They had gone ahead with haste. The coast was no longer clear. Maybe this was some form of retribution from a cosmic force, slapping them in the face with the weight of their own mistake. Karma? It didn’t matter. Finn didn’t have time to entertain that sort of thinking right now. Whatever the reason, they were facing a new type of opponent.

  One they hadn't expected or prepared for.

  The past few hours of the trip had gone well. They’d been thinking about stopping soon. All they’d had to deal with was a snowstorm that began picking up.

  While Finn had taken up a seat next to the people in the back, he was soon called back to the cockpit. Knowing it couldn't be for anything good, he wasted no time going back there.

  “Shade,” Ernesto began, “can you look around for a moment? These signs of battle. You see it, no? They look recent to you as well?”

  Smoking craters, footprints becoming apparent to his senses, burnt corpses so thoroughly molten they were impossible to identify. Very recent indeed.

  “You’re right,” Finn agreed. He was about to continue speaking when the leader of this mission gasped. Looking into the distance, he saw why.

  A row of machines thrice the size of a man, piloted by outfitted soldiers loomed on the horizon. They were outside the range of his senses, but the structure made it obvious enough that they were made to fit a person inside.

  “Are they bearing any flags, anywhere? Uniforms?” Ernesto asked once they were starting to come within range.

  It was a familiar one. “White stars on blue, red and white stripes.”

  “US military? There must be some mistake. How are they so far inland? I thought…” the man trailed off.

  At this juncture, Finn wasn't sure what calls to make. He wouldn't alert the refugees unless absolutely necessary. That went without saying. But aside from that, deciding what to do was difficult. Though they had prepared for primebeasts and Seraphim's army, they hadn't expected the other army to show up this deep into the country. Which left him in a tough spot. What did he do here?

  He didn't want to announce their presence, hence why he held off on any attempt to communicate in the hopes that they could slip by unnoticed. They were still camouflaged after all.

  No such luck.

  One of the mechanized juggernauts raised a dark metallic appendage, aiming it into the sky. A blazing projectile burst out of it and flew through the air. Then it homed in on them with pinpoint accuracy. There was no mistaking it, they were the target.

  “Incoming!” Ernesto shouted. Immediately, he turned right and made a wooden shield in front of the truck, pillars erupting from the snow as they melded together to form a barricade.

  “It won’t work,” Finn said bluntly. “Open the roof, I’ll handle it.”

  Ernesto shot him a panicked look but did as he was told. The ceiling parted above Finn and he wasted no time jumping out, snow and hail pelting him in equal parts.

  The weather didn't matter to him. He could see the missile bearing down on him like a raging comet just fine. Obviously, the Americans had detected the truck. Perhaps that made sense; perhaps the artifact wasn't as protected against specialized machine sensors. It was a useless thought he put out of his mind.

  Breathing in deeply, he raised his hand and called on the nanites, steered them using his power. He converted his accumulated energy into light. It concentrated in the tips of his right index and middle fingers, a glimmer of piercing white.

  Despite his long hours of training, Finn had yet to discover a way to circumvent the drawback of this technique—he could hardly manipulate the light outside his body without being significantly less effective, and he could not afford to risk holding back here. If that missile hit the carrier, that would be it for them.

  The technique itself was simple enough. Gather photons and other energy from the atmosphere, convert them with his nanite colony, focus it all into a single point. From there, he had to manipulate the light itself for it to fire correctly. That was it. In terms of problems, he only needed to worry about the speed at which he collected energy and the backlash on his body.

  Stretching out his arm, he aimed for the soaring death sentence, and fired. A blinding beam shot from his fingers, burning them to a crisp as it hit the missile, which exploded and shook the air. Clouds of orange-red and black weeped dark streaks towards the ground as the shrapnel fell.

  Another deep breath. His colony worked hard to turn the useful matter he inhaled to replenish his physical body, healing the wounds he had incurred from his own attack. It was a slow process, not fast enough to rapid-fire these things mid-battle at such intensity. Yet he could always recover.

  Not that he wanted the fight to continue for a second longer. Now that the threat was dealt with, he signaled the soldiers near the edge of his sphere of influence with colored messages. The chromatic text told them Finn’s group wasn't the enemy they came here to fight, not part of the supervillain’s forces.

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  His message was received. And promptly ignored. Eight more missiles came from the row of mechs, seeking their end again.

  Anger flared in his chest at the image of the enemy squad captain gruffly waving the message off as a lie and ordering his men to sustain fire. Clenching his injured fist tighter, he readied his laser again.

  Meanwhile, Ernesto did receive his communications loud and clear. The truck was to leave and go the other way the moment Finn got off and drew the attention of their new enemies.

  Light coursed into his fingers. He used the same hand to charge the second laser, wanting to keep the other one undamaged for his next attack. Making a gun sign, he made a more sustained beam this time. More damaging, but necessary to hit multiple targets. Even as it was building up, his hand was already destroying itself from the sheer heat it had to contain.

