He couldn't find her.

Upon first arriving here, he had naively thought that it was simply a matter of covering more distance than anyone else could while simultaneously having his senses inform him of every building's interior. It should have allowed him to lay eyes on her.

Frustration boiled in his gut, hot and persistent.

Finn had even set his nascent mental companion to respond to any shape within his range that crossed a threshold determined by a certain amount of commonality with memories of his girlfriend. Surely that would be enough to find her?

It wasn't. He gritted his teeth, pushing for more speed as he ignored everything happening in his radius except what mattered—what he wasn't seeing. Who would have guessed that every villain hideout of a higher caliber than basic no-name mooks had at least some measure of protection against observational powers, varying from the most basic anti-listening devices to metaphysical white noise generation and dimensional tunneling.

He couldn't lie to himself anymore, not when his journey took him farther and farther through Central. While the district was large enough to quantify as a country unto itself and the population size to match, he had speed and sensory reach in his side.

With his diameter spanning over ten kilometers that swept over houses, hotels, museums, and businesses alike, he scanned the skyline with his eyes as if she would somehow just pop up in front of him. He wasn't surprised that she didn't.

Lyra must have been avoiding him. There was no other explanation, other than her being incapable of speaking to him, but he had seen her log into Aegis. She knew he had tried to contact her, and had yet to respond to any of his calls.

Glowing rockets fired off in the distance, tended off by massive shields befitting of a giant, their clash creating audible shockwaves in the distance. Superhumans clashing, as they always did in this place.

Finn kept running.

Despite living here for the first eleven years of his life, he had never known what it was like to be a hero in this place. Small fish fought small fish, big fish drew out other big fish, and so on. When there existed such a huge range of what one could encounter here, between the weakest and strongest superhuman in the district, people adapted. At lower levels, conflict tended to take place in the shadows or areas hidden from the notice of the greats, who tended to make a big spectacle of their clashes even though they didn't necessarily intend to; it was just a consequence of being that powerful.

It mattered little to him. He would adapt, become stronger over time, and make general improvements to his skillset. But not now. Right now, he was searching and searching without finding someone he desperately wanted to see.

That was why he didn't put in more than a passing effort to stop the crimes in his range from taking place by warning people with colored text. If they couldn't save themselves, that was their problem until later, when he found the person he was looking for.

And he knew it had to be Central, because all her sightings in the last year had been here. She lived somewhere, it was just a matter of discovering what building it was.

Easier said than done.

Where were you, Lyra? He wondered to himself, desperation growing with every building he didn't find her in. Why wouldn't you just show up?

It didn't matter if she had gone villain. He would help her as much as she needed him to. Even if she had killed, maimed, and was liable to do worse in time, he wouldn't give up on her.

He'd promised.

A notification blinked in the corner of his vision.

[No match detected.]

Again.

He dismissed it with a twitch of his eye, bile rising in his throat. His still-unnamed assistant signaled him, conveying the results of his incessant requests for something he might have missed. A slight, miniscule clue that would lead him further. It wasn't limited to color sensing, but everything his brain was processing. Sights, sounds, smells, millions of data points processed every second and cross-referenced with the plethora of mental compilations he had made that went under the file called Lyra.

He got nothing.

Not even a maybe.

Sure, he hadn't traveled past all possible locations yet, and he would likely have to continue searching for much longer, but he just had this creeping sureness. The dawning certainty that Lyra didn't want to be found.

Why?

Did she blame him so much for blowing her off in this final moments before the explosion, for sacrificing himself instead of letting her die? Or was it because she'd thought he was dead for so long that she didn't trust it was really him? He wished he could read her aura right now, except that wasn't possible without having her in range.

Grabbing his phone again, he gave her another call, hoping she would pick up again. To no avail, because she didn't answer. She should know better than to dodge his attempts at getting in touch with her. He was absolutely the preferable option compared to whoever else might apprehend or kill her.

Although, it wasn't implausible that she didn't know better. That could have been the reason why she asked him for help in advance, foreseeing the eventuality of her power corrupting her mind.

The idea alone made him nauseous, thinking that something alien and malevolent might be messing with Lyra's head in ways that would make her do things she couldn't take back. And along with that came the fear, of what would happen if he was too late.

Beyond all else, he didn't want to lose her.

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How to prevent that, though? When she wouldn't even let him know she was alright… No, that was wrong. He should just operate under the assumption that she wasn't, and that time was limited, like he had been for months now.

The reality of it was hitting him harder as the inevitable confrontation grew nearer. His myriad questions faded into the background, his breathing evening out as he did his best to simply focus. He couldn't let her down. Inner turmoil was far from enough to deter him. Even death would be preferable to leaving his partner to her fate.

All those thoughts raced through Finn's mind faster than a normal human could keep up with, his enhanced neural network doing wonders for his thinking. It was an odd sensation how time seemed to stretch and compress all at once.

In the middle of running across city blocks in under a second, in the middle of analyzing entire skyscrapers' worth of data with each stride, Finn could hold onto a single idea and let it spiral into a web of thoughts and fears and hopes… and still react to a cat darting into the street three blocks away, or a gun being drawn in a back alley just beyond the next rooftop. It was like his brain comprised separate layers now. One focused entirely on Lyra, her memory, her presence, the ache of her absence. Another ran logistics, keeping him alive. A third watched the city for her. A fourth strategized endlessly, building a model of her potential movements, her decisions, her hideouts.

