Unsurprisingly, the second hit was blocked with the same ease as the first. Her blade clanged hard against the unyielding surface of Cerese’s barrier.

  It was a flat surface, a dinner table’s worth of shielding that looked like so much glass. Lyra struggled, pushing her power to the max in order to break through. To no avail. Again, within expectations. She hadn’t expected it to be quick.

  Cerese countered. A second flat pane crashed into her side, and Lyra barely had time to throw a shockwave against it to diminish the impact. It still knocked her clean out of the open hole where the window used to be. She sailed through the open air, raising her chokutō to parry the smaller spinning disc homing in on her.

  Sparks flew as sword and shield clashed, pushing Lyra back even farther. Leaning backwards, she let the projectile pass and flipped over in midair, launching herself up with a shockwave.

  When the disc flew back toward her, she used it as a stepping stone and jumped. The Unbound stayed on her. Launching out of the building at breakneck speeds with one hand outstretched, ready to capture her. Not something she could dodge the normal way.

  No other option, then. Taking a deep breath, Lyra began to hum to arrest her fall. Once she was steady, watching the heroine miss her by a hair’s breadth, and did something she had sworn to never do again.

  She started to sing.

  The soundwaves emanating from her vocal performance were intuitive in a way no other sound was. Her own voice, the core of her existence. Using it felt akin to being embraced by a second self who possessed far more reach than she did.

  The resonance of her song wrapped around her, intertwining with the vibrations of the city itself. Every note she sang shaped the air, forming invisible currents that carried her like a river of sound. The once erratic, desperate struggle against gravity transformed into effortless motion; she flowed through the sky, rising and diving with the pitch and intensity of her melody.

  Cerese adjusted instantly, whipping another barrier through the air, but Lyra twisted mid-flight, letting the sound guide her movements. She wove between the incoming shields like a dancer, her body no longer bound by conventional physics. For the first time in years, she felt truly free.

  Where before she had felt empty and weightless every time she was in the air, now it was like she was completely immersed within her domain. But she couldn’t get lost in the sensation. The Unbound wasn’t slowing down, and already, more barriers were forming around her, closing off avenues of escape.

  They were slow, though. A consequence of Cerese’s power. The bigger she made her barriers, the slower they moved. Also, she was incapable of creating more than four at a time. The woman coated herself in small barriers to enhance her movement and facilitate aerial combat, keeping herself mobile and able to protect other people in her range. In a team setting, accompanied by people who could make up for her relative lack of offensive capability, it made her almost unbeatable.

  No other heroes were present. Something Lyra and the others had been counting on.

  A gap in the barriers. Lyra angled her descent toward it, adjusting her pitch mid-note. The shift sent her gliding in a sharp arc, narrowly slipping through the opening before Cerese could close it off. A hair slower, and she would’ve been pinned against the glass-like surface.

  Her swift escape seemed to have been enough to get her opponent to start talking. “Calliope,” said Cerese in a neutral voice. “Don’t think I don’t remember you. It’s not too late to turn your life around. There’s help for you in the DHD, people to talk to. I’m not saying there won’t be consequences, but this doesn’t have to be the end.”

  At that, Lyra closed her mouth to hover in the air and stare. “It is too late for me.”

  In response, Cerese hung her head and hemmed Lyra in with a giant barrier from sky to ground, blocking off her escape route. More projectiles came for her, but she decided to launch an attack of her own this time. She released a shout, not holding back at all and channeling the destructive sonic waves to the maximum.

  The blast shook Cerese from the inside out, though it didn’t cause the expected internal damage or hemorrhaging. How? Was the woman’s body just that resilient? Whatever the case, Cerese rocketed forward again, a slew of flat barriers big enough to trap a person hovering on every side of her.

  Another burst of sound, and Lyra was twenty meters away, hearing a crackle in her earpiece.

  “It’s done,” Cipher spoke.

  “Finishing up,” she said to him, before directing her voice to her team members. “Good job getting the rest of the staff out. We’re retreating.”

  Chaffster grunted.

  “Understood,” Hoodwink said.

  While there was no third response, that didn’t bother Lyra. She just went ahead with the next stage of her plan. It would get the Unbound off her back.

  Extending the target of her sound, she screamed loudly, directing the bulk of her power at the building they’d just left.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  It collapsed. She muted the resulting cacophony with her silence field, making the scene look surreal.

  “What did you do!?” Cerese tried to shout, swerving to the ruined structure.

  What this hero didn’t know was that she had instructed her subordinates to get the actual innocents, the unaffiliated staff, out before everything came crashing down. The security guards were still going to die, sure, but they were despicable, and their deaths would go a long way when it came to establishing her reputation as more than just a minor gang leader.

  Cerese shot forward, barriers forming in a flurry of desperate movement, scanning the wreckage with frantic eyes. Even as she searched, Lyra knew the Unbound was running calculations in her head—assessing casualties, analyzing structural integrity, deciding how to minimize further destruction.

