The shock didn't last for more than a fraction of a second. My instincts violently took over, flooding my system with pure, icy adrenaline.
I broke the sound barrier, instantly closing the distance to the Sears Tower as the communication to Cecil cut abruptly.
The variant floating above the burning wreckage was wearing the classic yellow and blue suit, laughing maniacally as he hurled a piece of a fighter jet into the streets below.
I didn't announce myself. I blurred right through his blind spot, grabbed him by the throat, and slammed him into the reinforced steel beams of the tower with enough force to shatter the top three floors.
As I pinned him, my eyes immediately darted towards his neck. He was wearing the gravity collar the Maulers had built. But something was off. It wasn't just smashed—the intricate tech had been meticulously hacked and fried from the inside out.
Variant 4, my brain recalled instantly, recognizing the particular pattern of his suit. The maniac who helped his Omni-Man beat his dimension's Guardians of the Globe to death to subjugate his Earth. The governments of his world banded together to create a weapon strong enough to kill them, but only managed to take out Omni-Man, leaving this variant alone to continue the subjugation.
I gripped his throat harder.
That was until I arrived, beat him with little effort, and freed that Earth from his clutches.
"You!" the variant snarled in my grip, his eyes widening in recognition as he looked at my dark grey armor. "You're the one who locked us up!"
He twisted his hips and threw a massive, desperate haymaker directly at my ribs.
CLANG.
I didn't even move a single millimeter.
My suit flared as its conductors instantly absorbed the momentum of the blow.
Variant 4 stared at his fist in absolute disbelief.
"I guess I need to remind you of how things went last time," I stated emotionlessly.
I didn't give him a chance to blink. I quickly grabbed the sides of his head and brutally twisted at an angle. A sickening SNAP echoed through the smoke.
"It seems that some things stay the same," I said as I let his lifeless body drop onto the ground below.
I briefly looked around at the catastrophic damage he had caused in just a few minutes.
He's nowhere near my level, but he was still able to cause all this damage, I mused, my mind running rapid calculations. If I try to hunt down the others without a proper plan, they'll most likely band together to jump me. Then, the Earth will probably be reduced to a glass parking lot in the crossfire.
I didn't hesitate. I quickly tapped a button on my wrist and locked back onto the GDA's encrypted network.
"Cecil, you alive?" I asked.
"Mark!" Cecil barked, his voice strained over the sound of heavy clatter in the background. "We just managed to put down one of the hostiles at GDA HQ! There are dozens of them rampaging around the globe! And they look exactly like you! What the hell is going on?!"
"You tell me, you saw me get dragged down to hell moments ago," I said smoothly, feigning ignorance while instantly setting up my cover story. "Someone must have made clones of me or something. Accelerated, unstable clones."
"Sir, bio-scans on the deceased hostile are complete," I heard Donald report tersely in the background of Cecil's comms. "He's only registering at Invincible's baseline strength from roughly three months after he got his powers. He's vastly inferior to our Invincible."
"It seems your clones aren't exactly built the same," Cecil relayed, breathing slightly heavier than usual.
"That's good then," I said, keeping my voice perfectly level. "If they vary in strength, then we have a good chance of putting them down. We can figure out where they came from later. As for now, you need to broadcast a global mandate to every registered hero right away: Group combat only. Nobody engages these clones one-on-one."
"Done," Cecil stated, his voice tight but authoritative. "But even with the remaining Guardians and the independents, we don't have the heavy hitters to cover every major city. They're spreading out too fast."
"Then deploy your Reanimen," I responded like he asked a silly question. "Don't you have them for moments like these?"
"I would if I could!" Cecil snapped back, the stress bleeding into his voice. "But you vaporized my main stockpile a few weeks ago, remember?! I've only got a fraction of them operational! It won't be enough to hold the line!"
"Then send whatever you have left!" I responded back, cutting through the skies. "It doesn't matter if it's just a handful. Use them as meat shields if you have to. Give these clones something to punch that isn't a civilian. Buy enough time for me to make my way there."
I switched frequencies before he could argue. "Eve? Eve, do you copy?!"
Static hissed in my ear. I strained to listen. Through the white noise, I could hear the sound of shattering concrete, the shrieks of fleeing civilians, and the heavy, booming impacts of a high-tier brawl. Then, I heard Eve grunt in pain.
