Chapter 11: Origins - Part 11
Oh God, let her be safe.
The thought looped through Ben's mind like a broken record, desperate and raw, each repetition scraping against the inside of his skull as his legs pumped beneath him, sneakers slapping pavement that was slick with ash and worse things he didn't want to identify.
Please. Please let her be okay.
He ran through streets that no longer resembled the Metropolis he knew—the clean, gleaming city of tomorrow reduced to a hellscape of fire and rubble and screaming. Buildings leaned at impossible angles, their foundations cracked, windows blown out like missing teeth. Cars lay overturned, burning, their alarms still wailing weakly in harmony with distant sirens that would never arrive in time. The sky was wrong—choked with smoke and lit from below by fires that painted everything in shades of orange and red and black.
And the screams.
God, the screams never stopped.
Ben had made it to the shelter—a squat concrete building two blocks east, reinforced and marked with emergency signage, exactly where the Flash had said. He'd pushed through the crush of panicked civilians, searched every corner, every huddled group, calling out for his parents until his voice cracked.
Sandra Tennyson. Carl Tennyson.
They weren't there.
Not in the main hall. Not in the overflow rooms. Not among the wounded being tended by overwhelmed medical volunteers. Not anywhere.
Ben had tried to leave immediately—had to, needed to, because if they weren't here then they were out there, somewhere in the chaos—but the adults had stopped him. Firm hands on his shoulders. Voices saying it wasn't safe, that he needed to stay put, that his parents would want him protected.
They didn't understand.
They couldn't.
So Kevin and Gwen had helped him escape.
A distraction—Kevin "accidentally" knocking over a shelf of supplies, Gwen shouting about something near the back entrance, drawing attention—and in the confusion, Ben had run.
Kevin's voice echoed in his memory, urgent and low: "To get to the Back area of the Bellwood district, you have to go through the Industrial zone. If your mom's home, that's the route. Stay low, stay fast, don't stop for anything."
Ben intended to follow that advice.
He just hoped he'd make it.
---
BOOM.
An explosion erupted three blocks to his right—a gas station going up in a fireball that climbed toward the bruised sky, heat washing over Ben even from this distance, singeing the air in his lungs. The shockwave rattled windows in their frames and sent debris raining down like hail.
Ben stumbled, caught himself, kept moving.
And then—
A voice.
It didn't come from any specific direction. It wasn't shouted or broadcast. It simply existed, everywhere and nowhere, resonating through the air itself, through the ground beneath Ben's feet, through the marrow of his bones.
Deep. Resonant. Absolute.
"I AM ENTROPY."
The words crashed over Ben like a physical wave, and he stopped—not because he chose to, but because his body simply refused to move, every muscle locking up in primal, animal terror.
"I AM DEATH."
Cold sweat erupted across Ben's skin, slick and clammy, soaking through his shirt despite the heat radiating from the fires around him. His heart hammered against his ribs so hard it hurt, each beat a frantic drumroll .
"I AM... DARKSEID."
The name hung in the air like a guillotine blade, and Ben felt something fundamental inside him break.
He couldn't see the being who spoke. Couldn't even guess where it was—blocks away? Miles? It didn't matter. Distance was irrelevant.
Because somehow, impossibly, Ben felt it.
Felt the presence—vast, ancient, crushing—like standing at the base of a mountain and realizing the mountain was alive and looking at you and finding you utterly, laughably insignificant.
An ant.
That's what Ben was. An ant, scurrying through the dirt while gods walked above, and if one of them happened to step on him it wouldn't even notice, wouldn't even care, because what was one more crushed insect in the grand march of entropy?
Ben's legs trembled, knees threatening to buckle.
Move.
The command came from somewhere deep inside—the stubborn, defiant part of him that had gotten him through scraped knees and failed tests and bigger kids shoving him in the hallway.
Move, dammit. I gotta find Mom and Dad.
He forced one leg forward. Then the other. Shaky. Uncertain. But moving.
Come on. Come on, you can do this. Just keep moving.
Step.
Step.
Step.
The terror didn't fade—didn't even diminish—but Ben pushed through it anyway, because what other choice did he have?
And for the first time in his life, a thought crept into his mind that he'd never seriously entertained before:
What if the heroes can't win this?
