To say the passage of time was impossible to keep track of for him was entirely accurate. He had no idea how long it took for the nanites to deconstruct half his liver, but it felt like an eternity. Though once they did, he managed to push his power to new heights. At long last, his control and precision were at a level he couldn't have imagined before.

  It wasn't enough.

  Directing the black substance invading his body? That could be done; he felt the collective—for that was its true nature—respond to his probes. The tiny parts moved when he focused his entire being on willing signals into them, redefining their set course by flashing a bunch of different things until they responded to something. And they did. It simply wouldn't stick. Whenever he got a portion of them to stay away from his vital organs, they would come back a moment later.

  He needed to narrow the color focus down even more. The shades of his metaphysical grasp reached out to the myriad of miniscule, meticulously crafted machines. Still too many. His power just encompassed multiple nanites simultaneously despite his intent due to a lack of finesse. While he could sense them, as long as he wasn't able to separate them manually one by one, it was pointless. They spurred each other into action, somehow. Driven by some artificial instinct that told them to take him apart, slowly and painfully.

  There wasn't time to dwell on it any more than that. Either he succeeded at evolving his ability or he died. And with each failed attempt, the latter started to seem more likely. He started getting desperate, aware of the blood rising from his windpipe into his mouth. He hadn’t taken a breath in who knew how long. His lungs were incurring increasing amounts of damage after every attack.

  They were inexorable, these things. Soon enough it became a rhythm of sorts. He couldn't keep up the defense, because with each wave, his body got closer to death. He'd managed to keep them out of his brain, but that was hardly an advantage when the poison inside him was working its way through there!

  His vision was going dark, black spots encroaching on the view of his broken visor. Good thing he wasn’t relying on his eyes in the first place. It was a distraction in every sense, but the indicator of his plummeting oxygen levels forced him to do something. He couldn’t win without more air but he couldn’t move or breathe.

  When the nanites launched their offense this time, he let them, putting all his focus on baiting them towards a nerve cluster in his chest to cause as much pain as possible. And his plan was successful: he coughed.

  Blood splattered against the inside of his mask, dribbling all over his face, but he paid it no mind. He drew a rattling breath that sucked in as much crimson liquid as it did air, but he suppressed the urge to cough again so as not to break his focus. It was a small reprieve, yet also the extra window he needed.

  Doing it all in one go wasn’t possible, he had found. The discrepancy between where his power was and what he required from it was stark, a gap that couldn't be bridged with a single push. He needed to hone his chromatic touch, an endeavor which would take multiple passes to get right and consolidate his willpower in bursts.

  So he started. He concentrated on pressing his power together as hard as possible, and then some. Beyond maximal strength. Smaller and smaller it went, until it stopped. That was the sign.

  Pause.

  Regather.

  Continue.

  The new method made progress, and he was close to the finish line. He had far surpassed the scale of a regular microscope by now. He was getting there. He could do this.

  Then the venom kicked in and his mind became hazy, lacking the clarity he had managed to scrounge together in this desperate life-or-death battle.

  His hold slipped. Oxygen ran low. He was so tired. Every part of him had been pushed past its limits, screaming for him to give up, the agony reaching a crescendo he couldn't scream along with. Rest was what his body pleaded for. It was all shutting down, finite energy expended. If he could just rest… for a little…

  But he couldn’t afford to die here.

  His eyes shot open.

  From outside his body, outside the physical realm, colorful roads surged into his mind, carrying with them memories. Ones he should not have remembered with such vivid accuracy, but did. The contents of said memories weren't in chronological order, but they helped wake him up to reality. They reminded him who he was. That, in the end, was the most important thing.

  Finn took the decisive plunge into himself. Distracting thoughts weren't so much discarded as they were never there in the first place. He wound his power around the nanites ravaging his body and, ignoring the strain, ignoring the suffering he wrought upon himself, compressed it.

  The agony was worse than inhabiting a body that was on the very edge of breaking. It drowned out everything else. But he just kept going. The exhaustion of all his battles fought before this, all the foreign elements pumped into him, he fought it and kept climbing, until he reached the peak. Blinding pain seared his mind, exponentially worse the closer he got.

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  And suddenly, he had it. The nanites stopped attacking him in unison, the billions or trillions of them halted by his power down to the last unit, not a single one missed. The exact number didn't concern him at the moment, he just let his power make this all happen. Upon achieving control, it all went smoothly. None of the internal shredding continued.

  At which point he found that he had no clue what to do. His body was still about to die, and even if the havoc these new intruders had wreaked on his organs didn't kill him, the poison would. A mental tug later, he found he could give instructions to the nanomachines to travel in certain directions.

