Multiple things happened at once. Ashika wasn't the first to move, but she was by far the fastest. Whatever biology and weight translated to in terms of superpower, they couldn't match her when she'd been building up a decent charge for a few minutes. She'd only been walking, but it was enough to strengthen her beyond her baseline, which was already several times stronger and faster than someone her size should be.

  More importantly, the charge gave her heightened reflexes and improved cognitive ability. So even though Blonde had moved first, it didn't matter. She spun on him, aiming a lightning fast backhand that struck him in the torso. He was sent tumbling away. But not as far as one would expect, and the deep thud when he hit the ground sounded heavier than he should’ve been.

  Weight, I realised in that split-second. But I didn’t have time to dwell on it.

  Evidently, they’d decided that the more alert of the two of us needed to be taken off guard, so Blonde had attacked Ashika from behind. Meanwhile, Silver went straight for me.

  He was only a few strides away, so it took less than a second to cross the distance, hand held out as if to grab me, rather than strike. Biology was vague as far as foundations went, but it told me enough to guess that I didn't want to be touched by this guy. I threw myself to the side with all my strength, keenly aware that brunette was still behind me.

  The thing about my signal sense was it exhausted me on a spiritual level, dragging at my consciousness like it wanted to pull me down into the depths. It meant I was dizzy. Felt like I was on the verge of passing out. But there wasn't actually any physical fatigue in my muscles. It was going to suck, but I could still fight.

  I landed hard and rolled, putting Ashika between me and Silver. “Some kind of biology power. No skin contact,” I warned. Ashika just nodded.

  Silver had been pursuing me, and was forced to go wider to avoid Ashika. He didn’t expect how fast she could move, and her kick took him in the stomach before he could react, launching him across the room. His back hit the wall with a heavy thump.

  So much for keeping things quiet, I thought with a grimace. It’d be a shock if no one heard what was going on here.

  Then I noticed the walls themselves. There was something off about them that took me a moment to place—they were a far darker shade of cream than they’d been before. Like the sun had gone behind a cloud, except we were indoors, under the harsh light of LEDs mounted in the grid-patterned ceiling. Shadow. That had to be Brunette’s power at work; indeed, his power signal was singing.

  There’d been no time to assess his powers properly beyond the foundation, so I didn’t know what he was doing exactly, but I felt it was fair to assume he was trying to keep anyone outside from discovering what was going on in here. They wanted to silence us.

  Blonde was in the process of getting back to his feet, and Ashika whirled with the momentum of the kick she’d just landed, bounding towards the man with Weight powers.

  “Heavier than he looks,” I managed to tell her just as she landed a kick in his mid-section, bodily lifting him from the floor and sending him flying into the opposite wall.

  He hit with a thud of his own, but he seemed none the worse for wear. In fact, he landed on his feet. He was grinning as he took a moment to shuck his fluorescent jacket and stretch himself out, as if limbering up for a workout. “Thanks for that, kid. Might’ve taken me a while to get up when I’m this heavy otherwise.”

  On the other side of the room, Silver was also getting back to his feet, looking similarly unhurt. He looked more cautious though, his eyes on Ashika now.

  I took a moment to look around, but there was no sign of Brunette anywhere. The walls, floor, and ceiling were steadily darkening, though. Likely his work. It was getting hard to make out the images on the CCTV screens.

  I looked at Silver, keeping my back to Blonde. The biology power seemed more immediately dangerous right now; Ashika could hold off some heavy guy no problem, as long as she kept her charge up. Someone who could potentially mess with our bodies directly was a tougher match-up.

  “So what’s the deal here?” I asked. Stalling was still our objective, ultimately. “You work for the guys next door, yeah?”

  Silver just scowled.

  “Nothing you need to know,” Blonde said. He was moving around, circling us while Ashika bounced in place. The four active signals in the room were making my head spin.

  I kept my eyes on Silver. “I’m just curious. Are you guys not tough enough to be part of the main operation, so you sit out here, waiting for trouble? Or are you just rando weaklings who got bullied into doing grunt work for supervillains?”

