Chapter 8: Origins - Part 8
The night had never been so dark.
Not the comfortable darkness of bedtime, or the gentle dimming of street lamps at dusk, or even the deep black of a power outage where you could still see stars if you looked up.
This was different.
This was a darkness that pressed, that smothered, thick and oppressive like smoke filling lungs, like the world itself had been draped in a funeral shroud. The sky, normally a pale gray-blue reflecting Metropolis's million lights—had turned a sickly, bruised purple-black, choked with ash and the acrid stench of burning that coated the back of the throat and made every breath taste like metal and char.
How had it come to this?
The thought ricocheted through Ben's mind as he ran, legs pumping, sneakers slapping pavement littered with debris, chest heaving with exertion and terror in equal measure. His beanie—his constant companion, his armor against the world's judgment of his unruly hair—was gone, lost somewhere in the chaos blocks ago, and now his brown hair whipped in the hot wind that carried embers and screams in equal measure.
He didn't know when he'd lost it. Didn't remember it falling. Couldn't afford to care.
Around him, Metropolis burned.
Not the whole city, not yet, but enough. Fires bloomed from shattered windows like angry orange flowers, flames licking up the sides of buildings that had stood for decades, consuming glass and steel and the lives sheltered within. Smoke poured from a dozen different sources, black columns rising into the bruised sky where they merged with something worse—something unnatural.
The streets were a warzone painted in civilian colors: overturned cars, their undercarriages exposed like the bellies of dead animals, windows shattered, alarms still wailing weakly; storefront windows blown out, mannequins toppled and cracked, designer clothes trampled into the grime; fire hydrants torn from their moorings, water spraying uselessly into the gutters where it mixed with blood—some red, some not—and formed streams that reflected the fires like rivers of liquid flame.
Debris everywhere. Concrete chunks the size of basketballs. Twisted rebar. Bricks. Glass. So much glass, glittering in the firelight like stars fallen to earth and shattered.
And the people.
Oh god, the people.
They filled the streets in panicked rivers, faces pale with shock and streaked with soot, eyes wide and glassy, mouths open in screams that blended into a single continuous wail of terror. Some ran with purpose, dragging children, clutching loved ones, heading somewhere they believed might be safe. Others stumbled aimlessly, minds broken by the scale of what was happening, walking in circles or just standing frozen while the world ended around them.
A woman in a business suit, one shoe missing, screaming a name—"Ellie! ELLIE!"—over and over until her voice cracked.
An elderly man sitting on a curb, face in his hands, shoulders shaking.
A teenager clutching a phone with a cracked screen, trying desperately to get a signal that no longer existed, tears cutting clean tracks through the grime on his cheeks.
Ben saw them all in fragmentary flashes as he ran—snapshots of horror that burned into his retinas and would haunt him in dreams he hadn't had yet.
"This way!" Kevin's voice cut through the chaos, raw and urgent, and Ben's head snapped toward the sound.
Kevin was ahead, black hair wild, hoodie torn at the shoulder, one hand gesturing frantically as he skidded around a corner, rollerblades—no, sneakers—sneakers, not wheels, because Kevin was human and Ben's brain was scrambling details in the panic—leaving skid marks on the ash-coated pavement.
Ben followed, legs burning, and Gwen was right beside him, orange hair plastered to her face with sweat, backpack bouncing against her spine, breath coming in ragged gasps that matched his own.
They rounded the corner and the crowd surged with them—dozens of people all heading the same direction, fleeing something behind them, not running toward safety but just away from death.
Someone stumbled. A middle-aged man in a torn jacket went down hard, hands scraping pavement, and the crowd nearly trampled him before a stranger grabbed his arm and hauled him upright without breaking stride. No words of thanks. Just survival.
Screams rose from behind them, sharper now, closer, and Ben risked a glance over his shoulder.....
Scattered across the purple-black expanse of the sky , hanging like malignant sores, were glowing holes —circular rips in reality itself, each one ringed with crackling energy that pulsed yellow-gold and smelled of ozone and something else
Boom Tubes.
Ben didn't know the name. Didn't know the technology. But he knew what they were doing.
They were vomiting monsters.
Parademons poured from the portals in shrieking swarms, dozens—no, hundreds , wings beating the air into submission, claws extended, eyes glowing that demonic red that seemed to burn brighter against the darkness. They moved like locusts, like piranhas, coordinated chaos that descended on the city with singular purpose: destroy.
