The gas came from the west, which was correct.
That was the thing about meta-knowledge when it was right — it arrived as confirmation rather than information, the click of a thing landing where the map said it would be. Purple-grey at the treeline, spreading with the density of something that had been released in volume rather than concentration, the specific quality of a fog that was too uniform to be natural and too purposeful to be accidental.
Mustard.
He'd been at the forest's eastern edge for forty minutes, wearing the civilian layer over the costume elements, watching the trails the way he'd been watching them since Day 1. The test-of-courage exercise had taken most of the class in pairs into the forest's central zone, which was the right configuration for a villain attack designed to scatter targets — and the attack had now confirmed that someone on the League's planning team had done their reconnaissance.
The transmitter was green at his left wrist.
Mandalay's telepathic broadcast hit the class simultaneously: villains have infiltrated the forest — all students return to camp immediately. The voice was the specific quality of telepath communication, present inside the skull rather than arriving at the ears, and it carried the urgency of someone who was already fighting somewhere else while delivering the message.
He went east.
Not back to camp. Toward the clearing where Muscular's position should be — the eastern sector, the one he'd been building toward all day, the one that the meta-knowledge architecture had placed the A-tier villain for reasons that had to do with the forest's geography and the League's deployment logic as he'd understood it.
The Threat Assessment overlay activated automatically as he moved — the background noise of it, the faint tagging that had been running at ambient for three days. Eastern sector: low. Low. Nothing — the movement through the trees was birds startled by the gas, not human. The eastern clearing arrived in his vision at a sprint.
Empty.
He stopped.
The clearing had the quality of a space where something had been and was no longer — the disturbed undergrowth at the northern edge, the broken branch at shoulder height that was a fresh break, the specific signature of something large that had passed through recently and not lingered. Not the signature of something waiting. The signature of something that had already moved.
North, the Threat Assessment said.
Not the ambient murmur. The focused attention version, the one that narrowed the field — the signal was coming from the north, and the signal was not moderate or high or even the very high that the Pussycats had produced. The overlay had a category above high that it had never activated before in any of his training period's test runs or the Hosu street encounters.
Extreme.
Muscular was north.
He turned and ran.
The gas reached him at the second kilometer — the edge of Mustard's dispersal zone, which put him roughly within the villain's operational radius. He had a section of training cloth around his mouth and nose, secured with his left hand and his right hand free for balance in the dark, and the cloth was filtering what it could filter and leaving the rest to the body's decision-making, which was to cough once and continue.
Running through poison gas in a dark forest, he registered, at the neutral distance he'd developed over several months for noting objectively insane situations without the notation slowing him down.
Toward a villain who will kill me in eight to twelve seconds of direct contact.
Green, the transmitter said at his wrist.
He kept running.
The Threat Assessment ping grew as he ran north — not linearly, the way a stationary beacon would strengthen as you approached it, but in pulses, the specific pattern of something that was moving through the forest rather than waiting. Muscular didn't wait. He'd never waited, in any version of his recorded conduct. He moved through things, and the things had the option of being moved-through or not being in his path.
A tree detonated.
Not exploded — detonated, the specific quality of a large structural element being subjected to force that exceeded its tolerance in a single impact, the trunk shattering from the contact point outward in the way that trunks shattered when something hit them with the concentrated force of entirely too much augmented muscle. The splinter cloud was visible against the night sky through the canopy, the debris catching the moonlight at a hundred meters.
Extreme.
A silhouette moved through the cloud. The shape of someone whose physical profile was wrong in the way that Muscular's physical profile was always wrong — too much, too dense, the augmentation already running, the muscle fibers that could build beyond normal biological limits doing what they did.
He was fighting someone.
Yami pushed to 4.5% and closed the distance.
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