The morning of September 23rd met me with a deceptive idyll. A sunbeam danced insolently on my pillow, and my head felt an unusual, almost sterile clarity—a pleasant residual effect of yesterday's "upgrade." The frantic day that had swept through like a hurricane was over. In a sense, it could be considered a starting point. The mechanisms of the universe were in motion, the gears began to turn with new force, and who knows where it all would lead... But I couldn't influence that anyway. Since that was the case, I had to do what I could. And to start with—breakfast.
After messaging Peter to spend the day in the lab and make more portions of the Absolute Predator serum, muscle stimulant, and NZT-48, I quickly whipped up some fried eggs with bacon on the pan and brewed some strong black coffee, as befits a respectable garage worker and transmigration protagonist before the start of a workday. I opened my laptop, while simultaneously placing an order for healing components from Lucas for tomorrow morning, to browse the news and assess the situation.
The very first headline made me choke, nearly spitting hot coffee onto the screen.
"HE CALLED HIMSELF HYPERION: A GOD AMONG US OR A NEW THREAT?!"
Below in the news feed, a kaleidoscope of similar screaming headlines flashed:
"A New Hero in the Skies over New York! Everything Known About the Mysterious HYPERION"
"Captain America Is No Match for Him? Analysts Shocked by the Newcomer's Power Level!"
"From the Heavens to the Earth: Eyewitnesses on the Appearance of a Superhuman in Central Manhattan"
The essence of dozens of articles boiled down to one thing. Today, literally about an hour ago, in the center of New York (where else, it's the local branch of universal drama), a man descended from the sky. I clicked on the most popular video, filmed on someone's smartphone.
The quality was lousy. The camera shook, the sound was drowned out by the wind and the excited cries of the crowd. But the figure in the center was clearly visible. A tall, blond man in a form-fitting yellow and blue suit. On his chest—three connected circles, a logo resembling an atomic diagram. On his belt—a buckle with a radiation symbol. He hovered a couple of meters above the ground with inhuman calmness as onlookers gathered around him, pointing dozens of phones at him. Ensuring attention was fixed on him, he spoke. And his voice, even through a lousy speaker, sounded like a clap of thunder.
"Citizens of this world! For long years you have gazed at the stars in solitude!" His speech was solemn and measured, as if he were addressing a senate rather than a crowd on the street. "But from this day forth, that is no longer so. I have come to be your Shield against the threats that lurk in the darkness of space, and your Sword against the injustice that poisons your land. Among you, it is customary to call those like me Heroes. But I consider myself a Protector. My name is HYPERION! From this day, know this—you are not alone!"
After these words, he lingered no longer and soared into the sky. Without fire, without visible effort. He simply vanished, leaving behind only a loud crack of air that made the camera tremble. The video ended.
"Fuck..." I exhaled loudly, leaning back in my chair. "Who is this guy?"
I feverishly combed through the archives of my meta-knowledge. Hyperion. The name was familiar. An image from an old mobile gacha game I spent a couple of weeks on back in the day surfaced in my memory. Seemed like a canonical Marvel character. Flies, shoots lasers from his eyes, super strong, practically unkillable. And... that was it. That was literally the entire volume of information. No real identity, no origin story, no weaknesses. A blank slate. But at least I was almost certain he was a classic "good guy." Not a schizophrenic psychopath like the Sentry, who could lose his mind at any moment and collapse reality. That was already something.
Opening the comments section, I plunged into the usual chaos of opinions.
"Anti-Mutie_Patriot88: YET ANOTHER mutant decided he's above us and imagined himself a godling. Watch out, or he'll start demanding virgins as sacrifices. Waiting for the government to wake up and swat this flying threat like the rest of the freaks!"
"WellActuallyGuy: → Anti-Mutie_Patriot88, First of all, mutants are a genetic anomaly, the existence of which hasn't even been proven yet, and this subject, by all appearances, belongs to the 'meta-human' class. Learn the lore before writing conspiratorial nonsense. Secondly, did no one pay attention to his phrases 'citizens of this world' and 'your land'? He speaks of us in the third person. This leads to certain thoughts..."
"JustAsking: By the way, yeah. Has anyone actually run his face through the databases? He's not wearing a mask. What if it's just some actor decided to catch some hype before the release of a new movie?"
"Info_Broker: → JustAsking, They already did. Everyone who cares—from the FBI to journalists. Zero results. His face isn't in a single database on the planet. No passport, no driver's license, not even parking tickets. Officially, such a person does not exist."
