"Sometimes a deal with the devil is better than no deal at all." — Lawrence Hill.
ALTERNATE UNIVERSE: UNKNOWN LOCATION
The GDA Supermax Detention Center was built for one purpose: to make escape impossible.
Three-foot reinforced walls lined with electromagnetic dampeners. Sixty-seven active surveillance cameras. Rotating guard shifts, every forty-five minutes, no exceptions. Motion sensors in the ventilation shafts. Pressure plates beneath every floor tile in the high-security wing. New guns. New doors. New guards.
All of it, every last expensive, government-funded inch of it, had been installed specifically because of them.
The Mauler Twins sat in their cell like they always did — one pacing, one watching — both looking mildly inconvenienced rather than incarcerated. The cell itself was a masterpiece of containment engineering. Heavy containment glass, titanium-reinforced frame, a lock mechanism that required three simultaneous key cards and a retinal scan. A small slot at the bottom for food trays. That was it. No windows. No furniture beyond two bolted-down cots and a steel toilet. The GDA had stripped the room of anything that could be repurposed, weaponized, or used as a component in one of their notoriously creative escape devices.
It hadn't mattered last time. It probably wouldn't matter this time either, and both of them knew it.
"Who holds a grudge this long?" the first Mauler muttered, leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed. He wasn't talking to his clone. He was talking at the room in general, the way a man does when he's said the same thing enough times that it's stopped being a genuine question and become more of a ritual complaint. "I said I was sorry."
Guard Pete's footsteps announced him before he came into view. He was a heavyset man in his mid-forties, the kind of guy who had probably been athletic once and let it slide somewhere around his third kid. He carried himself with the practiced caution of someone who had been warned extensively about these two and taken every word of it seriously. His hand never strayed far from the tray slot lever. His eyes never quite settled on either of them for too long.
"Get back from the door if you want to eat," he said flatly, working the lever controls from the outer panel.
"That's the thing," the first Mauler said pleasantly. "I don't want to eat that garbage. I want real food."
"I said get back."
"Real food, Pete. Is that so much to ask? Something with flavor. Something that doesn't look like it came out of a bag that was already used once."
"Further. Turn around." Pete's voice had the strained quality of a man who was absolutely not going to show fear, and was absolutely terrified. "I'm not gonna— turn around!"
The second Mauler, who had been lying on his cot staring at the ceiling with the serene expression of a man on a beach vacation, didn't bother sitting up. He just rolled his head to the side and looked at Pete with something that might, under very generous interpretation, have been warmth.
"You should count yourself lucky there, Pete." He let out a small, almost affectionate scoff. "We could've torn your arm off. Smashed your head in. Ripped out your liver. Made your spine into a belt."
Pete's jaw tightened. "I ain't scared."
"We know."
"Get back, too. Both of you. Or you're both going hungry."
The second Mauler finally sat up, moving with the unhurried ease of someone who had nowhere to be and nothing to worry about. He folded his massive hands in his lap and regarded Pete with something approaching genuine fondness.
"Instead," he said, "we barely gave you a concussion. That means we like you. That means you're a friend. That means when we break out of here again, we don't kill you." He let that land for a moment, then added: "As long as you keep us in good food. Which you're currently not."
"Don't try to bargain with me." Pete jabbed a finger toward the cell. "We've got security turned up to a hundred on you two. New cameras, new guns, new doors. New guards. You ain't going nowhere."
The second Mauler opened his mouth to respond.
Behind the first Mauler, the air folded.
It was the only way to describe it — a crease in the fabric of the room itself, reality bending inward like a piece of paper being pressed from behind. Violet-edged and humming with something that wasn't quite electricity, a portal tore open against the far wall of the cell, roughly the size of a door, opening onto a vista of grey, scorched nothing.
Pete's eyes went wide. "What did you—?"
The second Mauler stood up slowly. A grin spread across his face — the wide, unholy, thoroughly satisfied grin of a man who had been waiting a very long time for this exact moment.
"Oh, yeah," he said. "I shit portals now. Didn't I mention that?"
Pete inhaled sharply and then hit the alarm.
The noise was immediate and total, klaxons screaming through every corridor of the facility at once, red emergency lighting strobing across the walls. Somewhere beyond the block, heavy doors were slamming shut, security teams mobilizing, weapons being pulled from lockers.
None of it mattered.
"Down here, hurry!" grabbed his counterpart by the sleeve. "Go, go, go, go, go."
The first Mauler glanced back at The second Mauler, then at the portal, then at The second Mauler again. "You think, uh—?"
"Couldn't be worse than the salmon."
"Fair enough."
They stepped through.
"See you around, Pete." The second Mauler said as he stepped through.
The portal snapped shut behind them with a sound like a thunderclap, and Pete was left standing in an empty cell with a ringing alarm, a racing heart, and absolutely nothing to show for all those new security measures.
"Am so Fired"
On the other side, they landed in ruins.
Not dramatic ruins — not a bombed-out city or some post-apocalyptic wasteland with broken skyscrapers and rusted cars. Just flat, grey nothing, stretching in every direction under a colorless sky. The ground was cratered and scorched, as though something enormous had happened here once, long enough ago that even the debris had been ground down to nothing. The air smelled like ash and old rain.
The second Mauler turned in a slow circle, taking stock. "Ugh. Where the hell are we?"
The first Mauler had already spotted the only thing worth looking at: a man, standing perhaps fifty yards away, his back to them, making no particular effort to turn around. He was lean, dressed simply, and had the posture of someone who had been standing in exactly that spot, in exactly that position, waiting.
"I bet he knows."
They climbed out of the crater they'd landed in — the portal had deposited them several feet lower than the surrounding terrain, which made sense the moment they thought about it — and crossed the scorched flat ground toward the man.
He turned as they approached.
Angstrom Levy was not an imposing figure, physically. He was the kind of man you might pass on the street and immediately forget — medium height, medium build, calm eyes set in a face that had clearly done a great deal of thinking and very little fighting. He looked at the Mauler Twins with the expression of someone who was used to being underestimated and had made peace with it.
"A tragedy," he said, gesturing vaguely at the devastation surrounding them. "But don't worry. This isn't your world." He paused. "My name is Angstrom Levy."
"Hi, Angstrom," said the second Mauler. "Why'd you break us out? And what do you want?"
The first Mauler gave his counterpart a flat look. "That's basically the same question, idiot."
"Is it though?"
"Yes."
