The portal invasion is getting out of hand.
Mathew had heard those words four minutes ago. He was still trying to decide which part bothered him more — that Cecil had said it like he was reading weather reports, or that Mathew already knew, because he'd been watching the news alerts cascade across his phone's lock screen for the last hour and hadn't said anything.
Portal invasions weren't exactly a new problem.
He'd handled 14 in the last year alone. Five cases of five different time traveling conquerors from alternate timeliness. One case of a sentient dimension whose attempt at communication turned a small town on an island near the coast of Japan into insane and highly intelligent mutated super cannibals, he was called in to 'clean out' the local mutated population. Two-dimensional bleeds off the coast of Greenland, one attempted incursion over the Sahara that turned out to be a very lost, very apologetic 790 squire kilometer migration vessel from a civilization that didn't even have a word for war yet. Weird day.
This was different.
He could tell from the altitude. At thirty thousand feet, falling feet-first through the belly of a storm system over the Midwest, he could already see it — a bruised tear in the sky above downtown Chicago, violet and crackling at its edges, hovering like a wound that refused to close. The scale of it made his spatial awareness itch. His brain converted it automatically, the way it always did.
Roughly two hundred meters diameter. Stable. Engineered. That's not a natural bleed. Someone built that.
That was already more than the last three.
He hit the lower atmosphere, and the wind screamed past him. His barrier absorbed it. He let himself slow — not much, just enough that he wouldn't crater Michigan Avenue — and angled his descent toward the city's skyline.
What he saw made him stop mid-air.
"...Huh."
***
He'd been to war zones. Fought false gods, demons, and magical maniacs in places where physics were dictated by monsters. Battled mechanized militias in secret, war-torn futuristic cities. He'd walked through the Guardians' HQ with their skulls caved in and their brains decorating the tiles. He had a decent threshold for 'bad.'
Chicago was bad.
Three city blocks on the south end of the loop were simply gone — not burning, not rubble, gone, replaced with scorched foundations and glass melted flat. The lakefront was on fire. Lower Wacker Drive had been folded in on itself like wet cardboard. An elevated train line hung twisted off its pylons, and the cars dangled over the street below, some still with people in them.
And in the middle of all of it, the aliens.
Flaxans, as the GDA analysts had taken to calling them on his way here.
Bipedal humanoids, somewhere between four and five feet tall, grey-green skin, eyes too wide for their faces, built like tanks from the neck down. They moved in organized squads, which was the part that made them actually dangerous. Their weapons discharged concentrated pulses of amber light that turned steel into vapor on contact.
The file said their biology ran on a different temporal frequency than Earth's. Prolonged exposure to this dimension's timeline accelerated their aging at an exponential rate. In theory, you just had to keep them here long enough and they'd age to dust on their own.
In theory.
In practice, someone had apparently handed them environmental suits with temporal compensation tech built in, because none of the ones on the ground were so much as growing a wrinkle.
Upgraded. They came back upgraded.
Mathew exhaled through his nose.
Below him, a small cluster of heroes was holding the northern perimeter with varying levels of success. He clocked them in a pass — a girl in a pink and white costume generating force fields with her bare hands, working herself ragged keeping a shield between the aliens and a knot of trapped civilians. A guy in orange and yellow throwing explosive charges with surgical precision, keeping three squads pinned behind an overturned transit bus. A humanoid figure in a robot suit directing them both, calm and coordinated in a way that suggested this wasn't their first rodeo today. Countless duplicates of an Asian teen in purple were scattered all around — some dead, some fighting, some distracted, others helping with the evacuation.
Good. They're not dead. That's a bar.
The robot suit looked up. Directly at him.
Just to mess with the robot slightly, he tweaked his barrier to redirect and subtly scatter reflected protons, flooding the exterior of his shield with ultraviolet and infrared radiation — rendering his figure as nothing but a blurry silhouette through any camera lens. A little trick he'd picked up to hide himself in plain sight.
Then the earpiece crackled.
"Blue." Cecil's voice. "You're on site. I can see you loitering."
"I'm assessing."
"You're hovering."
"Hovering is how I assess."
A pause. "Engagement Code: Ciera. The portal's been active for six hours. They've repelled three civilian evacuation attempts and they've got something anchoring the rift from their side. We need it closed."
Ciera. Continental-scale authorization. Five-hundred-kilometer radius if it came to it.
It wouldn't come to that. Probably.
"Civilian status?"
"Evacuation is sixty percent complete. Twenty-seven confirmed casualties. Rising."
Twenty-seven.
