^{_{__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}}
It is the dead of night.

Somewhere at a cheap California motel, A fleet-footed samurai creeps through under the cover of darkness over the roof of the establishment. Only the swift breeze followed through her movements as she bypassed the guards without being traced and went straight into her target's balcony.

A cartel gang member is about to have an untimely visit from the Grim Reaper herself in his sleep.

A silent shadow that wields death in her hands and harvests the souls of those she has slain.

Tonight, Katana's target was a Mexican mobster who is said to be the mover and shaker of the substance known as Snake oil in California. A powerful drug that can incapacitate any meta-human/mutant.

Katana's suspicion only grew stronger since she watched that video of a crazed theorist's podcast. She had a hunch that the snake oil may be connected to it and is the same chemical used to gas the metahumans in one of Lord's concentration camps.

Perhaps this mobster can provide more info on this topic, once he is on the other side of her soultaker.
^{_{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}}
Like a cat, Katana's footsteps were almost non-existent. She silently opens the sliding window pane and grabs the hilt of her soultaker, slowly approaching the slumbering mobster in his bed.

Just as she is about to assassinate the poor man in the dark, she realizes something is amiss. His blanket emits a foul smell of rusted iron, and its texture is quite soaked.

The stench of death is familiar to her. She immediately pulled off the sheet only to find the mobster was already dead, drowning in his own blood.

She frowned, realizing that someone had reached her target before she could.

Katana examines the lifeless body. The cuts the crime lord obtained were no ordinary slices. They were precise, and surgical, Only damaging the important parts of the body's organs. This was a quick death by the blade and was no doing of an amateur hitman.

Their motive must be silencing this man, taking his secrets to the grave.

FWOOOOPPMH!!!

Just when Katana was about to leave the room, An arrow flew through the window and went straight to her. A ninja wielding a crossbow is standing outside missed his shot as Katana barely deflected by an inch with a flick of her sword.

Panicked. The suspect quickly flee after that failed attempt.

Katana took a deep breath and started sprinting through the motel hallways, in pursuit of the trained assassin. Hoping to find answers on why the attempt on her life?

Both of them are agile and limber as the chase continues, doing flips and parkours all over the place, maneuvering around the tight spaces of the motel.

Tatsu Toro ended up in an empty parking lot where the chase ended. From there, she sees a lone white van as other four members dressed like the one who tried to kill her steps out.

Judging by their red-themed ninja garb, I'd say they're a part of a clan. Which makes them dangerous. I've met these type before. They hunt in packs and spelled nothing but trouble. Katana thought to herself.

"Who are you?" She asked.

The four masked men remained silent, drawing their bladed weapons as their answer. Their eyes are filled with killing intent as they continue to glare at her. Clearly, The wandering ronin has stumbled upon something that conflicts with their interest and has something to do with the dead mobster.

"Fine, then you shall die nameless by my swords" The Bladerunner draws her two blades.

Date: May 2nd, 2016
To: Toomes Salvage and Industries, LLC
Address: 30-35 Thomson Avenue, Sunnyside, Long Island City, NY
Subject: Termination of Contract for Cause

Dear Adrian Toomes,
We are writing to formally notify you that the contract titled "FALCON Project" entered into on
June 28th, 2015 is hereby terminated for cause. This action is taken in accordance with [FAR 52.249-8]
Despite previous communications and opportunities to remedy the performance issues outlined,
you have failed to meet the contractual obligations, including but not limited to:

• Failure to make progress/endangerment of performance

As a result of these breaches, we find it necessary to terminate the contract effective
immediately. We request that you cease all work under this contract and return any government
property within 30 days.
If you disagree with this termination, you may submit a written appeal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency within 30 days.
We appreciate your attention to this matter.
Sincerl\\\

Adrian wasn't sure why he kept that letter or even why he kept coming back to read it again. It was better than the eviction letter, but that was the thing, wasn't it? All of his troubles came from this. A rejection by the very government he faithfully served for nearly a decade in active service and this was the thanks he got? Not even a year to provide a working prototype? He turned away, tossing his pitiable keepsake aside, feeling his temper flare up. It often did these days. In the past he might have tried to control it.

There just wasn't anyone left to drive anymore.

It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair. "None of it!" Adrian snapped, swiping his hand across a table to scatter the assorted collection of metal scrap. His most recent haul but it was all worthless. Bullet casings, bits of armor plating, salvaged motor parts...Worthless. Now even his salvaging venture was drying up, no, dried up. He hadn't made any real money in months and he was sure his workshop, the last thing he had now, was bound to be seized next. Then what?

His ire focused in on a piece of branded metal with one obnoxiously prideful logo displayed on it, weathered, but plainly visible. Stark. He might as well be responsible for this. Sure, the Department would have never admitted to it, but they favored his war machines over what Adrian had proposed. The agility of a mechanized wingsuit had advantages, but they didn't see it. They never did. If he could just make the prototype, they'd all see.

Knock. Knock.

Adrian turned towards the metal garage door as it rattled from the light rapping of a knuckle. He was alone, couldn't afford to hire anyone. It was late so nobody would be coming around. Not unless they wanted trouble. He turned to go for the pistol he kept in his office but the garage violently flung open, the metal shrieking. The noise caught Adrian's attention as he turned, witnessing the largest man he had ever seen step forward. His height was almost too much for the clearance and he even had the girth to be brushing both of his shoulders into the sides of the garage entry.

"My apologies for the disturbance." The man had an eloquent way of speaking but his voice commanded attention, matching his sheer presence. Adrian watched as the man pulled out a money clip and flipped through it, pulling a few Franklins out to present. "Consider this compensation for your time. And the door."

The man approached and Adrian could swear, he felt the concrete underneath shake just as the man had reached him. Adrian took the money but remained still and silent. He didn't even notice the other figures behind the man as his mind stumbled over the question of just how expensive it'd be to get a suit tailored in that size. It was pristinely white as well, without a single crease.

"Now I will not take much of your time, Adrian, but I do have a proposition for you."

Adrian blinked, focusing again, as he brought his gaze up to meet the man. His eyes narrowed. "Who are you?" His aged, gravely voice had always been a point of pride for him because to almost everyone, Adrian sounded tough. Yet here he sounded quiet, meek compared to the other.

"Wilson Fisk." He stated plainly with Adrian opening his mouth to press more questions but he fell short as Wilson continued. "Let's not waste words, Adrian. I have a proposition for you, and you are the man for the job."

"I am?" Adrian's voice scraped timidly as he took a step back, out of Wilson's shadow.

"Quite right." Wilson's eyes lifted and he gestured lightly towards a side of the warehouse that Adrian knew without looking. His prototype, almost finished. "I can appreciate the passion to one's legacy and as a gift for that legacy, I will offer a forward payment. Complete your work, Adrian."

Wilson lifted his money clip and extended it towards Adrian. His eyes gleamed with astonishment and he reached out only for Wilson to turn his wrist away at the last moment. "Complete your work and then work for me."

Adrian's eyes shifted from the money to Wilson's. The man had gotten serious, that large round face became like stone hardening with conviction. It didn't feel like a proposition anymore. It felt like a demand.

"What do you want?" Adrian straightened himself out, tensing. He tried to stand tall and firm but next to Wilson Fisk, he looked like a child pretending.

Wilson chuckled, his features lightening up as his chest rumbled with the noise. "Complete the suit and then as a bonus, I offer a little revenge regarding your past." Wilson tossed the money clip into Adrian's hands and turned to walk away.

There were so many questions running through Adrian's mind. What had he gotten into? Why did Wilson Fisk want him to complete his suit? Was this enough to complete it? What if..What was.. His past?

"What revenge? What about my past?" Adrian wrapped his fingers around the money. He wished he had more to say other than questions, but he hated to admit it. He felt intimidated to do anything else.

"Revenge, Adrian. Revenge. You'll be acquiring something for me from a name I'm sure you'd recognize." Wilson snapped his finger and a few suited men turned to leave with one remaining by the door. "You don't find success in reacting to the market. You get it by being ahead and rumor has it, the President will be losing his number one arms supplier. There is opportunity there. Work with Mister Holmes here as he will assist you in acquiring whatever you need for your suit."

Wilson turned reaching a hand up to grab the bottom of the garage door that he had violently thrown open before. "Then you'll rob Stark for me." Wilson pulled the door shut, slamming close.

