This wasn’t happening. There was no way.
That was all she could think at that moment. A plain denial of what had taken place a moment ago. Matilda refused to believe this was it.
That brutal finishing move was executed so fast, no one could have intervened, but she could reach Allen now, so she did.
She sprinted over the road without hesitation, taking bounding leaps over the pavement until she was halfway down the street. Crouching, she kicked her legs and made her way up the building, leaping into the air to catch him.
He landed in her arms with a pained grunt, and the damage was even worse up close than it had seemed from afar. Her face crumpled as she looked him over. His left arm was completely gone from the shoulder down, and his side was partly melted away, chest included. She didn’t think she was completely imagining it when she thought he felt a lot lighter than he should have.
The gaping wound was frozen over, acid no longer eating away at him, but the damage was already done. Not even his cape had come out of this untouched. Her heart felt like it was getting stabbed every time her gaze wandered down.
Gravity took hold, and they started falling. She felt him shifting the tiniest bit. “Nice… catch,” he praised in a rattling breath.
How could he be so casual? How could he joke like that when it was his life on the line? Her lips parted to argue, to tell him to stop, but her voice caught in her throat, replaced with a dry sob.
“Quiet,” she said, voice shaking. “Don’t strain yourself.”
Nar flew by then, having finally caught up after the lightning-quick exchange he hadn’t managed to protect Allen from. There was no point in stopping either. Even if he had a combination of powers ready that could help, the switching process would take too long, especially since he’d already done plenty of that tonight. Never mind the fact that he wasn’t specialized or highly trained in healing. Instead, he was preparing another ability to combat the giant serpent slithering off to somewhere else.
For a brief moment, when they crossed paths, Allen caught his gaze.
Even though she could not see their eyes, she knew they conveyed a thousand words of meaning in that single glance. The details were lost on her, but she hoped this wasn’t… No, she couldn’t even finish the thought.
It couldn’t be true. Not like this. Not when he still had so much left to teach, so much left to give.
Upon touching down, she let her rescue training take over and got down to ground level, trying not to jostle Allen. If the quick journey hurt him at all, he didn’t show it.
“You kids grew so big when I wasn’t looking, didn’t you?” he asked, grinning weakly. Even as he spoke those words, his tone was losing weight, voice getting breathier and weaker.
Matilda wanted to answer, but her throat closed up, the lump in it too massive to swallow.
Carefully setting her adoptive father against a wall facing away from the fighting, she activated the communicator on her ear to speak with his team.
“Radi!” she shouted urgently, teary-eyed. The woman needed to hurry up. They didn’t have time. “You need to come here immediately.”
The reply came in that same Dominian accent the older heroine always had. “I am on my way, Damsel. I saw what happened.”
That made sense. She must have been waiting in the wings this whole battle until something like this occurred. Expected of someone with her power. Radi was a professional. Even so, Matilda hated how calm she sounded, like she wasn’t taking this seriously. That wasn’t true, but it felt like it. Calmness was necessary in the field, but right now it grated on her nerves like nails on glass.
Over the increasingly distant rumbling, she heard footsteps approaching less than a minute later.
She turned. Radi was kneeling beside her, and while her expression was impossible to read with the mask over her face, the younger girl knew there was sympathy there.
After a few seconds of watching Radi put her hand on Allen’s chest, Matilda couldn’t take it anymore. “Can you-” Her voice broke. “Can you save him?” She sounded as scared as she felt, and somehow she didn’t have it in her to care about that.
More time passed in awful silence as the healing coursed through him, and she felt a dash of hope when Allen sat a bit more upright, only for Radi to crush it.
The healer shook her head. “No counteragent has been devised as of yet, and that is excluding the increased toxicity from Viperia’s unbinding. If it were only that, I would have the capability to sustain him long enough for others with better-suited abilities to restore his body. Unfortunately, there seem to be traces of another substance circulating in the bloodstream. An extra poison, specialized in rot and decay. Taking that addition into consideration, his condition is not one I can slow down any further. He would have seconds left, were I not here. Even with my help, it makes little difference. He is being destroyed from the inside out.
