Almost Two Hours Later — October 14th, 2015 — Grayson House — 2:54 AM (Chicago time)
The front door creaked softly when Mark turned the knob.
Kai stepped in first, pulling off his mask. The fabric of the Infinity suit still had red dust caught in its seams.
"Finally home."
Mark shut the door behind them, pulling his phone out of his pocket out of reflex. Still dead, of course.
"Yeah, finally. I'm gonna tell Amber I got back—" He looked at the clock on the wall and frowned. "I mean, tomorrow."
The two of them stopped in the space between the hallway and the living room.
The sofa was occupied.
Debbie sat at the far left end, a shawl over her shoulders, a mug of lukewarm tea between her hands. Nolan sat beside her, his arms spread along the backrest, shirt unbuttoned at the collar, wearing the expression of a man who had waited exactly as long as he needed to.
"Still awake at this hour?" Kai tilted his head.
Nolan lifted his chin toward them, calm.
"Cecil said you'd be arriving soon." He took one arm off the backrest, letting his hand fall onto his knee. "Your mother and I were coming back from Rome. We ended up waiting for you."
Debbie set the mug down on the coffee table, the steam almost invisible in the dim light from the lamp.
"So?" She straightened a little, a smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. "How was space?"
Mark crossed the room to the other sofa in four steps, letting his body sink into the middle cushion. His legs stretched out, his back finally relaxing against the familiar fabric.
Kai let out a short sigh, walked to the open kitchen, and opened the fridge by instinct, grabbing a bottle of water while answering in a casual tone.
"It was Mars."
Mark laughed under his breath, turning his face toward Debbie.
"There were Martians. Real ones."
Nolan folded his arms again, the corner of his mouth lifting.
"And?"
The conversation slowly filled the room—red dust on their uniforms, frightened astronauts, spears pointed at them, a rock that Mark pulled from his pocket and set on the coffee table like an improvised trophy. Debbie tilted her head as she listened, Nolan seemed genuinely at ease, and Kai drank water while leaning against the counter, throwing in dry comments between Mark's more excited versions of the story.
The house started breathing again like a place that had been waiting for them.
Meanwhile — Arlington, Virginia — Pentagon, GDA — 3:04 AM (Chicago time)
The access corridor felt narrower under the fluorescent lights.
Cecil walked in front, his steady steps echoing across the polished concrete. Behind him, Damien Darkblood moved forward with his wrists cuffed in front of him, two GDA agents flanking each side, rifles discreet but ready. His long coat dragged lightly across the floor, and his cold breath condensed in clouds that did not match the rhythm of the humans' footsteps.
A reinforced steel door slid open ahead of them.
They entered.
The room was large, octagonal, its walls covered with smoked-glass panels hiding equipment behind them. At the center was a ritual circle engraved into the floor—white chalk lines, archaic Latin symbols, and something even older, all contained within a ring of metal embedded in the ground.
Cecil kept walking to the far side of the room, where Donald waited, his hands resting on the edge of a control table, carrying the posture of someone who had already seen this happen before.
Damien stopped exactly in the middle of the circle.
His yellow eyes lowered to the floor, following the lines that seemed to pulse faintly beneath the cold light. Then they rose, locking onto Cecil.
"Why?"
Cecil adjusted the collar of his shirt without hurry.
"I told you to drop this case." He stepped slightly to the side, opening the view toward the table. "But you insisted."
Damien straightened inside the cuffs, lifting his chin in defiance.
"You can't exorcise me." His voice carried the certainty of centuries. "I destroyed the ritual book centuries ago."
Cecil picked up a page from the table—yellowed sheets, uneven edges, clearly torn apart and reconstructed with surgical tape, the symbols and Latin text perfectly legible.
"This one?" He held the document up between two fingers. "Demonius Et Mortum." The corner of his mouth lifted by a millimeter. "I had my people reconstruct it. It's amazing what technology can do."
Donald cleared his throat behind him, the book already open to the marked page.
The lines in the circle began to glow.
Donald read aloud, his deep voice filling the room with ancient syllables that seemed to suck the air away.
Damien kept his eyes on Cecil, ignoring the ritual.