"Well, well, well," a male voice suddenly purred over her comms. It was my voice, but twisted with a sick, arrogant malice. "Wow. I didn't get to date you in my dimension. You're gorgeous in person. Let's see how much you can take before you break, pinky."
The line went completely dead.
As it did, a cold, murderous fury eclipsed every other thought in my mind. I broke the sound barrier so violently it shattered the windows below me for three city blocks as I headed straight for Invincible Inc.
When I arrived at my corporate headquarters, the building was under a full-scale siege.
The front lobby was completely decimated. The reinforced doors were crumpled like tin foil. Hovering in the center of the ruined atrium were four variants, casually tearing through my elite security reinforcements. Oliver, Titan, and Isotope were desperately fighting a losing battle, trying to keep the clones away from the lower levels.
I hovered in the shattered entryway, my eyes rapidly scanning the hostiles and pulling up their mental files.
Variant 7: The Cannibal, I noted, locking onto a variant whose yellow suit was permanently stained with dried blood. He had gotten trapped by some random villain in a pocket dimension with his dimension's Teen Team and ate them one by one to survive. Even after he escaped, his biology adapted to the point where he could no longer consume regular food, and he never stopped being hungry.
Variant 19, I sneered, looking at the one wearing the crisp white uniform of the Viltrumite Empire. To prove his loyalty to his father and the Empire, he had publicly executed his own mother without an ounce of remorse.
The other two were Variant 12, who was born fundamentally broken and had lobotomized his Guardians of the Globe to use them as pets just because he was bored.
And Variant 25, who had cowardly sold his Earth to his dimension's version of the Flaxans—one that had adapted immensely and gained technology surpassing even Viltrum's—just to save his own skin.
"Hey!" Variant 7 laughed, tossing a battered security guard aside and spotting me in the doorway. He licked his lips, his eyes wide, feral, and completely starved. "Look boys! The boss is home! I call dibs on his heart!"
"You're going to bleed for what you did to us!" Variant 19 snarled, his military posture giving way to pure, unadulterated hatred as he cracked his knuckles. "I'm going to rip your limbs off, beat you to death with them, and mount your skull on the Empire's throne!"
"Tear his eyes out!" Variant 25 shrieked from the back, using the other two as meat shields but emboldened by the numbers advantage. "Make him suffer!"
My face remained sharp, but neutral as my Bio-Reactive suit hummed. "Then, make it happen."
The four of them charged at me simultaneously.
They were fast, but they were sloppy. Months of rotting in Flaxan cells had dulled their combat instincts, leaving them running on pure, uncoordinated rage.
Variant 19 reached me first, executing a disciplined, military-style strike aimed directly at my temple. I didn't even bother raising my guard.
CLANG.
His fist slammed into the side of my head. The raw density of my body stopped him entirely. Then, the regulators in my suit instantly flared, drinking in the force of the blow like water. Variant 19 gasped, his wrist fracturing from the impact.
"You hit like a cadet," I said, grabbing his broken wrist and pulling him off balance.
I drove my fist straight through his chest cavity, and ripped his heart out before his brain even registered the pain, tossing his corpse aside.
"Get him!" Variant 12 roared, trying to grapple me from behind while the Cannibal lunged for my throat.
They managed to tackle me against a shattered reception desk. Variant 7 sank his teeth into my shoulder guard, trying to rip the armor away. I let out a dark chuckle, feeling the suit absorb their frantic kinetic output.
I flared my energy.
I spun on my heel, violently breaking their grapple, and grabbed the Cannibal by his throat before he hit the ground. I used the momentum to violently snap his arm backward at an unnatural angle. As he shrieked, I unleashed a devastating, energy-charged uppercut that completely shattered his skull.
Two down in five seconds.
Variant 12 stumbled backwards, his eyes wide with absolute terror as he realized his punches were only making me stronger.
"Oliver! High-low!" I voiced out.
Oliver, bloodied but still entirely focused, didn't miss a beat. He shot forward like a bullet, diving low and driving his shoulder directly into Variant 12's knees, completely shattering his stance. As the variant fell backwards, I blurred above him, bringing both my heels down in a devastating stomp that crushed his chest cavity and instantly ended his life.
Variant 25, the coward, completely panicked. He turned and tried to fly away through the ceiling.
But I wasn't letting a single one of them leave this lobby.
