I strode out of my ruined office, the sounds of my logistics team barking orders and frantically typing echoing through the chaotic hallway.
"Sir, patching the live GPS coordinates directly to your comms and wrist-display now," the lead logistics technician called out over the blaring alarms. "I have the last known location for Atom Eve, as well as the active pings for Tether Tyrant, Magmaniac, and the largest clusters of variant activity."
"Good work. Keep the channel open," I ordered, then turned to Oliver. "Let's go."
We shot out through the shattered roof of the building.
When we cleared the skyline, the sheer scale of the Invincible War finally settled over me. Chicago didn't even look like it was on Earth anymore. It looked like the Flaxan dimension when I tore it apart.
Thick, unnatural columns of black smoke choked the horizon. The distant, continuous thud of heavy artillery, collapsing skyscrapers, and sonic booms echoed through the clouds.
"Oliver, listen carefully," I said, my voice overriding the chaos around us. "You've seen firsthand just how dangerous these replicas of me are, so I think you should keep some things in mind as we deal with them."
Oliver nodded sharply, paying close attention to my every word.
"First and foremost, no interrogations or captures. Exert your full strength on every strike," I began. "No matter how closely they resemble me or what they say, take it with a grain of salt. We execute them and move immediately to the next target. Do you understand?"
"I understand," he replied. His voice was steady, his jaw set as he looked out over the burning city, steeling himself for his first real kills.
"Good, because the device says there's a massive energy signature nearby at Millennium Park," I said, checking the glowing digital readout on my wrist. "That's where Eve's comms were cut out. We're hitting that location first, so keep up."
We blurred quickly across the skyline.
We reached Millennium Park in less than a couple seconds, but the iconic plaza was completely unrecognizable. The Bean sculpture was a molten puddle of slag. The pristine gardens were reduced to massive, smoking craters.
And in the center of the destruction lay Eve.
My momentum completely faltered as I came to an abrupt stop.
Eve was lying unconscious on the cracked pavement. She was completely naked, her uniform destroyed, and there was a terrifying amount of blood pooling around her. The air around her body was practically vibrating with a dense, crackling residual of pink energy.
Scattered around her were the mutilated, molecularly-disassembled remains of two variants.
"Holy Shit. Did Eve really do this?" Oliver uttered, slack-jawed.
She could only cause this type of environmental damage if her mental blocks were lifted, I contemplated, then a sickening wave of anxiousness washed over me. They must have actually managed to kill her.
I placed a hand over my chin, my mind racing with questions as I made my way down to her unconscious form.
But how much damage did she take? How big was the trauma to her body? And did her powers activate on contact, or did it wait to register the trauma?
As my mind pondered the mechanics of the situation, a heavy slab of concrete shifted in the crater below.
A third variant, heavily damaged and covered in his own blood, dragged himself out of the rubble. He coughed, spitting some blood onto the pavement as he stumbled toward Eve's unconscious form.
Variant 9, my mind automatically registered, scanning his torn blue-and-yellow striped suit. He and his dimension's Omni-Man nearly subjugated their Earth, until he betrayed and murdered his weakened father to claim the planet for himself. A maniacal tyrant who fooled the Viltrumite Empire and kept his version of Eve locked in a cage as a trophy. I had to drag him into the vacuum of space and physically choke him into unconsciousness just to bypass his sheer durability when I first began hunting the variants.
A deep frown adorned my face as I shook my head.
She was really fighting some real demons, huh? I thought before signaling to Oliver.
"You're a lot stronger than the one I had back home," he wheezed, standing over Eve with a twisted, bloody smirk. "But it doesn't matter. Once I rip that bastard from this dimension's head off, I'm going to get you a nice collar, and make you just as compliant as—"
He didn't get to finish the sentence.
Oliver and I dropped out of the sky like orbital strikes.
Oliver didn't hold back an ounce of his strength. He unleashed a blistering combination of heavy punches directly to the variant's ribs, followed immediately by a devastating upward kick to the jaw that propelled the clone into the air.
As Variant 9 flew upward, airborne and completely disoriented by the sudden attack, I met him in the sky. I drove a spear-hand strike straight through his chest, piercing his heart and lungs.
He was dead before he could even register what happened. I grabbed him by the skull and pulled my arm free, letting his corpse hit the ground with a loud thud.
I didn't even spare the corpse a second glance. I immediately dropped next to Eve, my hands hovering over her as I checked her vitals. They were steady, and she was breathing. The resurrection had healed her fatal wounds, but the sheer energy expenditure had completely drained her.
Before I could pick her up, a blue flash lit up the ruined park.
Cecil stepped out. His left arm was in a medical sling, his suit was covered in dust, and he looked like he hadn't slept in a week. He was flanked by a team of heavily armored GDA medics carrying a specialized stasis-stretcher.
