The hum was a physical thing. It vibrated through the steel grates of the observation deck, up through the soles of Bob Reynolds' worn safety boots, and settled deep in his molars. It was the sound of a star being born in a bottle, and he was its chief midwife.
The Helios Core filled the vast chamber beyond the reinforced quartz glass. It wasn't a reactor in any conventional sense; it was a contained singularity of light, a miniature sun fed by a lattice of focused solar energy harvested from the roof of the Solaris Advanced Energy Corporation skyscraper. Bob's life's work.
"Pressure nominal. Photon saturation at 99.8%. We are green across the board, Dr. Reynolds." The voice of his assistant, Maya, crackled through his headset, tight with controlled excitement.
Bob didn't share it. His excitement had been sanded down years ago by bureaucracy, budget cuts, and the gnawing, ever-present fear that lived in the pit of his stomach. He saw the future in the Core's blinding heart, but he also saw the thousand ways it could go wrong. He saw his father's face, red with rage. He saw his mother's vacant eyes. He saw the mangled metal of the car that had gifted him a morphine addiction at sixteen.
"Proceeding to final ignition sequence. Authorization Reynolds, Alpha-Seven-Niner." His fingers flew across the console, inputting the codes that would push the Core to its theoretical maximum, a stable, self-sustaining fusion reaction that could power all of Manhattan for a year.
This was it. Clean energy. A legacy. Something good.
The hum intensified, climbing into a shriek that was just at the edge of human hearing. The light from the Core flared, bleaching the color from the room. Alarms that were meant to be comforting suddenly sounded shrill, panicked.
"Bob? I'm reading a cascade failure in the containment field! It's—it's not possible!" Maya's voice was no longer excited. It was pure terror.
It is. I always knew it was.
The numbers on his screen spiraled into madness. Containment was at 40%. 20%. 5%. The shriek became a roar. The light wasn't just bright; it was everything. It was the only thing.
He had a final, absurdly human thought. I never called my mom back.
Then, the world ended.
The top fifteen floors of the SAEC tower ceased to exist. Not exploded. Not collapsed. They were unmade in a silent, expanding sphere of pure, annihilating energy. The quartz glass, the steel, the consoles, Maya, Bob himself—all of it was vaporized into their base atoms.
Robert Reynolds died.
And then, he didn't.
Consciousness returned not as a thought, but as a sensation. He was floating. He was light. He was power. The energy that had destroyed him was now him, was part of him, was him. He hung in the air amidst the swirling debris cloud that had once been his office, his body reconstituted from the very radiation that had killed it.
He looked at his hands. They glowed with a soft, internal gold. His veins were not veins but circuits of sunlight. His hair, once dark and perpetually messy, was now a shock of radiant gold. His eyes saw everything—the terrified faces of people on the street thirty stories below, the individual molecules of dust in the air, the panicked electromagnetic signals flooding from cell phones and police bands.
A beam, several tons of steel, twisted and white-hot from the explosion, tore free from the wreckage and plummeted toward the street, directly above a crowded food truck alley.
He didn't think. He moved.
There was no transition. One moment he was in the heart of the destruction, the next he was between the falling steel and the ground. He caught it. The impact didn't even register. He set it down gently on the street as if placing a log on a fire.
Silence. Then screams.
People stared, frozen. They weren't looking at a hero. They were looking at a phenomenon. A man made of sunlight, risen from a cataclysm. Their minds couldn't process it. It was too much. Too bright.
A woman pointed a shaking phone at him, her face a mask of primal fear. "An angel..." she whispered, but the word was all wrong. It wasn't reverence. It was terror of the divine.
Bob looked at them, at their fear, and felt a crushing weight of guilt. My fault. This is all my fault.
And from that guilt, in the periphery of his new, god-like vision, something else stirred.
