Something primal takes over your brain when you get caught off guard by an unexpected event, especially a loud one. Instincts long buried in your genes reach into whatever part of your grey matter make the decisions and scramble things around.

  That was what I felt like at that moment. Despite the fact I’d just spent several hours standing right next to a living weapon as she set off ear-splitting booms one by one, the explosion completely discombobulated me. I wasted agonisingly long seconds with my head on a swivel, searching for the source of the sudden noise, and only found it when fire and smoke bloomed like a hellish giant mushroom a few blocks over.

  Next thing I knew, I was running. Towards the explosion. At that point, no actual thoughts had crossed my mind. No critical analysis, no logical or rational examination of the situation. Instinct had seized me, and my body was reacting without conscious input. A distant part of my mind recognised that Ashika was bounding ahead of me, and Alanna wasn’t far behind.

  It wasn’t close to dark out yet. The sun was only hinting at setting. But somehow the world around the fire seemed to have dimmed, like whatever had happened over there had stolen the universe’s attention and everything else had been deemed unimportant.

  My heartbeat thundered in my ears. Even moving on instinct, my body maintained the steady breathing that would keep me moving forward at full speed without issue. Ashika’s power signal roared as she built up momentum, pulling ahead. More power signals were coming to life around us, too. It seemed we weren’t the only ones responding to the situation, we just happened to be out on the street when it happened.

  It turned out we only had to turn a corner at the far end of Alanna’s long street to catch sight of the incident. Maybe a few hundred metres down the road, a fire blazed, completely engulfing one of the homes. Smoke billowed up in a great column. I could hear screams. Whether they were coming from within the house or somewhere else, I couldn’t say. In the end, my attention wasn’t on the house for more than a second.

  Dire as the fire appeared to be, it immediately became a far distant priority compared to the men who’d just emerged from the house.

  There were five of them, all decked out in identical dark clothing, black masks, helmets, and boots. They looked like a swat team, and they moved with purpose to the black van they had parked on the street. Relief filled me for a brief moment. Help was already here, I thought, and the occupants of the building had been rescued. I felt like I could finally release a breath that had been stuck in my chest, even though I hadn’t been holding it.

  But that feeling only lasted for a moment before I understood what I was seeing, and my heart dropped through my stomach. Three of the men had a person thrown over their shoulder in a fireman’s carry. A woman and two girls. Each of the three being carried wore matching pink pyjamas, like they’d been relaxing at home with a little family party before their world had suddenly been turned upside down. None of them moved. Whether because of the smoke or the explosion itself or something else, they were clearly unconscious. Even from a distance, I could tell they were covered in soot.

  And I could also tell they had bags over their heads. From the way their hands were behind their backs, I suspected they were zip-tied at the wrists, too. Why would an emergency response team spend any time covering up and binding the people they were rescuing like that?

  The answer was obvious.

  This analysis flashed through my mind in the span of seconds, but it might as well have been a lifetime. I cursed myself under my breath. I, of all people, should have noticed something like that instantly.

  My brief moment of relief vanished in a heartbeat, but no new emotions replaced it. I felt numb. Empty. There was no room for feeling here, only action.

  I spoke fast, words tumbling out, “Alanna, destroy the van.”

  Nothing happened. Long seconds stretched. I could hear she was right behind me because of her heavy breathing, which seemed to only be growing more laboured as the first villain reached the van and wrenched the side door open. The rest poured in, and the leader followed, slamming the door shut behind him. The van’s tires squealed in agony as it tore off down the street, moving in the opposite direction from us. It had all happened so fast, even Ashika had barely made it halfway there. Her roar of fury pierced the air.

  I spun on the spot, ready to demand answers, but my words died on my lips when I saw Alanna. She was trembling like a frightened rabbit, standing side on with one arm raised, a finger pointing to where the villains’ van had been moments ago. Her eyes were so wide it surely had to hurt, unblinking. Tear tracks scored lines down her cheeks.

  “I couldn’t,” she said. A sob wracked her chest, and her face seemed to crumple. “What if I hit them? I think that was the mayor’s house. His family.”

