“Alright girls and Cyborg, time for planning!”
Cyborg rolled his eyes at the way Alyssa had said that, already used to getting a bit of shit for being the only guy on the team so far. Given that he’d been in touch with Winston and the two had hit it off, it wasn’t actually a sore point, but that just made it perfect ammunition. Enough of an opening to land some harmless teasing and jokes, without causing real offense.
“We’ve been running through plenty of team training for the last week and a half, and we seem to be clicking decently well. We still have some rough edges, of course, but that’s to be expected at this point.”
It was true, and they’d been doing regular post-training breakdowns, so Alyssa wasn’t stepping on any toes by saying what the team already knew. Thankfully, Nico was the youngest member of the team at twenty, and even she was well past the teenage drama phase of trying to poke and prod at power dynamics. The fact Alyssa wasn’t a tyrant either, actively leaning on Talia and Crystal to help craft team exercises, didn’t hurt.
The result of having fairly mature adults, ones who hadn’t hit on any major personality conflict yet thanks to careful recruiting choices, seriously work at team training? Well, they could at least not get in each other’s way while fighting, at this point. Which was pretty damn good progress for the limited amount of time they’d had. Doubly so since they’d also been running minor patrols and a few small raids to establish their presence more firmly. Nothing major. Just enough to keep the criminal element aware they were there.
“That said, we also all agree we need to restart pushing at the gangs. Things have settled a bit, and we don’t want them getting too comfortable. Which brings up two problems. The first, of course, is finding ourselves a target. Yet it’s the second thing that means we need to be extra careful with target selection though. Specifically…”
Alyssa waved at the wall-display of the room and up popped numerous images of Solomon Grundy. No two were of the same iteration, and they showed off one of the reasons the local Endbringer was so irritating. He always came back slightly different, both in strength and power set. He wasn’t a particularly strong Endbringer…most of the time. But he had to be treated like he was, since he occasionally spiked towards being much stronger than normal.
Unfortunately…
“As our one and only Gotham native could likely tell you,” Alyssa waved at Dinah, who was scowling at the images, “it’s a bad sign that it has now officially been four months since Grundy was last taken down. The average over the last two decades has been three months, and each time it’s taken longer than that he’s popped up in an unusually powerful iteration.”
Dinah nodded, shifted, and pointed to one of the larger versions of Grundy in the compilation of images. It only sort of looked like what Alyssa remembered from the few times she’d seen him in animated or comics versions of DC. Yes, he was chalk white, heavily muscled like a super-roided out gym bro, and a bit monstrous looking. That all matched.
The most obvious thing that didn’t match was his size. While Solomon Grundy had always been depicted as large, even the smaller iterations on the screen were twelve feet tall. The one that Dinah was pointing too was even larger, closer to twenty than twelve. There were also growths all over his body, which looked like a sort of ragged chitin armor. Notably, he wasn’t wearing pants. Not in that image, or any of the others.
Which, fair.
Regenerating zombie doesn’t mean coming back with pants. She supposed the comics and other media would have gotten censored or banned, in her old world, if they’d shown the massive swinging dick visible in some of the images on the display. The one Dinah was pointing at was at least covered in that regard, with the ‘armor’ having built over the area. The blonde continued in a low, tightly controlled voice that spoke of bad memories.
“That was the last time an ‘Overcharged’ Grundy popped up. Three and a half years ago. That chitin armor was both tough as hell and regenerated just like the rest of Grundy does. Worse, he was able to control swarms of insects that flooded into Gotham. It took a far larger mobilization that usual to bring him down, and something like 7,000 people died before they could do it. Including my parents.”
Everyone winced, doubly so Alyssa, who most certainly hadn’t known that little detail. Dinah had half-turned to glance at them and must have seen her reaction, as she shook her head and shot a brittle smile.
“Don’t. Even if you’d known, you needed to bring this up, since we’ll end up being the first line of defense if it happens again. I won’t freeze or freak out. In fact, I’ve responded to the last three Grundy attacks, so I’ve long sense gotten over…most of my issues, regarding the monster.”
