Chapter Text
The patter of hot glass fragments against the wooden floorboards was the only sound to survive the magical detonation. The absence of light in the basement possessed a tactile density, a physical pressure that suffocated the room, soaking it in the stench of melted tungsten filaments and charred ozone. Mark gasped for air. The inhalation was deep, desperate, filling his total lung capacity without a single drop of liquid bubbling in his larynx. His sternum didn't creak. The cartilaginous friction had completely vanished, replaced by an absolute rigidity beneath the carapace of black sulfur. His heart hammered against his newly welded ribcage, frantically pumping clean blood through his arteries as they finished diluting the pulpy remains of reconstructed capillaries.
The oppressive weight on his chest vanished with the rustle of synthetic fabric and a faint scent of sandalwood and... soap? In the absolute pitch-black, mere inches from his face, two phosphorescent spheres floated in the void. Slowly, the toxic milkiness of those mismatched orbs began to drain toward the edges of the sclera, returning sharpness to the green iris and the blue one. The youth stumbled backward for a fraction of a second. The creak of his canvas boots against the floor betrayed a clumsy step, corrected in less than a heartbeat. He exhaled through parted lips, expelling a cloud of freezing breath that frosted the dust particles suspended in the air.
An orange spark tore through the dark. A small, fluorescent flame flickered to life on the tip of the finger the youth now extended inches from his face. He brought the tiny fire to the wick of a rusted kerosene lamp resting on an overturned apple crate. The amber light sputtered, casting elongated, grotesque shadows against the rotting wallpaper. The youth's face emerged from the gloom. It was coated in a thin sheen of cold sweat that made his marble complexion gleam. He kept his jaw clenched so tightly the masseter muscles bulged beneath his skin.
Mark pressed his bare palms against the waxed floorboards and pushed himself up. His arm muscles protested with a dull cramp, but his triceps held his weight. He managed to sit up. The black crust covering his thorax cracked at the edges, shedding thick scales that fell into his lap like chunks of dry asphalt. As he straightened his spine, the physical relief threw the floodgates of psychological trauma wide open. With his bodily agony neutralized, Mark's brain processed the true origin of his wounds for the first time. The echo of crumbling skyscrapers. The viscous slurry of train passengers crushed against his own face. The red-stained knuckles of the man who had given him life. A violent, acidic nausea twisted his newly rebuilt stomach. He rolled onto his knees and vomited a dark slurry of bile and digested clots directly onto the wood.
"It seems the spell managed to reduce the severe concussion. Your emetic reflexes appear to be functioning normally," the youth dictated from the far end of the room, his back turned. He had submerged his hands under the faucet of the porcelain sink again, scrubbing his skin with an unscented glycerin bar to strip away the last traces of sludge. "Your basal temperature will stabilize in fifteen minutes. The sulfur carapace will be harmlessly absorbed back into your system, Grayson."
Mark wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of a trembling hand. The lamp's light flickered, reflecting in the viscous puddles scattered across the floor around him. He fixed his one unswollen eye on the back of the tall, slender boy shutting off the taps.
"You aren't from the Agency," Mark whispered. His voice came out raspy, laced with the edge of rusted barbed wire. "Nobody on the planet has tech that smells like a dead storm. And how the fuck do you know my name?"
The mysterious youth grabbed a gray cotton towel and dried his fingers, paying excessive attention to the cuticles of his black-enameled nails. He dropped the cloth over the edge of the sink and slowly turned his neck, pinning the chromatic asymmetry of his gaze on the hero kneeling before his own vomit.
The stillness in the room was so dense it exerted physical pressure on their eardrums. The gray cotton towel slipped off the curved edge of the chipped porcelain and hit the floor with a damp thud, instantly soaking up the dirty water leaking from the broken pipes.
The boy didn't blink. He thrust an open palm toward the Viltrumite. He murmured a single, barely audible syllable and stared at him. Mark’s busted, swollen eyelids deflated in barely three seconds. The sound of blood being reabsorbed by his own system was the only thing that filled the sepulchral silence of that ecosystem.
"Now you should be able to recognize me."
"Are you... NICHOLAS? Nicholas..." Mark bubbled, thick blood still staining his teeth.
"Greengrass," the raven-haired youth finished, his voice utterly devoid of any inflection of surprise.