“I am deeply sorry, Captain,” said Radi when she turned her head to face her team leader, voice soft and gentle. “This is the most I can do.”
“I-it’s plenty,” Allen replied with a wet cough. “I get to talk to my daughter on my way out. What more could I- could I want?”
“You’re going to make it,” Matilda said hastily, but the lie rang hollow to her ears no later than it left her lips. “You have to.”
She got a wry smile in return, and he raised a trembling, blood-stained glove to his visor to lift it off his face. He looked pale, sweating and drained. His eyes struggled to stay open, fluttering as he looked her way. Between labored breaths, he said, “You’ll be… the best of us. Better than me. You’ll be fine, Matilda.”
Allen’s grip was so heartbreakingly weak, she sobbed when her hands closed around his. It was as if the ground had opened up beneath her, threatening to swallow her whole. “Don’t leave me,” she whispered. She took off her own helmet and veil. “Please. I wouldn’t know what to do without you. Please, Dad.”
A rasping chuckle came from his throat, his head lolling to the side slightly. “I thought you’d… never… call me…”
His grip slackened further, and Radi placed a hand on Matilda’s shoulder. “He is holding on for your sake,” she said quietly. “But his body cannot endure much longer. You must prepare yourself.”
Prepare herself? How could she prepare herself for this? The tears only flowed harder at the thought of being alone. Images of their time together flashed through her mind, making her curl up and hold onto the fabric of Allen’s bodysuit with balled fists.
“I’m so proud of you,” he told her so quietly she almost couldn’t make it out.
His eyes were glazing over, and she shook him as if that would somehow delay the inevitable. Of course, she couldn’t. His features softened, and with them, the faintest trace of his smile lingered—a mark of a man who had no regrets about the family he left behind.
Matilda wailed.
Huddling against his cooling, lifeless body, she let out the sound of her grief, hearing it echo off the walls.
There was no end to it. Ceaselessly, she cried. Every time she opened her eyes, she saw it. Reality would set in, tearing her apart and leaving her hollow. Empty. She was on her own now.
Except she wasn’t alone. Radi’s hand had never left her shoulder. “Damsel, it’s time to go. Get to safety, I will take care of the body.”
“Hurts,” she hissed, sobbing harder. Speaking was too much, calling up the ideas in her head and trying to form words just brought the pain into sharper clarity. Her breath hitched, her throat feeling like it had a vice clamped around it. Snot and drool dribbled down her face with every convulsive gasp.
However, despite her pain, the world didn’t wait for her. The tremors were getting louder again. “I know it hurts. But he sacrificed his life to save all of us. Do not let it be in vain, and I will do the same. Okay?”
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This just wasn’t fair. She’d finally found a home with him, and now he was gone, left on some battlefield with two people keeping him company on cold pavement. He should have had more time. Everyone else had passed by them, preoccupied with handling the disaster he hadn’t been able to stop.
Worse, that disaster was still rampaging. Just as it dismissed Allen after landing the killing blow, it would move on if they let it win. Go to some other place to spread misery and death.
Never would she allow that. This monster wouldn’t get to leave this behind.
Grief turned to rage in her heart, a billowing storm that demanded to be let loose. Taking a shuddering breath, she swallowed, finally composed enough to nod. Her hands reluctantly let go of the man she held most dear in her life, internalizing the words. It was up to her. It wouldn’t be in vain.
Donning her helmet and veil again, she stood and marched away in the direction of the battle before Radi could stop her. “Damsel!”
She had rounded the corner. With a screech, the metallic hood of a nearby car crumpled as her gauntlets grabbed on. She lifted the whole vehicle over her head, then sprinted.
Up ahead, the clash was in full swing. The serpent dodged lasers and avoided getting trapped by barriers, fighting back with bites and tackles and poison. It succeeded in worming its way out of the enclosure the heroes were forming. It was going through a side street.
