Three Months Earlier: Doomstadt, Christmas Morning
The castle was still standing. That was the first thing Victor Von Doom registered when he came back to himself.
The throne room floor was cold as hell against his face, biting through the torn plating where his armor had been breached in seventeen goddamn places. His mask had cracked along the left side, a hairline fracture running from temple to jaw like a split in reality itself. The ritual circle was destroyed, his people were out there with their illnesses reversed and their fields restored, a nation healed by the power he'd spent months accumulating for himself. The broadcast had reached every screen in Latveria and most of Europe, and he'd watched through one working optical sensor in the mask, watched the feed show him kneeling in the ruins of his own ambition, a broken man in torn clothing drawing symbols in his own blood.
That bastard had done this.
And then, as the last of the ritual's energy dispersed into the cold air, as the church bells of Doomstadt began ringing Christmas morning across a nation that believed the miracle had been a gift from God rather than stolen from their ruler, Victor Von Doom understood that he wasn't dead.
He wasn't dead, and that meant the outsider had fucked up.
You do not leave Victor Von Doom breathing.
What followed wasn't recovery, because recovery implied passivity, a body repairing itself while the mind waited, and what Doom did was methodical reconstruction conducted with the same precision he brought to everything. There was no other way he knew how to be. He catalogued the damage first, twenty-three fractures across the spine alone and the nerves in the right hand completely shot, his left knee beneath the armor shattered by the energy feedback and healed crooked in the three hours he lay unconscious on the throne room floor.
He reset it himself without anesthetic, because pain was for lesser men and DOOM was not a lesser man.
The machines came next, his backup laboratories untouched by the battle because the Broker hadn't known where they were, and they contained the tools he needed. Months of solitary work followed, in the deep levels of the castle where no staff remained and no cameras reached, and he rebuilt the body piece by piece. As each component came together he modified it, because the original design of flesh had failed and Doom did not repeat failures. He added things, rune-enhanced plating with dark inscriptions drawn from texts that the Sorcerer Supreme would've called inadvisable, texts that called on forces older than the deal with Mephisto, and neural integration that went further than the previous iteration had, nerve-welded connections that removed the distinction between the armor and the body piloting it.
By the end of the year, the distinction between Victor Von Doom and Doctor Doom had become basically meaningless.
He'd replaced what the Broker had broken, and he'd replaced it with something that didn't break in the same way because it wasn't entirely flesh anymore.
He wasn't a cyborg, that was a reductive term for what he'd done and DOOM did not deal in reductions. He'd simply accepted that the weakness of flesh was a liability he could no longer afford, and he'd addressed it the only way that made sense. The runes running beneath the new plating weren't decoration, they were load-bearing, woven into the metal and into what remained of his nervous system in patterns that made the armor not something he wore but something he inhabited.
He was better than he'd been. He was angrier. Both conditions seemed sustainable.
DOOM had been humiliated, reduced to spectacle in front of his people, made to serve the very masses he ruled, forced to heal them with power meant for his own ascension. The rage from that hadn't diminished during his reconstruction, it'd refined itself, become architectural. Every rune he inscribed carried that fury. Every nerve connection he welded held that grudge. He wasn't rebuilding to return to what he'd been, he was rebuilding to become what would be necessary to unmake the man who'd done this to him.
And then, a few months later, the announcement of a cosmic trial against the Broker and Oblivion's summons to fight against the Broker reached Doomstadt, and Victor Von Doom recognized an opportunity.
The Arena
The thing that entered the arena from a dimensional fold of its own making wasn't the Doctor Doom most of the heroes on Jay's side recognized.
The silhouette was correct, the green cloak and the iron mask and the hulking frame, but it moved differently, where Doom had always walked with the deliberate theatricality of a man conscious of his own presence, this version moved with the flat efficiency of something that had removed from its programming any consideration that wasn't functional. The runes along the armor's edges pulsed in sequence, dark light running the tracework like a circuit board displaying its own power draw.
He'd timed his entrance for maximum effect, or rather he'd timed it for maximum effect on the one person he wanted to face, which was why he positioned himself directly in front of Jay's new form and let the arena register him before he spoke.
"DOOM has returned," he said, and his voice carried the reverberation of the armor's new speaker system, calibrated to resonate just so. "What you thought you ended on Christmas Eve was not an ending. It was a forge. DOOM does not fall, DOOM is remade. You left Doom breathing, Broker, and that was your gravest miscalculation, every nerve rebuilt, every rune inscribed in fury, every piece of this form constructed from the knowledge of what you did to him and what he intends to do to you in return. DOOM has come to collect."
He raised one gauntlet and dark energy crackled along the runes.
"Doom answers you with his will. Now come, Broker. Face DOOM, and learn what a King who survives his supposed defeat becomes."
Jay looked at him.
Just looked, for a moment, with the expression of someone mildly annoyed that a thing they'd dealt with has come back to annoy them at this particular time.
Then he turned his attention back toward Oblivion, who was regrouping on the far side of the arena following their first exchange, and Jay raised his hand in Doom's direction without looking at him and swatted him sideways with the back of it.
