Back on Earth, television and cinema always painted revenge with a wide, triumphant smile.
The hero's face would split into a grin or crumble into tears of relief, a righteous surge finally washing away years of pain.
But as the head of Commander Kraevus struck the arena floor, I waited for that heat and found only a cold, static silence.
I stood over the cooling remains of a dead man and found a hollow, grey desert stretching in every direction.
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
The line from my previous life drifted through my mind like a stray leaf, and for the first time, I understood the bitterness behind it.
I finally killed one of my enemies, yet it didn't happen with weight or finality, but like something that ended without leaving a mark.
When Halvar broke me down through those years of torture, my heart burned with a furnace of fury and a need for vengeance so absolute it felt capable of burning the seas.
Now, that furnace was just cold ash.
"Candidate… no, Sir Glenn, by the authority of the High Command and the blood of the fallen, you have surpassed the threshold of the ceremony… congratulations."
The female official's voice pulled me out of my thoughts, her tone unsteady, carrying a sharp edge of fear as she informed me that I was now qualified for planetary missions.
"Oh… I thank the Empire for the opportunity to… whatever."
"..Yes...sir."
The words fell apart before they could finish, because none of it mattered while that slow, crushing emptiness spread through me.
I realized even revenge wasn't enough.
Maybe I didn't love myself enough to even feel the payoff of my own vengeance, but I pushed those thoughts aside and focused on the present.
"Hey man! If you stare any longer, people might think you fell in love with the commander."
Kang leaned against a blood-spattered pillar with a sharp grin.
Out of all the people watching this, he was probably the only one who actually came to support me.
"I am just standing here."
"Yeah, but you're standing there with love in your eyes..."
"..."
"Hahaha... um... ahem. Oh well... so why don't we go grab something to eat instead?"
"I am not that hungry to eat squids."
"...Fine, go fly into a vacuum until you cheer up, because I am not buying a drink for someone this boring."
Kang was someone I was starting to consider a friend, even if talking to him still felt awkward whenever he said something stupid.
But one thing he said was right; the moon was calling me.
The people staring at me were making it harder to stay here, so I decided to leave the mess behind.
Kang had already left after congratulating me, so instead of going home, my internal propulsion ignited and pierced the cloud layer until the blue of the atmosphere bled into a bruised, dark violet.
The abyssal sky opened up with the stars and the endless night.
The moon above Viltrum felt nothing like the one I watched from a bedroom window back on Earth.
That distant marble had been a miracle, something humanity could barely touch even with machines and luck stacked together.
Back then, it was unreachable.
Now, it wasn't.
My boots cracked through a crust of pressurized, frozen nitrogen that had never known what the sun felt like.
Because the gravity here was high enough to trap the air but the light was too weak to move it, the atmosphere just sat there like a silent, frozen floor.
A jagged ridge of basalt provided a seat where I could look back at Viltrum.
From this distance, it looked calm.
Untouched.
It was impossible not to marvel at the sheer, grounded impossibility of a species that treated the stars like their own backyard.
And whether I liked it or not, I was one of them—the same bloodthirsty, conquest-hungry species.
"How beautiful."
Just when I was busy admiring the view, I saw streaks of white cutting across the violet horizon.
They weren't patrols, because their trajectories were too jagged and lacked the precision of veterans.
They moved in erratic bursts, colliding in mid-air with the wet thud of flesh against flesh before scattering like shrapnel.
It didn't take me long to realize they were teenagers, even younger than me, playing on the moon.
Watching them for a moment was enough to understand what they were doing.
One would be thrown, forced into a free fall, while the others tried to break his descent before he hit the ground.
The goal was a perfect landing, a test of physics and timing.
It was a gravity-bound lottery where winning meant hitting the frozen surface without shattering it—or themselves.
"Hey, did you just push me away, you weakling?"
The peace of the ridge shattered with the sharp, grating sound of an argument that felt too human for this Viltrumite moon.
"If you get pushed away, then who is the weakling?"
I sat there as the satisfaction of the view was replaced by the bickering of kids.
I wasn't that old either, but if I combined both lives, I was a grown adult with the mind of a forty-one-year-old.
"A perfect landing doesn't count if you need a gust of wind to save your pathetic neck."
"I didn't need anything, you just can't handle someone faster than you."