Another thing that Alyssa hadn’t known, and now she had to consider if it was better to hand this briefing over to Dinah. That must also have shown on her face, as Dinah shook her head. This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
“I don’t know anything specific about him that your research wouldn’t have turned up. Well, not beyond the fact that he does react to my Canary Cry. I was able to use it once, two incursions ago, to lead him off a direct attack on a bunch of civilians. But it doesn’t really damage him, just pissed him off. For damage…well, I’m sure you were getting to that.”
Alyssa nodded slowly, let out a breath, and picked up the thread she’d been originally aiming for. She started clicking through slides of combat against him, showing the effects of various attacks.
“Right. Basics first. All versions of Grundy have some significant super strength, probably on par with my own, serious durability, and regeneration. He is, for lack of a better way of putting it, a horrifying damage sponge that just won’t go down.”
The entire team grimaced as a short clip of an arm regrowing was shown. Other wounds vanished, with varying degrees of speed.
“Important to note is that he’s both most resistant to physical damage and regenerates from it the most quickly in turn. That arm, for example, was cut off by a Hero with a fuck-off huge sword. The sword was some sort of special power-generated thing that lopped the arm off pretty easily. But, since it was pure physical damage, it regenerated in under a minute.”
She clicked over to a new set of slides, which showed a series of energy-based attacks ripping into various versions of Grundy.
“Energy attacks, particularly those that are heat based, are generally considered the best way to deal with him, since most versions of him resist heat poorly and regenerate the damage slowly. Since you have to destroy at least fifty percent of his body to disperse him, using such attacks lets you stack on the damage over time a bit better. Notably, he has one other weakness that’s likely going to make Nico our most effective member.”
Nico nodded at that, seeming to already know where Alyssa was going. She spoke up before Alyssa could continue.
“Magical disruption. He’s directly reanimated by the Green, so he’s a magical construct. That means he’s actually super resistant to magic in general. Buuuttt anything that disrupts magic fucks him up a lot. Powerful dispelling effects, even generated by spells, can cripple him heavily. I can’t just snap my fingers and make those happen, but given space and time to chant I can absolutely cause him major problems. You guys would have to be able to hold him in more or less the same place, though. Which is usually the problem.”
Alyssa smirked at that, switching the wall into holo-mode and bringing up a normal-sized Grundy along with models of the team. She started positioning the models around the Endbringer, with herself and Laserdream circling in the air.
“Thankfully, our particular team is actually well-suited for dealing with Grundy. Frankly, if we’re dealing with a ‘normal’ iteration of him, I’m virtually certain we can take him down without outside help. Laserdream and I can both produce high-output heat-based energy attacks. Added to the fact we can fly and Grundy isn’t typically all that smart, there’s an excellent chance we can contain him long enough for Nico to hit him. Then take him apart completely while he’s weakened.”
Smirk shifting to a frown, she replaced ‘normal’ Grundy with a larger variant, intentionally not choosing the most recent for the sake of Dinah’s mental state.
“Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the ‘Overcharge’ variants. Looking at just how much damage he’s soaked in that sort of state before, the odds we can defeat him alone aren’t great. Which means, since we may need to face such a version of him, we need to work out the best stalling tactics we can. If we’re lucky, the Avengers can start responding immediately to him popping up and one or more of their heavy hitters will show in under twenty minutes to help. The Avengers are busy and often scattered on missions, though.”
Splitting off an extra display from the projection, shrinking it a little for space, she threw up an ‘average response times’ list on the new screen. It was…not great.
“Equally bad is the fact that Grundy is considered a weak Endbringer. Which means he doesn’t draw the rapid response and raw numbers of walking catastrophes like Godzilla, or even mid-ranged Endbringers like Electron Storm or Azathoth. In the event of Overcharged versions, more alerts go out, but the usual lack of worry over him hampers response speed. As you can see, average response time is all the fuck over the place, due to Grundy alerts being considered relatively low priority by most teams.”