Elsewhere in the Arena
The arena, in the minutes since "Begin" had become operational, had become the kind of fight that only made sense in snapshots. Ben Grimm had found something worth punching in Abraxas and was making a project of it with the uncomplicated satisfaction of a man who'd been waiting for a correct application of force. The Ancient One was moving through the Goblin Force's outer edge with the efficiency of someone who'd been studying this type of hostile energy for decades and had strong opinions about how to address it. Johnny Storm was doing what Johnny Storm did, which was generating enough heat to make even the Beyonders recalculate their operational parameters, because fire was fire regardless of what tier of reality you operated from.
Luv and Bonk were somewhere in the middle distance, green and blue light marking their progress through the field, healing what needed healing and not getting stepped on, which in an arena this size required active management.
Then three Beyonders broke formation.
They moved toward Luv with the flat efficiency of beings who'd voted for his erasure out of curiosity about the timeline disruption it would cause and hadn't substantially revised that position just because the vote had been overruled.
They were Kings in Ivory, existing at the boundary of the multiverse proper, and they approached a five-year-old boy and his glowing dinosaur with the same expression they brought to disassembling failing cosmoses, patient and thorough and entirely detached from any consideration that the thing being disassembled might have preferences about it.
They didn't reach Luv.
The shadow caught them first.
It came from a direction the arena didn't technically have, from the angle that only symbiote constructs could navigate because they understood space as something to move through rather than a fixed coordinate system. Three tendrils, thick as structural columns, intercepted the Beyonders at the edge of their approach and held, and the things that had survived at the multiverse's outer boundary since before the concept of a boundary had a name found, for the first time in considerable experience, something that was simply holding them in place with no apparent interest in argument.
Domino had been moving toward Luv the moment the Beyonders broke formation, and she pulled up short when the shadow got there first.
She looked at it. The shadow looked back. Then it receded from the face of the being wearing it, pulling back from the black mask to reveal something unexpected, which was a human face, tired around the eyes with the tiredness of someone who'd been carrying something heavy for a long time and had learned to carry it without letting it show. Blond. Jaw set.
Eddie Brock said, "I know what this feels like."
He wasn't looking at Domino, he was looking at Luv, who'd stopped running and was watching the stranger with the wariness children deploy for adults who appear out of nowhere during a crisis.
"I know what it is," Eddie said again, quieter, "to fight the entire world for the sake of your kid, to have everyone with a title and a throne and a cosmic mandate line up to tell you that your kid doesn't fit and never will and the universe would be better managed without him." His jaw moved, tightened just slightly. "Dylan and I went through something similar, different scale but same basic shape, and someone helped us."
He looked at Domino.
"Let me," he said.
Domino held the look for a moment, and Jay had told her about Eddie Brock, about Knull and the war in the symbiote hive, about how a former villain with a complicated relationship to the alien entity bonded to him had become King in Black by defeating the god of the symbiotes and had carried that title with, by all accounts, more grace than anyone had expected. She had enough context to know what she was looking at. She nodded once.
Eddie let the hundreds of symbiote army ranging from the lowest foot soldier to Symbiotic dragon and Symbiotic celestials under his command out properly.
What came from him was more controlled than that, the King in Black exercising his authority over the symbiote hive, calling from the suit not combat extensions but something more useful, dozens of tendrils of symbiote biomass, each one finding the nearest injured or exhausted ally and making contact. Wade Wilson's suit suddenly had a black underlayer that moved like it had its own ideas about where threats were coming from, his reflexes hitting a different ceiling.
Masacre's machetes acquired an edge that cut through energy constructs with a consistency that hadn't been there before.
Clint Barton felt the symbiote touch his quiver and looked down to see arrows reforming, black-edged and tracking-capable, replenishing faster than he could fire them. He pulled one, tested the weight, and his face did something that was half grin, half disbelief. "Okay, that's new," he said to no one in particular.
Natasha Romanoff's movements acquired a half-second predictive buffer that read incoming attacks before they landed, the symbiote intelligence processing threat vectors faster than unaided human nervous systems could manage. She felt it the moment it touched her, the slight pressure of something else analyzing the battlefield through her senses, and she didn't fight it because she was too busy using it to dodge what would've been a killing blow from a Griever construct.
Every weakened or under-equipped fighter on Jay's side who the symbiote could reach found themselves, suddenly, better equipped and augmented.
"Told you there was more than one way to do a Black Face legally!" Wade announced, looking at his updated suit with visible appreciation, and he held up his sword and the symbiote coating caught the arena light and held it. "This is like getting an upgrade mid-game from the DLC boss who decided you're okay actually. I love this guy. Eddie, right? You and me, we should start a podcast. 'Two Guys, One Symbiote Hive Mind.' I'll pitch it to Netflix. We'll make millions. Metaphorically. Or literally. I'm flexible on the capitalism."
"We're not friends, Wilson," Eddie said, from somewhere in the middle of holding three Beyonders in place with the patient application of something that predated their comprehension.
"See, that's exactly what a friend would say," Wade replied. "Also, can your goo do my taxes? Because if it can process threat vectors it can probably process a 1099 and I've been putting that shit off."
[A/N]: Support my work and get early access to chapters, exclusive content, and bonus material at my P@treon - Max_Striker.
If you wanna hang out, join my Discord server- https://discord.gg/XxGEYk2PM5