"I never thought you'd protect the alien." His voice sharpened. "One day the world will know the truth, just like the slaughter one of his sons carried out against the cartels—and that you covered up."
Cecil folded his arms, holding the stare without blinking.
"That's the problem with demons." He tilted his head slightly. "You only see black and white. Right and wrong." His eyes narrowed. "But sometimes we need things in gray."
The glow on the floor intensified, shadows moving along the edges of the circle.
Damien gave a half-smile, teeth showing in the dimness.
"I'd say see you in Hell." His voice dropped an octave. "But there's probably a worse place waiting for you."
The floor cracked.
Dark chains burst from the fissures, coiling around Damien's wrists, ankles, and neck like living serpents. He did not scream—his yellow eyes flashed one last time toward Cecil before the portal opened beneath his feet, a vortex of smoke and red light swallowing his entire body.
The coat was the last thing pulled under.
The circle went dark.
Donald shut the book with a hard thud.
Cecil stared at the floor for one second longer, then turned his back.
"Get back to work."
Between October and November 2015 — Chicago, USA, and Other Parts of the Country
Mark found Amber at school. She greeted him with her arms crossed first, her eyes fixed on him for a few seconds too long to be comfortable. Autumn wind moved through the street outside the school in cold currents, stirring the loose strands of her hair, and for a moment Mark looked more nervous there than he had in space.
He handed her the rock he had brought from Mars—subtle, almost embarrassed by the gesture—and waited for the worst.
Amber took the gift, turning the stone between her fingers, studying the dull red surface that seemed to carry dust from another world caught in its contours. Her expression softened immediately. She let out a breath through her nose with a smile and lifted her eyes back to him.
"Thank you very much, it's a beautiful... rock."
Mark scratched the back of his neck. "Yeah. Would you believe me if I said it's special?"
She looked at the rock with a smile, then back at him. "Maybe."
"It is... Just don't show it to any geologist. They might tell you some crazy stuff."
The mood was lighter than Mark had expected. She took his arm, and the two of them headed down the hallway together.
Things did not go back to normal after Mars.
They just kept moving too fast, as if the world had decided no one there would be allowed the luxury of stopping to breathe—especially because Nolan had decided to start training his sons for real.
On the surface, routine looked almost functional. Classes kept going. The news changed topics every night. Traffic still filled the streets before sunrise and after sunset. Too many people going to work, too many people going home, too many people living without imagining that above the buildings, in alleys, on rooftops, and in dark skies, things kept happening on scales that did not fit inside an ordinary life.
October kept racing forward at a different rhythm for Mark, Kai, and quite a few others.
In another part of the city, far from the twins, Titan was staying far away from anything that looked like repair.
On a dawn under low skies and heavy clouds, he stormed a place alone that, from the outside, looked like nothing more than another forgotten warehouse wedged between industrial buildings, with rusted fencing and tall windows painted black. Inside, it was a smuggling hub for one of the operational branches tied to Mr. Liu—armed men, unregistered crates, weapons wrapped in tarp, money changing hands under fluorescent light.
The first door came off whole when Titan hit it shoulder-first.
The men had time to turn their heads and little more than that.
One punch from him sent one of the thugs flying into a stack of crates, splintering wood and scattering ammunition across the floor. Another tried to draw his gun and caught an elbow that lifted him off the ground before dropping him unconscious on a metal workbench. A third charged with a knife, shouting something that died halfway through the sentence when Titan grabbed him by the chest and threw him through a reinforced glass divider. The sharp crack of the structure breaking echoed through the warehouse before the rain of shards came down.
None of them ever had a real chance.
Titan moved forward without haste, heavy as a wall in motion, each step making the floor shudder beneath his boots. There was no pleasure on his face. Only exhaustion. Only that hard expression of a man who had crossed the point of no return too long ago to keep pretending he still chose his own battles.
Beyond the underworld moving behind the curtains, someone else was following a trail hidden from sight.
Robot.
In a sterilized lab where the air smelled of antiseptic, cold metal, and equipment that had been running for too many hours, a blood sample spun slowly inside an analysis chamber. The dark liquid moved through transparent tubes lit by blue light, while sensors read cellular composition, energy signatures, genetic markers, and anomalies that few people there would even know how to name.