I launched off the ground, catching him by his yellow cape. I yanked him backwards with enough force to snap his neck from the whiplash, then drove my knee through his spine just to be absolutely sure he wouldn't be getting back up.
Silence fell over the ruined lobby, save for the crackling of electrical fires and the heavy panting of my employees.
Four variants dead in under thirty seconds.
"Mark!" Titan gasped, leaning heavily against a shattered pillar, his rock-skin cracked and bleeding. "What the hell is going on?!"
"Are you guys alright?" I asked, coldly wiping a streak of cloned blood off my dark grey suit. "Is Powerplex's child—Jack—safe?"
"The baby's in the deep-bunker," Isotope coughed, adjusting his necktie. "He's fine. But these... these clones! They came out of nowhere! They just burst up from the deep sub-basements!"
They must have used the interdimensional portal networks we established on Flaxa, I mused, my mind running calculations. But it still begs the question of how they escaped.
"Logistics!" I yelled, striding over to the surviving communications desk where my tactical team was frantically typing on emergency backup servers. "Give me the numbers!"
"Sir!" a bleeding technician answered, pulling up a global holographic map. "Scanners initially picked up forty-two of these clones! Factoring in the five you just eliminated... and we're getting reports that the collective Earth heroes have managed to put down five on their own... that leaves thirty-two active hostiles globally!"
Not bad, I thought, genuinely surprised. They actually managed to drop five Viltrumites. They must have caught the weakest ones off-guard, but nevertheless, they did it.
"Get on the horn with the global press," I ordered the technician. "Leak a 'Clone Invasion' narrative immediately. Tell them a villain stole my DNA to create unstable copies. I need that narrative broadcasted globally right now to limit the confusion when I step out to assist. The other heroes need to know I'm the real one so we avoid friendly fire. Next, prep every single new healing pod we have ready to be used. Tell Cecil our doors are open for the wounded, and make sure he gets at least two pods delivered directly to the GDA."
"Yes, sir!"
"And give me the GPS locations of Atom Eve, the Guardians of the Globe, Tether Tyrant, and Magmaniac!" I commanded, rushing toward my private office elevator. "Oliver, get cleaned up, we got a planet to save!"
"I'll be ready in two minutes," Oliver nodded sharply, his face set with grim determination as he zoomed off toward the washrooms.
"Titan, Isotope. Get this building secured. Barricade the sub-basements so nothing else crawls out of them, and get the automated defenses back up and running."
"On it," Titan grunted, already moving to shift a massive, fallen support beam. And Isotope nodded and teleported away.
I rushed to my private elevator, taking it to the top floor. When the elevator doors opened, I effortlessly pushed the warped, heavy metal doors of my office off their hinges to get inside..
The room was trashed, but my encrypted, text-only terminal was still active on my desk. I rushed to the keyboard, pulling up the dimensional buffer.
There was a frantic, fragmented data-packet waiting for me from Angstrom Levy.
Holding cells compromised. Variant 22—unrecorded tech-genius. He never utilized technology during his dimensional conquests, so we assumed he was just a standard brawler. He reverse-engineered the dampeners and short-circuited the collars simultaneously. Then the variants opened portals back to your Earth. Flaxan dimension decimated in the riot. The Twins and I escaped to a dimension for treatment. Will be MIA for a few days. I'm sorry, Mark.—Angstrom
I stared at the glowing text.
Variant 22, my mind raced, flashing back to our fight. He was a straight-up brute when I captured him. Just fists and pure rage. He never utilized any tech or even showed an ounce of intellect in the fight. What a lethal oversight.
A crushing, suffocating wave of guilt hit my chest. I thought I had absolute control over the situation. Instead, I almost got Angstrom and the Maulers killed, ruined a dimension I spent time healing, and unleashed an apocalypse on my own home.
The world was burning, and it was entirely my fault.
I closed my eyes and let the guilt burn for exactly three seconds. Then, I pushed it completely out of my mind.
Guilt wouldn't save Eve. It wouldn't save Chicago. And it certainly wouldn't save this world.
I rolled my shoulders, readying my body for constant, brutal activity. I turned to the doorway to see Oliver hovering there. His suit was clean, his fists were clenched, and his eyes glowed with focus.
"I'm ready, Mark. Just point me at them," he stated, his voice steady despite the chaos outside.
"Ight," I said, my voice dropping into a register of pure, cold death. "Let's go hunting."