Mathew looked at the dangling train cars.
"What about them?" he asked.
A half-second pause from Cecil. "...Secondary priority. Portal first."
"Right."
He reached out.
His awareness spread through the city like a second skin, threading through the architecture, reading every stress fracture and load-bearing point in the train line's remaining structure. He found the cars — four of them, forty-one people distributed between them — and wrapped each one in a separate field, firm and even, redistributing the weight.
Then he set them down. Gently. All four cars, lowered to street level in a single unhurried motion, like he were setting down cups.
He'd done that in about three seconds. They were far enough from the fighting and close enough to the evac teams that their safety was guaranteed.
Okay. Portal…
He dropped.
***
He hit the Flaxan line like a question nobody wanted answered.
No explosion this time. No crater. He landed clean in the middle of their largest forward squad — twelve of them, weapons raised on the girl in the pink-and-white suit who had run out of ground to back into — and just stood there.
They turned.
He looked at them. Helmet off today. He hadn't planned this as a stealth op and he'd left the kit at home. Just him — dark jeans, grey hoodie, beat-up trainers.
One of them barked something in a language that sounded like gears grinding.
"Yeah," Mathew said. "Me too, man."
The amber weapons came up.
He closed his fist.
The weapons bent. All of them simultaneously folded in on themselves at the barrel like crumpled tinfoil, useless in the space between one breath and the next. He felt the squad's confusion like a pressure change. Their commander shouted something. They started to fall back in formation — disciplined, he noted, these weren't dumb — reaching for secondary weapons on their suits.
He didn't let them get there.
The whole squad lifted off the ground. Twelve bodies, twelve sets of armor, hovering at the same height, locked. They struggled. He barely felt it.
A few meters back, the pink-and-white redheaded girl was staring at him. Caucasian, red hair, green eyes — Atom Eve, threat level Ciera-possible Alpha, eighteen, Teen Team affiliate… She was prettier than her picture in the GDA dossier.
"You gonna drop those fields or—" he started, extending his barrier to cover them both.
The fields snapped down. She caught herself, visibly exhausted, hands on her knees. A short sigh of relief escaped her lips.
"You're the back-up?" She breathed, exasperated. She looked worn.
"Yep. Just give me a minute — I need to concentrate," he said.
Mathew closed his eyes as his psychic senses honed in on the twelve Flaxans caught helplessly in his grasp. He let loose a psychic wave that tore through them as his mind tagged and took apart their biology one cell at a time, along with their armor, processing the temporal field that allowed them to walk freely on Earth. The odd interdimensional energy and the fluctuating, erratic wavelength gave him a bit of a migraine — not enough to break his concentration, but present.
The constant energy-based fire bouncing against his barrier was another matter. Disruptive enough to break the delicate process of psychic extraction, the other Flaxan soldiers had turned their weapons on him and Atom Eve. His barrier repelled every shot back at them with double the force, but the tanks they'd brought hit hard enough to leave sizable cracks in it.
With a shallow grunt, he let loose a psychic wave that kicked up dust and flung the Flaxans back a few meters, then added a few dozen layers to his barrier for extra protection.
He turned his attention back to the twelve hovering aliens and, with something between a slight tilt of his head and a thought, sent violent streams of energy through them. His mind cataloged the information as his psychic energy washed over every molecule that made them up; the twelve were slowly and excruciatingly reduced to less than atoms.
That's twelve. There are about seven hundred more. Not enough to tear through the shields they've got, but it's enough to lock into their unique signature…
"Now for the fun part." He cracked his neck and got to work.
Mathew raised his left hand leisurely and snapped his fingers.
Boom!
He amplified the sound with a thought and projected it outside his barrier, looping it and using it as a medium — turning his barrier into something akin to a tuning fork. He projected his psychic senses through the vibrations, covering over two hundred meters in the span of a second, then locked in on the unique frequency, biology, and temporal shields of the Flaxans using the information extracted from the first twelve.
Fifty-three… No — fifty-seven Flaxan soldiers and four tanks… thirteen civilians…
He hovered slowly above the dust cloud, pulling Atom Eve with him.
"You'll handle clean-up. My priority is the Flaxans." He gave her a moment to steady herself in the air beside as he began pointing out locations. "Three civilians huddled in a car, 120 meters behind that building — one injured. Seven in a vault in the basement, 70 meters over there, three injured. Another injured and unconscious in a car over there, and one more pinned under debris."