In front of him, submerged in a tank of translucent fluid filled with bubbles rising lazily upward, was his primary body.
Deformed. Small. Fragile in a way most people would not be able to look at for long without turning away. Malformed limbs. Skin too thin over structures too wrong. A body kept alive more by obsessive ingenuity than by any natural logic.
The glow of the monitors reflected off the glass of the tank while Robot remained motionless in front of it.
The blood sample spun behind his shoulder. The tank before him reflected the cold truth of something he had spent years trying to transcend.
For one long moment, no sound seemed to exist beyond the soft bubbling of the life-support system. Robot tilted his mechanical head slightly, absorbing every line in absolute silence.
At school, on the street, in planned meetings still trying to look normal, Mark's life was beginning to crack slowly.
On a clear afternoon, he and Amber had arranged to meet. A few teenagers were leaving a nearby diner while watching a livestream on a phone, talking loudly about Invincible and Infinity as they crossed the sidewalk without really looking ahead. Amber waited farther down, leaning against a low wall with her arms crossed, one foot tapping the ground at short intervals that gave away her growing impatience.
Mark did not show up.
Not on time.
Not five minutes later. Not ten.
When he finally appeared in the skies over Chicago, on the other side of the city, he and Kai were far too busy with Kill Cannon to have any healthy sense of punctuality.
The villain flew in irregular circles above a partially evacuated avenue, strapped to a metal platform full of exposed gears, thick tubes, coils crackling with electricity, and a rotary cannon mounted over his right shoulder. Every shot spat energized projectiles that exploded against building facades and tore chunks of concrete from the structures around him. Car alarms screamed through smoke and people running.
Mark veered over one shot that blasted a hole in the asphalt and dove, trying to grab the main weapon. Kill Cannon spun in the air at the last second, catching him with a side volley that slammed him into the side of an empty bus.
Kai streaked beneath them in a blur of blue and white, hitting the villain's flying base with a dry, brutal impact that bent half the structure out of shape. Metal groaned. Sparks spat from an open panel.
"Damn it, Amber's gonna kill me!" Mark shouted as he grabbed Kill Cannon's platform by the sides while the engines strained against him. "Dad finally gave us a break from training, and then this thing had to show up!"
Kai scoffed. "Amber's gonna love hearing she lost to this thing."
"You're being super helpful!"
The cannon spun again. Mark yanked the platform upward, Kai came down along the side and ripped the power feed out of the main system with one strike. The machine died with an almost offended electric whine. Kill Cannon began to plummet, screaming threats that were lost in the wind, until Mark caught him in the air and hauled him back down toward the ground.
By the time he finally made it to the date, he was twenty minutes late.
Amber was irritated, of course.
The livestream kids were still passing nearby, filming nonsense, laughing too loudly, and she was still standing in the same place, her arms folded even tighter now.
Mark landed awkwardly at the end of the street, changed clothes as fast as he could in an alley, and ran to her still breathing a little harder than he should have for someone trying to look normal.
Amber did not even need to ask the time.
"More than twenty minutes, Mark."
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"I—"
"No." She raised a hand. "Don't even try to make up a quick lie right now. I'm tired of improvised lies."
Mark blinked.
Amber continued, "You know what the worst part is? It's not even the delay. It's the way it always feels like I have to pretend I don't notice when you're clearly hiding something."
But she did not leave. She just let it go when Mark showed her a box of sweets that were only sold on the other side of the city.
That same week, Titan got another job.
This one was worse.
An old apartment building caught fire shortly after nightfall. Not an accidental fire. Not a short circuit. Arson. Deliberate. The kind of message that had to be seen from the street, by witnesses, by families running down the stairs with children in their arms, by neighbors shouting each other's names through the smoke.
Titan came out through the flames before the sirens had even finished turning the corner.
Behind him, windows exploded. Glass rained onto the sidewalk. Residents stumbled across the street coughing, some still wrapped in blankets thrown over their shoulders in a hurry, others in slippers, pajamas, faces dirty with soot and eyes too wide to understand what they had just lost.
