Alex woke up to sunlight stabbing through his eyelids.
He groaned and tried to turn, only to feel something hard and uneven digging into his back. definitely not his mattress. It was rough and cold.
He forced his eyes open.
Concrete. Broken, cracked concrete, dust stuck to his skin. A chunk of twisted metal lay a few meters away, half melted. The air smelled like burned fuel, blood and salt water.
For a second his brain just… stalled.
Then everything from last night hit him at once.
Death, reincarnation, system.
Hydra.
The base.
The killing.
He pushed himself up, palms leaving faint cracks where they had been resting. No soreness. No stiffness from sleeping on rubble. His body felt light, like there was a spring coiled under his skin just waiting for him to move.
He turned slowly, taking in the scene.
The Hydra base looked like a giant had grabbed it and decided to see how easy it was to crumple steel. Towers flattened. Walls blown out. Black scorch marks everywhere. Limbs and bodies scattered in pieces, some burned down to charcoal, some still half recognizable.
He waited for the nausea. For the guilt, the remorse.
But nothing came.
He did not feel happy either. No twisted joy or sick excitement. Just a calm, simple fact in the back of his mind: Hydra base meant hostile.
104 hostiles. All dead now.
He knew exactly why his brain was handling it like that.
Memories that were not his started rising, clear as day.
Thragg standing on a battlefield knee-deep in corpses, thinking in terms of efficiency, not morality. Wuxian calmly cutting down enemies who had already been judged as monsters. Amaterasu watching wars like storms from above, weighing lives against harvests, plagues, cycles.
He remembered those scenes perfectly.
He also remembered his own previous life perfectly.
His tiny rented apartment. The microwave that always made a weird buzzing sound. The exact date of his first tax audit at work. The exact wording of every passive-aggressive email his boss ever sent him. All of it sat there in his head like someone had just hit "sort" and "enhance" on his memories.
His thinking felt different too. Faster. Cleaner. Thoughts linked together before he finished them. He could look at a broken wall and immediately see the angle of impact, the rough output of the blast, the direction the shockwave had traveled. He had to consciously decide not to care about that level of detail.
"Great," he muttered. "I died, landed in Marvel, and now my brain remembers the taste of my mom's breast milk."
The lack of guilt still bothered him a little bit though.
He looked at a corpse near his feet. The guy's chest was caved in, armor shattered, blood dried black around him. Alex stared at him for a solid ten seconds, waiting for that voice in his head to say you went too far or his stomach to get that sinking feeling.
It was not that he thought life was cheap now. He still knew what killing meant. He just… seems to somehow accepted it. As if his mental baseline had been dragged into the same world Thragg, Wuxian and Amaterasu lived in. A world where violence was normal, where mercy was a choice, not the default.
"Am I even still me?" he asked the air.
He felt like himself. He still hated his old job. He still thought about stupid stuff at random moments. He still found it a bit funny that of all things, he got a Samsung remote from a cosmic gacha, which goes to show that Samsung really does have that level of aura. At the same time, he could feel those three monsters in the back of his mind, their habits, their ways of thinking.
If he gets more templates and the percentages kept going up, would he just… vanish under them?
"SYSTEM," he called out in his mind. "should I be worried about being overwriting by these templates"
A metallic chime rang in his skull.
SYSTEM RESPONSE:
HOST PSYCHE IS ANCHORED.
TEMPLATE ASSIMILATION CANNOT ERASE CORE IDENTITY.
EXTERNAL MEMORIES AND INSTINCTS MAY INFLUENCE BEHAVIOR, BUT PRIMARY SELF REMAINS AS HOST.
He let out a breath he had not realised he was holding.
"Ok. So I am still me. Just running a remastered version with three new installed DLC."
He let that thought sit for a bit, feeling around inside his own head. He still cared about his own goals. He still felt annoyed at random things. He still felt like Alex. The voices did not talk. They did not try to take control. They were just… there. like Data, Instincts. Experience.
Yh. He could live with that.
Once he calmed down, and really thought over his situation a few times the next step was obvious.
Training.
He might have the memories, but that did not mean his body and soul were fully synced with them. Right now he was basically speedrunning three different character builds on day one.
"Alright," he said quietly. " First thing is figuring out what the hell I can actually do."