"We go... we go to..." Mark swallowed hard, suppressing a spasm that made his newly welded sternum grind. "High school. You walk the halls with black headphones. And you sit in the back of every class, always by the window."
Nicholas didn't smile. There wasn't an ounce of nostalgia or relief on his marble face. He simply began to wipe away a trickle of black blood oozing from his own nose with the back of his pale hand.
"Junior year Physics and Advanced Literature. And now History. You spend your time watching Amber as if you're afraid to breathe and break her. You see that Eve is pretty but you're too terrified to make a choice. And now, you are the son of the greatest mass murderer in human history," Nicholas's voice was flat, clinical, like he was reading a morgue inventory. "Your powers of observation were always pathetic, Grayson."
Mark tried to prop his elbows on the waxed wood to back away, driven by a primal instinct to flee, but a sharp, electric pain paralyzed his triceps.
"But you... you're just a kid," Mark panted, panic mingling with confusion in his good eye. He coughed, splattering the floor with crimson drops. "You're a student. What is all this? What did you do to me? What do you know about my dad?"
"Your father is the reason your lungs nearly collapsed five minutes ago," Nicholas interrupted, his harsh tone slicing through the hero's babbling like a honed straight razor. "And as for what I am... I thought, given your own experience, you would know how to see past appearances. But I see your observational skills and intellect remain just as primitive. Even with your new... physiology."
The pale boy stood with unnatural fluidity. The meager lamp light cast his shadow against the moldy wallpaper, stretching it until it seemed to devour the entire room. Nicholas looked down at him, his mismatched eyes—one green, one blue—nailed to Mark's misery.
"My physiology? What do you know? How do you—"
"I read your mind like an open book, Grayson. Since your powers awakened, I’ve known you are the son of a Viltrumite, you are Invincible, and all the rest of the paraphernalia. Reading a primate would be a greater challenge than your weakened alien psyche. Happy with the explanation?"
Disgust crawled up Mark’s throat, mixing with the taste of rust. Knowing that this taciturn boy with enameled nails had not only manipulated his entrails at will, but had walked through his most intimate memories—through the absolute terror and devastation of Nolan's blows—made him feel more naked and vulnerable than when his suit had been violently torn away.
Mark gritted his teeth. The initial panic was swallowed by a spark of desperate wrath.
"You dug into my head?" he roared. Or tried to. The sound was nothing more than a hoarse hiss that scraped his larynx. He tried to sit up, planting a hand still crusted in mud against the wood, but a whiplash of pain shot through his marrow, as if ground glass had been poured into his veins. He fell backward instantly, panting heavily.
"Don't flatter yourself," Nicholas replied, turning his back with total indifference to walk toward a shadow-drenched corner of the basement. "I didn't need to 'dig' into your head. Your emotions are so loud, so desperately predictable, they project outward like a pig squealing in a slaughterhouse. Fear. Guilt. Orphanhood. It’s deafening."
The clink of glass against glass echoed in the gloom. Nicholas grabbed a dark vial and poured two drops of a thick liquid into the galvanized bucket he had used earlier. The leftover sulfur hissed, morphing into a heavy, inert smoke that slithered across the floor.
"If it's any consolation," the velvety voice continued from the dark, "your father's mind is a far more disciplined labyrinth. Cold. Military. Relentless. But you... you were bleeding on the inside long before he broke your first bone."
The mention of Nolan was a direct punch to his freshly knitted sternum. Mark closed his eye, unable to sustain what little rebellion he had left. The images rushed back: the train, the dismembered bodies smashing against his face, innocent blood painting the Chicago sky. A dry, tearless sob racked his chest.
"Why?" the hero's voice finally broke, surrendering to the crushing physical and emotional weight. "If you know everything... if you know what we're capable of. If you know what he did. Why didn't you let me die in that crater?"
Nicholas emerged from the shadows in absolute silence. The faint yellow light of the lamp pulled a cold glint from the silver hoops in his ears. He stopped at Mark’s feet, looking down at him with that same freezing expressionlessness that already felt habitual. He leaned forward slightly. His heterochromatic eyes glowed with their own sickly light in the gloom.
