[Third Person P.O.V.]
The clock was ticking down on the planet and Cecil Stedman's orders rippled through the global hero network.
While the general public was going about their day blissfully unaware of the impending doom, the heroes, on the other hand, dealt with the war call in their own ways.
Inside the reinforced sublevels of the GDA, the sound of tearing canvas echoed continuously.
Black Samson and Mark Grayson stood in a ruined sparring ring, drenched in sweat. Mark launched a right hook, his knuckles burying into the padding of a titanium-laced heavy bag. Even with the controlled force, his strike tore the steel chains off their moorings, embedding the massive bag directly into the concrete wall.
Samson grunted, tossing Mark another bag from the pile.
"You're control is better than before," Samson observed, adjusting his power gauntlets. "I don't want to be all doom and gloom, kid, but this probably won't be enough.. Those freaks don't feel pain the same way we do. You hit a Viltrumite in the jaw and they'd just spit out a tooth and take your head off."
"I know," Mark said. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. " I won't aim for the jaw. If I can get a few good strikes on their joints, tendons and cartilage, then even if they don't feel pain, at least they won't be able to move."
Mark dropped into the low, fluid martial arts stance that Sebas had beaten into his muscle memory. He was training to be a butcher.
High above the atmosphere, hovering in low-Earth orbit, Zack Thompson checked his displays.
The Tech Jacket hummed around him as Zack looked down at the massive, swirling blue marble of Earth. He had fought aliens before and stopped planetary invasions. But the data packets from scanning Kradd's Corpse that had just been uploaded into his suit's mainframe were staggering.
'Thank God for Zoe; otherwise, it would've been a whole lot harder to match him, rather than outright kill him.'
"Suit," Zack muttered, his breath fogging the inside of his visor. "Reroute all power into Sonic Weaponry and unlock the 'Omega Jacket' Mode."
[SYSTEM OVERRIDE INITIATED]
[WARNING! WARNING! OMEGA MODE PROTOCOL IS LETHAL TO HOST BIOLOGY.]
[PROCEED Y/N?]
The suit's high-pitched warning and flashing red light flooded Zack's senses, and he floated there, making the hardest decision of his life.
Deep beneath Teen Team's old headquarters, Robot stood on a metal gantry.
He looked down at his private assembly line as thousands of heavily armed drones marched off the conveyor belts in perfect unison. They were sleek, upgraded with Chaos Corp's new 0.5 Arc Reactor cores.
Robot didn't look at his mechanical army for long as he moved his head to stare at the reflection in the observation glass.
Behind the glass was a sealed, nutrient-rich vat. Floating inside was his true body. A deformed, stunted mass of flesh that couldn't breathe unfiltered air without dying. The physical inadequacy always gnawed at him, a festering insecurity that he masked with cold logic. The Viltrumites were biological perfection. They were apex predators.
Robot turned away from the glass. If biology was flawed, his intellect would just have to kill a god and get his promised reward from John.
In a solitary house outside Chicago, Brit stood in the shower.
The water running down the drain was a deep red as he scrubbed the last chunks of Lucan's gore out of his hair, sighing heavily as the hot water washed away the alien blood. He stepped out, wrapping a towel around his waist.
Thula was sitting on the edge of the bed, nervously twisting the fabric of her apron.
"I fear after losing another scout team and Sebas's warning…" she said quietly. "They're coming… all of them."
"I know," Brit replied, grabbing a fresh shirt. "I put a hole through one of them."
"I know I can't stop you and I know I can't risk our baby either, so all I'll answer your question Anissa interrupted, as long as you don't get hurt out there", she whispered.
Brit paused, offering a wry smile. "Honey, you know I physically can't. It's my whole thing."
In the deep woods of the Pacific Northwest, Astounding Wolf-Man sharpened his massive claws against a boulder, the scraping sound echoing through the trees. He smelled the blood in the air and tasted the shift in the peace that was ripping away from nature. The slaughter was coming, and his pack was hungry.
In a dive bar on the outskirts of Baltimore, the atmosphere was entirely different.
Bulletproof, Kid Thor, and Knockout sat in a corner booth covered in empty beer bottles. It was a final Hoorah. The bartender had already locked the doors and left the bottle on the table.
"To the end of the world," Bulletproof smirked, pouring a tall shot as he raised his glass. "Or at least, the end of whatever alien bastards try to take my city."
Kid Thor clinked his mug against it, and Knockout laughed, throwing her arm around Kid Thor's shoulder.
She snatched the whiskey bottle from Bulletproof and took a long swig directly from the neck. The humor didn't reach her eyes. The bravado was a shield.
Halfway across the globe, sitting cross-legged in a pitch-black room in Tokyo, Best Tiger meditated. The green blindfold remained tied firmly over his face while his finger danced with terrifying precision, stripping down and reassembling Chaos Corp. custom handguns by touch alone.
The board was set.
[Dupli-Kate P.O.V.]
The squeak of my sneakers echoed across the abandoned basketball court.
It was a dilapidated community center in the Narrows and smelled of cheap floor wax as you'd expect. I dragged a metal folding chair to the center of the court and sat down and across from me sat three men.
Behind us, a rolling whiteboard displayed the words Serial Corpses Anonymous ~★ written in neon-pink bubble letters, surrounded by floating hearts and a cartoon bunny holding a bloody meat cleaver.
My brother, Paul, leaned back in his chair and pointed a thumb at the whiteboard. "Is this ragebait? Who drew the homicidal rabbit? "
"I did," the Mauler sitting on the left said, crossing his massive blue arms and looked genuinely offended.
