eugh, I completely regret thinking that this would end on a happy note.
Bye

I am disgusted at the lack of Wichita in this fic

I am a lineman for the county
And I drive the main road
Searchin' in the sun for another overload
I hear you singin' in the wire,
I can hear you through the whine
And the Wichita lineman is still on the line

The idea of using a qrown-up character and organizations at work is very good. However, pushing it immediately into Endbringer event and introducing industrial scale power production - this just turns the story into "As-you-know"-style explanation. This also could work - as a short story explaining some physics, for example. But here... it just grows quite boring very quickly. Also, your Armsmaster actually smiles! 8) There are other discrepancies with canon, too - both in characters and their powers.
Plus, many details are very 2016. Appstores, smartphones in each pocket, etc. Worm timeline happened earlier!
As it is, the best part is the protagonist's monologue as he drives to a pick-up point. It's actually was quite enjoyable to read. (Though a grown-up man would certainly thought up how to not expose himself with his car number.)

Very nice! I could point out some inconsistencies with canon...but I think I'll just take it for what it is and enjoy it. Thank you for making a nice short story while "shaking the rust off." I look forward to reading Knight of Broken Swords...once I finish reading Pact...once I finish catching up on all the Worm fanfiction now available to me.

It'll happen someday. Thanks for the story!

So I'm liking the story overall so far, but there are quite a few pretty random differences between this and canon. Such as panacea and glory girl being at the behemoth fight. Panacea was already in the birdcage by this point and glory girl was in the parahuman asylum. And it has to be the canon behemoth fight between the undersiders showing up and defiant being there rather than armsmaster. Though even that can't be right, because Murphy mentioned that defiant was usually the first to notice things when he tested at endbringer battles - but that was defiants first endbringer battle. He was armsmaster before then and certainly that isn't generally known. Not to mention contessa being known about casually like that? She was a vague legend in canon - just a ghost with the occasional vague story to even the most well informed other than maybe cauldron clients.

But all of those are pretty minor and can be overlooked reasonably easily. Some of them can be explained as AU elements - maybe the S9 didn't attack Brockton bay because Murphy changed this timeline, so panacea never went completely off the rails crazy. Other things like defiant and contessa references just don't matter that much. The big one that can't be overlooked is how you changed how the unwritten rules are treated. Yes, they can be kind of ridiculous and I know a lot of people don't like them, but they form the absolute foundation of how cape society works in canon. You can't just throw that out without ending up with a setting that looks almost nothing like canon did. Because if there were 'cape investigators' digging into cape's live's like that to deliberately attempt to unmask them in canon, they would end as a mutilated corpse being publicly displayed to make sure no one ever tried that again. It's just not something that people who aren't suicidal or very powerful would ever attempt. Comparing it to celebrities really doesn't work, because if paparazzi routinely disappeared, I bet celebrities would be left alone too. Yeah, if someone's identity does come out, people don't pretend they don't know it, but they can't go actively looking for cape identities. Coil got away with it because almost no one knew he was responsible and he was very close to ruling a city at that point. For random idiot civilians to do the same apparently without consequence is catastrophically destructive to how things worked in canon. So yeah, this isn't something you can just casually change to make sure the protagonist's identity is public, then completely ignore for everyone else. If people are doing this kind of investigation for everyone, virtually NO ONE should still have a secret identity. Not to mention that it would probably be a violation of the endbringer truce by using information found because someone volunteered for an endbringer battle against them. Which unlike the unwritten rules appear to be actual laws, so those people would get arrested if they weren't already brutally murdered.

So yeah, I think that big issue is very distracting from the story. But other than that I am enjoying it. Murphy's story especially was very well done. It seems very apt for the Worm universe that one of the most brokenly overpowered possible powers would just ruin his life.

This was a great story.

Good story.

When you mentioned the spark holding about one hour's worth of world power production, I got curious enough to do an excel spreadsheet. Here's my results:

One hour's production is 2.31 tWh, or 8.32*1015 Joules of energy. If that means nothing to you, that's equivalent to two megatons of tnt, or a city-buster nuke.

Since that didn't quite satisfy my lust for numbers, I went on to see how fast a projectile would fire if the entire energy was put into a superconductor railgun when firing a 1kg slug.
My go-to place for that is the kinetic energy calculator that google spits out. That one came up with 43% for a 1kg slug or 1.3 times the speed of light for a 100g slug... which is how I found out that it's only good for non-relativistic speeds. I couldn't find an online calculator that does what I needed, so instead I looked the equation up on wikipedia and reversed it manually so I could put it in excel.
End result: assuming the railgun has 50% efficiency for turning electrical energy into kinetic energy, the slug would be accelerated to 29.4% of the speed of light. Also the waste energy would instantly plasmarize the projectile and the railgun and kill everything in the area, but nevermind that.
(100% efficiency gets 40.2% lightspeed. Maybe it's possible to approach 100% efficiency with tinker know-how?)

Either way, I figured out two things to remember:
1) Humans use a truly ridiculous amount of energy
2) A 'spark'-powered railgun with Flechette to arm the projectile would be a realistic endbringer-killer, capable of hitting the endbringer from kilometers away since at relativistic speeds only the Simurgh could possibly dodge by using precognition.

Hope my curiousity entertained you and thank you for sharing your story with us!

Good story, perfect ending. 5/5

Meh

I'm not sure if anyone's pointed this out yet, especially since this chapter is only a part of the second draft as indicated, but the switching of tenses is really throwing me out of the story.

For example, "I turned right. It's a two lane row. My shoulders are literally scraping the side of the buildings." You switched from past to present tense. Most authors use past tense, with present tense being something of an anomaly; still, if you want to go that route, be careful with dialogue. I often find myself slipping up with changes like said/says and such.

This was just bothering me a bit, figured I'd point it out, but while I am commenting I'd like to say this is a nice spin in the Worm sandbox. I haven't finished Worm yet (Arc 10, whee) but Arc's power is pretty imaginative and unique. Good job!

Fantastic ending to a great story.

Brilliant story so far, but Murphy's narrative doesn't sound natural.

It's bugging me how fake it feels. Maybe it's the big-block paragraphs, or how he keeps the same tone for the entire story. Three people just standing in an open space, no appreciation of their surroundings, no gestures more than clenching fists, despite describing a memory where a person feels helplessly responsible for the death of thousands including his family. I wonder what the ship is like, where and how long Murphy fought Jack, just a few more personal details.

I normally avoid reading any OC-centric fanfiction because it's normally just terrible. There's not much to go around in the Worm section, though, so I gave this one a shot. I'm glad I did. Very well done story. I hope to read more of your work in the future.

Awesome fic. i look forward to more of your works

Damn. A sad ending, as per usual in Worm.