This island would be his training ground.
"you are on the clock body!."
──────
The following days blurred into a routine. He devided the this mini training arc into three parts.
First came the body.
He started by testing basic stuff. Jumping, running, lifting.
One casual jump sent him flying over a thirty meter gap without even trying. He landed hard, boots punching a crater into the ground instead of just scuffing the dirt. When he picked up a twisted steel beam with one hand and squeezed, it folded after just a little tension.
"God damm! that's that Viltrumite physiology right there."
He could feel the difference in the way his body was put together. The atoms that made up his cells were not normal anymore. Smart atoms, like Thragg's memories kept calling them. They shifted density, toughness, and weight on the fly, adapting to whatever he was doing.
When he focused on moving up instead of forward, his body answered.
He left the ground slowly at first, then hovered in place. No spell, no chant. Just the Viltrumite trick of messing with his own mass and momentum. It was ridiculously comfortable, like floating in water but with total control.
He tried using Amaterasu's version of flight simultaneously out of curiosity. He circulated divine energy through his body and willed it to move.
The result was instant. Speed jumped hard. The wind screamed in his ears as the ocean below turned into a blur. His eyes tracked everything easily, brain keeping up like it had been built for this.
Viltrumite flight was more efficient, using almost no energy. Divine energy for flight costs too much compared to it, it can instead be used to turned viltrumite flight into a real engine boost. can be used for short bursts of speed. Good to know.
After he was done testing raw strength, speed, agility and durability, he went into techniques.
Thragg knew how to break a person in close quarters better than almost anyone. Elbows, knees, joints, necks, all of it. Wuxian had smooth footwork, flowing strikes, ways to redirect force like it was nothing. Amaterasu's spear work was all clean lines, minimal waste, absolute control.
Alex spent hours upon hours running forms in the ruins. Punches that shattered boulders. Kicks that left dents in steel. Blocks and counters and throws stitched together from three lifetimes of memory. trying to force the muscle memories into his body.
He did not copy any one of them exactly.
He took Thragg's brutal efficiency, Wuxian's stepping, Amaterasu's precision, and kept twisting things until they felt natural in his own body. By the time he was on his third or fourth day, switching from bare-handed to sword to spear felt like breathing. No gaps, no pauses.
The sword from Genghis Khan's soldier helped. It was nothing mythical, just iron and blood and old violence, but it was a good test piece. He used it for cuts, thrusts, deflections, measuring how much force he needed to use so it did not explode in his hand.
As for the brick, the bucket of sand and the remote?
He stared at them in the SYSTEM INVENTORY for maybe three seconds.
Then he summoned them and threw all three straight into the ocean.
"I am not gonna be that guy who keeps junk in the inventory just cause there's space for it."
──────
Magic and energy came after that.
Amaterasu was different from the other two.
Thragg was a monster, sure, but still a living being that evolved up there on some insane power curve. Wuxian was a cultivator, a spiritual weapon forged by time and grind. Amaterasu was none of that. She was a god. A literal divine being, the same category of thing as Odin, Thor, Zeus, Khonshu and the rest of Marvel's walking myths.
He could feel that difference every time he touched her template.
Thragg's power felt like muscle and violence. Wuxian's felt like flowing water and carved stone. Amaterasu sat in him like a sun that had just decided to live in his bones. The domains she held were not skills, not something you "learned." Sun, agriculture, music, life. Those concepts were wired directly into him now, instinctual in a way that went deeper than muscle memory. His ability to summon and control solar fire was not a spell, it was a birthright. Same category as Ra, Apollo, any sun god you could name. The only limitation was scale. At his current level he could not throw around continent-melting output, not because he lacked the blueprint, but because his current self just was not there yet.
It was like Thor and Zeus with lightning. Same element, same authority, different league. Thor could call storms and fry armies. Zeus could do everything Thor did, just more and better, because his weight in the hierarchy was higher. Alex was in that position now. He could make a plant grow in dead sand with a bit of focus and a seed. He could sit at a piano he had never touched before and his fingers would find a symphony. It just would not be as blindingly beautiful, as heavy and divine as the original Amaterasu's. Yet.