Titan stopped in the middle of the sidewalk for a few seconds, watching the fire consume the upper floors. Orange light carved out the stone contour of his body, and for a fraction of an instant it looked like he was simply going to walk away.
Instead, he slipped a hand into the inner pocket of his coat.
A thick stack of bills appeared between his fingers.
He started handing out money.
To the woman trembling while holding two small children. To an elderly couple staring at the building in hollow silence. To a young man with a burned arm, still unable to properly process his own anger. He did not say much. He just placed the cash in their hands and moved on to the next person, like someone trying to make up with paper for something he knew could not be repaired.
When he finished, he moved slowly away from the crowd and the glow of the sirens beginning to wash the street in red and blue.
"I think I miss dealing with cartels," he murmured to no one except his own exhaustion, watching the smoke rise. "That was better than this."
The days kept moving.
Mark and Kai faced another threat on a dry, windy afternoon, when Cinder-Block emerged between shops and low buildings in a commercial block under renovation. He stood around eight feet tall, his entire body made of refractory bricks fitted together like grotesque musculature, incandescent mortar filling the gaps like veins of heat. Black smoke poured constantly from his shoulders, elbows, knees, and neck, leaving a suffocating trail wherever he went.
Every step left burned marks in the asphalt.
His first charge destroyed the front of an empty store. The second ripped through half of a structural wall in a small building beside it, already weakened by construction.
Mark rushed him at once, hitting him in the chest hard enough to tear away two rows of bricks and hurl him into the corner of a building. Cinder-Block twisted his smoking body and answered with one massive arm that caught Mark from the side and launched him through a line of street signs.
Kai slipped into the opening left by the next swing, hitting the creature's side with two fast blows while dodging the absurd heat pouring from the joints and the living mortar that seemed to breathe. Cinder-Block's body groaned like an old furnace about to burst.
Then came the worst sound in the fight.
The structural crack.
The small building beside them gave way.
Not all of it, but enough.
The front section pitched forward all at once, concrete, beams, and glass beginning to collapse into the street where a few people were still trying to run, stumbling between abandoned cars and screams.
Mark saw the movement too late.
Kai did not.
He shot forward without thinking, crossing the space between the fight and the building in one violent burst, his feet sinking into the ground the moment he got under the leaning structure. Shoulders raised. Arms extended. The concrete crashed down onto him with brutal weight, wrenching a deep impact sound from the whole street.
The ground cracked under his boots.
The front of the building stopped.
The effort pulled at the muscles in his arms and back all at once, concrete cracking inches above his head while dust poured down in thick clouds over his face, hair, and uniform.
"Mark!" Kai shouted through clenched teeth. "Finish this already!"
Mark turned in midair, his eyes widening for a fraction of a second before he hurled himself back at Cinder-Block with everything he had. There was no room left to hold back. He hit the villain in the chest, punched through the brick layers, grabbed the burning core hidden inside—a condensed structure of energy and refractory material—and tore it free in one brutal motion. The giant's body immediately lost cohesion, collapsing into heaps of smoking bricks scattered across the street.
Mark dove back to help hold up the building while the last civilians cleared out from underneath it, coughing, staggering, dragged along by firefighters and newly arrived police officers.
Kai let go of the structure only when he was certain no one was still under it.
Later, in another hallway, on another day, in another routine pretending to be normal, he ran into Eve at school.
It was quick.
A crossing of steps between lockers, notebooks, student voices, and the ordinary echo of some random break between classes. Kai was coming one way, she the other. They saw each other almost at the same time.
For a second, they exchanged a look that was practically indifferent.
Eve adjusted the books in her arm. Kai slowed just enough not to actually bump into her.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey," Kai answered.
Neither of them looked willing to bring up what had happened between them, and just like that, the matter was closed.
They kept walking. Neither one looked back.
During the nights of October, Titan kept going deeper.
At the top of a commercial building—Russell's old building, empty at that hour, windows dark and wind slicing between the taller structures—he held a man by one leg over open air.
Gary.
Rumpled suit. Crooked tie. One shoe already gone somewhere far below. His face was white with panic, fingers trying to grab at the air itself.