Crouching for maximum force, she flexed her legs and jumped after it, higher than ever. Higher than the beast attempting to escape them.
Screaming at the top of her lungs, Damsel brought the hunk of steel down with all her might.
*******
Lyra couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Superficially, the hit seemed ineffective. Damsel’s impromptu weapon broke as soon as it made contact, and Viperia’s head was only shoved to the side a little. Afterwards, the knightess fell down. A pair of strings quickly whisked her out of harm’s way, saving her from the expected counterattack.
Internally, it was a different story. She’d known Damsel’s power could deliver real hurt, but witnessing what the girl could do by picking up a car and dunking it into Viperia’s head was something else. When she concentrated on the loud vibrations traveling through the giant snake’s body, she could see the internal damage from that attack. Extensive skull fracturing and even brain trauma, along with hemorrhaging and torn tissue in several places. Far more damage than that amount of force should’ve been able to deliver, taking into account the defenses the Venin boss had displayed so far.
This was true damage. Yeah, Lyra felt that was a good name for it.
The raging viper wasn’t nearly as sharp now, beginning to slacken against the onslaught as dark blood started leaking from her maw, struggling to stay upright and fending off Nar’s attacks to the best of her ability. But the damage also made her more desperate. She was throwing a lot more venom around than before.
To Lyra’s dismay, that state didn’t last long. The injuries the Unbound received from Damsel’s attack were healing in no time, everywhere aside from the brain. The cerebral area was almost glacial in its regeneration. Until the damage there just disappeared in a blink. It took her a second to even suspect how that transpired. Once she did, she scowled.
“She transferred the damage to her human form,” Finn concluded, which confirmed her suspicions. The gang leader could do that exactly one time. A sign of how desperate she was. She was staking everything on this battle here. Either she got through, or she didn’t. Lyra wished she would simply drop dead already.
Then kill her.
No, not this. Squeezing her eyes shut, she took Finn’s hand in hers. The gesture surprised him, but he didn’t recoil. Rather, his fingers were firm and comforting as they watched together.
Contrary to her expectations, Nar took the intermittent pauses as a sign to back off from the fight entirely, landing on a rooftop and standing still for whatever reason. Wait, no, that must have been him switching powers. Something to put an end to all this, hopefully.
Other captains were the ones to take point, coming to the fore in and keeping her distracted for the real damage dealers to land their shots. Viperia was taking advantage of the terrain a lot more often, leveraging her bulk to create smokescreens and burrow into the earth below to surface in a different spot. It created bouts of anticipation where every fighter watched the shape Finn generated to indicate Viperia’s location, rearranging their positions as needed.
In one of those short lulls, she could feel the weight of what they’d seen happen sink in.
Mistral had died, but there was no time to mourn him. The battle raged on as it had before, albeit not without a significant hit to the overall morale of the heroes present. Viperia wasn’t stopping to wait for anyone, either killing somebody in her way or getting out of a bad position. And now that she had recovered from her most debilitating injury, her pace had increased again.
Combined with the changes in her fighting style and demeanor, the way it became more punishing and direct, Lyra had a bad feeling about how much more targeted the snake’s attacks were becoming. The last thing they needed was the Unbound they faced becoming more calculating and lucid.
What could they even do in such a situation? It wasn’t like any of them had an unbinding waiting in the works, convenient as that would have been.
Pathetic. You don’t need to consume in order to grow. We’re stronger as one. All you need to do is let go.
Her scowl deepened. She’d hoped to ignore the voice until it went quiet. No such luck.
Story of your life. Never stepping up to solve a problem until it blows up in your face.
Thankfully, Nar arrived at that point with a new power to distract her.
And what a power it was.