"I've got her, Mark," Cecil said immediately, motioning for the medics to move in. They quickly and respectfully draped a thermal blanket over Eve and loaded her onto the stretcher. "We'll get her stabilized."
"I have healing pods being delivered to the GDA right now," I told him, my voice completely flat. "Put her in one. They accelerate cellular recovery based on the trauma inflicted on the body. She'll be back on her feet in hours."
Cecil nodded, watching the medics step back onto the teleporter pad. He turned back to me, the stress etching deep lines into his scarred face. "The Reanimen deployment is buying us time, but it's not enough. These variants aren't mindless. They're adapting to the group-combat tactics."
"Where's the closest, heaviest fighting being done at?" I asked.
"Washington D.C.," Cecil said grimly. "A cluster of five hostiles is currently overwhelming the new Guardians of the Globe. And they're fighting as a coordinated unit. They're minutes away from breaking the defensive line and leveling the capital."
"Send us there," I stated.
Cecil didn't hesitate. He tapped his earpiece. "Give them hell."
The blue light engulfed Oliver and me, pulling us out of the ruins of Chicago and throwing us straight into the meat grinder of the nation's capital.
As the light dissipated, Oliver and I were dropped directly onto the National Mall.
Washington D.C. was completely unrecognizable. The Washington Monument was snapped in half, its top crushed into the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The Capitol Building was actively burning, casting an eerie, flickering orange glow over the battlefield.
And scattered across the ruined lawn, the Guardians of the Globe were getting dismantled.
Black Samson was on one knee, looking heavily damaged. The Immortal and Bulletproof were getting batted out of the sky in a brutal game of aerial ping-pong, while Robot's drones were being ripped apart like tin foil.
Hovering above them, taking their time, were the five variants.
"Is this really the best this Earth has to offer?!" one of the variants mocked, laughing maniacally as he grabbed a massive piece of marble debris and hurled it at Shapesmith. "I slaughtered you all in under three minutes back in my dimension! You're nothing but warmups!"
As I hovered, taking in the battlefield, my mind instantly pulled up their dossiers.
Variants 11, 15, 28, 29, and 40, I noted, scanning their varied, blood-stained suits. These weren't just random maniacs. They formed some sort of twisted alliance in the holding blocks. But I paid it no mind because I never thought they'd escape.
I scanned them from left to right.
Variant 15, the leader, sported a shaved head and the standard colors of the Viltrumite Empire. He was raised on Viltrum and was assigned Earth to subjugate, which he did through sheer military strategy before I ambushed him and ended his reign.
Variants 28 and 29 wore matching inverse-colored suits. These two were a unique set of "twins"—one actually being a clone of the other, thanks to tampering by their dimension's Maulers. They ended up enslaving their dimension together until I came in and smashed their heads together in a double-knockout.
Variant 11 wore sleek stealth armor, functioning as a kingpin for an underground crime syndicate. He didn't care who or what got hurt as long as he got paid. I had to hunt him down through mountains of his own enforcers on some John Wick shit. When I finally caught his ass, I crushed his legs for putting me through all the trouble.
And lastly, Variant 40, sporting a scruffy beard and tactical goggles. He was told about his Viltrumite heritage early and was indoctrinated to be the perfect soldier by Nolan. He ended up sabotaging his world's planetary defenses, allowing multiple alien empires to attack. In the chaos of the invasion, I swooped in and beat him down.
These five were smarter, faster, and vastly more experienced than the fodder we just fought in Chicago.
"Oh, shut up already!" Rex yelled from the ground, wiping blood from his mouth. Then he spotted me. "Well, look who finally decided to show up!"
The five variants snapped their attention towards me.
"You!" Variant 15 sneered, dropping into a perfectly disciplined combat stance. The other four instantly shifted, fanning out into a flawless, overlapping formation. "Kill the kid first. Then that bastard is ours."
They rushed us in a synchronized, military-style assault. Variant 11 came in low, sweeping for my legs, while 28 and 29 flanked my sides to lock down my arms. Variant 15 came straight down the middle with a devastating cross aimed directly at my head, while 40 looped around my blind spot.
Hmm, not bad, I mused, genuinely impressed by the coordination. I probably wouldn't have gotten out of this a couple months ago.
I tapped into my reserves and pushed out a concentrated burst of solar energy. A small, blinding barrier flared around me, violently repelling them just enough to break their momentum. As they recoiled from the sudden shockwave, I slipped through the gaps in their formation like water.
I weaved under Variant 15's right cross, let 28 and 29 collide into each other's airspace, and smoothly pivoted behind Variant 40 as he overextended his blind-spot strike.