"Do not be mistaken. I didn't snatch you from the jaws of death out of kindness, compassion, or because I believe in your heroic ideals. The world can burn for all I care. But what lurks beneath that layer of light belongs to me. And Omni-Man's departure has left the Earth unprotected. It is the only planet where I can breathe. For the moment, at least."
Mark froze. His body tensed like the string of a ruined piano about to snap under the unbearable pressure of tragedy. He closed his eyes and clenched his fists with the meager strength he still possessed, then stared straight into the mismatched eyes watching him from the dimness.
"I have to... I have to contact the base," the Viltrumite stammered. He forced his vocal cords to vibrate, swallowing rust-tasting saliva to moisten the passage. "My dad. Nolan. He butchered the Guardians of the Globe. It's him. He's going to destroy... we have to stop him before..."
"Your father left the Earth's atmosphere twenty-eight minutes ago," Nicholas's response sliced through Mark's desperation with the precision of a rusted scalpel severing a tendon. "He breached the stratosphere at hyperbolic speed. There is nothing to stop, Grayson. The butchery is over."
The air caught in the fallen hero's rebuilt trachea. The black sulfur carapace embedded in his chest cracked slightly as his pectorals contracted in an involuntary spasm of denial. He dug his fingernails, still filthy with stomach fluids, into the wood of the floor, seeking a physical stability that the entire planet seemed to have lost. The kerosene lamp cast the taciturn youth's silhouette against the decomposing wallpaper, warping the shadow of his shoulders into a pair of jagged appendages crawling across the ceiling.
The syllables uttered by Nicholas ricocheted inside his skull like shrapnel. Left the atmosphere. The sulfur shell fused to his sternum seemed to shrink, suffocating what little stale oxygen he managed to swallow.
A raspy groan tore from the hero's throat. He leaned his forearms on the rotting planks, dragging his newly welded skin over splinters and scattered bile. The friction tore microscopic strips of epidermis, but the physical sting was barely background static compared to the abyss of his mind. He managed to plant his right boot against the floor. His thigh muscles trembled beneath the scorched synthetic fabric, incapable of supporting the hyper-density of his own alien anatomy. He fell heavily onto his side. The impact against the wood dislodged another scale from the black crust protecting his ribs, exposing a patch of scarred tissue—pink, glossy, and repulsively new.
"Where...?" the question was strangled by a violent spasm in his diaphragm. "Where did he go?"
"I don't know. Nor does it matter." The sentence dropped into the room with the density of molten lead, utterly devoid of pity. "By now he must have crossed half the solar system. By the time Stedman and his technicians manage to recalibrate the deep-space scanners through the surviving satellite network, your father's thermal signature will be an invisible micro-meteorite passing through the asteroid belt. Pursuit is impossible."
Nicholas advanced with slow, rhythmic steps until he stood mere inches from Mark's sweating face. He slowly raised his left arm and pulled up the sleeve of his black shirt, exposing the marble skin beneath. A network of black ink lines—so dark they seemed to absorb the room's meager light—revealed itself, like serpents coiling into symbols along the student's musculature. He brought it close, almost brushing against Mark's parched, cracked lips.
"Bite. Draw blood," Nicholas snapped brusquely, not blinking.
"Huh? What are you talking about?"
"Bite, I said. It will replenish the iron and potassium levels the sulfurous paste incinerated during the accelerated cellular mitosis, and it will finish sealing your shattered capillaries. Furthermore, it will restore your blood reserves back to normal levels."
"You're insane. I'm not biting you."
Nicholas rolled his eyes almost imperceptibly. A grimace of annoyance surfaced across his cheeks before being buried once again beneath his usual layer of indifference. He brought his own forearm to his mouth and bit down hard, dead center. His fangs sank in with a wet crunch. Dark crimson blood began to flow from the wound, dripping thickly onto the filthy, splintered floorboards.
"Now you don't have to bite. Drink."
Mark stood paralyzed for a few moments, staring at Nicholas. That heterochromatic gaze brokered no argument. He leaned in just enough and rested his tongue against the oozing wound. He weakly shook his head, pressing his cracked lips together. The taste of gastric fluids still clogged his palate, and the sheer stench of iron and hemoglobin triggered a contraction in his pharynx. Before he could articulate a refusal, fingers as cold and rigid as iron tongs tangled into the roots of his brown hair, trapping him in place. He clenched his fists, but his body could barely keep him upright.
