Chapter 255: Disgusting Space Locusts
"Oh, Octagon... I ain't feelin' so good."
Rhomboid Vreedle groaned, his eyelids drooping weakly against a hazy, oppressive darkness. It felt as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to at least twenty of his bones. His muscles were practically liquefied, leaving him entirely devoid of the strength needed to even twitch his arms. Despite the agonizing full-body ache, a dull spark of awareness told him he wasn't dead just yet. The coarse, biting friction of heavy synthetic ropes digging into his thick hide made that abundantly clear. He was tied up, trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Feeling thoroughly miserable, Rhomboid had subconsciously called out to his brother, not quite possessing the brainpower to realize that in a hostage situation, captives were usually separated.
But, true to their shared cosmic luck, Octagon was indeed right there with him. In fact, they were bound back-to-back, the ropes squeezing them into a single, lumpy package.
"Rhomboid... me neither," Octagon wheezed from behind him. His condition was marginally better than his brother's, though that wasn't saying much. Still, the slight edge of clarity in his raspy voice proved he had a few more brain cells currently firing.
"Octagon!" Rhomboid's tone spiked with a dim-witted surge of excitement. He strained, forcing his heavy eyelids to peel open. "Are we..."
"Oh? Awake already, are we?"
A smooth, unfamiliar young male voice sliced through the gloom, cutting off Rhomboid's sentence. The overhead lights flickered on with a harsh buzz, forcing both Vreedle brothers to squint against the sudden glare.
As their vision cleared, they found themselves staring at a handsome teenager, roughly fifteen or sixteen years old. He was slouched casually in a metal folding chair, a dangerously mischievous grin playing on his lips.
"Congratulations," the boy drawled, his tone dripping with dry amusement. "Your surgery was a complete success."
The Vreedle brothers' minds were already a sluggish mess on a good day. Factor in the concussion, the ropes, and their inherent, staggering stupidity, and neither of them could immediately place the face of the teenager sitting before them.
Blinking in dull unison, they asked the first thing that came to mind. "What surgery?"
"Gender reassignment surgery." A strange, wicked glint flashed in Klein's cerulean eyes. He leaned forward, resting his chin on his hand. "You're both girls now, you know."
Octagon and Rhomboid froze. The gears in their heads ground to a screeching halt. Straining against their bonds, they awkwardly craned their thick necks to look at each other. To their mutual relief, the face staring back was just as rugged, bulbous, and spectacularly ugly as it had always been.
"No way!" Octagon shrieked, genuine terror warping his features. He would honestly rather die than face that reality. After all, they were just clones. As long as their memories were backed up, Ma Vreedle could easily pop them out of a fresh vat. Being turned into a girl, however, was a fate worse than death.
"It's okay, Octagon," Rhomboid said, proving to be surprisingly open-minded for a burly, trigger-happy mercenary. Or perhaps, beneath all that muscle, he just had a slightly softer side. "Ma already prefers daughters anyway. Maybe this way, we'll finally be a bit more likable to her, don't ya think?"
Klein, still sitting opposite them with his legs comfortably crossed, raised a single eyebrow. His amusement shifted into something sharper. "So, Ma Vreedle sent you? That fat old hag actually thought it was a good idea to cause me trouble?" He scoffed, a dark chuckle rumbling in his chest. "If I don't permanently vaporize a few of her clone bodies, she's really going to start thinking she's hot stuff, huh?"
"Hey, what do ya mean by that!" Rhomboid protested.
"Wait a minute... who exactly are you?" Octagon squinted.
The slow-witted brothers finally managed to scrape together enough brain cells to recall their actual purpose for being on this planet. Staring hard at Klein's relaxed, confident posture, a terrifying realization began to dawn on them. This kid looked awfully familiar.
Octagon's face instantly crumpled into a mask of pure, bitter despair. "Brother... would you believe me if I said we were just innocently passin' by?"
It all clicked. This was the anomaly. The monster in human skin. A formidable entity that even the notoriously fearless Vreedle Family actively avoided provoking. He was absurdly powerful and, worse, annoyingly idle. If he truly decided to hunt them down, even their infinite clone revivals wouldn't save them from the sheer psychological trauma he could inflict.
Sure, Ma Vreedle's reproductive capabilities were the stuff of cosmic nightmares, capable of churning out billions of clone descendants from her vats at a moment's notice. But the brothers had seen the galactic bounty footage. They knew the truth. Klein could casually obliterate entire planets with a flick of his wrist. Ma's cloning machines would literally catch fire and smoke out before they could ever hope to keep pace with his casual killing speed.
"You flattened my backyard," Klein stated, his voice dropping the teasing lilt, replacing it with a cold, flat deadpan. "And you blew several very large, very annoying holes in my house."
Every measured word that fell from Klein's lips struck the Vreedle brothers like a physical blow, making their twin hearts pound frantically against their ribs.
"Heh." Klein uncrossed his legs. He leaned forward, resting his elbows heavily on his thighs. His cerulean eyes, previously sparkling with mischief, went completely dead, devoid of any human emotion. "Do you honestly think I believe you were just passing by?"