One swooped low over the street ahead, claws raking across a car roof and peeling it open like a tin can, screeching in triumph before launching back into the sky.
Another smashed through a second-story window, glass exploding outward, and screams erupted from inside—cut short too quickly.
A third landed on a fleeing man, dragged him down, and—
Ben looked away, bile rising in his throat.
Where was Superman?
The thought was desperate, childlike, the plea of someone who'd grown up believing in heroes, in the Man of Steel who always—always—showed up when you needed him most.
'Where is he? Is he injured? Captured?'
Ben's mind conjured horrible images: Superman pinned beneath rubble, kryptonite glowing green in the darkness; Superman in chains, beaten, bloody; Superman—
'Dead?'
No.
The denial was immediate, a rejection of reality too terrible to accept.
'No. No, he's Superman. He can't lose. He can't. He'll save everyone. He always does. We just have to get to safety. We just have to....'
BOOM.
The explosion was massive, a sound like the world cracking open, and Ben's head whipped upward just in time to see the top three floors of a nearby skyscraper erupt in a fireball that painted the night orange and white.
Debris rained down—chunks of concrete, twisted steel, shattered glass—and the crowd scattered, people diving for cover, screaming.
And through the smoke, through the flames, a figure was launched from the building, not launched, thrown—a blur of blue and red that tumbled through the air before slamming into another building with an impact that cracked the structure down the middle.
Superman.
Ben's heart stopped.
He was there—he was actually there—cape dusty, suit scorched, but there, pulling himself from the crater his body had carved in the wall, and even from this distance Ben could see the determination in his jaw, the refusal to stay down.
Three parademons descended on him immediately, screeching, claws extended, and Superman met them mid-air with fists that glowed red-hot from the friction. The first parademon exploded in a spray of ash and chitin. The second went spinning into the pavement hard enough to crack it. The third—
THWOOM.
Something huge slammed into Superman from the side—not a parademon, something bigger, a mass of twisted metal and glass and...
—a car, Ben realized with numb horror. They'd thrown a whole car at him.
Superman caught it—barely—arms straining, boots skidding across rooftop gravel, but the momentum was too much. He was driven backward, through the building, the structure splitting like a rotten log struck by an axe, and then he was falling, tumbling, the top half of the skyscraper going with him in a grinding avalanche of steel and concrete.
"GET BACK!" Gwen's scream cut through Ben's shock, and her hand grabbed his arm, yanking him sideways just as the building's severed top fell.
It came down like the fist of an angry god, thirty stories of glass and steel and human ambition reduced to a projectile, and it hit the street three blocks ahead with a sound that wasn't just noise—it was apocalypse, a bass-note KROOM that shook the ground and sent a shockwave rolling outward that knocked people off their feet and shattered windows for half a mile.
Dust exploded upward in a choking cloud, gray and thick, swallowing buildings, swallowing people, swallowing hope.
And when it cleared enough to see—
Their path was blocked.
The fallen building sprawled across the intersection like a corpse, debris piled three stories high in places, fires already starting to consume what was left. The street beyond—the route to Bellwood, the route home was gone, buried under tons of rubble that would take weeks to clear.
Ben stared.
Just stared, chest heaving, mind struggling to process what he was seeing, to accept that the universe had just casually erased his way forward and offered nothing in return.
His mom.
Sandra Tennyson.
She was home. She'd been home when the portals opened, probably in the kitchen making dinner, humming to herself, completely unaware that the sky was tearing open and hell was spilling through.
They'd been so close. Three more blocks. Three.
And now—
"Mom," Ben whispered, the word barely audible, swallowed by the roar of flames and distant screams.
Hopelessness crashed over him like a wave, cold and suffocating, dragging him down into depths where breathing felt impossible and moving felt pointless because what was the point if he couldn't reach her, couldn't help her, couldn't—
"Ben!"
Kevin's hand grabbed his shoulder, shaking him, pulling him back from the edge. "Ben, snap out of it! We can't stay here!"
Ben blinked, focusing on Kevin's face—smudged with ash, eyes wide but determined, jaw set with the stubborn refusal to give up that Ben had seen a hundred times in smaller crises.