  Words escaped me for a moment, and I had to take a deep breath. This wasn’t her fault, I told myself. After seeing her accuracy today, I shouldn’t have put that pressure on her.

  “Call 911 and tell them what we’ve just seen,” I said as I turned away, breaking into a sprint. I called out, “Ashika!”

  It looked like she’d been ready to give chase, but she circled back around towards me when she heard my voice. She crossed the distance between us in seconds, and started circling me to keep her charge building. “We're chasing them, right?”

  More and more signals were rising in the area, and I did my best to tune them out. Distant sirens echoed. There were shouts, screams, alarms. The fire was a constant roar, punctuated by intermittent pops from small explosions still going off within the house.

  Objectively, I knew moving closer was a bad decision. The house could blow up again at any moment, and there was no guessing how much force it could yield. Of the three of us, Ashika was the only one with any physical enhancement to protect her, and even she shouldn’t be doing this without training. The real emergency services would surely be on the way. Greenwood was an expensive neighbourhood, and there were no doubt automatic alert systems in place, not even mentioning how many people had probably called 911 immediately after the explosion.

  But still I sprinted towards danger. There was no force on this Earth that could get me to run away and hide after what I’d just seen. Superheroes would undoubtedly be here in minutes, but I knew from experience just how long minutes could be.

  We couldn’t let that van out of our sight for more than a few seconds.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “Of course,” I said, taking a moment to get my phone out and turn on the distress beacon function while I ran. “Think you can carry me?”

  Ashika snorted. “Easy!”

  It took some careful manoeuvring to get myself onto her back without forcing her to lose her charge, but soon I was clinging to her like a monkey, holding on for dear life as she practically flew down the street. The roads here were long and straight, so the van was still in sight, though it was now reaching the end of the road. It turned right, the sound of its screeching wheels audible even from hundreds of metres away.

  Ashika gave chase. It couldn’t have taken her more than a few seconds to reach the end of the street, but it felt like an eternity. Wind whipped and slashed at my face, stinging my eyes, but I kept them open, fighting through the pain. My stomach swooped like I was on a rollercoaster as Ashika went careening around the corner.

  The van was visible in the distance, making a left this time. If my mental map of the area was right, they were aiming for the fastest possible route to the freeway. From there, they’d be able to swiftly reach the massive highway that ringed the city, and after that their options would be practically endless. We couldn’t lose sight of them at any point.

  The ensuing minutes were a blur. I was constantly having to blink away tears from the wind resistance clawing in my eyes, and that same wind made it difficult to communicate with Ashika. She knew the assignment, though, and with this much momentum built up her brain would be working far faster than mine, anyway. Eventually, I tuned out of the present moment, deciding to bury my face in Ashika’s shoulder to shield myself from the wind while I thought up contingencies.

  Strictly speaking, we weren’t supposed to be doing this. No matter how much research we’d done, we were unlicensed and untrained to be dealing with a situation like this. Even pursuing the villains was dangerous.

  Whether this was the right decision or not didn’t matter. I didn’t care what the correct thing to do was. There was no way in hell I was letting these bastards get away. None. Scenarios flashed through my mind, my imagination running wild. I saw those girls who’d been thrown over the villains’ shoulders, bags over their heads, chained up in a dark room, pale and terrified, crying for their father. It inspired a visceral reaction in me. A fury that I rarely allowed to let free.

  Dad had told me so many times that the world would be better off in the long run if we tried to empathise with those in our society who had been forced onto the wrong side of the law, to question what had put them in that position in the first place and eliminate the root causes rather than demonising them for their actions.

  I didn’t think I’d be able to do that, this time.

  Tempest had told me himself that results were what mattered. The only way we’d get in trouble was if we fucked up entirely, and I was going to make damn sure that didn’t happen.

  I shook my head as if to dislodge those grim images from my mind, seeking to replace them with analysis. What did I know of this situation?