Angstrom raised a hand slightly to forestall the argument. "I'll explain as we go. This Earth's too dangerous to stay here for long."
The second Mauler had already been processing the situation with the methodical efficiency that made him genuinely dangerous despite everything. He let his eyes track across the terrain, the angle of the crater they'd emerged from, the specific depth of it. Then he glanced at Angstrom.
"Let me guess," he said. "You can open portals between dimensions."
Angstrom tilted his head. "I mean, I don't like to brag. But not within the same dimension. Hmm." A flicker of curiosity crossed his face. "Why do you think that?"
"Because we're walking. And because you needed to find a crater deep enough here to reach us in the GDA's underground prison there." The second Mauler shrugged. "The depth differential compensates for the interdimensional displacement. Clever."
Angstrom looked at him for a moment with something that might have been reassurance or might have been relief. "Ah. You two are sharp. You know, I was worried freeing you could be a mistake."
"Still might be," said the second Mauler, "if you don't tell us what you want."
"I need your help with a very specific problem."
The first Mauler laughed, short and humorless. "Last time we helped someone else with their very specific problem, it didn't work out so well for us."
Angstrom took a breath. When he spoke again, he was careful — choosing his words with the precision of someone who had rehearsed this conversation and knew exactly which version of it was most likely to land.
"Look. I'm a pacifist. I don't hurt people. I don't kill people. I only use my power for good." He let that sit for a moment before continuing. "Working with the two of you is a real ethical and moral stretch for me. But I don't have a choice. There's no one else with your scientific prowess. Trust me. I've looked everywhere."
He held their gaze steadily.
"Now, I can't force you to help me. But I will leave you here forever if you don't. Or somewhere worse."
A beat of silence.
The second Mauler groaned quietly. "I miss when we only worked for ourselves."
"Me too," said the first Mauler.
They went with him.
What Angstrom wanted was, on its surface, straightforward.
He had been born with his ability — the latent power to open portals between parallel dimensions, to slip through the cracks in reality the way other people walk through doorways. In the years since he'd understood what he could do, he had traveled. Not for adventure, not for curiosity, but with purpose. He had seen versions of Earth that had solved problems the main timeline was still struggling with. Medical advances. Clean energy. Agricultural technologies that could end famine. Infrastructure solutions that could save millions of lives.
The knowledge existed, scattered across the multiverse. He just needed a way to carry it.
His plan was elegant in its ambition and brutally dangerous in its execution: gather alternate versions of himself from across the dimensions, except one universe where he died he was not sure what that was about but oh well, seat them all simultaneously in a specially designed apparatus, and use the machine to transfer their collected memories — their lived experiences, the knowledge they had absorbed from their respective Earths — directly into his mind. One transfer. One man carrying the sum total of countless parallel lifetimes.
The device was already partially built by the time the Mauler Twins were brought on. With their assistance, it took shape in a large warehouse on the outskirts of the city — a sprawling, intricate apparatus that occupied most of the building's floor space, ringed by chairs arranged in concentric circles like the petals of some impossible mechanical flower. Each chair was wired into the central housing. Each was designed for one version of Angstrom Levy.
They came through portals, one by one, from across the multiverse. Some looked nearly identical to the Angstrom the Twins had met. Others wore the differences of their respective worlds more visibly — small scars, different haircuts, the particular way a person carries themselves when the world they grew up in has shaped them differently. But they all sat down. They all consented. They all understood what they were here for.
The Mauler Twins, to their credit, built exactly what they were asked to build. Whether out of genuine intellectual engagement with the engineering challenge or simple contractual obligation was hard to say. Probably some of both.
Cecil Stedman had not survived this long in the intelligence business by being slow.
The moment the GDA's systems flagged the Mauler Twins' disappearance — confirmed escape, method unknown, no bodies recovered — he had already begun assembling a picture of what was happening. The construction materials being quietly sourced. The warehouse in the harbor district that had recently changed ownership through three layers of shell companies. The faint multidimensional energy signatures the GDA's most sensitive equipment had been picking up for the past several weeks.
He called Mark.
Their arrangement was new enough to still have rough edges, but it was an arrangement. Mark worked with Cecil. Not for him, not exactly — Mark had been very clear about that distinction, and Cecil had agreed to it with the calm, practiced ease of a man who knew how to let people feel like they'd won a negotiation. The reality, as always with Cecil, was more complicated. But for now, it functioned.
Mark arrived at the warehouse from above, dropping through the skylight with the practiced ease he'd developed over months of this kind of work — the controlled descent, the measured landing, enough force to make an entrance without destroying the floor.
He found exactly what Cecil had described. The machine. The chairs. The alternates — dozens of versions of the same man, seated and connected, the transfer already in progress. The air inside the warehouse hummed with energy that Mark could feel against his skin, a low vibration that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
The Mauler Twins noticed him immediately.
"Of course," said one of them, with the specific tone of a man who has been inconvenienced one too many times today.
"Hold on," Angstrom said sharply, looking up from the control housing. His voice was tight with urgency. "Hold on, we're in the middle of the transfer, you need to stop—"
Mark didn't stop.
He understood, intellectually, that Angstrom's stated goal was not malicious. Cecil had mentioned it, briefly — something about collected knowledge, humanitarian applications. But the Mauler Twins were involved, the machine was clearly dangerous, and the last time someone had built something ambitious in a warehouse with the Mauler Twins' help, it had not ended well. Mark's instinct was what it always was: get in, stop the threat, ask questions afterward.
It was, he would reflect later, a recurring problem.
The fight with the Twins was brutal and fast. They were stronger than they looked — they always were — and they had the advantage of working in concert, two bodies responding to effectively one mind, anticipating each other's movements without communication. Mark held his own. More than held his own, actually. He was faster than they were, stronger than either of them individually, and he had months of additional combat experience that he hadn't had the last time they'd crossed paths.
He was winning.
Which was precisely when Angstrom made the decision that would cost them everything.
He couldn't let Mark destroy the machine. Years of planning. Dozens of alternate selves who had agreed to be part of this. The future of countless lives on countless Earths, depending on the knowledge they were trying to consolidate. He couldn't let one overconfident teenager tear it all apart because Cecil Stedman had given him a mission briefing.
He opened portals.
Alternate Mauler Twins — ones from other dimensions, ones who had not made any particular deal with anyone and had no reason whatsoever to be gentle — came through in groups. They swarmed Mark, and where two had been manageable, six were not, and twelve were genuinely overwhelming. They drove him down, methodical and vicious, against Angstrom's increasingly frantic instructions to stop, just stop, don't kill him—
Mark hit the floor.
