Regent/Imp forever.

 

I liked how there was no fanfare about it, although the "Regent", then "Regent!" was kinda meh.

Minor inconsistency.
1) Phir Se: "we lose this city"
2) Weaver: "wipe India off the map".
3) Narrative: (the inconsistency) controlling a detonation that had the potential to level a continent?

 

Great chapter. Worm never ceases to be awesome.
I really hope Clockblocker isn't dead. Like someone said in the comments, the characters with 'conceptual' powers like Foil and Clockblocker have a lot of potential in damaging, maybe even killing the Endbringers. If one of Behemoth's legs managed to get cut off, that implies that the rest of him can be as well. So I think taking advantage of Foil and Clockblocker should be a big priority for the Protectorate.

 

India is also known as a sub-continent I assumed that means they were still referring to India. Though going from losing the city to wiping India off the map is probably either an inconsistency like you say or just Skitter exaggerating.

 

Finally some Undersider bites the dust- the fact that it's Regent is just icing on the cake... never liked that sociopath one bit.

 

Very nice chapter, and Behemoth ate it just like I imagined he would. Now this fight is going to be to make Phir See give up his attempt at a second strike, because it's pretty clear Behemoth has been warming up his dynakinesis throughout this fight. He finally got Alexandria's number and just look what he did to her.

Behemoth clearly thinks, despite being more hurt than he's ever been, that it's worth sticking around to go a second round with Phir See. And then goodbye New Delhi.

 

What? I thought Phir See would be retreating now since he is both exhausted and it took 3 days to gather that much energy...

 

Nope, he's definitely recharging for a second attack. And that's what Behemoth wants.

Also, it never said it took him 3 days to build the energy. Only that he'd been holding onto it for that long in anticipation of an Endbringer attack. He's already had to "power down" once to sleep and then power back up.

Now presumably it takes some decent length of time to get a full charge, but that's not stopping him from trying again. It might have only a small fraction of his full power, but that's still enough to wipe the city off the map.

 

I don't see how Alexandria could possibly be dead, if its actually her and not a body double.

She's invulnerable to everything but Siberian and a lack of oxygen. Clockblocker and Foil could probably do damage as well, come to think of it. But Behemoth and Leviathan and Simurgh have had decades to use brute force on her and it never succeeded.

She tanked a sun from Sundancer with zero damage to herself, I don't see her injured from the hit from Behemoth.

 

I wasn't implying that she'd died, only that Behemoth seems to have knocked her out by turning her own attack back on her. Her non-presence is a bit telling.

In other words, once he finally figured out how to properly redirect her power, he was able to completely turn it against her. Which is what he's hoping to do with Phir See's second attack.

 

I just don't understand how she could be knocked out. She's invulnerable, that's her whole shtick. Doesn't matter how hard you hit her

 

If this was Exalted I would say something on the level of knocking her breath out of her resulting in being knocked out.

 

I did some thinking about his power, earlier. The energy between his portals would ramp up exponentially, doubling as quickly as it takes light to travel from one to the other. If his portals are say, 2 meters apart, this doubles 149,896,229 times per second.

Keep in mind, that's not multiplying the initial light by 149896229. It's multiplying it by 2^149896229.

That's an INSANE number.

Of course, that's assuming the light is "straight on" enough that it can travel between the portals that many times without leaking to the side. If a photon was aimed even the tiniest fraction of a fraction of a degree off center, it would nearly instantly escape out into the room. It might travel a long distance and go between the portals hundreds of times if your aim is really good, but the time it takes for the light to make that many trips is on the order of a few microseconds. And even if the light was absolutely perfectly aligned, due to diffraction it would eventually leak out the sides- though I don't really know how many trips that would take.

But even if he can only make light go around the loop 1000 times, Phir Se is capable of generating an absolutely insane amount of energy in a tiny fraction of a second with a hand held laser pointer. Like 200 orders of magnitude more than enough energy to completely destroy the earth.

Lets say he gets a 1 watt laser pointer like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Rl3w8nG1kU
Lets say he fires it for a single nanosecond.
1 watt * 1 nanosecond = 1.0 × 10^-9 joules

Multiply that by 2^1000 and you get 1.07 × 10^292 joules

Just to put that in perspective, the gravitational binding energy of the Earth is something like 2.5 *10^32 J. That's the amount of energy it would take to blow up the earth such that it would never form back together under gravity. That's 3.7*10^18 hiroshima bombs.

It takes less than 7 microseconds to ramp up that strongly.

Hell, forget destroying the Earth. That's so much energy it would form a black hole larger than the entire observable universe.

 

Hooray for science?

 

Not that simple, first he has to time it perfectly so that the light waves are fully synchronised(otherwise they negate each other). Then depending on how it works either he is limited to how many photons can reliably be contained without them hitting each other too often for it to be the trouble or if he manages to fuse them which means he has to constantly fix the distance since higher energy photons means lower wavelength/higher frequency.

And this is what I came up in a few minutes of thinking on the subject, pretty sure there are plenty other problems, for instance as I was writing this exact sentence it occurred to me that unless the space in between the portal is pure vacuum(non-existent in reality and means the container has to be pretty strong) then the more it builds up the greater the chances of photons hitting air particles spreading them, increasing the number(by energy -> matter and by breaking apart atoms) and potentially triggering a nuclear reaction fast enough to resemble an atomic bomb.

EDIT: And now that I think of it, how the hell does he guarantee that light is contained? If you can see it then that means some light can get here and what about the light that comes from here to there? Building up so much energy in a small space pretty much guarantees that eventually the innumerably photons coming from other sources will hit each other so plenty of radiation coming around disturbing the system even more...

Hell now that you made me really think on the subject I don't know if it it would even be something that could work at all without at least several people working together with Phir See. Or someone who can just outright control light I suppose. Will re-read to check for anything I might have missed.

 

Photons are bosons, and so they can be packed as closely as you like- they don't hit each other. I don't think the timing/synchronization really matters, but laser pointers already give out coherent light. And even if it did matter, the wavelength and frequency would also be constant- what's increasing is the total number of photons- not the energy per photon, so getting things completely synchronized is just a matter of finding the right spacing between the portals in time and space, and maintaining that. It wouldn't require any "fixing".

He can't. Even if it were a perfect vaccuum and he had it perfectly aligned, the light would spread out because of diffraction. Yeah, he'd kill himself pretty much instantly.

 

The problem is that the fact Weaver can see anything at all implies the light is coming from there to her eyes which means it is not a straight line so the more is packed together the higher the chances they will hit each other and build up exponentially. But that is not only it, since Weaver can see behind that means light also travels through everything so yet another source of distortion. And there is the fact that while air isn't very dense part of the light still hits those anyway so the more you pack them together the more that will happen.

How the hell is that stable enough that he didn't kill himself pretty much immediately?

Okay for my sanity and like of story I will chalk it to the reason he takes so long to build up being that his powers(somehow) are busy ensuring it stays together. Way too many problems otherwise. That said if the portals were infinitely close to each other then that would be one way to sidestep the whole issue...

 

I'm perfectly happy hand-waving over the physics and just taking it on faith that it takes 3 days to build up what he did and being in the room with it doesn't kill you. It's a story with superheroes. Suspension of disbelief comes with the territory.

 

And I'll say again, the implication is not that it takes 3 days to build up, because currently in story Phir See is building it up to use again right now. And he doesn't have more than minutes before Behemoth gets to him.

 

If it just took a few minutes to build up, why did he stay awake for 3 days?