  Alanna had said the house that had come under attack was the mayor’s, and the hostages were likely his family. That meant this was probably an extortion situation, or something similar. A threat. They wouldn’t want to actually harm the hostages, just take them to another location so they could make their demands. This group had a professional look about them, given their outfits and rapid enacting of their plan.

  What was the explosion for, though? It only served to call a massive amount of attention to them. If not for that, they might have been able to extract their hostages without anyone the wiser. I had to assume it was a mistake, somehow. They had certainly looked to be in a hurry when they were rushing to their van, now that I thought of it.

  Maybe they weren’t as professional as I first thought. It didn’t really matter either way, their threat level remained high. Fighting them two versus five was out of the question whether they were amateurs or seasoned experts.

  Our role here was to ensure they didn’t disappear into the bowels of the city. Foresight was an enormous metropolis, with a lot of controversial privacy laws in place to prevent the rise of a surveillance state, and countless out-of-the-way locations to hide for someone who didn’t wish to be found.

  But making sure they didn’t disappear wasn’t all we could do. With my distress beacon active, we’d be able to call superheroes to our location fairly quickly, once the nature of my ‘distress’ became clear. Hopefully, Alanna would already have relaid our actions to the authorities, and they would be able to put two and two together.

  And when they arrived, I intended to have plenty of information available for them.

  I lost my bearings rather quickly, with my eyes scrunched shut, and my face buried in Ashika’s neck. All I knew for long minutes was the stomach-turning momentum of her relentless pursuit. I tried to count the turns to give myself a mental picture of our location, but gave up on that the first time I opened my eyes to check my deduction and found I’d been miles off.

  Ashika’s signal was roaring like a volcanic eruption, and she was moving so fast it was starting to make me feel faint. This was surely far beyond any speed she’d reached outside the gym before.

  Still, I clung on with everything I had. I checked every few seconds, and it seemed like we’d moved multiple blocks each time, the van always just visible in the distance—Ashika was making sure not to make it too obvious someone was in pursuit. Hopefully this villainous outfit was unprofessional enough not to notice.

  It felt like an eternity could have passed before Ashika started to bleed off speed. Soon, she was moving slow enough that it didn’t hurt to keep my eyes open, and I checked out our surroundings.

  As expected, we’d ended up in one of the more distant districts of the city. Hulking brick warehouses flanked the wide street we were on, looming behind chain link fences topped with barbed wire. The steady din of industrial activity was ever-present, mingling with the sound of distant sirens.

  Ashika was jogging at one side of the street, and I could see why. Far ahead, the van was moving at a more sedate speed, keeping itself inconspicuous, probably right at the speed limit. They’d evidently moved on from the escape part of their scheme, and were now likely ensuring they had no pursuit before reaching their base.

  “Do you think they’ve seen us?” I asked as I lowered myself from Ashika’s back and started to jog behind her. My body was sorer than any workout could have inflicted on me, but I pushed through it.

  “Not much if they have,” Ashika whispered back, her voice mildly distorted by her power. “I’ve done my best to only move really fast when they were out of line of sight around corners.”

  I looked at her. It had all felt like breakneck speed to me. “We’ll have to be careful,” I said.

  Ashika nodded.

  The next few minutes consisted of tailing the van as subtly as we could. It was obviously taking a circuitous route to its destination, and we did our best to only watch it from around corners. But the villains obviously knew they couldn’t stay out in the open in that van for long, and they soon turned into the parking lot of a red brick warehouse. They crossed right over to a wide open door where another guy was waiting for them, and it lowered the moment they were through.

  A hush fell. Ashika and I looked at each other, then exchanged a nod. No words were needed. I pulled my phone out and gave it a brief glance. It was still on distress beacon mode. Good. That meant it would be recording through my phone’s mic and camera. Up until now, it probably would’ve seen only darkness and heard a bunch of rustling and howling wind.

  But that was about to change. I held it up to my lips and spoke at a whisper. “We’ve pursued a group of six villains who fled from an explosion at the mayor’s house in Greenwood carrying three people who seemed to be unconscious. They have entered a warehouse at my phone’s current location. Stand by for further intel.”

  Discord :)