On the way to their actual destination, Finn was almost on autopilot as he swung from building to building with his grappling hooks, the movements ingrained and familiar. In his unoccupied mind, he wondered what type of gum Lyra had been chewing before meeting up with him. The flavor was rather strong when he swallowed, now.
Granted, he was still aware of his surroundings; it would be ridiculous beyond belief if someone with his senses couldn’t stay vigilant of what was going on around them. That was why he scanned for threats despite knowing there wouldn’t be any attackers, and kept track of Calliope leaping rooftops behind him.
The instinct to probe his environment with colors remained, but he was learning to get rid of it. Rather than forcing the information out of the outside world, he just had to let it speak to him. The existing colors, the matter around him, had a passive aspect that was fully apparent to him without any additional effort.
One might wonder how much extra mental bandwidth it cost to have such a tidal wave of information assaulting the mind at all times, but the answer was surprisingly none. As a matter of fact, Finn hadn’t strained the cognitive limits of his power after those first few days of practice. He’d pushed himself on intensity when manifesting vantablack in his entire range to put out those fires, yet those limitations never carried over to other aspects of his power, like what his mind could handle in terms of complexity or quantity.
It wasn’t as though he had infinite control or precision, just that his mind had not encountered a ceiling for itself in the ways it used his power. When he retreaded that thought, he realized he had been thinking of his mind as a separate entity, like he wasn’t his own mind, which sounded weird when he made conscious notice of it. What if his mind in this context wasn’t his mind, but his power?
Was his power alive?
There were certainly many researchers asking that question, and he was not one of them. But that didn’t matter; if he needed to dive into the more abstract parts of his ability to increase his chances against Omega, he would. Besides, Jack had hammered into him the importance of increasing his knowledge base. It might be worth looking into when he found the time.
Speaking of his best friend, they had him on the line again for this mission. Finn wasn’t clear on what it was he had trained while they were going through their bootcamp with Frameshot and later Nar, but the drones that flew in to accompany them looked far more advanced.
“Are you guys official yet or what?” Gridlock asked offhandedly.
“Sure,” Finn said.
Lyra tried to say something, but devolved into a fit of happy giggles.
Jumping over another ledge, Finn turned in the direction of the location they had been instructed to travel to by Cyrus. This time, they would not be the only ones in attendance.
The request to attend was twofold. One came from the Wardell billionaire, and the other from the DHD itself. The latter reaching out to them had been unexpected, though in retrospect it made sense. Knowing what they were getting into, having all hands on deck was a given. Adding some more couldn’t hurt, either.
Contacting Shade and Calliope was only possible via Aegis, and that was what had happened. Finn knew there were legal stipulations for when the government was allowed to make use of it to contact independents, so the fact that the hero branch bothered jumping through those hoops to get to them for something other than recruitment spoke to the importance of what they were planning.
On the other hand, Finn now also had context about how the government was, according to Cyrus, just another faction vying for control over Aegis as a whole. He would have to be careful about ulterior motives from them in the immediate future.
At the very least, there were people in attendance whom he had already been introduced to, so he wasn’t jumping into an entirely unfamiliar environment. Keeping his guard up just went without saying, particularly in this situation.
It wasn’t long before the abandoned building came into his range, and when it did, it made him pause as soon as he processed what he was sensing. So many costumes in one place, it was more than he had ever witnessed prior.
Mistral was there, standing on a stormcloud at the head of the crowd. Next to him were Mountpin and Radi, each woman on one side. The Junior Aces, sans their captain, were positioned in the back. He couldn’t detect Zeta or Gossamer, the other members of the adult district team, anywhere nearby. But plenty of other, non-affiliated vigilantes were scattered across the room.
Among them was Sphinx, looming over the rest in her shifter form and staring at the impromptu podium with bored eyes. Her swishing tail betrayed the aloof air she was trying to project, however. That mission at the start of his career where she helped him thwart the Beastlords seemed like lifetimes ago.
Around her were others he didn’t recognize and whose hero names he had heard from Jack but had never seen in action. Some of them he knew from pictures, but others didn’t have enough exposure for him to even know what their costumes looked like, making it hard to discern which was which from the list of Aegis operatives in the district.
Conversely, their faces were plain as day to him. He could see under every single mask in the crowd, promptly obliterating any sense of mystique the heroes may have carried for him if he had come here at an earlier point in his life.
Admittedly, there hadn’t been much left, by his estimation. Months of being Shade had seen to that. Still, being fully aware of the clear excitement, nervousness, irritation, and a whole host of other emotions clear on the faces of people who were under the impression no one could see them, brought with it a wave of disillusionment. These were just people, at the end of the day. Living, breathing people who could make mistakes like the normal civilians who so worshiped them.
Of course, based on what he knew, he and Lyra were the newest heroes here, with the exception of Damsel. But by this point, Finn would say they had a decent amount of experience in addition to his training refining his acquired skills to a new level.
“Been a while since I eavesdropped like this,” Jack was saying. “Ready to get this show on the road?”
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“I’ll do my best, but there is something I don’t understand,” said Lyra, her voice bright. She had apparently recovered enough from her giddiness to articulate words.
“What’s that? Not sure how so many fingers can be in one pie without messing it up?” he guessed.
Lyra nodded, though Jack couldn’t see it. “Basically, yeah. With so many potential leaks, isn’t it kind of guaranteed that the Venin would find out about it? How did the government prevent that? I mean, it doesn’t even seem like they have devices that can block signals inside that place. If we can still talk to you in there…”
“I get what you’re saying. The short answer? They didn't prevent anything. The longer answer? They knew what they were doing when they organized this meetup. They have resources the Venin isn't aware of.” Gridlock’s explanation was vague, but made perfect sense in the right context.