Dinah looked pissed at that statement but didn’t argue it. More telling were the appalled expressions of the rest of the team. Alyssa didn’t blame them, even if she didn’t have the local cultural mindset to have quite such a visceral reaction herself. She’d already sussed out that there was a strong culture of uniting against Endbringers in this reality. The things had plagued humanity for thousands of years, though only in the last two centuries had they become so…active. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
There were good reasons for that. Endbringers were a sort of immune system for the world, with the various Parliaments and a few other forces being the driving power behind them. Generally, they only responded to something seriously wrong in the environment. In ancient days, that had almost always meant someone had royally fucked an area with a widescale dark magic ritual or similar. In the modern day, however, it could be something as mundane as serious pollution that called one up. No dark magic or bloody sacrificed required, though both could speed things along if cultists got involved.
Regrettably, in a way, there were also a lot more powers around that could take on an Endbringer in the modern day. Which meant that the known prevention measures weren’t taken as seriously as Alyssa thought they ought to be. While the majority of this Earth did have better pollution control and stricter rules about destabilizing areas with abusive mining or logging practices, it wasn’t as big of a change as she would have expected.
Frankly, the fact that heroes always showed up to put Endbringers down enabled the callous to ignore them. What were a few thousand dead to a rich bastard in control of a multinational megacorp…or a government that fed off those megacorps? Sure, serious efforts were made to prevent Godzilla or similar high-end threats from popping up. But Grundy? Or even some of the mid-level Endbringers? The powers that be and the general public both just counted on the Heroes to deal with them, rather than take what Alyssa considered to be proper and logical preventative measures.
For obvious reasons that they tended to be the ones dying, the general population did not approve. At least not culturally. Even if they sadly weren’t quite committed enough to take those opinions to the polls, the general populace considered Endbringers a sort of natural disaster. Culturally, they expected their leaders and, even more, their Heroes, to unite and deal with them quickly and professionally.
The idea Heroes slacked off against even a weak Endbringer? It was a slap to the face of that expectation. A breach of the social contract that saw the population half-worship ‘Heroes’ as the Good Guys who Saved the Day. Heroes were given a lot of slack, more than Alyssa would have believed without seeing this Amalgam world at work, but they had high expectations placed on them in return.
It was finally Cyborg that spoke up into the stilted silence.
“That’s just fucking wrong, man. Like firefighters phoning it in because only one house is on fire. They don’t shrug and go ‘call us back when it’s a whole ass neighborhood,’ you know?”
Instead of chuckles, that half-joke only got grim nods. It was Dinah who cut in next, voice dripping with cynicism.
“Sure, Cy…but ‘it’s just Gotham.’ You wouldn’t fucking believe how many horrible memes and shit go around every time Grundy pops up. Tons of anonymous fucks on the internet, and even professional comedians on late night TV, outright joking that ‘maybe they ought to just let Grundy finish Gotham off.’ ‘It’s not like anyone would miss it.’ Or even, ‘He’d be doing us a favor and raising property values!’”
Everyone else on the team winced at the pure vitriol that was dripping off Dinah’s words by the end of her mini-rant. Not that any of them could blame her. It was a seriously fucked up thing to say. But, then, even in Alyssa’s old reality, people would joke about ‘glassing’ the Mid-East to solve the problems there. Callously ignoring the millions of innocents that would die with that sort of ‘solution.’ So it wasn’t exactly hard to believe that sort of thing would go around the internet here too. Still, she needed to say something.
“It’s fucked up. But it’s also what we have to deal with, and the people of Gotham have a hell of a lot better chance with us here than they ever have before. So let’s buckle down and figure out how we can slow the big brute down until the lazy bastards from out of town get here, if it comes to that, right?”
Dinah let out a heavy, shaky breath, seeming surprised at her own vitriol after Alyssa’s level voice broke her out of it.
“Y-yeah. That makes sense. Hell, maybe we can beat him even if he’s Overcharged and make them all look bad?”
Her smile at the comment was just as shaky as the breath, but Alyssa smiled back, nodding. They all knew it wasn’t likely they could pull something like that off. But whistling in the dark was a thing for a reason, and as they began to plan, they at least grew more confident they could keep the casualties down…
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A/N 1: A bit of an overview chapters, to show a little bit more of how 'Endbringers' work in this particular reality.