The city spread beneath them in points of light and streets too thin to matter. The height alone was enough to turn desperation into something animal.
"Please!" Gary screamed, his voice breaking from fear. "Please, I just need more time! I can talk to him! I'll talk to my boss, I swear! I can get the money!"
Titan kept his arm steady, holding him by the leg as if the weight meant nothing.
"You already had time."
Gary nearly sobbed. "I'm not lying, I have—"
Titan pulled the wallet from the man's inner pocket with his free hand.
He opened it.
Inside, between cards, folded bills, and documents, there really was a photo. Gary smiling beside a little girl with pigtails, holding a melting ice cream and smiling at the camera as if the world were still simple.
Titan looked at the photo for a second longer than he should have.
Gary was begging now. No dignity left. No filter. Just pure survival instinct.
Titan closed the wallet, slipped it back into the man's suit pocket, and then, in one rough movement, pulled him back up and threw him onto the rooftop.
Gary hit the concrete, rolling onto his back, gasping, his arms folding over his own body like he was still falling.
Titan stepped toward him.
"Two days," he said, his voice low and heavy. "Two days, and don't screw around."
Gary could barely lift his eyes.
"Or I'll grind your face into the asphalt."
Somewhere above the clouds, on another afternoon, there was a practical lesson in brutality with Omni-Man.
Mad Scientist was screaming upside down.
The villain wore a white overcoat over a bizarre laboratory-inventor outfit: orange boots, reinforced gloves, visor-like goggles covering his eyes. Mark held him by one leg high in the sky above the city, where the wind tore words out of the middle of sentences.
"It's no use!" the man screamed, swinging over open air. "I'm not telling you where the gravitational bomb is!"
Beside Mark, Omni-Man hovered with his arms crossed, looking less concerned about the bomb than interested in evaluating his sons. Kai floated a little farther left, watching the scene with the kind of cynical patience that always came over him whenever Nolan decided to teach something.
Mark looked at his father. "Now what? He won't talk."
Omni-Man answered as if the problem were obvious. "You have to let him go, Mark. He needs to believe you're really going to drop him."
Mark grimaced. "I don't know... that seems way too cruel."
Kai let out a breath through his nose.
Without asking permission, he took Mad Scientist's leg out of his brother's hand.
"Done."
And let go.
The villain's scream ripped through the sky.
"AAAAHHHHHH—!"
He plummeted in a straight line, arms flailing, coat spread out like a broken wing, his voice climbing higher with every second as the ground swelled below.
Mark turned to Kai, horrified. "What the hell, man?!"
Omni-Man, on the other hand, nearly laughed.
"Very good, Kai," he said, calmly watching the man fall. "Now he'll tell us everything."
Mark still looked trapped somewhere between panic and logic. "But we are gonna catch him, right?"
Nolan lifted a hand, signaling them to wait.
"We will... in a minute."
They watched the villain fall longer.
A few more seconds.
Then a few more.
Until the body below was already nothing but a flailing point in the air.
Only then did Omni-Man lower his hand and nod to Kai.
Kai dove like a shot, vanishing downward in a straight line so fast the air cracked where he had been. An instant later, he reappeared holding Mad Scientist by the coat, now incapable of producing any coherent argument beyond broken whimpers of terror.
When he finally spoke again, he gave up the location of the gravitational bomb without the slightest resistance.
On solid ground, another force was beginning to exist.
The new formation of the Guardians of the Globe appeared in public action for the first time in a short, brutal clash against a group of minor supervillains that had been causing too much trouble in commercial districts around the city. By the time helicopter cameras and delayed cellphone footage finally arrived, the fight was already practically over.
The damage, however, said plenty.
Villains spread across the asphalt, unconscious or immobilized among the wreckage. One overturned car. Signs of localized explosions. Impact marks on walls. And at the center, Green Slime—the same failed would-be hero who had lost to Kai in the Guardians' tryout months earlier—now defeated and trapped inside a massive block of opaque ice, frozen from the waist up, with a ridiculous look of shock still stuck on his face.
Beside the block, Frost stood with her hands on her hips, the air around her still cold enough to release white vapor with every breath.
Rex looked at Green Slime and broke into a crooked grin.
