1940–1944 — Across the Cities of America
Elijah Gray didn't die in 1936.
The Liberty Project's prototype serum had worked—violently. Moments after it was injected into him, his nervous system ignited. His blood ran like fire. His eyes flooded with light. Then, in a pulse of raw force, he vanished.
Not into another world. Just… elsewhere.
He reappeared nearly two miles from the facility, naked and unconscious, in a field outside Chicago. He was only thirteen. But something inside him had changed.
The Liberty Project classified the incident. Only the highest brass knew the truth. They marked the boy as "Patient Zero" and quietly buried the file. Unstable. Unrecoverable. Possibly dead.
But Elijah was very much alive.
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Becoming the Shadow
He learned to live on the run. And with time, he learned control. The teleportation stopped being random. He could will it—focus it. And other abilities began to surface: inhuman agility, enhanced reflexes, the ability to darken entire streets with his presence.
And a kind of mental intuition. Not mind-reading exactly. But an awareness of intent. He could sense fear. Lies. Malice.
He watched the rise of Marvelo-Man in the headlines. The capes. The smiles. The glory.
And he made a choice.
He would be the opposite.
He would never be a hero.
He would be a force.
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The Cities Burn
He moved through America's underbelly, nameless, cloaked in rags. No symbol. No fanfare. Only justice. He struck from shadows—silent, precise, brutal.
In Harlem, he took out corrupt landlords who burned their buildings for insurance.
In Kansas City, he snapped the spine of a preacher who trafficked orphans out the back of his mission.
In Detroit, he walked into a mob stronghold and left the entire building collapsed in rubble, six bodies inside. The police blamed a gas leak.
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Man, Not Monster
But he wasn't perfect. He told himself it was always justice—but sometimes, it wasn't.
He killed a rival informant once just because the man betrayed his location to a local gang.
He let a girl overdose in a tenement hallway because he was angry and tired. He didn't see her as a priority that night.
He wasn't Marvelo-Man. He didn't want to be.
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Rise of the Mask
By 1942, Elijah had learned to build a life above the surface. He used stolen knowledge from military experiments and chemical blueprints to patent revolutionary industrial cooling systems under the alias E. Graves.
By 1944, he was the sole owner of Graves Engineering—a shadowy conglomerate involved in arms manufacturing, oil, and high-speed computation.
He became rich. Hunted. Untouchable.
The media called him a genius recluse. The men in Washington whispered about him, but no one ever linked E. Graves to the phantom terrorizing America's most powerful criminals.
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Legend in the Alleyways
Among criminals, he was an urban legend.
A giant in a stitched black cloak. Skin like burnt glass. Eyes like furnace coals.
They said he could walk through walls, appear behind you in your last breath, vanish entire gangs in a single second.
And he never spoke.
But he left signs.
Burned corpses shaped like warnings. Sigils etched in walls with blood. The symbol of a zero carved with surgical precision.
He had no fans. No admirers.
Only fear.
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Unspoken War
And yet… he read about Marvelo-Man.
Maxwell Marvelo stood for everything he didn't. Hope. Bravery. Smiles and speeches. But Elijah didn't hate him.
He envied him.
What would the world have done if he had been given a clean chance? If he had been raised like a symbol instead of an accident?
He stared at his reflection one night—shoulders scarred, eyes pulsing with unstable power—and said aloud, "You're not the hero. You never were."
And that night, he marked his next target: a senator who had helped fund the Liberty Project.
Justice wasn't finished yet.
And neither was he.