Chapter 20: The Butcher's Price and the Empty Throne
A Viltrumite does not fight like a human martial artist. They do not rely on leverage derived from the ground, nor do they care about the conservation of momentum. They are self-contained engines of infinite kinetic generation. When two of them clash, it is not a fight.
It is a localized extinction event.
The state of Virginia was screaming. A shockwave ripped through the upper atmosphere, clearing the cloud cover for a hundred miles in every direction.
Nolan Grayson and Lucan the Butcher were a singular, blurring sphere of red, white, and crimson, tearing through the sky at Mach 15. The friction of their bodies moving through the atmosphere ignited the air around them, turning their brawl into a plummeting, erratic meteor.
Lucan's massive, scarred hands were wrapped around Nolan's throat. The Butcher's single blue eye was wide with absolute, fanatical glee. He drove his knee into Nolan's sternum.
KRA-KOOM.
The impact shattered the sound barrier again. Nolan coughed a spray of blood, his ribcage groaning under the incomprehensible pressure.
"You are soft, Nolan!" Lucan roared, his deep voice carrying over the roaring wind. "You smell like the cattle! You bleed like them!"
Lucan shifted his grip, grabbed Nolan by the pristine white cape of his Omni-Man uniform, and spun with terrifying torque. He hurled Nolan downward.
Nolan didn't just hit the Appalachian Mountains; he erased a peak.
He slammed into the dense granite of the mountain range at a velocity that defied earthly physics. The impact vaporized millions of tons of ancient stone in a microsecond, leaving a smoking, glass-lined crater a mile wide. The seismic tremor registered in seismographs as far away as California.
Nolan lay in the center of the molten crater. His vision swam. His left arm was numb, and he could feel the jagged edge of a fractured rib pressing dangerously close to his lung. The immaculate Omni-Man suit was in tatters, the white fabric soaked in his own blood and the ash of the ruined mountain.
He looked up at the sky.
Lucan was descending, not with a heroic pose, but dropping feet-first like an orbital strike, intending to crush Nolan's skull into the earth's mantle.
For twenty years, Nolan had fought with restraint. He had fought giant monsters, mad scientists, and subterranean armies, and in every single battle, he had held back 99 percent of his power to maintain the illusion that Earth's heroes were relevant. He had played the role of the benevolent god so perfectly that a small, pathetic part of him had actually started to believe it.
He thought of Debbie's face, contorted in absolute terror in the kitchen.
He thought of Mark, broken and bleeding in the rubble, looking at him with eyes full of pure, unadulterated hatred.
He thought of the Vanguard, the human girl, suspending him in silver chains while his own Empire sent an executioner to kill his son.
Nolan reached back and grabbed the torn, bloody remnants of his white cape. With a sharp, violent tug, he ripped it from his shoulders.
Omni-Man was dead.
Nolan stood up.
Lucan slammed into the crater.
The Butcher expected Nolan to be crushed. He expected the weakened, domesticated scout to yield. But as the dust and molten rock blasted outward, Lucan found his descending boot caught in the palm of Nolan's hand.
Lucan's single eye widened. The downward force of his strike was enough to sink a continent, but Nolan's arm didn't even bend.
Nolan looked up at the Butcher. The fatherly warmth, the superhero stoicism, the arrogant scout—all of it was gone. His eyes were cold, hollow, and burned with the terrible, ancient savagery of a true Viltrumite conqueror.
"I am not soft, Lucan," Nolan whispered, his voice vibrating through the bedrock. "I am just tired of pretending."
Nolan twisted his wrist.
The horrifying SNAP of Lucan's ankle breaking echoed like a cannon shot.
Lucan bellowed in genuine pain, a sound of pure shock. Before the Butcher could retract his leg, Nolan yanked him downward, driving his other fist directly into Lucan's scarred face.
The punch deformed the Viltrumite's jaw. Teeth, dense as diamonds, shattered and erupted from Lucan's mouth in a spray of glowing crimson blood.
