[Rex POV]
Life always seemed to find a way to kick me in the teeth. The misery began by being born to parents who literally sold me to a government black-ops lab because they couldn't afford a basic meal.
Life as a government lab rat wasn't fun. It was painful, intensive, completely lacking in privacy and the only other people my age were far from where I was.
Things got better after I met Eve.
I wasn't reduced to a government-sponsored bomb anymore; I was a hero. Or, at least, I was trying to be one.
I guess this is my karma for trying to be a good person.
-x-
My hover cycle screamed as I zipped my way toward Upstate University, I could feel this itch at the back of my head telling me that life was going to kick my balls all over again.
The night sky wasn't dark anymore. It was painted a churning orange, and the smell of burning asphalt whipped against my face.
As we closed in on the destruction, I finally saw him.
He was hovering above a burning intersection. A human-looking alien with slicked-back blonde hair and a pristine, classic moustache, matching too close to Omniman for comfort.
He looked like the poster boy for Hitler's wet dream of the perfect Aryan specimen. He wore yellow-tinted visors bolted directly into his skull by two thick, metallic screws on his temples.
But it was his eyes visible through the tinted glass that pissed me off the most.
I watched him casually reach down, grab a two-ton bus, and chuck it straight through the roof of a library. There was no anger or grimace of effort. Just complete boredom.
Something about that arrogant, apathetic stare just rubbed me the wrong way. It brought out that same spiteful, adrenaline-junkie rage that made me pick fights with half the New Guardians roster.
"Kate! Ray!" I yelled over the roar of the engines. "Jump off! Focus on the evac! I'm taking the opener!"
Kate leapt off the back of the cycle, splitting into a half-dozen clones before she hit the pavement to cushion her and Shrinking Ray's fall.
I cranked the throttle to the absolute max, feeling that familiar, chaotic hum of molecular instability pooling in my hands.
I surged my powers through the handlebars, charging the entire mass of the hover cycle until the metal began to glow a furious, unstable orange.
At the last second, I bailed and tucked into a roll on the concrete as the supercharged bike slammed straight into the Viltrumite's chest.
KABOOM!
A blinding sphere of kinetic fire engulfed the entire campus block. The shockwave was so massive it shattered every window in a three-mile radius. People who'd been hiding in buildings got thrown from their feet by the concussive force.
I stood up, dusting myself off with a cocky grin.
But as the smoke cleared, the grin died on my face.
The alien was just floating there, casually dusting a patch of soot off his pristine white uniform. He looked down at me, his bored expression unchanged.
"Pathetic," he muttered.
Tch.
I wanted to continue with the assault, but the team wasn't the same since the Battle Beast incident a week ago, and it showed.
Kate and I were the only ones who made it out of that meat grinder in one piece… well, mostly in one piece, considering Kate's clones.
It was all thanks to that Lobotomy Kais… I mean John Kaisen, who was apparently secretly working with Cecil the whole time, who patched us all up to be able to do this suicide gig.
But the mental scars were still wide open. Shrinking Ray had voluntarily taken evacuation duty, the sheer terror of nearly getting shattered alive had broken her frontline nerve.
Robot, usually a cold, calculating machine, was noticeably shaken. He overcompensated by coordinating the evac while actively throwing his metal body in the way to keep Monster Girl out of the direct assault.
With us tied up here, the GDA was stretched thinner than a wire. The comms were a mess of panicked chatter. Every D-list psycho was using the alien invasion as an excuse to riot. America was burning.
"Robot, who the hell is holding the line out there?!" I yelled over the chaos. "Is Mark back?!"
"Negative," Robot crackled. "Cecil gave the new recruit full autonomous authorization. Pepsi-Man is currently neutralizing thirty-four concurrent outbreaks."
I blinked. 'The walking vending machine?'
I tuned into the main GDA frequency for a split second.
Instead of hearing commercial jingles, I heard rolling sonic booms, followed by the wet, sickening crunch of aluminum caving in skulls.
"That's..." I started.
"Fucked," Kate finished, one of her clones looking as disturbed as I felt.
