In spite of his soul-deep mental exhaustion, the first stumbling steps were incomparably easier than before, if a bit out of balance. He was skinnier, and he had at best been lean to begin with, so his current build was slight, to say the least. And yet, he found himself drawing more strength out of his muscles than he had at any point during the past day, relatively speaking.

  He still felt rattled from that earlier confrontation, and the subsequent war he’d waged on the prototype colony. Weariness hung over him like a heavy cloak, contrasting his physical fitness with an undercurrent of sheer tiredness that he found to be quite disorienting. Sleep could come later, when he’d gotten his bearings. But could he continue like this? He would prefer it if he was able to clear his head.

  The tiny army of robotic marvels responded. They swam around in his head and released a wave of energy at multiple parts of his brain, and suddenly he felt clarity return in force. His eyes widened in time how alert he was feeling out of nowhere. What was that?

  He didn’t know. And the fact that he didn’t know was what unsettled him. These things had just responded to his intent without any conscious input from him. Truth be told, he had no idea how to handle that. He was only now coming off the adrenaline rush of confronting Omega and fighting for his life back to back.

  His eyes drifted to his filth-soaked costume, the last relic of the old Shade, and he began to think. Hadn’t he discovered something spectacular here? Even if it was entirely by accident, there was no reason not to make use of this new tool at his disposal, was there?

  “How far can I go now…” he mumbled out loud, surprised at the crisp sound of his own voice. He didn’t sound at all tired or hoarse like he’d expected he would. On the contrary, his vocal cords produced clear notes, very much his own voice but more refined. If he’d had an example to compare it to, he would’ve used it, but he didn’t think there was any precedent for this. Had the nanites healed more than he’d been aware of?

  Multicolored bridges formed in his mind, carrying more thoughts with them once again. Memories of what had happened during that desperate bid for his own life. He blinked. His power was supplying him with memories of what had happened earlier, lacking not a single detail. This was effectively a version of perfect recall.

  And the memories informed him of exactly what had been done to his vocal cords. It had simply taken the image of his own body, which he had also drawn out of his power’s memory storage without being aware of it, and restored it back to that state, except it had foregone the imperfections. Now that his senses could clearly compare the image he’d imparted and the result he got, he could see the deviation of what he asked the nanites to do versus what they ended up doing.

  Due to the nature of his power, he didn’t need a mirror to see what he looked like. Dried blood aside, his skin now had a complete lack of birthmarks, scars, or night imperceptible differences in pigmentation. Bone structure, also, had been rid of the smallest flaws that could hamper him in any possible way.

  As a matter of fact, even the lengths of his limbs weren’t the same. He had been made thoroughly aware by his senses of people’s internal bone structure, and therefore he likewise knew that one leg was almost always shorter than the other, no matter how small the disparity. With the current him, though, that was not the case. His limbs, where necessary, had been reconstructed down to the atom.

  So too were his fingers and toes remade, lengthened until they were precisely even. It was an odd sensation, though it explained how he’d lost a noticeable amount of muscle mass. This explained both that and his skewed sense of balance. Much like his improved senses. Be it vision, hearing or touch, everything was better.

  Finn pressed his lips into a flat line, pushing away his budding sense of awe. He knew it wasn’t just blood loss. That was just the only thing he’d paid attention to. Which was ridiculous, because he had been directing uncountable nanomachines at once. Or rather, his power had. Yeah, that sounded more accurate. But couldn’t he lean on that for his senses as well? Maintain multiple threads of thought for the sake of keeping track of various targets in his sphere of influence? It sounded convenient.

  Thoughts for later, he supposed. He had to focus on what was in front of him. Or inside him, whatever. Either way, he needed to bring his attention to what was important. He had these machines in his body. Nanomachines, but still machines nonetheless. He remembered discussing with Jack and Aiden the possibility of specializing in machine operation using his power, but he was quite sure they had all imagined something of a larger scale than himself, not something so inconceivably small. Ironic as it was, he had a feeling it would help him more than any giant military tank ever would.

  What he had to do was go through a mental checklist to make sure he wasn’t missing anything and could take action as soon as possible.

  Was he stable? Yes. Radi’s formula had been expunged from his body alongside Viperia’s poison, if it hadn’t been worked out of his system already by that point. And he was no longer dying from any particular condition in the short-term.

  Could he move? Another yes. While his balance was still wonky from unexpectedly gaining a body of perfect proportions, he should be able to manage regardless of the odd feeling it gave him. Thankfully his facial alterations were only skin-deep.

  Did he have a way of leaving Wanderlust’s dimension? No. A flash of panic washed over him. He honestly didn’t have a clue where to begin approaching that particular issue. The crystal in his pocket still wasn’t anywhere close to being fully “charged.” If he was going to get back to everyone, wasn’t that the biggest obstacle standing in his way? He had a duty to fulfill, he owed it to all the people Omega might hurt in the future to make it back posthaste.

  Was there a way of exiting this room that he could think of? Again, no. The door was too heavy for him to push or pull it open. Even if he became twice as strong, he wouldn’t be able to do it.

  On the bright side, he didn’t think Omega would be fighting anytime soon. If the state of that monster’s human form after his previous failed escape attempt and fight against Amalgam was anything to go off of, Finn was willing to bet that it would take time before Apexia saw that living nightmare roaming its streets again. More than likely, Omega would be taking time to recover.

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  Amalgam was stronger, after all. No other explanation, Finn thought. It would make no sense for Omega to wait to confront Amalgam at a fraction of its original strength if he had the ability to handle it at full. Which meant that there was time to figure out what to do.