Mathew pushed an open palm forward, and every Flaxan in the area froze, their movements restricted by an invisible force. When he closed his fist, they twisted and crumbled into themselves — individually plucked from where they stood and squeezed by some unseen hand. Their tanks warped and bent under the same pressure until their temporal shields popped. The Flaxans imploded, bodies scattering into dust as Earth's temporal flow began to take hold.
"Good luck."
He didn't wait for Atom Eve to respond. Mathew released her from his barrier and was gone in a flicker of speed that left visible ripples in the air.
***
The next few minutes were efficient, if not clean.
He worked methodically, moving through the forward lines in sweeping passes — lifting, folding, redirecting, occasionally compressing armour into shapes that left the occupants squashed into meaty paste inside metal balls. Any civilian he made contact with was sent miles away at record-breaking speed to a predetermined evacuation site, sealed inside a double-layered bubble of psychic energy. The ROE under Ciera was explicit about minimizing casualties where engagement parameters allowed. Disabling enemy weapons and machinery was fine. Redirecting enemy fire was fine.
Removing the enemy entirely was even better.
"Oh, fuck — not you." Rex cursed, throwing a charge over Mathew's shoulder at a flanking squad. He was handling the western perimeter and handling it well. "Are we really so bad that Cecil had to call you in?!"
Mathew hovered above him without a word. He raised his hand, and a single clap rang out through the streets. When the second clap came, the Flaxans were wiped out completely.
There was no third clap. Mathew left just as quickly as he'd arrived.
"Hate that guy." Rex dropped onto his back like a sack of potatoes. He'd been fighting for hours, and with Mathew's arrival, the fight was as good as over. "Hey, Robot — the unknown friendly messing with your visual sensors? Yeah, it's the Blue fucking Yonder. Flaxans are cooked, man. The GDA just nuked 'em."
"I'm just gonna… just gonna take a nap here."
***
Robot quickly locked up information on the Blue Yonder from his databanks.
"Oh. Oh, dear." Robot's monotonous voice almost sounded grave when he realized who the Blue Yonder was.
Robot was coordinating evacuation routing through his built-in comms system. He relayed his findings on the Blue Yonder to the team and stressed that they steer clear of him. He relayed Rex's location to Atom Eve — she was closest, and she'd gotten her second wind on the scattered Flaxan forces.
She was alternating between shields and offense with an efficiency that Mathew found interesting. He was fairly sure he could replicate her abilities to some extent, but her accuracy was what impressed him most. It was a versatile power.
Mathew observed them closely as he moved through what remained of the Flaxan forces.
They were good. Competent. Better than competent, given what they were working with.
They were also losing ground. Slowly, sure — but slowly losing ground wasn't winning.
Because for every squad he cleared, two more came through the rift.
Steady flow. It's not an invasion force, it's a pipeline…
"Cecil."
"I see it."
"If I just keep clearing the output, we'll be here until one of us gets tired. I can't clean the city without causing civilian casualties."
"I know."
"I'm going in."
"Blue—"
"Ciera authorizes breach if the threat source is confirmed as within the projection radius of—"
"I know what Ciera authorizes," Cecil said, and his voice had that particular flatness it got when he was choosing his battles. "What's your read?"
Mathew extended his awareness toward the rift. It was like pressing his hand against a hot surface — not painful, but present, a resistance, an otherness that pushed back. The temporal displacement made his senses blurry around the edges. Through it, distorted and strange, he could feel the architecture of something massive on the other side. A structure. Mechanical. Enormous.
An anchor gate. That's what's stabilizing it from their end.
"Big machine," he said. "Their side. They've got something anchoring the rift from their end. Dismantling it should collapse the rift."
A pause.
"Collateral?"
"Minimal. I'm not dropping a mountain on it. Just going to take it apart."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Don't go past the gate structure," Cecil said finally. "In and out. No extended engagement in their dimension."
"Yeah."
"Mathew."
The use of his actual name made him pause. Cecil almost never used it operationally.
"In and out."
"...Yeah."
"Godspeed, kid."
He let out a breath and began preparing. He adjusted the properties of his barrier, calibrating them carefully. He pulled a few Flaxan soldiers toward him and repeated the process he'd used on the first twelve — reverse-engineering the properties of their temporal shield, using Earth as his anchor, much the way the Flaxans used their home dimension as theirs.
It was crude. Under the circumstances, it was the best he could do.
He turned back to the city one last time. Movement over the skyline caught his eye — a hero in yellow, black, and blue, getting dragged through several buildings by a heavily armored Flaxan General.