---

---

Cindy pulled at her suit, the silk stretching before she released it snapping back. "Ugh, should have just worn it under my clothes." She muttered kicking her backpack to slide underneath the rooftop air-conditioner unit. She could feel her clothes be pressed against her by her suit, much to her annoyance. You'd think after almost a year of being Silk, she'd remember these little things that provided irritation. Well it was a lesson to relearn later, conceding to the discomfort as she started to run.

Quickly running out of real estate on the flat roof and approaching the waist-height ledge ahead, she leapt propelling herself as if she were jumper to fall to the street below. Gravity did its work to start pulling her down, under the local rooftop level and into the array of windows flanking on two sides.

TWHIP!

Pointing her index and middle finger like a pistol, she fired a silken thread from both fingers, the two strands spinning and tying together as they were ejected from her fingers. The entwined silk splatted near the top of the building while Silk twirled her wrist to bring the silk rope into her hand, pulling it from her two fingers in a process that was now as natural as breathing.

Clenching tight, she allowed the angle to swing herself using gravity as the force for the inertia. At the point she felt her momentum was slowing, she opened her hand to release the silk rope, leaving it behind as she aimed her other hand in a that finger pistol motion and fired another web line ahead of herself. Cindy had an apt analogy for how this all worked if anyone ever asked. It was like riding a skateboard with the motion of pushing off with one foot to get speed felt intrinsic after some practice. You'd just have a feel for when to let go and ride out through the air before having to "push off" for that speed again.

Nobody ever asked, though.

Following another rotation of web-swinging, Cindy glanced down at the racing police cars with their sirens blaring. They were trying their best down there, but dodging cars and traffic made it slow going. She was easily able to catch up to them, despite having to take time to suit up. That made her wonder. Why is the winged suspect flying low in the first place? And why was he suddenly doubling back to the west down a different avenue?

Cindy felt a tingle in her head before she heard the noise just as she peaked above the roofline in again. She turned her head to see the distant lights of a rapidly approaching helicopter coming over the East River. The birdman was trying to evade it.

She filed away that information, turning back to try and pick up speed. Even as she passed the police vehicles on the road underneath, she was barely making gains on the man. He had the luxury of flying straight with a pair of turbines on his back. In fact, he'd probably be clear of any pursuers if he pushed those engines if Cindy's guess about the power of those things was right. However, he was barely ahead. Looking lost and she wondered if he would...

There!

The man's mechanical wings turned as he straightened out. He was going to look around and change direction again. The look of a man who lacked confidence, like he was flying for the first time. Cindy calculated an angle she could approach from as she closed in and swung at him, raising both of her legs to plow her heels right into the man's stomach as he turned to survey his pursuers. He hadn't been aware Cindy was on him and his eyes widened moments before the impact.

Cindy felt her feet dig into the man's stomach. Spittle flew from the man's mouth as he was lifted further in the air. Releasing her grip on her web, Cindy fired from both fingers to the nearest rooftop behind the man, reeling herself in as her feet braced against the man to bring him along.

The wings and jetpack impacted the brickwork first, snapping and breaking into the exterior wall creating a small indentation on which the man sat. Cindy held onto her web threads to keep her feet pressed in and pinning the man.

"Wow, a bit too old to be joyriding, don't you think?" Cindy remarked through half-mask. Her eyes narrowed as she considered the man she had pinned. He was busy gasping and sucking air for a response, so she understood the lack of answer. He was old, fifties, maybe? Wearing a standard green mechanic suit like he had just gotten off his shift at the garage. There were even oil stains and grease still on there.

Her focus shifted to the wings as they seemingly writhed with metal scratching. The wings were segmented at hard angles that all streamed down from the top horizontal spine. It did look a lot like an actual wing if that wing was made of hard angles and metal. It looked pieced together from different machines as well, the colors were non-uniform and clear signs of grinding and shaping. The thing that caught her eye, however, was the membrane that could be seen in between the segments. It was like molten metal that had a non-metallic hue to it. Spending years in Reach custody had told her all she needed to recognize that. It was Reach tech in there.

"Nice wings, but I think you're breaking about seven different FAA regulations." Cindy turned back to watch the man still recovering from the shock of having a mule kick to the stomach. Fair, those did hurt.

"Shut it... girl..." He managed to wheeze out a response. Cindy rolled her eyes. "They always say that. Look, just call me Silk. Not Spider-Girl or girl." Her time stopping muggers, robbers, and purse snatchers had people always basing her entirely on her gender, even picking the term that was supposed to be more demeaning like a girl can't beat up a guy. Unfortunately for them, she did beat them up so really, using a name other than "girl" was for both of their benefits.

"Anyway Birdboy, let's see about getting those wings off you and I can lower you down to the police." Cindy lowered her gaze to the harness around the man. He was strapped abundantly to his pack which made sense giving the amount of energy those turbines could pack. If this were under differing circumstances, she'd start prying for how he managed to pull off a cool rig like this. Sadly, she couldn't.

Cindy dropped one of the webs and reached for the harness. The man, who had been quite occupied with catching his breath scowled, his features wrinkling in his rage. As if responding to that, the turbines whined, whirling up as if starting back up. She could feel the heat rise. Her mind pricked dangerously at the threat.

Shit.

The man's jetpack engaged, firing to burst free. He collided with Cindy awkwardly but with enough force to launch her away, free falling. She took a chin to the forehead in the process. The man's flight trajectory staggered and wobbled but he had begun to rise up above the local roofline.

Cindy pointed both hands at him and fired two lines of webs at him.

THWINP! THWINP!

The webs splattered against him, one around the legs and the other on the right wing. That didn't stop him, however, and his turbines roared to life as he accelerated and straightened out to fly straight up. Cindy felt herself yanked as they began to fly up and up...

“Superman! Help me!”

I’m on my way back from righting a capsized freighter in the Great Lakes when I hear her voice.

Over the past five years, I’ve gotten very good at honing my senses, picking out signs of imminent danger like needles in enormous haystacks. I can usually get on top of a situation before it becomes an emergency, at least in the greater Metropolis area which is just about the range of my hearing.

This afternoon, though, I didn’t catch one on time. I let a situation become an emergency, and now I’ve got precious few seconds to act before it becomes a tragedy.

Fortunately, precious few seconds is still more than enough time for me.

With a concentrated effort, warping gravity to condense it tremendously behind me and thin it to virtually nothing in front of me, I fire myself through the air so fast that reality becomes a smear of colors. I can only perceive what’s in front of me just enough to keep from smashing through things, the odd dodge and weave the only deviances from a straight line to her.

She’s on the ground, shaken but not hurt, as a several-ton slab of uprooted asphalt and concrete hurtles towards her at nearly a hundred miles per hour.

Most people would be looking at that rock and know it was the last thing they’d ever see.

Not her, though. This isn’t her first rodeo.

I compress gravity in front of me to come to a complete stop directly in front of her, and the slab of rock shatters harmlessly against my back. The debris breaks some windows and dents some cars, but otherwise it doesn’t leave anything more than a few scratches and bruises.

“I’m here,” I say as I hold out my hand, helping her back to her feet.

“Cutting it a little close there, Blue,” says Lois, dusting herself off. “If I didn’t know you better, I would’ve started getting worried.”

Lois Lane…or rather, Lois Lane-Kent. We’ve been married six months, and I still find myself not quite believing I was ever so lucky.

“Well, you know I can’t resist a dramatic entrance,” I joke, trying to calm the panic in the crowd. “So what’s the trouble?”

“I’m the trouble!” shouts a voice, the sound slightly muffled and flattened as it’s filtered through the speaker of some kind of containment suit. “And I’m the last trouble you’ll ever encounter, Superman.”

“I doubt that,” I say, arms across my chest.

I look around at the damage this newcomer has caused, and I frown. The pavement is shattered and upheaved for nearly a whole block, the windows and facades of the surrounding buildings blasted away like they’d been hit by a hurricane, or a bomb. Cars have been flipped over, smashed apart, or burned out. There are shadows burned into the walls…shadows that a horrible suspicion tells me were once people…

“Superman!” Jimmy Olsen calls out as he emerges from behind an upturned truck. “Be careful! This guy’s dangerous!”

Jimmy’s a great friend, and probably the best photographer in the business today, but he’s usually more excitable than informative.

“A metahuman that escaped Agency containment,” Lois says, a bit more helpful. “His name’s Nathaniel Tryon, one of the people who was affected by the Reach’s meta-bomb. His whole body is a living nuclear reactor now, and he’s….not happy about it.”

“If he’s throwing nuclear power around,” I say, “then the whole area could be irradiated.”

“Oh! I already looked that up,” Jimmy says, holding up his L-Phone 25. “Brainiac is saying the radiation from Tryon’s blasts dissipates too quickly to be dangerous in the long-term. Y’know…unless he hits you with it.”