"FFF_Fan_Forever: → WellActuallyGuy, AN ALIEN?! FINALLY!!! Soon Reed Richards and his team will return from their expedition, and then we'll know the truth! I'm sure if he got information in space, he's already building theories!"
"SpideyFan_HornetQueen: I don't know, guys... All this pompous speech, a costume like a circus performer. Yes, he's strong, but our Spider-Woman feels more like one of us, I guess. She's here, with us, on the streets, not preaching from the heavens like some messiah. She's ours, but this one—he's a stranger."
"PowerLevel_9000: → SpideyFan_HornerQueen, LOL, another insect-spider-fanboy, log out! You're comparing a street hero to this guy?! He'd wipe your spider-girl into powder with one flick of his finger! Did you see how he took off?! To break the sound barrier from a standstill, you need insane durability! Pray that it doesn't occur to him to commit genocide against us here! HYPERION IS THE NEW GOD OF THIS PLANET! ALL HAIL HYPERION!"
"Skeptic_Dent: → PowerLevel_9000, Spiders are arachnids, not insects, you uneducated fool. And dial down your fanatical fervor. No one is omnipotent. They found a way to deal with Captain America, though he also seemed invincible. This is just a flying, steroid version of Cap. He'll find his own kryptonite, or whatever those super-strong aliens have."
I slammed the laptop lid shut. Enough. You could get bogged down in this swamp for hours. What did I care about Hyperion right here and right now? The appearance of a Queen-level piece on the board was interesting, of course, but I had my own clearly defined list of tasks. And it was time to start performing them.
Rising from the chair, I rinsed the dishes and walked with a confident step into the garage. The world could go as crazy as it wanted. My work didn't wait.
First thing—the most important part. The foundation. The thing without which all my grandiose plans were just incoherent scribbles on a board. A power source.
For all my love for lithium-ion batteries, you wouldn't get far on them. I needed something orders of magnitude more powerful. Compact, stable, and capable of outputting energy in the hundreds of thousands, or better—millions of Watts.
First to mind, of course, was it. The crown jewel of Tony Stark's creation in the cave. A palladium-based Arc Reactor. The engineer inside me smirked contentedly and helpfully suggested that yes, in my garage conditions, this was more than realistic. Especially considering I already had the ore. There were a few nuances with processing radioactive palladium, but it was solvable. The output—a miniature star working on beta decay of isotopes, producing gigawatts of energy practically without heat or waste. Of the downsides—I'd have to kill the whole day on this toy, putting everything else aside. But... was it a downside? To become the first in this world to create such technology? Craft Points for this should fall like a generous rain.
I mentally ran through other options just to confirm the correctness of the choice. A micro-fusion fusor, creating a plasma ball for deuterium fusion? Elegant, beautiful, but unstable and outputting only a couple million Watts. A nano-graphene hypercapacitor from old CDs and batteries? Clever and in the spirit of a garage engineer, but it was more of a sprinter-battery, giving out powerful pulses, not a marathoner powering a system constantly.
"Yeah, they lose on all fronts to the dark genius of a desperate Stark," I muttered into the void of the garage. The choice was made. Today I repeat Tony's feat, albeit shamelessly cheating with the help of knowledge obtained from the system, and tomorrow... Look out, the first armor might not be far off!
I pulled some components from old electronics, but for the rest, I had to drive into the city. A brief shopping list—hydrochloric and nitric acid, a vacuum pump, a small jewelry furnace, a tank with deuterium, and, of course, reinforced protective filters and gloves. After spending about six hundred dollars and an hour of time, I returned to my sanctuary.
Starting Phase One: metal extraction! Taking a piece of palladium ore from my inventory, I smashed it into small pieces with a hammer. I threw about fifty grams into an old but powerful blender. The roar of the motor, the screech of metal—a minute later, I had a fine, dusty powder. Putting on a mask, I carefully poured it into a flask and added "aqua regia"—a horrific mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acid, which I heated to 80 degrees. This was a chemical cocktail capable of dissolving even gold.
Under the full power of my cobbled-together exhaust hood, I stirred the hellish brew. The solution hissed and emitted caustic orange vapors. Half an hour later, it finally acquired a rich yellow color—the palladium had turned into chloride. Filtering it through ordinary paper, I added zinc foil cut into strips to the flask. Simple chemistry: zinc is more active, and it literally pushes the palladium out of the solution, taking its place. Fifteen minutes later, a nondescript gray powder settled at the bottom of the flask. Purest palladium. Drying it with a hair dryer, I poured the powder into a crucible and sent it to the jewelry furnace. At a thousand degrees, it melted and solidified into an ideal rod weighing about 8 grams.