They were arguing over a botched landing, and it was the same posturing I had seen in back alleys and schoolyards on Earth.
"Damn it, I'll kill you."
"We'll see."
Kids are kids anywhere, I suppose.
Even in a world that eats its own, they still found a way to turn the path of a warrior into a game, but I didn't like the way this was going.
"Hey, you brats."
"If I hear one more word, I'll throw you into the sun."
The moment I said that, they turned to see who dared to speak, and when they saw my uniform, they ran.
This was Viltrum.
They knew people here could actually do that.
I wouldn't, but they had no way of knowing.
A small, tired weight lifted from my chest, and for the first time since the arena, the corners of my mouth twitched upward.
If someone shaped them properly, they wouldn't end up like the rest.
They were weapons, yes, but still just children playing in the dirt of the stars.
I wanted to stay on the moon a little longer, but I decided it was time to go back and see if I could find a stronger opponent in the arena.
.
.
.
One day passed.
A rumor was already tearing through the training arenas across the capital about a mad bastard with red eyes challenging everyone in sight.
I was the reason for that, mostly because I didn't know what else to do with myself now, so I just let it all out in battle.
As they say back on Earth, some men only know how to talk with their fists first.
Not a single match ended in defeat.
The lack of a real challenge made me question the non-existent limits of my own strength, sending me on a search for an opponent who could actually make me bleed.
I even went to the residence of Conquest, only to find the old monster was still off-world.
As for Kreg or the other names from my past life, none of them were available, and Thragg wasn't someone I could just challenge on a whim.
He was the only surviving son of His Majesty Argall, personally slaughtering every other claimant to the throne to ensure his seat was the only one left.
"You know, for someone who supposedly has the mind of a tactical genius, you spend a lot of time hitting people who can't hit back."
Kang leaned against the arena wall with his arms crossed and that same shit-eating grin plastered across his face.
"I'll treat you to a meal tonight, so why don't we skip the rest of this before you accidentally kill me?"
"No, I'll treat you, but only if you manage to block my next punch."
"Oh, so you want to treat me to a funeral? How generous."
The only thing left to do was train Kang, forcing him to become a better version of himself through sheer attrition.
Half the time the man was furious, cursing my dead ancestors as I pushed him past his breaking point, but I didn't stop.
Three more days passed in that same cycle… until no one in the barracks even wanted to look me in the eye.
I was getting tired of the repetition, and since Kang wasn't improving after our last spar, I gave him some space and a few drinks as a silent apology for the bruises.
When the boredom became too much, I returned to my spot on the moon and found those two kids from before.
They were bloodied and bruised, pushing themselves too far in their games while their parents were away on patrol duty.
There was no reason to leave them like that, so I used my powers to mend their broken bones.
When they saw the green energy stitching their skin back together, their eyes sparkled with a look I hadn't seen on this planet before.
Their names were Zyrith and Thiera, and suddenly two little shadows followed me through the lunar cold.
It turned out the rowdy "boy" I had scolded before was actually a girl, just another weapon in training with a foul mouth and a hard head.
Ten days passed while I waited for an imperial order that never seemed to arrive.
Instead of a mission, an ancient-looking man appeared at my door one morning with severed hands and a face carved into a mask of scars.
"Glenn the Undying."
"...Who?"
"Well, I'm Dravol, a retired soldier of the Empire, and I got into a bit of a disagreement with my son yesterday that left me in this state."
The old man spat a bit of blood, looking at me with eyes that saw a thousand years of war.
"Brats these days don't respect their elders, so I was thinking you could heal me."
"Then what made you think I'll respect you?"
"...I can share my honor points with you."
"...I'll do it."
I said yes for the points, since Viltrum has no use for paper currency.
Everything here worked on contribution; you served the Empire to earn the right to exist, and honor points were the only thing that bought a seat at the table.
Besides, with the constant adaptation of the mana in my veins, my healing was getting stronger by the second.
The next day, I realized it was a huge mistake.
Word of what I did spread like a plague through the ranks, and soon my doorstep was crowded with the broken wreckage of the veteran class.
"It was severed by a beast... I can offer twenty years' worth of contribution points... can you make it stand again?"
"..."
A perverted old man looked at me with a desperate, pathetic hope.