And the machine hit its limit.
The premature interruption to the transfer caused a cascade failure that propagated through the entire apparatus faster than anyone could react. The energy that had been carefully, precisely channeled through the connections between chairs released all at once, in every direction, and the warehouse simply ceased to exist as a coherent structure.
The explosion was massive.
When the dust settled — and it took a while — the rubble of the harbor warehouse was a field of twisted metal and shattered concrete spread across nearly half a city block. The shockwave had blown out windows for two hundred meters in every direction. Several nearby structures had partial wall collapses. A fire had started in the eastern section and was being handled by emergency services that had been on standby per Cecil's instructions.
The Guardians of the Globe arrived in the minutes following the explosion, picking through the wreckage with the careful, practiced efficiency of a team that had done this before. Immortal directed the search. Duplikate spread copies of herself across the debris field, covering more ground faster. Shrinking Ray worked the gaps too small for the others. Robot coordinated from above, his suit's sensors building a structural map of the collapsed building in real time. Rex Splode worked beside Immortal in silence, which was either a sign of professional focus or the fact that there genuinely wasn't anything to say.
They found Mark in the center of it.
He was alive. He was always alive, which was both a blessing and something that, when you thought about it too hard, was slightly unsettling. He was buried under a slab of collapsed roofing material, suit damaged, face cut in several places, conscious but not particularly happy about it. They pulled him clear, and Rex crouched next to him while the others kept working, and told him he'd done fine, that nobody could have anticipated what they were walking into here.
Cecil said something similar, standing over the rubble with his hands clasped behind his back and his expression giving away nothing except a faint, controlled frustration that Mark had learned to read as the closest thing Cecil ever got to open disappointment.
Mark sat in the rubble and felt the particular weight of a situation that had not gone the way it was supposed to.
Elsewhere in the wreckage, in a section the search teams hadn't reached yet, something moved.
One of the original Mauler Twins — which one was, at this point, probably unknowable even to him — pushed a concrete slab off his chest and sat up. He was disfigured in ways that would have been catastrophic for anyone without his particular biology. Burned along one entire side. Three fingers on his left hand bent in directions fingers weren't designed to go. One eye partially sealed by debris impact.
He was furious.
Not about the injuries. Pain was an old acquaintance at this point. He was furious about the helmet.
Angstrom had removed his protective equipment at a critical moment during the fight — a decision made in desperation that had exposed him to the full brunt of the explosion's concussive wave. He'd been knocked out of his protective positioning, sent tumbling through collapsing structure, and he had survived through sheer biological stubbornness while everything around him hadn't.
He found Angstrom in the far corner of the wreckage, and for a moment he almost didn't recognize him.
The transfer had been interrupted mid-process. The memories — dozens of lifetimes, countless parallel experiences, the accumulated knowledge of an uncountable number of Angstrom Levys from across the multiverse — had been jammed into one mind that had not been given the time to properly organize and integrate them. The results were visible on Angstrom's face and body in ways that were genuinely difficult to look at. His physical form had been altered by the energy of the failed transfer. His mind was somewhere considerably worse — buried under a landslide of memories that weren't entirely his, unable to distinguish where his own experiences ended and the borrowed ones began.
He looked up at the Mauler Twin.
And the Mauler Twin looked at him.
"Hell of a thing," the Mauler said quietly. "Hell of a thing you did, pulling that helmet."
Angstrom didn't answer him. He was already somewhere else, mentally — sorting through the cascade of images and experiences flooding through his consciousness. Some of them were Angstrom's memories. Most of them belonged to other versions of himself, from other Earths. And threaded through all of it, impossible to ignore, was a recurring image:
Invincible.
Not this Invincible — not the teenager who had crashed through the skylight and made the catastrophically bad decision to start a fight in the middle of a delicate scientific procedure. Different Invincibles. Alternates from the dimensions the other Levy's had come from. What they had done there. The trails of destruction they had left. The bodies.
Angstrom stood up. His face had settled into something that was no longer the careful, measured calm of the pacifist he'd introduced himself as hours ago. There was something underneath it now, something being slowly organized and hardened by the weight of all those borrowed memories. All those witnessed tragedies. All those versions of a story that ended the same way.
"This is their fault," Angstrom said. The words were quiet, almost conversational, but they had a quality to them that the Mauler Twin recognized immediately as the particular register of a decision being made.
He opened a portal.
"Wait—" the Mauler started.
But Angstrom was already gone.
The portal snapped shut. The Mauler stood alone in the rubble, listening to the distant sounds of emergency services and search teams working through the debris. He looked at the spot where the portal had been. He looked at his hands — the good one and the broken one.
"Hell of a sacrifice," he muttered to himself, to no one. "Hell of a price for that new look of his."
He straightened up. Rolled his functional shoulder. Began walking toward the perimeter of the wreckage, toward open air and distance.
"Never again," he said, with the absolute conviction of a man who had said this before and meant it slightly less each time, but genuinely meant it this time. "Never working for anyone else again. That's it. We're done."
He disappeared into the pre-dawn dark, and the search teams never found him.
PRESENT UNIVERSE
The clearing north of the Guardians' base had seen better days.
Three weeks of training sessions had turned what had once been a reasonably pleasant stretch of mountain terrain into something that looked like a geological argument. The grass was gone in most places, replaced by packed earth and shallow craters. Several of the older trees along the perimeter had lost significant portions of their canopy to shockwaves. One of them had simply fallen over during last Tuesday's session and nobody had gotten around to moving it yet. It sat at a slight angle against its neighbor like a man who had fallen asleep on a stranger's shoulder on a train.
Mark stood in the center of it in his nanite suit and looked at the assembled Guardians of the Globe.
They looked back at him with the collective energy of people who had been told they were allowed to do something they'd been wanting to do for a while.
"Don't be nice about it," he said. He'd said it in the briefing room that morning too, but he wanted to say it again out here where it counted. "I need to know the limits. The only way to find the limits is to hit them. So hit them."
Rex Splode, standing near the back with his explosive staff resting across his shoulders like a man waiting for a bus, raised an eyebrow. "You sure about that?"
"Positive."
Rex glanced at Bulletproof. Bulletproof shrugged. Rex looked back at Mark with the expression of a man accepting a generous invitation.
"Alright," he said. "Your funeral."
"I literally can't die."
"Your near-funeral."
Blue Rush went first.