What if Superman—invincible, unstoppable Superman—wasn't enough?
What if the Flash, the Green Lantern, all of them together, still lost?
What if—
Ben shoved the thought away, hard, and ran faster.
No. They'll win. They have to. Because if they don't...
He didn't finish the thought.
Couldn't.
Behind him, the voice of Darkseid continued to echo across Metropolis, a pronouncement of doom that left no room for hope.
And Ben Tennyson, terrified, ran toward home with legs that felt like lead and a heart that refused to stop fighting.
---
***
Meanwhile, in the cold vacuum of space—
The hyperdrive corridor was a tunnel of twisted light and warped physics, reality compressed into something human minds weren't meant to perceive. Colors that had no names bled into geometries that defied Euclidean logic, and through it all, two ships hurtled at speeds that made light look lazy.
Max Tennyson's scout vessel twisted and banked, dodging plasma bolts that screamed through dimensions they weren't designed for, his hands white-knuckled on the controls, alarms shrieking warnings he didn't have time to acknowledge.
Vilgax's pursuit craft followed like a predator that had caught the scent of blood, weapons firing in relentless barrages, crimson energy carving through the hyperspace medium.
Max dodged left—a bolt seared past, close enough to char his shields. Rolled starboard—another miss, but the heat made his hull groan. Dove, climbed, juked—
But Vilgax was landing hits.
More than Max. Consistently. Methodically.
Each impact drained shields, cracked plating, sent sparks raining through the cockpit. Max's tactical display was a sea of red warnings, systems failing faster than he could compensate.
Can't keep this up. Need to—
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
The navigation scanner flashed urgent amber, and Max's eyes snapped to the readout.
APPROACHING STELLAR COORDINATES: SOL SYSTEM. ETA: 14 SECONDS.
Earth.
No. No, not yet, I'm not ready—
"Dammit!" The curse tore from Max's throat, raw and furious, and in that brief moment of distraction—just a fraction of a second where his focus slipped—
Vilgax fired.
The shot was perfect, precise, targeted with the kind of surgical accuracy that came from decades of conquest.
It struck Max's fuel crystal—the glowing green power core nestled in the ship's heart, the component that fed energy to the hyperdrive and kept them tethered to faster-than-light velocity.
The crystal cracked.
Spiderwebs of fractures spread across its surface, light bleeding from the fissures, and the ship's entire power grid screamed in protest.
The hyperdrive collapsed.
Reality snapped back like a rubber band stretched too far, and Max's ship was thrown out of warp space, tumbling end-over-end through normal space-time, alarms deafening, systems failing, the sudden deceleration slamming him against his restraints hard enough to bruise.
Vilgax's ship followed, emerging from the warp corridor with far more control, weapons still hot, circuitry glowing with barely contained fury.
Max fought the spin, hands flying across controls, correcting thrust, stabilizing—barely—and looked at the tactical display.
Earth.
The blue-green marble hung before him, beautiful and fragile, atmosphere glowing softly at the edges, clouds swirling in familiar patterns.
Home.
And he'd just led a genocidal warlord straight to it.
"No," Max whispered, horror settling in his gut like ice. "No, no, no—"
Behind him, Vilgax's ship charged weapons.
Max's damaged sensors screamed warnings, but he barely heard them. His mind was racing, calculating, running through scenarios at desperate speed.
Fuel crystal's cracked. Can't warp. Can't outrun him. Can't fight him. Can't—
His hand drifted to the manual release lever beside the pilot's seat—bright red, clearly marked, designed for emergencies where the ship needed to jettison cargo to survive.
Or in this case, to jettison the Omnitrix.
The pod sat in the co-pilot's seat, still secured, still pulsing with that steady green glow.
Max stared at it.
Then at Earth.
Then at the photograph clipped to his console—Gwen, Ben, Kevin, laughing in the sunlight, ice cream melting, the world still safe and whole.
I'm sorry.
The apology was silent, internal, but it carried the weight of worlds.
I'm so sorry.
Max's hand closed around the release lever.
Behind him, Vilgax's ship flared—energy building, coils charging, preparing to unleash a blast that would vaporize Max's vessel and everything inside it.
Max pulled the lever.
THUNK.
