Viltrum opened itself to Chris slowly, like a fortress revealing only the gates it wanted him to see.
After the trial, the jeers had turned to nods of acknowledgment. Where once Viltrumites looked at him as an oddity, now they looked at him as one of their own — or at least, as something worthy of survival. Among a people who despised weakness, Chris had proven himself too strong to dismiss.
Anissa guided him through their world. The capital gleamed beneath its spires, every street lined with perfect order. There was no idleness here. Children drilled in formation, their fists already hard enough to dent stone. Soldiers trained in open yards, their combat echoing like thunder through the city. Even the scholars were warriors, their knowledge sharpened like weapons.
And yet… it felt empty.
Chris noticed it on his first day. The cities were vast, sprawling marvels of stone and steel that could have housed billions. But only hundreds, perhaps a few thousand, walked their streets. Every voice echoed too loudly. Every hall stretched too far without being filled.
It was a world built for an empire that no longer existed. A throne room with no court.
To Chris, it was haunting. To the Viltrumites, it was pride. They had endured.
Still, he adapted.
He learned their combat forms, the grappling techniques passed down through generations of conquest. He mastered his speed, taught to move with precision instead of reckless bursts that split the earth beneath him. He refined his senses until he could hear the scrape of metal across the city, see a sparring match on the farthest balcony, feel the pulse of an army drilling miles away.
But it wasn't just combat. Chris threw himself into their sciences. Their archives were vast, filled with maps of galaxies conquered and histories rewritten to suit their pride. Their technology was millennia beyond Earth's, and yet built with the same cold efficiency as everything else — tools for war, nothing more.
He studied it all. Energy cores, medical regeneration chambers, starship engines that folded through space. He memorized every schematic, every formula, every detail. Not because he wanted to become one of them… but because knowledge was power. And here, knowledge was survival.
Decades passed.
Viltrum's people came to know him as Miracle, the outsider who fought like one of their own and thought like none of them. He drank with their soldiers, sparred with their champions, debated their scientists until they cursed his name and admired him in the same breath.
And through it all, Anissa was at his side.
Their bond deepened in the spaces between battles — in the long silences after sparring, in the rare moments when Viltrumite discipline gave way to something more human. She never stopped being a warrior first, but there were nights when she allowed herself to lean against him, her eyes soft, her touch lingering. For her, he was not just strong — he was different.
And yet, Chris never forgot who he was.
One night, deep in the archives, he found it.
A planet marked for conquest. Blue oceans. Green continents. White clouds.
Earth.
The name was foreign in their tongue, but the sight of it hit him like a blade to the chest. His home. His people. Not yet touched, but already targeted. Another world on a long list of future campaigns.
Chris stared at the image for hours, silent, motionless. Something in him stirred awake. The assimilation cracked. The outsider within remembered who he was.
He said nothing to Anissa. Nothing to Thragg. Nothing to anyone.
But from that day, when he donned his combat uniform, he began to change it. A seam here, a plate of armor there, colors shifting from Viltrumite red and white into something brighter, golden-white, uniquely his. Piece by piece, he was remaking himself. Not one of them. Not anymore.
And though Anissa never spoke of it, she noticed.