At first, their frontal assault looked to have been the right move. Despite the transformation of their target, the battle actually seemed manageable for a moment. The first exchange happened in a blink, but they were ready.
Although their adversary moved instantaneously with speed that beggared belief, Nar didn’t miss a beat, countering with a wave of golden translucent golden force to hold Viperia in place. Someone else followed up with a laser, and Beefdom threw a haymaker so powerful it rocked the street on impact.
If they wished for the evolved lizard woman to remain still, though, they were going to be disappointed. While Nar’s power remained active, she moved despite the telekinetic pressure holding her back. Noticeably slower, though. Slow enough that Finn could actually follow her movements.
He wasted no time. His power tried to reinforce Nar’s around the contours of Viperia’s body. It didn’t work. He gritted his teeth. This was one of those times where the arbitrary limit of his power reared its ugly head. He couldn’t affect the layer of force around their opponent because it counted as part of her, or as if she was wearing it, like clothing—yet somehow it let attacks through from the outside. Frowning, he dropped the idea and ran forward along with plenty of others to rain down a flurry of attacks as Viperia’s movements were hampered.
Swinging his enhanced staff, it connected with the dark scales and didn’t do any visible damage, blending in with all the other blows the shifter was taking. It didn’t even stagger her, merely pushing her stomach inward a bit. Viperia swung her claws, but Nar wrapped golden chains around her this time, another layer of containment to go with the force. He was going all-in on subduing her, it seemed. Was someone else preparing to land another devastating blow?
Regardless, he wasn’t going to find out, since Viperia broke the chains and dashed forward. She caught a hero by the throat with her tail, squeezing until the woman’s neck broke, causing screams to ring out from another person behind Finn. A giant spectral feline pounced on the supervillain, who twisted out of the way, the movement blurring into rapid a flick-flack that ended with her out of the line of fire of another hail of blue bullets by a hair. Trooper fired his grappling hook at her unsuccessfully, catching thin air instead of the leg he’d been aiming for.
Finn couldn’t believe his eyes. Even slowed down significantly, she was on a different level, almost playing with them. Almost, because the expression on her scaly face was anything but playful. She snarled, baring her black fangs at one of the heroes running at her. He held a giant hammer, the head reaching all the way up to Viperia’s height. Air twisted around the weapon as he swung, and Finn bolstered it.
A clawed hand blocked it, then crushed the weapon in half a second of effort. Viperia didn’t stop there, swiping her other hand to disembowel the man and kicking his corpse into the path of another group of close range fighters with enough strength to scatter them like bowling pins. Her attention turned back to Finn, the white slit on her black sclera narrowing in agitation.
Finn didn’t wait for her to charge before dashing sideways, knowing she was still faster than him, reduced air resistance or no. His eyes widened and how much distance her first step covered, over half the gap between them cleared in an instant as she waded through the barrage of suppressing fire without a care. Right when she was almost in his face, a bundle of thread snapped into place around the humanoid reptile, binding her in place.
Realizing this was his chance, Finn anchored the threads in reality beyond what should be possible to make them sturdier, harder to break or change. Gossamer was a short distance away, her power straining to keep the struggling monster in place. He knew it wouldn’t last more than a few seconds, but that was all they needed.
Red cages of metal, shining manacles, blue rope, and a bunch of other powers sprouted around the now-stationary opponent. Finn enhanced all their colors to the best of his ability. That was the disadvantage of this shrunken form Viperia had assumed. Lithe and agile as it may have been, fast as it may have moved, it was still a far smaller target. Previously, many powers had been limited in use or completely useless because the giant snake was the size of a building, which was a much larger area than what a lot of these restraining techniques could encompass. Hence why they hadn’t been used. But now, with their opponent no more than double the height of a normal person, these options suddenly became viable again.
Provided with some breathing room, Aiden floated closer and stretched out his hands. Nothing happened for a few moments. For a few more seconds Viperia just weathered the attacks coming in but warily eyed the Junior Ace captain. Still nothing happened though. Except something did. A tiny, golden flame came to life. It was concentrated and vertical, like the fire from a laboratory gas burner, roaring as it grew brighter. Next, in a flash, it extended like a lance, stabbing into the Venin leader’s head.