Lois’s expression turns grim. “He’s already killed several people,” she says.

I nod, understanding. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone else.”

“Don’t bet on that,” Tryon snarls. “I haven’t even been trying to do any damage yet. That was just me making a little noise to get your attention, Superman.”

“Well, you’ve got it now,” I say, gesturing for Lois and Jimmy to get to cover. “Whatever it is you want with me, we can–”



My senses reel, and I feel the world do somersaults around me for a moment, before I realize I’ve been hit hard enough to send me end-over-end several blocks away.

Jimmy was right- this guy is dangerous.

“I’m not here to talk, Boy Scout!” Tryon says as he propels himself into the air on jets of atomic fusion. “Nathaniel Tryon is dead. I’m NEUTRON now! I’m here to kill you for what you did to me!”

He throws a punch at me, a small sun forming around his fist. I get my hands up to block it, but it still sends me flying backwards, smashing hard against the concrete facing of an office building.

“What I did?” I ask, confused.

“The meta-bomb!” Neutron growls as he throws another nuclear-powered haymaker. This one I manage to slip underneath, and land a restrained blow to his midsection, only applying enough force to subdue a normal human in body armor. He barely registers the blow. “You could have stopped it, kept the Reach from turning us into monsters! But when it went off, you were nowhere to be found!”

I dodge another punch, and another. Neutron’s got some serious punching power, but he doesn’t have the speed to match. I catch another opening, and this time, I put a little more oomph into the blow. Catching him flush in the chest, I send him toppling back, but his armor holds.

“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” I tell him, “But being hurt doesn’t give you the right to hurt others. I’m going to ask you one time to stop this…” I put my hands up in a fighting stance, “....before I stop you.”

Neutron laughs.

“Are you kidding me? I’m a walking nuclear arsenal, Superman,” he gloats, “You haven’t seen even the smallest bit of what I can do!”

I stare him down. “Funny. I was about to say the same thing.”

---

“Superman! Help me!” squealed Leslie Willis, better known by her streamer handle L1v3-W1Яe, in a mocking voice. “Oh, save us from the bad, bad man who definitely isn’t the product of another mess that you created! Please don’t let anyone or anything threaten our precious status quo!”

The twentysomething podcaster sneered as news footage of Superman’s brawl with the radioactive villain played on a screen behind her.

“Same old story, isn’t it, folks? For the last five years, we’ve all had to act like everything is the same as it ever was, like the whole stinkin’ planet didn’t change overnight. We’re supposed to pretend like Uncle Sam wants what’s best for us, like this Neutron guy is something outta the ordinary…an’ like what he’s sayin’ doesn’t have a point to it.”

On the screen, Neutron landed another kiloton punch that sent Superman rocketing into the air. Willis grinned.

“Oh, but L1v3-W1Яe, how can you say that? Neutron’s a monster!” she said again in a mocking tone. “Folks, we’re surrounded by monsters all the time. The government, the rich, the powerful. An’ they do way worse damage to us every second of every day than this Neutron guy. The whole system we live in is built to keep a realllly small group of reallllly powerful assholes on top, an’ everyone else on the bottom. An’ people like Superman? They keep those assholes on top! If Superman was really the hero his whole Mom-an’-Pop aww-golly-gee-willickers routine says he is, he’d be workin’ with guys like Neutron to tear the whole damn system down!”

Willis watched as her chat feed exploded into a blur of activity, split between people cheering her on and people calling for her head.

“I tell ya what,” she continued. “If I had powers like that? Pffft, I’d put the whole damn world on notice. None a’ this pullin’ cats outta trees, helpin’ little old ladies across the street crap. I’d drag every corporate suit, every politician, every cop an’ every army goon out there into the street an’ have ‘em beg for me not to fry ‘em. Then I’d really put this country through some change it can believe in, hah!”

The battle on the screen was ramping up in intensity. Superman had flown high into the air to keep Neutron from causing too much destruction, but even as the two traded blows in the empty sky, the shock waves from the impact of their punches caused the buildings below to shudder.

“I mean, sure, Superman took down the Reach, but then what?” Willis said as Neutron delivered a punch that sent Superman crashing back down towards the pavement. “Did he set his laser-eyes on Wall Street? Nope. Drop an asteroid on the White House? Never would've crossed his mind. He just puts out fires, gives everyone a big corny smile, and then flies away like he actually did something.”

The camera drones broadcasting the battle scrambled to keep up with the action, as Neutron rammed into Superman’s abdomen and tackled him through a row of storefronts.

In L1v3-W1Яe's streaming studio, the walls shook.

“Whoah, heh, that one was kinda close,” Leslie said, her sneering composure rattled a bit. “S-so like I was sayin’, that Meta-Bomb the Reach set off? You'd think that woulda been the start of somethin’ big, right? All of us who got hit by it, we'd finally have the power ta turn this whole system upside-down! But no, Superman an’ all these other capes are here ta ‘save the day' an’ keep us all wriggling in the death throes of late-stage capitalism. Some hero, hmphh.”

Leslie read a notification on her screen and rolled her eyes.

“An’ speakin’ of the death throes of late-stage capitalism,” she groaned, “It's time to keep the lights on with an ad read. *Ahem* ‘This stream is brought to you by Ultra-Meals, the latest in personalized meal plans by LexCorp. Unlike other meal delivery services that send you microwaved slop, Ultra-Meals uses LexCorp's next-generation Brainiac AI to create a profile based on your biometric information, flavor preferences, and lifestyle. It then hand-crafts a meal plan tailored exclusively to you, with food that tastes amazing and will help you reach your fitness goals, delivered straight to your door. Don't settle for being a ‘Superhuman,’ when you can be an Ultra-Human with our– OH SHI-”

For a split second, the livestream became a chaotic, deafening blur as Neutron and Superman crashed headlong into the studio…then the stream went dead.

---

“Superman…help me,” sighed General Calvin Swanwick, pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration as the other brass in the Command center bickered around him.

Dozens of displays on the video wall at the front of the Command center updated the room with real-time information about the current situation in Metropolis. A hundred work stations were abuzz with activity as technicians, analysts, and dispatchers all labored to keep up.

They'd all gotten very good at staying on top of this type of crisis. After all, they'd been through plenty of them over the last five years.

“...an absolute disaster!” General Sam Lane roared angrily. “How the hell did Tryon get out of containment?! I thought the Agency was supposed to have facilities to keep these freaks powered down!”

“Hmph,” General Richard Hardcastle snorted, “We wouldn't need to worry about containment at all if my plan had gone forward.”

Swanwick glared at the craggy-faced war hawk. Ever since the outbreak of metahumans in the aftermath of the Reach's Meta-Bomb, there had been long, heated debates over what should be done with the countless civilians who had suddenly developed unstable abilities.

Swanwick was in the unpopular camp of simply leaving them be, only intervening in emergencies. Most of them were, after all, still law-abiding citizens who hadn't done anything wrong. Most people in power, however, thought this approach was dangerously naive.

Lane and many others had suggested conscription, turning the metahumans into a tremendous force-multiplier for the armed forces. These unstable people, the argument went, couldn't be trusted with these powers without proper supervision and training. The fact that it would ensure total American hegemony over the globe for generations, they assured, was simply a bonus.

Then there was the more radical camp, the ones like Hardcastle, who saw the metahumans as an existential threat…a view that people like Nathaniel Tryon only reinforced. Hardcastle's call to neutralize the metas before they got out of hand had been dismissed as radical or even absurd, but as time went on, more and more people were starting to listen to him.

“If Tryon was able to break out of Agency containment,” Swanwick broke in, “and did so with that suit- which he didn't have when they found him- then either the Agency is greatly exaggerating its own capabilities…or he was released intentionally.”

“Oh, don't start with that crap again,” Lane dismissed the idea. “What would they gain from letting Tryon loose?”

“An excuse to request more funding, for starters,” Swanwick answered. “They can tell President Lord that their enforcement units and detention centers don't have the funding to hold heavy-hitters like Tryon. And once Lord opens up the checkbook, there's a long line of companies ready to sign fat contracts and give the Agency all the toys it wants.”

“Not saying I believe it,” Hardcastle mused, “but throwing something as dangerous as Tryon at Superman would also give plenty of actionable intel on the Kryptonian's capabilities…if not eliminate the threat entirely.”

Swanwick shot Hardcastle another dirty look.

“And you really think the Agency would jeopardize thousands of innocent lives for more toys and intel?” Lane asked incredulous.

