Chapter 14: Origins - Part 14
A massive red humanoid sprinted through the industrial zone of Metropolis, each footfall cracking pavement, leaving shallow craters in his wake.
Ben—Fourarms—marveled internally at the speed.
This body is FAST.
Not Flash-fast, not Superman-fast, but fast in a way that felt wrong for something so massive. Each stride covered ten, fifteen feet, muscles coiling and releasing with hydraulic efficiency, and the world blurred past in streaks of smoke and fire.
How is something this big moving this fast?
But he didn't question it. Couldn't afford to.
Because thanks to that impossible speed, Fourarms covered distances in seconds that would've taken Ben—human Ben, small Ben—minutes to traverse.
And finally—finally—he crossed the invisible boundary that marked the edge of the Bellwood District.
---
The Bellwood District hadn't always been called Bellwood.
Fifty years ago, it had been Industrial Sector Seven—a grid of warehouses and freight yards, smokestacks and loading docks, the kind of place where honest people worked hard jobs for modest pay and never complained.
Then Alexander Bell, a second-generation immigrant and self-made steel magnate, bought half the sector and transformed it. He tore down the warehouses and built homes—affordable, sturdy, designed for families. He planted trees. Paved streets. Funded a school, a library, a community center.
When he died, the district unofficially adopted his name. Bellwood. A place where working-class families could own a piece of Metropolis without selling their souls. Where kids played in yards instead of alleyways. Where neighbors knew each other's names.
It was home to plumbers and teachers, nurses and mechanics, delivery drivers and janitors—the invisible backbone of a city that liked to pretend it ran on super-science and heroism alone.
And now it was burning.
---
Fourarms slowed as he entered familiar streets—streets he'd walked a thousand times, ridden his bike down, raced Kevin through during summer—and his four eyes widened in horror.
No. No, please, not here...
Cars lay overturned and burning, their frames twisted like aluminum foil, windows shattered, alarms wailing weakly into the smoke-choked air. The streets themselves were cratered—massive gouges where parademons had landed or where something heavy had impacted. Asphalt peeled back like burnt skin, exposing dirt and broken pipes beneath.
Buildings burned.
Not all of them. Not yet.
But enough.
Mrs. Henderson's house—the one with the flower boxes she tended obsessively—had its roof caved in, smoke pouring from the windows. Mr. Patel's bike shop was a gutted shell, the neon sign still flickering weakly: PATEL'S CYCLES - SINCE 1998. The corner store where Ben bought candy every Friday was just... gone, reduced to a smoking foundation.
And people—
Fourarms saw them as he ran: bodies lying too still in the street, covered with improvised sheets; a man sitting on a curb, face in his hands, shoulders shaking; a woman screaming a name over and over, voice cracking, until it became just noise.
This is my neighborhood. These are my NEIGHBORS.
Fourarms's chest tightened, something hot and sharp lodging behind his ribs.
Mom. Dad. Please be okay. Please—
A school bus blocked the road ahead, tipped on its side, flames licking from the engine compartment, yellow paint blackened and peeling.
Fourarms didn't slow.
He leaped—all that mass, all that muscle, launching him fifteen feet into the air—and cleared the bus easily, landing on the other side with a thud that cracked the pavement.
"Hope Mom won't freak out when she sees me," Fourarms muttered, voice still deep and gravelly.
But even as he said it, he knew it was a lie.
Knew he was just trying to distract himself from the gnawing terror in his gut, from the images his brain kept supplying of what he might find when he got home.
What if they're hurt? What if they're—
BEEP.
Fourarms froze.
The sound came from the Omnitrix—high-pitched, insistent, cutting through the ambient chaos.
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
Accelerating.
"What—what's happening, what does that—"
FWOOM.
Green light exploded from the faceplate on Fourarms's chest, washing over him in a wave that felt like static electricity and vertigo combined.
The world lurched.
Fourarms's perspective dropped—twelve feet to five-foot-nothing in an instant—and his four arms became two, his dense muscle mass evaporating, armor-plated red skin shifting back to pale human flesh.
