**July 4, 19:38 EDT**
**Washington, D.C. — Project Cadmus, Sub-Level 52**
The air this far beneath the earth tasted of ozone, synthetic cooling fluid, and filtered copper. It was dead air, pressurized to three atmospheres to keep the containment glass from flexing under the thermal bleed of the chamber within.
Dr. Mark Desmond stood on the gantry above the pit, tapping a digital pad with a gloved stylus. Behind his thick spectacles, his eyes were cold, darting between the diagnostic readouts and the shape suspended in the center of the vault.
"The neuro-inhibitors are failing again," a technician seated at the telemetry console said. Her voice carried the tight, nervous tremor of someone who knew exactly what was keeping her alive and how thin it was. "Batch forty-six is metabolizing at twelve times the projected rate. His vascular pressure didn't even dip when we flushed the carotid shunt."
"Increase the dosage by fifty percent," Desmond replied smoothly, not looking up from his screen. "And cycle the mag-field to resonance band nine. The Board wants a stable baseline before the shipment from Star City arrives."
"Sir, the alloy cuffs on his wrists... the stress sensors are registering micro-fractures. Not from strain. From *mass*. It's like his cellular density is increasing to counteract the compression."
Desmond paused. He walked to the edge of the railing and looked down.
He was massive. Easily six-foot-two, but broad in a way that defied human anatomical proportions, with a torso like a slab of chiseled basalt and shoulders scarred by dozens of jagged, pale lines that looked like they had been carved by heat rather than blades. Thick graying hair swept back from a face dominated by a heavy, brutal mustache and a jawline built to take planetary artillery.
Cadmus had found him three weeks ago, buried sixty feet into the Virginia bedrock after an uncatalogued atmospheric event. No capsule. No ship. Just a man-shaped crater surrounded by glassed sand and a body that had shattered three diamond-tipped recovery drills before they managed to wrap him in high-tensile Promethium tow-cables.
For two weeks, he had been a corpse. Then his heart had beaten once. A single, heavy thump that had registered on seismic monitors two floors up.
Since then, Cadmus had pumped enough synthetic tranquilizers into his bloodstream to put down an entire pod of Atlantean leviathans. For the first four days, the sedatives had worked. His brainwaves had flatlined into a comatose gray line.
Then the curve had begun to climb. Slowly. Steadily. His biology didn't reject the poison; it ate it, broke it down, and grew thicker walls against it.
"He's adapting," Desmond murmured, a hint of genuine fascination breaking through his sterile demeanor. "The tissue isn't healing like Project Kr's. It's reorganizing. Hardening against the specific molecular weight of the compound."
"Dr. Desmond," the technician said, suddenly standing up from her station. Her monitor flashed crimson. "We have an intrusion alarm on the ground level. Fire reported in the upper labs."
Desmond frowned. "The fire department?"
"No, sir. Local authorities, but... two speedsters and an Atlantean were spotted breaching the roof access. They're descending through the express shafts."
"Block the elevators," Desmond snapped, turning toward the blast door. "Deploy the Genomorph perimeter on sub-level thirty. If it's the League's sidekicks, they won't make it past the mid-tiers. Double the sedative drip here and lock down this sector completely."
"Sir, look at the neural scan."
Desmond halted.
On the central holographic display, the brainwave monitor was no longer climbing. It had spiked. A jagged, violent wall of white-hot activity exploded across all four lobes.
Down in the pit, two eyes snapped open.
***
Cold.
The first sensation wasn't thought; it was a physical weight, pressing down on Stiles Stilinski's chest with the force of an entire collapsing stadium.
He tried to gasp, tried to yank his limbs inward the way he always did when he woke up from the Nogitsune's nightmares—sweat-soaked, tangled in his bedsheets, waiting for his dad to knock on the door with a glass of water.
His lungs didn't spasm. His chest barely rose.
Instead, a mountain of memories—not his, never his, but burned so deep into the meat of his brain that they felt older than the earth beneath him—crashed through his skull like an orbital drop.