  Strangely, he didn’t feel any form of despair at being stuck here. He just… accepted that he needed to think of other options and thus turned to the newest and most versatile weapon in his arsenal.

  At a mental prod from him, the nanites stirred. He waited and observed them before giving any specific commands. Controlling them was still new to him; there wasn’t a manual that would just appear from nothing and guide him in their use. He didn’t think there was, anyway. And neither was there a mentor specialized in the use of these creations.

  Was there?

  Straining power somewhat—it became noticeably less strenuous to use following his transformation—he willed the color signals to prompt the nanites to carry out a command: communicate. It wasn’t exact or well-directed, he just wanted to see what they did and whether they understood his various ways of trying to convey his desires.

  To his utter shock, they exhibited signals that made it past his miniature color fields that he used to control them, energy signatures that he didn’t have a hope of reading. And they made it out of his body, seemingly meeting open air and dissipating into nothingness.

  He waited.

  At first there was silence.

  Then, it hit him like a burst of static. A reply.

  ??▲███???▓: 5F-RR:?→ERR→~~~

  It wasn't a voice. It wasn’t even sound, really. It was something his mind registered as data—raw, incomprehensible, and overwhelming. Finn’s head throbbed as he strained to parse it. A code? A signal? Whatever it was, it felt impossibly vast, as if it was something meant for a machine far greater than he was. Or a collective, maybe.

  Like the one he was harboring.

  HIs eyes widened at the implications. That message… was it from Amalgam? But he didn’t know how to decipher it. The vast complexity of it boggled his mind. Even if he were given a week to decrypt every aspect of the message, he didn’t think he could do it. It would take months. At least. Did he have that much time?

  He watched his restored fists clench. He couldn’t afford to panic right now. One thing at a time. So, the message. Was it actually from Amalgam? Process of elimination told him that it was. There was no other intelligent being that could communicate with him or his nanites at that level in this place.

  That meant he could communicate with Amalgam, if he managed to understand that underlying code and form messages with it himself. That could potentially get him out of there, if reprogramming Amalgam was a possibility. Or convincing it to let him leave. It certainly beat the alternative of engaging it in combat. He wasn’t going to defeat it in a straight fight.

  At that moment, his stomach rumbled. He still needed sustenance? It shouldn’t have caught him off-guard. He’d just expected something to be different. But either way, that required him to leave this room even earlier. He couldn’t stay here without food or water for months deciphering that encrypted message.

  Assuming Omega hadn’t been lying, and that was a big assumption, there would be food and water “outside.” Wherever this outside was, he couldn’t sense it. The facility he was in was so gargantuan that it had individual rooms that the entirety of his range couldn’t encompass, let alone the whole building.

  Stretching his arms and shoulders, he made his way over to the door, noticing how there was no reaction to him walking away from the circle. No sudden mass of white interrupting him or stopping him from leaving. Good.

  He unlatched one of his grappling hooks, what was left of it, from his side. It had taken too much damage for him to be able to shoot it the normal way. Instead, he manually grabbed the hook and pulled it out, unspooling it out of the palm-sized disc it was stored in.

  Stepping up to the door, he attached the semi-adhesive hook to it, and pulled it off. It came loose without resistance, causing him to frown. This thing was really broken. He tried the other one and got similar results. Shaking his head, he tossed both of them away and concentrated on the nanites.

  Combined, the machines made up some sort of collective intelligence, didn’t they? A rudimentary one. Like Amalgam, but in an earlier stage, maybe? And with a host. Did that mean they could eventually become that strong?

  Could they make him strong enough to kill Omega?

  If the answer was ever going to be yes, they had better get him past this door. He pulled on the handle, but there was no give, no matter how much effort he exerted. Standing back, he decided to try something else.

  In order to move the giant hunk of metal standing before him, he needed more force than his muscles could possibly generate on their own. What, then, could give him more force? Energy. He needed more energy. And that was what he set the colony to do.

  Obviously, he couldn’t draw too much from inside his body, since he needed it to live, but since the nanites could send energy outside his body, was the reverse not true as well? He should have no problem drawing it in. All he needed was the specific type of energy to absorb, as energy was basically everywhere he looked. He decided on light.

  Lo and behold, when he specified the type of energy he wanted and translated it into a proper command, the nanites went to work and absorbed light around him through his skin. It was slow, and no matter how hard he tried, it seemed that they could not leave his body under any circumstance. To speed up the process, he peeled off the top half of his costume and turned his skin vantablack.

  When they had collected it, he noticed they were converting it into heat without prompting, so he stopped them. He needed kinetic force, and reinforcement of his musculoskeletal structure. A temporary gathering of nanites that would make sure he didn’t break himself trying to hit a ridiculously durable surface.

  At his signal, the nanites held the internal structure of his arm together while he gathered all the converted kinetic energy in his fist. He bent his knees, reared his arm back, twisted his hips, and punched.

  A thunderous bang rang echoed through the empty space. Out of breath, Finn straightened and surveyed his handiwork. The metallic door was now bent inwards with a fist-sized imprint at the epicenter, proof that he had reached a level beyond anything he’d ever achieved.

  Finn grinned. It wasn’t a nice, happy grin. But it was real and vicious, baring his bloodied teeth.

  He had real potential, and when the time came, he would emerge from this place as someone better.

  For the first time in years, Finn felt like he wasn’t just surviving—he was becoming.

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