Chapter Text
Pulverized concrete drifted like slow rain over a crater that reeked of hot copper and torn flesh. Mark could no longer feel his limbs. His body had been reduced to a throbbing slurry of pulped meat and splintered bone, pinned against the naked rock. Air entered his lungs with a wet, bubbling hiss, fighting through the blood choking his windpipe. His left eye was buried beneath a ridge of swollen, purple flesh; the right, reduced to a trembling slit, registered only the ashen smoke rising for miles, silhouetting the jagged skeletons of ruined skyscrapers.
The mechanical hum of drones began to needle into his shattered ear like a persistent mosquito. The signal of his location was a mere three seconds from pulsing through the GDA’s subterranean grid. Then, the air went dead. A sudden, violent vacuum tore at his lungs and made his ears bleed anew. The stench of dust was swept away by a current of air—dense, suffocating, and sharp against the nostrils, like the ozone before a coming storm.
The fractured stone beneath Mark’s spine gave way. A swirling circle of milky, blue-black light opened beneath what remained of his existence. His broken body slipped into the maw. Freezing fingers emerged from the dark. Onyx-lacquered nails bit into the soaked, shredded fabric of his suit, dragging him into the abyss. The dry, violent force wrenched a spray of crimson and a muffled groan from him before the rubble-strewn asphalt vanished entirely.
The absolute cold of the fissure swallowed him whole. The distant roar of GDA extraction engines cut short, like a nerve severed by a blade.
He hit a floor of waxed wood, the impact making his fractured ribs groan. Above, the wound in space snapped shut with the crack of a whip, leaving a wake of static that made the hair on his arms stand on end. Through a trembling slit of an eye, he saw black boots of canvas and leather halt inches from the fresh pool of his own blood. Mark tried to lift his head, tearing what little muscle remained intact. Higher up, framed by unruly tufts of raven hair falling over marble-pale skin, an eye of green and an eye of blue pinned him from the dark. Not a single flicker of pity marred the cold symmetry of that face.
The youth crouched with the fluid ease of a coiled spring, the black cloth of his trousers rustling softly. A pale hand descended toward the shredded, smoking meat of Mark’s chest. The touch was a lash; the stranger’s freezing skin burned like acid against the hero's raw flesh. Without hesitation, those dark-nailed fingers dove straight into the open tear beneath his breastbone. A wet, sickening snap echoed through the room as splintered bone was wrenched back into place.
A violent spasm arched the fallen boy’s broken spine. The scream he tried to expel crashed against a thick clot in his throat, filling his mouth with the heavy taste of old copper and bile. His useless fists, knuckles flayed, clawed at the waxed floorboards, seeking a hold that did not exist.
“Take short breaths,” a low, rasping voice commanded, entirely devoid of empathy or urgency. The timbre of the words seemed to suck the lingering warmth from the room. “If you vomit, you will choke on your own teeth.”
The slender figure drew back, canvas soles creaking against the wood as he moved into the unlit corners of the room. The air was heavy, thick with stagnant dampness and the sharp bite of ozone. From the dark came the scrape of iron against stone, then the dull clink of heavy glass jars. A shadow fell over Mark’s ruined face once more. A foot from his ear, a galvanized steel bucket slammed onto the floor, splashing the wood with a thick, black sludge that reeked of burnt sulfur.
The black sludge clung to the pale fingers like cold tar. Without a moment's hesitation, the youth shoved his coated hand directly into the open ruin of Mark’s side, where jagged ribs poked through the shredded blue and yellow suit. A sharp hiss—like raw meat dropped onto a white-hot griddle—filled the space. The stench of sulfur mingled with the sickening, sweet smell of flesh burning and weaving itself back together with terrifying speed.
Mark convulsed. His jaw locked with such force that the enamel of his teeth audibly cracked. His fingernails sought to bore into the wood of the floor, ripping up waxed splinters that drove themselves under his bloodied cuticles.
“What... what are you...” he bubbled through thick saliva, barely a muffled grunt from the depths of a wrecked, waterlogged throat.
“Even Viltrumites have a limit to how long they can sleep to mend,” the black-haired youth replied, his voice cutting through the heavy air. “This will force your flesh to knit before the emptiness starves your brain. Stay still. If you move, your breastbone will set crooked, and I will have to snap it for you again.”
The temperature around the galvanized bucket plummeted, a heavy, suffocating stillness settling over the dark metal. The youth’s thin, flawless lips began to shape faint whispers in an unknown tongue. His face held no tension, no urgency, no disgust. He wrenched his hand from the wound with a sharp tug, leaving clumps of the sulfurous paste clinging to the boy's torn muscles.