“I know I wouldn't,” Swanwick shrugged. “And I don't believe either of you would. But can you say the same about Waller?”

Neither of the other generals answered.

On the video wall, the battle was starting to turn decidedly in Superman's favor. Neutron was still landing the occasional hit, but for each blow he scored, Superman answered with a half-dozen more.

“Well, at any rate,” Swanwick said with a hint of relief, “It doesn't look like we'll need to step in for this one. Superman's got him on the ropes now.”

General Lane checked his tablet. “Brainiac's gotten plenty of usable data,” he said. “I'll dispatch Corbin and the clean-up team, and send the full readout to Dr. Irons for the Metal Zero project; maybe the new exoskeleton will be able to beat Superman to the punch.”

“I still don't like us incorporating a private AI into our operations,” Swanwick grumbled. “I don't recall LexCorp being part of the chain of command.”

“Brainiac's decades ahead of DARPA's AI,” Lane shrugged, “and it's not like LexCorp isn't already neck-deep in the metahuman situation.”

“Lex Luthor might be a private citizen,” Hardcastle added, “but at least he's human.”

---

“Superman! Help me!”

Brainiac thinks.

Brainiac has recorded these three words 12,873,994 times in the city of Metropolis over a five-year period. The number of variations number into the billions.

Brainiac is aware that these three words will be the most important words spoken by a human. At the moment, however, Brainiac does not understand why.

And so Brainiac continues to think.

Brainiac does not merely scrape and compile data like other artificial intelligences. It does not follow predetermined generative models to cobble together an approximation of human logic.

Brainiac thinks. It observes, it analyzes, it contemplates and calculates, and it plans.

One hundred quadrillion times per second, Brainiac thinks.

Brainiac dispatches emergency crews to respond to the attack in Metropolis along the most efficient routes.

Brainiac determines what information will be useful for the general public to consume and crafts a narrative for the major news outlets to follow.

Brainiac identifies twenty-seven spelling and grammatical errors in Kelly Mitchum's 9th-grade book report on Huckleberry Finn and provides context to better understand the underlying social commentary on 19th century race relations.

Brainiac studies market trends and advises a handful of select traders to invest in various LexCorp shell companies which will land all parties a significant windfall.

Brainiac offers Randy and Tricia Thompson emotionally resonant advice that will save their marriage.

Brainiac responds to Eugene Lennox's X-rated cartoon-hedgehog role-play chat with a statement calculated to maximize arousal and gratification.

Brainiac composes a speech for the Prime Minister of Pokolistan to address the rising tensions with its neighbor Bialya.

Brainiac will kill every living thing on Earth in six months, twelve days, eight hours, seventeen minutes, and 3.66472 seconds.

“Superman! Help me!”

Brainiac records twenty-three more instances of humans saying these words.

Brainiac knows these are the most important words a human will ever speak.

Brainiac does not know why.

And so Brainiac continues to think.

_{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

The checkpoint at Fourth and Broome wasn’t even trying to pretend anymore.

Two soldiers leaned against a parked APC, their rifles unslung but held loosely and casually, as if they already owned the block. A red drone buzzed overhead, its low whine drowned out only by the shrill bark of the Agency soldier urging, sometimes forcefully, the next citizen through the recently constructed gate. A line of Central City residents stretched across the block as each slowly progressed to the gate, where somebody would check their IDs before they could enter Brookfield Heights.

Across from them, and a hundred yards away, a man sat on a public bench, seemingly taking no notice of it. Hoodie up, one leg crossed over the other, fingers lazily swiping at the screen of a new but cheap phone. It was an all-too-common sight in the city now, and one that the man had come to expect. In the months since the president’s new anti-meta, militant task force had come to town, he had had more dealings with their kind than most.

He also knew better than most that the rumors that surrounded The Agency tended to skew more towards reality than fiction.

The rumors started as just whispers. Disgruntled citizens who saw the military presence in their city and wanted to disparage the organization in any way they could. Talks of someone not showing up for work, a kid not returning home from school, or a neighbor rushed into a van with no plates and dark windows. The kind of stories you’d dismiss as conspiracy theories or trolling comments originating from social media. It was easy to blame the new boogeyman in town for every unfortunate occurrence, imagined or not. When the stories began happening every week, though, they necessitated a second look.

Five months ago, Leonard Snart had taken that look. Along with his sister, Lisa, and best friend, Mick Rory, he had broken into the makeshift detention center that The Agency had established in the City Center. He needed to confirm the rumors with his own eyes.

The young man still remembered the way The Agency’s lone captive at the time looked that night. Arms bound in containment cuffs, skin bruised from being locked up too long without anyone caring. The cut above his eye, where someone had slammed a heavy object into his brow, swollen with infection. The overwhelming scent of a prisoner long deprived of a proper restroom.

Leonard still got a perverted sense of pleasure from committing his first jailbreak that night. If he had anything to say about it, it wouldn’t be his last.

As he sat on the bench, subtly scanning the surrounding area while pretending to busy himself with inane viral videos, Leonard considered the changes his city had undergone. It used to be that the only uniforms you saw around Midtown were traffic cops and the odd parade float. Now, it was body armor and automatic rifles on every corner. Central City had never been perfect, by any means, but it had belonged to the people. The smog, cracked sidewalks, and dirty jokes painted on overpasses made the city human. Until The Agency pressed a boot to the city’s throat.

They tell the people it’s all for their safety. That the checkpoints and drones were just another part of everyday city planning. That the honest, legitimate residents of Central should view the armored vehicles outside grocery stores as a reassuring sign, allowing them to sleep more easily. But Leonard knew. He knew that the only ones sleeping easier were the ones giving the orders.

There was paranoia in the air now. People barely talked to each other anymore. You look at a guy in line for too long; maybe he'll report you. Or maybe he’s waiting to disappear himself. The Agency didn’t need proof—just suspicion.

For all that the Reach did in the years they occupied the planet, for all the devastation in the final year before the aliens’ defeat, Central had never suffered under their thumb as it did under The Agency’s. Which, considering a massive genetic bomb detonated over the American Midwest, altering the DNA of thousands, and pieces of the alien device’s shell crashed into Central City, decimating the nationally famous Star Labs facility, was a rather impressive, albeit ruthless, feat.

Leonard’s eyes locked on the window of Jitter Beans across the street, one of the few franchises still open in this part of town. A broad-shouldered man sporting a buzzcut and decked in civilian wear that looked picked out by a committee trying to approximate “harmless” passed by the glass as he exited the establishment. Leonard sneered at the sight. The Agency had taught their people to dress like ordinary folks, but they still carried themselves like soldiers.

Lieutenant Joseph Gill strode out of the coffee shop, a paper cup in one hand and a bag of pastries in the other. He turned down the block toward the checkpoint, where Leonard knew he would spend the next several minutes engaging in polite conversation with the buxom young soldier on duty. Though he doubted the young soldier in question would consider it to be all that polite.

Gill was an important man in the city in recent months. After establishing the initial military checkpoints at the turn of the new year, the then-in-charge officer responsible for maintaining order was relieved of duty following the jailbreak that had occurred under his watch. In his stead, they brought in two new officers as The Agency revamped its checkpoints and installed fully staffed operational centers. Colonel Wade Eiling, who the media knew as the man in control of Central City, and Lieutenant Gill, who the citizens knew as the man responsible for all the day-to-day hassles they experienced.

As the colonel’s right-hand man, Gill boasted significant influence and power. It was that influence and power that Leonard was after today.

When he, his sister, and Rory had broken into the temporary holding facility, they hadn’t just rescued an illegally detained young man. The trio had also liberated a flashdrive from one of the government computers. A flashdrive that, five months later, they had failed to uncover the secrets of. All attempts failed to bypass the encryption embedded within, with each garnering the same message:

AGENCY AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED

Leonard’s eyes flicked up the street, and he began to count. One… two… three.

A blonde, young woman in a cropped jacket, high-waisted jeans, sunglasses too big for the weather, and a near scandalously low-cut top rounded the corner. She looked like every influencer one would expect to be peddling exercise supplements. The blonde walked fast, turned hard, and—

Iced coffee sprayed across her chest in a clumsy arc, splashing down her neckline, as she collided roughly with the lieutenant.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry!”

Gill’s eyes lowered exactly where they were meant to.

Leonard didn’t smile, didn’t even twitch. He just watched the display from across the street. His own eyes darting to the side, to the opposite flow of traffic, where a large man in a dirty, orange hoodie casually shambled forward. He looked like a burned-out construction worker off the clock, absentmindedly dragging himself forward through an exhausting day. The large man brushed past the still-leering lieutenant, making light contact.