  So for a moment, she was preoccupied.

  “Now,” she sent down to the figure standing on the ground below.

  A red and brown blur torpedoed into Cerese, causing the heroine to instinctively dodge to the side. She wasn't on time, and a blurring point found its way into her shoulder.

  Bloodbrand kicked off and dove back, the bloody knife lodged in Cerese’s stilling. Bursting forth, Calliope caught her subordinate, saving them from another cage.

  “That was great, Bloodbrand,” she praised.

  In her arms, Bloodbrand said nothing. Entirely predictable, seeing as Xena's power temporarily eroded the user's sense of self the more brands were created to imbue power and skills. Even more so when the brand she used was made from Lyra's blood. It was a trick they had prepared months ago, but only just got to use after months of practice to maintain an identity anchor. On top of that, the fraction of her ability that the older villainess got was lackluster. Not even five percent of the original, no signs of growth, and single use before a new brand had to be made.

  More than enough to phase a knife through the unbreakable bastion.

  It was far from a victory. Not even close. But they didn’t need to stay. Only the towering barrier was in their way.

  She induced the frequency required to become intangible on the both of them. Phasing while flying required her to sing, but she managed to pass through the wall in front of them.

  Ignoring the blood flowing from her shoulder, Cerese turned to look at their departure, without giving chase. Instead, the protector of “justice” flew down to save who she could, leaving the two girls room to escape.

  Lyra fell.

  *******

  Finn rose.

  The roof of the truck was intact, courtesy of his own scouting. He had finished up another round of exploration ahead of them like he usually did, though not too far. After things had gotten more dangerous, he didn't want to leave these people behind for too long.

  Over the past few weeks since burying Madeline’s body, he had resumed traveling with Ernesto and the refugees on the way to their destination. It had taken weeks to get to this point, where they would have ordinarily been if the route hadn’t been cut off, because of frequent stops.

  They’d been mostly dealing with the United States military, since a lot of Seraphim’s troops had apparently been sent east to the site of the battle against the titanic-class primebeast to harvest the corpse and stop the opposing army from stealing it. That meant the current battles were more about holding territory than pushing the enemy back, at least for one side.

  Therefore, avoiding attention hadn’t been as difficult as anticipated, simply being a matter of timing and positioning. He wished her could say he enjoyed the lucky break like Ernesto seemed to, but he felt like there was a weight on his shoulders that just wouldn’t leave him.

  Just like the feeling of blood staining his hands even when there was nothing, he felt like this was going to haunt him forever. He had killed someone. The longer he sat with that notion, the more uncomfortable it made him. And yet simultaneously, the fewer other options he saw. He couldn’t have left Madeline there to die a slow, painful death.

  Mercy. That was a word he’d been saying to himself very often, lately. It was a concept he wasn’t sure he entirely understood now that he had been forced to apply it so irreversibly. She had been suffering, and he had put her out of his misery. That should have been the end of it, but his conscience wouldn’t leave him alone. Not even in his dreams, during what little rest he did get on this journey.

  The feeling of stabbing her in the chest, how easy it had been to get past the resistance. He hated how vivid it was, and his power would never let him forget it if he wanted to, which he badly did. Although, at the same time, he recognized that there was a lesson here. How he could ever make peace with the fact that it had taken a life to teach him something crucial, he didn’t know. He’d come up with something.

  She had been so awfully vulnerable and human, in the end. Just a person who’d thought they were worthless, throwing themselves into the one thing that might give them meaning, only to yearn for rest when she was broken and dying with nothing left to give. Finn had delivered that eternal rest.

  To be completely honest, he wasn’t sure why he’d chosen to do it in the end. He thought he had been, that it was the right thing to do, but that justification rang more hollow as the days passed. Maybe he had done it because he could relate in some way.

  The day he gained his power, he had certainly considered the road to fighting Omega to be the one thing he would find meaning in, as if it would clear the haze that had settled over him in the previous years. Despite the circumstances being wildly different, on some level, he recognized that feeling. Like all other aspects of life didn’t matter if he just did this.

  Like her, he may have ended up in the same position even if life had gone the way he expected to, and he won. He would have stood at the finished line, lacking purpose, empty inside. That, more than anything, had been what allowed him to gather the resolve to kill the lone soldier.

  If he hadn’t started the team with Lyra and Jack, he could see himself experiencing the same feelings. Meaning that it was amazing that he had, and he needed to get back to them no matter what, regardless of whether he returned as the same person.

  Something triggered in his mind.

  Suddenly, his senses alerted him to something peculiar. He registered what was coming into range and realized he’d seen it before. It was underground, man-made. A tunnel, crafted from reinforced stone, supporting a train track. Finn’s eyes widened. The same tunnel system he’d discovered prior to their detour.

  It ran parallel to their carrier, and though Finn couldn’t go there right this second, he wanted to find out more about it when they stopped for the night.

  He had a suspicion that he wouldn’t regret it.

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