Nolan didn't stop. He didn't monologue. He fought with the clinical, merciless efficiency that had earned him command of the Empire's western expansion.
He blurred forward, driving a shoulder into Lucan's chest, tackling the massive executioner horizontally. They didn't fly up. Nolan drove them straight down.
They breached the crust of the Earth.
Bedrock, subterranean rivers, and tectonic plates gave way as Nolan plowed Lucan through the subterranean depths of the planet. Total darkness consumed them, lit only by the friction-fire of their descent.
Lucan roared, thrashing wildly in the dark. He wrapped his massive arms around Nolan's back, intending to crush his spine in a bear hug. The pressure was agonizing. Nolan's fractured rib snapped fully, piercing his right lung. Blood filled his mouth.
"Die, traitor!" Lucan's voice was a wet, gargling rasp in the crushing dark.
Nolan couldn't breathe. His vision began to narrow. The Warlord Kaelen would have fought the grip. The Aether-Weaver Oram would have tried to slip it.
Nolan simply embraced the agony.
Instead of pulling away, Nolan thrust his hands upward, plunging his thumbs directly into Lucan's eyes.
The Butcher shrieked. He possessed skin that could withstand the heat of a star, but his eyes were still soft tissue. Nolan's thumbs sank deep into the sockets, blinding Lucan's remaining good eye in an explosion of vitreous fluid and blood.
Lucan's grip faltered.
Nolan ripped himself free, gasping for air in the subterranean vacuum. He grabbed Lucan by the collar of his armored uniform and abruptly reversed their trajectory.
They shot upward, a crimson blur of unimaginable violence, bursting back through the crust of the Earth. They erupted from the ground in a completely different state, emerging in a desolate, abandoned strip-mining quarry in West Virginia.
They crashed into the bottom of the quarry, rolling through the gravel and ruined excavators.
Lucan scrambled to his feet. He was completely blind, his face a ruined mask of blood and torn tissue. But Viltrumites did not need eyes to kill. He tracked the microscopic shifts in air pressure, the heavy, wet sound of Nolan's pierced lung.
"You cannot run, Nolan!" Lucan spat a mouthful of blood and shattered teeth onto the gravel. "Kregg knows! The Grand Regent knows! You have allied with the Vanguard! You chose a pet over the Empire! Your world will burn, and I will wear your son's skull as a trophy!"
Nolan stood fifty feet away, clutching his bleeding side.
He looked at Lucan. He didn't see an unstoppable executioner anymore. He saw the pure, concentrated essence of the Viltrum Empire. The arrogance. The absolute, unyielding brutality. The endless, suffocating cycle of conquest that he had devoted his entire life to.
For the first time in thousands of years, Nolan Grayson realized he hated it.
He hated the Empire for making him lie to his wife. He hated them for making him break his son. And he hated them for making him afraid of a human teenager with a glowing chest.
"You talk too much, Lucan," Nolan said softly.
Nolan inhaled a deep, ragged breath, letting his pierced lung fill with blood. He didn't care. His Viltrumite healing factor was already desperately trying to knit the tissue back together.
He flew forward, skimming inches above the gravel, moving entirely silently.
Lucan swung a blind, massive backhand, a strike that could level a skyscraper.
Nolan didn't dodge. He caught the massive arm. He used Lucan's own terrifying momentum, twisting his body and stepping perfectly into the Butcher's guard.
With a roar that carried the grief of a shattered family and the rage of an exiled god, Nolan drove his right hand—fingers rigidly extended—directly into Lucan's abdomen.
The Viltrumite abdominal muscles, dense enough to survive atmospheric reentry, parted before Nolan's hand like wet paper.
Nolan's arm plunged elbow-deep into Lucan's stomach.
The Butcher froze.
The air in the quarry went absolutely dead. The roaring of the wind stopped. The falling gravel ceased.
Lucan looked down with his ruined, bleeding eye sockets. He felt the cold, agonizing reality of Nolan's hand gripping his spine from the inside.
"The Empire..." Lucan gasped, a thick, dark slurry of blood spilling over his lips. "...is infinite."