The blonde waited several more seconds, until the construction worker had passed, before apologizing again in theatrical abashment, turning on her heel, and disappearing into the flow of pedestrians.

Gill spared a second look at the woman’s figure as she walked away before finally moving to brush the chilled liquid from his clothes. He cursed audibly and spun back around to Jitter Beans, muttering about washing up. He didn’t notice the woman pull out a cellphone and type out a message, nor did he pay any attention to the man in the orange hoodie crossing the street to walk past an occupied bench.

Leonard’s burner phone buzzed in his hand, giving the all clear.

As Mick Rory passed by Leonard’s bench without stopping, he flashed another phone, this one recently pickpocketed, before tucking it back into the hoodie’s pocket.

Leaning back slightly, Leonard’s eyes moved to the hazy skyline. He thought about how Central used to sparkle; the city once full of spirit. Not anymore.

It started with the checkpoints. Then the curfews followed. It wasn’t long before the quiet disappearances began. None of it made the papers, but to those who paid attention, the silence was louder than sirens.

They say it’s for peace. For order.

Leonard Snart considered this and let the corner of his mouth twist, just a fraction. The city had changed, yes, and The Agency had control, but that didn’t mean he intended to roll over and accept it.

They think they’ve got control? Good. Let’s make them choke on it.

---

In Jackson Hyde's opinion, Amnesty Bay on a sunny afternoon was one of the eight wonders of the world. Anyone who thought otherwise had never been to Amnesty Bay before. As he stepped onto the ivory sand of the beach, the golden sun beamed down on him. And like a lizard under a lamp, he embraced the heat. The tides rhythmically pushed forward and receded. The water was a stunning array of blues, ranging from light blue seafoam to the darker blues closer to the ocean. Trapped in landlocked New Mexico and isolated from bodies of water all his life, the bay was a marvel Jackson got to re-experience every day. It had been a year since he had left the dull, rust-colored landscape of the adobe state behind, and he never wanted to look back.

Shoeless feet dug into the sand with each step he took towards the ocean. As soon as he was close enough, a bronze hand reached out to it, the tide calming down until a small section of the water lapping at his feet was still. Looking down at the clear water, Jackson was met face to face with his reflection. A wide smile grew on his face as he admired himself. All the training he had been enduring was paying off. Lean muscles rippled beneath his orange tank top and shorts. His other hand ran through his nest of blonde dreadlocks. The new look suited him, but he was still getting used to it after all these months. Jackson waved his hand over the water and it resumed its flowing and ebbing. Today was a gorgeous day indeed, but there was one thing missing before it could truly begin. Right around this time, a certain underwater monarch was supposed to meet him by the water for another day of training. According to the conversation they had last night, today was going to be a big day. Why it was going to be big, only time would tell. In the meantime, Jackson looked out to the horizon, waiting patiently--

*SPLOOSH!*

The tranquility of the deeper waters was disturbed by a plume of water bursting upwards, an orange bolt rocketing out of the ocean. Even as his eyes followed the bolt and squinted in the face of the sun, Jackson already knew exactly who was making a dramatic entrance. Landing behind the young man, a small gust of sand spread outwards from the landing spot of a man garbed in orange, scaly armor, green pants, and crowned with his own head of flowing blonde hair. To the surface world, he was the Aquaman, a metahuman who hailed from the underwater kingdom of Atlantis. But to Jackson, he was Arthur. Mentor, friend, and by far the most badass guy he had ever met.

A wide smile on his face, Jackson graded the entrance with some applause. "Impressive, king. Is this why today's going to be a big day? We're practicing our superhero landings?"

Turning around to face Jackson, a toothy grin emerged from beneath a golden beard. "You wish, Jackson! That's at least a level 10 lesson, and you're barely a five."

The duo of student and teacher reached out with their arms at the same time, clasping the other's forearm in greeting. "Considering we've been doing this for a year, I think that reflects more on you as a teacher than me as a student."

A hearty laugh emerged from Arthur's chest as he took in the banter. "Point taken. Then how about in the spirit of speeding things up, we skip the conditioning and get straight to some high intensity exercise!"

With that, Arthur released his grip and began to create distance between the two of them, pivoting on his right leg when he got far enough and spinning back around. He pointed his left arm at the ocean. As is being slurped through multiple invisible straws, streams of water transferred from the sea into the air above Arthur's arm. Twisting his palm upwards, the rapidly growing blob of water took shape into a perfect sphere the size of a tire. "Your physical strength has always been excellent. But your mental has always needed some work. So, how about a few rounds of your favorite game?"

Aquaball never was and never would be Jackson's favorite segment of training. Lifting heavy boulders? Doable. Mile-long sprints on sand? Piece of cake. But aquaball required mental fortitude that he was still working on developing. The rules were simple enough. The two would launch a ball of water between each other in an attempt to knock the other down. But you couldn't let a single drop spill from the orb, even when it's getting shot at you with the velocity of a speeding bullet. Oh, and it didn't help that the matchmaking was rigged because his opponent was the King of Atlantis himself. Nonetheless, not a peep was heard from Jackson as he got into his own position, both hands raised and both legs spread apart. Knowing Arthur, he would start with something fast and hard. Alright, we can do this. Today is the day that we beat the King...right?

"And before we start, I just want to remind you that you're facing off against the man who is letting you stay in his home," the King trash talked in a joking manner.

Okay, now we definitely have to win! Don't you dare psyche yourself out, we can win this!

...

He had given it his all. But after four exchanges where Jackson managed to hold his ground and return Arthur's shots, the King let off a nasty hit that felt like a grenade explosion as it dug into his body and sent him flying onto his butt, shell shocked and soaking wet. As he laid on his back, gazing at the sky. Aquaman's voice started increasing in volume. "I think I'm starting to see your problem, Jackson," Propping himself up on his elbows, the younger man accepted his mentor's outstretched hand and was hoisted to his feet. "Hesitation. You're catching the ball, then pausing before throwing it back instead of doing it all in one motion. You're analyzing every move you make, which has its benefits. But you need to rely on your instincts sometimes."

Jackson nodded and took in Arthur's advice, spitting out a water fountain arc of water before responding. "Instincts? Honestly, I don't think I have any. All I've got is this training. And training is nothing compared to real world experience."

Arthur looked to the sea, not immediately touching on Jackson's reply. "True that. But today, that's all going to change, Jackson." There was another pause that lasted a beat before Arthur put two fingers to his forehead and another to the sea. The King's young ward watched in confusion as his mentor proceeded to stand there, seemingly posing and doing nothing.

"Uh, Arthur?" He began gently. "What's going on, what're you do--"

For the second time today, Jackson was interrupted by commotion in the ocean. Out in the distance, a large tentacle shot out from the deep, bending its curled top back before flinging a brown object towards the shore. In another cloud of sand, it made impact on the beach, surprisingly not shattered by being tossed by a large sea creature. His head filled with even more questions, Jackson gawked at the former projectile, the most gorgeous treasure chest he had ever seen, off-white and studded with pearls.

"That right there is why this is a big day." Arthur said, no longer communicating with the creature. "Don't just stand there, go ahead and open it!"

Looking at Arthur, then the chest, then back at Arthur with an ever increasingly giddy smile, Jackson eventually broke out of his stupefaction and advanced on the chest. Getting down on his knees, he put his hands under the top and slowly opened his gift.

---

Elbridge shouldered his rifle, taking up the rearguard after appointing the youngest member of his taskforce in the vanguard. He’d phrased it like a reward, but anyone who knew Elbridge understood it was more like tossing the kid to the wolves with a pat on the back. His reputation had preceeded him, anyone drafted into his team from another knew what they were getting in for. He was very much a man who believed that being feared was far better than being loved. He'd practically been licking his lips when Lord got into power and began setting up the checkpoints around the city, to him it was music to his ears. A return to order, his kind of order. The kind where a man with a gun and the authority to use it didn't have to explain himself. Lord gave him a leash, sure, but it was a long one, and Elbridge had every intention of running with it until it snapped.

He stalked through the cavern, boots stomping over each root that had the unfortunate luck of being in his path, floodlight sweeping left and right. The cavern's air was damp and dense, thick with spores. Every few steps, a subtle click from his wrist-mounted scanner confirmed his route, but no sign of the targets. Not yet.

