[Unknown Facility, Year 2000]
Consciousness returned to Ethan Carter the way light returned after a power outage — sudden, disorienting, and unwelcome.
He groaned as awareness flooded back into his limbs. His head throbbed with a dull, rhythmic ache, and the air around him carried the cold, metallic bite of rust and damp concrete.
His eyes opened slowly, adjusting to the dim, sickly light that barely managed to push back the shadows of the room.
It's a cell.
Cracked concrete walls, deeply scored with old scratches that told stories he had no interest in hearing.
A door made of corroded iron bars, solid and unmoving. The kind of place that existed specifically to remind whoever was inside of it that they had no say in anything anymore.
'Of course,' Ethan thought flatly. 'Of course it's a cell.'
"Damn you, ROB."
He said it quietly, without heat. The words came out more like an exhale than a curse. He had not wanted another life. He had said so clearly, directly, and without ambiguity.
And what had that gotten him? Dropped into something worse than the existence he had willingly been prepared to leave behind.
He pushed himself upright with difficulty. His arms trembled from the effort and his body felt hollow — not merely tired, but emptied out, as though whatever had been living inside this frame before had not been eating or sleeping or existing with any real commitment.
When he finally got his bearings and looked down at himself and his stomach sank.
His body is thin. Shockingly so. His shirt hung off his shoulders in tatters, barely a garment anymore, and his arms beneath it were all bone and stretched skin.
The outline of his ribs was visible. His hands shook slightly just from the act of holding them up to examine them.
He thought. 'A mildly determined child could finish me.'
"What the hell is this?" he muttered, turning his hands over slowly.
Then the warmth came.
It started without warning — a gentle, spreading heat that bloomed in the center of his chest and radiated outward like sunlight breaking through storm cover. It moved through him in a wave, reaching his shoulders, his arms, his legs.
His veins lit up with it. It did not hurt. It was, if anything, the most comfortable sensation he had ever felt — steady, purposeful, like something inside him was recognizing what it was supposed to be and correcting it.
Then his body began to change.
The frailness dissolved. His arms thickened and filled, muscle layering over bone with quiet efficiency.
His chest broadened. The hollowed contours of his malnourished frame filled and shaped themselves — ribs disappearing beneath sculpted muscle, shoulders squaring, legs reinforcing with a density of power he had never known even in his original life.
The transformation lasted only seconds. It felt like being rebuilt from the inside out.
Ethan looked down at himself when it was over.
The person staring back at him in the dark reflection of the iron bars was not the person who had woken up sixty seconds ago.
This body was flawless in the way that things crafted with divine precision were flawless — not excessive, not theatrical, just absolutely correct. Every line of him spoke of capability.
He clenched his fists. Power hummed through them like a current.
'Insane,' he thought. 'This is completely insane.'
Then the memories arrived.
They came without ceremony, flooding his mind in organized waves — a life that was not his original one but now belonged to him entirely. His name was still Ethan Carter. His parents in this world were dead, gone for years. He had been alone for a long time. And the world outside this cell was—The Marvel Universe.
"Oh, you have got to be shitting me."
He sat with that for exactly two seconds.
Mutants were real. Tony Stark existed. The X-Men were out there somewhere living their complicated, dramatic lives.
And he — the previous version of him, the Ethan who had grown up in this world — had been born a mutant.
Not a particularly impressive one. A mild regenerative ability, slightly above baseline, nothing that would have earned him a second glance from anyone important.
But it had been enough to make him a target.
The memories came with weight attached to them. Experimented on. Tormented. Locked away with clinical detachment and institutional indifference by people who had decided that what he was made him property rather than a person.
And from the guards' conversations he had absorbed through those memories, he knew one more thing.
The year was 2000.
'Great,' Ethan thought, his jaw tightening. 'Dropped into a universe full of gods and monsters, in a secret facility, twenty-four years before I might have any idea what I'm doing. Fantastic planning, ROB. Really.'
'Fucking asshole.'
He didn't want to push the cursing any further. If Rob heard it and took offense, there was no telling what he might do—send him to a world like Berserk, or worse, Warhammer, without his current power.
That was a nightmare he had no intention of facing, so he swallowed the bitterness and moved on.
He stood, rolling the tension from his shoulders, and that was when he noticed it.
Resting beside him on the cell floor, as though it had always been there and simply waited for him to be ready, was a pocket watch.
Silver and Ornate. The engravings that covered its surface were intricate enough to suggest they had taken an inhuman amount of time or patience, spiraling patterns that seemed almost organic, like something that had grown rather than been carved.
The second hand inside the face was frozen, the watch perfectly, absolutely still — not wound down, not broken, but suspended, as though whatever governed time within it had simply chosen to pause.
He turned it over. The back bore symbols he did not recognize, each one glowing faintly with a deep, quiet blue light that pulsed in slow rhythm, like breathing.
