The portal invasion is getting out of hand.
Mathew had heard those words four minutes ago. He was still trying to decide which part bothered him more — that Cecil had said it like he was reading weather reports, or that Mathew already knew, because he'd been watching the news alerts cascade across his phone's lock screen for the last hour and hadn't said anything.
Portal invasions weren't exactly a new problem.
He'd handled three in the last year alone. Two-dimensional bleeds off the coast of Greenland, one attempted incursion over the Sahara that turned out to be a very lost, very apologetic scout ship from a civilization that didn't even have a word for war yet. Weird day.
This was different.
He could tell from the altitude. At thirty thousand feet, falling feet-first through the belly of a storm system over the Midwest, he could already see it — a bruised tear in the sky above downtown Chicago, violet and crackling at its edges, hovering like a wound that refused to close. The scale of it made his spatial awareness itch. His brain converted it automatically, the way it always did.
Roughly two hundred meters diameter. Stable. Engineered. That's not a natural bleed. Someone built that.
That was already more than the last three.
He hit the lower atmosphere and the wind screamed past him. His barrier absorbed it. He let himself slow — not much, just enough that he wouldn't crater Michigan Avenue — and angled his descent toward the city's skyline.
What he saw made him stop in mid-air.
"...Huh."
***
He'd been to war zones. He'd walked through the Guardians' HQ with their skulls caved in and their brains decorating the tile. He had a decent threshold for 'bad.'
Chicago was bad.
Three city blocks on the south end of the loop were simply gone — not burning, not rubble, gone, replaced with scorched foundations and glass melted flat. The lakefront was on fire. Lower Wacker Drive had been folded in on itself like wet cardboard. An elevated train line hung twisted off its pylons, and the cars dangled over the street below, some still with people in them.
And in the middle of all of it, the aliens.
Flaxans, as the GDA white coats had taken to calling them over his way here.
Bipedal humanoids, somewhere between four and five feet tall, grey-green skin, eyes too wide for their faces, built like tanks from the neck down. They moved in organized squads, which was the part that made them actually dangerous. Their weapons discharged concentrated pulses of amber light that turned steel into vapor on contact.
The file said their biology ran on a different temporal frequency than Earth's. Prolonged exposure to this dimension's timeline accelerated their aging at an exponential rate. In theory, you just had to keep them here long enough and they'd age to dust on their own.
In theory.
In practice, someone had apparently handed them environmental suits with temporal compensation tech built in, because none of the ones on the ground were so much as growing a wrinkle.
Upgraded. They came back upgraded.
Mathew exhaled through his nose.
Below him, a small cluster of heroes was holding the northern perimeter with varying levels of success. He clocked them in a pass — a girl in a pink and white costume generating force fields with her bare hands, working herself ragged keeping a shield between the aliens and a knot of trapped civilians. A guy in orange and yellow, throwing what looked like explosive charges with surgical precision, keeping three squads pinned behind an overturned transit bus. A humanoid figure in a robot suit, directing them both, calm and coordinated in a way that suggested this wasn't their first rodeo today. Countless duplicates of an Asian teen in purple were scattered all around, some dead, some fighting, some distracted and other helping with the evacuation.
Good. They're not dead. That's a bar.
The robot suit looked up. Directly at him.
Just to mess with the robot slightly he tweaked his barrier to redirect and subtly scatter reflected protons and flood the exterior of his shield with Ultra-violet and Infrared Radiation rendering his figure as nothing but a blurry silhouette through the lenses of camera's. A little trick he had picked up to hide himself in plain sight.
Then the earpiece crackled.
"Blue." Cecil's voice. "You're on site. I can see you loitering."
"I'm assessing."
"You're hovering."
"Hovering is how I assess."
A pause. "Engagement Code: Ciera. The portal's been active for six hours. They've repelled three civilian evacuation attempts and they've got something anchoring the rift from their side. We need it closed."
Ciera. Continental-scale authorization. Five-hundred-kilometer radius if it came to it.
It wouldn't come to that. Probably.
"Civilian status?"
"Evacuation is sixty percent complete. Twenty-seven confirmed casualties. Rising."
Twenty-seven.
Mathew looked at the dangling train cars.
"What about them?" he asked.
A half-second pause from Cecil. "...Secondary priority. Portal first."
"Right."
He reached out.
His awareness spread through the city like a second skin, threading through the architecture, reading every stress fracture and load-bearing point in the train line's remaining structure. He found the cars—four of them, forty-one people distributed between them—and wrapped each one in a separate field, firm and even, redistributing the weight.
