Finn felt, on an existential level, that the glow encompassed his entire being.

He inspected his hands, puzzled as to what was happening. And even more puzzled at the fact that he knew there was no ill intent behind it, whatever it was.

Moreover, he felt something else, accompanying the sudden intrusion as clearly as a sun illuminating a sapling at dawn, aiding its growth in the light of a new day:

Power.

Suffusing him, head to toe. And yet paradoxically, his muscles didn’t give the impression of being any more robust than before, and neither did his skin or bones. No, this increase, this strengthening was of a different nature.

It was his ability, his connection to the colors in the world around him. There was something fundamentally different about it now. It had been bolstered. Enhanced to greater heights, ones he had barely been able to grasp before, ones that were now in his reach. Experimentally, he tried a basic application of color to the environment.

The entire district turned white. As far as the eye could see, yet in his awareness he knew exactly where the boundaries were. His passive senses were no exception. The edges of his senses were well past the disaster zone, to the point where he could even sense plenty of people in their homes continuing with their lives like everything was normal. He had been seeing nothing but fear and distress since the moment alerts started going out in response to Viperia’s rampage.

Contrasting that starkly were the scenes playing out in his mind, people he observed in real-time being untouched by the horrors of tonight’s events. Though they were starting to wonder why every object around them seemed to be doing its level best to reassert its identity as part of the milk brotherhood.

Finn pulled back, eyes widened in shock. This range was far beyond anything he had ever come close to, much more than the measly few blocks he used to content himself with. His perception was… bigger than this entire battle. As it had been previously, but not to such a mind-boggling degree.

The rooftop supporting him returned to its regular shades, and he saw Lyra watching him with clear confusion.

“What…” she tried, not quite getting the words out. But she was noticeably calmer. The inexplicable part of her aura overlapping her head had gone inert when the glow had briefly touched her, unlike the ripples he had felt from it earlier.

“Are you- Did I really just see you do that?” Jack spoke up then, a bit of awe lacing his voice. “What’s going on with you two?

“I don’t know,” Finn admitted. He honestly didn’t have a clue. Who was doing this? He knew this wasn’t the result of unbinding, so how were his capabilities better? It had to be someone else…

There. In his preoccupation with his expanded range, he had neglected the sensory information he was receiving from his immediate vicinity momentarily, but there was something different. Or more accurately, someone. The battle was still ongoing, and civilians had long abandoned the area in accordance with the safety mandates and emergency responders.

A few lingered, but one in particular was uncomfortably close to the battle, hardly a kilometer away, if that. And she was staring straight in his direction.

Casey Wardell.

Was she the source of the glow doing weird things with his power? Yeah, that explanation rang true in his head, though he couldn’t explain the certitude with which that belief cemented itself after a moment’s consideration.

The girl was just standing there near one of the vacated buildings behind them, sunglasses over her eyes but no attempt at a mask or anything else to obscure her identity despite the public power use. She wasn’t even carrying any other equipment, just leaning there against a wall with her arms crossed without so much as a phone in her pocket.

That the circumstances leading up to her arrival and subsequent power use here were a mystery to him went without saying. However, Finn quickly dismissed those details as irrelevant in the current situation. Instead, he assessed the useful aspects of their predicament. The key pieces of information were that Casey had gained a power somehow, as he was pretty sure she hadn’t possessed one before, and she was here to help out.

When it came to the nature of the power itself, it currently acted as some sort of ability amplification, if his deductions were correct. Whether it had other facets that weren’t active at the present moment, he didn’t know, and with her presumed lack of experience it was very possible his blonde classmate didn’t either.

Swiftly, Finn scrawled out a message with his power in her field of vision, asking how long she could keep this up. Her head twitched in surprise, and Finn couldn’t figure out why until he remembered Casey didn’t know about his true sensory capabilities.

She took it in stride nevertheless, mouthing something like “long enough.” Then she made the universal hurry up motion with her hand, the sentiment she was trying to convey obvious to Finn. He knew what she wanted him to do.

Take action.

“Alright,” he said out loud, drawing the attention of his two teammates, who’d been in a discussion of their own. “Let’s move.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Gridlock. “What is that effect you’re under? Why are you glowing?”

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“Shade, are you… are you okay?” Lyra asked.

“It’s temporary,” Finn replied to both questions at once. As the answer left his mouth, he was beginning to appreciate just how accurate it was. It was, in fact, temporary. This was not a permanent boost to his personal strength. The moment Casey stopped channeling the boost, he would go back to what he was.

Essentially having that windfall of power he’d been searching for fall into his lap only to know it was guaranteed to be taken away later was bitter. Ironic. But it was what he had, and he was going to use it, even knowing he couldn’t rely on this power to achieve his ultimate goal. Yet even so, he couldn’t deny the feeling was intoxicating.

He didn’t look towards the battle. Every detail of it was already obvious in his head, each individual muscle twitch from Viperia, shifts in the terrain, attacks fired by the heroes.

