Physically, he hardly sensed a difference between the sensation of sitting in this vehicle while it was moving as opposed to when it was standing still. The reason he even sensed the slowing of the truck was his color senses, his ever-present perception of the surroundings. That was also what had woken him up.

  Finn opened his eyes and blinked forcefully for a few seconds, then looked at Ernesto, who was getting up from his driver’s seat. The man glanced at him the next moment and noticed he was awake.

  “Ah, I see I did not manage to sneak past you. Never truly expected to, but still,” he said with a lopsided smile, stretching the kinks out of his back. They must have been traveling for a while.

  Telling the time was easy. Soon, Finn found out by checking the hands on an analog clock in the supply cache downstairs. About an hour and a half, it seemed. “I wasn’t out for too long?” he asked.

  Ernesto shook his head. “No, no. I decided to do our routine stop later than normal, as I wanted to be well outside of the danger zone first, you see.”

  “Alright.” Finn planted a hand on the wall he had been slumbering against, and got his feet under him.

  “No, no,” Ernesto said hastily, holding his hands out. “Save your strength. If you need to rest, rest. If you need to sleep, sleep. Just do not strain yourself needlessly. Please.”

  “It’s fine,” was the response. “I can recover while I move around. If we’re stopping here, I have a few things I need to get done before it’s too late.”

  The middle-aged man scrutinized him, dark eyes searching his face, but eventually Ernesto nodded. “Very well. It’s not within my power to stop you, anyway. I won’t insult you by saying you don’t know how to handle yourself.”

  Acknowledging his fellow superhuman with one last glance, he turned to leave. As he saw the refugees descending the wooden ladder, he undid the transparency effect on the carrier, which startled quite a number of them.

  “What are you going to do, if you don’t mind telling me?” Ernesto tried.

  “Scouting is top priority,” he said, a hand on the brown door handle. He decided to end the conversation there, wanting to get some fresh air and give himself time to think. His body only felt slightly less wrecked than it had before his nap, but he left the truck quickly.

  He went invisible and jumped over someone starting to get into position for the ladder. He grabbed the edge of the roof, hoisting himself up with one harm. They had stopped in another forest, so he dashed over the roof upon landing. Letting himself fall off the ledge, his hand found purchase on one of the nearby tree branches.

  From there, he hopped from tree to tree, travelling continually farther from the group. When he thought he had enough distance, he relaxed under the snow-covered foliage.

  Finn perched on the sturdy branch, letting the cold seep into his skin as he exhaled slowly. His breath curled in the crisp night air, dissipating into the void. His muscles still ached from overexertion, but the pain was dull now—more of a reminder than an obstacle. He rolled his shoulders, testing his range of motion. His missing arm sent no phantom sensation, which meant he had already adjusted to its absence. That was good. He couldn’t afford to be distracted.

  Closing his eyes, he focused on what the colors of the world were telling him.

  They bled into his mind as an extraordinary sense that was most easily likened to sight, though not completely identical. The trees were a tranquil mix of grayish brown and green coated in white. The snow covered the earth like a frozen blanket, trails of the various creatures in this area evident from footprints and other marks of passage.

  He filtered through it all, searching for any sign of trouble.

  Nothing so far.

  Accompanied by nothing but the chilling winds, he allowed himself a few seconds of quiet, listening as the branches stirred. For once, there was no immediate fight, no chaos, no rush, no desperate struggle for survival. He could simply exist. It was unsettling. He couldn’t help feeling like the other shoe was going to drop at the least opportune moment. He had spent so long fighting, running, training to get home, that the absence of urgency felt unnatural. The tension in his body hadn’t faded; he was still primed for another battle.

  This wasn’t peace. It was just a lull, the space between battles.

  Then, an odd sensation struck him, followed by a thought.

  Was he doing this right?

  It sounded inane, even to his own mind. But he felt like there was something to it, nonetheless. Was he utilizing his senses to their full potential, or was there more to discover that he hadn’t mastered already?

  Because the air was… heavy. Not what it was supposed to feel like.

  Checking the light, he sensed nothing out of the ordinary there, either. So how was it different? He felt an undercurrent of something, roiling like a storm beneath everything else. Beneath reality itself, maybe.

  Orienting himself again, he traveled northeast, like they had been doing. Nothing on the way besides some pest-class lynxes in the first few minutes. Beyond that, he started seeing vast changes in the landscape, to the point where they would have to alter their travel routes. Ernesto hadn’t said anything about that.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  No, there was definitely something off about this. He increased his running speed, landing on the crunching layer of snow when the trees gave way to an open tundra. He spotted these cracks in the frigid soil. That wouldn’t be too weird on its own, but they looked so recent. The unidentifiable feeling intensified.

  Now that he was closer to whatever was emitting it, he could feel it was coming from the east rather than the north. He tried to filter his colors another way, hoping to discern the source at a modulated configuration.

