Light pollution made the starry night sky somewhat less so. Which was to be expected, especially in an area like this, in the heart of a megacity.

  Still, it cast the building in front of her in a dazzling gleam, the polished exterior shining in a mix of artificial and natural light. It loomed over the buildings next to it, but not all the other ones in the district. This place was high-end, but not at the top of the list in terms of importance. No, she was here for something obscure and specific.

  “On my signal,” Lyra said, projecting the sound towards each of her members. She’d been astounded to learn that the gang had, until she found them, been so lacking in technological support for one established in Central, albeit in the periphery. The thought had made her wistful, recalling the early days with Jack providing her with whatever he managed to tinker up before she was ready to take on another job.

  Those days were gone now.

  Here, the scale would be bigger, if things went wrong. Ideally they wouldn’t, but by this point she knew better than to think she could account for every possible variable and have all her plans go off without a hitch. Reality just didn’t work that way.

  You no longer have that strength at your side. Instead, you’re closer to me, which is much better.

  “You got it,” Chaffster rumbled, slamming a fist in his meaty palm.

  “Yeah, boss,” Bloodbrand agreed, sounding eager.

  “Okay,” Hoodwink replied, her voice soft-spoken as ever. Supposedly, that had been a problem for Raze back when that man had been leading the then-named Carrion Feast. Lyra, on the other hand, could hear her subordinates perfectly well at all times.

  “Tap the blue button when you’ve planted the receiver,” Cipher said for the umpteenth time over her earpiece. “We can’t risk Noor showing up, and we have only ten more minutes where she’s going to be accounted for.”

  “I know,” Lyra responded simply. “Just keep me updated on first-responders.”

  Being the last of her powered membership, and not physically present besides, Cipher grunted in acknowledgement and went back to monitoring his various feeds. Although he wasn’t quite like Gridlock, his supernatural skill with numbers made a lot of his work smooth on the first try, and he had other facets of his power that were immensely useful in preparation. Most of his work had already been done.

  Calliope tapped into the ambient sounds. Distant sirens sounded clear as day to her, yet she ignored them in favor of her objective. The pristine exterior wasn’t going to deter her. She utilized her vibrational senses to identify all living bodies inside the building. At this time of night, it was relatively empty. There were less than a hundred people present in total, and half of those wouldn’t be able to reach them regardless.

  “Let’s go,” she commanded. “Hoodwink.”

  Instead of giving verbal assent, the short woman stalked forward ahead of Chaffster, out from the street corner they had been hiding behind. The pair reached the side entrance of the building without incident, and Hoodwink raised her palms. Four meters around her, a silent updraft stirred her black-and-green robe, making it glow brighter and brighter. When it became almost blinding, it suddenly blinked out. The door, reinforced with several locks and a security code they had no hope of cracking, opened on its own.

  That was her power. She had the ability to build up charges of exotic green energy, and any non-living object could be put into another possible state. On living creatures, she could cast various kinds of illusions. Alternatively, she could also spend multiple charges on an object over time to imprint it with illusions of its own. It was what kept their base hidden from most people.

  Stepping aside, robed villainess stepped aside to let Chaffster take point. The large man’s skin began to take a silvery sheen, and they ran through the empty hall. They hadn’t made it eight steps before the first security guard popped up in their view. Bullets started flying immediately, pinging off Chaffster’s hardened form.

  With each impact, his metallic skin cracked apart in jagged, uneven lines, only to reform instantly, as if being stitched back together by unseen threads. Chaffster’s body wasn’t just durable—it was modular. If a limb was severed, it would reattach itself in seconds, and even if he was blown apart entirely, the scattered pieces of his flesh would slither back together like a living jigsaw puzzle. The more he was broken, the more inevitable his return became.

  However, that wasn’t the only component of his power. He also possessed the ability to actively hold himself together, or split himself apart. Violently.

  His fist rocketed away from his arm, crashing into the foremost guard’s stomach and sending the guy crashing into the guard behind him as they were sent careening into a wall with a loud bang. Chaffster recalled the metal fist, causing it to lift from the two prone guards and smack into another one as it reattached.