The blood slid down his esophagus like a wad of barbed wire, clawing at his newly rebuilt digestive tract. As it hit his stomach, a feverish, alchemical heat collided with his empty gastric mucosa, triggering a cramp so savage the capillaries in his sclera ruptured instantly, turning his intact eye bloodshot. Nicholas maintained the suffocating grip on his skull, watching the dilation of the other boy's pupils with his two phosphorescent irises, not slackening the tension until Mark began to dry heave severely.
The hemoglobin detonated in Mark’s stomach with the violence of a thermite reaction. There was no comforting warmth, only a chemical abrasion that propagated through his vascular network at breakneck speed. The veins in his neck and forearms bulged against his pinkish epidermis, sketching an anatomical map in an unnatural violet hue. The spasmodic trembling of his musculature ceased on the spot. The medullary fatigue—that leaden heaviness threatening to drag him into a coma—was eradicated by a torrent of raw energy that triggered a high-pitched ring in his left ear canal. He coughed once, twice, spitting a thread of dark saliva that stained the waxed wood. The taste of iron, human tissue, and a faint trace of something spicy and rotten encysted itself in his taste buds, completely obliterating the residual acidity of his own vomit.
In front of him, Nicholas's slender silhouette took a step back, moving away from the puddle of gastric fluids. The flickering light of the kerosene lamp bathed half his face, accentuating the unreal symmetry of his features. He looked like a statue carved from alabaster, immutable and entirely detached from the basement's rot. Three surgical silver hoops embedded in the cartilage of his left ear flashed briefly, competing with the three on his right that glinted violently, demanding their own spotlight. He placed his right hand over the damaged forearm, covering the wound, and whispered three words that sounded delicious to the ear. The gash began to crackle wetly. The severed skin and veins started knitting back together with faint spasms until no scar remained.
"Get up," he commanded. The instruction brooked no argument; it lacked volume but carried an imperative density that scraped against the stale air. "The iron and hemoglobin from my blood have finished sealing the micro-fissures in your body. There is no longer a risk of internal bleeding. Your skeleton can support your body mass without stress fractures."
The half-Viltrumite planted his skinned knuckles against the floor and pushed. His triceps flexed beneath the torn fabric of the suit. His right knee joint popped slightly as it bent, but the bone held. As he stood completely upright, the sudden shift in blood pressure triggered a nauseating wave of dizziness, forcing him to lean one hand against the soot-covered brick wall. The grit of the masonry scratched his palm, anchoring his consciousness to the world of the living. He took a deep breath. Oxygen, filtered through sepulchral dampness, inflated his lungs without meeting resistance. However, the structural integrity of his anatomy served only as a blank canvas upon which his psychological trauma could project its true magnitude. His mother’s face. The indifference in Nolan’s eyes as he shattered the Immortal’s skull. The sound of human meat bursting under the aerodynamic pressure of their intertwined bodies.
"I have to go home," Mark's voice came out hollow, stripped of the resonant authority of his heroic alter ego. It was the murmur of a massacred teenager. "My mom. She was at the house when... when he... I need to know if she's alive. If the GDA has her in custody."
Nicholas circled the apple crate and positioned himself mere inches from the Viltrumite, invading his peripheral vision. The scent of dead ozone radiating from the raven-haired boy's clothes drowned out the masonry's reek of rot.
"If you set foot outside this dimension, Cecil Stedman's satellites will detect your thermal signature in forty seconds," Nicholas's cadence was monotonous, grinding Mark's hope down with the efficiency of an industrial gear. "The instant your biometrics flag on their screens, you stop being a victim. You are the son of the entity that just annihilated the planet's first line of defense and leveled half a city. Genetically, you are a weapon of mass destruction off its leash. The Agency isn't going to send you to a trauma ward, Grayson. They'll lock you in a reinforced lead containment chamber three hundred meters underground, pump you full of neurotoxins, and dissect you to figure out how to kill your father when he returns."
Mark squeezed his eyes shut. The logic of the argument was a concrete slab dropping onto the back of his neck. His fingers curled into fists, clawing at the dry mortar between the bricks. The dull ache in his knuckles was a pathetic comfort compared to the monstrosity of the truth. His legacy, his heritage, the blue and yellow suit that still hung from his shoulders in melted rags—it had all turned into a death sentence of dissection or uninterrupted confinement.
