He was already moving before he'd made a conscious decision to.
The Omnitrix was warm under his fingers as he ducked into the nearest alley, the smoke column visible above the rooftops, black and growing. He hit the dial and scrolled. His mind ran the options fast — strength, firepower, raw toughness — and landed on speed. Whatever was burning, people would be trapped. Speed was the variable that saved the most lives in the least time.
He stopped on XLR8.
" Yeah. Let's go."
He slammed the dial gently.
The transformation was a full-body current — his frame streamlining, legs reshaping into something built for velocity, the helmet locking into place with a sharp click as his visor sharpened the world into crystalline focus. The alley snapped back into view, crisper than before, every detail precise.
He rolled his weight forward onto the balls of his feet, felt the frictionless glide of them, and launched.
The world didn't slow down so much as rearrange itself. Pedestrians became statues mid-stride. Cars drifted through intersections like they were moving through syrup. He threaded between them without thinking, his body processing the geometry of it automatically, the Kineceleran instincts layered over his own. He wasn't even at full speed — he could feel the ceiling above him, somewhere much higher — and it already felt like flying.
Three blocks dissolved in seconds. He stopped at the corner of the scene with the same fluid precision that had always distinguished XLR8 from blunter speedsters — no skidding, no drag, just a clean cessation of motion.
The building was a five-story apartment block. The lower floors had taken the worst of it — whatever caused the blast had torn through the foundation, exposed rebar jutting from crumbled concrete like broken ribs. Fire had claimed the gap and was climbing fast, floor by floor, feeding on everything it touched.
Morning crowd. People frozen on the sidewalk across the street, phones already out. No fire department yet — just sirens in the distance, still a minute away at least.
One minute. That's a long time.
He didn't announce himself. He just moved.
Inside, the building was a different world — heat pressing from every surface, smoke hanging low and thick in the corridors, visibility dropping fast. His visor cut through it, mapping the space in real time. He listened past the roar of the fire and caught what he needed: breathing, coughing, a child crying somewhere above him.
He started on the top floor and worked down.
A woman in a nightrobe, dark skin grey with ash, barely registered being lifted before she was on the sidewalk outside, blinking at the morning sky. A middle-aged man materialized beside her a second later, doubled over coughing. Then a teenager. An older woman. A couple who'd been sheltering in a bathroom, soaked from the taps they'd turned on to buy themselves time.
He moved without stopping. The heat didn't bother XLR8 the way it would have bothered him — the biology ran hot, thrived under pressure. What bothered him was the arithmetic. Every second in a room was a calculation: who was reachable, who wasn't, how much time the structure had left.
Third floor. Two kids — young, maybe five and six — huddled beside a man pinned under a collapsed ceiling beam. The man was breathing, barely. The kids weren't hurt but they were terrified, pressed into the corner with their arms over their heads.
Ben crouched in front of them first. XLR8's voice came out as a sharp rasp — alien, nothing like he intended — and they screamed. He winced and stopped trying to talk. Just scooped them up carefully, kept his speed low enough not to hurt them, and had them on the street in four seconds flat. A paramedic who'd just arrived caught them automatically, his face going blank with shock as they appeared from nowhere.
Back inside. The beam took real effort — XLR8 wasn't built for brute strength — but he got the angle right, shifted it enough, and got the man out with a minute to spare before the floor above groaned and dropped.
Seventeen people on the street. He counted without meaning to.
He also counted the ones he'd passed on the lower floors, too close to the original blast. He didn't stop moving when he saw them. There was nothing to stop for. But he noted every face, the way you note something you know you'll carry.
The fire was still going. The building wasn't a threat to collapse immediately but the adjacent structures were close — close enough that if the fire jumped, this got much worse very fast.
He stood in the street and thought about a comic he'd read once. Superman. The Flash. The trick where a speedster rotates their arms fast enough to generate a vortex — deprive the fire of oxygen, smother it from the outside in. He'd always wondered if that was physically plausible or just comic book logic.