The pod ejected, magnetic clamps releasing, emergency thrusters firing, and it shot away from the ship on a ballistic trajectory toward Earth, tumbling through the void, carrying the Omnitrix toward a destiny neither Max nor Vilgax could predict.
And then—
FWOOOOOOM.
Vilgax's ship unleashed hell.
A coherent beam of superheated plasma, thick as a bus, brighter than stars, crossed the distance in a heartbeat and struck Max's ship dead center.
The scout vessel exploded.
Hull plating vaporized instantly, reduced to constituent atoms. Internal systems flashed to plasma. The fuel crystal, already cracked, detonated in a chain reaction that consumed what little remained.
Max's ship became a cloud of debris—metal fragments tumbling through space, glowing orange from residual heat, scattering across kilometers in an expanding sphere.
---
Vilgax sat in his pursuit craft, helmet retracted, red eyes fixed on the destruction, and laughed.
It was a sound that should never exist in vacuum—deep, resonant, triumphant—echoing through his ship's interior and carrying the weight of absolute victory.
"Tennyson." The name was a sneer, dripping with contempt. " you thought you could deny me."
His eyes tracked to the scanner, which beeped softly, highlighting a trajectory.
The pod.
Still intact. Still heading toward Earth.
Vilgax's tentacles writhed with anticipation, and he gripped the controls, preparing to follow.
"The Omnitrix is—"
PROXIMITY WARNING.
The alert flashed red across his console, and Vilgax's eyes narrowed.
What—
BOOM.
An explosion rocked the ship—not from external fire, but from within, somewhere deep in the engine compartment.
Vilgax snarled, pulling up diagnostics, and his eyes widened fractionally as realization dawned.
THRUSTER ASSEMBLY: CRITICAL DAMAGE.
NAVIGATION SYSTEM: OFFLINE.
Max's earlier shots—the ones Vilgax had dismissed as desperation, as random fire—hadn't been random at all.
He'd been aiming.
Targeting critical systems. Weakening structural points. Planting the seeds of catastrophic failure that would bloom at exactly the wrong moment.
Like now.
"TENNYSON!" Vilgax roared, fury and grudging respect warring in his voice. "Even in death, you interfere!"
His ship shuddered, trajectory veering, pulled by Earth's gravity but unable to correct course. Thrusters fired sporadically, fighting physics and losing.
The pod continued its descent, clean and true.
Vilgax's ship began to break apart.
Atmospheric re-entry without functional thrusters was a death sentence. Heat built. Hull plating glowed red, then white. Seams cracked. Alarms screamed.
CATASTROPHIC HULL BREACH IMMINENT.
Vilgax's hands flew across controls, rerouting power, compensating, but it was like bailing out the ocean with a teaspoon.
"NOTHING," he snarled, tentacles lashing, "will keep me from my prize! The Omnitrix WILL BE MINE!"
The ship's interior temperature spiked. Systems failed in cascades. And then—
Icy vapor began to fill the cockpit.
It poured from vents built into the chair itself, which suddenly morphed, panels sliding, reconfiguring, transforming from pilot's seat into something else entirely.
A stasis chamber.
Unique to the Chimera Sui Generis—a biological failsafe evolved over millennia, allowing them to survive catastrophic injury or environmental extremes through induced hibernation.
The chamber's lid descended, sealing Vilgax inside, and the vapor intensified, flash-freezing everything it touched.
Within seconds, Vilgax was encased in ice—perfectly preserved, suspended between life and death, metabolism slowed to near-zero.
His ship continued to break apart, pieces scattering across Earth's upper atmosphere, trailing fire.
And somewhere inside the largest fragment, buried in ice and fury, Vilgax slept.
Dreaming of conquest.
---
The Omnitrix pod descended toward Earth, clean and perfect, trailing a faint contrail of ionized atmosphere.
It pierced the cloud layer, arcing gracefully, guided by momentum and gravity toward the glowing sprawl of lights below.
Metropolis.
The pod didn't slow.
Didn't deviate.
It simply fell, carrying the most powerful device in the galaxy toward a city already burning under the boot of a tyrant who called himself a god.
And somewhere below, a ten-year-old boy ran through smoke and fire, searching for his mother, completely unaware that his life was about to change in ways no one—no one—could have predicted.
The pod descended.
Darkseid's voice echoed across Metropolis.
And the universe held its breath.