"I—I know another route," Kevin said, words tumbling out fast, urgent. "Through the industrial district. It'll take longer, but we can loop around, get to Bellwood from the east. But we gotta move now, before—"
A screech cut him off—close, too close—and all three kids whipped around to see a parademon landing on a car twenty feet away, claws gouging metal, wings mantling, green eyes fixed on them with predatory hunger.
"RUN!" Gwen screamed.
They ran.
Back the way they'd come, against the fleeing crowd, dodging debris and abandoned belongings and people too shocked to move. Kevin in the lead, weaving through obstacles with the practiced ease of someone who'd spent half his childhood running from things. Gwen right behind him, backpack bouncing, one hand clutching a broken piece of rebar she'd grabbed from somewhere. And Ben bringing up the rear, legs pumping, lungs burning, mind screaming at him to go faster, to not look back, to just survive.
Behind them, the parademon shrieked and gave chase.
And above them, the Boom Tubes continued to vomit more.
The night had never been so dark.
And it was only just beginning.
***
On the distant planet of Galvan Prime, light-years removed from Earth's descending nightmare, Max Tennyson—blissfully unaware of the Boom Tubes tearing open his home world's sky—was engaged in a battle of his own.
And he was losing ground.
BOOM.
Max dove sideways, years of muscle memory overriding conscious thought, body tucking into a combat roll that carried him across debris-strewn floor just as a massive black gauntlet slammed into the spot where he'd been standing a heartbeat before.
The impact was cataclysmic. The reinforced metamaterial floor cratered, chunks of blue-green plating exploding outward in a spray of shrapnel, cracks spiderwebbing across the surface in fractal patterns that glowed faintly orange from the stress. The shockwave rippled through the chamber, rattling loose equipment and sending data cylinders tumbling from damaged shelves.
Vilgax—encased in his black knight armor, tore his fist from the crater and turned toward Max with a movement that was too fast, too fluid for something that massive. The T-shaped visor fixed on him, glowing red with malevolent focus, and a sound erupted from the helmet—deep, guttural, resonant with rage barely contained.
A roar.
Not a threat. Just pure, distilled fury given voice.
Then he charged.
Nine feet of black-armored destruction accelerated across the chamber, boots pounding the floor with rhythmic thuds that shook loose dust from the ceiling, each step a promise of violence. His gauntleted fists clenched, nanotech rippling across the knuckles, and his entire frame radiated the kind of overwhelming momentum usually reserved for freight trains and natural disasters.
Max didn't freeze. Didn't hesitate.
His hands dropped to his utility belt—worn leather studded with pouches and clips, each one containing tools refined over decades of survival—and came up holding two guns.
The weapon in his left hand was a Plumber-standard energy pistol: sleek, compact, matte-gray composite with a glowing green power coil running along the barrel. Designed for reliability over style, built to fire superheated plasma bolts capable of punching through tank armor at fifty meters.
Max raised it, sighted down the barrel with the calm precision of someone who'd done this a thousand times, and fired.
BANG.
The first bolt screamed from the muzzle, emerald light cutting through the smoky air, and caught Vilgax center-mass—right where Max's earlier cannon blast had scorched the armor black.
BANG.
Second shot. Same spot. The impact flared bright green against the nanotech, energy dissipating across the surface in crackling arcs.
BANG.
Third shot.
Vilgax didn't even flinch.
He kept coming, charging through the barrage like it was rain, armor absorbing the plasma with contemptuous ease, and the distance between them collapsed from twenty meters to fifteen to ten—
Max's right hand came up, revealing the second weapon: a grappling gun, bulkier than the pistol, angular and mechanical, with a reinforced cable coiled in the housing and a magnetic anchor already primed.
He aimed upward, toward the higher levels of Azmuth's laboratory—balconies and observation platforms that ringed the chamber like the interior of a tiered coliseum—and squeezed the trigger.
THUNK.
The anchor launched with a pneumatic hiss, trailing cable that gleamed silver in the emergency lights, and slammed into the underside of a balcony three stories up with a solid metallic clang that echoed like a bell.
The cable went taut.
Max was yanked off his feet, harness built into his armor engaging automatically, and he shot upward just as Vilgax's fist came down where his head had been a fraction of a second before.
CRASH.
Vilgax's gauntlet punched through the floor, buried wrist-deep in crumpled metal and sparking circuitry, and for a heartbeat he stood frozen—arm extended, visor tracking Max's ascent.
