I was getting better and better at calling on my psychic vision without having to close my eyes and shut out the world. Using it as I was now to see all the traffic outside our vehicle was not something I would have thought was possible a week ago under these circumstances, but there was no better place to learn than on the razor's edge of death.

This was what gave me the confidence to tell the guard, "Traffic is clear. You can fire!"

Since the fight had broken out, it had taken a few minutes for all the cars around us to finally clear away. They had gone either towards the shoulder or the off-ramp, making any errant round far less likely to do harm.

He hesitated at hearing me say this. He had been holding back to avoid collateral damage, but he chose to trust me when he saw the certainty in my eyes. We didn't have many other options left, either.

If Passthrough touched one of us and dropped us into the ground, we would resolidify at sixty-miles-per hour with nowhere to go. Our brains would smash themselves against the inside of our skulls as we stopped instantly; and if that didn't kill us, we'd suffocate to death just moments later as we aspirated dirt.

Neither one of us wanted to go out that way, to put it mildly.

The bullets from the guard's gun tore through the armored van easily and pelted the car behind us. With my ears covered to protect me from the sound, I watched as the aura of the villain turned from a calm blue to a fearful yellow. He quickly used his power to cause his vehicle to detach itself from our van, and skid away in a rain of sparks.

This left a massive hole in the doors and floor as the structure of our housing failed entirely. With the aft wheels half-disintegrated and the entire rear end crumbling, we found ourselves scraping the road as our back end plummeted. The impact jostled us both and smoke began to fill the chamber.

My guard grabbed ahold of the driver's cage behind us, keeping himself from sliding forward, but I was not so fast at reacting. My hospital socks lost traction on the cold metal of the floor, and I slipped directly towards the speeding ground now open through the hole. To keep my feet from making contact, I desperately grasped for anything to hold onto, finding only the guard's leg as an option.

I stopped myself from being eaten alive by the speeding asphalt, but my feet bounced on the road before I could get them pulled up against my chest. My socks were instantly ripped off, and I felt a fair chunk of flesh get burned off where it made contact.

"Shit!" I yelled.

A hand had grabbed up my shirt, helping me to pull myself to safety. Though it was getting hard to breathe with all the smoke, we didn't slow down. We had front-wheel drive and we were damn well going to use it to put some distance between ourselves and the villain now that he was retreating. It might have been ugly to drag ourselves this way, but it worked, and that was what mattered.

Once the cage was opened, the guard and me made our way up into the driver's cabin where we didn't have to worry as much about falling out. There, I could use my sight again to check and see if we'd made it. Thankfully, Passthrough’s aura seemed nowhere in sight. He might have been able to clear out what steel he had fused into the driver's seat of his sedan, but there was going to be far too much of it jamming up his engine for him to keep moving. He would have to commandeer another car if he wanted to stay after us.

Unfortunately for us, we were leaving a massive rut in the road which wouldn’t be hard to follow…

My suspicions were mounting now that Passthrough himself could not turn incorporeal, only the things that he touched. If this was true of his power, it meant we stood a fair chance of killing him if we fought again on a more equal footing. That thought gave me some confidence.

Still, I thought, that won't bring back the dead guard.

I had watched him throw himself on a grenade for our sakes when just seconds before he had been chatting with me and cracking jokes. That was the part about death that I could never get over. Whether there was an afterlife or not, I knew that in this world our ending was final. Whatever plans for dinner he'd had, or whatever argument he'd left unfinished with his wife, they would never find a resolution now. All the narrative of his life was left hanging and abandoned, like so many strands of his story forgotten by its author.

I shook my head to clear the disorientation I felt. These thoughts could spiral if I wasn't careful. Right now, though, I had to keep my focus on survival in the immediate-to-short term. Regardless of whether Passthrough was still a danger to us, the whole city was going up in flames this very moment. I couldn't just leave New Marion to go and enjoy my therapy summer-camp at a time like this.

I had to convince Debra that they needed to release me. And if I couldn’t do that, well… I needed to find a way to escape custody.

There was still a hole in the pit of my stomach when I thought about making myself a criminal. Closing off my one last chance to a normal and respectable life seemed nightmarish, but I refused to leave when my help was needed. If Debra forced my hand, I would do what I had to then.

Besides, everyone would be much safer if I could strike out on my own. Those guarding me would no longer be a target and I’d be impossible to track with my invisibility. These government agents might have had helmets that could block my influence, but the villains didn't as far as I knew. There'd be no way for them to find me if I weren't rolling around in a suspicious black van that just screamed out ‘covert government transport’.

My mind raced, but back in reality we were taking an off-ramp. As I saw this, it caused me too stutter through to ask, "How far?"

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

The driver answered, "Five minutes or less. I've already alerted command to our situation. The meeting site is compromised, and we’re being followed."

I checked again to see if he was right, and indeed he was. There was a car following us a half a mile off with just one passenger, and he was intensely interested in us, so much so that his willpower radiated off him like waves of heat. He doesn't like to lose, I noted. Maybe we could use that against him?

With no more minions to throw at us, he simply trailed our van and waited patiently for it to stop. People had once again cleared off the streets and headed back to their homes. Though the homeless camps were full of the dispossessed, they too hid in their tents. Everyone had figured out by now what was going on. The city was being taken over, and any civilians who got in the way would certainly be disposed of.