It was not light. It was the absence of it. A patch of darkness deeper than any shadow, clinging to a half-destroyed wall. It had no form, but it had hunger. It drank the fear radiating from the crowd below. As Bob felt his own guilt, the darkness seemed to pulse, to grow more solid. For a fraction of a second, it took a shape—a long, thin tendril of pure blackness that lashed out, not at Bob, but at the fear itself, giving it form. A man who had been frozen in panic suddenly screamed and recoiled, swatting at a phantom only he could see.
Bob blinked, and the darkness was gone. Just a trick of the light. A shadow.
High above, in the orbital watchtower he called home, a single red eye focused and zoomed in. The footage played on a monitor: the explosion, the golden man's appearance, the casual catch of multi-ton steel.
>> ANALYSIS INCONCLUSIVE.
>> ENERGY SIGNATURE: UNQUANTIFIABLE. COSMIC/BIOLOGICAL FUSION.
>> POWER SCALE: BEYOND ALPHA LEVEL METAHUMAN PARAMETERS.
>> DESIGNATION: UNKNOWN. THREAT ASSESSMENT: POTENTIALLY CATASTROPHIC.
Cyborg transmitted the data to the Justice League server with a high-priority flag. But the Big Guns—Superman, Wonder Woman, the Batman—were dealing with a breakout at Arkham Asylum and an alien incursion in Dakota City. The alert would be seen, but it would be minutes, maybe hours, before a response was coordinated.
Down on the streets of New York, surrounded by smoke, screams, and the first wail of sirens, Bob Reynolds understood nothing. He only knew that he had died, and now he was alive, and he was powerful enough to fix this. To save everyone.
And he knew, with a certainty that chilled him to his solar-powered core, that he hadn't come back alone. The sky was empty where the darkness had been, but the air was still cold.
The silence after the screams was the worst part. It was a vacuum, sucking all sound and reason into its void. Bob—no, not Bob, not anymore—stood amidst the wreckage, the golden light of his body a blasphemous sun in the man-made canyon of New York. The people below weren't cheering. They were statues of fear, their faces etched with a terror so profound it felt like a physical force pressing against him.
He could hear it all. The frantic thrum of a thousand heartbeats, a chaotic drumroll of panic. The sizzle of a severed power line. The wet, ragged sob of a man trapped under a chunk of facade. Every sound was a needle driven into his new, hyper-sensitive senses.
My fault. All my fault.
The thought was a cancer, multiplying with every terrified glance thrown his way. He had wanted to do good. To create something that would help. And instead, he had become this... this thing that caused only fear. The guilt was a physical weight, a black hole in his chest that threatened to collapse his brilliant form.
And from that darkness, he felt it.
It wasn't a presence he could see or hear, not like the others. It was a coldness. A perfect, absolute zero that existed just at the edge of his perception, a stain on reality itself. It was the silence within the silence. He didn't have a name for it. His reeling mind, grasping for an anchor, could only label it what it felt like: The Void.
It was hungry. He could feel its hunger like a dry wind sucking the moisture from the air. It fed on the fear he had created. It thrived on his guilt. And it was growing.
A police cruiser screeched to a halt, its lights painting the smoke in frantic red and blue. Two officers emerged, hands on their sidearms, their faces pale. They were heroes, in their own way. They saw the destruction, the golden man at its center, and they moved to confront it.
"Freeze! Put your hands where we can see them!" one yelled, his voice cracking with a bravery he didn't feel.
The Sentry took a step forward, his hands raised in a gesture of peace. "Officers, I'm not going to hurt anyone. I'm trying to help." His voice was not his own. It was a chorus, a resonance of power that vibrated through the concrete.
The younger officer, his nerves stretched to breaking, flinched. His fear spiked—a sharp, acrid scent in the air. And the Void drank it.
The coldness behind the Sentry moved.
It was faster than thought. A tendril of absolute blackness, not a shadow but a rip in the fabric of light, lashed out from the spot where he'd first felt the cold. It didn't strike the officer. It flowed into him through the man's shadow on the ground.
The officer jolted as if electrocuted. His eyes, wide with fear, now flooded with an inky, consuming darkness. His body began to tremble, then convulse. His partner stared, horrified, his service weapon forgotten.