He reached out and touched it.
The voice hit him the moment his fingers made contact — not through his ears but directly into his mind, clear and unapologetically cheerful.
"For my amusement, I sent you here. Consider it a challenge! Oh, and that watch? It can let you travel to other worlds — but you'll need an enormous amount of energy to use it. Right now? It's empty. Good luck! Hahaha!"
The message ended with more laughter.
Ethan sat very still, the watch in his hand, staring at nothing.
Then he looped the chain around his neck and tucked the watch against his chest, his expression perfectly calm in the way that expressions go calm when the emotion behind them is too large to put anywhere useful.
"That bastard," he said quietly.
A slow breath left him. He looked at his hands — these new hands, steady and strong. He looked at the rusted cell around him. He looked at the watch resting against his sternum.
Before ROB's gift had reshaped him, the thought of simply ending things had been present at the edge of his mind — a grim and weary option for a man who had not wanted to be here in the first place.
But the moment the Fountain of Youth had moved through him, something in that thinking dissolved. It was not that the thought was suppressed or overridden. It simply no longer fit.
His body had changed, yes — but his mind and soul had changed alongside it. Whatever the Divine Spring had done, it had rewritten something fundamental.
He did not want to die but wanted to know what he could become.
He had been informed that he was immortal, that he could only grow stronger, that every opponent he faced would push him further along whatever trajectory the spring had set him on.
Some part of him — quieter than sarcasm, more genuine than irritation — wanted to see if that was true. Wanted to find out exactly how far this body and this existence could go.
'Life has screwed me over again,' he thought. 'Apparently that's just what life does.'
His eyes settled on the iron door.
'Fine. Let's see what I can do about it.'
Ethan crossed the cell in four steps and stopped in front of the door. He studied it briefly — solid, reinforced, the kind of door that did not open for people who knocked politely.
He pulled back his fist and hit it.
The impact rang through the cell and his arm and the empty hallway beyond. The door did not move.
He stared at his hand, then at the door. 'So that's where we are.'
He hit it again. And again. And again. And again.
His knuckles split. Blood welled up across them immediately and then, just as immediately, sealed shut.
The skin knit itself back together between strikes, smooth and clean, and each time it did, Ethan felt — not just healed, but refined. Something in the tissue was remembering the impact, processing it, building against it.
"Oh." A genuine smirk moved across his face. "That's actually pretty cool to watch happen in real time."
He had known intellectually, from the flood of information ROB had given him, that his regeneration now operated at a level incomparably beyond the mild healing his original mutant ability had provided.
Knowing it and watching it happen to himself were different things. There was something almost academic about the fascination — he noted, with detached interest, that his thoughts were already processing faster than they had moments ago.
His stance shifted without him thinking about it. His shoulder angle corrected. His hips rotated into the punch with more efficiency each time.
The dents in the door grew larger and his body was already adapting.
A voice crackled from a speaker mounted in the corner of the cell, beneath a camera whose red indicator light blinked steadily in the dark.
"Cease immediately. Continued resistance will result in severe consequences."
Ethan did not pause. "Consequences?" A dry, short sound left him that was almost a laugh. "Yeah? Bring it."
He drove his fist into the door one final time.
The reinforced iron buckled. The hinges screamed. The door flew off its frame and crashed into the hallway beyond with a sound like a cannon going off in an enclosed space, skidding across concrete before coming to a stop.
Ethan stepped through the gap.
A dozen guards were waiting, arranged in the hallway with batons and tasers and knives, their posture tight with readiness.
Overhead, a different voice came through the intercom, "Subject 18 has undergone a secondary mutation. It appears to be granting superhuman strength. Restrain him immediately."
The guards moved.
Ethan rolled his shoulders and exhaled. The dim hallway lights caught the bare lines of his transformed physique, and the shadows carved it into something that did not look like it belonged in a cell.
'Old me would have been terrified,' he thought. 'I would have backed up against the wall and tried to talk his way out of this.'
But he was not the old version of himself anymore.
The first guard came in with a knife — a direct lunge, committed and fast. Ethan sidestepped on reflex, his body moving before his conscious mind had finished analyzing the trajectory. The blade sliced across his ribs in a thin, clean line and blood followed.
Ethan looked down at the wound.
He watched it seal. Watched the skin draw back together like a zipper closing, smooth and immediate, leaving nothing behind.
A baton came at his head from the left.
He ducked, but not fast enough. The impact rattled through his skull and staggered him a half-step sideways.
"Shit," he muttered, adjusting his balance. "Still not used to fighting."
Two more guards closed in from different angles simultaneously — one driving a punch toward his midsection, the other going for his arms. Ethan twisted his torso and let the first attack slide past his stomach, but the second man caught his wrist and locked on.