"It's patronizing," the Mauler II on the right argued, glaring at him. "We are feared, world-class scientists. That is a disgrace to my reputation."
"Whatever," the first Mauler grumbled, "It sets a welcoming atmosphere for the trauma discussion, not that you would understand; you lack the emotional intelligence of the original."
"I am the original!" the second Mauler yelled, kicking his chair back and standing up.
"Sit down," the first Mauler said smugly as he tapped his index finger against his cheek. Right there, etched into his thick blue skin, was a crude letter 'I'. "The ink doesn't lie, clone."
Mauler-II ground his teeth, grabbing his chair and slumping back into it.
"Can we focus, please?" I asked, rubbing my temples. I already had a headache. "I called this session because the normie GDA therapist doesn't understand the concept of dying multiple times a day. You three are the only people on the planet who share my brand of trauma."
I pulled out my phone, unlocked the screen, and turned it around to show them.
It was an Instagram post that showed Rex Splode and Shrink Ray sitting on a white-sand beach in Bali, holding tropical drinks and wearing sunglasses.
"Look at them," I whispered.
Rex had retired the second he got out of the hospital after the Vidor fight. He made the sacrifice, he blew up his own skeleton, and decided one close call to death was enough. Shrink Ray had been too traumatized by the invasion to put her suit back on and they just walked away. They took their GDA pensions and disappeared.
"I want that," I admitted, dropping the phone into my lap. "I don't want to be a hero anymore. When they put me in the Teen Team, and then the Guardians, they gave me this responsibility to be greater than myself. They told me I had to be the vanguard because my body was expendable."
I looked down at my hands. "You guys know what it feels like to actually die. The feeling of your neck snapping, feeling your lungs fill with blood, the panic of your heart stopping... and then continuing to fight with another copy while having to process that memory as the rest of the team moves on."
The Maulers looked at each other and burst out laughing.
I glared at them. "Excuse me?"
"That is exactly why the hero business is a scam, little girl," Mauler-I chuckled, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. " Where is your freedom? You wake up every morning to put on that spandex and wait for Cecil to tell you who to punch. If you ever get into some controversy, the public will hate you even after dying a thousand times to keep them safe. It's a pathetic way to live."
"Exactly," Mauler-II nodded in agreement. "We are villains. People may curse our names and may wish we were dead. But you know what? Villainy is self-care. I sleep whenever I want. I eat whatever I want. I conduct my research without moral oversight. We accepted that we are monsters long ago, and it gave us freedom. Freedom no hero can ever have."
Paul sighed, dragging a hand through his hair. He looked at me, his usual cocky demeanor dropping completely.
"Kate, ever since Dad had his breakdown when our curse activated, the government has owned us," Paul said quietly. "They took us in to train us to be weapons. And you always took the hardest of those missions, not to mention so much blame for my mistakes. You duplicated yourself to cover my blind spots so I wouldn't have to die as much. Even though we are twins, you've always been the mature one of the two of us. But things are different now, we're grown adults with our own choices to make. You don't need this responsibility, bullshit."
I bit my lip as I felt the defensive walls I usually kept up cracking.
"Death is just a mechanic," Mauler-I said, his voice surprisingly gentle for a hulking brute. "You fear losing yourself. You fear that the Kate who remains after seeing herself being pulled apart, squashed and cut up isn't the Kate who died. I've accepted that I could be a clone of the previous original. It doesn't matter if it's right or wrong. The original, the duplicate... we are who we are because we survive in the end."
Something inside my chest curled up and died.
The years of lost childhood that I saw Rex reclaim so effortlessly, the buried trauma of thousands of brutal deaths becoming natural to Maulers; the exhaustion of trying to save a world that didn't care about the disposable child I saw in Paul. It all finally boiled over as I covered my face with my hands and began to cry.
It was an ugly cry with heaving sobs that echoed across the empty gymnasium.
Nobody interrupted as I let go, trying to find salvation in these tears. Paul reached over and squeezed my knee, while the Maulers politely looked away, staring at the ceiling and giving me the space to just break down.
When the tears finally stopped ten minutes later, I wiped my eyes with the hem of my shirt and took a shuddering breath. I felt lighter even though the crushing weight on my sternum hasn't fully evaporated; I know I could get there.
"Thanks," I mumbled, sniffing loudly. "I needed that."
"Anytime, sis," Paul smiled, leaning back in his chair as the cocky bravado instantly returned to his face. "Speaking of death. I died exactly one thousand, eight hundred times these past six months."
The Maulers blinked. "Excuse me?"
"Ten times a day," Paul clarified, shuddering visibly. "Sebas, that fucking asshole! He's been training me, Atom Eve, and Mark. And by training, I mean he's been using me as a training dummy to have them murder me, whether it be by showing Invincible the best way to kill an enemy in the most brutal death or by having Eve try to use her powers on my clones to get her to seemingly unlock another level of her powers and then do it again to build my tolerance to pain or trauma or something."
Paul leaned forward, looking at the Maulers with a conspiratorial grin. "Which brings me to my secondary reason for coming here. I want to hire you."
Mauler-II raised a massive eyebrow. "Oh a gig? For what?"
"I am placing a bounty on the butler," Paul declared proudly.
[A/N]:
If you want to read Chapters in advance, check out my P@treon - Max_Striker.
If you wanna hang out, join my Discord server- https://discord.gg/XxGEYk2PM5