"You're out of formation," I whispered into his ear as I passed him.
I didn't give him a chance to correct himself. I shaped my hand into another rigid spear and drove it directly into his lower spine. The sickening squelch of a body being forcefully pulled apart echoed across the National Mall as I violently separated the variant's upper half from his lower body.
He dropped like a stone, instantly paralyzed and bleeding out.
"Formation broken!" The Immortal roared from below, recognizing the opening I had just created. "Hit them now!"
The Guardians didn't hesitate.
Variant 11 dove toward the ground to regroup, but Monster Girl intercepted him. Instead of shifting her entire body into her massive, slower form, she executed the partial-shift technique I told her about. She hyper-condensed the mass of the untransformed part of her, hardening her skeletal structure, while only transforming her right arm into a massive, muscular green limb.
She threw a devastating, concentrated uppercut. The sheer force behind the strike completely caved in Variant 11's ribcage, launching him back into the air coughing up blood.
As the variant came crashing down, Rex stepped into the picture.
He didn't throw a bomb. He dropped into a boxer's stance and charged the compressed air molecules directly between his knuckles. He punched upward, and a localized kinetic charge shot out, connecting directly with the falling variant's face.
BOOM.
The explosive force, channeled directly into the bone, blew half of the variant's jaw clean off, snapping his neck instantly.
Ooh, shit. He put a lot of juice into that one, I thought as the variant's blood spattered across the ruined lawn. And he learned to use it from a distance too. That's going to be versatile.
Variant 29 attempted to blitz Rex, who had fallen to one knee from the sheer energy expenditure he just put out, but Dupli-Kate intercepted him. She leaped into the air, throwing a standard flying knee. But a micro-second before impact, she utilized the micro-cloning technique she'd been practicing.
She cloned herself mid-strike. One knee instantly multiplied into ten synchronized, overlapping kinetic impacts. The sheer output of ten forces hitting him at the exact same time shattered Variant 29's sternum and sent him crashing into the dirt. Shapesmith rapidly flowed over his face, ruthlessly finishing him off by suffocating him.
Meanwhile, Oliver, Bulletproof, and The Immortal converged on the remaining two variants in a brutal tandem assault. The Immortal locked up Variant 28's arms while Bulletproof struck him repeatedly in the chest with kinetic blasts, and Oliver dropped out of the clouds, bringing his knee down on the clone's skull with a sickening crack.
The fifth and final variant—Variant 15—found himself severely outnumbered and surrounded by the mutilated corpses of his squad.
He lost his nerve and turned to flee, but I didn't allow him to.
I ripped a massive chunk of marble from the ruined monument and hurled it at supersonic speeds, catching him square in the back and dropping him out of the sky. Before he could recover, Robot entered the fray. A swarm of his surviving drones descended, firing localized, high-tensile cables that pinned the variant's limbs to the dirt.
Black Samson was waiting on the ground, finishing the job with a fully charged, electro-kinetic hammer blow to the back of the head.
Silence fell over the National Mall.
Five elite variants that had been terrorizing the capital were now dead in minutes.
A blue light flared on the lawn as a squad of GDA medics teleported in, setting up a rapid triage center. Cecil's voice buzzed in my earpiece.
"We got five hostiles down in D.C.," Cecil reported, his voice tinged with a mix of relief and trepidation. "Med-Evac is on site. The healing pods are primed and ready at headquarters. Any Guardian who is badly hurt needs to step through that portal right now, recover, and get back into the field as fast as possible."
"You heard him," I said, landing on the ruined grass. "If you're broken, get in a pod. If you can still fight, lock down the perimeter. The sooner we take care of these guys, the sooner we can get to the bottom of things."
I looked at the Guardians. They were battered, bleeding, and exhausted, but they had actually held the line against a coordinated Viltrumite threat.
"Good job," I told them, my voice flat but genuine.
My wrist display beeped aggressively, flashing more than a half-dozen red clusters across the globe. The variants were causing chaos at a very fast rate, and I needed to get to them before the mortality rate soared.
But the rate at which I'm going with Oliver, night might hit before we cycle around the world, I contemplated. Plus, I need to silence these bastards before they start spilling my secrets.
"Oliver," I called out, turning to him. "Stay here and assist the Guardians. Help them secure areas, then go assist others who may be struggling with these clones."
"What about you?" Oliver asked, wiping a streak of soot from his forehead.
"I'll be covering the rest of the globe," I said, locking onto the next variants' coordinates. "The amount of casualties will lessen if I do. I'll regroup with you later."
Before anyone could say another word, I shot straight into the upper atmosphere, leaving a massive sonic boom in my wake.
It's time to end this little war, I thought, my eyes locking onto the horizon.