Immediately, Mark’s body became a war zone. Torn fibers began to writhe beneath his skin like a nest of maddened worms, reaching for their severed ends to knot themselves anew. The sound was sickening—a wet, grinding friction punctuated by dry clicks as bone fragments snapped back into their sockets. The young hero's left eye, a hopeless purple mass just moments ago, throbbed beneath a lid sealed shut by scabs as the ruined eye rebuilt itself from within.
The youth stood in a single fluid motion, effortless. He wiped the remnants of black mud from his nails with a scrap of coarse linen from his pocket. The static in the room thinned, though the bitter tang of ozone still clung to the peeling walls. He dropped the stained cloth directly over Mark’s face, blinding his one working eye. The damp, filthy rag stifled his nose, forcing him to swallow gulps of rust-tasting air through parched, split lips. The creak of canvas soles retreated toward a ramshackle door at the far end of the room. Its rusted hinge shrieked as it swung open, letting out a sharp, unpleasant whistle.
The coarse linen scraped against his swollen eyelids. With the rag choking his breath, Mark’s universe shrank to the deafening echo of his own tearing flesh. Beneath the skin, his chest muscles interlaced with the harsh friction of hemp ropes strained to their limit. His right collarbone, shattered into dozens of shards by a hammer-blow, crunched as the fragments migrated through living meat to weld themselves shut. A deep, agonizing itch from the marrow of his bones forced him to arch his back against the hard wood. Every breath filtered through the stained cloth filled his lungs with the metallic taste of his own dried blood and the persistent reek of sulfur.
Behind the makeshift veil, memories of the mountain battered his broken mind. There were no clear images, only textures and temperatures. The grit of stone crushing his shoulder blades. The unnatural weight of a boot as heavy as a tanker truck sinking into his abdomen. The whistle of the air before each blow. The heat of blood boiling over his skin. He tried to swallow to moisten a throat that felt lined with sandpaper, but a violent spasm racked his chest. The black ointment labored on, utterly ignoring his body’s natural rhythm, forcing the flesh to multiply in a frantic frenzy.
On the other side of the rickety door, the shriek of an old pipe broke the quiet of his agony. Water struck a porcelain basin with irregular force, spitting air and a muffled thud. Nicholas scrubbed his hands under the freezing stream, tearing away the remnants of sulfurous mud with a stiff-bristled brush. After a minute, he twisted the taps shut so hard the metal buckled slightly beneath his fingers.
The canvas steps returned, measuring the floorboards with cold precision. The youth caught the rag over Mark’s face and yanked it away, tearing the fresh scabs from the bridge of his nose. The meager light filtering through the boards nailed over the windows stabbed at the wounded boy’s eyes. He blinked repeatedly, fighting tears and double vision. Above him, silhouetted against a ceiling of peeling dampness, the black-haired youth watched with absolute expressionlessness. The blue iris and the green one lacked any kind of luster—static and dead, like two glass marbles embedded in a face of wax.
“How... how long...” Mark’s voice was a raspy croak, cut short by a dry cough that flecked his lips with bloody saliva. “How much time?”
“Thirteen minutes since the crater.”
The voice was a velvety, flat whisper that echoed in Mark’s damaged ears until he felt dizzy. The youth knelt beside the broken body, resting one hand on the floor and extending the other toward Mark’s neck. Two frozen fingers pressed hard against his pulse, searching for the rhythm of his heart.
“My dad... the government... Cecil...” The words stumbled over one another, pushed by the panic beginning to stir in his barely mended mind. He tried to lift his right arm to push the cold hand away, but his muscle refused to respond. It was dead weight, a sack of dense, useless meat anchored to the floor.
“You are off their radar. This basement is isolated from the reality you know. Or rather, the one they know.” The youth withdrew his fingers and wiped a stray drop of blood on his dark trousers. “The GDA is sweeping the ruins. They found your blood, but not your body. They will search for ripples in space, energy trails, glitches in their perimeter scanners. They will find nothing. The threshold I used to bring you here moves along the Ley lines I carved myself. To Stedman’s satellites, you simply evaporated between one heartbeat and the next.”
Mark let the back of his head drop. The dull thud against the boards was a stark reminder of how helpless he was. The air was thick, choked with dust, rust, and a sepulchral dampness that clung to the back of his throat. He turned his head a few centimeters. The walls were lined with wallpaper flayed by rot, revealing bricks blackened by old soot. Everything was shadow and gloom, save for the two orbs of blue and green scrutinizing him from inches away.