He let his thoughts thread out endlessly, hoping to find some new idea in deliberation of his circumstances, an epiphany that might come to him in his moment of need. Unsurprisingly, none came, and he was left to stew in his cocktail of impotent angst.

Then, something happened.

At the end of his range, some six kilometers away, he sensed a congregation of auras, resolved and hardened. It didn't take more than a second for him to assess the entire situation: top floor of a building, penthouse of some sort, a man being dragged out of bed by a group of armed kidnappers towards a weird contraption of a device in the living room.

The people carrying him wore soldier-esque uniforms, only instead of camouflage colors, they were outfitted in dark blue, with a white star that had an inverted triangle inside it. Their insignia was familiar to him.

Homeland.

Should he interfere in this situation? They were almost certainly doing something objectionable. He lacked the full context, merely knowing the person they were carrying must have held some influence and worked against their agenda in some way.

Involving himself with the biggest active gang in all of Apexia so soon after returning hadn't been in his plans, but perhaps it was inevitable. They had such a wide reach, their paths were bound to cross no matter what. The logic behind it was quite simple. With his expanding range and extensive search, every step he took increased the likelihood of him running into a major villain group's active operations. And it seemed that had finally happened.

With that, he chose to go after them. He wasn't going to put this off. It was possible he was misjudging the situation and the person they were after deserved death, but that was exceedingly unlikely, in his view.

He hadn't forgotten the time their organization held his mother at gunpoint.

Decision made, he sprinted the last sets of blocks between him and his destination at increased speed, fading to reduce air resistance and almost soaring with each stride. When he reached the last part of his route, he engaged his chainmail under armor flight method, magnetizing the metal with his nanites and soaring for real, defying gravity to shoot forward like a bullet.

Inside, the men had already activated some features on the helmets they wore in order to navigate the room they were in, since they couldn't use normal sight. Consequence of him blacking out the entire apartment.

Some pointed their guns this way and that, yet no one saw him coming as he shot through the window faster than a car on the highway, fist extended to clobber the first guy in reach. He fell over before he could raise his gun and Finn took care of the rest in short order, blitzing around to free the would-be victim from whatever they were planning to do.

He didn't stop there, disarming the men with ease before knocking them unconscious or restraining them. They didn't get up.

However, the device behind him did start to glow. The blackened room became lighter against his will.

Turning, he found he was just in time for three new figures to appear. A pair of superhumans he didn't recognize in the same nondescript uniforms as the rest, both accompanying a heavier aura. Of a type he hadn't sensed on this continent yet.

An Unbound.

The person standing in the middle was of a different caliber, he could already tell. An established force in A10A, long before Finn gained his own power. Her suit was a sleek, black ensemble that seamlessly blended advanced technology with the austere elegance of military regalia. The fabric of her outfit seemed to absorb light, as if it existed in a perpetual shadow, and the intricate markings of her insignia ran down the sides of her legs, barely visible against the darkness. Her helmet, a full-face visor, reflected nothing. An obsidian faceplate covering every trace of emotion or identity. To normal people, that was.

To Finn, her face underneath was plain to see. Plain being the operative word. Not a single one of her features would make her stand out in a crowd, and where others would have small microexpressions indicating how they were processing a situation, this woman did no such thing. She was still as a statue, her aura not fluctuating with the regular range of things he saw on humans at any given point, instead radiating pure calm. Emotionless.

She was Dame Edict.

"Shade," she spoke, her voice an expected monotone. "You interfere with our mission. There is no need for this."

"...There isn't?" he asked, likewise making his tone neutral.

"Because an accord may be reached between us." The villainess gestured to the frightened man scrambling back in his underpants. "Taking into account your interference, the conclusion I draw is that you lack awareness of the actions attributed to this vile scum. An understandable oversight, following your recent return to Apexia."

He didn't address the fact that they had been keeping tabs on him. "What did he do?"

"He is one of the foremost lobbyists fostering the territorial expansion of our borders that this 'megacity' can't process, and has increased his wealth in recent years. Men like him are the reason why our people suffer. Families ousted from their homes of generations to live in outer districts where quality of life is minimal. Workers suffering under the thumb of weapon development corporations to whom their lives are of no consequence. Do you not see the injustice?"

Dame Edict paused to give him a chance to reply, though remained unbothered when he didn't, continuing, "We are more than the propagandist DHD would have you believe. We are united. With our guidance, Apexia could flourish as a nation. We believe in the safety and the potential of all, not the few. And the next step is to cease this military campaign that those in power have proven incapable of sustaining."

"Have you ever seen a primebeast in real life?" he asked coolly. He honestly wondered what she thought was going to happen if the megacity as a whole stopped fighting against those unnatural killers.

"Yes. We would handle their kind with the arm of a better system. But first, corruption must be excised." She spread her arms in an almost inviting manner, the most expressive action she'd taken so far. "You would be an excellent addition to our cause. Consider the lives you could save, in the long term."

It almost made him sigh. He'd heard their pitch, and they failed to convince him. He opened his mouth to refuse, right up until he sensed another change in his perception, coming from right beside the broken window in midair.

Slight distortions, followed by golden swirls in space itself, expanding to form a portal Finn was familiar with. He knew who would be coming out. Dame Edict's people brandished their weapons, in contrast to their leader who remained still aside from a slight turn of her head.

And just as Finn expected, the one to come out was a jester whose costume he hadn't seen in well over a year, still wearing that same smiling mask and those bells adorning his cap.

"And so he returns!" the new arrival announced.

Nar and Finn made eye contact.

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