"Then tell them to send someone stronger," Nolan whispered into Lucan's ear.
Nolan violently ripped his arm backward.
The sound of the Butcher's spine snapping was deafening. Nolan didn't just break the bone; he pulled.
A horrifying, sickening wet schlick echoed through the quarry as Nolan disemboweled the imperial executioner.
Lucan's eyes rolled back in his head. The massive, indestructible conqueror spasmed once, twice, and then went entirely limp.
Nolan pulled his arm free, tossing the horrific, bloody ruin of the Butcher's internal organs onto the gravel. He let Lucan's massive body fall to the earth with a heavy, lifeless thud.
Silence descended on the quarry.
It wasn't the heroic, triumphant silence that followed a Guardians of the Globe victory. It was the desolate, suffocating silence of a graveyard.
Nolan Grayson stood over the corpse of his former brother-in-arms. He was bathed in blood—both his own and Lucan's. His crisp white and red suit was a shredded, filthy mockery of the symbol he had built. His left arm hung uselessly at his side, his ribs ground together with every breath, and his lungs burned.
He had won. He had killed the executioner. He had protected his son.
But as the adrenaline slowly, painfully receded from his system, the absolute, crushing reality of his victory settled over his shoulders like a lead shroud.
Nolan looked down at his blood-soaked hands.
What have I done? He had killed a loyal soldier of the Viltrum Empire. By Viltrumite law, that was treason of the highest order. The punishment was death. Not just for him, but for his entire bloodline. Kregg knew. The Grand Regent Thragg would know. The armada would come, and they would not send a single butcher next time. They would send a fleet.
Nolan looked up at the sky.
He couldn't go back to the GDA. Cecil knew the truth. The entire agency would open fire on him the second he appeared on a radar.
He couldn't go back to the Vanguard. Mira Lin had unlocked Tier 3. She had the Kaelonian Sentinels, the Aether-Weaver's magic, and the absolute certainty that he was a monster. If he approached her, they would fight to the death, and right now, broken and bleeding, Nolan wasn't sure he would win.
And worst of all... he couldn't go home.
The image of Mark's face, contorted in pure, heartbroken hatred, burned into Nolan's mind brighter than any Kaelonian plasma.
"I'd rather die."
Mark had chosen Earth. He had chosen the fragile, fleeting humans over his own father. If Nolan went back to the suburban house in Virginia, he wouldn't find a family. He would find a son ready to fight him to the death, and a wife who looked at him like he was a demon.
Nolan sank to his knees in the gravel.
For the first time in thousands of years, the invincible Omni-Man wept.
It wasn't a loud, dramatic sob. It was a single, silent tear that cut a clean line through the blood and ash on his cheek. He was a god, yes. He possessed power that mortals could scarcely comprehend. But as he knelt in the ruins of the quarry, surrounded by the silence of the Earth, he realized he was utterly, completely alone.
He had no empire. He had no family. He had no home.
He was a king without a kingdom. A conqueror without a cause.
Nolan slowly pushed himself to his feet. His body screamed in protest, but the Viltrumite healing factor was already forcibly knitting his ruptured lung back together. He didn't look back at Lucan's corpse.
He looked up at the darkening sky. The stars were beginning to bleed through the twilight. Billions of worlds. Infinite cold dark.
Nolan bent his knees.
With a sonic boom that echoed like a final, mournful tolling bell across the empty quarry, Nolan Grayson launched himself into the sky.
He didn't fly toward Washington D.C. He didn't fly toward the destroyed suburbs of Virginia.
He flew straight up.
He breached the atmosphere in seconds, leaving the blue and green marble of Earth behind. He didn't look down at the world he had spent twenty years trying to conquer. He couldn't bear to look at it.
Nolan entered the absolute, freezing silence of deep space. He angled his body toward the deepest, most uncharted sector of the cosmos—away from the Viltrumite outposts, away from the Hollow King's armada, and away from the only people he had ever loved.
Omni-Man vanished into the dark, leaving Earth to face the coming storm alone.