Now I could proceed to Phase Two: enrichment! This is where the magic unavailable to this world begins. Natural palladium is like a bag of nuts. It has everything in it, but for work, you only need one specific sort—the rare isotope Pd-107. In the ore, it's only about one percent. It is the energy source, but it decays agonizingly slowly. To make the reactor output gigawatts like Stark's, two things were needed: increase the concentration of the "correct" palladium and make it decay faster.
Using simple electrolysis, passing current through a solution with the palladium rod, I made the Pd-107 isotope I needed settle on the cathode. It's like using a magnet to pull only the necessary iron filings from a pile of metal. Then—the most interesting part. I pumped deuterium—heavy hydrogen—into the porous structure of the enriched palladium. Essentially, I "fed" the palladium a catalyst. Deuterium, soaking into the metal, begins to "jostle" the lazy isotope at the atomic level, making it decay thousands of times more actively. Without this, the reactor would output the energy of a candle. This way—it woke a sleeping giant.
Phase Three, the final one: shielding! Now I needed to lock all this power and radiation inside. Again, scavenged materials came into play. I took a stack of old CDs and used ordinary tape to peel off the thinnest metallized layer of graphite. Grinding it in a blender with vinegar and salt, I got graphene oxide. After filtering and calcining it in the furnace, I restored it to pure, shimmering graphene.
Mixing the powder with rubbing alcohol to the state of a paste, I applied it in three perfectly even layers to the palladium rod with an ordinary brush. To make the coating as dense as possible at the nano-level, I used ultrasound from a simple speaker, turning it into a high-tech sealer. Done. This thinnest film now absorbs 99% of beta radiation. It's safe on the outside, but inside—a sun is being born.
Just in case, I poked the rod with multimeter probes. Resistance—almost zero. Everything was in order.
The reactor core was ready, but this was only the initial, albeit most important, stage of the work. A quiet monster sleeping in its graphene cradle. Now I faced the hardest part—building the engine that would turn its radioactive whisper into a roar of lightning.
I needed a betavoltaic cell. Essentially, it's like a solar panel, only instead of photons of light, it catches beta particles flying out of the palladium. A particle hits a semiconductor, knocks out an electron, and there it is—electric current. Simple and elegant. But to reach gigawatt power, even in a pulse, this elegance was not enough. It needed doping. Plasma. An idea that could be partially glimpsed from DIY physics bloggers who assemble nuclear fusors in garages from all sorts of junk.
First—a vacuum chamber. I took a sturdy titanium cylinder the size of an AA battery as a base. Carefully securing the palladium rod inside, I connected the vacuum pump. After ten minutes of humming, the homemade pressure gauge showed 0.1 atmospheres. Ideal. Now beta particles could fly freely without crashing into air molecules.
Next—the heart of the converter, the p-n layer. I laid a handful of diodes and transistors desoldered from an old motherboard on the table. Biting off everything unnecessary, I selected several pure crystals of silicon and germanium. These were my semiconductors. With jewelry precision, I soldered them into a thin, flexible ribbon: one p-type layer (with an electron deficit), another n-type layer (with an excess). When a beta particle flies into this "sandwich," it will create a pair of an electron and a "hole," making the current flow.
I cautiously wrapped this ribbon around the vacuum chamber. Now I needed to run wires inside to connect to the core. I drilled a microscopic hole and threaded through the thinnest wires. To seal it, I mixed a two-component heat-resistant epoxy resin, applied it as a tiny drop to the joint, and "baked" it with a directed beam from an ultraviolet lamp. The result was a strong, glassy insulator. Hermetic and reliable.
Now—the peripherals. To keep the particles from flying off chaotically and make them hit the target exactly, I extracted copper coils from an old microwave's transformer and wound them around the chamber. The magnetic field will work like a lens, focusing the energy flow. To accumulate charge, I soldered four large capacitors from the same microwave in parallel. They will work like a dam, accumulating energy for one powerful, crushing pulse. On the side of the case, I attached a small fan from a hair dryer—the plasma, even if microscopic, would heat up, and cooling wouldn't hurt.
And here it was, the final boss. Plasma.
I connected the magnetron—the heart of any microwave—to the chamber. There was an inert gas inside, and now the magnetron was supposed to ionize it, turning it into a glowing, super-hot globule. This was the most dangerous moment. Too much power—and my chamber would explode, splashing the garage with radioactive palladium. Too little—and there would be no effect. Relying on the precision of my knowledge, I slowly turned the power regulator.