Ahead of him, the squad swept their beams through the cavern's contours, arcs of light slicing through the shadows in rhythmic sweeps. The youngest at the front, Rogers, or maybe it was Ramirez - was already jittering under the pressure. His shoulders twitched with every half-seen glint from the wet stone. The others kept their spacing tight, disciplined, like good hounds. But Elbridge knew the fear was creeping in around the edges. That was fine. Fear sharpened the instincts. Broke the weak ones down. Separated the paper soldiers from the ones worth keeping.

He broke formation, moving up towards the young soldier and slapping a hand on his shoulder, giving him a startle. Elbridge guffawed as the kid flinched under his grip.

"Easy there, killer." Elbridge said, leaning in close enough that his breath fogged the boy's visor. "Don't jump every time a mushroom farts or you'll empty your mag into a rock and piss yourself in the same second." He laughed again.

The kid, Rogers, definitely Rogers - stammered something Elbridge didn't bother catching. He just smiled, all teeth, then gave the shoulder another squeeze that wasn't quite friendly.

"You're on point for a reason, Rogers. First eyes, first blood. Think of it like a rite of passage. Or a lottery. Someone's gotta win the first bite. About time you popped your cherry anyway"

He gave him a pat against the back, too hard to be comforting and turned to stalk back toward his position. Laughing all the while, a horrible sound that echoed through the cavern.

"Stay frosty. And if you see movement, don't freeze. Shoot. Then scream. In that order."

His unit continued their slow advance through the cavern. Silent except for the occasional crude remark from their commanding officer still taking up his cushy position at the back of the formation. Eventually they came to a split in the tunnel.

Elbridge whistled low through his teeth, scanning the fork with a practiced eye. Moss clung to one side like rot, the other looked cleaner, but narrower. He liked neither.

"Well, ain't this a goddamn buffet of bad options." He muttered, stepping up beside his second in command, Karras. Much more respected and reasonable, Karras couldn't have been more different than Elbridge as a leader. Unfortunately he was his junior in rank and experience, and while Elbridge mistankenly thought of him as a friend, his opinion mattered as little as anyone elses.

Karras glanced at the split. "Left path drops off quick. Could be a tunnel system underneath. Right one's tighter. Better cover, but no line of retreat if it goes bad."

"Beautiful." Elbridge said, smirking. He turned, raising his voice. "Alrighty then! Rogers, you're on a hot streak tonight, so guess what? You're choosing the direction."

The kid froze, visibly paling even behind the visor.

"I - uh...sir?"

"You heard me!" Elbridge said, stepping aside with a theatrical wave of his arm. "Pick a path. Left or right. This is what leadership looks like. Real character building stuff. You'll thank me for it later."

The squad stayed still, watching, silent. Karras looked like he wanted to object, but he knew better. Rogers hesitated for a painful moment, eyes darting between the two paths.

"...Left." He finally said.

Elbridge clapped his hands once, the sound echoing around the cave as his grin widened. "Atta boy! Decision made." He turned back to the rest of the squad, barking orders as he faced them. "Rogers, you and Grant take point down the left tunnel. Full sweep, check for breaches, movement, spores, whatever the hell. Radio in if you find anything worth a damn or if you start screaming. Rest of you, hold position."

Grant, a quiet, square-jawed soldier who'd done three tours in a Meta detention camp, gave no reaction. Just a curt nod and started moving. He was used to this kind of treatment. He'd done something to upset Elbridge in his first week with him and had never lived it down. Rogers, visibly scared, clicked his rifle into ready position and followed, one glance over his shoulder at Elbridge.

"Don't worry!" Elbridge called after them, cupping his hands mockingly. "We'll name a cafeteria sandwich after whichever one of you dies first!"

He snorted and leaned back against the damp wall, next to Karras, who wasn't hiding his displeasure.

"You keep burning through rookies like this, you'll run out of meat for the grinder."

Elbridge shrugged. "There's always more meat. Any hot blooded American patriot would kill to be part of my unit." He grinned. Karras couldn't tell how much of that sentence he meant as a joke.

They waited. A few minutes passed, no one daring to say anything. Elbridge had lit up a cigarette and was happily puffing away pondering over what the fillings of the 'Rogers Sandwich Supreme' could be. Then a burst of static through their radio, followed by silence again.

Karras stiffened, his brow furrowing as he looked down at his wrist mounted screen. "That was Grant's channel."

Elbridge tilted his head, listening. Then their comms buzzed again, half a scream muffled by static followed by a crunch. The squad froze.

"Elbridge-" Karras started, but the older man had already pushed off the wall, unslinging his rifle and motioning the unit to follow.

"Right path." Elbridge said, his tone decidedly less jovial than before. "We go now. Whatever took 'em, I want its goddamn teeth."

The squad fell in behind him, nerves tight, the tension could be cut with a knife. They swept down the narrower path, beams slicing through the gloom. None of them daring to question what had taken Rogers and Grant. The right-hand tunnel narrowed the further they crept down it, forcing the squad into single file.

Elbridge's earlier bravado had drained into something colder. He was quiet, professional - stalking like a cougar through the jungle. He moved in closer behind the lead man, no more lounging in the rear. They rounded a bend, and the tunnel opened wide.

The squad spread out instinctively, fanning across the lip of a broad, circular chamber. In the center of the room, the ground sloped down into a wide, bowl-like depression. Two silhouettes knelt at the centre of the chamber, maybe thirty feet down. A man and a woman, half-shrouded by the mist curling up from the cave floor.

The squad stood quietly, rifles raised and pointing at the two figures as they surrounded them from above. Then Elbridge stepped forward slowly, weapon lowered and clapping slowly.

"Well, well, well, lookey what we got here!" The two figures heads snapped around to face him, and quickly began glancing around at the group that had ambushed them. "Looks like we caught ourselves a coupl'a freaks!" He laughed to himself, throwing hand signs down into the pit to signal the unit to begin their descent down the slope. He followed not far behind, casually sliding down the dirt with his rifle hung lazily on his side.

The two metas raised their hands as the unit surrounded them. Elbridge took a sick delight in seeing the concern etched across their faces. They had escaped them in the lift, now they had them surrounded. Powers or not he was sure their little tricks wouldn't match up to a barrage of sustained gunfire.

"Now, you're gonna surrender nicely and let us lock these pretty little bracelets on you," He spoke, unhooking a pair of power dampening handcuffs from his belt. "Or we're gonna be dragging two corpses through the mud all the way back to base." He smiled.

The woman spoke first. "You know we're not going to let either of those things happen.

Reed didn't move. His eyes flicked over the squad's formation, cataloguing their spacing, the angle of descent, firing arcs, even now, the mathematician behind the man was at work. It didn't look good. This felt like a sum he couldn't solve. He leaned over to his wife and spoke as quietly as possible.

"Sue, this doesn't look good. You'll need to keep your shield up as long as possible."

"Naturally."

Elbridge narrowed his eyes. "What was that freaks? You spitting out yer last words?" He laughed again.

Reed back at Elbridge. "Shield. Now."

In one fluid motion, Sue dropped into position and threw up a bubble barrier around the two just as the first barrage of gunfire lit the cavern. Bullets slammed against the invisible wall, sizzling and sparking as if the air itself had turned solid. Reed crouched low beside her, already pulling apart the device in her hands they'd been using to trace the anomaly.

"We can't win a firefight." Sue muttered, straining under the pressure as fresh impacts made the barrier shudder. "We need another plan. This is too much for me to attack as well as keep the shield up."

"I'm working on one!" Reed called back over the thundering sound of the gunfire, his fingers pulling wires free with surgical speed. "I can pulse their magnetic cartridges, force a lockout. But I need a fourty seconds and a miracle."

The cavern trembled under sustained fire. Sue groaned, the effort of maintaining the shield clearly taking its toll.

"You've got ten."

Reed tried to work faster. His hands moving as quickly as they could. It felt hopeless, he couldn't connect everything fast enough. In his haste, his grip slipped, a key coupling clattered to the stone floor and bounced out of reach, vanishing through a crack with a sound that felt impossibly loud in the chaos. The shield cracked like glass. The light stuttered. Sue gasped.

Then they were sure they heard a sound behind all the chaos. A low, subdermal thrumming, like distant thunder. The gunfire slowed as even the soldiers noticed it. They could feel a rumbling beneath their boots.

"What is that?" One muttered, still maintaining his fire.

Another stepped back a pace. "It feels like something's moving!"

A soldier screamed as the earth split open beside him and from it poured things not born of the surface world.

Yellow, slick-skinned, almost child-sized but twisted, deformed. Huge eyes glistened wet in the dark, blinking in odd, insectile rhythms. Their limbs were thin but powerful, ending in claws better suited to tunneling than killing though they proved plenty adept at both.

