Chapter 2
TWO
LEO
Smoke pushed through my mask, the mechanisms in my suit overheating as they attempted to catch up.
Pull out the debris, filter in new oxygen, push coolant, try to prevent my inevitable implosion.
Rinse, and repeat. It was never this bad; I’d always held some semblance of control, even if that only meant preventing my own burnout.
But now, even against weaker Variants, my ability threatened to incinerate me from the inside out.
I fucking hate June.
Flames ripped across my suit, coating the black material in bright orange.
Five Villains surrounded us, and three were already knocked out on the ground.
Reed had his back against mine, his perfect shield already up.
There weren’t many people who could withstand my firepower—but Reed was an ideal match.
His shields and its uses varied; he was nearly untouchable, as long as he kept his focus.
He was the one person I was confident that I’d never be able to burn.
“Cinder,” he snapped as attacks bounced against the rippling air around us, “we gotta take them out quick, before it gets worse. You’re close to burnout.”
“Yeah, I’m aware,” I growled. “I got it.”
“I don’t know if you noticed, but whenever you say you ‘got it’, you one hundred percent do not got it. If we destroy one more city block, the VIA’s gonna have our heads. I’m too pretty to die, man. Get it together,” Reed sighed.
I clenched my fists as my teeth ground together. “Get them inside the shield with me and let me do the rest. You work on minimizing the damage.”
Reed whipped around, his fire engine red hair hovering over a mismatched colored glare. “I’ve been trying to minimize the damage, asshole. You’re the one lighting everything on fire.”
I ignored him, and Reed gave up on the argument.
The kid could never watch his mouth, but at least he knew when to shut it.
He raised his hands, and I pulled oxygen into my lungs, black smoke pushing through my silver mask as the heat began to rise.
Joon always joked that I looked like a comic book Villain—he wasn’t wrong.
By the time Reed dropped his shield and rushed through the Villains still surrounding us, I was ready. He slammed himself against a brick wall before throwing the shield back up again, trapping the other Variants in with me.
I couldn’t always see his ability, but I felt it.
The way it pushed down around me, threatening to suffocate my flames.
It had taken us six months of intensive training to figure out how much of his ability he could use on me, and how much would be enough to stop me if I started to burn out, or got out of control.
Two years later, and the VIA was content with our progress—they started to pay less in damages to the city.
The Villains inside the shield with me started to bang on the solid air around us, realizing their mistake. I didn’t have to hold back here.
“Fuck this,” one spat, “Just take him down!”
The other four looked at each other as I smirked, the flames licking off my body like I was hell incarnate.
And I was. I didn’t have sympathy for bastards that used their abilities to throw our city into chaos, calling themselves Villains, and I didn’t have empathy for weaklings that thought they could take on a Hero.
But these were special; each wore jackets with an emblem of an S on the back, made of bones.
The same emblem of the Villains I’d been hunting for three years. These guys were small fries—new recruits, most likely. Still, it sent glee through my veins, knowing that I’d be the one to take them out.
I’m the same as them, after all.
“I usually try to go easy on you idiots,” I cracked my neck as coolant began flooding through my veins, trying to keep me at a safe level.
Orange tubes ran across my suit, all riddled with needles that would puncture my skin and inject me the moment my system sensed a flare up.
The watch on my wrist beeped frantically, alerting me that another dosage was ready to be administered.
In my Academy days, I’d rely on the stuff occasionally during mock battles, if at all.
But for three years, it was as if I was endlessly impaled with needles.
My skin was littered with marks by now, pinprick scars to remind me of how little control I had left.
I was a fuckup and always had been. But the VIA kept me around for a reason—a show of force.
“The VIA really hates it when I go overboard. I don’t think they’ll mind my making an exception, though.” Sharp jabs shot through my skin — in my arms, my legs, my chest, and stomach.
It was barely enough to take the edge off.