*Two thousand years of blood on the plains of Viltrum.*
*The wet, hollow crunch of an elder's spine under his boot.*
*The cold vacuum of space, tearing at raw muscle while an empire bowed to the simple, absolute truth that only the strongest are permitted to breathe.*
*The crown. The conquest. The slaughter of his own bloodline to purify the ranks.*
*Grand Regent Thragg.*
*No,* Stiles's mind screamed against the tide, clawing for purchase. *No, I'm Stiles. I drive a beat-up blue Jeep with a roll of duct tape on the radiator. My dad is the sheriff. Scott is an idiot who got bit by an alpha in the woods.*
The two minds didn't fight. They slammed together like two runaway freight trains and fused in the wreckage.
The panic evaporated. Viltrumite neural chemistry simply didn't have room for Stiles's nervous, rambling dread; the sheer, ancient arrogance of Thragg's physiology seized the human terror and crushed it into cold, sharp focus. Stiles was still there—the thoughts, the morality, the kid from Beacon Hills who knew what it felt like to be weak and terrified—but the engine driving the machine was an apex predator that had conquered galaxies.
*Where am I?* Stiles thought, his vision clearing.
The world wasn't human anymore. He could see the individual scan-lines on the display monitors thirty feet above him. He could hear the hum of electrical current running through copper conduits inside the concrete walls. He could smell the sweat of the terrified woman at the computer terminal, the burnt carbon of the laser emitter pointing at his sternum, and the chemical bile dripping into his neck through a four-inch surgical needle.
The needle burned. It had burned for days. But as Stiles focused on the sting, he felt something deep within his cellular marrow shifting. The pain was dulling. The foreign chemical in his veins wasn't paralyzing his muscles anymore; the nerve endings were calcifying, dulling their receptors, locking out the toxin with an agonizingly slow, rhythmic stubbornness.
It was agonizing, like molten lead being poured into his capillaries, but his body took the heat, absorbed it, and hardened.
*Promethium alloy restraints. Magnetic dampening field. Class-four energy tethers.* Thragg's tactical mind cataloged the room in half a second. *Amateur work. Built for beasts, not soldiers.*
He looked up.
A man in a white lab coat was staring down at him through the gantry railing, his eyes wide behind small, round glasses.
"He's awake," the man whispered. The sound carried across the vault like thunder. "Purge the chamber. Atmospheric vent now!"
*Hostile,* Stiles thought.
*Squash him,* Thragg's memory commanded.
Stiles didn't argue.
He flexed his right hand. The Promethium cuff, five inches thick and bolted into a shock-absorbing tungsten bulkhead, groaned. The metal didn't bend; it screamed, the microscopic crystalline structure popping under the sudden, incomprehensible leverage of Viltrumite muscle.
"Sir! The telemetry is off the scale!"
Stiles pulled.
The bulkhead tore out of the concrete wall with a sound like a bomb detonating. Chunks of reinforced masonry exploded outward in a hail of gray shrapnel. Stiles didn't jump; he simply planted his bare feet against the floor and tore the other three restraints out of their mountings with a single, sweeping rotation of his torso.
The magnetic dampening field flared brilliant neon blue, trying to ground the kinetic force. Stiles felt the heat wash over his skin—blistering, peeling the top layer of dermis on his forearms.
*It burns,* Stiles's human brain noted with a shock of primal fear.
*Let it,* the body responded.
The heat stayed, but the flesh beneath didn't vaporize. His cells locked, absorbing the radiation, the micro-tears in his skin sealing under the slow, crushing pressure of an internal armor that was already learning the frequency of the beam.
He took a step forward. Then another.
The heavy steel blast doors of the containment pit were forty feet above him. Stiles crouched slightly, his bare feet cracking the floor tiles to powdered chalk, and launched himself upward.
He didn't fly—not yet, the instincts of flight were still tangled in the web of Stiles's human equilibrium—but the physical leap was enough to carry him through the observation deck floor like a cannonball through balsa wood.
Steel decking sheared. Iron bolts snapped like dry twigs.
Stiles landed on the upper gantry in a crouch. Concrete dust settled on his shoulders, mixing with the dark, dried blood from his older scars. He stood up to his full height, his massive frame blotting out the emergency lights behind him.
The technician was on the floor, scrambling backward on her elbows, her mouth open in a soundless scream.
Desmond was frozen, clutching a small syringe in his right hand.
"What... what are you?" Desmond whispered, his voice trembling despite himself. "You aren't Kryptonian. The radiation didn't trigger cellular decay. What are you?"