Well, he thought, planting his feet. Only one way to find out.
He started slow, built the rotation, felt the air begin to move in response. The crowd backed up without being told to. The vortex formed — both arms, twin columns of displaced air pulling inward — and he pushed harder, the hum building into something he could feel in his chest even through XLR8's physiology.
The flames guttered. Pulled toward the vortex rather than outward. Starved.
He gave it ten more seconds and stopped.
The building smoldered. The fire was out.
The street was completely silent for a moment — that particular silence that only happens when a crowd of people all forget to speak at once. Then the sirens arrived, fire trucks and police cars swinging onto the block, and everyone seemed to remember how to move again.
Ben stood in the middle of the street and let himself breathe.
Seventeen people. He kept coming back to that number. It felt simultaneously like a lot and not enough, which he suspected was just what this felt like — what it was always going to feel like. He'd read enough comics to know that the heroes who stopped feeling that weight were the ones who eventually became something else entirely.
The phones were still up. Dozens of them, pointed at him. A black-and-white raptor-like figure standing in the smoke with a glowing green emblem on his chest — he didn't need to imagine what that footage was going to look like online in an hour.
Time to go.
He took one last look at the survivors clustered around the paramedics — wrapped in shock blankets, being helped to ambulances, alive — and then he was gone, a blur that turned a corner and vanished before anyone could decide to follow.
Behind him, the crowd erupted.
"What the hell was that thing?"
"Did you get it on video?"
"I got it, I got all of it—"
A older man near the back watched the empty street where the blur had disappeared. He'd seen a lot in sixty years in New York. He wasn't sure what category this fell into yet.
"Whatever it was," he said, to no one in particular, "it put the fire out."
He left it at that.
---
Ben ducked into the nearest subway entrance and kept moving until the fluorescent light thinned out and the platform noise faded behind him. He found an alcove in the tunnel wall — maintenance access, long abandoned — pressed his back against the cold concrete, and let the Omnitrix revert him.
The green flash was brief. Then just him, in a grimy subway tunnel, breathing hard.
He slid down the wall until he was sitting, elbows on his knees, and stayed there for a minute.
The faces came anyway. The ones on the lower floors. He'd made the call in motion — too close to the blast origin, structural collapse imminent, no viable extraction window — and the math had been correct, but correct wasn't the same as okay. He understood that now in a way he hadn't when it was abstract. You could make the right call and still have to live with it.
"Come on," he muttered, and slapped his own cheek hard enough to sting. The sharp sensation pulled him back to the present. Seventeen people. Focus on seventeen people.
He'd been operating on instinct and adrenaline. That was fine for a first run but it wasn't good enough — he'd felt the gap himself mid-rescue. XLR8's accelerated cognition was there, available, but he hadn't been consciously using it. He'd been running fast and thinking at human speed. Wasted.
And Brainstorm. He could have transformed first — seconds of Brainstorm's processing would have given him a complete structural map, an optimal extraction sequence, a calculated approach to the injured who he'd had to leave. He'd gone straight to speed without asking whether speed was actually the right tool. He could have done the same with XLR8 if he had a clear mind.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Use the brain before the legs. Basic."
Lesson filed. He stood up, dusted off his jeans, and listened. Distant rumble of a train, two platforms over. No footsteps. No one had followed him down.
He pulled up the Omnitrix display and scrolled. He needed to move — get clear of the area before anyone thought to check subway entrances near the scene. Something that could get him out without being seen.
He paused on a silhouette he recognized immediately. Moth wings. Spectral frame.
He almost said going ghost on reflex — the words just appeared in his head fully formed, a childhood habit from a different cartoon — then caught himself and smiled despite everything. Wrong ghost. He had his own now.
He slammed the dial.
The cold came first, a mist escaping his lips as his body dissolved into something translucent. The tattered, dark wings spread wide, jagged blue light pulsing along their edges, and gravity became a suggestion rather than a rule. He rose through the tunnel ceiling like smoke through cloth — intangible, silent, weightless.
