Naruto opened his eyes and saw nothing.
No walls. No floor. No sky. Just a black so deep it felt alive like it breathed with him, curling and pulsing at the edges of his vision. The void swallowed even the sound of his own heartbeat, leaving only his breathing, ragged and too loud in the silence.
The air, if there was air, was heavy like it clung to his skin.
Somewhere far away, a drip of water echoed once… then was gone.
"Are you proud of yourself?"
The voice cut through the darkness like a blade.
Naruto turned toward it, but there was no direction to turn, just spinning in nothing. His chest tightened, the question burrowing under his skin before he could even answer.
It came again, closer this time. Familiar in a way that made the back of his neck prickle.
"Are you?"
And then he saw him.
A boy stood barefoot a few paces away. Blond hair spiking wildly, shadows falling across his face. Small hands balled into fists. Same blue eyes Naruto had seen in mirrors all his life, but younger. Eight, maybe nine. And those eyes weren't kind. They weren't innocent.
They were cold.
Naruto's throat was dry. "…What…?"
"You tore through half the city like a rabid dog."
The boy didn't raise his voice, and he didn't need to. Each word landed with a weight that made Naruto's shoulders stiffen.
"Do you even know how many people you killed?"
Naruto's jaw clenched. "I didn't.."
He stopped himself, heat crawling up his spine. "I was defending my friend. He was.. Mark was about to die. I did what I had to do."
The boy tilted his head slightly, like a teacher humoring a bad excuse.
"No. You did what you wanted to do."
The darkness stirred, rippling outward in silent waves. Shapes began to form in the void. Thin slashes of light, jagged and shifting. Naruto realized they weren't shapes at all, but moments.
Memories to be exact.
They flickered like scenes on cracked glass.
Naruto's fist smashing into Battle Beast's jaw, the shockwave hurling the lion-man backward through a high-rise. Concrete sheared away in chunks the size of cars.
On the street below, a mother screamed, clutching her child against her chest. A slab of debris punched through the hood of a parked sedan beside them. She wasn't fast enough to shield the boy from the smaller chunks that followed.
Naruto hurling Battle Beast into the side of a city bus. Metal crumpled like paper, glass spraying out in glittering arcs. Inside, passengers slammed into seats, into each other. Someone hit the floor and didn't move.
Their fight crashing onto a rooftop, shattering its support beams.
A man standing on the fire escape below looked up just in time to see the structure buckle. His scream was lost under the roar of collapsing metal.
Naruto's breath came shallow as he remembered the fight. The heat, the rage, the singular focus on crushing the enemy in front of him, but not this. Not the screams. Not the blood. Not the way the shockwaves rippled outward, past the battle, into the lives of people who had nothing to do with it.
The visions blinked out. The dark returned, heavier now.
The boy's voice was quieter when he spoke again, but it pressed down like stone.
"You weren't paying attention. You weren't fighting to save anyone. You were consumed. And in your rage, you killed them."
Naruto's hands hung useless at his sides. He couldn't lift his head. Couldn't find the words. The images replayed behind his eyelids until his knees nearly gave out.
The boy stepped closer. Naruto could feel the heat of him now like a furnace banked just under the skin.
"To whom much has been given, much…"
Naruto's lips moved on instinct, the words tasting like ash. "…much will be expected."
"And yet you never learn," the boy said. His voice didn't echo, but it carried, final and cold.
He turned away and walked into the dark.
Naruto tried to call out, but his voice caught in his throat. The black rose up like a tide, swallowing the boy whole and then him.
Naruto woke up with a sharp inhale.
The first thing he felt was the weight in his chest not from pain, but from something heavier.
Then came the rest: the sterile white ceiling overhead, the faint hum of a fluorescent light, the soft beep of a monitor somewhere to his right. The air smelled of antiseptic and something faintly metallic. His ribs ached with every breath.
But before his eyes adjusted, before he could make sense of the room, he felt it, that quiet, deliberate stillness of someone else nearby. A presence. Watching.
His gaze found it in the far corner.
Nolan.
He stood near the window, back partially to the room, arms crossed, his shadow stretching long against the wall. His face was unreadable but not hostile, but heavy with something held back.