That must be Cecil's new pet project… He watched them with a raised eyebrow. Supposed to be my replacement. Poor Cecil… He chuckled lightly. If things went south, they'd figure something out. With Omni-Man's kid flying around, he wasn't worried.
He looked at the rift.
It looked back.
***
Passing through felt like being turned inside out by someone who'd read the manual but never actually practiced.
The other side was a corridor — not metaphorically, literally. A vast enclosed space, all metal and geometry, the walls close enough that the scale felt wrong, like the dimensions of the room hadn't been agreed upon. The light was amber, low, sourceless. The air tasted like ionized copper.
The anchor gate dominated the center of the corridor. It was the size of a building, a few football fields came close to describing it — a lattice of enormous electromagnetic rings, spinning at staggered intervals, generating the field that kept the rift stable at Earth's end. Around its base, a dozen Flaxan engineers in suits distinct from the soldiers' were running adjustments from raised platforms.
There were a dozen other gates open in the building and thousands of armed Flaxan soldiers with dozens of war machines stood on standby waiting for the gate to stabilize so they could enter.
They saw him and they scattered to surround him.
Mathew looked at the gate. He ignored the Flaxans and cocooned himself with metal structures of the building. He amplified his shield, layering it a few times over.
Alright. How do you come apart?
His awareness moved through it the way it moved through everything — threading into the structure, reading the tolerances, finding the load-bearing points of the electromagnetic lattice. The rings were held in their spin by a series of gyroscopic anchors at the core.
Pull those and the rings destabilize. Rings destabilize, the field collapses. Field collapses, rift closes. Simple enough…
Yeah…
Simple...
A thought occurred to him then.
Simple wouldn't get the message across. Simple wouldn't stop the Flaxans from tying again.
When was the last time he went all out?
There was no Cecil here.
No GDA.
No rules or guidelines.
No one to tell him to stop.
So he didn't stop to think about it.
And time — for once — was on his side. Days here were seconds over there, from what he could tell.
Maybe this time, just this time, he could let loose. This race was an active threat to humanity. He couldn't let them go. If he didn't stop them now, who knew what they'd do in a few years. They could come back stronger. Better. Prepared.
This was necessary. He had twenty-seven reasons to go through with it.
With that in mind, he began in a low tone. "Sonata, Fuselage, Zion, Protocol, Mitosis, Reagent, Orange, Left-eye, Equity, Keel, Warp, Basalt, Verdict, Projection, Lexicon, Atrium, Three, Isobar, Ligament, Quasar, Tundra, Stamen, Fresco, Fractal."
That familiar feeling flooded his veins. Every cell in his body buzzed with activity.
A voice resounded through his thoughts. "Warning. Failsafe triggered. Emergency keywords accepted. Level 1, Unknown Alpha Rating Threat Assessment, Psychic Lock Released, Dampeners Powering Down. Protocol Echo in effect. MTF Argus has been notified. Mama Bear will be dispatched to your location. Please return to the designated safe zone when the threat has been neutralized before detonation. Detonation in T-minus 1,128 hours, 23 minutes, and 23 seconds."
"Consider yourselves lucky I've got a time limit." He smiled — slightly, half-deranged — and the Flaxans opened fire.
If someone had asked Mathew whether he ever felt like a weapon, he would have said no. A weapon was what the GDA called him, what they needed him to be. A hero was what he wanted to be — probably what some of the world saw him as — but he knew the truth.
He was an addict.
An addict going through rehab. And like an addict, he was looking for that high in everything he did. That one hit. It was why he picked up every time Cecil called. Why he went to fight whatever demons the GDA threw at him. Why it haunted his every waking moment — that invisible itch he couldn't scratch, that kept him on his toes, kept him in control, gave the GDA something to hold over him.
But now and then, when the conditions were right, he allowed himself to scratch it.
It wasn't something he could control. He needed it the way ordinary people needed to breathe, and right now, out here, on their turf, with enemies on all fronts and no civilians to protect and no one to hold him back.
This was it.
The Flaxans had come knocking on the wrong door. He was going to give them a reason to never knock again. He had twenty-seven reasons to do so. Maybe more once they cleared the rubble.
Twenty-seven was more than enough.
Just for a moment — just for a few Earth hours — Mathew let his mask fall.
An earthquake shook the Flaxan city.
Countless Flaxans fled in panic as their city crumbled around them. High above, held in place inside an indestructible bubble, was the building containing the portal to the world they had once sought to conquer.
Something had come through that portal. The Flaxan king had lied to them. Their king's greed and ambition had cost them. The Flaxan army had failed them. Their empire crumbled around them.
