The void between galaxies wasn't silent.
It was a symphony of radiation, a whisper of cosmic microwave background, the distant scream of quasars, and the low thrum of gravitational waves passing through my body like ocean tides. I was a speck, less than a speck, hurtling through infinity in a suit that felt more like skin than armor.
I left the solar system behind with a thought, the sun shrinking from a monstrous fireball to just another star among billions. The satellite that had watched me bask was probably still sending frantic signals to Earth. Poor bastards. They'd spend years analyzing footage that would never make sense to them.
But I had bigger things to occupy my mind.
Meteoroids drifted past me—ancient debris, the shattered bones of dead planets and comets that had lost their way. Most were no bigger than my fist, but a few were the size of cars, houses, even small buildings. They tumbled slowly, gracefully, caught in the barest gravitational eddies of the sun's distant pull.
I squinted at one, a chunk of nickel-iron about the size of a basketball. My eyes felt... warm. That was new. Not the heat of the sun I'd just absorbed, but something internal, like muscle tension before a punch.
Why don't I try heat vision?
The thought was casual, almost flippant. But the moment I considered it, my eyes responded. I felt them change, the molecular structure shifting, becoming something that shouldn't exist in a human body. They began to store energy, to focus it, to—
Fire.
Twin beams of pure white light erupted from my pupils. Not red. Not orange. White—the color of a star's heart, of a nuclear detonation. They lanced out across the void, perfectly straight, completely silent. There was no pew pew sound effect, no dramatic vwoosh. Just light, impossibly concentrated, moving at exactly the speed of light.
The meteoroid I'd aimed at didn't explode. It simply... ceased to be. The beams hit it, and the matter converted to energy in a flash so brief it was barely there. But the beams didn't stop. They curved.
I blinked, my eyes cutting off the flow. The beams vanished, but not before they'd swerved mid-flight, zeroing in on another meteoroid behind the first, then another beyond that. Three explosions in perfect sequence, each one silent but brilliant as a miniature star.
"Okay," I breathed, my voice sounding strange in my own ears without air to carry it. "That's... that's cool."
But even as I said it, I felt the comparison settling into my mind. Darkseid's Omega Beams. The literal God of Evil's signature ability—beams that could erase existence, that could chase a target through time and space itself, that could even resurrect the dead they'd killed.
Could mine do that?
The thought was intoxicating. Erasing from existence wasn't just destruction; it was unmaking. Deleting something from reality's code. And revival... that was playing with the rules of life and death themselves. My adoptive mother—Death—probably wouldn't be thrilled about that last part. She had her own domain to maintain.
Still, the potential was there. I could feel it, like a locked door in my mind. The power was present, but the key—the understanding, the will to use it in such an absolute way—wasn't something I was ready to grasp. Not yet.
A massive shadow drifted into my peripheral vision, pulling me from my thoughts. I turned my head, super-vision focusing automatically.
A meteorite. Not a meteoroid—this was the real deal. Fifteen, maybe twenty kilometers across, a small moon of rock and metal that had probably been orbiting the sun for eons. It rotated slowly, pockmarked with craters, ancient and indifferent.
I felt a grin spread across my face. Why not?
I flew toward it, not at full speed. I wanted to savor this. The surface details grew clearer—jagged peaks, deep shadows in crater basins, a thin layer of space-dust that had settled over millions of years. I landed on its surface, my boots touching rock that had existed since before dinosaurs walked on Earth. The gravity was barely there, just a gentle tug. I had to consciously hold myself down.
I pulled my fist back. The movement felt ceremonial, like winding up for the most important pitch of my life. I could feel the kinetic energy building in my muscles, but more than that, I could feel the molecular bonds of the meteorite itself. I could sense every fracture line, every point of stress, every place where the rock wanted to break but couldn't quite.
My fist flashed forward.
The impact wasn't a sound. It was a feeling, a shudder that passed through the entire mass of the meteorite like a scream through a body. For a fraction of a second, nothing happened. Then the meteorite's far side—fifteen kilometers away from where I stood—exploded outward.
A nuclear bomb would have been quieter.
The meteorite shattered into three main pieces, each the size of a mountain, and thousands of smaller fragments. The explosion was silent, space showing its indifference, but the light was incredible. Molten rock vaporized, turning into plasma that cooled instantly into strange, twisted shapes. The three big pieces began to drift apart, their ancient gravitational bond finally broken by a punch that shouldn't have been possible.
I hovered there, watching my handiwork, flexing my fingers. No pain. Not even a sting. My knuckles weren't bruised. The suit wasn't torn.
"Okay," I said to the void. "So that's my baseline now. Good to know."
But the power was singing in my veins, the solar energy I'd absorbed mixing with the kinetic force I'd just generated, creating something new, something eager to be used. I felt like a engine that had just been started, purring with potential.
How fast can I really go?
I'd flown at Mach 50 to reach the sun. Mach 50 was cute, child's play. Light speed—that was the real barrier. The cosmic speed limit. The line between where physics worked and where it wept.
I positioned myself in the void, far from any major gravitational pulls. Deep space. Just me and the background radiation of creation.
"Alright," I muttered. "Let's break the universe a little."
I poured energy into motion. Not gradually—immediately. One moment I was stationary. The next, I was moving so fast that the stars around me began to stretch. It wasn't like acceleration in atmosphere. There was no resistance, no friction, nothing to push against. I was simply deciding to move faster, and reality was bending to accommodate that decision.
The speedometer in my head—because yes, I had one now, another convenient feature of molecular control over my own body—ticked upward with absurd speed.
0.1c... 0.5c... 0.8c...
The universe around me started to change. Colors shifted. Stars ahead of me grew bluer, their light doppler-shifting as I plowed through it. Stars behind me turned red, their photons struggling to catch up to my backwards-facing eyes. The void itself seemed to thicken, not with matter, but with potential, with the sheer effort reality was making to keep up with my demand for speed.
