The dust had barely settled in the subterranean cavern when a massive blue pillar of light illuminated the rocky ceiling.
Before the communications array went completely dark, Robot and Brit had managed to send out a distress signal. Backup had finally arrived. Stepping out of the teleportation beam was the rehabilitated Darkwing II, flanked by a dozen hulking, cybernetic monstrosities. The first official deployment of the GDA's Reanimen.
Darkwing II immediately fell into a combat stance, pulling a shadow-gadget from his belt, before freezing. He looked around the cavern. He saw the freed heroes stretching their limbs, Doc Seismic unconscious on the floor, and millions of pieces of shattered, flash-cooled gravel coating the bedrock.
He slowly lowered his weapon, looking up at me hovering a few feet in the air.
"Invincible?" Darkwing II swallowed hard, clearly intimidated by the new suit and the sheer scale of the destruction. "Is... is the threat neutralized?"
"Mhhm, but it seems that a possible new threat arises," I glanced at him as I casually floated down to the floor.
Darkwing II rubbed the back of his neck, looking incredibly awkward. "Right. Hey, listen, man. About our... previous encounter in Midnight City. I wasn't in my right mind. I wanted to apologize for—"
"It's cool," I interrupted, waving a hand dismissively. "Water under the bridge. Don't sweat it."
If only your boss was as easy going as me, I thought.
Before Darkwing could say anything else, a second blue flash lit up the cavern. Cecil materialized, his trademark scowl etched into his scarred face. He took one look at the devastation, the crushed titanium gauntlets on Seismic's arms, and then at me. His expression didn't change, but his eyes calculated the entire room in a fraction of a second.
"Well," Cecil said smoothly, his voice perfectly level as he casually put his hands in his pockets. "This is quite the scene, Invincible. My satellites just picked up a localized thermal spike that nearly fried their sensors. Care to explain how an entire subterranean army was reduced to... gravel?"
I didn't answer him. With pure, unadulterated disgust, my eyes locked onto the dozen cybernetic Reanimen standing behind Darkwing.
I have billions of Reanimen waiting on standby in the Flaxan Dimension too, but those are soldiers from a doomed, dying Earth. We repurposed them because their world was already dead, and I still hate looking at them, knowing what they were. These ones standing in this cavern? Are definitely fresh.
I shook my head.
"Mark?" Eve hovered down next to me, noticing the dark shift in my posture. "What's wrong?"
An opportunity has arisen, I thought. These guys need to know exactly why I do things separately.
"Those cyborgs," I said, pointing a finger at the Reanimen. My voice echoed loudly through the cavern, ensuring that every single hero—Brit, the Guardians, Capes Inc.—heard me loud and clear. "How'd you make them?"
Cecil's eyes narrowed slightly, though his posture remained completely relaxed. He knew exactly what I was doing.
"That's classified," he stated quickly, but firmly.
"Really now?" I questioned innocently. "Don't the people put their lives on the line deserve to know what they're allying with?"
"They are a highly functional GDA asset, Invincible," he responded, a little edge in his tone. "That's all that needs to be known. We don't need to discuss operational logistics here."
"Of course we can," I said calmly as I turned to Eve. "You remember D.A. Sinclair? The psychopath from Upstate University who kidnapped college kids, mutilated them, and turned them into cyborgs against their will?"
Eve gasped, her hands flying to her mouth in horror.
"Wait," she stepped forward, her pink aura flaring dangerously as she glared at the GDA Director. "You put the serial killer who tortured innocent kids—including William's boyfriend—on the taxpayer payroll?!"
"I put a brilliant mind to work for the defense of this planet," Cecil countered smoothly, his voice raising just enough to carry over the sudden murmurs of outrage spreading among the assembled heroes. "The world isn't black and white, Eve. People can change. They can be rehabilitated and turned into a force for good. Just look at Darkwing."
Darkwing II stiffened, shifting uncomfortably under the sudden, heavy, judging gazes of the entire superhero community.
"Second chances only work if the intentions behind them are pure, Cecil," I countered, my voice tinged with a sincere tone. "You and the GDA don't have pure intentions. You didn't rehabilitate Sinclair. You just gave a psychopath a blank check and a million stolen corpses so you could build a private zombie army."
The cavern erupted.
"A million?!" Brit shouted, stepping forward, his cigar nearly falling out of his mouth.
Monster Girl looked physically sick. Robot's eyes widened as he furiously calculated the sheer scale of the grave-robbing required to build that many units.
"It's necessary!" Cecil snapped, his cool facade finally cracking just a fraction under the weight of the collective disgust. He pointed aggressively at his Reanimen. "These units benefit the world! They don't sleep, they don't hesitate, and they can handle major, planetary threats! They are the shield Earth needs!"
"Don't flatter yourself," I scoffed, crossing my arms. I looked at the Reanimen like they were cheap toys. "They don't seem as powerful as you say they are. All they really have is numbers. Against a real threat, they're just expensive scrap metal."
Cecil's jaw locked.