"Those damn doctors said this limb was dead tissue, boy, so fix it... and you get out of my way."
A massive warrior with a necrotic arm shoved the old man aside like an insect.
"I've got three centuries of service points with your name on them if you can make me whole."
I spent the next hour acting as a divine mechanic, mending flesh that the official medical bays wrote off as scrap.
Finally, the crowd of wounded veterans and newbies left my home, and just when I was planning to have a hearty meal, a man arrived walking with a cane made of black iron.
His eyes were milk-white and scarred shut, yet he navigated the uneven ground with a precision that made my skin crawl.
"I'm Virexa, one of the three oldest living fossils in this land, and I didn't come for healing, Glenn the Undying."
The blind man stopped ten paces away, his head tilting as if he were listening to the very rhythm of my heart.
"I came to see if the red-eyed devil is as fast as the rumors claim, or if you're just a pampered little rat."
"You can't see me, just go home and sit in a chair."
"A chair is for those who can no longer feel the wind of a strike coming."
He didn't wait for a signal before he ignited his internal propulsion and shot into the sky.
I followed him up, leveling out a few hundred feet above the barracks where the wind was steady and the wind was cold.
I tried to activate my Sharingan to read him, but realized there were no eyes to lock onto, and his intent was buried under a layer of absolute, frozen calm.
He lunged, his iron cane cutting through the air with enough force to crack a mountain.
His movements were slow compared to a peak soldier, but his senses were so sharp he was parrying my counters before I even fully committed to them.
He wasn't watching me, instead he was feeling the displacement of air every time I shifted my flight path.
I took a sharp blow to the ribs that sent a jolt of genuine pain through my chest, realizing my visual cheats were useless against a man who fought by feel.
I closed my eyes for a split second, focusing entirely on the heartbeat and the internal propulsion coming from his body.
Virexa swung the black iron cane in a wide arc, aiming for my temple, but I dropped a few inches in the air and felt the weapon whistle past my hair.
I drove my fist into his solar plexus, catching him before he could adjust to my change in altitude.
The impact sent him flying into a nearby building, dropping him into a massive crater of dust and stone.
He stood up just fine a second later, letting out a short chuckle that sounded like grinding rocks.
"Ha. Fast enough, I suppose."
"What the.."
Just when I thought he was going to continue the fight, he turned and left without saying another word.
.
.
.
Nearly a month passed without a single order from the high command, and the silence didn't feel like freedom so much as a threat being delayed for maximum impact.
This was a world built on the constant grinding of bone and the endless expansion of the Empire, but now everything around me slowed to a point where even my own strength felt like a blade rusting in a sheath.
Vultures only thrive while they're hunting, and in a place like this, staying without direction felt like a suffocating death.
I spent my time doing nothing but healing people, making constant trips to different moons, and drinking with Kang until the repetition became its own kind of torture.
They say that waiting for a strike is often worse than the blow itself, but for me, the lack of results was just another test of my patience.
I wondered if they finally decided to open a front against me as an enemy, questioning if I was already that much of a threat, or if they simply forgot about my existence.
But that was a biological impossibility for a species that tracks its weapons as closely as they track their kills.
Regardless, I was strong, so I stayed exactly where I was.
If something needed to happen, it would happen, and I planned to make sure the outcome served me above all else.
Thankfully, the very next day a Viltrumite soldier arrived at my door with a summons from General Kreg.
After a few minutes of silent flight, we landed in front of the central spire and I was escorted into the obsidian office that served as the General's headquarters.
The room was filled with cold light and shifting holographic maps of systems that haven't been bled dry yet, but my focus remained on the man sitting behind the desk.
General Kreg looked exactly as I remembered, a veteran of a thousand wars with a red ocular device replacing his left eye.
"Sit down, Commander Glenn, because the vacancy Kraevus left is not a hole that stays empty for long in this Empire."
The moment he saw me he made me a Commander, which looked like an upgrade but felt like a contract with terms I never read, a total scam.
I moved toward the chair and sat comfortably in the center of the room before looking him straight in his mechanical eye.
"Look, I didn't kill him for the title, General, I killed him because he was a nuisance to me."
Kreg brushed the statement off as if my personal motives were nothing more than the buzzing of an insect.