We had exited the highway and were now driving through the city again. We veered off into a more residential area, only to stop unexpectedly at a private marina. We parked out front by the storage building there, and a red car pulled in behind us.

Since the city was under attack, there were no reinforcements to spare for us. Not heroes, not even cops. As we exited the vehicle, it was only us against this villain. Whoever my pickup was supposed to be, they were not here either. They were likely not coming at all now that our location was known by a villain. The Rig was a moving ocean platform, and the secrecy of its location was paramount, thus I doubted they would be risking it on my account.

The driver and the guard loaded up their weapons and stepped out. They gave me no time to protest as they told me to stay put. Instead, they stepped out and opened fire with no warning on Passthrough's car, intending to kill him before he could make a single move.

"Die, cocksucker!" I heard the guard yell.

Regular rules no longer applied, and no one would be taking prisoners today.

Using my power, I could see Passthrough had already escaped his sedan to safety though. He was hiding around the corner of the marina building, and he had something in his hands whose outline I could not quite make out. Neither of my two friends here seemed to see him then as he stepped out from behind the corner and drew back his arms.

"Hey!" I tried to yell, but the gunfire drowned me out.

Why didn't they see him? He was standing right out in the open now. My power showed me where he was placed, and I knew for certain that it was beyond the reach of cover.

As I peered back through the driver’s cage and into the van's aft chamber, I could see through the open hole that the white sedan had shorn away where his feet should have been placed. Yet, there was nothing there at all. His aura stood there, but he himself was completely invisible.

Holy shit, I realized.

Beside me the driver dropped dead on the ground. An arrow had pierced straight through his helmet, resolidified with perfect timing to ignore his armor completely. The gunfire had only just now stopped, not quickly enough for the guard to hear him crash onto the gravel. I saw that their attention was still glued onto the enemy's car, ignorant of what similar fate awaited them.

By the movements of his aura, I watched as Passthrough notched another arrow from his quiver. He was causing all light to pass through his body. It must have been tremendously taxing, because his aura shimmered painfully with the strain. Nonetheless, he could maintain it long enough to finish the job.

He was going to kill the guard, and then it would only be he and I.

I had no choice but to dive out of the van and tackle the guard. Even with the full weight of my body propelled towards him, I just barely managed to make him stumble. Meeting his torso felt like slamming into a solid brick wall, and I crumbled to the ground in heap of pain, but it had been enough to save his life, and that brought a smile to my face.

The guard looked down at me, then back to the arrow that had solidified halfway through the glass of the van's open passenger door. As soon as he'd put two and two together, which did not take long, he sprang into action.

I was thrown back into the van by his brute strength using only one hand. There we both took cover as another arrow flew by and missed its mark. Though Passthrough’s power was spectacular and deadly, he was only a decent archer in the end; not the best.

"He's invisible," I wheezed out, but I was stating the obvious.

"Yeah. He must have killed everybody else he used this trick on, because it's not in our fucking intel." The guard pulled the pin on one of his grenades as he seemed to consider our options. "Where's he at?" He asked.

"By the c-corner of the building."

It was just a stun grenade, but it caused Passthrough to panic and run, which was good enough to buy us time.

We knew what his trump-card was now, and I was able to cancel it out. Mentally, I added one more item to the list of things that my power was good for. Circumventing invisibility. Just like with the rampager, I had been given a unique edge. Psychics were a rare type of super in this world, and no one ever knew exactly what to make of them for this reason. On reflection, this was most likely why the villains were so intent on killing me before I got my bearing. I could make a real difference in the world of heroes.

My pride swelled. I knew now that Passthrough's reputation had been inflated by this one trick of his, and I could overcome him and get us this win if only I were allowed to try.

A blast of pain might not cut it. I need firepower.

Whenever my heartbeat came down enough, I put my hand on the guard's shoulder and told him what I had in mind. "You can't see him, but I can. Let me shoot. Give me a gun."

"I'm not giving you a fucking gun, Adrian. That is so beyond protocol that it's not remotely on the table, even if it would work. I'm sorry, but if you can see him, then you can tell me where he is. You point and I'll shoot. How does that sound?"

"…Okay." That was fine.

He nodded and pulled out a different magazine, loading it into his gun as he spoke. "Switching to explosive rounds. Try to be precise. Let’s move."

We carefully made our way outside. I tried my best to keep my psychic-sight active at the same time as my normal vision, but the strain was now mounting on my power, and at best I was making out a red blur further ahead, or a blur of strange movement. In the full light of the sun, however, it was hard to know if what I was seeing was an invisible man about to kill us or just another blur in my vision, still spotty from looking directly into a weld earlier.

If I closed my eyes, I could more clearly pinpoint what I was seeing, but then I lost the ability to relay its position back to the guard. Suddenly, I pulled back on his shoulder and bellowed, "Duck!"

The arrow whizzed by over our heads. I hadn't seen it coming before Passthrough let the string loose, but I had seen the color of his aura shift from frustration then to triumph without warning, leaving me to intuit the rest. He was fast, almost frictionless as he ran to set up his next shot, and I had no choice but to close my eyes and focus on reading his moves.

The guard fired at where he guessed our enemy had been standing, but it was no use. "That was too close!"

It was my head that Passthrough had been aiming for, so I couldn't have agreed more. Once again, I pushed us to the side for a dodge, this time causing the villain to realize that he needed to shift up his game. "He's gone inside the office building," I said.

"Good. Let's finish this motherfucker."

Amen.