Stiles looked at his hands. Thick, scarred fingers. Knuckles that felt like solid ingots of iron. Beneath the walrus mustache, his jaw set into a hard, unforgiving line.
The quip was right there on his tongue. *I'm the guy who's going to sue you for medical malpractice,* he wanted to say. *I'm the guy whose dad has a very specific set of laws about kidnapping teenagers, even if I look like an angry gym teacher.*
Instead, what came out of his throat was a deep, gravelly baritone that vibrated the fillings in Desmond's teeth.
"You put needles in my neck."
Desmond backed away, his hand frantically reaching into his coat for a communicator. "Sub-level 52 security! Code Red! Evacuate Project Kr and deploy—"
Stiles moved.
To Desmond, the air simply cracked. There was no transition between standing still and moving; the massive gray-templed man vanished, and a concussive wave of displaced air threw Desmond off his feet.
A security guard had just burst through the hydraulic blast doors at the end of the hall, assault rifle raised, body armor strapped tight.
Thragg's muscle memory took the wheel before Stiles could even process the man was a human being.
Stiles's palm hit the guard's chest plate.
There was no struggle. There was no dramatic push. The guard's Kevlar and ceramic trauma plate didn't absorb the impact; it shattered instantly into lethal shrapnel, and the man's entire torso caved inward with a sickening, wet crunch of pulverized ribs and ruptured organs. The kinetic force picked the two-hundred-pound guard up and threw him seventy feet down the corridor like a wet rag, leaving a wide, bright crimson smear along the ceiling before he hit the far wall and crumpled into a motionless heap of broken bone.
The hallway went dead silent, save for the sirens wailing in the distance.
Stiles stood in the doorway, staring down at his bloody palm.
His human stomach heaved. *I just killed him. I tore him in half. Oh God, he's dead, he's completely—*
*A soldier who points a weapon at the Grand Regent forfeits his life,* Thragg's cold, ancient consciousness answered, flat and unmoved. *He was fragile. They are all fragile.*
Stiles closed his fist, squeezing the blood from his fingers until his knuckles turned white. His heart was hammering—not with fear, but with an overwhelming, intoxicating surge of adrenaline that his new body drank like water.
He didn't throw up. The biology wouldn't allow it.
He turned back toward Desmond.
The scientist was staring at the smeared corridor in sheer, unadulterated horror. He scrambled backward toward a maintenance shaft, his fingers frantically jamming a keycard into an emergency override panel.
"Stay back!" Desmond screamed, his voice cracking into a high pitch. "I'll vent the entire sector with nerve gas! You'll choke on your own blood!"
Stiles tilted his head, listening.
Beyond the sirens, beyond the hum of Cadmus's reactors, his ears picked up something else.
Dozens of levels above, metal was warping. The distinct, rhythmic crackle of lightning. The whirr of miniature grappling hooks. The sound of young voices shouting commands in the dark.
*Robin. Aqualad. Kid Flash.*
The memories of a television screen from another life, watched in a bedroom with a lacrosse stick leaning against the closet door, collided with the cold reality of the concrete beneath his feet.
*Young Justice.*
*Cadmus.*
Stiles looked down at Desmond, whose trembling hand was hovering over a red toggle switch.
"Try it," Stiles said softly. The voice didn't belong to a high school kid, and it didn't belong to a tyrant who had burned worlds. It was something new—cold, weary, and dangerously patient. "Let's see how long it takes my lungs to learn how to breathe it."
The blast door behind Desmond suddenly hissed, its hydraulic locks sealing as the facility's master security override engaged from the upper levels.
Desmond went pale. "No... no, Desmond to Command! Cancel the lock—"
A shadow fell over him.
Stiles reached down, his fingers wrapping around the collar of Desmond's lab coat like it was paper, lifting the grown man until his polished shoes dangled three feet off the grated floor.
"Where is the exit?" Stiles asked.
Desmond swallowed hard, his eyes darting toward the bloodstained corridor where his guard lay broken. "Fifty... fifty-two floors up. But you won't make it. The League... the Genomorphs..."
"Good," Stiles murmured, turning his gaze toward the ceiling. His ears dialed in on the sound of reinforced steel groaning thirty levels above as an elevator cable snapped. "I was getting bored of sleeping."