Then he set them down. Gently. All four cars, lowered to street level in a single, unhurried motion, like he was setting down cups.
He'd done that in about three seconds. They were far enough from the city and close enough to the evac teams that their safety was guaranteed.
Okay. Portal…
He dropped.
***
He hit the Flaxan line like a question nobody wanted answered.
No explosion this time. No crater. He landed clean in the middle of their largest forward squad — twelve of them, weapons raised on the girl in the pink-and-white suit who had run out of field to back into — and just stood there.
They turned.
He looked at them. Helmet off today. He hadn't planned this as a stealth op and he'd left the kit at home. Just him, dark jeans, grey hoodie, beat-up trainers.
One of them barked something in a language that sounded like gears grinding.
"Yeah," Mathew said. "Me too, man."
The amber weapons came up.
He closed his fist.
The weapons bent. All of them, simultaneously, folded in on themselves at the barrel like crumpled tin foil, useless in the space between one breath and the next. He felt the squad's confusion like a pressure change. Their commander shouted something. They started to fall back in formation — disciplined, he noted, these weren't dumb — reaching for secondary weapons on their suits.
He didn't let them get there.
The whole squad lifted off the ground. Twelve bodies, twelve sets of armour, hovering at the same height, locked. They struggled. He barely felt it.
A few meters back, the pink-and-white redheaded girl was staring at him. Caucasian, red hair, green eyes-- Atom Eve, threat level Ceira-possible Alpha, eighteen, Teen Team affiliate… She was prettier than the picture of her in the dossier from the GDA.
"You gonna drop those fields or—" he started as he extended his barrier to cover the both of them.
The fields snapped down. She caught herself, visibly exhausted, hands on her knees. A short sigh of relief escaped her lips
"You're the back-up?" she breathed out exasperated; she looked rather worn.
"Yep, just give me a minute, I need to concentrate." he said.
Mathew closed his eyes as his psychic senses honed in on the twelve Flaxans caught helplessly in his grasp. He let loose a psychic wave that tore through them as his mind tagged at, took apart their biology one cell at a time along with their armour and tried to process the temporal field that allowed them to walk freely on Earth. The odd interdimensional energy and the fluctuating erratic wavelength gave him a bit of a migraine but not enough to break his concentration.
But the constant energy-based bullets that bounced against his barrier were distracting enough to disrupt the delicate process of psychic extraction of information through molecular disintegration. The other Flaxan soldiers around them turned their weapons on him and Atom Eve and although his barrier repelled all their attacks right back at them with double the force and energy, the tanks they brought with them hit hard enough to leave sizable cracks in his barrier.
With a shallow grunt, he let loose a psychic wave that kicked up dust and flung the Flaxans back a few meters and added a few dozen layers over his barrier for extra protection.
He then turned his attention back to the twelve hovering aliens and, with something between a slight tilt of his head and a thought, sent violent streams of energy through them. This mind cataloged the streams of information as his unique psychic energy washed over every molecule that made them up, the twelve were slowly and excruciatingly reduced to less than atoms.
That's twelve. There's about seven hundred more. It's not enough… Not enough to tear the shields they got but it's enough to lock into their unique signature.
"Now for the fun part." He cracked his neck and got to work.
Mathew lifted his left hand up leisurely and snapped his fingers.
Boom!
He amplified the sound with a thought and projected it outside his barrier. Looping the sound and using it as a medium by turning his barrier into something akin to a tuning fork. He projected his psychic senses through the vibrations, feeling out and covering over 200 meters in the span of a seconds. He then locked in on the unique frequency, biology and temporal shields of the Flaxans using the information he had extracted from the previous 12 Flaxans.
Fifty-three… No—Fifty-seven Flaxan soldiers and four tanks… 13 civilians…
He slowly hovered above the dust cloud he created, pulling Atom Eve with him as he did so.
"You'll handle clean up. My priority is the Flaxans." He told her as he began pointing out locations. "There are three civilians huddled in car 120 meters behind that building, one injured. Seven in a vault in the basement 70 meters over there 3 injured, another injured and knocked out in a car over there and another one pinned under debris. "
Mathew pushed an open palm forward and every Flaxan in the area froze. Their movements restricted by an invisible force. Then when he closed his palm, they too, twisted and crumbled into themselves like they were individually plucked from where the stood and squeezed like some unseen hand. Their tanks waned and bent under the same pressure until their temporal shield popped — the Flaxans imploded and their bodies scattered into dust as earths temporal flow began to affect them.