“Why?” Mark demanded, gritting his teeth through the sharp burn where his flesh was still knitting together. “Why take me from there? They have... they have healing tanks. Surgeons. Equipment.”
... “Your body reacts to ruin by shutting down, forcing what little life you have left into your core,” the explanation flowed from the pale youth’s lips without pause, reciting alien anatomy like a man reading an instruction booklet for a broken machine. “Your heart was down to seventeen beats and dropping. Your spine was open to the air. If the GDA had pulled you out, their medics would have wasted fifteen minutes just trying to clear the blood choking your lungs. By then, the darkness in your brain would have become permanent—beyond the reach of even your strange blood.”
The youth leaned in close. The gloom of the corner swallowed half his face, leaving only his green eye exposed, glowing with a sickly phosphorescence. He gripped the edge of the wrecked blue and yellow suit—right where the black ointment had dried into obsidian crusts—and ground his knuckles brutally into Mark’s newly welded breastbone.
Mark let out a guttural howl, arching upward like a spring as the air left his lungs in a ragged gasp.
“You aren't healed, Grayson. It’s a patch,” the youth murmured, keeping his weight pressed into the brittle bone. "The sludge forces your flesh to burn through its own reserves so you don't die, but your skeleton is cheap glass right now. Sneeze too hard and you’ll puncture your lung again."
The fabric of the uniform, designed to withstand the friction of the sky, was now a rigid mass fused with Mark’s skin. The youth didn't hesitate or look for kind angles. He hooked his pale fingers into the edge of the yellow emblem—right where the weave had melted from the heat of Nolan’s fists—and yanked upward. The sound was like coarse sandpaper tearing wet bark. The scabs gave way all at once. With sharp, precise tugs, he began to flay the boy, ripping the hardened fabric away from the raw meat. The stench of scorched cloth and clotted blood filled the small space. Mark choked back a moan, driving his skull against the boards as the stale basement air bit into his exposed flesh.
Once his torso was bare, the ruin of that supposedly invulnerable body lay exposed to the gloom. The sulfurous mud had settled into the deepest tears in his chest, forming a thick, rugged crust that pulsed in time with the erratic thumping of his heart. Nicholas slid both hands over that black shell. The friction of his freezing palms against the burning fever of the alien flesh generated a sharp hiss, followed by a thin, grayish vapor. His fingers, tipped with black polish, spread wide. They sank into the hardened paste, gripping the edges of the fractured breastbone.
The first word left the youth’s throat with a low, seismic rumble. It was a heavy, rasping frequency, born deep in a chest that sounded like a hollow abyss. The rotting wood of the floor groaned in sympathy. Mark felt the vibration rattle the roots of his teeth. The language lacked vowels entirely; it was a harsh succession of guttural consonants, syllables with razor-edges that cut through the cold air and left a taste of metallic ash on the tongue.
As the chant grew deeper, the air in the room grew suffocatingly heavy. A dark stain, spreading in jagged, thorny patterns, crawled from the youth's knees across the floor, devouring the wax of the planks. The stale air began to shift, coiling in a frantic circle over the broken body on the ground. A thin line of crimson began to drip from the youth’s nose as he continued his low, endless incantation.
Beneath the pressure of those marble palms, the ointment boiled. Thick bubbles of sulfur burst against the hero’s skin, injecting a searing heat straight to his core. The sudden shock paralyzed his breath. His throat strained to the point of snapping, unable to release the scream his body demanded. His flesh began to multiply in a cannibalistic frenzy, devouring the dead meat and braiding new muscle fibers with terrifying speed. The splintered edges of his broken ribs scraped against his lungs as the magic dragged them by force back into alignment.
The cold mask of the youth’s face began to crack. The veins in his neck, usually hidden beneath immaculate skin, bulged into a dark purple as they pumped blood to his skull. His mismatched eyes lost their pupils entirely, dissolving into two milky, glowing spheres that spilled a sick light over Mark’s bleeding face. The guttural syllables now tore free accompanied by plumes of dense smoke that blackened his parched lips.
The frantic knitting of flesh reached its peak. A deep, heavy snap reverberated inside Mark's chest as the bone of his breastbone fused into a single, solid plate. His limbs spasmed violently, his heels drumming against the wood. The sorcerer did not stop his rasping chant; instead, he threw the full weight of his body onto the boy's chest, pinning him down to keep the convulsions from shattering the newly mended bone. The final syllable of the spell snapped through the stale air like stone smashing against glass, shattering the single bulb in the ceiling in a rain of hot shards and plunging the basement into absolute darkness.