  It wasn’t the first time he had attempted to adjust the way his altered colors behaved. The first instance he could recall was actually all the way back during his second ever outing, on the night he had tested out his “night vision” trick for the first time. The one where he rendered his pupils, irises and sclera black to block incoming light from searing his retinas, while still somehow being able to see through it. That should be impossible, but his power had made it happen.

  After a year and a half of training and experimentation, he had sufficient context to guess that that had been his power working at its full capacity in the background despite his sole input being the vague intent to make it work. He must have been somehow overlaying the transparency trick with black—or perhaps interpreting the light directly with his power senses—before knowing he could even do that. Past Finn didn’t have a clue what was happening. He’d had guesses, but nothing that touched on the truth. It would explain why his power “grew” with insight. It had always been capable of those things, he was simply finding out more about it. The real growth it underwent was other trainable characteristics like range and precision, not interpreting a photon pattern through a metaphysical medium.

  In fact, that wasn’t the only example. There were also the times when he felt like he should have forgotten something, but hadn’t. He couldn’t think of a single moment since gaining his power where he really wanted to remember something and failed to do so. In truth, that had almost certainly been the perfect recall aspect of his power at work, feeding him information without his conscious awareness.

  Therefore, it stood to reason that Aiden’s observations about his ability were correct. Working on a conceptual level, modifying the underlying principles of the world to allow the colors he asserted on it to exist. Finn wasn’t sure if that was the whole of it, but it seemed like this was as close as he was going to get for the time being.

  The point was that he could try to concentrate on each extreme of every observatory trick he had, and think backwards to see if it got him anything. He slowed his pace to a light run and began to try.

  Dark vision did nothing for him, unsurprisingly. Neither did his active sensing. He prodded the environment to the extreme with various invisible colors, but nothing bore any fruit. He switched over to searching his range, starting with everything in close proximity, branching out all the way to the edges.

  In the middle of testing, he uncovered an irregularity. It was a complete accident. He’d just been trying to identify the source whatever he was sensing, but his brain registered a bunch of rocks grouped together in a way that could not possibly have happened naturally.

  And it was underground, too. He approached to find more in the surroundings, leading him to find even more. At the end of the neatly arranged pile, he spotted a hollow space, built largely enough to fit a person inside. The ends were both open.

  A tunnel. But how? And it was fairly deep, all things considered. He couldn’t see the entrance, however. While he would have liked to search for it more, he didn’t want to stray too far from the refugees, as he got the impression this tunnel was a long one.

  He brought his attention back to his sensory tests, with two more left. One was his own brand of precognition, where he perceived the externalized decisions of future movement someone with an aura made. And the other was emotional auras themselves.

  Unfortunately, it seemed like there was nothing in the—

  The ground quaked.

  Finn, falling forward with his momentum carrying him onwards, rolled to stabilize himself. Hair still covered in flakes of white, he looked around in the direction of wherever that was. He read the land to see what was going on. He spotted fissures in the ground, and patches of snow were slowly beginning to fall in, swallowed by the spontaneously created ravines. He didn’t think normal people could survive falling that deep.

  His eyes widened.

  Turning on his heel, he sprinted straight back to the camp, knowing he had to warn them before it was too late. He knew it was the right call to go scouting; having actionable intel about the environment was invaluable in a place like this. If he hadn’t gone, a lot of people might have died without him being able to do anything about it.

  Auras lit up in his mind. Or more accurately, the traces of one. But that should’ve been impossible. No single being in his range could emit anything with such a massive range. And he didn’t have an explanation for any creature outside his sphere of influence reaching him all the way here with their presence.

  Did that mean this thing was beyond comprehension? So powerful he couldn’t hope to fathom the true depths of its strength? He stopped wondering instantly as he recognized the murder in the aura.

  A primebeast.

  Titanic-class. It had to be.

  They had no chance. He didn’t even entertain the idea of fighting it. If he had pushed himself past the limit to do superficial damage to a colossal-class, he was out of his league here. Even after all the training, it was far too soon.

  Throughout all of history, there were only three people recorded to have successfully slain primebeasts of the highest classification. One of those three was dead. That left Yama.

  …Or Seraphim.

  Gritting his teeth, he sprinted harder, propelling his steps with kinetic energy. Every muscle protested his every movement. He made haste, uncaring of the damage he could heal later. This was the time for decisive action. Proper positioning.

  Slowing down wasn’t an option. He kept going, increasing his speed to arrive even a second earlier. It took an agonizing minute for his destination to enter his range.

  Finally, he reached the camp. Wasting no time, he found Ernesto, rushing to the man’s side in a gust of wind.

  Finn paid the surprised expression no mind and undid the invisibility. “Get everyone ready to move.”

  Ernesto inhaled deeply to speak, only to frown.

  The temperature plummeted.

  Tremors ran through the earth.

  Whispering winds swelled into a howl, carrying the certainty that they were caught on the edge of a natural disaster.

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