The venom breath she’d been building up spilled from her mouth as she lost concentration, trying to bring her hand up to her face but failing. There was a hole in her forehead, yet not too deep. Finn’s senses told him it didn’t extend far inside, not sufficient to be lethal.
But the heat… wasn’t dissipating. Not the way it should. The wound lost its glow, yet it spread underneath her scales, glowing beneath the cracks. Then she flexed to break out while another rocket bore down on her and everyone got some distance.
Nar, meanwhile, backed away, and Finn saw the clear signs of exhaustion under the mask. How had he been able to switch powers so fast after so many rotations? Was he straining himself to the limit?
No time to investigate further. After so many unsuccessful hits, Finn half-expected Viperia to pull another crazy trick to avoid the combined power of Homeland’s weapon operator, Bodkin, and himself. But no such thing happened. She just took it straight to the face, the doubly superpowered weapon impacting her body in a contained boom. The environment shook, and all the power of the weapon could be felt, even if it didn’t reach them. Smoke extended from the blast radius, but it was quickly swept away by an aerokinetic they had on hand.
Quickly enough for everyone to see a regenerating Viperia breaking out of her impromptu cell. Finn could see despair setting in for the people around him. They were starting to realize what it meant facing someone of this caliber, what it meant to fight an unwinnable battle to the bitter end. Or maybe they were just losing the last bits of false hope they’d clung to.
Personally, he wasn’t too surprised. Even though this exact attack had seemed like the finishing move earlier, he’d suspected this compressed form had higher durability and similar strength and speed. The only thing she lacked was weight and size. Two things she honestly did not need in order to deal with them.
The attack wasn’t that big in scale. They’d only cleared the area to the end of the street, but that was enough. The buildings on either end of the road were gone, completely destroyed. What remained of the road itself was a crater, just one far less devastating than he would’ve expected. Less devastating than the first rocket. At which point he realized: Bodkin could control the area of effect of weapons he coated.
However, the potency couldn’t be doubted. It had sheared away flesh all the way down to the bone in places, and those scales were blackened with soot. There just wasn’t any way to make the damage last. Potency wasn’t the issue anymore.
Perhaps if the entire group of heroes and villains were a coordinated collective, they would’ve been able to come up with a better answer before their enemy broke out. But beyond the individual groups doing their own thing, they’d never trained together a day in their lives, and the second they saw her standing still they had to take the opportunity to land a strong attack. So strong, in fact, that Nar hadn’t been able to keep up his force suppression field around Viperia.
And that was all she needed.
She disappeared in a flash, practically teleporting next to Finn and stabbing at him with a claw. Her aim was off. Not because he’d dodged in time, but because he’d used camouflage at the last moment. No, it would be more accurate to say he’d used true invisibility, as he had activated his camouflage while his body had looked partially faded from lessening the colors of his visage. Combined, he was completely undetectable to the naked eye. Not even Viperia was an exception, searching for him. Briefly. She had plenty of other senses to rely on that could detect him. He’d just surprised her. But it would do. For this one attack, it saved his life.
He backed away from the claw, dashing backwards when Nar was about to reactivate his force ability. It didn’t take this time, Viperia blitzing around towards the other heroes instead of sussing out the exact location of the invisible Finn. Without the field hampering her, no one stood a chance.
First, Viperia stopped next to a heroine with short black hair, twisting her head off with a welding mask still attached. Then she appeared next to a hero with a surgeon-esque getup, caving his chest in with a simple jab, which turned out to be fatal. After that she rounded on Beefdom’s squad, his supporting members unable to prepare themselves for having their rib cages torn open, heads stomped on, spines ripped out…
Harrowing didn’t even begin to describe it. Finn couldn’t keep up with her, couldn’t keep up with the slaughter. Viperia opened her mouth and fired more venom, except this time it was concentrated and even more lethal than before. Try as he might, his defense enhancements and weakening of her attack didn’t help. The entire group standing there died within seconds of being hit.
The deaths were blurring together. Keeping track of all of them was starting to be a tall task. One he didn’t have the time to complete with his attention occupied futilely attempting to save the remaining fighters. At some point, he’d begun running in the direction Viperia appeared in. He couldn’t consciously explain why, other than in some vain attempt to make it seem like his proximity actually mattered in the middle of all this carnage. Did it matter that he was more effective up close if he was facing something like this? No, but that wasn’t any reason not to perform as well as possible.