Rhomboid swallowed hard, the sound loud in the quiet room. "Octagon... I'm scared."
"Rhomboid, don't panic," Octagon managed to squeak out, though his trembling throat could barely squeeze the choked syllables past his vocal cords. "I'm scared too..."
If this terrifying kid hadn't instantly vaporized them upon waking, it meant he had something far worse in mind. He wanted to play with his food. He wanted to torment them.
The atmosphere in the room thickened, becoming suffocatingly heavy. Klein leaned back in his chair, his fingers steepled beneath his chin as he observed the two trembling thugs. He looked like a bored god contemplating which plague to unleash next.
Seeing the dark calculation in his eyes, Octagon and Rhomboid clamped their mouths shut. They didn't dare breathe too loudly, obediently waiting for the executioner's verdict.
And at that exact moment, Klein was indeed doing exactly what they feared: brainstorming the most entertaining way to make them suffer.
He hadn't had much direct interaction with the Vreedle Family before this. While his impression of these disgusting space locusts was overwhelmingly negative, they had always been smart enough to give him a wide berth. It had been a comfortable arrangement of live and let live, which perfectly suited Klein's lazy disposition. It saved him the effort of exterminating them.
After all, even with his god-like arsenal, Klein had to admit that the Vreedles were uniquely annoying. They were the ultimate cosmic roaches. Their numbers were unimaginably vast, a literal plague of clones with descendants as numerous as grains of sand on a beach. Worse, they possessed a flawless revival network. As long as their memories were backed up to the cloud, a fresh clone body would simply step out of a vat on the other side of the galaxy the moment the current one died.
Ma Vreedle herself was the absolute worst of the bunch. From what Klein's intelligence network had gathered, that bloated matriarch had hidden cloning facilities and memory servers scattered across multiple universes. They were an interdimensional infestation., the Vreedle Family hoarded an absurd arsenal of highly illegal, catastrophically dangerous weaponry. Rumor had it that Ma Vreedle even kept a few galaxy-destroying bombs tucked away in her apron pockets just for emergencies.
This sheer, unadulterated persistence was exactly why major cosmic factions—even the Plumbers—refused to engage in all-out war with them. You couldn't win a war of attrition against an enemy that treated death as a minor inconvenience. They were physically strong, heavily armed, numbered in the billions, and possessed an infinite respawn cheat. They simply couldn't be permanently killed off through conventional means.
Hell, even Vilgax the Conqueror actively avoided crossing paths with Ma Vreedle.
But Klein? Klein intensely despised these brain-dead thugs. If things truly escalated, this family of trigger-happy morons—many of whom were somehow even dumber than Octagon and Rhomboid—wouldn't even possess the brain capacity to understand fear. They would just keep coming, wave after wave, ruining his peaceful life.
At that point, he would have no choice but to roll up his sleeves and permanently scrub the universe clean of these locusts.
And to achieve a true, permanent wipeout across multiple dimensions and timelines, he would have to rely on his ultimate trump cards. Only the Three Phantasm Gods residing within his genetic database—Alien X, Clockwork, and Terminus—possessed the absolute reality-warping and temporal authority required to erase the Vreedle network at its conceptual roots.
While he was more than capable of swatting these bugs, the mere thought of having to exert that much effort left Klein feeling deeply disgusted.
"I should just kill them," Klein muttered, seemingly talking to himself as he stared blankly at the wall. "And while I'm at it, I might as well just purge the entire Vreedle Family from this universe. Save myself the future headache."
Seriously, buddy?!
Octagon and Rhomboid's eyes bugged out of their skulls. That ruthless?! Are we just trash to you? You're just gonna clean us out like taking out the garbage?! And the ENTIRE universe's worth?!
The brothers' jaws dropped so low they practically unhinged, gaping wide enough to comfortably swallow a soccer ball. It wasn't that they doubted Klein's combat prowess, but his casual declaration sounded a bit too fantastical, didn't it? Erasing an omnipresent galactic plague in one afternoon?
But then their sluggish minds replayed the footage of Klein's previous battles. They swallowed hard. They had to admit, this lazy teenager sitting in front of them was unequivocally the most terrifyingly powerful entity they had ever encountered in their miserable lives.
Even though their stubborn instincts screamed that wiping out the entire Vreedle network was a logistical impossibility, a tiny, terrified voice in the back of their minds whispered, But what if he actually can?
Klein couldn't care less about the existential dread spiraling within the brothers' heads. His decision was made. He raised his left arm, the sleek, menacing faceplate of the Another Omnitrix flaring to life with a crimson glow. His fingers hovered over the dial, preparing to lock in the genetic signature for Terminus and end this farce once and for all.
"Ship!~"
Suddenly, the heavy wooden door of the warehouse-like room was nudged open. A small, black-and-green, vaguely dog-like creature scurried inside, bounding across the concrete floor with happy little hops.
Completely oblivious to the heavy, murderous tension in the room, Ship excitedly trotted right up to Klein, hopped onto his boots, and began affectionately rubbing its sleek, techno-organic head against his leg.
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