On the way to his destination, Finn wasted not a second of time. Every move was deliberate and necessary. He wasn't going to spend a beat longer than he needed to in order to clear this place out.

  Before him, a giant building towered. While it had the same futuristic design as the other structures in the area, this one was once again betrayed by its interior, which Finn could sense down to the finest detail. He thought there would be more differences or deviations from his expectations, but there weren’t.

  Really, he should have expected it to be just another villain gang, and he supposed some aspects were not the same. There were far more cyborgs, a few villains he didn't care to name, and almost no unpowered members on each floor. Giant, supermassive servers buried deep underground hummed with stolen data and sketchy contracts. The kind of place that ran high-tier mercenaries and made money off back-alley tech enhancements.

  Didn’t matter.

  Finn stepped through the front door.

  They didn’t even have time to sound the alarm.

  A half-second after his foot hit the floor, light fractured across the lobby in rays of searing precision.

  Then it all went dark.

  To the guards watching the feed, the footage simply cut—one moment static bodies were pacing the polished floor, the next, a blackout. They didn’t know the cameras weren’t broken. They were just blind to him.

  Finn faded into the color of the environment, folding into the hues of steel, glass, and artificial light until the guards lost track. A brief shimmer passed through the air, like heat distortion, and then he was gone. Invisible, light warping around him in a way that rendered him undetectable to the naked eye. Reinforcement helped hide his presence from sensors, but he wasn’t trying to make this a stealthy mission.

  There wouldn’t have been any point in staying hidden when he was here to take everyone down anyway. Better to let them come to him and leverage his invisibility as a combat tool during the fight itself. Insofar as it could even be called a fight, that was.

  On the floor, the guards heard footsteps. Close. Too close.

  Someone reached for their comm.

  The device snapped in half.

  Ten more men of steel went down just like that. He didn’t delay for a moment, running further into the building. He could see emergency turrets and lasers trying to lock on, but they couldn't find a target. He maintained his invisibility while breaking into the next door toward the elevator shaft. His arm broke through with a single punch, metal getting torn off when he pulled.

  He hopped in, latched onto the wall and climbed up to a higher floor, about seven stories. Conveniently, the elevator itself was all the way at the top.

  Kicking his way out, he punched out a couple more guards and rendered himself visible so as to attract some backup from the gang. It was funny, because he had to voluntarily allow the cameras and monitors to register and display his image to the people in the other rooms. Throughout the building, not a single screen was readable unless he willed it.

  Finn lasered down a trio of turrets and stood, waiting. Soon enough, the first real villain appeared. A random woman whose name he’d never even bothered to learn. She had a mechanical tentacle for a right arm, an armada of firearms hovering over her shoulders.

  Oddly enough, she was a baseline human. He paused. No, that wasn’t odd. He just was no longer used to fighting villains who didn’t have some overwhelming advantage he had to actually think about in order to get past.

  This? It didn’t even take him a microsecond. Although the bullets might be able to hurt him if he didn’t raise his active defenses, he decided not to bother leaving it to chance and rushed in with a hyper-speed dash. It would’ve made for a funny sight if he had time to be amused; she was still looking at the elevator he'd exited from despite him being behind her. When all her guns had been destroyed she'd barely had time to blink.

  Finn kicked her in the back.

  It was controlled. Measured. Still sent her flying across the hallway like a ragdoll, skidding to a halt with her back to the wall and a groan faintly escaping her lips. Not unconscious. Not bleeding. But very, very done.

  Two more appeared around the corner, their attempts to kill him equally fruitless as he destroyed them in a flash of blinding light. He didn't glance their way after they fell, advancing to the next part in full view of the surveillance cams to expedite the process. Authorities would arrive soon to do clean-up, which meant all he had to do was defeat these guys. A tall task for the heroes stationed in this city, given that some of them would ordinarily be troublesome to put down for good. Fortunately, he was stronger now.

  Unfortunately, this gang in particular was known for its sheer number of superhumans, making it a case of quantity over quality. Not that they wouldn’t have torn the old Shade apart, of course. They would have. That just wasn’t a concern anymore.

  Backhanding a short-range teleporter so hard the guy’s jaw shattered, Finn dismissed the idle thoughts from his head. The past was the past, the only thing he could do was move forward.

  Twin tongues of blue fire licked the air where he’d been standing a moment ago, and he responded with a gut punch that laid out another enemy. It was almost awkward how fast they were to succumb to his counterattacks. He had only manipulated his nervous system once in this entire fight.

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  Regardless, the building was set ablaze after a few minutes, prompting him to put a swift stop to that before it could spiral out of control. A quick flex of vantablack, and the flames winked out.

  Reapplying invisibility wasn’t an option because of the smoke giving away his position unless he strained himself, leading him to stay visible for the remainder of the fight. Honestly, it made no difference in the end. Metal and flesh stood no chance against him. They couldn’t fight or run or hide.

  At length, in the midst of a ruined mess of shattered walls, plumes of smoke, and broken labs, Finn’s expression remained impassive.

  One down, two to go.

  *******

  Grabbing a slice of pizza from the microwave oven, Naomi went over to the holo-vision where the others were watching a nonsense cartoon she didn’t really care about.

