Everyone felt the change when it happened. From one moment to the next, something was different. It was akin to looking at something, blinking, and then realizing it had details you never noticed before. Except here, they hadn’t been.

The other vigilantes in his sensory range shifted, discomfort and dread clear in their body language. He wasn’t sure all of them had caught on yet, but every last one of them knew something bad had happened.

Honestly, he wasn’t even completely certain he had caught on yet. He had an idea of what happened, yes, it was just so bad that he didn’t want to articulate it to himself. The literal worst case scenario was coming to pass.

Jack, however, had no such reservations. “You guys, if that’s what I think it is, you need to get out. Right now. Don’t even think about fucking around. You need to run.”

Lyra, having been watching as if in a trance, snapped out of it with that last emphasized word and turned to Finn. He saw the weird aura thing in her head ripple a few times, though he couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and currently he simply did not have the time.

“No. We need to move,” were the first words that fell from his lips. Jack didn’t respond, knowing they couldn’t afford to argue.

In the hold of the district’s top heroes, Viperia’s body flexed. Her muscles bulged, and her mouth fell open, impossible wide as her jaw unhinged. The ice prison keeping her contained shattered, throwing Nar back a dozen meters.

Those white scales on her body fell off, like an old husk that had served its purpose and was no longer needed. Discarded, rudimentary. In their place, brand new scales of a gleaming dark gray formed like armor forged in a storm, sharp-edged and unyielding.

On her shifting, ophidian face, her eyes lost their verdant light, black sclera with slitted white pupils emerging there. Her hair, too, disappeared, dissolving and leaving a green luster on her exterior.

Finn never stopped moving in the time she transformed. His grappling hook had already latched onto another building and started carrying him away. Mistral, also, didn’t wait for her to just complete her evolution. He threw icicles at her, followed by a roiling wave of lightning. But it did next to nothing; beyond momentarily displacing her, there was no visible effect. No damage.

It seemed she wasn’t done changing, though, since her arms began to shrink, while a tail took the place of her legs and morphed into a serpentine body. The size of her body was increasing as well. Even without his senses telling him all about the metamorphosis, he could see her visibly growing in the distance to match the abandoned buildings around them, getting to eye level with the floating Mistral.

And what was Nar doing…? Wait, switching powers. Of course. This might even be his only opportunity before things went out of control. Really, they weren’t in control to begin with, but Finn was categorizing this moment as a chance to prepare in his head, hoping it would help somehow.

What was the plan, then? First they needed to see if Mistral and Nar could handle it. If they couldn’t, they had to reassess and see what could be done from there. He didn’t want to just leave, because letting this monster out of his sight felt like a stupid idea.

Even though he couldn’t do anything.

They were facing an Unbound, after all.

There was no way this was going to end with their triumph if they just rushed in recklessly. Something just told him so, despite him not knowing anything about Viperia’s strength beyond her apparent durability.

As if on cue, she deigned to show them what she was capable of. The lizard-woman-turned-giga-snake opened its mouth and coiled up. Trails of smoke started leaking from its throat, and then a veritable beam of acidic venom spewed forth from her, shooting straight for the district’s hero team captain. The speed and sound were comparable to that of a high-pressure garden hose, except more cacophonous and with a hissing undertone.

Mistral raised a wall of ice and dove out of the way onto another cloud. Good thing he did, because the venom burst through as though the barrier attempting to block it wasn’t even there. And through the five buildings behind it.

An explosion followed, shaking the surroundings and obscuring the battlefield. The dust didn’t need to clear for Finn to sense a massive hole where her breath landed. Anything that had been there was gone, the edges of where she’d hit melting visibly with sizzling smoke rising from them.

Witnessing that, Finn didn't need to make any estimations of what would happen if that attack hit him. He’d be dead. Plain and simple. No amount of blocking or inventive gadget use or lucky positioning and armor cushioning would save him.

Golden chains shot around the serpent, seeking to entrap her. Huge volumes of ice did so as well, Nar and Mistral combining their efforts in the lull created by the gang leader discovering her newfound powers.

They may as well have been trying to wrap her in cotton candy for all the effect it had. Her body twisted, scattering shards of glistening metal and ice around her and leaving her free to move as she pleased.

Hails of gunfire pinged uselessly off Viperia’s left side.

After a beat, her neck swiveled to the source.

Then she slithered.

Stolen novel; please report.

Such tremendous swiftness and momentum was behind the movement, she was a locomotive accelerating from zero to blistering, mind-numbing rush in that split the air with a thundering rumble.

Finn almost died.

Not even from a deliberate act on Viperia’s part, or any other superhuman present. No, the gales of wind from the snake’s passing had merely thrown his grappling hook off course while he was in the middle of firing it, causing it to miss the wall he’d been aiming at. He was out of position to shoot his other hook, and it was only with a feat of dexterity he wouldn’t have been able to pull off without his enhanced proprioception that he managed to twist and latch onto a window behind him.

He was certainly too late in warning the group of independents preparing to continue their ranged assault. He couldn’t do anything but watch the Venin boss barrel into the building, collapsing it with the weight of her charge. One of the gunmen on the roof used his power to create a hexagonal field that seemed to enhance the velocity of his bullets and emptied another round in her direction.