"Good luck."
He didn't wait for Atom Eve to respond. Mathew released her from his barrier and was gone in a flicker of speed that left visible ripples in the air.
***
The next few minutes were efficient, if not clean.
He worked methodically, moving through the forward lines in sweeping passes — lifting, folding, redirecting, occasionally compressing armor into shapes that made left them squashed into meaty paste in metal balls. Any civilian he came in contact with were sent miles away at record breaking speeds to a predetermined evacuation site in a double layered bubble of psychic energy. The ROE under Ciera was explicit about minimizing casualties where engagement parameters allowed. Disabling enemy weapons and machinery was fine. Redirecting enemy fire was fine.
Removing the enemy entirely was even better.
"Oh Fuck! Not you." Rex, cursed while throwing a charge over Mathew's shoulder at a flanking squad. He was handling the western perimeter and handling it well. "Are we really so bad that Cecil had to call you in!?"
Mathew hovered above him without a word. He raised his hand and a single clap rang throughout the streets. When the second clap rang out, the Flaxans were wiped out completely.
There were no third clap and Mathew left just as quickly as he arrived.
"Hate that guy." Rex fell on his back like a sack of potatoes. He had been fighting hours and with his arrival this place fight was as good as over. "Hey Robot. The unknown friendly messing with your visual sensors… Yeah, It's the Blue fucking Yonder, Flaxans are cooked man, the GDA just nuked em."
"I'm just gonna… just gonna take a nap here."
***
"I'm just gonna… just gonna take a nap here." Robot quickly locked up information on the Blue Yonder from his Data banks.
"Oh, Oh dear." Robots monotonous voice almost sounded grave when he realized who the 'Blue Yonder' was.
Robot was coordinating evacuation routing through some built-in comms system. He relayed his findings on the Blue Yonder to the team and stressed that they steer clear of him, he relayed Rex's location to Atom Eve since she was closest to his location, she'd gotten her second wind and then some on the scattered Flaxan forces.
She was alternating between shields and offense with an efficiency that Mathew found interesting, he was quite sure he could replicate her abilities to some extent but her accuracy was what impressed him the most. It was a versatile ability.
Mathew observed them closely as he moved about making quick work with any Flaxan force he came in contact with.
They were good. Competent. Better than competent, given what they were working with.
They were also losing ground. Slowly sure but slowly losing ground wasn't winning.
Because for every squad he cleared, two more came through the rift.
Steady flow. It's not an invasion force, it's a pipeline…
"Cecil."
"I see it."
"If I just keep clearing the output we'll be here until one of us gets tired. I can't clean the city without causing civilian casualties."
"I know."
"I'm going in."
"Blue—"
"Ciera authorizes breach if the threat source is confirmed as within the projection radius of—"
"I know what Ciera authorizes," Cecil said, and his voice had that particular flatness it got when he was choosing his battles. "What's your read?"
Mathew extended his awareness toward the rift. It was like pressing his hand against a hot surface — not painful, but present, a resistance, a otherness that pushed back. The temporal displacement made his senses blurry around the edges. Through it, distorted and strange, he could feel the architecture of something massive on the other side. A structure. Mechanical. Enormous.
An anchor gate. That's what's stabilizing it from their end.
"Big machine," he said. "Their side. They've got something anchoring the rift from their end. Dismantling it should collapse the rift."
A pause.
"Collateral?"
"Minimal. I'm not dropping a mountain on it. Just going to take it apart."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Don't go past the gate structure," Cecil said finally. "In and out. No extended engagement in their dimension."
"Yeah."
"Mathew."
The use of his actual name made him pause. Cecil almost never used it operationally.
"In and out."
"...Yeah."
"Godspeed kid."
He let out a breath and began preparing. He started with his barrier, the properties of the barrier that surrounded him had to be just right. He dropped low and pulled a few Flaxan soldiers towards him then began the process he did to the first twelve. He managed to reverse engineer the properties of their temporal shield with earth as his anchor similar to how the Flaxans used their home dimension as their anchor.
It was a bit crude for his liking but under the circumstances it was the best he could do. The heroes could handle the remaining forces on this side.
He turned back to the city one last time. His sights locked in on something moving over the skyline. He watched as a hero in yellow, black and blue got violently dragged through a few buildings by a heavily armored Flaxan General.
That must be Cecil's new pet project… Mathew watching them with a raised eyebrow.