  “Not gonna want to piss me off here, kid,” Blonde said.

  “The fuck are you gonna do about it, asshole?” Ashika growled. “I’ll punch your face through the back of your head if you come at me again.”

  “I seriously doubt that, little lady. Props to you if you can pull it off, though.”

  “I can’t help but notice you didn’t answer my question,” I said mildly, still watching Silver. Unlike Blonde, who was circling, he was still as a statue, only his eyes moving, flitting between Ashika and I, as if waiting for some cue. The walls were still darkening. The room around us was practically black.

  There was a sigh behind me. “Look, you’ve stumbled upon some serious shit here, alright? I don’t want to kill some teenagers who aren’t even related to this whole shindig, so please just give up. We’ll tie you up and hold you until this is all over. We’re gonna be out of here soon, anyway, and you can go back to doing whatever wannabe hero shit you usually do.”

  That gave me pause. The idea of actually giving up briefly did cross my mind, but an instinctive revulsion from deep within me overpowered it immediately.

  Never. No way, no how. I’d never let villains win.

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

  I resisted the urge to look back. Taking my eyes off Silver seemed like a bad move. “You guys aren’t the real security guards for this place, are you?”

  “Nope,” Blonde said, not elaborating. “Seriously. Do I have to beg you? We’re on a schedule here, and there’s gonna come a point where we won’t be able to go easy on you anymore.”

  Ashika scoffed. “Was that you going easy before?”

  “Yep,” Blonde replied immediately. “We were just trying to grab ya and tie you up.”

  “How’d you figure that plan out without coordinating?” I asked.

  There was a moment of silence. Then came another sigh. “Alright. Fuck it. If we get caught we’re in shit deeper than the Mariana Trench anyway, so we might as well just kill you if you’re not gonna cooperate.”

  Silver burst forward, moving far faster than he had before, practically blurring. I had been prepared for him, primed to move, but it wasn't enough. My reaction time just couldn't compete with a superpower.

  In the blink of an eye, his hand was reaching for my face. I flinched back, but it didn't matter. He was too close. The hand filled my vision, latched onto my face, and suddenly my legs felt like they'd caught fire and someone had tried to put it out with acid. I cried out in pain and aimed a punch at his throat to win some space. Ashika spun and backhanded him away again before he could do anything more, but the damage was done.

  I collapsed, my lower half rendered totally useless. It felt like I’d way overdone it on a workout, utterly exhausting every muscle. Not quite paralysis; I could still feel them just fine, he’d just somehow strained my muscles far past their tolerance.

  Blonde wasted no time seizing the opening, but luckily Ashika had expected it. She kept her spin going, slamming him aside again. But even though she’d surely built up more charge now, her blow seemed to have less of an effect. It took him off his feet, but his arc through the air was far swifter, and the ground shook when he hit the floor, landing on his feet.

  This time, neither of them wasted a second regrouping. They were going all in.

  I could only watch helplessly as they charged at Ashika simultaneously from either side. She was forced to bounce away, leaping from one side of the room to the other, trying to get them both in front of her without leaving them between her and me.

  Everything in me screamed to call out to her, giving instructions, but I held back. For now, they were focused on her. If I called attention to myself, they might come back to finish the job on me, and then I wouldn’t be able to help at all.

  A wave of helplessness washed over my like a tide of scalding water. My skin prickled. My heart pounded. Tears of frustration gathered in the corner of my eyes; there couldn't be any worse feeling than being unable to move a part of your body.

  I considered dragging myself along the floor with pure upper body strength, thinking I could latch onto one of them to trip them up, giving Ashika long enough to do… something. I didn’t know what.

  It was clear these two weren’t going to be easily defeated, and we still had no idea what Brunette was up to with his shadow powers. The room continued to darken steadily. All the walls were practically black, like we were being steadily pulled into a void. It felt like it got a shade darker every time my attention strayed. Sound was slightly muffled, as if we were in a sound booth.

