A headache, something that started dull and grew with time to throb and scream – I saw numbers not so much flashing before my eyes, but flittering. Countless equations danced before my perspective. Briefly, I focused on my injured hand. It was healing, soon the cells would be properly synthesized into their existing places and – nausea, I was focusing too long on the equation, I needed to process it faster.

I blinked with my magic eye, my special eye, the Ultimate Eye. That single blink had all the effect of a camera shutter. I knew the numbers, but I was blind for that briefest moment. A sense of alertness struck me as I stood. June’s voice was a soft echo, barely something that qualified as a taunt and more an assessment of what I was and what I might do. She was warning combustion man.

His posture changed. He was listening to her, not deferring to her but taking into account her skill in the field. Her creature stood on edge, watching me through its sinuses and taking every tiny detail of my person and position into account. An ultimate nose to my vision, it was almost appropriate.

…It was kind of a shame that this thing had a sense of smell that powerful while lacking key aspects of intelligence. At the same time, I was grateful. Its tongue contained a carbon-based neurotoxin capable of penetrating cotton, silk, and leather cloth and polymers in addition to skin and some armor. How terrifying, that it could corrode certain alloys of metal in order to poison skin or erode supports.

A building collapsed, testament to an aftereffect of this thing’s toxin on the inanimate. Visola was lucky that all she suffered was the aftermath from one of the combustion man’s detonations. Prolonged exposure to the toxin could move from being paralytic to lethal.