He always went first. Speed was his opening argument in any tactical situation, and he made it with conviction — he came out of the starting position like a rifle shot, the air behind him collapsing into a brief vacuum before rushing back in with a crack that startled a bird out of a nearby tree. He hit Mark from the left at approximately the speed an express train wishes it could travel, and for just a moment, a fraction of a second, it felt like it was going to work.
Mark had both feet planted. The impact hit him square in the left shoulder, and he didn't move.
Blue Rush, on the other hand, redirected dramatically. Mark caught his arm on the follow-through and used the speed against him — pivoted, redirected the momentum downward, and Blue Rush went skimming across the packed earth for about thirty feet before he could get his feet under him again. He came to a stop in a low crouch, hands up, looking slightly betrayed.
"That was fast," he said, in his thick Russian accent.
"You were fast," Mark agreed. "I just stopped being where you expected me to be."
Blue Rush narrowed his eyes. Filed it. Fell back.
Duplikate was already moving.
She had split into eleven copies during Blue Rush's approach, fanning out wide to create overlapping angles of fire, each one armed with a plasma rifle pulled from the weapons cache Robot had set up at the perimeter. The copies didn't communicate vocally — they didn't need to — and the volley they produced came in from directions that should have made simultaneous blocking impossible.
Should have.
The nanite suit absorbed the first three impacts and logged them. The fourth and fifth hit the reinforced shoulder plating and dispersed. Six through nine hit Mark while he was already moving, turning into the fire rather than away from it, and the suit took each one and catalogued the frequency of the plasma discharge for future reference. Ten and eleven missed because Mark wasn't there anymore — he'd moved through the gap in the pattern, the one that existed because eleven copies of the same person, however well-coordinated, still thought with the same tactical instincts and therefore created the same blind spot.
"You're telegraphing the angle shifts," Mark called, already repositioning. "Watch your left flank — the gap between copies seven and nine is consistent."
"I'm covering eleven positions!" Duplikate shouted back from at least four directions at once.
"I know. You're doing great. Still telegraphing."
Two of the copies made expressions that communicated feelings that couldn't be said in a training environment.
Robot came in next with his support drones — six of them, arranged in a formation that was genuinely clever, the kind of tactical geometry that made Mark take it seriously even though he knew what the outcome was going to be. They were fast. Their targeting systems were good. They communicated with each other in real time, adjusting positions based on where the others were firing, no gaps, no hesitation.
Mark let three of them hit him. Let the suit drink the energy, process it, understand it.
Then he started dismantling them.
He worked through the formation in tactical priority order, narrating as he went, because Cecil had asked him to provide feedback during sessions and he was trying to be a good partner in this arrangement even when that arrangement still had edges that caught on things.
"Second one in the formation," he said, catching a drone mid-flight and redirecting it into its neighbor, "is always the coordinator. You take it out first and the others lose coherence. The formation degrades from the inside."
"Noted," Robot said, from inside his suit, in the tone of a man who was already rewriting the formation logic.
The last three drones scattered as the coordination signal dropped. Mark plucked them out of the air one at a time, unhurried, like a man picking fruit.
Then Thunderbolt and Powerplex came in together, and the session got genuinely interesting.
Their combination had been discussed in the briefing — Thunderbolt's lightning generation channeled through Powerplex's amplification field produced something at the upper end of what electrical output could mean in practical terms. Enough to fuse steel at close range. Enough to stop most things cold. Against most targets, it was a hard stop.
Against the nanite suit, Mark wanted to know exactly what it did.
He made eye contact with both of them across the field. Powerplex raised an eyebrow — the one that meant are you sure in the language of someone who had seen what their combined output looked like up close. Mark gave him a small, deliberate nod.
Do it.
They did it.
The bolt that formed between Thunderbolt's hands and Powerplex's field took about a second to build, and the crackle of it filled the clearing with the sharp smell of ozone and the uncomfortable feeling of every metal object in the vicinity being aware of electricity. When it released, it covered the fifty-meter gap between them and Mark instantaneously, the way lightning does, because it was lightning.
The sound arrived about a second and a half later.
The ground around Mark's feet cracked from the heat differential between where the bolt struck and the air six inches away. The nanite mesh lit up — every seam, every connection point, every distribution node — as the suit processed the incoming charge. For a moment, Mark looked like he'd been outlined in white light, every edge of him burning.
And then the suit routed it.
The charge cascaded through the mesh, converted from raw electrical energy into stored capacity, distributed across the network, locked in. Mark felt the output parameters shift — a sudden upward jump, like a car finding a gear it hadn't known it had. The suit felt more present than it had a moment ago. Denser. More awake.
He looked down at his hands. The suit was faintly luminous, a pale glow along the seams that faded slowly as the stored energy settled into the network.
"Huh," he said.
Thunderbolt lowered her hands. "Did that... work?"
"Yeah." He flexed his fingers, feeling the suit respond. "Yeah, it worked great actually. Thank you."
"I feel used," Powerplex said flatly.
"You were incredibly helpful and I mean that sincerely."
But then came the part that the suit couldn't quite prepare for, because the suit absorbed energy and the problem that came next wasn't about energy. It was about mass and leverage and numbers.
They jumped him.
Not all at once — that was the thing about this team, the thing that made working with them genuinely useful. They understood tactics. They didn't pile on in a formless mob. They came in overlapping waves, each attack designed to force a response that opened him up for the next one, threading the needle between his reaction times in ways that required genuine creativity.
Rex came low with the explosive staff, driving the butt end toward Mark's ankles in a sweep that had the detonator engaged — not a full blast, a controlled pulse, enough force to disrupt footing. Mark absorbed it through the suit, but absorbing a concussive sweep wasn't the same as dodging it, and his footing broke for just a moment.
Monster Girl was waiting for that moment.
She came in from the right in her larger form — twice her normal height, proportionally stronger, the transformation adding mass and force that she hadn't been born with — and her shoulder check hit Mark while his feet were still recalibrating. It wasn't her hardest hit. Didn't need to be. The physics of impact timing did the work: Mark went sideways, two meters, and landed in a controlled stumble rather than cleanly.
"Okay," he said, resetting. "Good."
"Don't sound so pleased," Monster Girl said, shaking out her shoulder. "That hurt me too."
Bulletproof hit him from behind while he was talking — a full-speed tackle, all body weight, the kind of hit that would have gone straight through most walls. Against Mark in the suit it didn't go through anything, but it pushed, and pushing was the point, because the push put him into the path of Shapesmith who had reshaped his arms into something dense and blunt for exactly this application.
