We collided with the force of two unstoppable freight trains.
The impact was completely devoid of technique, a raw exchange of pure, primal violence. We threw our fists forward with everything we had. The sheer kinetic backlash of the clash shattered Conquest's massive cybernetic arm into jagged pieces of sparking shrapnel, while the bones in my right hand splintered and sprained under the overwhelming pressure.
We didn't pull back from each other.
We crashed into the glassed earth, rolling through the obsidian wasteland.
With my solar reserves depleted and the massive, gaping wound in my abdomen freely leaking raw, unstable energy, the fight completely devolved. The high-speed, earth-shattering aerial battle was over.
This was a gritty, gruesome, close-quarters brawl in the dirt.
I headbutted him, shattering the bridge of his nose. He gouged at my eyes, ripping a chunk of flesh from my cheekbone. We tore into each other like feral animals, leaving smears of blood across the glowing, scorched earth.
And through it all, Conquest was laughing.
He was absolutely loving the brutality, a twisted smile plastered across his ruined face through the pain. While he reveled in every second of the bout, I was experiencing the exact opposite. I was fading fast.
I was rapidly losing blood from the wound the Apex had left in my gut, and my body was exhibiting the ramifications, making my movements dangerously sluggish.
Conquest exploited this immediately. He dodged a slow left hook, caught my extended left arm, and used his downward momentum to sharply torque the limb.
CRACK.
He snapped my arm perfectly at the elbow with a sickening crunch. The bone sheared cleanly, bursting through the skin and muscle of my forearm.
I staggered backward, dropping to one knee. The pain was suffocating. Conquest loomed over me, casting a long shadow across the crater. He cracked his charred neck, looking down at me with his singular, manic eye.
"I want to thank you," he grinned, his voice raspy and breathless. "Really. From the bottom of my heart. I haven't enjoyed my time this much in centuries. It's not very often I get to cut loose like this. And I mean really cut loose, there are so many mission parameters. But not here, not this planet. For whatever reason, I was told to take control of this planet, by any means necessary. So, whatever you did to piss us off... thank you."
Suddenly, his grin dropped and he gained something akin to a sad expression.
"Truth be told, I'm going to miss you," he said with a genuine tone. "Our society is terribly lonely. Especially for me. All the other Viltrumites are scared of me. No one talks to me. No one wants to be my friend—They all think I'm unstable. They send me from planet to planet committing atrocities in their name. And as I get better at it, they fear me more and more. I am a victim of my own success. Conquest. I don't even get a real name, only a purpose I didn't even ask for. As time went by I started to think that I was incapable of so much more. Until today. You've reignited something within me. I feel like I could go on for another millennium. Anissa was right, you truly are one of a kind."
Then, his expression hardened once more.
"But all good things must come to an end," he said as he lunged forward to deliver the final blow. "Take this moment to your grave."
He drove his bare, blood-soaked hand directly into the existing, exposed wound in my abdomen. He intended to kill me by reaching straight through the opening, and slowly ripping out my spine.
He plunged his arm deep into my ruined torso.
By the look on his face he expected me to wail in agony. But I didn't scream. In fact, I didn't even flinch. The ludicrous amount of adrenaline coursing through my veins completely numbed the pain. So much so, that I leaned forward, driving his arm even deeper into my guts, physically trapping his forearm inside the muscular cavity of my stomach.
Conquest's psychotic grin faltered at my sudden action.
Inside my body, my smart atoms reacted aggressively. Being completely depleted of solar radiation, they instinctively tried to pull energy from anything they could get in contact with nearby. When the Apex variant pierced me, my reserves were already low; after I used the solar flare, they dropped to a critical level—just enough to keep me from burning up completely. Now, there wasn't enough energy for my atoms to quickly close the wound, leaving them as desperate as a starving animal. As Conquest reached further into me, my unstable, leaking cells violently latched onto his cellular structure.
My body began searing his hand and forearm from the inside out.
Conquest let out a sharp hiss of agony as the flesh of his arm began to literally cook within my guts.