Among the combatants she targeted, only the final two survived. The first was Trooper, getting stabbed in the gut and slumping for a second before he stood upright again, no worse for wear.
The second was Beefdom, rushing at her with a punch that carried the weight of all his dead comrades. She caught it with ease, the black venom on her claws nicking his skin. The poison began to spread, but the captain of A23H tore his arm off at the elbow before it could affect a vital area, retreating as he sacrificed his limb.
When all was said and done, a scant few remained. From what had been over a hundred before, Finn was now looking at less than twenty.
Viperia was surveying her handiwork like it was some macabre play rather than a mass grave in the making, just as Nar’s ability took hold again, though he could see it was weaker. Less solid, lighter, more prone to breaking.
But he wasn’t the only Wardell sibling to hinder her.
Casey’s power didn’t have visual feedback when she used this aspect of her gift, but via the metaphysical link he shared with her through the glow, he could tell that she was doing the opposite to Viperia. Reducing the shifter power, decreasing it.
The effect was immediate. Viperia fell to one knee and the remaining fighters took the chance to try and finish this once and for all. Finn was one of them, using his staff at full charge to ready a blow that would do as much damage as he could muster. Mr. Cotherman used his laser cannon, and unlike last time they fought, Finn was on his side. So rather than limiting the internal reflectivity to make it blow up, he made it more reflective, in addition to empowering the structural integrity of the device itself and adding reality to the high-intensity light that was beginning to build.
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Viperia hadn’t become a long-standing gang boss without racking up experience, though. If nothing else, she had skill. In her weakened state, slowed down on top of that, she deftly weaved past a pair of gauntleted heroes to dodge the laser. It would’ve worked, if not for one thing.
Like Finn, his grappling hook was also invisible until the last moment, so she couldn’t see it in time to sidestep it. It connected with her leg, and he had to pull with all his strength to get her to move even slightly towards him. She was heavy. Of course, that wasn’t a big problem. He didn’t need to pull her all the way. Just slow her down so Trooper could land his shot.
Viperia held up both arms to block the flashing red beam that seared her frontside, and it surprisingly melted and peeled off her scales, starting to dig into her bones, nearly removing her arms altogether. The force was so great that she began taking steps back just so she wouldn’t fall over.
Reeling his hook back in, Finn approached her from behind, but she must have heard him as her tail lashed out blindly when he neared. He stayed clear of it and used his staff to hit her in the back of the knee to break her balance. It didn’t work, but the distraction served its purpose in allowing Trooper time to use his other hand so he could fire his own grappling hook.
Contrary to his own, it wasn’t a mere semi-magnetic, semi-adhesive effect that clung to surfaces temporarily but harmlessly. No, Trooper’s hook pierced and latched onto whatever he shot it at. Brutal, efficient, and heavy. Much like the man himself.
With Finn enhancing it for him, and Viperia’s form weakened, it found purchase in her ruined arm and pulled her forward as the laser cut out. The Homeland villain had no trouble handling her weight. She couldn’t recover in time to avoid Nar rocketing down from the sky at full speed, smashing her into the ground with a barrier in front of him.
From there, the pressure didn’t let up. Bodkin kept shooting at her, and even though it wasn’t close to as much ranged assault as before, with Casey’s new power discovery, it was infinitely more effective.
Unfortunately, when Finn checked on her, he saw her leaning on the wall behind her for support, eyes squeezed shut in pain. There was even a trickle of blood dripping from her nose. She couldn’t keep this up for long.
To his shock, Viperia was up again a moment later. He was too exhausted to feel any frustration at this point. At a certain point he was just coming to expect it with no particular emotion. It wasn’t strange anymore.
The real strange part was how she had never stopped glowing. That heat between her scales, inside her scales, was still there. More intense than before. Not just heat, also… the lingering energy from Mistral’s strongest technique. It was fading from her half-exposed skull, spreading to her scales as well. But it didn’t make her stronger. It didn’t have any noticeable effect at all. She got wounded like usual. Trooper cut her with his translucent energy blade and her crackling, glowing scales parted. What was going on?