The guard's grip was firm and confident.
It was a mistake.
Something in Ethan's body responded to the restraint the way water responded to a container — by finding the shape that worked against it.
His movements became fluid without him consciously directing them. He turned into the grip rather than against it, using the leverage the guard had inadvertently given him, and wrenched the man's arm at an angle it was not built to accommodate.
The crack of bone was loud in the narrow hallway.
The guard's scream followed it down the corridor as he collapsed, curling around his broken arm.
Ethan had already moved on.
A knife entered his shoulder from behind. He felt it — not as pain, but as information. Pressure, depth, angle. There was sensation in it, some ghost of what pain was supposed to feel like, but it carried no urgency, no distress. It was simply data.
He reached up, closed his hand around the guard's wrist, and pulled. The blade went deeper into his own flesh, and he watched the shock move through the man's face — the complete inability to process what he was seeing. Ethan used that moment of paralysis to twist the knife free of the man's grip.
Then he drove it into the man's throat and the guard folded.
Ethan stood over him for a moment, the sounds of the remaining guards filling the hallway around him.
He had expected something to surface — some tremor of regret, some flash of the moral weight of taking a life for the first time. He searched himself for it with genuine curiosity.
There was nothing. Not suppressed, not buried but simply absent.
Whatever the Fountain of Youth had rewritten in him extended to this as well. His nervous system had adapted. His psychology had adapted. He was not cruel, he realized — he was simply unburdened by a reaction his body had decided was not useful.
He looked up at the remaining guards with his lips curved.
"So," he said, "who's next?"
The guards hesitated. Half a second — just long enough.
Ethan moved and he was faster now than he had been sixty seconds ago.
The adaptation was continuous, incremental, building on itself with every exchange. One guard raised a baton to block — Ethan caught it mid-swing, used the man's own momentum to pull him forward, and drove a knee into his ribs. Bones gave way. The man went down gasping.
Another came from behind. Ethan felt the attack arrive before it landed, his reflexes already oriented toward it before his eyes confirmed it. He turned, took hold of the man's head with both hands, and slammed it into the concrete wall beside him.
The wall won.
Two guards remained. One of them raised a taser with hands that were not entirely steady.
Ethan tilted his head. 'They really think that's going to help.'
The electricity hit him in a full surge and moved through his body in a crackling wave. For a brief moment, the sensation was sharp and present — and then it simply wasn't. His cells found the current and processed it the way they had processed every other force tonight. The tingling faded. The adaptation completed itself.
He smiled. "Thanks for the charge."
He closed the distance in a single step.
One strike to the chest. The guard's ribs caved inward and he dropped without another sound.
The last one ran.
Ethan reached out and caught him by the back of the neck before he made it three steps.
He felt the man struggling in his grip, heard the desperate, animal sound of someone who understood exactly what was happening, whose eyes had gone wide and glassy with the kind of terror that bypassed thought entirely.
Ethan held him there for a moment.
'So this is what it feels like,' he thought quietly. Not pride, not cruelty. Just recognition. 'This is what power actually feels like, when there's nothing on the other side of it.'
His grip tightened and the struggling stopped.
He lowered the body carefully and let it rest against the wall. Then he stood in the hallway surrounded by twelve men who were no longer a problem and looked at his bloodied hands.
"I just killed them all," he said, to no one in particular.
The words carried no horror. They were simply accurate.
What surprised him was the other thing — quieter, underneath the calm.
A pull in his chest that wanted more of this. Not the killing, but the testing of himself against resistance.
The sensation of his body answering every challenge thrown at it and coming out the other side stronger.
The knowledge that somewhere out there were opponents who would push him further than this, and the beginning of something that felt almost like anticipation at the thought.
He let out a slow breath and reined it in. 'Let's take this slowly and enjoy this life properly.'
He stepped over the fallen guards and picked up a jacket from the nearest one, pulling it over his ruined clothes. It was loose but functional. Good enough.
The intercom crackled overhead. The clinical voice returned, and this time there was something in its tone that had not been there before — a careful, controlled edge that might have been surprise.
"Subject 18 has exceeded initial expectations. Deploy reinforcements immediately."
Ethan glanced up at the camera in the corner. His memories surfaced the designation they had given him here, the number they had used in place of his name for however long he had been in this facility.
Subject 18.
He thought about the people who had decided that was a sufficient replacement for a person's identity. Who had run their experiments and administered their torments with institutional patience, filing reports and reviewing results and treating the previous Ethan's suffering as a data set.
'I'm going to find every single one of them,' he thought, with perfect calm.
He stretched his fingers and turned toward the deeper hallway, where the sounds of reinforcements were already beginning to echo from somewhere further in the facility.
His eyes settled into something quiet and certain. "Good," he said. "Let's see how much stronger I can get."