Beautiful. Regardless of how it worked, she found it beautiful. Ripples danced over his form as he swam through the air. He approached the scaled colossus with a grace that was quite literally out of this world; there were parts of his movements her senses didn’t pick up. His form seemed to travel between various points in an instant. At first, she assumed it was teleportation. But that didn’t seem complete. The Junior Ace captain seemed to be building up some kind of momentum too, using it to land punches and kicks capable of fracturing those inordinately durable bones.
Mystified, she watched Nar zip back and forth, raining down devastating hits on Viperia one after the other. He was winning.
Finn, also, stood frozen, transfixed with the scene in front of them.
Nar always knew where to be. As if he was chasing disturbances in general. Not an exact type of vibration or wave. Just any significant change in the environment was enough for him to latch onto. At least, that should be the case if Lyra was understanding this correctly. Then again, he could move in straight lines into the sky as well, so she could be wrong. She didn’t research powers as a hobby like Jack would.
But her friend did enlighten her as to whom it belonged to. “Shiftseeker’s power!? He had it all along! What?” The boy on the other end of the call was laughing hysterically.
“Dad…” she heard Finn whisper, so low that the microphone didn’t catch and transmit it over their comms. Only her power allowed her to hear him say that word.
That was his dad’s power? It was so strong. Just a few hops and the serpent was already on the backfoot, struggling to even keep that massive slitted eye trained on the jester. She couldn’t land a single hit, swiping at empty air no matter how hard she tried. Lyra would’ve lost him herself a few times if she couldn’t feel the exact location of every individual hit.
Nar didn’t pause, simply continuing the assault while preparing another attack at the same time. His right hand shimmered and attacked from an unexpected angle, except instead of only pushing Viperia back, it carved a massive gash across the front of her body, meeting no resistance and splitting her scales easily. The wound didn’t heal.
By now, the fight had gotten to the point that the rest could hardly contribute, similar to Mistral’s earlier duel with her, both parties going so fast it was hard to follow their exchanges. The distinction here being that Viperia wasn’t the one dominating.
It was almost enough.
The next attempt at landing at one of those cuts wasn’t as clean. Nar blitzed forward, aiming for an exposed part of her skull. And his power fizzled out at that moment, the fluctuations around him trembling and giving out, opening him up to Viperia’s tail slap. It was only a partial shift to the side that kept him from taking the full brunt of the impact, and even that sent him flying into a building. A quick check made her aware he was alive, though clearly worse for wear.
At least it explained why Nar hadn’t used Shiftseeker’s power before: he wasn’t able to control it properly, so using the ability was a risk the whole way through.
What are you waiting for? Join the fight.
She couldn’t fight that. What did it expect her to do?
Sing.
And that was why she never listened to it, all its suggestions led to ruin. What if she had a repeat of that disastrous first performance with her power, and Finn got hurt because of it?
If you stop hesitating, he won’t. I can show you.
No! Where were the reinforcements? How much longer was it going to take to send one heroic Unbound? The other heroes had engaged Viperia for the umpteenth time, but they were not a real match for her at full strength, let alone with some starting to tire in an extended confrontation. Viperia was getting more dangerous as the night drew out. Lyra fidgeted, looking around for a magical solution she knew wasn’t there.
Wasting time when you can’t afford to? It’s like you want everything to go wrong.
She was about to think up a response, but then a glow lit up in her mind, and she heard the voice scream in agony. Lyra yelped, recoiling at the awful burning sensation in her head, flapping her arms in front of her face while staggering back as if fending off a particularly dangerous mosquito.
What was that, she wondered upon recovering. Where did it come from? She tried to scan for the source, or the voice, yet neither was forthcoming with answers. In fact, the voice was totally silent now, not uttering a peep even when she provoked it. She didn’t dare hope it was gone for good, in spite of the welcome reprieve.
“Calliope,” Finn spoke in an alarmed tone. “What was—”
Suddenly, he began to glow like the morning sun. She stared at him with rapt attention, scanning his whole body with her eyes and senses. Still there was no identifiable source.
Lyra’s instincts screamed to act, unaware of what was coming.