The double impact drove Mark to one knee.
He was back up in under a second, but the dynamic had shifted. They had his attention now in a different way than before — not just his physical attention, his tactical attention, the part of his mind that had been monitoring and cataloguing now actively engaged in a way it hadn't been during the drone exercise or the electrical test.
"You're coordinating off my response patterns," he said, scanning the positioning. "You're reading where I'm going to be before I'm there."
"We've been watching you train for three weeks," Rex said pleasantly, from somewhere to his left. "You have patterns, man."
"I know." Mark turned, tracking positions. "I'm supposed to."
Rex threw the staff.
Not as a weapon — as a distraction, end over end, the detonators live enough that Mark had to account for it. He did, stepping offline to avoid the blast radius, and that step put him between Black Samson and Bulletproof, neither of whom had been in those positions a second ago.
Samson activated the earthquake bracelets.
The shockwave that traveled through the ground was low-frequency and targeted, the kind that hit feet and ankles rather than the air around them. The nanite suit registered it at the foot contact points and tried to counter it, which it did, but countering a ground shockwave took a moment of active processing and during that moment Bulletproof's tackle connected cleanly.
Mark went to two knees this time.
"Alright," he said, and there was something in his voice that the team recognized — not frustration, not concession, but the particular register of someone shifting gears. "Alright. Now I'm paying attention."
He came out of the crouch fast.
What followed was less a drill and more a controlled chaos that made several of the team privately reassess some things. Mark moved through the field with a different quality than before — not harder, exactly, but sharper, reading the spacing between people and threading through it, using the suit's stored energy in short bursts of enhanced output rather than passive absorption. He didn't try to fight all of them at once because that would have been stupid. He isolated. Moved through the formation, separating attack angles, denying the coordination that had been working against him.
Rex went first — Mark put him on his back in a controlled takedown that left him looking at the sky and reconsidering several recent decisions.
Shapesmith went next, reshaped arms and all, redirected and deposited firmly on the far side of the field.
Bulletproof he simply grabbed by the vest and moved, physically relocating him from one position to another like a piece of furniture, which was its own kind of statement.
Monster Girl gave him the hardest time — her larger form was genuinely difficult to displace, and she had the experience to know how to use her mass. They went three exchanges, which was longer than anyone else managed, and Mark had to use the suit's stored electrical charge to enhance his output to finally get underneath her center of gravity and take her down. She landed with an impact that shook the ground and immediately started laughing, which was its own form of compliment.
Thunderbolt got one good hit in — a close-range bolt that the suit absorbed and which made Mark's outline flicker white again for a moment. He gave her a nod of genuine acknowledgment and then got past her guard.
Atom Eve held the perimeter the entire time, maintaining the barrier that kept the worst of the environmental damage contained to the clearing, her expression one of focused concentration that was managing about forty percent more genuine concern than she was showing. The barrier bowed and flexed as the exchanges intensified, and she poured more into it steadily, the pink light deepening at the edges where the shockwaves hit hardest.
Powerplex and Duplikate ran a second coordination attempt late in the session — plasma fire laying down cover while Powerplex tried to channel an electrical disruption through the ground, more targeted than the bracelets had been. It was creative. It was well-executed. It was the kind of thing that would have been genuinely problematic against a different suit or a less engaged opponent.
The suit logged it, adapted, and the next time the electrical pulse came it was ten percent less effective than the first time.
"It learns fast," Powerplex observed to Duplikate, in the tone of a man who is impressed despite himself.
"So does he," she said.
When the session formally ended — Robot calling time with the precision of a man who had been counting seconds — the team was breathing hard in aggregate, and the clearing had accumulated another layer of evidence that things had happened there. More craters. Several new ruts where people had skidded. The fallen tree from last week had been joined by two of its neighbors.
Mark stood in the center of it and checked his systems. Everything was up. Everything had adapted. The suit had learned more in the last hour than in the previous three weeks combined, because there was no substitute for a coordinated multi-vector assault when you were trying to understand the edges of something.
He was satisfied. Tired, but satisfied. That good kind of tiredness that came from having actually worked rather than gone through motions.
Around him, the Guardians caught their breath and traded commentary with the easy energy of people who had given it everything and come out the other side intact.
The Immortal had been standing to the side the entire time.
Mark noticed it the way he noticed most things during training — peripherally at first, filed away, revisited. The Immortal had been present for the entire session. Had not participated in any of it. Had stood with his arms crossed at the eastern edge of the clearing, expression unreadable, eyes tracking Mark through every exchange with an intensity that wasn't casual and wasn't neutral and wasn't the data-gathering focus that Robot used.
It was something else. The particular quality of a man watching something he has already formed an opinion about and is waiting for it to be confirmed.
Mark had seen it from the first minute. Had watched it continue, unchanged, through the entire session. Had left it in the category of things to deal with later.
Later arrived as the team wound down, because the Immortal walked forward.
The field went quiet in the specific way it goes quiet when everyone present understands simultaneously that the dynamic of the moment has just shifted into something with weight to it.
He stopped ten feet from Mark.
"Spar," he said. One word. No inflection. Not a request.
Mark looked at him.
Everyone else looked at both of them.
Rex broke the silence with the inevitability of Rex breaking silences. He drew out a single syllable — Ohhh — with the theatrical appreciation of a man who had just watched two pool players discover they were at the same table.
"Showdown," he said.
Robot stepped forward before anyone else could navigate the moment. His suit's voice modulator gave his words the flat, system-readout quality that made them feel like data rather than commentary.
"If you intend to spar, it would be advisable to relocate. The structural damage potential at your respective output levels—"
"Fine," the Immortal said, without looking at Robot.
"—is considerable," Robot finished, which was approximately the conversational equivalent of a door closing on a room nobody had wanted to be in anyway.
The team began moving toward the mountain area, following the two of them, and the conversation that happened in the margins was the kind that happens when people who know things say them quietly to the people next to them.
Blue Rush, drifting alongside Powerplex toward the higher terrain: "This is gonna be a good idea?"
Powerplex, with the deliberate calm of someone who has been in enough situations to know: "Statistically? No."
Bulletproof, close behind them, talking to Shapesmith at a volume calibrated to carry to approximately the people next to him: "He's still worked up about Omni-Man. You don't get over watching half your team get killed by someone's dad and then just— go back to work. Doesn't happen in a few months."