He didn't move, didn't speak, just kept his eyes somewhere out over the city.
Naruto looked away from him first.
Across the room, Mark sat propped up in bed. His head was wrapped in fresh white bandages, face still bruised but not as swollen as before.
He was alive. Debbie sat close beside him, holding his hand, her thumb tracing small circles against his knuckles. Relief softened her tired smile.
Mark noticed Naruto before Debbie did.
"Hey," he rasped, voice low and worn. "Guess you made it too."
Naruto swallowed. His throat felt raw, like speaking might tear something open. "…Yeah."
Debbie turned to him then, her gaze warmer than he expected. "You saved his life," she said softly. "You both… you came back."
Naruto's eyes stayed on Mark. Awake. Breathing. Talking. And yet..
The boy from the darkness tried to push through. The accusing eyes. The flashes of falling debris. The mother's scream. The bus crumpling around the bodies inside. His stomach knotted.
He shoved it down. Buried it under the fact that Mark was still here. He had done some good.
He managed a small nod. "Good."
Mark gave him a faint smile, but there was a flicker of something else behind it. Gratitude mixed with quiet unease, like he'd seen something in Naruto during the fight that he couldn't quite name.
Naruto felt Nolan's presence again, steady and silent. And beneath it, a truth he couldn't ignore: He was sure Nolan had been here when Mark was fighting Machine Head. Close enough to know what was happening. Close enough to hear the fight.
And yet Mark had been alone.
Naruto didn't look at him again. Not now. Not while Debbie and Mark were here. But the weight in his chest shifted, reshaping itself into something sharper. A question that wouldn't stay buried.
Later, he told himself as the door swung open.
"Naruto!" Eve's voice broke mid-sentence as she froze in the doorway, eyes locking on him. The tension in her shoulders vanished, replaced by a rush of relief so sharp it almost looked painful. She crossed the room in three long strides, ignoring the chair, crouching at his bedside.
"God, Naruto…" Her voice was low but urgent, like she was afraid he'd disappear if she blinked. Her gaze swept over the bruises, and the faint burns along his jaw. "You look like hell."
Naruto managed a faint smirk. "I feel worse."
Eve's eyes didn't soften. "Don't joke like that." She stayed there for a moment, just watching him breathe, as if confirming for herself he still could. Then, softer, "You nearly scared me to death."
Naruto glanced past her for a moment, catching Nolan's reflection in the window glass, still silent, still watching.
When he looked back at Eve, he only said, "I'm still here."
But the words felt heavier than they should have.
The silence in the room pressed in, heavier than the IV, heavier than the ache in his ribs. It wasn't just the weight of what he'd done. It was knowing that somewhere in the same city, people who hadn't been lucky enough to walk away would never know why they'd died.
Only that they'd been caught in the storm.
And that storm had been him.
The wind tugged at Naruto's jacket as they hovered over the skyline, the cold sharper this high up. Both wore street clothes, stripped of masks and colors.
Below them, the city stretched in every direction, a grid of golden light spilling into the horizon. Headlights streamed like veins through the streets, the occasional wail of a siren cutting through the hum of distant life.
They stayed quiet at first, listening to the city breathe beneath them.
Mark broke the silence.
"I'm glad you're okay," he said, glancing over. His voice carried a thin edge of relief with something heavier underneath. "For a while there, I didn't…" He trailed off, shaking his head with a faint, uneven smile. "Yeah. Just glad."
Naruto didn't return the smile. His eyes stayed fixed on the horizon, the orange glow bleeding into the night sky.
"Why didn't you ask me for help?"
Mark blinked. "What?"
"Before you left school," Naruto said evenly, his tone cutting through the wind. "You knew something was coming. You didn't tell me. Why?"
Mark's gaze dropped to the streets far below. His jaw tightened. "I don't know.. I thought I could handle it on my own."
Naruto didn't push further, but he didn't look away either. The air between them felt heavier than the night around them.
Mark's breath left him slow, his words quieter now, almost lost to the wind. "I feel like I have to be a hundred different people all the time. Mark the boyfriend. Mark the friend. Mark the son. Invincible the hero." His hands flexed, curling slightly as his knuckles whitened.