A burnout was hard to come back from; I’d only done it twice, and each one brought me closer to a nice pair of steel lungs to repair the damage. I didn’t care anymore, though. I didn’t care about anything but this—decimating every Villain I came across.
One with tentacles for fingers reached out.
They expanded, writhing as they reached for me; nearly twelve feet long, each littered with suction cups that had pointed spikes inside.
Physical abilities could manifest in the nastiest ways, and sometimes, they came with poison.
I lifted a hand and burned them away in an instant.
He howled as he fell back on his ass, clutching his fingerless palms to his chest.
“So fucking weak,” I hissed. “You’re a waste of my time.”
I let my flames roar. They pushed out, searing skin and making the Villains collapse almost instantly.
Fire whipped around me, starting to singe away the edges of my suit—they always claimed it was fireproof.
The VIA was full of liars. I was sure that from the outside, the shield Reed held up was a swirling vortex of orange and yellow that blocked out any hint of a body inside.
When I was done, Reed’s shield grew smaller, pushing my fire back until it only surrounded me, and I started to suffocate.
I ripped off the mask around my nose and mouth, and choked as black smoke pushed out of my throat.
When I was on my knees and my fire was finally extinguished, the shield disappeared.
The smoke started to dissipate, leaving the alleyway drenched in the scent of ash and fire.
As plumes of it climbed up into the night, over the towering skyline of Nightmyre City, I could hear sirens in the distance.
It was a well-known fact that when this much smoke spilled into the city, the Hero Cinder was at work, and damage had been done.
I couldn’t wait to rub it in their faces that I’d only burned part of the buildings around us, and that we’d actually evacuated the citizens beforehand.
Reed insisted, but still, I managed to contain myself until the block was cleared.
The wins were far and few these days, so I’d take whatever I could get.
“You good?” Reed’s voice filtered through as his shadow began to appear, still swirling in the haze.
Hacking coughs rang around us as I clenched my fist over my mouth. “You could’ve gone a little easier on me. I can’t fucking breathe in that thing.”
He sighed and waved a hand in the air, pulling up another shield to push out the rest of the smoke before dropping it again.
Reed crossed his arms, his black and red Hero suit finally visible.
We all had the same basic black uniform, but each one was tailored to the Hero using it.
My own had the orange, vein-like tubes that ran over it, bringing the bubbling coolant throughout my body, and a metal mask that looked like I should’ve been in containment instead of out on the streets.
The tabloids were never nice about that one.
Reed had red patches that doubled as armor around him—he was a perfect shield, but his own body was weak.
If he got hit by a Villain without throwing up a shield first, the damage would be…
extensive. The material in his suit was bulletproof and came with sensors to monitor his vitals.
He wore a red mask across his green and blue eyes, a stupid attempt at concealing his identity.
Getting to be a Hero in the VIA meant more people had their eyes on us than we’d ever wanted; we were weapons, something to be tracked.
Although we used codenames on the field, most Heroes and VIA workers knew our true identities.
It wasn’t the comic book plot that people would read growing up, no matter how hard the VIA worked to make it seem similar.
They tried everything to make the public choke down our existence.
That’s why we were called Heroes and Villains, rather than mutants.
“It’s getting harder to snuff you out,” Reed sighed at the charred bodies that moaned around us. “Isn’t this kind of…overkill?”
I shrugged. “They’re still alive, aren’t they?”
I didn’t care how bad they hurt—they were trash, the scum of the streets.
The VIA had the best healing Variants around; some could bring people back from the brink of death, or restore singed skin to make it look brand new.
They were far more talented than civilian Variants, or even the ones we’d had at the academy. I could afford to be a little reckless.
“Barely.”
“And that’s what the healers are for,” I stretched my arms above my head and yawned. “We’ll get them fixed up once the collection units come and then send them off for interrogations. Keep an eye on them; I’m taking a smoke break.”
“For someone who’s on their way to having no lungs, you don’t seem to give a damn,” Reed grumbled.