I slowly met his gaze. My eyes were entirely dead, cold, and utterly devoid of sanity, a violent light flickered in the irises.
I opened my mouth, and a dark, hollow, rattling laugh spilled from my lips. It sounded completely alien.
Then, I did the unthinkable.
I reached across my chest with my sprained right hand and grabbed the dangling, severed half of my own broken left arm. Holding it in a reverse grip, I raised the arm, exposing the sharp, blood-soaked bone protruding from my elbow.
Conquest's singular eye widened in genuine, unadulterated terror. For the first time in years, the Viltrumite executioner wasn't thrilled. Seeing a reflection of pure, sociopathic emptiness—someone willing to weaponize their own mutilated body—shattered his battle-lust entirely. The face he made was one of pure, primal panic.
"The other me died quickly," I whispered with an unhinged smile. "I won't let you have that grace!"
I violently drove the jagged bone directly into the charred flesh of his shoulder.
He screamed, a wet, gargling sound. I ripped the bone out and stabbed him again. And again. Driving my broken bone repeatedly into his collarbone, his chest, his neck.
Conquest frantically tried to rip his arm out of my abdomen, blindly thrashing backward to escape the nightmare scenario.
Feeling my life force dwindling by the second, I stopped stabbing him with my broken arm and hooked my right arm tightly around his neck, locking him against me. As he violently wrangled to get out of my hold, tearing his burning flesh against my searing internal radiation, I manually overrode the safety regulators on the micro-fusion battery powering what was left of the shattered wrist communicator on my broken arm.
My body was a biological solar battery currently leaking unstable radiation. Detonating the high-yield tech near me wouldn't just cause an explosion; it would act like a spark in a gas-filled room, triggering a chain reaction from the radioactive energy I was leaking.
The communicator beeped a shrill, rapid warning.
"Let's see how much fun you have in Viltrumite Hell," I smiled wickedly into his terrified face.
Conquest roared in absolute, horrified panic. With a sickening sound of tearing meat, he painfully forced his arm out of my abdomen, leaving strips of his own seared skin and flesh peeling behind inside my stomach. He slipped my neck hold and violently twisted his body away, trying to shield himself.
The battery detonated.
A massive explosion of blue plasma quickly engulfed us both. The heat was instantaneous. I felt my flesh instantly charring to a crisp, the sheer agony completely overriding my nervous system before everything went entirely black.
BEEP…BEEP…BEEP.
The rhythmic hissing of a respirator pulled me from the void.
My consciousness returned slowly, fighting through a haze of heavy exhaustion. My limbs felt like they were made of lead, like I had been sleeping for an eternity. I opened my eyes, the harsh, sterile lights of a medical bay blinded me for a moment.
I was submerged in a high-tech healing pod.
I slowly lifted my hands. My left arm had been reattached and was completely healed. I reached down to touch my abdomen. The flesh was closed as well.
I'm alive, I mused, feeling out my hand.
The fluid in the pod rapidly drained, and the glass doors hissed open. I stepped out, shivering. Looking down at my body, I saw my skin was unnaturally pale. Being trapped in a dark med-bay had starved my solar atoms; my body was screaming for sunlight.
The doors to the medical bay slid open. Walking in were Titan and Isotope, alongside my lead logistics director. They stopped in their tracks, looking at me with a mix of awe and profound relief. Titan and Isotope subconsciously took a half-step back, clearly unnerved by my pale, dead-eyed appearance.
"Mark," Titan rumbled, his deep voice carrying a hint of disbelief. "You're awake."
"Back from the dead, it seems," I rasped, my throat feeling like sandpaper. "How long was I out?"
"You've been in a coma for two full weeks, sir," the logistics lead answered softly, stepping forward with her digital pad. "Your body has been building itself back up. When we located you at the blast site, we couldn't even retrieve you for an entire day because the air in the environment was too concentrated with radiation."
"The GDA said it was the highest thermal signature that they have ever recorded," Isotope added, loosening his tie.