Lyra looked at Finn’s back, and he indicated his confirmation with a flex of his power. A sign she took with a pleased smile under her mask. Her aura flared, pulsing much the same way it had when they were alone. She didn’t ask another question.
But she had been right to worry about operational security. After all, the reason they were here was to organize before destroying the Venin for good. It was totally rational to have concerns when the gang in question could find out about their plan so easily.
The truth was, they knew. Viperia was aware that her key addresses were compromised, and would have doubtless relocated by this point. But there was one variable she wasn’t taking into account.
Nar.
Copying Finn’s power, Nar had been taking extra patrols to scout the district for Venin hideouts. Where Finn would have spent significantly more time covering that much ground, the jester was able to use other abilities to get around significantly faster, and even keep his approach subtle if necessary.
This had been a resounding success, and also what he knew Mistral and the others were basing the real plan around. What they were planning before Finn let his power get duplicated, he wasn’t sure, but right now they had a trump card the Venin leader could not possibly have predicted.
So this assembly and the subsequent strikes were known to the supervillain. She assumed she was prepared. In reality, Nar had long since tracked down all their relocated assets, and was prioritizing targets in order of significance.
The downside of the plan, which Nar had told him about, was that the DHD would know about his ability to sense objects in the environment. However, Finn was unconcerned with that comparatively minor aspect of full the breadth of sensory capabilities; the passive people sensing and emotional auras were a bigger deal in his view—they could have figured out his awareness of inanimate material from extensive observation anyway. And that wasn’t even counting the fact that the older boy had downplayed it to his superiors.
Not to mention, if Nar had unlocked as much of the power as Finn, he would have to keep his ability to sense underneath masks close to the vest, rising star or no. Perhaps that would change when he was sufficiently powerful to disregard the perceived threat others saw in him, on top of what he represented in the first place. But that day was not today.
In an ideal world, Finn would have nobody knowing anything about his power, ever, until he defeated them, but the situation as things stood was… not the worst. While he didn’t like leaving so much to other people, he could tolerate it.
Multiple individuals inside the large space began noticing their arrival, some taking ready stances and others merely turning in the direction of the entrance. They weren’t the last to arrive, others were coming in from around them as well, yet they weren’t the first either.
They came here at the exact time Cyrus had stipulated. Was this part of the man’s schemes, to have other people reacting to their hero personas in a specific manner only possible with them coming in on the later side.
He supposed it was possible their benefactor had given them a reasonable time without double meanings, but Finn knew better. If there was one thing he knew Cyrus Wardell never lacked, it was intentionality.
Whatever that hidden layer of plotting was, the impact of himself and Lyra walking in was a variety of different reactions being displayed on the faces of these people. And in their bodies too. Odd as it was, he could see the inside of every human and inhuman body in the vicinity.
Being active superhumans, it went without saying that most took care of their physique, the most basic needs being tended to. But not all of them were in perfect health. He could see various cardiovascular systems straining a bit too much to keep going, various improperly healed micro fractures, what could be the beginnings of a tumor, bad joints and ligaments, and a bunch of scars and old injuries that had likely been sustained in combat.
Despite knowing that telling them about their internal health issues would be detrimental, he still felt a compulsion to do so, since ignoring it when it could potentially save a life down the road was rubbing him the wrong way. He couldn’t pinpoint the precise reason for it.
He saw this in normal people all the time now, and that had resulted in suspiciously engineered scenarios and recommendations to Jack to hack into their devices and use targeted advertising to get them the help they needed.
The impulse to warn them, to intervene and fix those hidden problems, gnawed at him. It was a peculiar sensation, one that surfaced more and more the deeper he dove into his power. He couldn't quite explain why it bothered him so much with his fellow heroes; it wasn’t like he could act on it without raising a thousand questions about how he knew such personal details. Yet the awareness that he could do something—no, that he should do something—buzzed in his mind, loud as static.
It could have been some byproduct of his powers, an instinct to “correct” the world when it deviated from its optimal state. He didn’t know. He kept imagining scenarios in which a single suggestion could change everything for someone. A word whispered in the right ear about that blood clot forming near a hero’s heart, or the ligament damage that would inevitably tear during their next mission. Things they couldn’t see, things that he could fix.
He didn’t even know if the sensation was a foreign one or internal to himself, really. What was it those philosophers said? Power revealed who you really were? Maybe this was similar, where he had the ability to act on certain things for the first time in his life, and his moral character was being exposed in ways it never had been previously.
“Moral character” might have been the wrong term for it. He just did what was right, proper for a hero to do. It wasn’t as if he had some sort of burning sense of justice in his gut urging him to go around scouring evil from the face of the planet. Rather, he did what Dad would have done, and if there was someone in danger right next to him, doing the right thing wasn’t something he could skip out on.
Except, when so many people’s problems were laid out as if they were right next to him, he suddenly felt overwhelmed with solving them all, even if he knew he couldn’t.
Because he couldn’t save everyone.
No one could. Not even Yama. Admirable as his defense against the strongest primebeasts in the world was, he couldn’t be everywhere. And in his absence, innocents would die when faced with such abominations.
But Finn wasn’t doing this to save everyone. When it came down to it, his goal came first. It took precedence over everything else. And this was a big step toward it, as he was now taking the fight to his enemies.
No more running away.
A couple more people streamed into the building, and he caught Sphinx smiling at him before Mistral called for attention.
“I see everyone’s made it,” he said, projecting his voice to be easily audible without shouting. “That’s good—we’re all in this together. Now let’s get started and go over what needs to be done.”