  I grit my teeth. There was only one thing I could do here, one skill unique to me. I just had to make sure I didn’t tire my signal sense beyond the limit. I couldn’t afford to fall unconscious.

  There was no time to waste, though. As Ashika kicked Blonde away and ducked beneath Silver’s outstretched hand and landed a brutal kidney punch that launched him onto the security table, I closed my eyes and delved into my signal sense.

  The pulse technique had done what I needed it to so far, but I had no choice but to push it further. If I was going to make any kind of contribution to this fight from here on out, it would have to be information and intelligence gathering. I had to figure out what their powers could do and find a way to use that knowledge.

  So this time, I let my focus linger a little longer, giving myself a full second rather than a flash. Compared to what I’d been doing all day, it was an eternity.

  Four nearby signals screeched in my mind, and I had only a second to analyse them. One was horribly powerful and growing by the second: Ashika. I tuned her out as best I could, keeping in mind that all this, all I could feel, was actually my own signal reacting to theirs. Tuning out Ashika’s wasn’t an act of blocking her out, but attempting to force my own to stop resonating in her frequency.

  Easier thought than accomplished. By a long, long way. In fact, it immediately became clear that was futile. Tuning out one signal and focusing on three others was the wrong approach. I barely made any progress at all on my first attempt, forced to shut off my focus before the signals overwhelmed me.

  Something deep inside me clenched. It felt like my soul itself was being squeezed by a giant hand. I sat on the floor, forced to gasp in breaths as I watched Ashika continuously slap the two security guards away.

  A failure. Not even close to good enough. I’d learned nothing I hadn’t from one of my ‘flash’ pulses, because I’d approached it wrong.

  So when I tried again a second later, I went the opposite way, focusing entirely on one signal, like I had with Vixen’s, tuning myself to the frequency that whispered biology. If Ashika’s A-rank signal was the benchmark, then the strength I felt here couldn’t have been half as resonant, putting him somewhere around a D-rank. I dismissed that. Not relevant right now.

  Instead, in the tiny amount of time I had, I forced my mind right into his signal, immersing myself in it. With just a fraction of a second’s extra attention, it became obvious the foundation of his power was biological manipulation centred around himself. Self-change, or perhaps self-improvement, were the core of it.

  An aspect gave him self-understanding. Presumably, before that he’d been working blind, giving his body vague commands and hoping it worked out. A second aspect gave him understanding of others, as long as they were in contact with him. The third aspect allowed him to change them.

  So far, none of this was useful. It was easily observed based on how the fight had gone so far. Only the fourth and fifth aspects weren’t immediately obvious, and at first they confounded me.

  Command and distance. After some thought, those were the words I’d use to describe them. They were murkier than the others, probably gained from more recent revelations, and they were intertwined together, much like Vixen’s illusion-strengthening revelations had been.

  Naturally, I hadn’t figured them out by the time I pulled myself out, having only had a second or so to analyse, but I thought deeply about it as I watched Ashika batter them away.

  It looked like Blonde was getting heavier every time she hit him, and at this point she was barely able to knock him back half the distance she had with her first hit. Silver, too, was adapting to her strength, presumably reinforcing his body with his power, though this only meant he was returning to the fray faster and faster, since he couldn’t make himself heavier.

  This was essentially a race, I realised. They were all escalating their capabilities in some fashion. Ashika was keeping ahead, but the other two were doing everything they could to chase her down, close the gap. Right now, she was too fast and strong. But eventually Silver would make skin contact, and he’d do to her what he’d done to me.

  And that was what revealed the secret to me. If he could render my legs useless in an instant, he should’ve been able to adapt to Ashika far faster than this. Command must have been an ability to impart an affliction on an enemy he’d created beforehand, like executing pre-written code. Distance presumably let him maintain it once it was active.

  The implications took a while to register. When they did, though, I immediately came up with a plan.

  Discord :)