After the abrupt turns, tilts, shooting and explosions had stopped, Paloma and the other people inside the carrier witnessed just what kind of person they were being protected by.

  And what a sight it was. Paloma didn’t realize she was holding her breath until her lungs burned, her vision swimming at the edges. She let the air out in a shaky gasp, her fingers trembling as she pressed them against the cold metal floor of the truck.

  Outside, beyond the reinforced but frighteningly transparent walls of the vehicle, Shade was still standing.

  Barely.

  The battlefield around him had changed. What had once been a chaotic storm of gunfire, explosions, and clashing armies was now still. The US mechs lay in ruined heaps, their armored plating warped and torn. The Seraphim troops had been dismantled, weapons crushed, bodies crumpled where they stood. Even the primebeast—the enormous, bone-white yeti that had been moments away from flattening them—was nowhere in sight, thrown beyond the treeline in a single devastating strike.

  And all of it—all of it—was because of him.

  Her protector. Her savior.

  Mister Shade’s body was still glowing faintly, the last remnants of his power flickering away like dying embers. His breath came hard and ragged, his stance uneven. Steam curled off his burned skin, his clothes barely clinging to him in charred, tattered strips.

  And his arm.

  Gone. Completely gone.

  Paloma’s gut twisted. How was he even standing?

  He had done all of this. For them.

  Why?

  The very thought of it sounded too good to be true. Why was she the only one out of her family who got this far and it made it here, with a real chance of making it all the way out? She wasn’t special, so what was the catch?

  Yet at the same time, hope started to bloom in her chest, taking its place next to aching concern. She wanted everyone to survive. She wanted to help in some way, but she didn’t know how. All she could think to do was watch with wide eyes as the first signs of movement began around him.

  Apparently, neither of the armies was dead for good, since they were stirring now. Although none of them, lying broken and bleeding in the snow, looked eager to continue the fight with Shade. In fact, most didn’t look able to.

  Just at that moment, Ice wolves reformed and lunged for Shade’s back. He wasn’t caught off guard in the slightest, dodging to the side, then hopping on top of their truck with a single leap. The few soldiers on both sides who could still move on both sides looked like they wanted to continue, but a flash of light from the savior’s hand made them all disperse. They were retreating. Finally.

  There must have been some unspoken signal, or Ernesto just took his actions as a cue to leave as they started moving not two seconds later. The roof opened up and let Shade in along with some of the now-abated snow and hail before quickly closing again. They had heaters inside, but no one was eager to waste more warmth than necessary.

  The older boy dropped down onto the see-through floor with a sigh, in the middle of all the people here on the upper floor. The lower one had some as well, but it was mostly supplies down there. So most of her fellow refugees got to see their hero up close, right after a battle she wasn’t sure people would believe really happened if she told it if they ever got over the border.

  The silence inside the truck was suffocating. No one spoke, no one moved, as they stared at the boy… No, the force of nature who had just saved them all.

  Shade sat eased himself down against the wall near her, his breath shallow but controlled, like he had only gone jogging. His remaining hand clenched into a fist before relaxing again, as if he were testing whether his body still responded at all. His face was pale beneath the soot and blood, his eyes half-lidded but still sharp.

  Paloma could hear the soft patter of melting ice dripping from his burned skin. The air inside smelled of scorched fabric, sweat and blood.

  She swallowed hard.

  An eternity later, someone moved. A young woman around Shade’s age crawled forward cautiously, her hands shaking as she reached into a small medkit they had scrounged together before departing. She pulled out bandages and a bottle of disinfectant, her eyes flickering between Shade’s wrecked arm and his face, waiting for permission.

  Shade exhaled, a sound that was almost a laugh but too exhausted to be anything more than a breath. “Go ahead,” he said in English.

  The woman hesitated for just a second before she began working, dabbing at the torn flesh where his arm had once been. He didn’t flinch.

  Paloma did.

  It wasn’t just the injury that made her stomach churn. It was him. The way he sat there, silent and still, like he wasn’t even human anymore, just some burned-out weapon that had done its job.

  She clenched her fists, desperately wanting to say or ask something useful. What came out was:

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  “It hurts?”

  Her voice drew his attention, that green gaze settling on her with… amused patience?

  “I’m fine,” he said, a small smile crossing his features. “I’ve had worse.”

  Paloma didn’t know what to say to that, though her grasp of his language had improved enough to understand the words. Worse? How could it get worse? She wanted to ask, wanted to press him for answers, but the words tangled in her throat.

  Shade must have noticed, because his tired smile widened—just barely. It didn’t reach his eyes. “You should rest. You’ll need your strength.”

  Paloma almost laughed. Her strength? What had she done but sit here, helpless, while he tore through monsters and machines alike? While he burned himself away for them?

  The young woman continued dressing his wounds in silence, her movements growing steadier the longer she worked. Around them, the other refugees began to stir, some whispering in hushed voices, others simply watching. A few exchanged glances, hesitant, uncertain.

