Seeing the fear on the faces of the people huddled around him wasn't quite the same as seeing it in their auras. The flares of color around them had all sorts of tiny subtleties, like their faces. A shade distinguishing one person’s quiet dread from another’s more acute panic.

  It also told him about all the other fleeting emotions, the ones rippling below the surface. That showed him the melange of negative emotion had a wider breadth than fear. There was despair, sadness, and anger.

  In contrast to that, Finn also felt hope. Mainly when people looked at him, as if he was a messiah capable of solving all their problems with a wave of his hand. Though thinking about it more, he was probably the closest thing to it for them.

  But that didn't change the reality. He was fully aware how little he could do to help at the moment, even after the leaps of progress he had made in the past year, both physical and mental.

  After all, a clash of titans was taking place right now. And he didn't have the means to stop it or even make the slightest difference. The only thing he could do was keep an eye out for everyone here so they wouldn't become collateral damage.

  They were under a wooden dome, created by Ernesto. All their supplies were inside, and the space was far larger than the truck had been, because they didn't need to transport anything. They couldn't, actually. The outside world was too volatile for them to traverse.

  Not surprising, considering that Seraphim was fighting one of the strongest primebeasts in existence.

  Upon returning to the camp, Finn had explained the situation to the best of his ability. Fortunately, their guide seemed to have a solid idea about what was going on.

  “It’s rare for this to happen,” Ernesto had said. “I won't deny that. The last time we got so close to an active battle with Seraphim involved was years ago, and before you ask, yes, that was also against a similar opponent.

  “What you should know is that I cannot continue while it's going on. The good news is, neither can anyone else. We don't have to worry about either military finding us in this period as they, too, will be hunkering down. Our number one concern is the environment.”

  Finn had then asked whether it would take long for the battle to be over, and the answer he had gotten did not inspire confidence. Apparently, it ranged from anywhere between an hour to multiple months.

  Three hours had passed.

  Around him, a few of the refugees crept closer. Finn understood why; he was quite literally a beacon of warmth, sending out comfortable levels of heat to stave off the cold using his energy conversion.

  Similar groups could be seen nearing some heaters spread throughout the campsite, though those were much weaker than Finn’s own warmth. The makeshift heaters burned low, their fuel carefully rationed. Some people wrapped themselves in tattered blankets, whispering in hushed voices, while others simply sat in silence, their eyes locked on the trembling ceiling of the wooden dome.

  Finn wished he could offer more than warmth. But as much as he wanted to reassure them, he knew better than to make empty promises. The battle outside was a force of nature, something beyond him. Even if he tried to lift their spirits, what good was hope if the next shockwave shattered their shelter and buried them all?

  A low rumble passed through the ground, sending tiny ripples through the dirt floor beneath them. Finn tensed, shifting his stance to absorb the vibrations. The refugees stiffened, some clutching onto each other.

  To his left, a young boy whimpered, hiding his face under his mother’s arm. Finn glanced at them and kneeled without thinking, picking a stone off the floor that had gotten caught in their faux-wood shelter. Special in absolutely no way whatsoever, but gradually becoming warmer to the touch as he used his nanites to heat it up a bit.

  “Here,” he said, offering it to the kid. “You can have it. It’s safe.”

  Wide, fearful eyes peeked out, staring at him, then at the stone. After a moment of hesitation, the child took it, gripping it tightly in his tiny hands. The mother nodded at Finn in silent gratitude.

  These people, they hadn’t asked for any of this. It wasn’t fair to them to be facing one catastrophe after another. At least Finn could say that becoming Shade had been his own decision; no one had forced him to put on the suit and go on the journey that would eventually lead him here. The refugees, on the other hand, just wanted to live normal lives. They didn’t want to be in this position, didn’t want to suffer through years of oppression until they got the chance to run.

  Sighing, he set his nanites to maintain the temperature passively, and sat cross-legged. Since his only task at the moment was to watch for any cracks in the ground big enough to kill them all, he could pay attention to that while doing something else, using his power to notify him of any major underground shifts. He would most likely feel it anyway, but if he had the chance to save these people, he would.

  He blinked. How had he even done that? He went back through his memories and evaluated the visualization related to the task he had just automated. It worked like… a trap. No, that was the wrong word. It worked like something put in place so the trap could be sprung.

  With closed eyes, he tried to sink deeper into a meditative state, doing anything he could to reach a higher level of focus in order to figure this out. Because if he was right, that meant his mental colorization power wasn’t limited to memory. He didn’t know what else he could do with it, and he was eager to find out.

  The mental aspect of his powers had always confounded him. He had never found a true limit to it so much as he had continuously found limitations in himself that prevented him from using it to its full potential. The first was processing power. Billions of nanites, all given unique commands if the need arose. He had no idea how he did that, aside from just thinking about a bunch of different things at once, he supposed.

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  Additionally, he didn’t get why such processing was limited to the context of his power use. He couldn’t just think of twenty random things at once if he wasn’t using his power in conjunction with it. Did that mean he could, what, construct mental thought processes if he made them entirely out of color? He didn’t know how he would do that. Thus far he had gotten as far as creating pictures in his head. That was it.