That's supposed to be my replacement. Poor Cecil… He chuckled lightly at the thought. Well, if things go south, he had nothing to worry about. With Omniman's kid flying around he was sure they'd figure something out.
He then looked at the rift.
It looked back.
***
Passing through felt like being turned inside out by someone who'd read the manual but never actually practiced.
The other side was a corridor — not metaphorically, literally. A vast enclosed space, all metal and geometry, the walls close enough that the scale felt wrong, like the dimensions of the room hadn't been agreed upon. The light was amber, low, sourceless. The air tasted like ionized copper.
The anchor gate dominated the center of the corridor. It was the size of a building — a lattice of enormous electromagnetic rings, spinning at different intervals, generating the field that kept the rift stable on Earth's end. Around its base, a dozen Flaxan engineers in different suits from the soldiers were running adjustments from raised platforms.
They saw him.
He looked at the gate.
Alright. How do you come apart?
His awareness moved through it the way it moved through everything — threading into the structure, reading the tolerances, finding the load-bearing points of the electromagnetic lattice. The rings were held in their spin by a series of gyroscopic anchors at the core.
Pull those, the rings destabilize. Rings destabilize—the field collapses. Field collapses, rift closes…
Simple enough.
Yeah... Simple…
But simple wouldn't get the message across. A thought suddenly occurred to him.
There was no Cecil here.
No GDA.
No rules or guidelines.
No one to tell him to stop.
So, he didn't.
When was the last time he let loose and went all out.
And time this time was on his side since days here were seconds over there from what he could tell.
Maybe this time, just this time, he could let loose. This race was an active threat to humanity. He could not let them go.
He had to stop them, if he didn't stop them now. Who knows what they would do in a few years. They could come back stronger for all he knew. If he let them walk way, they'd come back better.
Stronger.
Prepared.
This was necessary. He had twenty-three reasons to go through with this.
With that in mind, he began in a low tone. "Sonata, Fuselage, Zion, Protocol, Mitosis, Reagent, Orange, Left-eye, Equity, Keel, Warp, Basalt, Verdict, Projection, Lexicon, Atrium, Collet, Isobar, Ligament, Quasar, Tundra, Stamen, Fresco, Fractal."
That familiar feeling flooded his veins when he finished. Every cell in his body buzzed with activity.
A voice resounded through his thoughts. "Warning. Fail safe triggered. Emergency Keywords Accepted. Level 1, Unknown Alpha Rating Threat Assessment, Psychic Lock Released, Dampeners Powering Down. Protocol Echo in effect. MTF Argus has been notified. Mama Bear will be dispatched to your location. Please return to designated safe zone when the threat has been neutralized before detonation. Detonation in t-minus 1128 hours, 23 minutes, and 23 seconds."
"Consider yourselves lucky I got a time limit… Or not. Either way, I'll make this quick." With a slightly half deranged smile he spoke, and the Flaxans opened fire.
If someone was to ask Mathew if he ever felt like a weapon, he would probably say no. A weapon was what the GDA called him, what they needed him to be. A hero was what he wanted to be and probably what some of the world saw him as but he knew the truth.
He was an addict.
An addict going through rehab. and like an addict he was looking for that high in everything he did. That one hit. It was why he picked up that call every time Cecil called. Why he went to fight the demons GDA threw at him and what haunted his every waking moment. That invisible itch he could not scratch that kept him on his toes, kept him in control, allowed the GDA to put a leash on him.
But every now and then, when the conditions were right, he allowed himself to scratch that itch.
It wasn't something he could control, he needed it like ordinary people needed to breath and right now, out here facing enemies on all fronts on their turf with no civilians and no one to hold him back.
This was it.
The Flaxans came knocking on their door and he was gonna give them a reason to never come knocking again. He had twenty-three reasons to do so, maybe more once they cleared up the rubble and more bodies were found.
Regardless, twenty-three reasons were more than enough.
Just for a moment, just for a few earth hours, Mathew allowed his mask to fall.
***
An earthquake shook the Flaxan city.
Countless Flaxans fled in panic as their city crumbled around them. High above them, held in place by an indestructible bubble was the building containing the portal to the world they had once sought to conquer.
Something had descended. Something had come through that portal. Their king had lied to them. Their king's greed and ambition had cost them. Their army had failed them.
They had brought a demon into their world.
The demon bathed in blue light. Its eyes were alit like two blue stars that destroyed anything that met his gaze. His laughter rang like deaths knell.
He hovered above them in wistful ecstasy, like a god of destruction that reveled in their ruination.
