thin-bladed sword. Next to him floated a green-haired woman in a black dress and no mask. She folded her arms and shook her head.

"Don't be stupid. A construct like that would take more than one attack to – " her words were washed away by the second salvo of artillery striking home. "– of course, if they'd just let me take care of it like I suggested, we'd already be done!"

"Of course, dear. But it would be bad form to keep Uncle Sam and his doughty fighting men from doing their part."

The two of them bickered quietly – and on occasion, not so quietly – as the gathered parahumans watched the military batter the dome with all its mustered firepower until, after a half-hour passed, the thunder stopped. The distant city stopped flaring with exploding ordnance, and a heavy silence fell. It seemed for a moment as if the rest of the world's noise had faded away beneath the thundering drums of artillery. The buzzing, half-dead air conditioning unit behind her sounded whisper-quiet to Taylor's overloaded ears.

Her eyes were keen, superhumanly so, but even they couldn't pick out detail at five miles, so she asked one of the parahumans who'd thought to bring binoculars if she could borrow them for a moment. She could, it turned out, and focused them on the distant edifice of smooth, gray stone.

Smooth no longer, she saw. Craters had been blasted into its surface; some as small as a person, others as large as buildings. Cracks like canyons ran across the surface and it didn't take her long to find the widest of them. A great, vertical tear that, as she watched, began to run and spiderweb smaller lines away. She imagined the sound of rendering stone as pieces began to crumble, falling inward. Slowly, and small pieces at first, until they were breaking off in great chunks like calving icebergs and a breach was opening in the face of the dome.

"Well." The well-dressed man sounded satisfied. The woman next to him looked otherwise. "I'd say that's that, then."

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The second phase had a much more complex name, but essentially boiled down to what Taylor called it in her head; firestorm. With the kind of pinpoint accuracy that could only come from either superhuman aiming skills or computer programming, a series of bombs would be launched through the breach. The payload of these bombs was a hellish blend of napalm, Greek fire, and some kind of Tinkered mix that was supposed to burn everything. Even water. She'd had her doubts beforehand, but now...

Not so much. There was something about how gouts of amber-red flame were belching from the breach, how the howling screams of something within being consumed by fire and agony, how it just kept burning, that did those doubts away. It was hard to argue with evidence when it was right in front of you.

Beside her, Lily whistled. "That is...really something, huh?"

Taylor nodded. "Yes. Yes, it is."

The pair of them were watching the conflagration on a tablet that Lisa had – let's call it borrowed – from the command center. Taylor took no small amount of pride in how valued her girlfriend's skills were by the higher ups. Some of the them really were high up. Like, Joint Chiefs of Staff high up. It was...it was really something. Hard to say what, exactly, but. Something.

"You think your girl will get in trouble for snagging this?"

Taylor shrugged. "Things are so crazy right now, they probably didn't notice." After a moment, she felt compelled to add. "And she's not my girl."

"Uh. Taylor?"

"I'm her girl, and don't you forget it." From within the breach came a mushroom cloud of inky, black smoke. A roiling cloud of ash that meant something real big had just given up the ghost. "Whoa. What was that?"

"No idea." Lily watched in silence for a moment, before asking, "You still planning on being in the third wave?"

Taylor looked away from the tablet to see her friend chewing on a cuticle. Worry had drawn her brows together. "Yeah."

Lily swallowed. "Be careful, okay?"

"I will."

=+= Chapter 51: End's Beginning =+=

The third part; extermination. The part itself had two phases. First, unmanned mech suits remote piloted by Dragon and specialized Tinkers would enter the breach. Their objective was to clear any debris and form a beachead inside the dome. The second phase was Taylor's. Well, not just hers, but it was the one she'd be part of. Every battle-themed parahuman – which was most of them – worth their salt would be right behind those mechs. All those people, all that power, with a single purpose.

Wipe Rinke and his monsters from the face of the Earth.

Most of the attackers had or were their own weaponry. For those otherwise inclined, the armory had been opened. The conference room had been repurposed; long tables stacked with magazines, weapons, crates of bullets and grenades of all calibers and flavors. There was a section devoted entirely to knives that she spent a long time at, letting her fingertips dance over the sharp steel until she found one that felt right to her. It was a KA-BAR, a brutal and simplistic thing that she loved immediately. She pulsed Arc Light down its edge for a moment, enjoying the dance of blue-and-white lightning, before sheathing it and moving on.

Her pistol, ever reliable, rode on her thigh. She took a satchel and began filling it with speed loaders of ammunition. Several boxes of shotgun ammunition followed her choosing of a short-handled, pump-action 12 gauge. It was slung around her back, leaving her hands free for same model of assault rifle she used in the stadium distraction. A dozen magazines later her satchel was full and she was ready.

Not long after that, and they were moving out. She let the flood of people carry her to the staging area, feeling solid and weighted. Ready, all the way down to her bones. No time for fear, now. Doubt and worry, she let it all wash away. As people trooped into the land-based transports that would carry them to the breach, she made a promise to herself.

No matter what, it ends today.

=Chapter 51: End's Beginning =+=