"And lately…" He hesitated, the silence stretching long enough for the city's hum to fill it. "…lately I've been failing at all of them. I was just.." He broke off, shaking his head. "I was tired of disappointing everyone. I thought maybe if I could take down Machine Head, do something right on my own, it'd make up for the rest."
Naruto studied him for a long moment. He wanted to say Mark was wrong, that saving someone was worth the cost, but flashes of the fight with the lion-faced brute cut through his mind. Glass raining down like shrapnel. Screams swallowed by collapsing steel. People who hadn't walked away.
His voice was quieter when he spoke. "It's okay to rely on others."
Mark's brow furrowed slightly, caught between doubt and wanting to believe.
Naruto's voice softened further, almost lost to the wind. "You don't have to do it alone."
And in his mind, he saw her. His mother. Her voice reaching him across light years of space.
You don't have to do it alone.
Naruto blinked, and the vision dissolved into the present. The endless skyline, the cold, the sound of air moving past his ears. Mark was still there, hovering beside him, waiting.
Neither of them spoke after that.
The wind filled the silence, carrying it out into the night.
After a while, Mark exhaled, his voice softer now. "Amber forgave me, by the way. Eve told her I got hit by a bus." He gave a crooked smile. "It does help that I kind of look like I did get hit by a bus."
Naruto smirked faintly but didn't answer.
Donald stepped into the elevator, the stainless-steel doors sliding shut with a low hiss that seemed to seal the world above away.
He pressed his palm to the biometric scanner. A red beam traced across his hand, then shifted green. The panel unlocked, and he keyed in a long sequence from memory
A sharp beep confirmed the code. The elevator jolted once and began its descent.
He passed levels most of the building's staff didn't even know existed, sub-basements buried under sub-basements and still kept going. Reinforced bulkheads flashed by in the dim light, each one thicker than the last. At least two of the floors they passed were "dead floors," nothing but empty space meant to throw off anyone tracking the shaft's depth.
The ride was silent except for the steady whumm-whumm of the motors.
Donald adjusted his tie, though it hadn't shifted.
When the doors finally slid open, the air that rushed in was cooler with the faint chemical tang of disinfectant layered over something metallic. The lighting here was harsh, fluorescent strips running along the ceiling in sterile white lines. Shadows had no room to hide.
He stepped out, his footsteps clicking against the polished floor. The sound carried down the hallway and bounced back to him. The walls were reinforced steel, painted white but still showing the faint seams of their plating. Cameras tracked him as he moved, each one following his head, his hands.
At the far end, behind a thick, sealed door, was the lab.
Inside, a scientist was hunched over a workstation, gloved hands steady as he manipulated a thin beam of green laser light across a petri dish smeared with blood. The beam cut through the sample in microscopic arcs, making it shimmer briefly before fading.
The man's brow was deeply furrowed behind the protective goggles, his posture tight with concentration.
Donald stood in the doorway. "Any progress?"
The scientist didn't look up. He let out a short, humorless scoff, the kind that carried its own answer.
Donald stepped further into the room. "Jesus… is it really that bad?"
Finally, the man straightened, pulling the goggles up to his forehead. He looked like he hadn't slept in days.
"We've tried everything," the scientist said, rubbing his temples. "Drugs. Viruses. Bacteria. Prions. Even nanobots and radioactives. Viltrumite cells don't give a damn. They adapt. They repair. They ignore anything we throw at them. It's almost like they're.."
INVINCIBLE
The scientist trailed off, then swiveled toward a side monitor. With a few quick keystrokes, he pulled up two high-resolution cell images, magnified to the point where every fiber, every membrane was visible.
"This is the weird part," he said, tapping one image. "Maelstrom's blood. And this.." he tapped the other, "is Invincible's."
Donald leaned in.
"They're a perfect match," the scientist continued. "Not close. Not 'cousin DNA.' Identical down to the last strand. Almost like they're from the same…"
"Species?" Donald finished for him, voice flat, but his eyes stayed on the screen.
The scientist just nodded, lips pressed into a thin line.
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