"The blast turned the Nevada desert into some kind of surreal, alien landscape," Titan said, as the logistics lead tapped her pad to project an image on the wall.
The lead began to explain how the epicenter of the blast created a shallow, star-shaped depression covered in greenish, foamy glass beads caused by the intense thermal radiation and pressure. The bedrock beneath had melted and rapidly cooled into deep pools of smooth, reflective black obsidian. Surrounding the crater were jagged fulgurites—glass roots—sticking out of the sand where localized energy had branched through the soil. The atmosphere itself was filled with a shimmering, crystalline haze of vaporized silica that had re-solidified in mid-air.
"The GDA's scientists said that it will take centuries to get the environment there back to normal," Titan informed me.
That's fucking crazy, I mused internally, before dismissing the environmental concern. I'll just get Angstrom to help me fix it later.
"We can deal with that later. As for now, how's the rest of the world doing? Did the clone narrative story hold up well?" I asked the lead.
"It's a mixed bag, sir," she admitted. "Half the world believes that you were the biggest reason why this multiversal invasion stopped and see you as a global savior. However, the other half are uncertain what your motivations are. Which is solely based on the things that clone on the live broadcast said before we cut the feed. They fear you might be another Omni-Man situation, just lying in wait until they are comfortable before you strike."
Tch, same problem, new audience. Ain't this a bitch, I thought, sighing aloud.
"I think the best course of action would be to hold a press conference," she proposed smoothly. "You could clear everything up and make sure the world knows you're on the side of humanity."
"Sounds good, schedule it for later in the week," I agreed, rubbing the back of my neck. "Get me updates on casualties and what happened to the other heroes too. But first... what about Conquest? Did his body survive too?"
They all exchanged a grim look.
Then the lead shifted through her digital pad one again before pressing play on something. "We found a few scraps of his cybernetic arm, unrecognizable and melted to slag. But, our satellites and the GDA's captured this during the explosion."
She showed me the footage of the explosion expanding and engulfing me and Conquest. She slowed the footage down and I was able to see a high-speed thermal streak rocketing out of the edge of the explosion, soaring straight up through the atmosphere.
I replayed it five times, zooming in each time to get a better view of it, until the gears in my head started spinning.
He survived.
I recalled the exact moment I closed my eyes from the pain of the explosion, and how Conquest had twisted his body to try and escape. He got just enough of his hand out, and must have used the massive concussive momentum from the blast to propel himself into the upper atmosphere.
Even with his entire body charred to a crisp, he still managed to escape, I mused, hand over chin. Viltrum is far as hell, so he likely landed on an isolated planet to heal his body some before returning to the other Viltrumites for proper treatment.
I shook my head at the sheer absurdity of the situation. Truly remarkable.
"There's more, sir," she said quietly. "We tracked at least six surviving clones who had also escaped into the atmosphere during the chaos in New York. We have their flight patterns."
I clenched my jaw, a fresh wave of exhaustion washing over me.
Great. Six variants, and Conquest still being alive, I thought, rubbing my temple. Then, I quickly waved the inconveniences off. Man, whatever.There's nothing I can do about them right now. I just need to get healthier, and deal with them when I'm all better.
"It's fine, let's just take it one step at a time and start setting up that press conference," I said as I moved past them towards the exit.
I navigated the quiet halls of Invincible Inc. until I reached the private sector I had specifically designed for myself. Inside my quarters, high-yield solar panels were installed on the ceiling, angled perfectly toward a specialized bed panel to recharge my smart atoms at any time.
I walked over and laid down heavily on the bed panel. The intense artificial sunlight immediately went to work on my pale skin, the warmth seeping into my starved cells. I let out a long breath, staring up at the blinding light.
As my mind settled, a familiar hum of displaced air echoed in the room. A glowing green portal opened at the foot of my bed.
Angstrom stepped through, brushing a bit of dust off his coat. He looked down at me, a small, knowing smile on his face.
"You're looking well."