"From hero project to third-rate villain."
Dupli-Kate dismissed a few duplicates with the ease of someone who had already done it a hundred times. Black Samson stood a few steps ahead, imposing through posture alone. Monster Girl rubbed her knuckles, unimpressed. Shrinking Rae returned to normal size atop the shoulder of a fallen villain. Robot watched them all in silence, measuring dynamics, response time, efficiency, mistakes.
It was enough.
The city now had a new team officially in action.
On another front, Titan received yet another task.
He broke into a commercial building protected by armed guards and cameras in every corridor. Reinforced doors. Biometric control. Electronic locks. None of it could stop someone capable of tearing through concrete and steel with brute force.
He went up floor by floor until he reached the protected room in the interior of the building—a kind of corporate vault disguised as an executive office, surrounded by multilock doors and security plates. Titan simply drove his fingers into the metal protection, ripped away the first layer, then the second, then tore out the entire central mechanism, opening a path as if he were ripping apart a can.
Inside, in the main compartment, he took the microchip.
Small. Dark. Far too discreet technologically for how important it clearly was.
When he turned around, the guards were already behind him with their weapons raised.
Titan looked from one to another.
"You'd rather fire at the ceiling and say you did everything you could," he said, slipping the chip into his coat pocket, "or die for minimum wage?"
The men exchanged quick looks.
No one there was paid enough to play hero.
The guns lifted a few inches.
The shots went into the ceiling.
Titan walked between them without hurry, letting the echo trail down the corridor.
Meanwhile, Mark was desperately trying to keep his personal life from collapsing—and slowly failing.
On another day, another call, he and Kai were fighting Human Swarm.
The villain hovered above a jammed avenue, controlling a vast cloud of nanodrones that mimicked insects in shape, movement, and group behavior. Each unit was tiny. Together, they became mass. Buzzing. Living pattern. Swarm.
Within seconds, the nanorobots gathered into the form of a colossal ant atop four stacked cars, metallic legs piercing hoods, mandibles closing with a saw-like noise, the entire body vibrating with black-and-blue shine.
Kai stayed on that.
He got in front of the creature to stop it from crushing more vehicles or reaching civilians who had not yet managed to get out of the street. Every blow he landed shattered part of the structure, but the nanodrones rebuilt it quickly, filling the gaps like intelligent water.
A few yards away, Mark hovered in the air with his phone wedged between his shoulder and ear, trying to sound sick.
"No, seriously," he said, dodging a chunk of car thrown at him. "I'm feeling kind of bad. I think it's better if I don't see you today. Wouldn't want to pass this on to you..."
On the other end of the line, Amber said something he could not push back against without lying even more.
Kai grabbed the head of the robotic ant when it tried to lunge at the line of cars and shouted, irritated,
"Hey, can you hurry up and go get the guy already?"
Mark closed his eyes for a second. "Just one second!"
The ant's jaws opened with a metallic crack. Kai drove a punch so hard straight into the center of the structure that the nanorobots exploded in every direction in an uneven cloud, scattering through the air like a million directionless metal beetles.
"I hate insects!" he snarled.
Freed from the main form, Mark finally shot toward the controller. Human Swarm barely had time to react before being ripped off his control platform and slammed against the roof of an already empty truck, blacking out on the spot.
When Mark ended the call with Amber, he looked at the screen for one second longer than he wanted to admit.
Another excuse.
Another thing that felt too small to matter in the moment, but kept adding weight anyway.
And then came the meeting that closed the trap around Titan.
It was already night when he entered the top floor of a building where the air smelled like expensive carpet, discreet electronics, and laundered money. Isotope was already there, standing as if he were part of the décor, too calm, too neutral. In front of him, behind the main desk, Machine Head slowly turned his chair to receive him.
"I was sure you were the right guy for the job," he said, mechanical humor in his voice.
Titan took the microchip from his pocket and threw it onto the desk.
"With this, we're square. I'm going back to what I was doing before."
Machine Head picked up the chip between two fingers, examining it like a man recovering a missing piece of his own thought process. Then he slotted the device into a discreet opening on the side of his robotic head.
His eyes lit up.