Max landed on the balcony in a crouch, boots skidding slightly on the smooth surface, cable retracting with a mechanical whirr. Behind him, data machines beeped and chirped—holographic displays flickering with information streams, diagnostic readouts scrolling past in languages most species couldn't pronounce—all of it irrelevant in the face of the nine-foot death machine pulling itself upright below.
Vilgax wrenched his fist free, armor grinding against the ruined floor, and tilted his helmeted head upward. The visor's glow intensified, pulsing in rhythm with the circuitry across his chest.
When he spoke, his voice was filtered through the helmet into something deep and resonant, stripped of inflection but somehow still dripping with condescension.
"You are a slippery little fish, Tennyson."
Max straightened, energy pistol still raised, and despite the exhaustion pulling at his limbs, despite the ache in his ribs from the earlier impact, despite the very real possibility that he was seconds away from death—
—he grinned.
"Yeah, well," Max said, voice calm, almost conversational, "you know what they say about old fishermen."
He fired.
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
Four more shots, rapid succession, each one striking the exact same spot on Vilgax's chest—the scorched crater where the earlier cannon blast had landed, where every subsequent bolt had been methodically targeted.
Because Max Tennyson wasn't just shooting randomly.
He was executing a plan.
The nanotech armor was almost impenetrable—almost. Its adaptive properties allowed it to redistribute kinetic energy, to absorb plasma, to self-repair minor damage in seconds. But every system had limits. Every material had a breaking point.
And if you concentrated all your fire on a single compromised section, if you hammered the same weak spot over and over without giving it time to regenerate, you could create an opening.
Almost there, Max thought, tracking the faint discoloration spreading across the armor's surface—black fading to charcoal-gray, structural integrity degrading with each hit. Just need one more—
"I tire of this game."
Vilgax's voice cut through the chamber, and the T-shaped visor began to glow.
Not the dull red of ambient menace.
This was bright, searing, crimson light building to blinding intensity as energy coils within the helmet charged with a high-pitched whine that set teeth on edge.
Max's grin vanished.
"Oh, shit—"
FWOOOOM.
The laser erupted from Vilgax's visor in twin beams of coherent red light, superheated to temperatures that made plasma look cold, and they didn't fire in a straight line—they swept, tracking Max's position with horrifying precision.
Max bolted, legs pumping, sprinting along the balcony as the beams carved through everything behind him.
The data machine he'd been standing beside exploded, components vaporizing in a flash of white-hot light and raining molten fragments. The balcony's railing melted, metal turning to liquid and dripping in glowing rivulets. The wall beyond cracked and buckled, structural supports groaning under thermal stress.
And the beams kept coming, tracking him, chasing him, cutting a glowing line of destruction that followed his every movement like the finger of an angry god.
Max ran to the balcony's edge, saw the beams gaining, and didn't think—just jumped.
He launched himself into open air, three-story drop yawning beneath him, and for a heartbeat he was weightless, suspended between levels, gravity not yet remembering he existed.
Then it did.
Max hit the ground floor hard, knees bending to absorb impact, combat roll carrying momentum forward, and came up already moving, energy pistol tracking back toward Vilgax.
BANG. BANG.
Two more shots. Same spot. The armor's weak point was glowing now, faintly purple around the edges—almost breached.
Vilgax's laser cut off with a sudden snap, heat-distorted air shimmering where the beams had been, and the massive figure turned toward Max with movements that radiated barely restrained violence.
Then he charged again.
Not methodical this time. Not calculated.
This was pure aggression—a berserker sprint that ate the distance between them in seconds, boots cracking the floor with each thunderous step, fists already cocked back for a strike that would turn Max into paste.
Max didn't retreat.
He charged too.
Two figures hurtling toward each other across the ruined laboratory—one nine feet of black-armored fury, one aging human in battered Plumber gear—and the gap closed with terrifying speed.
Max's hand dipped to his belt, fingers closing around a small device clipped near his back—circular, palm-sized, matte-black casing studded with blinking red lights.
Proximity mine.
Military-grade. Plumber-issue. Designed to breach ship hulls.
He armed it with a thumb-press, felt the subtle vibration as the charge primed, and as Vilgax loomed closer—fifteen meters, ten, five—Max's arm snapped forward in a pitcher's throw.
The mine flew, spinning end-over-end, and slammed into Vilgax's chest—right into the weakened spot Max had been targeting, the compromised armor that glowed faintly purple.