At the forefront, right under the head of the snake, Holderbar was the one taking point, as opposed to the DHD captains Finn expected to assume that role. The unassuming jacketed man displayed incomprehensible feats. One moment he dispersed like wind. The next he made duplicates of himself. Then he charged ahead faster than a speeding car. Even after witnessing it personally, Finn couldn’t make heads or tails of the guy’s ability.

Whatever it was, it didn’t change what he needed to do. Namely figuring out the new limits of his own power before anything else. The new sphere of influence was one thing he could check off the list. His control was also sharper. In addition to that, there was another quality to the colors now, one he’d never been able to leverage or even perceive in any real capacity before.

For lack of a better term, the “realness” of the world around him was, all of a sudden, easy for him to understand. But if that were the only thing that had changed, it would be a rather useless development for him given that he could already see through almost any form of deception.

What Casey had done allowed him to move his mastery over color along a different axis entirely. It wasn’t just the base parameters of his powers that had expanded. No, he was also capable of whole new techniques such as the following.

Out of a habit borne from long hours of practice, he crouched slightly in the camouflage stance used for sneaking around. While that wasn’t what he was planning to do here, the movements themselves helped him focus. He figured it would be most effective to use this technique on himself considering that, regardless of how much he had improved since that first day of receiving his powers, it still worked best when used on targets he was touching or his body.

Thus, more so than altering his colors in terms of shade or brightness, he lessened them. Slowly, the fabric of his costume started letting in the light from the other side of his glove..

Finn was speechless. His body was transparent. He gazed down at himself in silent wonder at the casual ease of this trick’s modulatory component. Little more than a thought, and he was actually see-through.

Sight and sound faded out. As did touch, smell and likely taste. He could no longer feel the wind on his skin, the world casting itself to an indiscernible blur in his eyes. Lyra’s voice called out to him, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying.

Her motions grew increasingly frantic, and he took half a step forward. The red-and-white bird mask was suddenly a hair’s breadth away from his visor. Did she just approach him? No, he sensed that she was stationary, and her shocked expression indicated she registered what happened at the same time he did.

That was all his own speed. He was quick. He could explain why, he just hadn’t expected the effect to be this pronounced. Perhaps, he supposed, rendering yourself less susceptible to air resistance by means of partially unmooring yourself from reality was best done with caution.

Doing the opposite wasn’t outside the realm of possibility either. If he wanted, he could make himself more “real.” And he did, fading back into view with more weight than before. The dimensions of his body didn’t change, nor did any of its colors, but they were more apparent. As if he had surpassed the point of one hundred percent opacity. His outline was just more obvious than anything around him.

Finn took a step back and found himself moving against regular resistance with abnormal steadfastness. Where in his faded state he had been bypassing the natural atmosphere with a somewhat unreal physique, he was now anchored to reality in a way no one else was. Pushing against the air with greater success due to his emphasized position in the universe.

Useful, he concluded. He couldn’t use this against other people, manipulating their place in the world by altering how their colors existed, because his power was incapable of affecting them. It could see the colors they comprised, yes, but turning someone else invisible or blackening internal organs was beyond him.

Not that he needed that. He could affect everything else, and after beckoning with his hand he wasted no time shooting his grappling hook to travel closer to the big fight. On his way, he assessed the situation further.

Aiden had gotten up, recovered from that brutal hit that had nearly taken him out of the fight for good had he not managed that last second dodge. Finn knew the older boy wasn’t going to be using Dad’s power again because of his imperfect control over it. Although, it had been heartening to see it confirmed that his father would have been able to resolve the entire Venin situation on his own. Finn buried the stab of pain he felt at being reminded of dad being gone, nice as it was to know someone was carrying on Shiftseeker’s legacy.

No longer risking that power, Nar swerved up into the air with a combination of powers Finn had seen from him before tonight. He must have been approaching the limit of his repertoire. Come to think of it, the Junior Ace captain had taken too long to get back into the battle, even though he should’ve been able to get regeneration fairly quickly. Did that mean that every subsequent ability swap took more time than the last?

Down below, the Unbound serpent reared back for another poison breath attack, and Finn seized his opportunity. A trio of independents raised a barricade of concrete to block the attack before scrambling away from certain death. He targeted it, reaching out with a hand and all the mental force he could muster to take its color and pulling on every characteristic, bidding it to claim its place.

His other hand faced the space in front of Viperia’s open mouth, and as soon as the stream of venom burst forth, he pushed its sickly green away from the world, willing its strength to disappear into oblivion. He didn’t succeed in erasing it altogether, not by a long shot, but the effect was noticeable once it connected with the hastily erected defense.

The collision still happened, the wall still melted away, the remnants of the attack still melted pieces of the road underneath, if at a considerably slower rate. The heroes behind it?

They were fine, heads swiveling around with flabbergasted looks on their faces.

Finn never let his guard down. He braced himself for the next round, vigilant of every minute change in the area. He needed to be ready.

The fight wasn’t over.