With nothing stopping it from regenerating any longer, the left side of Viperia’s face healed. Her other eye was back, and with it she no longer had a blindspot there, avoiding a swordsman from one of the surrounding districts. She was physically as good as new, save for the cut on her chest.
Right as she was about to counterattack, the ground began to vibrate, and Finn sighed as his senses told him who was approaching. With a tremor, Viperia stumbled into the trajectory of a bazooka shot from Bodkin. She fell backward, towards a girl with a bird mask.
Lyra’s blurry fist connected with Viperia’s back, shaking her to the core in a very literal sense. It didn’t do a lot of damage. What made it so effective was how thoroughly it disoriented the Unbound. Viperia couldn’t get her bearings in time for the follow-up that came from another familiar girl.
The metal pipe Damsel hit Viperia with did not break when it made contact. What broke this time was Viperia’s arm, as the woman tried to block the hit ineffectually. Finn was making sure the new weapon didn’t shatter with his ability, and the internal damage power worked wonders. The knightess went for another hit. The bipedal reptilian weaved around it and tried to lash out, but got hit by one of Nar’s fire lances again.
A golf ball-sized hole opened up in her throat, narrowly missing her spinal cord. He must have been going for the head, and Finn was fully intent on providing another opening for Aiden to do exactly that.
Injecting the tiny needle of another capsule into his veins, he ran forward with his staff raised, and Trooper also approached. Viperia used her breath attack on Lyra, which got deflected with a targeted shockwave, whereas Trooper got grabbed and thrown into a building so hard he came out the other side.
Picking up a loose piece of rubble, Viperia tossed it at Bodkin. The saved himself from an early grave, though his shoulder still shattered under the glancing blow. He wasn’t even a warrior type. He went down with a cry of pain. Finn didn’t think he would do the same if that happened to him, but there was no time to compare.
He closed in and swung at Viperia, causing her to back away right into Lyra’s next shockwave that in turn knocked her into Damsel’s swing. The frontside of the shifter’s skull fractured, and they kept up the offensive.
Nar made more lances that each came closer to skewering her head, Lyra kept her disoriented enough to stop her from mounting a proper defense, Damsel did by far the most damage with her bone fracturing hits, while Finn stayed invisible and used his charged staff in combination with his dashes to push her forward or slowed her down with his hook. She was getting beaten like a piñata from every direction, getting burned and broken at a rate her weaker regeneration could barely keep up with.
At one point, the supervillain grabbed the pavement and clawed herself out of their circle, desperately getting away from them. The moment she was out, she thought she was safe. She couldn’t have been more wrong. A wave of floating water droplets washed over them, dense and far-reaching.
Viperia, still on her knees, got soaked, then blinked out of her position and reappeared in the middle of them in time for a dashing tackle from Finn into a shock wave and another whack from Damsel. The beatdown continued mercilessly, this time with the suspended rain in that signature grid pattern hanging around.
Aquiveil hovered nearby, ready to teleport Viperia back should she escape a second time. Finn kept up the assault, knowing this needed to end quickly.
Nar finally speared Viperia through the skull, but not in a vital area as she didn’t look to be dead. Somewhere near the frontal lobe, though her brain didn’t appear to be the exact same as that of a human. She went half-limp all the same, slumping. Damsel shattered her spine with an overhead strike, arresting her movement entirely. One more and she could’ve ended it.
With a ripple in her form, Viperia began to grow.
A reverse of her shrinkage before, her form seemed to revert, and throughout the fight the energy build-up in her scales had never ceased, instead intensifying beyond all reason. The other difference was that this one wasn’t at all focused. He saw it for what it was, which was a gambit to make herself a bigger target and multiply her surface area so each attack didn’t have as much effect. A sound strategy if they didn’t have the power to kill her. They did, so it did nothing except buy her time.
Buy her time…
“She’s going to explode!” Jack shouted over the comms. “It’s like an explosive variation of molting. She can expel her external energy to the outer layer of her skin and shed it in every direction. Violently. With the amount she’s built up she’s going to devastate the whole area. You need to get away now. If you don’t… Oh.”
Wait, what did he see? Finn knew that his friend was observing the surroundings of the battle, but nothing in his range really stood out.