Big Chill.
He emerged above the rooftops into the midmorning sky and just... floated for a moment, the city spread out below him, tiny and loud and indifferent. From up here the smoke column from the fire was a dark smear drifting east, already thinning. Emergency vehicles clustered around the building like insects. Footage of the last twenty minutes was probably already on every local news site.
He turned north and flew, slow and invisible, and let himself think.
---
S.H.I.E.L.D. — Undisclosed Location
The footage wasn't good. Fury had seen bad footage before — grainy, shaky, half-obscured — and had still pulled everything he needed from it. This was worse than bad. This was a blur with a glowing symbol on its chest, and even the traffic camera angles couldn't give him more than that.
He watched it again anyway.
The figure moved through the building systematically — not panicked, not random. It had a sequence. Top floor first, working down, extracting civilians with a speed that made the timestamp counter on the footage look broken. Then it came outside, stood in the street, and spun up twin vortexes that snuffed the fire like a candle.
Then it was gone. One frame it was there, the next the street was empty.
"Satellite?" he said.
"Lost it at the subway entrance on 46th." Coulson's voice was steady, his hands clasped behind his back. "Thermal, optical, both. Whatever it went into, it either went underground or it stopped being something our systems can track."
"Or both."
"Yes sir. Or both."
Fury straightened up from the monitor. "Banner situation?"
Coulson considered it. "Maybe, but it doesn't fit the profile. Banner is reactive — his transformations are triggered by external stress, and the results are destructive first. This was the opposite. Deliberate, precise, contained. Whatever this is, it chose to help."
"Choosing to help and being safe to have around aren't the same thing." Fury turned from the screen. "What's the symbol?"
"Unknown. No match in any database — terrestrial or recovered extraterrestrial. The hourglass configuration is consistent across every angle we have, green bioluminescence, appears integrated rather than attached." Coulson paused. "It's not a weapon signature we recognize."
"Which means it could be one we don't." Fury paced the length of the room, slow and deliberate. "Enhanced, alien, or tech — I want all three lines running simultaneously. I want origin, motivation, and capability. And I want to know if there are others." He stopped at the edge of the room. "Romanoff."
From the far end of the room, Natasha uncrossed her legs and leaned forward out of the shadow she'd been sitting in for the last ten minutes. She'd been there when Fury arrived. He hadn't acknowledged her until now, which meant he'd been thinking carefully about what he was going to ask.
"The footage has gone viral in about an hour," she said, before he could frame the question. "It's already on three separate social media platforms. By tonight it'll have a name."
"Then we're already behind." He met her eyes. "I want eyes on this. Quietly. If it surfaces again, I want someone there before the cameras are."
" That a little hard to do when you can't see it, " She said with a small smile as she stood up, " I'll do want a can too try and locate the target. "
The door closed behind her without a sound.
Fury turned back to the monitor. The frozen frame showed the figure standing in the street — slider, alien, the green hourglass emblem bright against its chest — in the moment before it vanished. On the desk behind him, the Avengers Initiative file sat where it had been sitting for weeks, edges softened from handling.
He didn't look at it. Not yet.
But he didn't move it either.
---
////
Big Chill
General Information
Species:
Necrofriggian
Home World:
Kylmyss
DNA source:
Unknown
Body:
Humanoid Moth
Abilities:
Cryokinesis
Freeze Breath
Ice Generation
Freeze Touch
Flight
Temperature Resistance
Intangibility
Strong Bite
Space Survivability
Underwater Breathing
Enhanced Strength
Enhanced Durability
Enhanced Agility
Appreance:
Big Chill is a blue and black insect humanoid alien with navy-blue wings, green eyes, and dark blue fur on the top of his shoulders to the bottom of his thighs. Big Chill has light blue spots on his forelimbs, antennas, claws, and head.
The Omnitrix symbol is located on his chest.