A tail slap reduced him to red mist.

Another falling victim plummeted into that deadly mouth, bitten down on and necrotizing from the inside out. The black pulp that Viperia swallowed didn’t even resemble the hero it had once been. And she just kept going. Swatting and crunching on seasoned veterans like flies.

If he hadn’t had his power constantly feeding him the exact details of everyone’s viscera, this might have given him more pause. He didn’t let it stop him either way. His weakness was already slowing him down too much when he didn’t have paralyzing fear arresting his movement.

Truth be told, he wasn’t afraid, despite the risk of what they were facing. What he was looking at, it was a mere glimpse of what he’d be facing in the future. Assuming he made it out of this alive.

Wearing a tense expression on her masked features, Lyra followed him and kept pace with his run, alert regardless of the frustration and worry she was exuding. He understood. They weren’t doing anything of any real consequence, he knew. All this was accomplishing was keeping the distance between them and Viperia consistent.

Something Mistral didn’t adhere to in the slightest. The man flew at rocket speeds, elbow-deep in an colossal overloaded elemental spear of swirling ice, lightning, surging water, and a tornado holding it together.

The roaring weapon slammed into the scaled juggernaut. Contrary to Finn’s expectations, it managed to do something to her, namely knocking her back far enough away that no one else could be harmed. She rolled along the ground. The quakes from her weight alone caused him to nearly lose his footing again.

Unfortunately, what little damage it did do was superficial. Some scratches near her abdominal region that healed in a second. That was it.

Suddenly, a golden dome formed around her, turning the area inside fuzzy and slowing Viperia down while she moved to untangle herself. Nar floated up beside his mentor and kept both hands extended, focused on maintaining the field.

The other heroes present took that as a signal to engage, commencing the mayhem in earnest.

By this point, being outmatched was more of a way of life than a one-time occurrence for Finn. The aquatic primebeast, Trooper, Havoc, Fetter, all of them were vastly stronger than him.

But this was something else.

It wasn’t just facing a stronger opponent this time. He couldn’t do anything to this force of nature, he couldn’t resist her, he couldn’t escape if she targeted him. He couldn’t even assist Nar or Mistral. He was supporting the supports.

Warning signals with color, highlighting danger zones, keeping people aware of the others’ positions, he did his best wherever he could. The problem was that there weren’t many places for him to lend aid.

Valken came next. She dive bombed Viperia from above and pushed her into a cone of flame created by another hero, a move someone else followed up with twin slaps of crimson handprints as big as a caravan. It was followed up with another move. Then another. And so forth. They didn’t give the rampaging Unbound a second to breathe.

Finn didn’t know if it was better or worse that he, unlike the rest, didn’t have to wait with bated breath to find out how much effect a particular attack had through the smoke and flashing lights from powers and environmental effects being chained continuously in a small radius. He could observe the actual damage Viperia incurred, negligible as it was. Conversely, he was likewise aware of the ridiculous healing rate she boasted, rendering the strikes that did work on her trivial.

And she wouldn’t even let them keep that up.

Sweeping her tail around, the reborn viper broke the entire formation, ending a dozen additional lives forever. She glided out of the slowing field immediately. Mistral threw two more of those crackling hurricane javelins at her, but they didn’t throw her off again as she had braced herself.

Perhaps it was because he’d expected her to start fighting Mistral, but he was shocked when she instead bounced off the ground in a manner reminiscent of a spring, away from her opponents.

Towards the densely populated district.

Mistral shouted something and gave chase, Nar at his heels. The liters of blood coating the streets didn’t get the consideration of pause they probably deserved, but there just wasn’t time. The people who were still alive needed to move, and that included himself. So he tracked the snake that was already nearing the edge of his range. At least he wouldn’t lose her trail, with how much devastation she left in her wake.

Viperia was about to descend on a bunch of innocent civilians. They couldn’t let that happen. Mom was there, clueless as to what was going on in this area. He didn’t want this wyrm of destruction coming anywhere near her.

The others? Aiden, Colette and Lyra were here at the battle or closeby. Jack was operating remotely, and Casey… would be able to escape, if Ines was with her.

Which brought him back to the question: what could he do? The answer was the same as before, nothing, but that just led him to look at the other people on this mission, who were dying in droves if they didn’t get out of the way fast enough.

Backup seemed like the best option for them, and it looked like they were getting it, going by his lip reading of Nar’s conversation with whoever was on the other side of that earpiece.

Finn welcomed that revelation. Other districts would be jumping in and bringing someone capable of defeating Viperia for good, putting an end to the chaos and bloodshed.

But that would all have been far more manageable if she’d stayed in one place, rather than rushing into a district full of civilians with iron determination, unmoved by the attacks peppering her.

Did her behavior confirm she was sufficiently lucid for rational thought? He would say that she was at minimum capable of conscious thought after Nar removed the drug from her body. Thus, her goal would likely be to look for her son, if there was a higher priority than fighting the heroes.

As for the direction she was traveling in?

“Cal, Shade,” Gridlock spoke, his tone grave. “She’s headed for the DHD building.”