He refocused on the battle, watching Viperia’s tongue snake out. He was getting his last hit in so the others could put a stop to this madness. He took a step—
Viperia’s tail caught him around the waist, no doubt to keep him close rather than have him slip away again after another hit. It was all he could do to reinforce his existence to the point where he wouldn’t get his skeleton crushed. Lyra freaked out and jumped straight towards him, but that just resulted in her getting pinned down by a clawed hand.
Purple sparks lit up around everyone else, and a second later they had all disappeared with a popping sound.
The entire area was empty save the three of them. Boy, girl, and monster.
The realization struck him like a bolt of lightning. The reinforcements had arrived outside his sensory range, and they’d evacuated everyone they could, which was to say everyone not in direct contact with the mass murdering Unbound.
His arms were still free, and he had his staff in them, so he was ready when Lyra managed to vibrate Viperia to the point where the growing, fiery beast loosened her hold somewhat. His staff, fully charged, rammed down and he got free.
He caught his balance. Sprinting over to Lyra, he helped her to her feet. Viperia wasn’t reacting to their escape, having a hard time staying upright. It was a cursed wonder that she was even moving with a hole in her brain, period. But her movements were becoming smoother by the second, and the glow was still intensifying. Killing her would take too long without Damsel or Nar present, if they could manage it before she inevitably recovered. They didn’t have time. They had to run.
Faint swirls in space originated ahead of them as they began making distance, sputtering to life and flickering as if through the screen of one of those old televisions. Shortly after the portal started coming into existence, Finn understood. Warp was creating it from the edge of his range, a last ditch effort to save them from the explosion. The caveat was his limitation.
Only one person could enter his portal before it expired and he had to make a new one.
Something they lacked the time to do. Neither did they have time to cover the entire distance by themselves.
He saw in Lyra’s aura that she was thinking the same thing he was.
They moved at the same time, Lyra jumping back and aiming a shockwave that would send Finn hurtling into the portal. Finn observed every moving particle in her body to see her next move, to predict what was going to be. This plan hinged on the assumption that he dodged right and maneuvered around her in the perfect way.
His mind zeroed in on her aura and muscles, her brain and nerves, anything to suggest what she was going to do. He needed to know because he could not mess this up. It felt like an eternity but couldn’t have been more than a fraction of a second.
When he pictured the area she was looking at from her perspective, he saw the faintest outline of color suggesting what she was going for… there.
Positioning himself as if diving to the left, he pulled a feint and went right. Lyra’s shockwave missed and she couldn’t prepare another one in time for his dash. Then he was behind her.
She was vibrating now, her entire body was vibrating. To send him flying the moment he touched her. It was the same trick that won her the duel they’d had back during their first official training session. A technique she’d initially considered risky because of the internal damage she could do to herself if she wasn’t careful. She was pulling out all the stops.
He responded in kind. His entire body reinforced itself beyond anything he’d managed before tonight, making him resistant to her shockwaves along with the hooks he fired past either side of her, connecting to the road with the portal between them. He jumped forward, tackling Lyra along as the gadgets spooled back in. His body endured the shock.
Lyra tried to twist him in front of the portal. He brought his legs up and kicked full force, sending her flying head over heels into the spatial breach. When they parted, her face and aura spoke of disbelief, heartbreak, and longing.
Finn watched his partner get to safety during what he guessed were the final seconds of his life. The portal winked out as anticipated, and he kept running. He knew he wasn’t going to make it in time, but there was no reason to give up.
Pumping his legs faster than ever, he noticed that Jack had been pleading for his life the entire time, and felt sorry for disappointing his friend. He’d known something like this could happen. After so many brushes with death, he supposed his luck had run out for real.
A newly sprouting portal bloomed before him, and his hand reached out. Behind him, Viperia released all the energy she’d built up in a giant explosion.
His power spread to everything he could think of that would save him. The explosion, to make it weaker. His body, to make it sturdier. The weird crystal in his pocket that he had never found a use for. The very air itself. Everywhere his power could extend, it did. Where it couldn’t, it still struggled.
His fingers brushed the edge of the whirling pattern in space, but the portal wasn’t finished, leaving him to weather the surge of fiery death alone. Roaring waves of forceful heat encompassed him.
And then he was nowhere.