Marvel gods usually got stronger with "age," but he understood now that it was not about the number of birthdays. It was attunement. The longer they lived, the more naturally they synchronized with their domain. Asgardians did not magically level up because a calendar flipped. They grew because every battle, every feast, every prayer and story tied them tighter to what they represented. The same thing applied to him. The more he used sunlight, life, growth, music, the more natural it would become and the stronger his divine side would get.
The difference between him and someone like Thor was simple and disgusting in the best way. Thor had to live it out. Fight, bleed, survive, get blessings, get weapons, maybe get a shove from something like the Odin Force when plot demanded it. Alex had all of that potential path on one side, and on top of that he had the TEMPLATE sitting there like a reservoir. Every time his body, mind and soul caught up, every time he grew enough on his own, the percentage could tick upward and dump another chunk of Amaterasu's full power into him. Thor needed fifteen hundred years and a few miracles to reach where he was. If Alex played it right, he could walk past that level in a few years, just by stacking his natural divine growth with template unlocks and whatever nonsense he decided to buy from the SYSTEM SHOP.
Other gods needed fortunate encounters, artifacts, ancient spells, weird cosmic events to break their limits. He had all of that available for purchase, and a cheat that directly fed him more of a goddess whenever he was ready for it. In this universe, divine progression was supposed to be a long road.
He had turned it into a staircase.
Then came Wuxian's side of things.
He sat cross-legged on a flat rock, closed his eyes and tried to circulate qi exactly like Wuxian's memories showed him.
Nothing.
The breathing was right. The mental picture was right. The paths were right. But the energy just did not move the way qi was supposed to.
He shifted his focus inward more.
Underneath all the power, his "core" did not feel like a human's at all. Where there should have been the warm, mist-like feeling of qi flowing through meridians, there was something heavier. Brighter. More solid. It hummed with a weight that did not belong to mortals.
Divine energy.
It kind of made sense. Qi was basically refined life force. The power generated by existing as a living being. As a god, his base energy had upgraded. There was no point expecting default human qi anymore.
So he changed the mental script.
All the formations, all the seals, all the techniques he got from Wuxian, he rewired them in his head to accept divine energy instead. The first time he formed a hand seal and pushed that stuff into the technique, the shadow tendrils that came out from the base of a tree were thicker, darker, and obeyed his will with less effort than Wuxian ever needed.
Elemental seals that should have taken time to prepare lit up almost instantly.
Divine energy was just better in every way. Stronger, cleaner, more stable. The only possible issue was overkill. He spent the seventh and eighth days focusing just on control, on not overdoing it and blowing himself up by accident.
Through all of this, something else kept poking at the back of his mind.
Whenever he thought about trying a certain combo or pushing his body in a specific way, some part of him would just quietly say "no, do it like this instead" without words. like Instinct or Intuition. Whatever it was, it felt like an automatic understanding of where his limits were and how to stretch them safely.
He tried focusing on it. No system window popped up. No hidden template explained it. It just sat there like a quiet second sense about himself.
He shelved it.
If it was not trying to kill him, he would deal with it later.
──────
On the ninth day, standing on a cliff with wind in his face and the ruins of the Hydra base far behind him, he called out.
"STATUS."
SYSTEM STATUS:
NAME: ALEX MERSEY
TEMPLATES:
THRAGG: 17 PERCENT
AMATERASU: 28 PERCENT
WUXIAN: 43 PERCENT
INVENTORY:
SWORD USED BY AN ORDINARY SOLDIER OF GENGHIS KHAN
EIGHT BATTLE MAIDS (SUMMON PENDING)
SHOP BALANCE:
1(bill) SP
He nodded slowly.
The percentages had gone up quite a bit. Not a crazy jump for all of them, but enough that he could feel everything sitting more comfortably in him now. Less "raw power dumping into a mortal" and more "fuck, if this is my first 10 days in, im gonna be op"
The eight battle maids waited in the background, fully equipped and ready. He left them where they were. Dropping eight unknown high tier units into the world when he still did not know where he was on the globe or how he was going to even integrate into this universe would be stupid.
His foundation was set.
He let the SYSTEM window fade and looked out over the water, sun resting warm on his skin in a way that felt almost personal now.
"Ok," he said quietly. "Training arc done."
Now it was time to actually start playing the game.