  For the last guard, a physical takedown ended up being more than sufficient. The hardened villain smashed them away like potato sacks, not even slowing down while he gestured for Hoodwink to follow him. More security guards streamed from around the building to the ground floor, straight into Chaffster.

  On the other side of the building, Lyra looked at Bloodbrand, and asked, “Ready?”

  The red-clad girl nodded, and Lyra grabbed her by the shoulders, captured the sound of her heartbeat, then started to vibrate every particle in her body at a frequency outside her usual range.

  A year ago, when she had first discovered this technique, she'd been leaning on her power to get her to the next level. It hadn't worked. Not until she understood that she was the next level. The degree of mental separation was what held her back. There needed to be balance between herself and her environment, to a degree where they passed in between it, because she was her power.

  Lyra let the vibrations intensify, letting the sound of Bloodbrand’s heartbeat pulse through her fingers, steady and strong. The world around them flickered—not visually, but in the way a song shifted when a single instrument was removed, a fundamental note vanishing from the harmony of existence.

  Then they dropped.

  The ground beneath them should have stopped them, but it didn’t. It welcomed them, their bodies shifting into the spaces between molecules, slipping through solid matter as if it were nothing more than mist. The sensation was one she would never cease to be amazed by, like being stretched infinitely thin, a whisper of a person rather than something solid.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Her equilibrium registered the fall, and her stomach lurched in that way it would whenever she jumped off a building. Except here, she would be jumping into one instead. She tapped into the ambient sound, the sound waves traveling to and fro, every wave of vibrating particles in the air. Traffic. Machinery. Turbines and power grids. The rhythm of the city made itself known to her. It was a symphony, and she was the conductor.

  She pulled.

  Sound bent around them, wrapped them in a cocoon of force. Then when they had a sonic path to ride on—

  They launched.

  The air around them split apart in a violent burst of displaced sound, a shockwave rippling outward from where they had once been. They became blurs of motion, two streaks of sound cutting through the building’s structure like a knife through silk.

  In a fraction of a second, they crashed through the reinforced glass of the 32nd floor, the material shattering into a thousand pieces, glittering in the light as they were strewn across the floor.

  Lyra landed first, boots skidding across the polished floor. Bloodbrand hit the ground a second later, rolling with the momentum before coming to a stop in a crouch. Not as smooth as she was, but definitely better than the first time they’d done this.

  Security noticed them in no time, drawing weapons and bursting into the room to eliminate the new threat. Bloodbrand rushed forward, drawing a knife from her leathery costume that quickly met flesh. Drops of red liquid splattered onto her hand, forming rune-like sigils.

  She began to run faster, stab harder, waste less movement. One of the guards leveled his gun at her, only to have it taken from him and be shot full of lead. Bloodbrand shot the commandeered weapon with the accuracy of a seasoned marksman, going for the fastest way to end the fight.

  Though she didn’t necessarily take special care to spare anybody’s life, Lyra wasn’t too concerned about that. Not anymore. First off, knowing what she knew, there was no chance that these assholes were innocent. They could and had done worse in the past.

  Second off, she’d originally tried to get her gang to be more merciful, and that had lost her a lot of the unpowered membership. There were still some, whom she had not chosen to take along on this mission, but her heroine persona was dead. Although she had managed to convey to them the concept of not drawing too much heat by killing too many high profile targets.

  Tonight, they were raiding a private security firm’s data hub. Inside the building itself, there weren’t any other superhumans that she could see besides her own team. But that wasn’t the issue here. The problem, and the reason more villains didn’t just hit this target when there were no powered people present, was because of the influence this company had.

  They would have to be quick. While Cyrus’ intel had been accurate, it was up to her to complete this mission herself, if she wanted to have a shot at finding the monster she was looking for.

  “You need somebody on the other side,” she had told Cyrus on the night she’d left A23G. “That can be me. Let me be useful in the way I still can be.”