Their aerial armada fell first, each combat drone lit up the skies around him like fireworks.
A sea of fire swallowed the surface for the Flaxan planet. Their Orbital satellites and stations were pulled down from above them turned into meteors that rained down on them like nails on their coffin. In an hour one of their continents was reduced to scattered islands.
In a few more their planetary population was reduced by half. As the days went on that half that remained became a quarter and yet, the demon did not stop.
A Flaxan dragged another from the fire, only for both of them to be pulled screaming into the sky as the gravity around them inverted.
Another Flaxan attempted to hold up rubble to keep his family safe only for a wave of fire to reduce them and everyone around them to ashes.
There was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. The demon had turned their own world against them.
For the Flaxans this was a festival of death, a moment where their great empire was brought low by a single entity and the closest, they would ever be in their history to the extinction of their race, they were less than 3% of them left when he ended his rampage.
For the demon that brought this crisis on them however, this moment was a moment of weakness. A relapse triggered by the unique set of conditions they unknowingly created for him when they invaded his world.
This wasn't justice for the world they had attempted to conquer. This wasn't heroism. A few human deaths were used to justify this act of mindless destruction. A projected threat was still a threat in the end. This was genocide repackaged as revenge.
Mathew knew this more than anyone. He just didn't care at all about it in that moment.
***
The rift opened and swallowed him whole for the last time.
The building that held the rift open, without his psychic energy to keep it up, it fell from orbit as he left.
Chicago met him on the other side — grey sky, smoke, the distant sound of sirens. He hovered for a moment above what remained of the south loop, suspended in nothing, the wind finding the gaps in his barrier and going quiet against them.
The dampeners were coming back online. He could feel them, one by one, like doors closing in a long hallway. His awareness contracted. The world shrank back to a manageable size. The hum faded by degrees.
Ninety-four casualties… His count had stopped updating. Ninety-five, it had gone up…
He looked at his hands.
They were steady. They were always steady. That was the worst part.
His earpiece crackled.
"Blue." Cecil's voice. Something in it that wasn't quite relief and wasn't quite anything else. "Report."
Mathew was quiet for a moment.
"Gate's down," he said. "Rifts closed. They won't be back."
A pause.
"And the other side?"
Another pause. Longer.
"Handled."
Cecil didn't say anything. Maybe he already knew. He usually did.
"Good," Mathew could hear Cecil's sigh. "You know the drill kid, don't fight it."
"Yeah."
He looked at the space where the rift had been one last time.
Then he descended slowly into the smoke, and let the city close over him.
"Hey Blue," another voice slipped through after Cecil. She spoke softly." Why'd you have to go and do that?"
He turned slowly towards the sky and waited for that annoying craft that had always somehow made itself invisible to his senses to show itself.
It didn't.
"I really don't know doc."
Chemical canisters clattered around him as a specialized toxin designed specifically for him filled the air. God, I hope that's not PV-203. Hate the headaches with that one…
"Your guess is as good as mine."
He could already feel his shields weakening.
Boom!
Something tore through his shields like butter as it rammed into him, the force that hit him created a crater in the concrete.
He could feel them fluctuating in and out of his range. He counted five, no six of them surrounded him, two with a gravity gun each holding him down and the other four with psychic dampeners built specifically for him, each gun emitted distinct and individually unique waves that disrupted his psychic energy and prevented him from locking onto anyone of them.
That's classic MTF-Echo 3 attack strategy. Would have liked Echo-2 but genocidal maniacs can't be choosers…
Bright blue glowing eyes locked onto his own as a slim figure pinned the back of his head into the rubble. Her bleach blond hair held tied back in a bun, half her face hidden behind a tactical mask that matched her suit. There was a clear 'Echo-01' on her left chest, his code number that she had inherited. Her gaze told him nothing but his stomach churned with that familiar feeling.
Hate.
He did not regret what he did on the other side of that portal. No, that was what he was—part of his job—GDA conditioning made sure he'd always get the job done. The Flaxans were an imminent threat to the planet and to humanity and he dealt with them as such.
What he hated was the fact that he knew he did not regret it, that he couldn't, not anymore.
Mathew glared at the figure who pressed down on him. He could feel her own psychic energy pushing down on him, suppressing his weakening abilities. Why do they always send you?
Of course it was her. They didn't send anyone else anymore. Containment always ended the same way.
Something cold was pressed against the nape of his neck and his world went black.
"Sleep tight Blue."
Mama Bear…
*Chapter End*