  Though perhaps that wasn’t important at the moment. Here and now, he worried more about that other aspect of his power. The automation thing, whatever he was planning to call it, if anything. To use a better analogy, it was akin to a tripwire. Yeah, that was more accurate. If an external stimulus disturbed his senses in a way that he had “told” his color perception not to allow, then there would be a sort of alarm he could trigger inside his mind, which would alert him to whatever had disturbed his surroundings.

  That was potent. Finn could see the potential of this trick already. With this, he would never be caught off-guard again, even in his sleep. So long as it was within range, he could react. Provided his body was fast enough.

  He suppressed a scoff. His body was still the limiting factor, albeit not the downright crippling one it had been in the beginning. He was working on it, and it would improve with time. His current priority was sharpening his mind with his power.

  Protective measures were the first thing he thought of. Discounting the tripwires against physical threats, couldn’t he expand that to all types of stimuli that he could perceive. Make his power ping in his awareness when someone had a particularly intense emotional outburst, or when a superhuman was within range, or in the case of direct threats to his mind.

  In other words, psionics. He hadn’t encountered any in a long time, but that didn’t mean he had reason to become careless. Having something and not needing it was preferable to needing something and not having it.

  For example, the psionic he was most familiar with, Colette. Could he create countermeasures against her power? Was there some innate boundary that would prevent him from creating coverage against that weakness? What if he was bound to have that Achilles heel forever?

  …He wouldn’t find out unless he tried everything. Could he trigger a bunch of signals that would bombard his senses if his thought patterns deviated from the norm? After thinking about it for some time, he came to the conclusion that he would need a system in place capable of observing his thoughts and categorizing them, along with recognition of the distinction between regular deviations in thought and foreign interference.

  The tricky part was that not every mental force construct required touch to work, just most of them. So he couldn’t simply scan for mental force wherever and keep himself in a loop of resets if he was near an apparent psionic. Never mind the eventuality of an unknown superhuman creating mental force constructs right next to him before he knew what they could do. Aura precognition was the only countermeasure he could think of, if there was no time to react once it happened.

  Alternatively, there was the option of periodically resetting himself through a combination of nanite and color usage, always keeping himself battle-ready and not allowing himself to get caught for too long. The question was, how long would those intervals need to be? If he made it once every day, it was borderline useless, and if he made it once every five seconds, he would not be sleeping again. Ever.

  So that was out. Which made his thoughts drift back to the idea of the self-check system. A way to ensure that his mind wasn’t being tampered with. The tripwire concept worked for external stimuli, but what about internal ones? Could he set up markers within his own psyche to track deviations in thought? And if so, what was the baseline?

  Finn frowned slightly. His mind was never static. His thoughts fluctuated, shifting between different priorities depending on the situation. He had moments of clarity and moments of chaos. If he was going to establish a monitoring system, it needed to differentiate between natural changes in thought patterns and something foreign. Something invasive.

  The key, he realized, was memory.

  Assigning colors to his usual patterns of thinking would allow him to contrast them against any sudden shifts. If his internal color system detected a break in his established flow, something that didn’t belong, it could trigger an internal warning. He was missing a way to store and recognize what counted as normal thinking.

  That was the difficult part. How did one map out their own mind?

  His aura perception could only track emotions and externalized actions, also known as movements in the material plane. What about passive thoughts, things below the surface? Background processes, instincts, subconscious urges—these were things that guided his decisions without him being fully aware of them. And that was exactly the kind of space that psionics like Colette could exploit.

  Finn’s fingers clenched around his ruined pant legs. It wasn’t enough to set tripwires.

  Besides, even supposing that such a method did work and he had a rigid system in place to work out whether someone else was trying to turn him into a puppet, wouldn’t he be robbing himself of free will like that anyway? If he settled into a thought pattern that was predictable enough to suss out how he should think or how he was going to think in any scenario, his brain needed to function within set parameters to make that feasible for a standard list of rules. He would be letting a persona take over, giving into simplicity.

  The idea of putting himself in the backseat for the minor benefit of slightly better odds in certain combat scenarios didn’t sit well with him. It strangely reminded him of those times in early middle school when Jack had shown him an aimbot in a shooter game that would hit the targets for you because he was so bad at it, and he remembered vehemently refusing to ever use it again no matter what.

  Recontextualizing that time, Finn understood what he had been feeling. The thought of not being in control of his own destiny…

  Nothing in the universe disgusted him more.

  Although that did confirm to him that he needed someone else to check his thoughts over. Obviously, he couldn’t project his thoughts to another person twenty-four seven so they could tell him when he was being brainwashed, leading him to arrive at the only recourse left to him.

  He needed to create a sentry. A live guardian. A part of himself that wasn’t actively “him” but existed within him, intelligently observing, analyzing, detecting discrepancies.

  Was it possible to create something like that?

  He didn’t know. But if he could, then it would be one of the most powerful tools in his arsenal, both in the present and in the future.

  Opening his eyes with a new goal in mind, a sort of restful clarity settled over his being. Despite his body still being in a horrible state, he felt good.

  Ready to take on the world? No.

  Definitely getting there, though.

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