Even from all the way back here, the change in the skies was impossible to miss. Dark swirling clouds crackling with energy converged, forming an ominous glowing point in the center, almost like an eye glaring down at the world beneath.
The distance and lack of detail were strangely somewhat novel for Finn, given that he’d been acclimating to the precision of his new senses, and having to rely on his eyes for something outside of his range reminded him that his passive awareness was not necessarily going to let him know everything transpiring on the battlefield. There would be effects he couldn’t account for. Or in this case, ones that were simply too far away.
“Gridlock?” Lyra spoke up, leaving the unasked question hanging in the air.
Jack still got what she meant. “That’s Mistral up there. It looks like he’s preparing some technique to deal with Viperia, but it’s taking a lot of time, and I don’t have anything about it in my notes. Which are extensive by the way.”
“How many people are on Viperia?” Finn asked.
“A lot. Backup’s finally arrived. Beefdom got there first, Nar’s still taking point, and I think I see A23F’s team coming in as well. And that’s not counting the indies who are sticking with this mission and haven’t bailed yet. Those are mostly staying back.”
Not enough, then. Finn knew it was probably not too surprising that only the nearby teams were available on such short notice, though it was unsettling just how much damage Viperia was able to do before anyone managed to stop her. The current roster of heroes coming down on her didn’t have the power to end the battle.
Aiden was strong, he could attest to that. But the older boy hadn’t been capable of stopping Viperia even with his mentor’s help. He supposed that was why they were stalling for Mistral to come through with this presumably much more powerful attack.
He didn’t want to think it would be that easy. This raid had already gone on for so long, the idea of it ending seemed hard to picture. Actually, he didn’t know how long it’d been. Likely not as long as he thought. It just felt that way because of everything that had gone wrong. All the people who had suffered. The images of all the death he’d witnessed today weren’t something he would ever forget.
Right now, they were on the move again, swinging and jumping to the battlefield, respectively. They had taken off after the emergency services arrived in force, despite knowing they could’ve stayed to help more people. Because he had drawn the conclusion that any minor contribution they could make to the battle was going to be more effective for ensuring the safety of all the people who could get hurt if they didn’t, especially if it tipped the scales.
…Yeah, no.
He was just paranoid about Viperia rampaging in the same district where his mother lived, even if his motivated reasoning might have sounded valid from a certain perspective. Although their house wasn’t close to the DHD headquarters, he didn’t want the unbound villain to suddenly change course and put her in danger. The decision to stop in the first place was absolutely influenced by the feedback from his power. Besides, other heroes had stopped to get people out of the wreckage.
Flashes of the last civilians bleeding out under the rubble came up in his mind. He pushed them down. He'd shown others where they were. That was the extent of what he could afford to do.
His grappling hook pulled him onto the next roof. The trip to the fight was much quieter this time around, many of the initial participants having chosen to stay behind or straight up leave the mission entirely. He could understand it, if not agree with it. This was a mission given to them by Cyrus which they were following up. The whole objective of bringing down the Venin’s boss wasn’t personal for them. He assumed the same was true for many others too, so the unwillingness to risk their lives here wasn’t too perplexing.
What he didn’t grasp was how Viperia thought this situation could ever end in her favor. Unless she became the strongest in the world, she would inevitably lose. Even if she managed to free her son, they’d be subdued and the kid would be recaptured. The problem they were facing was how much damage she could do before someone with enough strength was sent. She must have known that.
Running would have been the better option for her. It would have been a lot easier than bulldozing through all the heroes to get to the most secure place in the district. He’d turned that thought over in his mind multiple times, and settled on the idea that trying to ascribe logic and rationality to her actions was pointless.
Why was he thinking so hard about what was going through her head, anyway? It wasn’t that important considering she was behaving more like a primebeast than anything.
Maybe he just wanted to find meaning in her actions because the thought of her being totally unpredictable filled him with unease. All the more reason to end it as soon as possible.
Making their way over the devastation left in the wake of the transformed gang boss was another unwelcome sight. More bodies, dead and nearly so. He didn’t stop running, limiting himself to giving as many color signals as he could to the paramedics, heroes, and victims.
It was becoming easier. For the same reason he wasn’t keeling over from the passive aspect of his power overloading his parietal lobe, maintaining multiple “instances” of color manipulation was less tricky than it had been. There didn’t seem to be a real ceiling to the total number he could run at once. The thing hampering him most was precision, and while it was at a level that the naked eye couldn’t really spot the visual difference between his current work and that of a Shade with ten times the control, it still served as a buffer to the other aspects. Pushing certain parts of his ability to the brink was doable, but all of them simultaneously? No tangible progress was made that way. And a bunch of suboptimally constructed recolorings weren’t very useful.