  As was tradition, she claimed the love seat for herself. Okay, it wasn’t really tradition, but no one had objected when she made it clear she was feeling restless again because her evening patrol got canceled. She couldn’t blame them for that, though. None of them liked to be spun around in a mini tornado indoors.

  She’d never followed through on that implied threat before, but when one of her teammates annoyed her enough, the temptation became real. A wince escaped her as she accidentally bumped her plate against her sternum. Ow. The bruise she had there was a nasty one, courtesy of their fight this afternoon against that asshole, Shade.

  Naomi’s cheeks flushed with embarrassment as she thought about how she, the team speedster, had lost a contest of speed in plain view of the others. She lifted the pizza slice to cover her face. Could she get any more useless? It was all because of that arrogant mystery super making her look incompetent.

  She nibbled on her pepperoni for a second. Truthfully, on some level, she was aware that her anger was misplaced. Because of her heightened cognition when using her power, she was aware of the level of force Shade could have used against her—more than enough to punch a hole through her chest despite all the layers of wind. She also knew the reason he had used the level of force he did was probably in order to discourage her from getting back up. Just… did he have to be so aloof about it, like he was better than other people!? It pissed her off!

  Naomi huffed and slumped deeper into the cushions, eyes flicking up to the screen. Some neon-colored blob was making shrieking noises while being chased through space by a grinning toaster. Or something. She didn't know. She didn't care.

  The others were laughing at the stupid show like nothing had happened. Like the fact that an unknown “hero” had trounced their entire team and rattled even the ever calm, collected Automique, had never occurred. The others might not have seen it, but their supervisor had been scared throughout that whole interaction. Ready for a fight, but desperate for it not to happen.

  It was easy to see why. Though he wasn’t an Unbound, according to Jericho, he seemed to have the power of one. Nowhere else had she encountered that level of strength. It reminded her a bit of the one and only time she met Darkshiv, that deep helplessness of knowing you couldn’t do anything if you tried. Being made to feel small like that, she hated it.

  Were her teammates affected by the loss as well? Not that she could tell. Except maybe Larissa, who seemed to get flustered every time the name was brought up. Meanwhile, the goofball Jericho and the taciturn Peter sat around as if they hadn’t gotten their faces kicked in too.

  On second thought, Ronnie, or Vindex in costume, acted a lot more serious today, having taken the opportunity to meet with the adult division and talk about stuff she wasn’t privy to.

  Speaking of, their leader took that moment to appear, walking into the room with a solemn look on his face. “Guys. Did you hear?”

  “Hear what?” Jericho asked, on everyone’s behalf since they were all curious.

  “The Coil got taken out,” Vindex announced.

  “...You mean the entire gang?” Larissa said in a tone pitched with disbelief.

  “The entire gang,” he confirmed.

  “The fuck? How? Who?” Jericho once again voiced what they were all thinking.

  Vindex shook his head with a smirk. “Our new friend, who else? We watched him run off and everything.”

  “It hasn’t even been a day!” Naomi found herself exclaiming, more heat in her voice than intended. “What do you mean he took down the Coil. They have twenty supers and a bunch of augmented goons.”

  “The facts don’t lie, Zyph,” he said. “Automique and her team are making a bunch of arrests right now.”

  “It's true, Naomi,” Jericho confirmed, already looking at his phone. “Blackout in sector twelve, research lab building destroyed, discovered to have been a front for black market operation syndicate known as ‘the Coil.’”

  Naomi blinked, dumbfounded. Her pizza drooped in her hand, forgotten, a trail of cheese threatening to slide off completely.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she muttered. “He just came to Miami. Like, just.”

  “He’s rolling up gangs we’ve been struggling to pin down for years,” Larissa commented helpfully, as if that wasn’t obvious. “That’s amazing.”

  “And he’s not leaving it at this,” Jericho continued. “There’s another blackout further west. Three guesses who it is, first two don’t count.”

  “Is he…” Peter faltered when all eyes went to him, but he got his sentence out. “Is Shade planning to clear out the city before he leaves?”

  “Fuck,” Vindex laughed while throwing his hands up, his mask of professionalism slipping. “At this point, maybe. I’m willing to believe it, y’all.”

  Naomi slumped even further into the cushions, her expression twisting into something between exasperation and reluctant awe. “That’s not normal,” she grumbled. “People don’t just show up and do this kind of thing unless they’re trying to make a statement.”

  “Or,” Jericho chimed in, “we’re just a speed bump for him, and the actions he thinks are trivial have long-lasting consequences for us. At his level of power, small ripples to him are like tidal waves to us little guys.”

  “We’re not little!” she retorted, not entirely believing her own words.

  Larissa gave Naomi a sympathetic glance, twisting space a bit to lean in. “We’re not,” her teammate agreed quietly, “but… we kind of are, compared to him.”

  She threw her head back with a groan. “Don’t say that. Don’t agree with me and then immediately contradict it.”

  “I’m being real.”

  “Be less real,” she deadpanned. “Be fake and supportive.”

  A collective chuckle passed over the group at that, some of the tension in the air dissipating.

  “If nothing else,” their captain said, “we’ll see him again the day after tomorrow.”

  She wasn’t sure if she was looking forward to it.

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