The world was ending and a corporate mascot was out there turning domestic terrorists into paste.
But I didn't have time to dwell on it. Right in front of us, hovering above a burning intersection, was the real problem.
Black Samson, though? He was a completely different animal.
Turns out, getting your powers back wipes away that 'powerless boomer' bitterness. The old Samson would have played it tactically.
This new Samson? He dove straight out of the sky like a missile, his eyes glowing a crackling yellow. He slammed into the Viltrumite from above, carrying enough momentum to finally knock the smug bastard out of the sky and into the pavement.
As the dust kicked up, a sharp sound suddenly echoed across the campus.
TWANG.
A wooden sliding door materialized in the middle of the street floor.
'Didn't Kate say they were used by Kaisen's girlfriend?' I thought to myself.
The gate slid open, immediately swallowing terrified civilians into the safety of whatever bunker was at the other end.
First, it was just one gate, but then the frequency increased.
TWANG. TWANG. TWANG.
Civilians flooded the gates in panic. Parents carrying kids, students helping each other, blood-covered survivors dragging the wounded.
Dozens of them opened up across the campus. Over the comms, Robot confirmed they were opening city-wide.
The Viltrumite effortlessly punched Black Samson through an office building and paused. As the dust settled, he looked at the wooden gates swallowing up the civilians.
"So, these are the gates to that nightmare maze Nolan was talking about," the alien mused, tilting his head. "And that sound... it must be those witches he kept cursing out."
He vanished in a blur, zipping straight toward the nearest gate.
Monster Girl and Robot double-teamed to form a massive blockade and protect the evacuating civilians.
As the Viltrumite approached, he didn't slow down. He raised his right hand in a chopping motion, aiming a cut right for Monster Girl's thick, green neck.
Robot threw his metal chassis directly in the path of the strike.
CRUNCH.
The Viltrumite's hand sheared cleanly through Robot's reinforced alloy torso, chopping his head off the metal shoulders.
"No!!!" Monster Girl roared, throwing a massive haymaker.
The alien swatted her away like a gnat and stepped right into the tatami gate.
"Dammit!" I cursed, running to the gate.
We knew exactly what that place was. A safe haven where thousands of defenseless civilians were being evacuated to.
It was going to be sheep waiting for the slaughterhouse.
We froze, terror gripping our lungs at the realization.
But a second later, a massive CRASH echoed from the portal.
The Viltrumite came flying backward out of the gate, skipping violently across the asphalt for yards.
Stepping out of the wooden frame wasn't a slaughtered civilian but a massive, orange Cyclops. He was covered in medical bandages, his chest heavily wrapped, shaking and stumbling as he walked out, but his single eye burned with defiance.
"You're not killing any more innocents, Viltrumite scum!" the Alien roared loud enough for the whole campus to hear.
The Nazi Poster Boy stopped his skid, floating back up. He wiped a tiny tick of blood from his lip as his eyes widened in genuine surprise.
"How dare a measly Unopan damage the perfect body of a Viltrum soldier!" he yelled, blitzing forward, smashing Cyclops brutally back into the gate.
"You survived Conquest?" he muttered as he cracked his jaw. "What is that senile old bastard even doing?!"
I didn't care about their alien politics, but he was distracted enough.
I grabbed my explosive discs, charging them to the absolute limit, and hurled a barrage at the blonde bastard.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The explosions caved the ground, damaging the cars nearby, but all it did was successfully piss him off. His bored eyes finally locked onto me like a predator.
"Well, come and get it, asshole!" I yelled.
I did what I was good at. I broke things.
I used everything I could get my hands on—parked cars, shattered streetlamps, the debris of shattered pavement, in a blanket barrage.
I hurled charged debris at him like a machine gun, but he was just playing with me. Eventually, though, I saw his eyes change from apathetic boredom to irritation.
'Hell yeah! I knew I was gifted…'
But just as I was patting my back, he phased through the smoke, grabbed me by the throat, and lifted me effortlessly off the ground all in a literal second.
"A loud, irritating insect," he whispered, chillingly close to my face.
He grabbed my left arm.