0.9c... 0.95c...
My surroundings blurred. Not just visually—existentially. I could feel time starting to bend, to stretch. Relativity wasn't just a theory anymore; it was a pressure on my skin, a weight in my bones. To reach the speed of light, I would have to become light. I would have to rewrite my own mass as energy.
0.99c... 0.999c...
The last barrier wasn't physical. It was conceptual. It was the universe saying, "You can't."
And me saying, "Watch me."
I became a singularity of will. My mass flickered, phased, became something that wasn't quite matter but wasn't quite energy either. I was a particle with intention. I was a wave with purpose.
I hit c.
The universe didn't break. But it did hold its breath.
I shot forward, and now the stars weren't points of light—they were lines, streaks of color that painted the cosmos in abstract art. Space itself felt thin, stretched. I was riding the fabric of spacetime like a surfboard, and it was less stable than I'd expected.
I aimed for the nearest galaxy, Andromeda's smaller satellite, M32. It was "only" 2.5 million light-years away. At light speed, that would be... well, it would be instantaneous to me, thanks to time dilation. To Earth, they'd age and die before I arrived.
Fortunately, I wasn't bound by Earth's time anymore.
The journey took subjective seconds. Maybe a minute. I stopped on a whim, my mass reforming into solid matter, my senses snapping back to normal human-ish parameters.
Andromeda's satellite galaxy spread out before me, a collection of stars that felt smaller than the Milky Way, more intimate. It was a dwarf galaxy, a cosmic afterthought, but it was still a galaxy. Billions of stars. Millions of worlds.
I activated my super-vision, and suddenly I could see them all.
Not just see—scan. My eyes became telescopes, microscopes, spectrometers, all at once. I looked at a planet orbiting a red dwarf star, saw its atmosphere of chlorine and methane, watched acid rain fall on barren rock. Another world, this one tidally locked to its sun, had a twilight zone where sludge-like things moved slowly through boiling seas. Harsh environments. Apocalyptic worlds. Nature's failures, or maybe just its experiments.
But these weren't natural.
I found the first Parademon on the third planet I scanned. It was on a world three times the size of Mars, a rocky sphere with gravity that would crush a human flat. The Parademon didn't seem to mind. It patrolled a ruined city, its biomechanical wings flexing in air too thin for flight. More followed—squads of them, hundreds, then thousands. They moved with purpose, not mindless drones, but soldiers.
And the monsters... dear god, the monsters. Things that looked like they'd been designed by a sadist with a biology degree and no conscience. Multi-limbed horrors that fed on radiation. Worms the size of skyscrapers that burrowed through planetary cores. Living weapons, every one of them.
This was an invasion force.
This was a war machine.
My vision narrowed, focusing on the largest concentration of activity. There, on the planet three times Mars' size, in the center of the largest ruined city, stood a figure that made the Parademons look like toys.
Grayven.
I knew him the way you know a story you've never read but heard whispered in dark places. Darkseid's son. The forgotten heir. The one who could never be enough.
He was massive, easily eight feet tall, with the same gray, stony skin as his father. But where Darkseid's presence was absolute, an inevitability, Grayven's was desperation made flesh. He wore armor that was a cheap imitation of his father's, all spikes and chains instead of the stark, functional design of true godhood. His eyes glowed with the same crimson fire, but it flickered, uncertain.
In his hand, he held a Father Box—not a Mother Box, never that. The Father Box was a cruel parody, a tool of conquest instead of communion. It pulsed with angry red light, coordinating the invasion, marking worlds for destruction and repurposing.
I drifted closer, invisible in the void, my presence hidden by the same molecular manipulation that let me blur my face from satellites. Grayven's thoughts were broadcast on a wavelength the Father Box created, and I could hear them if I listened just right.
"...will see," he was thinking, the words bitter as poison. "He will have to see. These worlds, this galaxy... it will be mine. And then he will have to acknowledge me. Father will have to..."
The pain in that thought was ancient. It was the pain of every child who had looked up to an impossible standard and fallen short. But this child had the power to crack planets in half to prove his worth.
Grayven's forces were spreading through this galaxy like cancer. I counted twelve worlds already subjugated, their populations converted into more Parademons, their resources stripped to feed the war machine. This was just the beginning. He had ambitions that stretched across the Local Group.
I hovered there, watching him scream orders at his subordinates, watching the Father Box pulse with malicious intelligence. I felt the solar energy inside me, the power I'd taken from Earth's star. It was a candle compared to the bonfire that Grayven commanded, but it was my candle. It burned with my will, not my father's.
This is new, I thought, drifting closer to the planet's orbit. This is something I didn't expect to find.
Part of me wanted to descend right then, to crack my knuckles and show this wannabe tyrant what real power looked like. Another part—the part that had grown up on a Kansas farm, that had Death herself as a mother—knew that jumping in blind was how you got killed, or worse.
But I couldn't just leave.
Below me, a world burned. In the twelve worlds I'd scanned, billions of lives had already been extinguished or converted into those... things. Parademons. Weapons. This wasn't a war. It was a harvest.
Grayven turned his head, as if sensing something. His crimson eyes swept the space above his planet, passing over my location. I held perfectly still, not just physically, but existentially. I became part of the background radiation, just another particle in the void.
His gaze moved on.
I let out a breath I didn't need to hold.
Game on, I thought, and I didn't move. Not away, not toward. I just watched, my mind racing with the possibilities, the responsibilities, the sheer audacity of what I'd stumbled into.
The cosmos had just gotten a lot smaller.
And my problems had just gotten a lot bigger.
[should we let grayven become mc friend .i feel sry for him]
[Give me stone 😅]