"Jenkins? Mike, what's wrong?!"
Officer Jenkins's back arched. A low, guttural growl erupted from his throat, a sound no human should make. The fear on his face was gone, replaced by a mask of pure, unadulterated rage. His skin darkened, taking on a grey, stone-like texture. Cracks of the same absolute blackness that had infected him spiderwebbed across his cheeks.
"So much... anger in this city," the thing that was Jenkins rasped. His voice was layered, a chorus of whispers scraping over gravel. "So much fear. It's... delicious."
He looked at his partner, and a cruel smile split his features. He raised a hand, and the pavement at his feet writhed. Shadows coalesced, forming jagged, spear-like shards of solidified darkness. With a flick of his wrist, he sent them shooting toward his former friend.
The Sentry moved on instinct. A blur of gold, he interposed himself, the dark shards shattering harmlessly against his chest. They didn't feel physical. They felt like concentrated hate. The impact was cold, a numbness that seeped into his golden light.
"Stop this!" the Sentry commanded, his voice booming with an authority that shook the street. He reached for the possessed officer.
Jenkins—or the Void wearing Jenkins—laughed. It was a sound that promised endings. "Why? He wanted order. I'm giving him the power to enforce it. The power to never be afraid again."
The possessed officer's body began to swell, his uniform straining at the seams. His strength was growing, mirroring the Sentry's own, but twisted, fueled by malice. He was becoming a monster, and he was loving it.
High above, the watchful red eye of the satellite recorded it all. The data stream scrolled with frantic, impossible readings.
`>> ENERGY SIGNATURE DETECTED. PARASITIC. PSIONIC/COSMIC ORIGIN.`
`>> HOST SUBJECT: NYPD OFFICER MICHAEL JENKINS. BIOLOGICAL READINGS SKEWING BEYOND RECOGNITION. POWER SCALE ESCALATING RAPIDLY.`
`>> SOURCE TIED TO PRIMARY UNKNOWN (SENTRY). SYMBIOTIC/ANTITHETICAL RELATIONSHIP.`
`>> THREAT ASSESSMENT UPDATED: CATASTROPHIC. CONTAGIOUS.`
The Sentry stared at the monster he had, however indirectly, created. The Void wasn't just a darkness. It was a contagion. It took the worst in people—their fear, their rage, their pain—and gave it form and power. It made their nightmares real.
He had to end this. Now.
He lunged, not to attack, but to contain. To grab the possessed officer and try to somehow pull the darkness out. But the Void-Jenkins was fast, unnaturally so. He moved with a warping speed, blurring into shadow and reappearing behind a fire truck, heaving it one-handed toward a group of fleeing civilians with a roar of gleeful destruction.
The Sentry caught the truck, the metal groaning in his grasp. The weight was nothing.
He could feel the Void's satisfaction, a cold tide washing over him from that same empty spot in the air.
The golden man, the savior, stood holding a fire truck while his own personal hell gave a normal man the power to tear the world apart.
The fire truck was a toy in his hands. The metal shrieked as his golden fingers dug into its frame, the sheer, mindless force of his grip threatening to crumple it. He set it down, the crash of it against the asphalt a dull, stupid sound in the new, horrifying silence.
His heart wasn't beating. It was a fusion reactor, a trapped sun pounding against ribs that felt too thin to contain it. Every breath was a hurricane in his lungs. The world wasn't just clear; it was an avalanche of data. He could see the individual fibers in the possessed cop's uniform, count the dust motes dancing in the beams of emergency lights, hear the frantic, skittering thoughts of every person for blocks. It was too much. His mind, a mind used to the slow, methodical crawl of engineering schematics and the hazy blanket of morphine, was breaking under the onslaught.
Cucumber. Cucumber. Cucumber.
The mantra did nothing. The fear was a chemical taste in a mouth that felt like it was full of static.
The thing that had been Officer Jenkins laughed again. The sound was wrong. It was the crackle of a bad radio signal, the crunch of bones under tires. It tilted its head, the movement too fast, a bird-like jerk.