Shapesmith made a sound that communicated understanding without attaching an opinion, which was his particular social skill.
Eve, walking with Monster Girl, Throwbolt and Shrinking ray, didn't say anything out loud. They shared a look that was its own complete sentence.
Black Samson had his comm out. "Samson to Cecil. Mark and Immortal are about to spar. Advising you now."
Cecil's voice came back with the speed of someone who had already been watching. "Stop them if it gets too far."
Samson lowered the comm. Looked at it. Raised it again.
"You want me to stop two of the most powerful people on this planet. You want me—"
"Yes."
"Cecil—"
"Have the rest of the team assist you."
Samson let out a breath through his nose, long and controlled, the sound of a man recalibrating expectations in real time. "He still doesn't trust Mark," he said, mostly to himself. "After everything that kid has done."
He put the comm away and followed the team north.
The mountain clearing north of the base carried history the way old places do.
Not dramatically — it didn't announce itself. But you could feel it in the ground, in the way the soil gave slightly differently in some places than others, in the stripped bark on the older trees and the lines where root systems had been exposed by shockwaves over repeated sessions. It was a place that had absorbed force and kept evidence of it, the way some rooms hold the memory of arguments long after the voices are gone.
Mark and the Immortal stood about thirty meters apart.
The rest of the team had arranged themselves at the perimeter without needing to be told — instinct, or experience, or both — in the loose, ready configuration of people who were going to watch but might need to move suddenly. Eve was already at the edge of her comfortable range for barrier work, quietly calibrating. Robot had his suit's sensors running. Rex had his arms crossed and his full attention, which was rarer than it looked.
Mark reached inward to the suit's interface. He felt the familiar response of the nanite mesh — present, attentive, organized around him like a second skeleton made of light and intention. He held it for a moment. Then he let it go.
The suit withdrew. Folded back into its inactive state, leaving him standing in his regular clothes in the mountain air, nothing between him and the world.
The Immortal watched him do it without expression.
"Don't hold back," Mark said. "I mean it."
The Immortal's jaw shifted. When he spoke, his voice was level — the way a voice is level when the feeling underneath it has been carried long enough that it's become load-bearing, structural, part of the architecture of how the person moves through the world.
"Every time I die," he said, "I come back stronger. That's how I work. Every death is another step. There's no ceiling I've ever found." He let that land before continuing. "Your father found out how I worked. He made use of it. He killed me, and my friends, and he left. Walked off the planet like it was nothing." His eyes stayed on Mark's face. "I came back. Stronger than I've ever been in several thousand years of being alive." The narrowing of his eyes was slight but deliberate. "I want to know what that means. Against you. Against his son. Who might make the same choice, someday, when we're not paying attention."
The words sat in the space between them and didn't move.
Mark took a breath. Slow. Deliberate.
"So that's what this is about."
Something settled in Mark's expression — not coldness, not aggression, but the particular focus that came when he had accepted the terms of something and decided to meet them honestly. He looked at the Immortal for a moment the way you look at a thing you've been circling and have finally decided to face directly.
"Okay," he said. "Show me what you've got."
The Immortal moved.
He covered thirty meters before Mark's eyes finished tracking the departure. For someone carrying several thousand years of accumulated existence, the Immortal was genuinely, shockingly fast — the kind of fast that didn't announce itself the way youth and power announced themselves, but arrived without preamble because it had never needed preamble. He came in low and direct, the trajectory stating its intentions clearly because it didn't need deception. Full weight. Full commitment. The fist that came at Mark's face was moving fast enough to leave a pressure wake that stripped bark from the nearest tree at range.
Mark planted both feet and caught it.
One hand. No suit. The impact hit him like a moving car hitting a wall, and the shockwave that rolled outward from the contact point was enough to flatten the grass for twenty meters in every direction and send a crack spreading through the packed earth under Mark's feet in a starburst pattern that expanded outward for four meters.
Fifty meters back, Atom Eve raised her barrier on pure reflex. The pressure wave hit it and bowed the construct inward — she pushed back, jaw set — and it held.
Mark held.
The Immortal's eyes registered something. Not surprise, exactly. Something more like the first data point in a long calculation. He increased the pressure, driving forward, trying to convert the arrested strike into a push. Mark's feet gouged into the earth, two lines appearing behind him as he was walked back half a meter against his will.
He stopped.
Then he pulled.
He took the Immortal's momentum, reversed it, yanked him forward off his committed weight distribution — and drove his elbow into the Immortal's midsection with every bit of unaugmented force he had on a short swing. The impact was a dull, thunderous sound that you felt in your back teeth. It doubled the Immortal forward.
For about half a second.
Then the Immortal's arm snapped around Mark's wrist and the world inverted. Mark went over his shoulder in a hard arc — fully airborne, the arc of a proper throw, not a stumble — and came down on both feet through sheer reflexive training, already moving before he'd fully processed landing. He planted, pivoted, met the Immortal's immediate follow-up with a forearm deflect that redirected the strike past his ear and used the opening to drive a kick into the Immortal's ribs.
The Immortal took it. Slid back. Dug one hand into the earth to stop himself.
Looked up.
And rushed again.
What came next lasted a long time and defied the kind of clean narrative description that applies to most fights, because it was not a clean fight. It was fast — genuinely, incomprehensibly fast, operating at speeds where individual exchanges lasted fractions of seconds and the accumulated effect of dozens of them created a continuous roar of displaced air and shockwave interference that made the clearing feel like a place under sustained bombardment.
They both stayed on the ground. Neither of them took to the air. There was something in that, something unspoken and maybe not fully conscious on either side — a mutual agreement that this was going to be decided close, physical, without the tactics and distance that elevation offered. Just force and experience and whatever each of them actually was.
The Immortal was a problem.
Mark understood this within the first thirty seconds and let the understanding recalibrate his approach in real time. The man had centuries of combat in his body — not memory, not theory, but physical knowledge, the kind that lived in muscle and reflex and the specific way you rotate your torso half a degree to turn an absorb into a deflect. His defense was economical in the way that only deep experience makes defense economical. There was no wasted motion. Every block was also a setup. Every step placed him relative to Mark in a position that cost Mark something to attack.
He was fighting with ten centuries of accumulated intelligence.
The problem was that Mark was stronger. Not by a small margin. By a meaningful one. And he was faster, by a fraction that compounded over extended exchanges, and he was reading the patterns in real time the way the nanite suit read incoming energy — cataloguing, adjusting, finding the edges.