  He flushed with relief, despite knowing it wasn't over. He tried to sigh, and gurgled a bunch of blood as a result. He coughed a third time and breathed. The hardest part was behind him. Now he only had to figure out how to go about stabilizing himself and getting rid of the poison in some way.

  The reason his power worked on the nanites was because his power could affect their internal mechanism, and also due to his limited ability to influence energy with his colors.

  How that was going to save him, he couldn't say. He was too tired to think up a million different instructions even if he could do that. More specifically, his color manipulation was too tiring. At best, he had a few more uses left in him. Anything complex would, at the very least, put him under. And if that happened it was over.

  With that in mind, he distributed the clusters of impromptu helpers to different parts of him. Mainly his limbs and ruined innards, to help fix them. Then he took a detailed depiction of his physique at its most healthy, drawn from perfect recollection down to the cells, and spread the message. He predicted he would have to steer the process a bit, perhaps test the limits of what the nanites were capable of. He was wrong.

  The instant the picture of what he wanted manifested inside the unfathomable inventions, the whole colony spurred into action. Nothing went to waste. Parts he thought would be lost for good got broken down and converted into new, healthy tissue, bones, nerves or whatever he needed to fix what had been destroyed.

  When his broken hand recovered enough to move, he pulled up the bottom half of his mask and hacked up all the red mucus. That done, he inhaled. His heart, liver, colons and lungs were patched up in kind, even his brain was healed. He had been warily protecting it but realized it was going to get worse if left unattended. The feeling of his thoughts speeding up was discomforting, as it came with the knowledge of how compromised he had been before. Nevertheless, it was miraculous.

  …Despite their excellent work, however, the machines could not create matter ex nihilo. Some things had to be sacrificed in order for him to be restored to the best possible condition with the amount of blood loss he had experienced. So he lost weight. He hadn’t had much if any fat to sacrifice, so he chose to lose a bit of muscle mass. He could at least dictate what he lost.

  Though that didn't mean the poison was gone. It was still circulating in his bloodstream, simply having been out-healed until now. He didn't even have to break it down by himself, the nanites coming into action to help with it once they had obeyed his command.

  Black motes of decay resisted their efforts to remove them, but he reinforced them with his power. He didn't know how it helped, though that wasn't relevant right now. It did, so he would be fine. Before he knew it, he wasn't in immediate danger of dying anymore.

  Unbelievable as it was, that damn venom was fully neutralized. It wasn't an issue anymore. Its exotic properties had been no match for the combined might of Finn and his new companions. Assistants? Friends? He could come up with a better name for it later.

  Later…

  There was actually a later. He'd done it. His weakened but whole arms tore the mask and visor off. He threw them to the side and rolled over.

  Here he was on his back, staring at the ceiling. Abandoned in an alternate dimension. Omega was long gone. Amalgam had retreated. It was just him. He was alone.

  He laughed hysterically.

  Completely and utterly spent from the endless mission, having ridden a roller coaster of emotions so intense he hadn't even come to terms with it yet, Finn's laugh turned into a sob. It was over. Finally, it was over.

  From the start of his journey until now, he'd bottled it all up. Every setback, the frustration and hurt, the lowest points, the trauma, he had suppressed it all, telling himself he would deal with it after his confrontation with Dad's murderer. Because that was how he'd be different.

  It all erupted in his quietest moment. With no one here to bother him, he could admit to himself what a failure he had been. To everyone. It was a sobering realization, a simmering background thought he'd carried for as long as he could remember being pulled to the forefront, glaring in how obvious it was.

  This journey he had embarked on, from start to finish, was immature. He had crossed his arms and refused to engage in life after Dad was gone like a petulant child, waiting for a power to show up. And when he'd metaphorically flipped the table in frustration, he'd gotten one.

  He didn't deserve it, he had never done anything to deserve how far he had even gotten, regardless of whether he ultimately reached his goal or not. The reason for that was other people. Practically everything he had accomplished, he had achieved with help.

  Finn was nothing but a blip on the scale. His action had accomplished so little, and the reason he had ended up here was that he was reckless. A careless loser. That described him pretty well.

  With his own vendetta and boiling rage to fuel him, he had cultivated a life that was unsustainable, no matter how he looked at it. Did that mean he would stop going after Gunther? After Omega? Of course not.

  Obviously he was at fault. He was the person who let that monster back into the world. Any death caused by that psycho bear was on him. Plain and simple. If there were already people dead because of him…

  He shook his head. Damp, matted hair whipped against fresh pinkish skin. Rising shakily from the pool of red, Finn put his hands on his thighs and rose to his feet, flecks of blood dripping off of him. His eyes drifted towards the spot where he had last seen his father's killer.

  This wasn't about revenge anymore.

  This was about responsibility.

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