  Eventually, a late-fifties man opened his mouth. “You… saved us.” His voice was thick with disbelief. “Really.”

  On his left hand, Shade’s fingers twitched. He didn’t respond right away, exhaling slowly before actually speaking. “That was the deal,” he said, as if he had gotten anything out of this.

  The response was a shake of the head, rightfully so in Paloma’s opinion. “No, you did more. You didn’t run. You stayed.” The man’s eyes were growing misty as he glanced at the people next to him, probably his family. “Thank you.”

  That was all it took for the others to join in with thanks, whispers, prayers of their own. Shade fielded them with grace, receiving their gratitude but never making a big deal out of it.

  He spent some time talking to her too, the language barrier much less steep now. Unfortunately, good things never lasted forever.

  A couple of minutes later, Shade’s head turned to the door, beyond which their driver and camp leader sat. He got up and left her there with another suggestion for her to sleep.

  *******

  Regenerating his arm was going to be harder, he could already tell. That was the double-edged sword with pushing his physical body to the limit using the reality impression aspect of his power where he made himself more real and therefore harder to affect; it came with the drawback of making himself harder to heal afterwards too, because that resistance to alterations persisted once he did manage to affect himself with something.

  Though obviously potent, that strength and speed enhancement state had taxed him quite badly. It just wasn’t sustainable or even viable in any scenario where he had to fight for prolonged amounts of time. And here, on a journey where he had to be prepared for a battle to find him at any moment, it was a mistake to have used it. The problem was that he didn’t see an alternative, and his current predicament left him tense. He didn’t show anyone else that, but that undercurrent of worry was there. All because he had pushed himself past his limits.

  Finn couldn't do it again, not for a while. If they ended up in the middle of another one of those conflicts, they were done for. He was… tired in a way he couldn't completely describe. In no shape to fight at full strength a second time. He'd gone days without sleep already, but this was the first time he felt like he actually needed it.

  The damage to his musculoskeletal structure was extensive, but individually tiny. A bunch of small tears and fractures throughout his body. It was going to be exhaustive to recover from because he was almost certainly going to have to use his power to make the process more effective. He would have to do it in stops and starts to maintain concentration and not push the limits of power strain, he supposed.

  His arm was another, more serious matter. Almost immediately after the battle, he had cauterized the bleeding wound so he wouldn’t pass out, but getting it back would take a substantial amount of time. Not to mention matter. He was going to need some food later, even if he didn’t feel hungry. It was hard to, when he had this smell of blood on him.

  Thoughts of rest and recovery could wait, however, seeing as Ernesto wanted to talk to him for some reason. He didn’t know if they were out of the woods yet, so to speak, and he suspected that was what the conversation was going to be about. There was one particularly dangerous element he stayed wary of.

  That colossal-class primebeast? There was zero percent chance it was dead. He’d only done a moderate amount of damage despite sending it flying so far away. If that thing made it back here before they could get away, he didn't know what he would do.

  And why had it only halfheartedly gone after the soldiers? It was like ninety percent of its attention was focused on Finn and the truck.

  Wait… had it prioritized the only superhumans around? Now that Finn replayed the fight in his head, he noticed he had been the sole powered human there, since the ice summons’ creator had most definitely not been present. Perhaps that was the reason why the militaries had been so blasé about their formation around a formidable primebeast. While he couldn’t jump to conclusions, that seemed to be the most likely hypothesis he could come up with.

  For the time being, he came into the cockpit and closed the door behind him, leaning against the wall while staring out ahead at the snowy landscape they were traversing.

  “Sparing them has its own consequences, you know,” Ernesto spoke up after a beat.

  Finn just looked at him, too exhausted to waste any breath on a verbal acknowledgement.

  “Those soldiers,” Ernesto clarified. “You may have destroyed their equipment, but you see, you left witnesses.”

  Witnesses? Was he supposed to kill them? They were murderers, but so were many of the supervillains he had faced in his life. He wasn’t planning to kill anyone except Omega, and even that was mainly due to the fact that that monster would stop at nothing to keep up his headhunt, no matter what people said. Finn could imagine the road that killing people for the sake of convenience would lead him down. The armies were not going to be the start of that.

  Of course, that didn’t mean he was going to stick his head in the sand and deny the reality facing them. “What are the implications of that? Are they going to come after us?” he asked, pressing down on his fatigue.

  “It’s possible,” Ernesto answered. “If we do see them again before reaching our destination, I would advise against expecting too much from them.” He clicked his tongue. “It would not fall on me to lead these trips back and forth alone if we had help from a real government.”

  Finn raised an eyebrow. “But we’re going into their country anyway?”

  “Not much choice, is there?”

  Not exactly, no. He had to admit that there was no way to get to any other country that wasn’t infested with primebeasts and thus an active threat to their lives. Still, it went without saying that that wasn’t going to prevent him from seeing this through. They would find a route, one way or another. If people couldn’t show him, his power could.

  That was the one thing that had never left his side, in all this chaos.

  It would get him to the other side.

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