  His face didn't twitch. This was nowhere near the worst pain he had experienced, and he had trained for a year to master his mind and body in preparation for using the new power available to him.

  Sweeping his hand out, the beam cut through all the explosive weapons rocketing down at him, decisive and sharp as a sword.

  None of the mech pilots had another moment to ready a third salvo because the world suddenly went black for them. Finn’s power covered their windows, rendering it impossible to look outside. Their cameras were likewise blinded, no longer getting a good lock on their target.

  He jumped off the not-wood roof, landing in the snow. Ernesto steered the vehicle out of harm's way, the people inside frightened at the sound of explosions.

  Crouching, Finn reinforced his legs and blitzed forward, a cloud of white in his wake. After the upgrades to his physique, his base running speed was more than twice what it used to be as a fit human male.

  With kinetic energy boosts? He more than quadrupled his new pace, which in practice made it so he was eating the distance to those soldiers, who were now scrambling for order after having their machines disrupted.

  Energy was building, not enough for another powerful ranged assault but sufficient for something close-range. He made himself invisible and reared his arm back. The soldiers did recover, the internal mechanisms of the machines shifting in a way he didn't understand but that apparently allowed them to track him again.

  Just as planned, with the surprise of suddenly having him in their face, the refugees were safe as they turned their attention to him. Unfortunately, it seemed they had a variety of different weapons because they didn't use missiles this time.

  Worse, he was close enough to sense that it wasn't just them. They had regular ground forces with armored transport and high-tech looking weapons mounted on every single one.

  What they didn't know was that he saw where they were going to shoot as soon as they did. Not only that, he saw what they were going to shoot as well. Streams of rapid machine gun fire.

  Their auras told him.

  Those of the pilots, that was. Not the machines. However they were made, they didn't have minds, and thus didn't have a consciousness whose emotions he could track. But that didn't matter because the humans operating them did.

  Colored outlines of bullets cut his path off in front of him. He slid to a halt and turned with some breathing room until the actual hail gunfire started. And the one after that. Third one. Fifth. Seventh.

  Finn didn’t stop moving. He couldn’t. The moment his feet touched the ground, he was already pushing off again, body twisting and angling to avoid the lethal rain of metal screaming toward him. The first volley ripped through the air where he had been a fraction of a second ago, the sheer force of it kicking up waves of snow and leaving deep, jagged trails in the ice. The next was even closer, grazing past his shoulder as he ducked low and spun to the side.

  He darted left, skimming along the snow-covered ground with inhuman speed. Bullets traced his shadow, smashing into the frozen terrain, kicking up shards of ice that pelted his face and arms. But he was already pivoting, already gone before the next burst could reach him. His aura sight painted the battlefield in layers of movement—each pilot’s intent flaring like a beacon, telling him when and where they would fire before they even pulled the trigger.

  A sharp clank rang out as one of the mechs adjusted its stance, bringing a mounted net gun to bear. Finn’s focus snapped to the impending capture, his muscles tensing in preparation. Then he changed his stance. No. This had to end. If he kept himself on the defensive he wouldn't get anywhere.

  Suddenly releasing a blast of energy from his legs, he zipped to the closest assailant, hulking steel body sluggish in its movement compared to him. He ran around to the side of it to bring it out of balance. He punched, releasing the kinetic charge in his arm that he'd been building from the start.

  Electromagnetic force fields spawned on top of different parts of its body. It made no difference. His nanites dismantled the field with ease at this short range in just a split second, aura precognition and enhanced perception working in tandem to let him command the nanites to get through. He didn't need to include any details or figure out the exact workings himself, just point and tell the colony what they were facing.

  The force field parted for his fist, leaving the mech to bear the full brunt. Layer upon layer of reinforced material crumpling under his fist, circuitry sizzling and failing, toppling the entire thing over. Inside the soldier was rattled, but alive. Finn backed off.

  Other mechs were only now adjusting their aim to him. They were so slow. But not all their targets would be. His senses alerted him of that fact.

  Uniformed, denoting their devotion to one being. Ice hound summons accompanying them from the other side of his range. Seraphim's army.

  Finn disengaged his other fight and began sprinting to a better position, because that wasn't the only challenge coming. There came something else trudging in the icy storm, headed straight for them all from the south. The yeti-like primebeast they had seen hours earlier, that colossal-class. Was it affecting the weather? How had it followed them this far?

  One of the mechs pulled out a railgun that Finn preempted with a laser, blasting the mech in the shoulder between the openings, breathing hard to recover his seared flesh.

  Somehow, he was caught in the middle of this, playing distraction and intending to leave right after. But what was he now, if not embroiled in a war?

  He couldn't think of a good answer, too busy staying in the right mindset to answer such questions.

  A roar shook the battlefield, and everything went to hell in this three-pronged attack.

  That was how he found himself running into the face of a monster unlike anything he had ever faced. All for a group of people he barely knew.

  Finn was determined to get them out of here.

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