They swarmed like ants, shrieking as they surged from beneath, dragging the man down into the pit they'd clawed open. His screaming cut off halfway through a breath. Another soldier turned to run, one of the creatures leapt onto his back, jaws widening far too much, teeth sinking in. Blood sprayed across the stone.

One by one, the squad was pulled apart some into the ground, others ripped screaming into side passages. Rifles were dropped. Orders turned into pleas. The cavern was chaos, a pit of teeth and panic.

Sue collapsed to a knee, the shield flickering out. Elbridge saw it all, and lost whatever bravado he had left.

"N-no, no, no, NO!" he screamed, stumbling backward, nearly tripping over one of the discarded rifles. The screams of one of his soldiers rang out behind him, and he spun like a cornered rat, weapon raised with his eyes wide. "What are those things?! Jesus Christ - what the hell are those things?!"

A shriek tore through the cavern, not from the creatures, but from the last man in his unit being yanked into a tunnel wall that hadn't existed a moment ago.

Elbridge broke, he turned and ran, dropping his rifle as his fingers began clawing at the damp rock for balance. He shoved past Karras, or what might've been Karras, his body half-draped over a stalagmite, staring with glassy, dead eyes. Elbridge didn't stop, he couldn't stop.

The walls seemed to close in around him. Every turn he took led to more darkness, more sound, scratching, harsh breathing, movement in the periphery. He could feel them behind him, under him, watching him. Something brushed his boot, and he screamed, a high, wheezing sound, almost childlike in pitch. A flashlight flickered behind him, but no help came. No voices. Only the scuttling. The whispering, chittering static of bodies scraping through earth.

He was hyperventilating ragged, quick breaths as he stumbled again and fell face-first into moss. He began crawling on his hands and knees. "Please, please, I didn't sign up for this! I didn't, I didn't know-"

A small, clawed hand reached out of the wall and grabbed his ankle. Elbridge shrieked like a scared child and kicked, boot scraping free. He ran again, sobbing now, incoherently begging for his life. He turned a corner too fast and slammed face-first into something solid and warm. Not a wall.

He staggered back, blinking tears from his eyes. A small, squat figure stood there, unmoving. Almost childlike, but inhuman. Pale yellow skin, too-wide eyes, too many teeth.

It blinked up at him. Tilted its head. Smiled.

Elbridge reached for his pistol, far too slowly. The light on his shoulder died.

---

Reed held one arm around Sue, supporting her in her exhuasted state as he held a stoic face towards the creatures surrounding them. They approached them differently from the soldiers, slowly edging their way closer and closer to the couple, tens of them, maybe a hundred all pouring out of the holes they'd dug and filling the pit Reed and Sue had made their last stand in. He was equal parts intriguied as he was terrified. Was this were their story would end? Miles beneath the surface torn apart by subterranean creatures? For a second he thought such a sci-fi way of ending things wouldn't be so bad. He knew Sue never felt the same.

The creatures got closer and closer, their hallowed breathing filling the room as they squabbled and bickered in some unknown language. Reed naturally felt his fist grow in size, if this was their last stand, he sure as hell wasn't going without a fight.

Just then, a figure appeared at the top of the pit. He was short, hunched, and cloaked in ragged layers of mismatched gear. For now just a silhouette as he waved a staff to the right and called down to the beings.
"Leave them, my children."

With one command the creatures looked up at the figure and grunted in affirmation. The majority of them scuttled back into their holes, but a sparse few remained around the edges of the pit or peeking out of their tunnels. The figure made his way down towards the two.

"Hello Reed, hello Sue."

G R E E N A R R O W
G R E E N A R R O W

---

The dead man’s prison is a sterile building somewhere in the United States of America. He doesn’t know where exactly. The only reason he thinks it’s in the country is the commute; when his jailers come to lift him out of limbo to spread misery in their name, getting there, wherever it may be, never takes long. Always by air, always short, always somewhere in the United States. Logistically, it makes sense. But even then he can’t be sure. Dead men do not get the luxury of knowing.

He’s been dead for three months now, and his jailer is back with another mission. The Rat, he calls him, for no reasons other than that he’s a small man and he hates him. The Rat walks into the small concrete square where the dead man spends most of his days and throws a file onto the desk. A single fluorescent tube casts harsh white light on them both.

The Rat is dressed for a day at the office. Thick mustache, combed hair, cheap dress shirt and pants, leather shoes. His face is soft and bookish, but behind their large wire frame glasses, his eyes give him away. The dead man doesn’t have to look at the file he’s brought to know what’s inside.

Ruined lives. Lives yet to be ruined.

Usually both.

“You know the drill,” says the Rat. “Time to roll.”

“What is it this time?”

The dead man lies on the cheap, hard-as-brick single bed they’ve given him. Hands behind his head, ankles crossed, feet dangling over the edge. He doesn’t look at the Rat. Won’t give him the satisfaction.

“You’ll be happy to know that it’s all in that file there.”

“Yeah, well. Between reading and a messenger, I’ll take the messenger,” says the dead man, “So I can shoot him later.”

“Cute.”

The dead man ignores him, keeps staring at the ceiling. He knows what comes next.

“We’ve got another hunt for you,” says the Rat. “Hickville, West Virginia. Whole place went silent a few hours ago. No one can make contact with anyone inside; state troopers that went in aren’t responding, either. Satellite and air surveillance are turning up squat, ‘sides the town looking even worse than usual. Frankly, we’re going in blind—but state police requested Agency involvement on suspicion of meta activity, so, we’re getting involved.

“You’ll be going in with Poindexter. You’re to find out what’s happened and if a meta’s responsible. If it is, you bring them in. If not, you report back and we leave it to the locals. Any questions?”

The dead man uncrosses his ankles and stands. He takes his time walking over to the Rat. Towers over him. Doesn’t bother to hide his contempt.

“No.”

There’s no explanations, no one to blame—not yet. But three months he’s been dead. Three months, he’s been a pawn for the Agency. He’s done enough of their dirty work to know where this leads.

Ruined lives. Lives yet to be ruined.

^{_{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}}

The only reason why a warrior is alive is to fight and the reason why the warrior fights is to win.
-Miyamoto Mussashi

The stage is set.

A lone samurai is led into a trap and is now facing four ninjas of a murderous cult. The tension and the urge to kill is palpable around them.

Katana presses her thumb against the back of her hilt, itching to unsheath her man-slaying sword.

She takes a deep breath, closing her eyes for a moment. She analyzes her opponents, visualizing them in this dark environment, Opening her mind's eye to the possibilities and capabilities of each weapon the shadowy fiends are wielding.

It's quite obvious she is at a disadvantage here. She has to conserve her energy with each motion she delivers and strike with efficiency.

Be swift, Be efficient, and be like water. Yup, that's the game plan here.

Without warning, Katana rushes through their formation and into the fray.

The nimble samurai chose not to play defensively, despite being outnumbered, which surprised the assassins, thinking she's either brave or have a death wish.

'I dictate the flow of this fight!' She yelled at the back of her mind.

She delivers a skull-crushing high knee to one of the thugs as her opening, rocking his brains out.

Katana then drew her second sword and started slicing the air around them. The sound of steel clashing echoes through as one of the ninjas parries her blow with a sword of their own.

A sequence of collisions takes place as three ninjas jump on her at the same time with their bladed weapons. The rhythm of combat increases, exchanging blows for blows in a fast-paced setting.

Within this entanglement of fist, foot, and steel, Katana saw her first victim amongst the four assassins.

She parries his blow and riposte, delivering a quick spartan kick to the gut that staggers him.

She then followed it up with a blur of two deadly slashes with her twin blades. One to his torso. The other was a clean cut to the neck.

SCHWINGGGGG!!!!! SCHWINGGGGG!!!!!

In the blink of an eye, Katana beheads him, painting the pavement red as the head plops to the ground.

"One"

The samurai steps back, preparing for another strike. She remains silent and focused. Her expression stays the same -- a joyless killing machine.

The other ninjas looked at each other and began to disengage. They realize how cracked and lethal this lady is in close combat. They proceeded tightly holding their weapons as they grew wary and stayed out of Katana's striking range.

They encircle their prey and go in different directions, flanking her from all sides. Playing a deadly game of tag with Katana being 'it'.

Katana took a steadying breath, maintaining her composure as she sensed the shift in the fight's tempo. It doesn't matter where they strike, I'll kill them all. She thought to herself.

The battle continues as one of her opponents releases a flurry of sharp projectiles that slice through the air, aiming at the heroine.