"So what do you suggest?" Mark spat, snapping his neck around to face the young sorcerer's phosphorescent heterochromia. "That I rot in this hole while the world buries thousands of people because of me? While my mom thinks I'm decaying under a mountain of rubble?"
Nicholas's only response was to slide a pale hand into the pocket of his loose trousers, digging around. He extracted a rectangular device, thick and encased in a heavy, opaque polymer shell. The screen was splintered in the top right corner, stained with scabs of dried blood that obscured the Global Defense Agency logo carved into the back. He dropped it. The communicator fell like a stone, bouncing off the wooden floorboards and sliding until it stopped just grazing the toe of the hero's bloodied boot. The green light of the emergency transmission indicator blinked frantically, endlessly, bathing the nearby puddle of bile in an intermittent emerald glare.
The emerald blinking dissected the basement's gloom in half-second intervals. The light bounced off the viscous surface of the bile puddle, painting Mark's haggard face in a sickly, stroboscopic glow. The hero fixed his gaze on the black polymer casing. The dried blood smearing the splintered corner of the screen wasn't his; it had the flaky, brown texture of fluids oxidized under the burning sun of a mountain range.
"I ripped it from the vest of a GDA agent," Nicholas explained. His tone remained anchored in that clinical neutrality, ignoring the gravitational pull the communicator exerted on Mark. "An aerial recon team that reached the crater ten minutes before your father's final assault. The man was cut in half by shrapnel from a subway car. His ribcage served as a shock absorber so the transmitter wouldn't shatter on impact."
Mark swallowed hard, dragging the harsh remnants of the dark brew down his esophagus. His knees protested as he flexed the joints to crouch, but the sharp pain had mutated into a simple muscular burn. His fingers brushed the casing. The polymer was freezing, imbued with the metallic reek of the dead soldier's coagulated blood. He picked it up. It weighed far more than a civilian satellite phone, dense and shielded against electromagnetic interference.
"The frequency void of this basement acts as an anomalous Faraday cage," Nicholas continued, anticipating the tactical terror paralyzing the Viltrumite's thumbs. "The signal won't travel through the stratosphere. The electromagnetic pulse will be filtered through the fissure I brought you through. It will bounce off the currents along the Ley lines of all Chicago and emerge in the Pentagon's servers as a static echo with no geographical point of origin. To Cecil's technicians, the call will come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. You have ninety seconds before the tachyon saturation melts the device's internal circuits and it blows up in your hand."
Mark's right thumb, still stained with the gray dust of devastation, hovered over the jagged transmission switch. The edge of the button dug into his skin. The barometric pressure in the room seemed to plummet once again. He pushed the polymer down. A dry click opened the audio channel. The emerald light stabilized into a steady glow that illuminated the surgical silver hoops in Nicholas's ear. From the device's dented speaker poured not the digital hum characteristic of the Agency, but an organic crunch, akin to wet embers being crushed, followed immediately by the static of an open, maximum-security channel.
"Authorization code not recognized," a synthetic voice spat through the speaker, distorted by interdimensional interference. "Identify your badge number, agent. North American airspace is under martial law. Any unencrypted signal will be considered hostile."
Mark brought the transmitter’s grille to his cracked lips. His hot breath bounced back against his chin. The words piled up in his larynx, a logjam of panic, rage, and pure desperation that threatened to splinter his newly welded sternum. Barely two meters away, the raven-haired youth averted his gaze toward the shadows of the ceiling. He dug his enameled nails into the palms of his own hands with such brutality that his immaculate skin nearly gave way, injecting physical pain into his bloodstream.
"I'm Mark," the half-Viltrumite's voice rasped across the audio channel. "Mark Grayson."
The static on the other end of the line was severed cleanly. A high-frequency whistle, barely perceptible to the human ear but piercing to Mark's alien hearing, punctured the transmission. Someone in the central control room had just knocked a porcelain mug over the command console, followed by the awful screech of an office chair being violently shoved backward. The sound of military boots sprinting over linoleum tiles filled the acoustic spectrum of the call before a second voice, gravelly and coated in tar, snatched the microphone from the operator.
"Son of a bitch..." Cecil Stedman's whisper hissed through the distorted network.