I saw Monster Girl and Dupli-Kate rushing him, desperately trying to get me out of his hold, but he just kicked them away without even looking.
Then, his grip tightened, and he pulled.
A sickening pop echoed in my skull as my shoulder wrenched from its socket.
But he didn't stop. As my muscles sheared apart, skin tore like wet parchment, and tendons snapped like high-tension wires, followed by the nauseating crunch of splintering bone.
He ripped my left arm, dragging a grotesque trail of severed veins and shredded meat right out of my torso till a few strands remained connected.
"AGGGHHHHHH!!!" I screamed, choking on copper and bile.
A violent geyser of arterial blood erupted from the gaping crater, blinding me instantly. The pain was a white-hot pain that completely short-circuited my nervous system.
But my brain wired from years of being a government-bred weapon, trained by the worst of what humanity had to offer, focused on one single, delirious thought.
'Blast it.'
My severed arm was still clutched in his hand. I locked my eyes onto it and forced every ounce of my will, my molecular acceleration, into the still somehow connected via vessels, flesh and bone of my own torn-off limb.
BANG!
The localized explosion went off right in his palm, the sheer, unexpected kinetic force flinging him backward into a pile of crushed cars.
I hit the ground, puking up saliva and blood, clutching my spurting stump. I looked up, terrified he'd already be on his feet to finish the job.
Instead, a shimmering pink forcefield snapped into existence around me. The Viltrumite flashed and slammed his fists into it, shattering the construct, but it bought me the clarity I needed to scramble backward.
"Rex... oh god! Your arm!" Eve dropped beside me, her eyes wide with horror.
"Heh," I choked out, flashing a blood-stained grin that probably looked psychotic. "You should see the other guy."
The Viltrumite roared, bursting from the wreckage. I finally saw it- a jagged crack running down the yellow lens of his visor.
'Weird…'
Before he could reach us, Black Samson dive-bombed again. He grabbed the alien, detonating the pent-up energy in his body with a blast bright enough to temporarily blind us all.
When my vision cleared, a mile-wide crater had been carved into the campus. In the center, the alien was holding Samson in a choke hold, wrapping his arm around the guy's throat, slowly crushing his windpipe in mid-air.
"No! Samson!" I yelled, trying to run forward despite my missing arm.
But Eve pulled me back and pointed up.
Three sleek, metallic pods dropped from the sky, slamming into the earth in a triangle around the Viltrumite.
The pods hissed open and what stepped out was pure nightmare fuel.
They were ghoulish men, sickly pale, with bulging green veins running across their bodies and horrific mechanical implants grafted into their decaying flesh.
They launched themselves at the alien in perfect, mindless synchronization.
"How?" I asked, stumbling back.
Robot hovered down next to us, awkwardly welding his severed head while somehow carrying Samson.
"ReAnimen. They are a secret project the GDA has been working on... dead soldiers, working for their country one last time," Robot's mechanical voice echoed, somehow sounding grim even without vocal cords.
The ReAnimen were relentless. They didn't feel pain, and they didn't tire. They swarmed him like rabid animals, biting into his face and tearing at his hair. They pounded his chest, driving every strike with a horrific mix of hydraulic torque and whatever nightmare chemical cocktail was pumping through their rotting veins.
The sheer, mechanical force was enough to shred his pristine Viltrumite uniform and cave the asphalt even deeper beneath them.
Eve didn't waste time as she placed her hands over my bleeding stump. Pink energy swirled, sealing the wound and weaving together a crude, fully functional robotic prosthetic.
"I'm gonna stop him from decimating them," Monster Girl said, her voice steeling over as the Viltrumite began methodically dismantling the undead cyborgs. "We need to pressure him."
Just as we prepared to throw our lives away again, the heavy, thrashing chords of Metallica blasted from the heavens.
Author's Note:
To celebrate finishing Arc-1, I'm also putting a 50% discount across ALL tiers until June 1st.
If you want to read up to 15+ Chapters in advance, check out my P@treon - Max_Striker.
If you wanna hang out, join my Discord server- https://discord.gg/XxGEYk2PM5