  “Very well, if you insist,” the head of the Wardell family had said. “Just know that I truly do regret that you did not approach me sooner regarding your condition, Ms. Chen. If you had, we may have been able to get it under control. In the current state of affairs, however, it pains me to say that my ability to aid you, be it with your affliction or your future endeavors, is limited. I possess a great deal less resources and contacts in Central, so should you decide to go there, you will be acting largely independently save for the information I can provide you with. I do not necessarily condone your actions, but if you can be in the right place at the right time…”

  That was the last time they had spoken, for better or worse. Remote information exchange was as far as their current communication went.

  With a final thrust of her knife, Bloodbrand finished off the last of the wave of guards that had come for them. Some were circling back from the other side of the building, but they all had a significant amount of distance to cover since they’d all gone for Chaffster and Hoodwink on the lower floors.

  From her side, Lyra unsheathed her chokutō, a straight single-edged katana-like sword with no wristguard. A bit of a departure from her own heritage. When she’d first purchased it from the Aegis store, she had been looking for a weapon that would allow her to increase its sharpness when she added vibrations to it. And this had sufficed. Ever since, she had been training to improve her skill with it, and she had made a lot of progress. Far from perfect, but enough to get rid of the filth ahead of her.

  In a burst of sound, she phased through the wall and got to the room where her target was located. A mainframe bigger than a fridge that she stuck the receiver onto after tapping the button. Allowing Cipher to get to work, she turned to face the other person in the room.

  “Elias Voss,” she began in her filtered voice. “I hope you’ve said your goodbyes.”

  Taking a cautious step back, the bespectacled older man chuckled. “You’re fucked, you know that? I’ve already sent out the alert. This is the end.”

  “The West Ardell Safehouse,” she continued, ignoring him. “Sixty children with powers, all gone. Do you remember that, Voss?”

  His smirk faltered. Just for a second. But she caught it.

  “That wasn’t me,” he said, voice steady. Too steady. “I’m a scientist turned businessman, not a murderer.”

  “Businessman?” Lyra echoed, taking slow steps forward. “I guess that makes those kids nothing more than assets. Wasted resources, right?”

  Voss’ fingers twitched at his sides. His gaze darted toward the doorway, but he had nowhere to go. Lyra could feel the vibrations of the building, the approaching footsteps of security too far away to help him in time.

  “You signed off on the funding for the facility,” she continued, her grip tightening around her chokutō. “You gave the green light for experimental augmentation, led the project. When it failed? You gave the order to erase the evidence. No survivors.”

  “That’s not—”

  Lyra struck.

  She closed the distance in an instant, sword flashing in the dim light. Voss didn’t even have time to react; she was already behind him when his severed arm fell to the ground. The scream came after a beat, and she watched as the pathetic excuse for a human being clutched the stump in agony.

  He tried to crawl away from her, but she kicked him in the side, sending him sprawling on the floor. She stood over him as his screams died down, raising her sword.

  Voss, still panting through clenched teeth, spat at her feet. “You think you’re any better than me?” His voice wavered, but the hatred was real. “You kill, you terrorize, you destroy. And for what? Some self-righteous crusade? You’re just another villain.”

  She tilted her head. Smiled behind her mask.

  “Then don’t be surprised when I act like one.”

  She swung downward, intending to sever him in two.

  Steel met an unbreakable, transparent barrier, bouncing off and sending her staggering back.

  The windows burst apart once more, and a figure landed on the floor with all the grace of a meteorite, carving a trench upon coming to a stop.

  Dressed in an off-white coat with knee-high boots and a pair of pigtails poking out from behind her helmet mask, the heroine stood. She was world famous for her defensive capability, and now it seemed she had decided to come alone, to confront Calliope.

  Being part of Noor’s personal team, this person had achieved the next stage of power, a stage few in the world could even dream of reaching.

  The barrier hero, Cerese the Unbound. Quietly observing, not interested in talking.

  Could Lyra handle this?

  They were about to find out.

  “Worldsong,” she whispered, so quietly no one else could hear.

  I’m with you. We’re stronger as one.

  And she attacked.

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