Thirty seconds in: Mark took a hit to the jaw that snapped his head to the side and would have taken most people off their feet. He planted through it and answered with a body combination that drove the Immortal back three steps.
A minute in: The Immortal found the pattern in Mark's defense and exploited it — a feint that pulled Mark's weight left, opening the right side, and the follow-up connected across Mark's ribs with enough force to produce a crack like a bat hitting something solid. Mark felt it. Showed none of it. Tied up the Immortal's arm before the next strike and threw him.
The Immortal bounced. Came back.
Two minutes in: The wind from their exchanges had stopped being ambient weather and started being an active environmental condition. Leaves were not so much falling as being involuntarily removed from their attachment points and sent in lateral directions. Eve was visibly working to maintain the barrier, her feet spread, hands up, a line of concentration visible between her brows as she poured more into it. Rex, who had been leaning against a tree with professional interest, had taken several steps back as the tree began to shift.
"Robot," Rex said worryingly.
"I see it," Robot said.
Three minutes in: The Immortal landed a sequence that was genuinely impressive — four strikes in combination, each one threading through Mark's adjusting defense, the last one an uppercut that connected under Mark's guard and lifted him half a foot off the ground. Mark came down and the ground cracked under the landing. He looked at the Immortal across two meters of churned earth with blood at the corner of his mouth and something in his expression that was not quite a smile but occupied the same neighborhood.
"There it is," Mark said.
"Still standing," the Immortal said.
"Yeah."
The Immortal came at him again.
Four minutes in, Mark stopped defending.
Not recklessly — it wasn't an absence of strategy. It was a strategic shift, the decision to accept the hits in exchange for controlling the positioning. He took a cross to the face that left his ear ringing and used the fraction of a second the Immortal spent recovering his extension to get inside his guard. Close. Too close for the big strikes to work. The range where speed mattered more than power and Mark had the edge.
He worked.
Three-hit combination, body-body-head, each one landing clean with the full mechanical advantage of proper weight transfer behind it. The Immortal took the body shots and tried to clinch. Mark broke the clinch, stepped offline, caught the follow-up across his shoulder instead of his face, and answered with an elbow that connected with the specific geometry of bone against bone.
The Immortal staggered. Not far. Half a step. But it was the first time in the fight he'd been staggered, and the observation registers at the perimeter.
"Oh," Thunderbolt said quietly, from somewhere to the left.
The Immortal reset. His breathing had changed — not labored, but different, elevated, the body accounting for expenditure. He looked at Mark with the expression of someone who has received an answer to a question and is processing what it means.
He came again.
This time Mark didn't wait for him. He closed the gap himself, cutting the distance in half before the Immortal's committed attack could develop full power, and the result was a mid-range exchange at the kind of pace that made following it visually from fifty meters away essentially impossible. Impacts stacked on each other. The air between them was a continuous concussive event. The ground in the area they occupied had stopped being recognizable as ground and had become something more like evidence.
Five minutes in: The Immortal hit Mark with something that genuinely moved him — a combination that ended with a two-handed push at full output, the kind of force that would have launched a tank. Mark went backward eight meters, skipping once, and came down in a crouch with his fingertips dragging the earth to stop himself.
He breathed.
Came back.
The Immortal was breathing harder now. Not winded — that word didn't apply to someone who had survived things he'd survived — but working. Visibly working, for the first time. The economy of his motion was fractionally less perfect than it had been, the signs too small for most people to read but present.
Six minutes in: Mark got the clean sequence.
He'd been building to it for the past ninety seconds, layering the setup in, planting false patterns that the Immortal's experience would recognize and respond to, using that predictability as the mechanism. The Immortal read the feint the way Mark intended him to read it, committed his weight to the response, and found that the next strike didn't come from where feints like that came from.
The first hit in the combination broke the Immortal's guard. The second opened him up. The third connected across the jaw with Mark's full weight behind it, fully committed, nothing held in reserve.
The Immortal left the ground.
He went backward through the air for twenty meters — airborne, fully, the trajectory of a hit that had genuinely moved him — and came down in a crouch that gouged twin furrows eight feet long in the earth. He stayed in that position for a moment. Still. The team at the perimeter had gone completely quiet.
Slowly, the Immortal straightened.
He raised the back of his hand to his mouth. Looked at the blood there. Then looked up at Mark across the twenty meters of devastated ground between them.
His eyes were different. The thing he'd been carrying — the calcified anger, the specific weight of a man who had been killed and had waited, who had come back and not yet had anywhere to put what he came back as — had settled into something else. Not resolved. But different. Acknowledged. Real in a way it maybe hadn't fully been until this moment.
He set himself.
His hand came back.
His feet left the ground.
Mark moved to meet him.
The pink barrier came between them like a wall dropped from a great height.
It hit the Immortal's strike with a sound like the largest bell in the world, the energy spreading across Eve's construct in visible rippling waves, the pink light deepening and then recovering as she absorbed and dispersed. Behind Mark, Bulletproof and Shapesmith were there — hands on his arms, not a restraint exactly, more a presence, a physical fact that said here, stop, here. On the other side of the barrier, Monster Girl in her larger form had her arms around the Immortal from behind, not holding him down but grounding him, giving the moment somewhere to land.
Powerplex stepped into the gap. Took the residual force of the Immortal's interrupted strike across his palms. Absorbed it. Sparked. Lifted off his feet by about two inches. Came down and was caught by blue rush, who had moved without being asked.
Black Samson and robot walked through the settling field with the particular inevitability of a man who has decided the chaos is over because he has decided it.
He planted himself in the center. Looked at both of them.
"Enough."
The word wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.
A beat of silence. The kind that has texture.
Cecil appeared — the portable projector activating, his image materializing in the mountain air with the slight translucency of field-quality projection. He was looking at the Immortal. Just looking. After a long moment, he shook his head. Once. Slowly. The specific language of a man who has seen what just happened and has already finished forming his opinion of it.
The Immortal looked at him.
The tension in his posture changed. Not gone — not resolved, not fixed — but reduced to something that could fit inside a person's daily life without tearing things.
"Fine," he said.
He looked at Mark one more time. The look carried something. Mark held it without flinching.
Then the Immortal was gone — straight up, fast, a crack of displaced air the only evidence of where he'd been standing. His contrail dissipated against the grey sky and was absorbed into weather.
Mark watched the spot where he'd been. His breathing was controlled and even, the trained regulation of someone who had been working very hard and had the discipline to manage the aftermath. The field around him — churned, cratered, stripped, bearing the full evidence of what had just happened in this place — sat in his peripheral vision like a record.