His posture changed. He straightened a few inches, as if an entire series of internal functions had just rebooted.
Titan was already turning away when he heard:
"I don't think so."
He stopped and looked over his shoulder. "No?"
Machine Head smiled faintly.
"Titan, your problem is that you're way too useful for me to let you go." He tilted his head. "Sure, sometimes you don't kill people who should die. Sometimes you try to keep some discount moral compass. But you know how to send a message. And people who know how to send a message get paid well here."
"I don't need your money."
"Of course you do." Machine Head rested his elbows on the desk. "What, you gonna play the good guy now? What are you gonna do? Fry burgers at Burger Mart?" His smile widened slightly. "This is your life now. This is what you do."
Titan's jaw hardened. "It isn't. If it comes to it, I'll find a way."
Machine Head answered without changing his tone. "I know you'll keep working for me. The only question is how much you're gonna suffer before you accept that."
Stone began creeping over Titan's arms and shoulders in a dry rush, climbing over his skin like natural armor.
Machine Head laughed.
"You think you can solve this with brute force? I know where your family lives." His voice stayed simple. Almost casual. "Which means you'll keep working for me until I say otherwise."
Titan took one step forward and drove his fist down into the desk.
The wood exploded down the middle, splitting from side to side, but the strike stopped inches from Machine Head.
Silence.
Machine Head looked at the destroyed desk. Then at Titan.
"See?" he said, genuinely enthusiastic. "That's exactly the kind of spectacular display that makes you so good at the job. I'm never letting you go." He paused briefly. "Oh, and on top of that, now you're gonna have to pay for the desk. Imported wood from Italy."
Titan lifted his eyes to the ceiling for a second, tired on a level that bordered on blasphemy, as if he were cursing the heavens, the city, his own life, and any entity that found any of this amusing.
Outside, autumn kept advancing.
The trees lost more leaves. The mornings grew colder. The shadows began arriving earlier. At school, in the skies, in alleys, in laboratories, and on rooftops, every thread kept moving without giving the others enough time to understand the whole picture.
Mark kept trying to balance love, secrets, and heroism while his lateness turned into a pattern.
Kai remained at his side, useful, far too sharp, and... strangely at peace, carrying the distance inside himself as it kept shrinking, as if it were nothing more than another part of the uniform.
And training with Nolan continued...
The blue curve of Earth filled half the horizon.
Above it, silence.
Nolan hovered nearby with his arms crossed, cape shifting only with tiny adjustments in position. Mark and Kai were just behind him, both of them holding together a chunk of dark rock bigger than a building—an asteroid heading toward Earth.
Nolan tilted his chin toward the rock.
"You need both of you for that?"
Mark shot Kai a sideways glance and gestured with his head.
Kai let go of the rock and drifted back a few yards, his body turning sideways as he pulled away until he was parallel with his father. Mark adjusted his grip alone, fingers sinking slightly into the uneven surface.
"Now push harder." Nolan's voice came clear, unhurried.
Mark pushed.
The rock began to move, slow at first, then picking up speed as the force built. It passed Nolan, rising in a broad arc, heading into the infinite dark.
"Now throw it back into space," Nolan added.
Mark pushed harder.
The asteroid crossed the line between Earth's gravitational field and open space.
Nolan shot after it, a red-and-blue streak cutting through the void. He caught up to the rock, planted both hands against it, and shoved the opposite way, sending the asteroid back toward his sons and Earth with an ease that made it look like a game.
Mark's eyes widened in alarm.
"Are you insane?"
Nolan slowed as he returned, stopping in the same place in front of them.
"Now it's your brother's turn." His tone remained calm. "You both need to know how to handle this."
The rock came back spinning slowly. Kai moved forward, intercepted it, and absorbed the impact with his arms, his body sliding back half a yard before stabilizing.
"Make the most of this one and learn from it. It's the perfect opportunity," Nolan continued, his eyes shifting between the two. "This one's small."
Kai locked the rock in place, took a deep breath—human habit, not necessity—and repeated the exercise. He pushed, felt the weight answer, calculated the force, twisted, and redirected it back into the vacuum.
Mark drifted closer, still staring at the spot where it had vanished.
