A fiery streak tore across the void—too bright, too violent, too alive to be any ordinary meteor. It was a body. A person. A young man plummeting through the cold silence of space with no ship, no suit, nothing but the thin fabric of a green hoodie whipping against his skin as the cosmos peeled past him in distorted light. His name—though no one here yet knew it—was **Asap Ashton**.
There were moments during the fall where he wasn't sure he was even conscious. Heat licked at his arms, plasma blooming behind him like a tail of a dying comet. Flames curled around his body as if trying to erase him before he reached solid ground. But Asap didn't burn. He didn't understand why. He couldn't think long enough to question it. There was only freefall and an endless drop toward the surface of a world that shouldn't have existed.
The planet below looked like Earth, with clouds and blue oceans and shapes of continents. But the air had a metallic shimmer, like the sky itself was glitching. Asap hit the atmosphere like a sledgehammer striking water, and for a moment the sky lit up in a blinding emerald flash, as if the world recognized him before he even arrived. He slammed into the planet, the impact shaking the bones of the abandoned city that waited below.
Dust flung upward in a tidal wave. Cracked pavement split in every direction. An entire block collapsed into its own foundation. And at the center of it, lying in a crater of molten stone and shattered concrete, was Asap—arms limp, hoodie torn at the sleeves, hair smoking from the fall.
He wasn't dead.
He wasn't even bleeding.
He didn't know why.
Darkness swallowed him.
---
Asap woke with a gasp—the kind of sharp inhale where your lungs feel like they're being stabbed awake. He jolted upright, disoriented, tangled in thin blankets. The room around him was small and wooden, built from crooked planks that looked ready to collapse with a strong breeze. A dusty lantern flickered on a table beside him.
He wasn't in the crater anymore.
He wasn't outside.
He was… in someone's cabin?
The air smelled like old wood and wet stone. Shadows pushed against each other on the floor, twitching with the faint flame of the lantern. Asap pressed a palm to his forehead, struggling to remember where he was before this place, before the crash, before the sky. Nothing came. His mind was a tangle of static—glimpses of alleyways, faces he couldn't quite remember, nights of sleeping on cold pavement somewhere far away. A life he lived but didn't feel connected to anymore.
A life with no purpose. No meaning. No direction.
He swung his legs off the bed, hoodie sagging off one shoulder, socks half-torn. The floorboards groaned under his feet as he took a step toward the door, pushing it open a crack. Outside was a ruined city—an entire skyline of collapsed towers and overgrown roads, stretching under a pale lavender sky. It looked like Earth, but broken. Abandoned. Wrong.
Before he could think further, the world shook.
A tremor rolled through the ground, knocking dust from the ceiling. The lantern flickered violently and Asap staggered back, catching the edge of the bed. Heavy metallic stomps echoed through the cave-like streets outside, each impact louder than the last. Something massive was approaching—something that didn't breathe and didn't belong in any natural world.
A red glow washed across the cracks of the cabin door.
Asap's pulse spiked.
Another stomp. Another tremor.
Then the door exploded inward.
Shards of wood blasted across the room like shrapnel. Standing in the frame—towering, broad-shouldered, and forged from a mesh of chrome plates—was a **silver robot** easily twice Asap's height. Its joints hissed steam; its chest buzzed with humming circuits. Two red optics glared like twin lasers locked on a target.
Asap froze.
The robot's claw snapped open with a metallic shriek, razor points scraping against each other. It stepped into the cabin, crushing half the doorway with its weight. Its optics narrowed as if scanning him.
Asap's legs locked. Fight or flight kicked in—but neither option felt possible. His chest tightened painfully. For a single moment, he wondered if this was where his story ended: not falling from the sky, not in some cosmic explosion… but here, cornered by a giant metal monster in a shack that smelled like wet lumber.
The robot lunged.
The claw tore through the air, aimed straight for his skull.
And something inside Asap snapped.
His breathing stopped. Time thinned. And deep within his chest—behind his sternum, behind whatever he believed he was—something sparked. Like a fuse being lit.
Memories flickered through him like flashing lights: sleeping under bridges, eating scraps, fists bruised from fights he never wanted, the feeling of drifting through a life that wasn't meant for him. He had been powerless for so long that the emotion clawing up his throat felt foreign. It felt bigger than fear. Bigger than adrenaline.
It felt like defiance.
Pure, unfiltered, absolute defiance.
The robot swung again.
Asap roared.
Not a scared scream. Not a cry for help.
A roar of something awakening.
His fist swung upward—glowing with a strange light he had never seen before. It was colorless and colorful at the same time, like energy that didn't understand physics. His knuckles collided with the robot's arm in an impact that boomed like a thunderclap.
The robot's entire forearm **exploded** into shards.
Asap stumbled backward, staring at his hand, stunned. His fist smoked. His hoodie sleeve was torn to the elbow. His breath came in ragged bursts.
"What—"
He didn't finish.
The robot reeled back with mechanical rage, gears grinding, compartments shifting open along its shoulders. But Asap didn't retreat this time. He lunged forward, driven by instinct and something deeper—something inside him demanding he keep moving, keep hitting, keep fighting.
His body moved faster than his mind.
A glowing knee strike bent the robot's metal leg backward. A spinning elbow shattered its chest plate. His fist, glowing brighter now, crashed into the robot's head with enough force to launch it into the far wall.
The robot's head didn't simply break.
It **bounced**.
A ridiculous rubber-like *boing* echoed through the room as the head ricocheted off a broken chair, wobbling like it weighed nothing. Sparks spat from the decapitated body. The robot collapsed into a heap of steaming chrome, legs twitching before finally going still.
Silence returned.
Asap stood in the center of the destroyed cabin, chest heaving, hands trembling—not in fear, but in the aftermath of something awakening deep within him. His hoodie hung off one shoulder, dust coating his hair. A sliver of light broke through the shattered roof, illuminating him in a column of pale gold.
He stared at his glowing hand.
"I… did that?"
He didn't understand the power inside him—not yet. But the world around him suddenly felt smaller, as if he had outgrown it in seconds. Something was calling him now, louder than the robot's metallic screams. He felt it in the cracked earth beneath his feet, in the strange air shimmering above the city ruins.
This world wasn't where he belonged.
But it was where his story began.
And whatever force threw him from the heavens had more in store for him than a single robot in a broken cabin.
Asap Ashton took a breath, tightened the torn sleeve of his green hoodie, and stepped out into the alien sunlight—unaware that every step he took would soon echo across universes.