From what I knew he wasn't as strong as Conquest or the version of Omni-Man I knew from the future, but his position in the hierarchy was enough to keep me from doing anything reckless for now.
For a second, I caught myself thinking like a true racist Viltrumite, but I pushed the thought aside to focus on the reality of the situation.
"Your motives are irrelevant to the Council, but your results earned you his fleet and the seventeen worlds he held in the Emperor's name."
"From this moment on, you are the protector of those worlds and a vanguard of the Empire, even if I personally dislike giving a fifteen-year-old brat more than he deserves."
"However, obeying the will of His Majesty and the Council is my primary duty, so you will take the fleet and you will ensure those worlds remain productive."
Then came the rant about wisdom, duty, honor, and servitude, a lecture that dragged on until I stopped listening to the words and started counting the scars on his knuckles.
"So I just need to play exterminator on these seventeen rocks, so when do I leave and where is the map?"
"You are given the right and the authority, but not this early, because before you take your seat you need to complete at least one real mission for the Empire."
To say I wanted to stay on Viltrum would be a lie, because while the place was high-tech and imposing, it was also boring enough to make me want to fly into a moon.
"..Tell me what needs to be done."
"Do you know about the Dead Zone of the Empire?"
"...I don't."
The moment I said that, Kreg looked at me like I was a special kind of moron, but if studying was my strong suit then my past life wouldn't have been spent hauling drywall on a construction site.
"The Dead Zone exists on the boundary of the Zenith star cluster where our Empire meets the void."
"There's a world inside that doesn't belong to anyone, not because it lacks value, but because every expedition we send there ends in a graveyard."
"The planet is a stable anchor in a sea of chaos, making it the only passage point between empires, yet the last seventeen teams didn't even make it to the atmosphere."
"The latest group was slaughtered by something capable of killing a Viltrumite, and to make it worse, those damn lizards of the Badoon Empire found a way inside."
When he mentioned another empire I felt a jolt of genuine confusion, because in this era before the purge, I thought we were the only apex predators in the dark.
"..If there is something out there that eats Viltrumites for breakfast, then this sounds like you're just sending me to my death."
"...Did you forget what they call you, and I'm not sending you alone."
I sat back, trying to process the fact that the scope of this world was suddenly a lot bigger than a few millions rebellious colonies.
"And these Badoon, are they actually a threat to us or just a nuisance?"
"They are a plague of lizards who use numbers and stolen technology from the Skrulls and the Kree to bridge the gap nature gave us, though they fail every time they test our borders."
And that was the moment I completely froze as air in the room suddenly feeling a lot thinner as those names hit me like a physical blow.
Kree.
Skrull.
Those words shouldn't have belonged in this reality, and they definitely shouldn't have been coming out of the mouth of a Viltrumite General.
So keeping a face like stone was the only option, besides what I was even wondering about since I died and reincarnated in Viltrum.
And then a strange system gave me the powers of a naturally evil Uchiha, the healing of Ken Usato, and even the biology of the god-killer Doomsday.
Probably what I was feeling wasn't actually fear but the headache I would get from coping with all this nonsense.
That headache only grew as the man remained professional and tolerable, spending another fifteen minutes explaining the mission parameters with a level of patience that felt out of place for a high-ranking officer.
Just when the exit was in reach, the atmosphere in the room shifted into something strangely awkward.
"Ahem... Wait, there is one more thing, Commander Glenn."
"..."
General Kreg looked at me for a long moment before his hand moved to his face, slowly clicking the red ocular device out of its socket to reveal a hollowed-out mess of scar tissue.
"Do you think this can be healed?"
"..."
I looked at the hollowed-out socket, seeing past the rank and the armor to a man who just wanted a broken part of himself repaired.
"Seven million honor points, Glenn, if you can give me back my sight."
"Sure."
I simply let the green energy flood the cavity to bridge the gaps in the tissue, watching the optic nerves reconnect with the same focus I used to use when wiring a complex circuit board.
After treating him, I didn't fly back to my home and instead walked the capital streets, keeping my boots on the pavement while I stared at the open sky for the first time in a long while.
The stars looked different now, appearing much larger and more predatory than they had when I first learned I could fly.
"Damn it... there are levels to this shit."
I looked up into the dark, realizing the world I thought I knew was just one corner of a much bloodier map.
.
.
.
(End of the Chapter)