They had brought a demon into their world.
The demon bathed in blue light. Its eyes burned like two blue stars, destroying anything that met their gaze. Its laughter rang like a death knell.
It hovered above them in wistful ecstasy, like a god of destruction reveling in their ruin.
Their aerial armada fell first — each combat drone lit the sky around him like fireworks. A sea of fire swallowed the surface of the Flaxan planet. Their orbital satellites and stations were pulled down from above, turned into meteors that rained on them like nails in a coffin. Within an hour, one of their continents had been reduced to scattered islands.
In a few more hours, their planetary population was cut in half. As the days went on, the half that remained became a quarter — and still the demon did not stop.
A Flaxan dragged another from the fire, only for both of them to be pulled screaming into the sky as the gravity around them inverted.
Another Flaxan held up rubble to keep his family safe, only for a wave of fire to reduce them and everyone around them to ash.
There was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. The demon had turned their own world against them.
For the Flaxans, this was a festival of death — the moment their great empire was brought low by a single entity, the closest their civilization had ever come to extinction. Less than three percent of them remained when the rampage ended.
For the demon that brought this upon them, however, this was a moment of weakness. A relapse, triggered by the unique conditions they had unknowingly created when they invaded his world.
This wasn't justice. This wasn't heroism. A handful of human deaths used to justify an act of mindless destruction. A projected future threat repackaged as revenge. This was genocide.
Mathew knew this better than anyone.
He just didn't care.
***
The rift opened and swallowed him whole for the last time.
The building that had held the rift open, without his psychic energy sustaining it, fell from orbit as he left.
Chicago met him on the other side: grey sky, smoke, the distant sound of sirens. He hovered for a moment above what remained of the south loop, suspended in nothing, the wind finding the gaps in his barrier and going quiet against them.
The dampeners were coming back online. He could feel them, one by one, like doors closing in a long hallway. His awareness contracted. The world shrank back to a manageable size. The hum faded by degrees.
Ninety-four casualties… His count had stopped updating. Ninety-five. It had gone up.
He looked at his hands.
They were steady. They were always steady. That was the worst part.
His earpiece crackled.
"Blue," Cecil's voice. Something in it that wasn't quite relief and wasn't quite anything else. "Report."
Mathew was quiet for a moment.
"Gate's down," he said. "Rift's closed. They won't be back."
A pause.
"And the other side?"
Another pause. Longer.
"Handled."
Cecil didn't say anything. Maybe he already knew. He usually did.
"Good," Mathew could hear Cecil exhale. "You know the drill, kid. Don't fight it."
"Yeah."
He looked at the space where the rift had been one last time.
Then he descended slowly into the smoke, and let the city close over him.
"Hey, Blue." Another voice came through after Cecil's. Soft. "Why did you do it?"
He turned slowly toward the sky and waited for that craft — the one that had always somehow made itself invisible to his senses — to show itself.
It didn't.
"I really don't know, Doc."
Chemical canisters clattered around him as a specialized toxin designed specifically for him filled the air. God, I hope that's not PV-203. Hate the headaches with that one…
"Your guess is as good as mine."
He could already feel his shields weakening.
Boom!
Something tore through his shields like butter and rammed into him, the force driving him into a crater in the concrete.
He could feel them flickering in and out of his range. He counted five — no, six — surrounding him. Two with gravity guns holding him down, the other four carrying psychic dampeners built specifically for him. Each gun emitted a distinct and individually unique wave that disrupted his psychic energy and prevented him from locking onto any of them.
That's classic MTF-Echo 3 attack strategy. Would have liked Echo-2, but genocidal maniacs can't be choosers…
Bright blue glowing eyes locked onto his as a slim figure pinned the back of his head into the rubble. Bleach-blond hair tied back in a bun, half her face hidden behind a tactical mask that matched her suit. A clear Echo-01 on her left chest — his code number, the one she'd inherited. Her gaze told him nothing.
His twisted feeling in his gut told him enough.
Hate.
He did not regret what he had done on the other side of that portal. That was the conditioning — GDA-built, deep enough to be permanent. The Flaxans had been an imminent threat to the planet, and he had dealt with them as such. That was the job.
What he hated was that he knew he didn't regret it. That he couldn't. Not anymore.
Mathew held the figure's gaze. Why do they always send you?
Of course it was her. They didn't send anyone else anymore. Containment always ended the same way.
Something cold pressed against the nape of his neck, and his world went black.
"Sleep tight, Blue."
Momma Bear…
Chapter End