"You said that's one of the small ones, or did I hear that wrong?"
Nolan looked down, pointing his thumb at the blue-and-white sphere beneath them.
"Yes." His eyes narrowed slightly at the memory. "You should've seen what I diverted a few years ago." He spread his hands, indicating an impossible scale. "It was the size of Texas."
Mark let out a low whistle.
The sound of a phone ringing cut through the conversation, completely out of place in that setting.
He slipped a hand into the small pocket of his suit and pulled out the device, the screen lighting up with a name on it.
"Dad, I have to go." He was already speaking while looking at the message.
Nolan frowned slightly.
"Whatever it is, your training is more important."
"I know." Mark twisted his mouth and turned the phone in his hand. "But it's Amber."
Nolan turned to look at him, and the silence made it clear this conversation had already happened before.
"Mark..." The tone carried a warning. "We've already talked about this."
Mark held his gaze, his shoulders shrinking a little. The expression slipped into his eyes—guilt, longing, exhaustion, all tangled together.
Kai floated a few yards away, staring into space.
The memory of Blue came back uninvited—not the color of the planet below, but the blue of his own Void when he had crossed Mars like a guided bullet. In the vacuum, the void had felt... lighter to touch. As if the entire universe were made of the same thing he carried inside himself.
He kept his eyes fixed on the darkness, leaving the two of them to deal with it.
Nolan let out a nearly imperceptible breath.
The hard line in his face eased a little.
"Fine." He shook his head. "Go." He pointed a finger at Mark. "But just this once."
Mark's smile appeared instantly.
"Thanks!"
He floated up to his father and gave him a quick one-armed hug before he could change his mind. In the same motion, he extended a fist and punched Kai in the shoulder.
Kai turned quickly, interrupted in the middle of his own thoughts.
"What's your problem?"
By the time he looked, Mark was already a colored streak dropping toward the atmosphere, a thin line of fire cutting through the blue.
Kai watched the point shrink for a few seconds.
Then he turned to his father.
Nolan shrugged, crossing his hands over his chest again.
"Well..." His eyes dropped to Earth and then returned to his son. "Since we're not training anymore today, we could watch a movie with your mother."
Kai considered whether he had anything better to do.
He didn't.
"Sure."
Nolan moved closer, rested a hand on his shoulder, and together they started descending toward the city lights, leaving the small asteroid spinning by itself in some distant orbit.
And when the calendar reached November 17th, 2015, too many things were already in motion for any of them to pretend that the days between Mars and whatever came next had been nothing more than an intermission.
Interlude — Part 1: Crime Doesn't Pay
November 17th, 2015 — Chicago — Rooftop of a Residential Building
The sun spilled orange across the rooftops, dragging out long shadows that swallowed the streets below.
On top of the tallest building on the block, three figures stood on concrete still stained with fresh paint. The letters were still wet, gleaming in the angled light—INVINCIBLE and INFINITY, painted in yellow, large enough to be read from the ground.
Titan stood in the center, muscular arms crossed over his broad chest, gray suit dirtied with construction dust. He stared straight at the two in front of him without backing down.
Mark hovered a few feet above the rooftop, his own arms crossed, his blue-and-yellow suit reflecting the sunset. Beside him, Kai floated at the same height, his black-and-gray uniform motionless, his gaze going through Titan as if he had already calculated the best angle of impact.
The wind rose from the city, carrying the smell of hot asphalt and distant smoke.
Titan uncrossed his arms, opening his hands in a gesture that asked for a truce before a fight.
"Invincible. Infinity."
His voice came out rough, measured.
"I need your help."
Interlude — Part 2: Impostor
Meanwhile, Somewhere Else
The bathroom smelled of disinfectant and damp metal.
The man—one of the astronauts from the mission to Mars—stood in front of the mirror, hands braced against the cracked sink, steam from a recent shower fogging the edges of the glass. A towel hung loosely around his waist.
He tilted his head to the side.
Olive-green skin had spread across his neck, creeping upward in irregular patches to the line of his jaw. His head was lengthening, turning rectangular, his dark eyes stretching into a shape that was no longer human.
In the reflection, a Martian stared back at him.
He did not blink.