"Is that right?" Cecil sneered, his tone dropping its diplomatic edge. "If you think they're so weak, Invincible, why don't you come down to the GDA and put your money where your mouth is? Let's see how your new range of abilities handle a real stress test against my 'scrap metal'."
Oh, you poor, foolish man, I thought, suppressing a grin. I'm about to end your whole career.
I let out a loud, exaggerated yawn, stretching my neck. "It wouldn't do anything but waste my time. But, I guess I can spare a few minutes. I need a better warm-up than these guys anyways. Let's get it over with."
"Good," Cecil said coldly, ushering me close. "Come with me."
A blinding blue flash consumed us.
When my vision cleared, the cavern, the heroes, and the magma were gone. We were standing in the center of a massive, perfectly sterile, blindingly white room. The walls, floor, and ceiling were completely seamless, forged from some kind of heavy, reinforced composite metal.
Cecil wasn't standing next to me anymore. He had teleported himself behind a massive wall of thick, reinforced observation glass suspended above the floor. He stood up there at a control console, looking down at me. His relaxed facade was completely gone now. He just looked cold.
"I'm sorry, Mark," Cecil's voice crackled over the intercom, stripping away any pretense of a 'stress test'. "But you've grown too powerful, too fast. You're hiding things from the GDA, and your scaling is off the charts. I can't leave Earth's safety to chance. I have to subdue you until we can figure out exactly what's going on with you."
I didn't panic or yell. I just looked directly up at him, crossed my arms, and gave him a terrifying smirk.
"Don't bore me now, Cecil."
Behind the glass, Cecil slammed his hand onto a red console.
The seamless white walls suddenly retracted, revealing dozens of massive, dark tunnels. And from those tunnels poured the dead.
It didn't look like an army. It looked like a tidal wave of cybernetic metal, flesh (some rotting), and whirring servos. They came in by the hundreds, then thousands, until there were millions of them. The sheer scale of the GDA's grave-robbing was laid bare. The Reanimen flooded the room, moving with mindless, robotic aggression. They shrieked with synthetic roars, instantly swarming the center of the room.
They hit me like a collapsing skyscraper.
A mountain of metal and flesh buried me in a fraction of a second. Millions of pounds of crushing weight piled on top of me. Metal claws capable of tearing through tank armor ripped at my Bio-Reactive Containment Suit. Fists that could dent battleships hammered against my skull, my chest, my back.
Up in the observation deck, Cecil watched the mountain of Reanimen writhe and tear at the center of the room. He looked at his biometric scanners, expecting to see my vitals plummeting.
Instead, the screens flared red with warning sirens.
Down in the dark, buried under a hundred thousand bodies, I closed my eyes and smiled.
Every single time a Reanimen threw a punch, my suit absorbed the kinetic energy. The sheer, crushing weight of the dogpile wasn't hurting me; it was jump-starting me. The kinetic regulators channeled the impact force directly into my smart atoms. They weren't beating me down—they were actively charging my batteries to a thousand percent.
"What is happening?" Cecil's voice panicked over the intercom as his consoles started smoking from the sheer energy readings. "Activate the sonic pulse! Now!"
A high-frequency, concentrated sonic weapon dropped from the ceiling, blasting a soundwave designed to instantly rupture Viltrumite inner ears and induce a localized coma.
It washed over the pile. But, I didn't even wince.
The Maulers had used that exact frequency as my alarm clock for a decade in the Flaxan dimension. My eardrums were completely scarred over and adapted to it, and whatever fraction of the sound did get through was instantly absorbed by the suit's kinetic dampeners as just another form of vibrational energy.
Alright, I thought, my veins glowing blindingly bright under the armor. Guess it's my turn.
I flexed and released all the accumulated kinetic energy the Reanimen had just generously fed me in a single, omnidirectional shockwave.
BOOM.
It was like setting off a nuclear bomb inside a tin can.
The blast radius was perfectly contained within the White Room. The shockwave hit the swarm of Reanimen so hard and so fast that they didn't just break—they were instantaneously vaporized. The sheer kinetic force turned the multi-billion-dollar cyborgs into a fine mist of red blood, shattered microchips, and pulverized bone.
The blinding white walls were instantly painted a gruesome, metallic crimson.
The blast shook the Pentagon to its foundations, but the room held. As the dust settled, the silence was deafening.
Out of the literal millions of Reanimen, nothing was left but a sea of scrap metal and puddles.
I stood perfectly in the center of the room. There wasn't a single scratch on me. I didn't look tired; I looked like I had just woken up from a refreshing nap. I casually dusted a piece of synthetic flesh off my shoulder, floating slowly up to the reinforced, thick observation glass.
On the other side, Cecil Stedman was pale, sweating, and completely horrified. He backed away from the glass, his hands shaking. His absolute strongest, most desperate contingency plan hadn't even made me break a sweat.
I hovered right in front of him. I raised one armored finger and tapped lightly on the "indestructible" glass.
A massive, spiderweb crack instantly shattered across the entire pane.
"Told ya so," I shrugged, my voice muffled but perfectly clear through the fractured glass. "Now, let me out before I make my own exit. I got things to do. I'm a very busy man, after all."