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Aside from that, he also ran into the barrier of conceptualization. Some base part of him, a fundamental element of his way of thinking perhaps, was prone to remaining how it always had. Regardless of how much cognitive bandwidth his power provided him with, he wasn’t simply going to switch his mind from thinking in a single stream of consciousness to managing a thousand concurrent mental iterations at the same time in the blink of an eye. He was beginning to think he would need something drastic to shake the habit of thinking like a human, monstrous as that sounded.
Never mind that the extra brain capacity only really applied to his power, not any random stray thought. Then again, going by how he could visualize practically anything using his power, that wasn’t a true hindrance.
Ultimately, he was missing a way to convert that avenue of growth into offense, into a weapon he could use. A weapon better than parlor tricks. Great as it would have been to have an accessible way to achieve that, he saw the situation for what it was and acknowledged none of this was going to happen today.
Soon, they caught up to the battle. Or rather, he had it in his range now. They weren’t quite there for the front row seats yet. It didn’t matter, though; he and Lyra could perceive the fight just fine from where they were.
Fine enough to see it was chaos.
Dogpiling an Unbound with the most prominent heroes of various districts resulted in a slugfest for the most part. He wouldn’t have been able to follow it if not for his ability to see past the smoke and explosions and dozens of bodies moving this way and that.
Viperia became more lethal with each new trick she discovered, her coiling ophidian body the size of an office building broke up formations, and each time she tried to position herself for a move that would buy her some space, ten other powers would prevent her from doing so.
Closest to her were the heroes who wouldn’t easily die from a single attack. Nar still took up most of her attention, but Mountpin went in with her amorphous needle form right behind him. Being flattened by straight hits, morphing around them, aiming for perceived weak spots like the eyes and mouth, the woman did her best to harry the supervillain. Her contribution was a drop in the bucket.
A bit behind her was Scalestrike, rolling around the battlefield and mostly blocking stray shots from hitting squishier people, whom Aquiveil occasionally teleported to a better position with his water drop outlines.
Not all the DHD heroes were with their teams, however.
Damsel landed greaves-first on a building closer to the gigantic snake, and Finn noticed a drone floating next to her, which she appeared to be conversing with. Under other circumstances, he would’ve assumed that was Zeta chaperoning her, but the model was unmistakably one of Jack’s.
“Gridlock,” he said.
“What’s up? You planning another maneuver?” his friend replied after a moment’s pause.
“No. What are you doing with Damsel?”
“Helping her look for an opening. You guys should group up with her.”
When had he gotten acquainted with her? This was the first time Finn saw those two working together in any capacity. Jack was expanding his network, which was good, but in the present all Finn cared about was how long it would take to eventually find the supposed opening.
He wasn’t sure about the specifics of the knightly heroine’s power, other than that it was high damage and a warrior variant. The biggest issue would be making sure she wasn’t caught out or hit by a counterattack. That was the point of having a team: covering each other’s weaknesses. But being part of a team could also make you complacent, drive you forward less, not stimulate you to seek to genuinely improve as much.
Which category did Damsel fit into? Both, he would say, as she didn’t have any real solo achievements but was showing willingness to branch out from her usual crowd here. This whole night, she had been, he realized. It had never been a problem of attitude, but of constraints. That inference made him more confident than ever in his decision not to join up with the government.
Next to Finn, Lyra seemed to want to add something to the conversation, based on the way she bit her lip and how her aura fluctuated. He didn’t press. If it was important enough, she wouldn’t be so stupid as to keep it hidden from them.
Below, their opponent disengaged. Viperia burrowed herself into the ground, coating herself in venom and slithering through the melting dirt. She came up underneath one of the buildings a few support heroes were standing on. Finn warned them, and it got them moving, though it was Nar who ended up having to save them with a dozen platforms and
Erupting through multiple stories of concrete, stone and other materials he didn’t bother identifying, the towering predator had a dangerous gleam in those slitted eyes and readied more venom breath.
Then Beefdom wrapped his arms around her like she was Apexia’s biggest tree trunk and hurled her skywards.
Platforms of gold manifested below her, positioned exactly so she wouldn’t be able to get any leverage and hoisting her up farther and farther. Nar had his hand pointed up at her, tension and strain evident in his posture. He’d been pushing it for a while.
Through it all, the battlefield seemed to hold its breath, the chaos briefly stilled as they waited to see who would make the next move.
Then the sky cleared. The dark clouds, swirling and crackling with energy, drew inward, spiraling toward a single point directly above the suspended Viperia. The oppressive storm began to collapse on itself, twisting downward in a perfect, lethal funnel, like a cosmic drain swallowing the fury of the heavens. At the center of it all, a figure descended—a streak of motion outlined in lightning and frost, glowing against the writhing black.
Mistral.
The district captain careened towards her, thrusting forward his arm and releasing all the accumulated fury in one go.
The explosion made the world flash white.