He was Ben again.
Small. Weak. Human.
And completely unprepared for the sudden shift in balance.
Ben's legs—used to supporting three hundred pounds of alien muscle—buckled under the comparatively tiny weight of a ten-year-old boy, and he tripped, pitching forward, arms windmilling uselessly.
SMACK.
He hit the pavement face-first, jaw scraping concrete, and pain exploded through his skull—sharp, immediate, real in a way the parademon's flames hadn't been.
"OW!" Ben rolled onto his back, clutching his face, tasting copper. "What the—why did you—"
"TRANSFORMATION TIME LIMIT REACHED: TEN MINUTES ELAPSED.
EXTENDED DURATION RISKS IRREVERSIBLE GENETIC CONTAMINATION AND POTENTIAL DNA DESTABILIZATION. REVERTING TO BASELINE HUMAN FORM FOR USER SAFETY."
The Omnitrix's voice was calm. Clinical. Utterly indifferent to Ben's pain.
"ACCESSING USER PHYSIOLOGICAL STATUS. SCANNING... MULTIPLE MINOR INJURIES DETECTED: EPIDERMAL ABRASIONS, LOCALIZED HEMATOMAS, ELEVATED STRESS HORMONES. INITIATING ACCELERATED CELLULAR REPAIR PROTOCOL."
"What are you—"
Ben felt it before he understood it.
A warmth spreading from the device on his wrist, flowing up his arm, across his chest, settling into the scraped flesh of his jaw and the bruises forming on his elbows.
The pain began to fade.
Not instantly—not like flipping a switch—but steadily, like someone turning down a dimmer. The scrape on his jaw tingled, itched, and when Ben touched it with trembling fingers, he felt smooth, unbroken skin.
He looked at his arm, where he'd scraped it during the fall from the sky.
The raw, bleeding abrasion was closing, edges knitting together, new pink skin forming over the wound in real-time.
"Whoa." Ben's voice was small, awed. "That's... that's actually pretty useful."
He pushed himself upright, testing his jaw, flexing his fingers.
No pain. No stiffness.
Just... normal.
Well.
Almost normal.
Ben looked down at himself and winced.
His clothes were destroyed.
The white T-shirt he'd been wearing was ripped straight down the middle, torn at the sleeves, hanging off him like a rag. His cargo pants were shredded at the knees, one leg split up to mid-thigh.
'Right. Because I turned into a twelve-foot alien and my clothes... what, stretched? Morphed? And then when I changed back...'
"Damage carries over," Ben muttered, tugging at the torn fabric. "Great. Just great."
He could already hear his mother's voice: Benjamin Kirby Tennyson, what on EARTH did you do to your clothes? Do you think money grows on trees? Do you think I have TIME to—
"Mom."
The word came out strangled, and Ben took off running.
Not Fourarms-running—not ten-foot strides that ate distance like a hungry thing. Just... running. A ten-year-old boy's desperate sprint, legs pumping, lungs burning, heart hammering against his ribs.
Please be okay. Please please please be okay.
---
The Tennyson house sat at the end of Maple Street, a modest two-story with blue siding and white trim, a porch swing that creaked in the wind, a lawn Carl mowed every Saturday.
It had always been home.
The place where Ben learned to ride a bike. Where Sandra baked cookies that filled the whole block with the smell of chocolate and love. Where Kevin crashed on the couch during Saturdays and Gwen rolled her eyes at their dumb jokes but laughed anyway.
It was supposed to be safe.
But as Ben rounded the corner, legs shaking, breath coming in ragged gasps—
He stopped.
The house was burning.
Not completely. Not yet.
But flames licked from the second-story windows, orange tongues curling against the siding, smoke pouring from gaps in the roof. The porch swing hung by one chain, the other snapped, wood scorched black. The lawn was cratered—something heavy had landed there, tearing up grass and dirt, leaving a scar.