Eve moved next to him. Close. Not touching him, but close enough that the warmth of it was present.
"You okay?" she asked quietly.
Mark was quiet for a moment. He genuinely checked.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I think I actually am."
She looked at him. He looked back.
"That's what he feels like," Mark said, more to himself than to her. "Everything he's carrying. That's what it actually feels like."
Eve didn't have an answer for that, which was its own kind of acknowledgment.
"Mark." Cecil's projection had shifted, his image now oriented toward the two of them. His voice had the quality it took on when he was being direct without the armor of institutional distance — as close to human as Cecil usually got in the field. "You and I need to go. There's a situation."
Mark looked at him. Looked at the field around them. Added the data point to the collection he'd been building, the one that was slowly becoming a picture of something he was still working out the shape of.
He nodded.
"Yeah," he said. "I'm ready."
The teleport field opened. The light took both of them, and they were gone.
The Guardians of the Globe stood in what remained of the clearing and collectively assessed the situation.
The word devastation felt slightly dramatic, but only slightly. The ground for a forty-meter radius had been comprehensively rearranged. Two trees that had survived every previous session had not survived this one. The large fallen tree from last week had been joined by both of its closest neighbors and all three of them were now leaning on each other in a configuration that was structurally cooperative if nothing else. There were impact craters. There were gouges. There was a general sense that the mountain had opinions about what had been done to it and was registering them quietly.
Bulletproof surveyed all of this with his hands on his hips and the philosophical equanimity of a man who has completely recalibrated his baseline for what counts as a normal Tuesday.
"Gotta love this team bonding," he said.
Rex Splode turned to him. Then turned to the debris field. Then back. He gestured broadly at the surrounding evidence of localized catastrophe — the craters, the absent trees, the furrows, the general air of having recently been in the vicinity of several small geological events.
"This," he said, his voice carrying the weight of a man raising a genuine procedural objection. "This is what we're calling team bonding? This is the thing we're describing with those words?"
"Team bonding can take many forms," Shrinking ray said.
"Can it take the form of trees? Because we are significantly down on trees."
Atom Eve looked at both of them. Then at the field. Then at the rest of the team, standing in their various stages of post-session recovery, breathing hard, nursing minor impacts, collectively inhabiting the aftermath of a morning that had contained more than any of them had technically agreed to when they showed up.
"Come on, guys," she said. "Let's just clean this up."
Blue Rush exhaled. It was the particular exhalation of a man who has done a lot of cleanup in his life and has made peace with the probability that he will do more. His Russian accent came through in the weight of it, the specific register of someone who processes resignation through the body rather than the mouth.
He looked at the three-meter tree branch lying nearest to him. He picked it up. He began.
Powerplex, somewhere to his left, said: "Do we have a plan for the craters, or are we just hoping it rains?"
"It always rains eventually," Monster Girl said, back in her regular size now and rolling her shoulder where she'd taken the hit from Mark earlier, the one that had shaken the ground.
"Inspiring," Powerplex said.
"I thought so."
Shapesmith, who had reformed his arms back to standard human configuration and was experimentally flexing his fingers to confirm the reconfiguration had taken properly, looked at the damage with the particular expression of a being who had come from another world and occasionally found human conflict genuinely baffling.
"We do this every few weeks," he observed, not accusingly. Genuinely observationally.
"Yep," said Rex.
"And every time, it is worse than the last time."
"Also yep."
"And then we clean it up and come back."
Rex pointed finger guns at him. "You're getting it."
Shapesmith considered this for a moment with the focus of someone processing a cultural phenomenon they find simultaneously absurd and somehow moving.
"Okay," he said, and picked up a tree branch.
Thunderbolt had already started on the far side of the clearing, working methodically with the calm efficiency she brought to most things. Duplikate had split into four copies for greater cleanup coverage, three of them handling debris while one documented the damage for the incident report that GDA protocol required after any training session that exceeded a certain threshold of environmental impact. This session was going to require a long incident report.
Robot's suit hovered at the perimeter, running a comprehensive sensor sweep of the site. "I'm compiling the structural damage assessment," he said. "Based on current data, we are looking at between forty and sixty hours of remediation work to return this site to pre-session baseline. I'm cross-referencing with the previous twelve sessions' remediation records to identify efficiency improvements."
Everyone ignored him with the comfortable ease of a team that had developed a working relationship with being data-informed.
Black Samson picked up a section of fallen trunk that, combined with its root ball, probably weighed close to a ton, and moved it to the tree line with the methodical ease of a man doing light housework. He didn't say anything for a while. He was thinking about what he'd told Cecil on the comm. About trust. About whether it was reasonable to expect trust to develop on a reasonable timeline when the situation that had necessitated trust-building was as fundamentally unreasonable as this one was.
He didn't arrive at a clean answer. He wasn't sure there was one.
He picked up another section of trunk and moved it.
Eve floated above the clearing, using her power to lift debris in organized batches and sort it — organic material to one side, structural damage she could attempt to partially remediate with her constructs, things that just needed to be cleared. From up here, she could see the whole picture: the field, the team working through it, the sky above beginning its slow afternoon shift toward something cooler.
She thought about Mark's face when he'd said that's what he feels like. The way he'd meant it — not as a complaint, not as sympathy, but as a kind of respect. The acknowledgment that what the Immortal was carrying was real and large and earned.
She thought about how he'd handled it. Had met it directly. Hadn't flinched from the weight of what the encounter was actually about.
She thought about that for a while, floating above the wreckage, moving debris.
Below her, Rex was telling Bulletproof a story about a previous cleanup operation that had, apparently, been significantly worse than this one, though Bulletproof was expressing appropriate skepticism about the comparative claim. Monster Girl was finding that her larger form would actually be useful for moving the bigger debris and had converted back up to handle a section of collapsed hillside at the northern edge of the blast radius. Powerplex had decided that the craters were, in fact, a problem and was attempting to address them with a combination of loose earth and some creative physics applications that were of questionable methodology but clearly sincere intent.
Blue Rush, still working through the fallen branches with the systematic patience of a man who processes things through physical activity, finished one pile and moved to the next.
He sighed again. Longer this time. The kind of sigh that was its own complete philosophical statement about the nature of existence, delivered in a Russian accent that gave it additional weight.
"Can't we have a normal day?
"READ AUTHORS NOTE, PLEASE."