Inside the chamber, a tiny dot of lilac light flashed, resembling a distant star. It pulsed, filling the vacuum with a ghostly glow. Plasma. It would catch the beta particles and accelerate them to incredible speeds, increasing the output power by orders of magnitude.
All that remained was to pack it all into a case. I took the empty shell of an old smartphone. I made the construction modular. The first module—the "Core": the vacuum chamber with palladium and plasma. The second—the "Converter": the p-n layer and coils. The third—the "Output": the capacitors and a USB port desoldered from a charging cable. Connecting the modules with quick-release clips, I got the complete circuit: palladium emits particles → plasma accelerates them → magnetic field focuses them → they hit the p-n layer → current goes to the capacitors → from there to the output.
Soldering took half an hour. My hands did not shake. Every contact was ideal. I closed the case. In my hands was a simple plastic box, utterly nondescript.
Final calibration. I twisted the coils, achieving ideal focusing. Then I took the syringe with deuterium I obtained earlier and injected a single drop of gas into the chamber through a special micro-valve. The palladium rod absorbed it like a sponge. The decay process would accelerate more than a thousandfold. With a resistor, I set the limiter: constant power—1 Megawatt. Peak power, during capacitor discharge—up to 1 Gigawatt.
The palladium NON-arc reactor was ready.
I held it in my hands, feeling a slight vibration. And before I could test it, a blue system notification flashed before my eyes:
[Created unique power source "Palladium Reactor" (Uncommon). Technology that previously did not exist in this world has been unlocked! Received +800 OP!]
A compact betavoltaic generator using deuterium-catalyzed decay of the enriched isotope Pd-107. Generates a stable energy field with plasma acceleration of particles for pulsed bursts of super-high power energy. A fundamental technology for next-generation energy systems.
Yes.
I did it.
Before Tony Stark. In my garage. Practically out of trash.
Simply no words. Only emotions. In my hands was not just a power source. It was a key! A key to...
The solemnity of the moment was ruthlessly shattered by the sharp trill of a phone call. Peter.
"John, did you see?! Did you watch the news at all?!" His voice on the phone was excited, almost breaking.
"Um, calm down, Pete. If you're talking about our flying Boy Scout Hyperion, then..."
"Hyperion?!" he interrupted impatiently. "I don't care about him, the whole world already knows! I'm talking about what's happening right now! Open the news feed!"
I returned to the living room, placed the reactor on the table like a priceless artifact, and refreshed the page. The feed was bristling with events. My gaze caught the very first screaming headline. A robbery of several jewelry stores in the city center. In the blurry photos from the security cameras—a figure of a man crumbling into a vortex of sand. Flint Marko. Another meta-villain. This world had definitely decided not to give Gwen a break.
"I see... A sandy meta-human," I played dumb. "Interesting, but I don't know anything about him, if that's what you mean."
"Sandy? No, not about him! Although that's also crazy, of course... Lower! Scroll lower, John!"
Why intrigue like that... and scare me. I scrolled down. And my heart dropped into my heels.
"Fuck!" escaped me.
A photograph of a destroyed laboratory. The headline:
"Tragedy in the Scientific World: Doctor Otto Octavius Missing After Experimental Device Explosion."
"He was supposed to have his conference on October 14th!" I said it out loud, more to myself. A key date in my mental chronology had just been ripped out by the roots.
"Yes! Exactly!" Peter's voice trembled. "No body, no traces... John, Octavius is a genius. He periodically lectured at our university, I even spoke with him a couple of times... He had such ideas... I'm worried something terrible might have happened."
"I'm afraid, Peter, the most terrible thing has already happened," flashed through my head. That brilliant scientist who shared knowledge with the younger generation most likely burned up in that explosion. And what crawled out of the ruins... it's better you don't know about it. For now.
"I... I'll try to find out something through my connections," I promised, trying to make my voice sound confident.
We said goodbye. I put the phone aside and stared at one spot.
What, in the name of all that is holy, else happened on this damn September 22nd?! Richards, Hyperion. Gwen. Shocker, Blade, Harry. Now Sandman and the birth of the Octopus. The universe seemed to have pressed the fast-forward button. No, this wouldn't do. I needed to become stronger urgently.
My balance was 1300 OP. Enough for two "spins" in the system. Two attempts to pull something that would give me an edge.
But first...
A roar of a powerful engine came from the street, smoothly quieting right at my house. Headlights momentarily illuminated the living room windows.
First, I needed to talk with the right guy who just pulled up. He seemed to have promised some kind of surprise.
I sincerely hoped the surprise Blade had in store for me would be a pleasant one. In this day, I desperately lacked good news.