"All that light," it rasped, shadows leaking from its mouth like black saliva. "And you don't know what to do with it. Pathetic."
It moved.
It was unbelievably fast. One moment it was twenty yards away, the next it was in front of him, a fist of solidified midnight slamming into his jaw.
The impact wasn't really painful. It was the sudden, shocking absence. A patch of his golden light snuffed out, replaced by a cold, dead numbness. It was the feeling of a needle sliding into a vein, but a thousand times worse. It was the void he'd felt inside himself made real.
He stumbled back, more from surprise than force. His heel caught on rubble and he went down, crashing onto his back. The street cracked beneath him, a spiderweb of fractures racing outwards. He lay there for a second, stunned, the breath knocked out of a body that didn't need to breathe. The sky above was a dirty orange, choked with smoke from his own failure.
The Void-Jenkins was on him. It dropped, a knee aiming for his chest. Instinct, raw and screaming, took over. He rolled. The knee hit the street where his heart had been, and the ground exploded. Chunks of asphalt and concrete erupted upward, smashing into the surrounding buildings like cannon fire.
Panic, an old, familiar friend, closed its icy hands around his throat. This was a bad trip. The worst one yet. The DTs—shadows crawling at the edges of his vision. He was back in his shitty apartment, sweating, shaking, every corner alive with things that weren't there.
He scrambled backward on hands and heels, a crab-like retreat of pure terror. His power reacted to his fear. A golden shockwave erupted from him, uncontrolled and furious, vaporizing the rubble around him. The force slammed into the monster—but also ripped through the street, throwing terrified civilians to the ground, splintering walls, and shattering windows. Screams pierced the air, swallowed instantly by the roar of his own energy.
But It didn't scream. It absorbed it. The darkness of its form drank the light, swelling, growing more solid, more real. The grey, stone-like skin took on a polished, obsidian sheen.
"More," it hissed, its voice now a chorus of a thousand corrupted whispers. "Give me more. Your fear tastes like candy."
It lunged again. The Sentry didn't fight this time. He ran—hands scraping concrete, fear fueling the eruption inside him.
He shot backward like a living cannonball, shearing the facade off a bank in a storm of glass and steel. People on the street screamed, diving for cover—some too slow. A few were caught under falling debris. Cars were crushed. Mothers and children toppled by the force, some never getting up.
He spun through the air, uncontrolled, the city a dizzying blur. His body was a runaway reactor. His mind screamed, but he couldn't stop, couldn't steer.
Then the parking garage. He crashed through the roof, smashing through three concrete levels. Cars twisted, ceilings collapsed. The survivors inside the garage were few; several were killed instantly, others crushed or buried under rubble. Dust choked the air. Shouts became screams, screams became silence. When he finally came to rest in a crater of his own making, the stunned few huddled in shock, bloodied and broken.
He had not meant to hurt anyone. But they were gone. And the city would not soon forget the day the Sentry's fear became a weapon.
Above, on the street, the Void-Jenkins lingered. It didn't chase him. It didn't need to. Its pitch-black eyes swept over the screaming, scrambling crowd. People dove for cover, but there wasn't enough room. Falling glass cut arms and faces; cars twisted under the force of debris. A mother shouted for her child, only to see him thrown across the street. The crowd's terror was delicious to the thing, and it smiled—a wide, impossible gash of nothingness. New toys. New chaos.
Deep in the cold, suffocating rubble, Bob Reynolds curled into a ball. The golden brilliance of his body flickered, unstable. Dust and tears coated his face. Screams rose above him again—some alive, some echoing from those already crushed. He could feel the weight of what he had done, and yet the noise, the crashing, the screaming pressed into him like a living thing he could not escape.
He had the power of a god.
And all he wanted was a fix. Anything to make it stop. The fear. The light. The noise. The everything.
He was a hero who had never been in a fight. A savior who only knew destruction. A sun fallen from the sky, leaving ruin in its wake. And in that darkness, something infinitely worse waited—patient, smiling, and already learning which screams were the sweetest.