Magnetic clamps engaged instantly.
CLICK.
It stuck.
Vilgax's fist came around in a brutal haymaker, black gauntlet cutting the air with a sound like tearing canvas, and Max raised both arms in a cross-block—pure instinct, pure training, knowing it wouldn't be enough but doing it anyway because you never stopped fighting, never stopped trying—
WHAM.
The impact was a hammer blow that rattled Max's entire skeleton. His forearms absorbed most of it, reinforced Plumber gauntlets taking the brunt, but the sheer force behind the strike was overwhelming—like being hit by a cargo truck doing sixty.
Max was launched backward, body tumbling through the air, and slammed into a wall hard enough to crack the metamaterial. His vision whited out for a fraction of a second, pain exploding through his back and shoulders, breath driven from his lungs in a single agonized wheeze.
He slid down the wall, landed in a heap, debris pattering around him like hail.
And then the helmet retracted.
The black faceplate that had concealed Max's features throughout the entire fight—the anonymous, featureless shell that made him just another Plumber soldier—peeled back, nanotech flowing down into the collar with liquid smoothness, and for the first time his face was visible.
Max Tennyson.
Sixty years old, maybe more, with a face that carried the weight of a life lived on the edge. Silver hair cropped short, practical, military-precise. Weathered skin marked by sun and scars, laugh lines around the eyes that suggested warmth despite the violence he was capable of. A strong jaw, a straight nose that had been broken at least twice, and eyes—sharp, blue, kind—that held the particular exhaustion of someone who'd seen too much and kept going anyway.
Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, bright red against pale lips, and he tasted copper and ash.
But despite the pain, despite the exhaustion, despite the very real possibility that he'd just made a fatal mistake—
Max smiled.
It was a small thing, barely more than a quirk of his lips, but it was genuine. The smile of someone who'd just played their final card and knew—knew—it was going to work.
He pushed himself upright, one hand braced against the wall, ribs protesting, and looked directly at Vilgax.
"Checkmate" Max rasped.
Vilgax froze, confusion flickering through his body language—head tilting, stance shifting—and then his visor dropped to his chest.
To the device stuck there.
The proximity mine was beeping.
Soft. Rhythmic. Accelerating.
Beep... beep... beep-beep-beep-beepbeepbeep—
Vilgax's hands clawed at the mine, nanotech trying to envelop it, to crush it, to tear it free, but the magnetic clamps held fast, bonded to the compromised armor with industrial-grade adhesion.
And then Max's smile widened, just a fraction.
Because this wasn't a proximity mine.
It was a directed implosion charge.
The device didn't explode outward—sending shrapnel and fire in all directions like conventional explosives.
It exploded inward.
CRACK.
The detonation was almost quiet—a sharp, brittle sound like glass shattering under pressure—and then the air around Vilgax warped.
Gravity inverted. Space folded. The mine's core unleashed a localized singularity that lasted for exactly 0.3 seconds—long enough to create a collapse field that pulled everything within a two-meter radius toward a central point with the force of a collapsing star.
Vilgax screamed.
It was a sound Max had never heard before—raw, agonized, stripped of the mechanical filtering the helmet provided, just pure animal terror as the implosion field tore into him.
The black armor buckled, nanotech shredding like tissue paper, crimson circuitry flaring white-hot before snapping. Pieces of the knight's shell were ripped inward, compressed, crushed into the vortex at his chest where the mine had been.
And beneath the armor—
Purple blood sprayed.
A torrent, thick and viscous, erupting from the collapsing chest cavity as bone cracked and organs ruptured and the flawed clone's unstable biology gave up under stress it was never designed to withstand.
Vilgax staggered, one massive hand reaching toward Max—not in attack, but in desperation, fingers splayed, trembling—
And then he collapsed.
The armored body hit the floor with a sound like a cathedral bell tolling, and the impact sent a final shudder through the ruined laboratory.
Silence.
Max stood against the wall, breathing hard, ribs aching, blood still warm on his lips, and stared at the fallen clone.
Dead.
Vilgax—or at least this iteration of him—was dead.
Max exhaled slowly, tasting victory and ash in equal measure, and let his head fall back against the wall.
"Still got it," he muttered to no one in particular.
Then his legs gave out, and Max Tennyson slid down the wall into a sitting position, utterly spent, and allowed himself—just for a moment—to close his eyes.
The battle was over.
For now.