And the front door stood open.
Just... open. Hanging crooked on broken hinges.
"Mom?"
Ben's voice cracked, barely audible.
He took a step forward.
Then another.
"Mom? MOM?!"
He broke into a sprint, ignoring the heat radiating from the house, ignoring the smoke stinging his eyes, ignoring the rational part of his brain screaming , don't go in there, it's not safe, you'll die—
"MOM!"
A tear slid down Ben's cheek, cutting a clean line through the ash and grime coating his face.
And then—
A sound.
Ben looked up.
The Boom Tubes—those sickly yellow portals that had vomited parademons into Metropolis for hours—were collapsing.
Not exploding.
Reversing.
The energy at their edges shifted, began to pull instead of push, and parademons across the city—fighting heroes, attacking civilians, setting fires—suddenly felt a sucking force drawing then towards the tube.
Despite the creatures trying their best to hold on, they're sucked by in , by the boomtube.
Ben watched, numb, as dozens—hundreds—of the creatures streamed back through the Boom Tubes like a video played in reverse.
And then the portals closed.
One by one, winking out of existence, leaving only empty sky and the fading smell of ozone.
Silence.
It's over?
Ben stood in front of his burning house, fists clenched, tears streaming, and felt... nothing.
Not relief. Not joy.
Just emptiness.
'They won. The heroes won. It's over.'
But it didn't feel like victory.
---
***
The sun rose over Metropolis, pale and weak, filtering through smoke that still choked the sky.
Dawn came slowly, reluctantly, as if the universe itself was hesitant to illuminate the aftermath.
People began to emerge.
From shelters. From basements. From hiding places cobbled together in desperation—closets, bathtubs, under desks, anywhere that might offer protection from monsters that shouldn't exist.
They stepped into streets they no longer recognized.
A woman in a business suit, still clutching her briefcase, stood in the middle of her block and screamed—raw, inarticulate rage at the universe for doing this, for taking everything.
An elderly man sat on the curb where his house used to be, staring at the foundation, and wept—silent, shaking sobs that came from somewhere too deep for sound.
A teenager picked through rubble, calling a name, over and over, voice cracking, until a neighbor pulled him away gently and he collapsed into their arms.
Some couldn't believe it.
Stood frozen, mouths open, eyes wide, brains refusing to process the scale of destruction because to accept it would mean accepting that the world had changed, and they weren't ready for that.
Metropolis had survived.
But it would never be the same.
---
***
In space, far from Earth, far from the burning streets and grieving survivors—
The Chimera Warhammer hung in orbit above Galvan Prime, engines glowing faintly, preparing to disengage.
The planet below was a ruin.
Cities reduced to ash. The metallic streets cracked and lifeless. Fires still burning in places, visible even from orbit—bright orange scars against jade-green continents.
And deep within the planet's core, where Azmuth had set his final contingency—
Detonation.
The explosion didn't start at the surface.
It started at the heart.
A chain reaction, carefully calculated, designed to consume the planet from within so completely that nothing—nothing—would remain for Vilgax to claim.
The core ignited. Energy cascaded outward. Tectonic plates shattered. The mantle flash-boiled.
And Galvan Prime died.
BOOM.
The planet exploded.
Not a slow crumbling.
A detonation that turned an entire world into light and debris, scattering fragments across the void, erasing millennia of civilization in a single cataclysmic instant.
The shockwave rolled outward, buffeting the Warhammer, and Vilgax's ship—already pulling away, mission complete, prize secured (or so he thought)—accelerated into the void.
Behind it, where Galvan Prime had been, there was only emptiness.
A graveyard of rock and ash, drifting silently through space.
Azmuth had been right.
Galvan Prime was lost.
But the Omnitrix—
The Omnitrix had escaped.
And somewhere on Earth, a ten-year-old boy stood in front of his burning house, wearing a device he didn't understand, carrying a responsibility he couldn't yet comprehend.
The universe had just changed.
And Ben Tennyson was at the center of it.