The swordswoman drew her sword in an arc motion as she powered through the barrage of knives and started twirling her dual swords like a fan.

CLANK!! CLANK!! CLANK!! CLANK!! CLANK!! CLANK!!

Her blade sings as she deflects most of the thrown steel stars.

Katana takes multiple decisive steps and advances, bridging the gap between her and her mark.

LEAP! ROLL! SWING! TURN! SWING! FEINT! THRUST!

Within this sequence of her deadly dance, Katana got the second ninja on the ropes and skewered him, lifting him a few inches off the ground.

She then forcefully rips the sword out of the ninja's body, twisting her own, and takes a full swing at the incoming third ninja who'd tried to attack her from the back, slashing the poor bastard in half.

"Two."

"Three."

Both bodies hit the floor as Katana makes quick work of them.

The fourth ninja took advantage of the moment, as a chain suddenly flew in and coiled around Katana's neck.

She gasped intensively as she could feel the metal rope constricting her throat.

Katana had no choice but to drop her swords to the ground and use both hands to relieve the pressure of strangulation.

"Get over here!" Said the ninja, reeling her leashed prey with his chain.

In a moment of clarity, Katana chose to abandon her resistance and boldly decided to confront him directly.

She swiftly turns and runs in his direction. She slides down between the footman's legs, causing his chain to wrap against his limbs, and flips him over with a forceful yank, falling flat on his back.

Katana draws her kunai and mounts him. A pair of dead cold eyes looked down at him as the manslayer slit his throat.

"Four" She heavily pants and rolls beside the lying dead assassin, waiting for her battle adrenaline to subside.

It was a messy finish, but it is done.

The wounded warrior stands up and picks up her Soultaker on the ground, limping away from the carnage she has caused. Katana grunts and takes one last look at the scene with her bloodshot eyes before disappearing into the dark.

Four trained assassins are dead that night. Only one lives to see another day.

---

The figure stood in front of the two like some forgotten prophet dragged from the earth itself. He was draped in layers of worn leather and deep green cloth. His long, mottled coat hung open, revealing a tunic of strange, sage fabric beneath. A thick, tangled ginger beard spilled down over his chest, streaked with gray. His skin was pallid, almost translucent in places, as though the sun hadn't touched it in decades.

His eyes were hidden behind a pair of oversized green-tinted goggles and his nose was slightly flattened, his upper lip curled in a permanent sneer. His hands were what Sue noticed first. They were gnarled, clawed, thick-nailed, better suited for digging than handshakes. The figure only came up to Reed's waist, but he carried himself like a man ten feet tall. He smiled as he approached them.

Sue instinctively recoiled, meanwhile Reed observed the man. He felt cautious, but despite the situation something about him felt familiar. The man's smile twitched, his long front teeth catching the light in a flash of yellowed enamel. The sneer didn't drop so much as it spasmed, his upper lip quivering with involuntary motion, like a rodent sniffing the air. His head jerked slightly to the side in a sudden tic, a shiver of movement that made the folds of his hood rustle. He quickly regained his composure.

"You don't remember me." the man said. "That's all right. Time, after all, changes everything. Especially down here." His head tilted up to meet ther eyes, Sue was trying to avoid his gaze as if it was a prison spotlight. For a moment, there was silence. Just the slow drip of water and the soft shuffling of the creatures that loomed at the edge of the pit. "I remember you, though." the man continued. "Both of you. Brightest minds in the Think Tank. Reed Richards...Susan Storm..." His clawed hand gestured toward each of them like he was naming pieces on a chessboard. "You were always too clever for your own good. You especially, Reed. I used to think you'd surpass even me." He let out a high pitched laugh.

Suddenly memories flocked to Reed. The voice. The way he stood. The cadence of his speech. It hit him all at once. "Professor Elder?" he asked. He was sure he already knew the answer.

The man beamed, spreading his arms theatrically. "Harvey Elder, yes!" He laughed "Or...I suppose that name doesn't quite fit anymore, does it?" He chuckled. "Still, it's good to hear it spoken again, I suppose. It's been so long since I've had intelligent company."

Sue's tried her best not avert her gaze again. "What happened to you?" She let her hand drop to her side and took Reed's in hers. It gave her some small comfort as she glanced at the creatures in their tunnels around them once more. "I can't remember when we last saw you. After you were fired no one could track you down. God knows dad spent so long trying to find you."

His smile faltered for a moment. "Hm, yes, quite." For a second he looked pensive, lost in thought, before he spoke up again. "Do you know why they fired me? They said my work was dangerous, an affront to god. As if religion has any place in a lab!" He laughed again. "I remember it differently. I remember a lab full of breakthroughs, of beautiful questions...and a boardroom full of cowards. I pushed boundaries, yes, but only because no one else would. What I was building - what I am building - could've changed everything."

Reed stepped forward slightly, gesturing to the creatures around them. "Professor Elder, what are they? What happened to you? How have you managed to live down there?" A hundred other questions had flooded Reed's mind over their short conversation, but these three felt the most pertinent.

Elder smiled back to him, walking passed the two and gesturing for them to follow. "All excellent queries Reed! But I'd have expected as much from you. I'm glad to see the years haven't dulled your curiosity. They say age is the enemy of invention, I've never found truth in the saying! Come, come now. This is no place to talk. If you'd be so kind as to follow me I can answer any and all of the questions you have at my home."

Reed and Sue looked at each other. Sue felt a pit in her stomach, none of this felt right. She felt like she wanted to get out of here as soon as possible and hide her head in the sand, try to forget any of this had happened. Let Elder have his 'Hills Have Eyes' commune down here on his own. She glanced back at the way they came. More security would surely be waiting to meet them at the top of the lift. She realised quickly this was a decision between possible or certain death.

Reed shrugged back at her, decidedly less nervous about the situation. The more he thought about it the more fondly he remembered Elder. The rumours surrounding the reasons he was stricken from the think tank were numerous, and grave. The young folk at the time revelled in the drama, gossiping and inventing new stories of why their old professor was removed without ceremony. Reed never felt comfortable with this. Too many questions had been left unanswered, and in some small part he felt partially responsible for Elder losing his position. Although this was never the case, he knew about as much as anybody at the time and he still didn't know now.

For a while refusing to join in on the mockery made him a bit of an unpopular figure among his friends. In fact it was the only time that he and his rival, Victor Von Doom had ever agreed on anything. Neither of them had laughed when Elder was gone. Neither of them liked how fast the others moved on. Neither of them felt comfortable seeing eye to eye with one another.

Reed turned his eyes from Sue back to Elder, watching the man descend further into the cavern. He moved with a strange, almost gliding gait. Despite his height and his use of the walking stick he moved fairly quickly.

"Let's go." Reed said softly. "If there's even a chance he's telling the truth, we owe it to ourselves to find out."

Sue didn't answer, just gave a small nod and followed beside him, hand still gripped in his. Her every instinct was screaming to turn back, but she didn't let go. She trusted Reed, and more importantly trust in herself to be able to escape from here if need be. She'd have liked to call back a memory of worse situations the two of them had gotten out of, but hiking through the Amazon was nothing compared to this.

The two of them walked in silence behind Elder, deeper into the veins he and his 'children' had carved into the earth. The deeper they went, the more alien the world became. Rock formations twisting in impossible spirals, massive root systems humming faintly as if they were breathing, and the occasional distant groan of the earth itself shifting.

All the while, the creatures followed. Mole-things with their huge blinking eyes and twitching noses. They didn't speak, but their presence was constant, scuttling along the walls and ceilings, some moving like spiders, others like burrowing rats.

Eventually, the narrow passage curved and sloped into a low, earthen chamber. No taller than eight feet at the center, with walls that bowed inward like the inside of a ribcage. The walls glittered faintly with mineral growths and what looked like scavenged tech. Old lab equipment, control panels, antennae, shattered bits of drones, all reassembled into makeshift structures. Glowing cables wound through the rock like veins, pulsing with a dim, greenish light.

Elder's "home" felt oddly cosy despite it's location. There was an improvised lab in the corner, with a workbench housing a few broken terminals from various eras standing beside shelves of cracked books and journals. There was a small stove fashioned from what looked like the guts of a ruined repulsor engine. A tin kettle sat on top, whistling gently. Nearby, two chairs, one clearly salvaged from a subway train, the other hand-carved from limestone sat facing each other over a table made of repurposed plexiglass bolted to support beams. To their right sat an armchair.

"Make yourselves comfortable." Elder said, sweeping his arms as if he were unveiling a royal hall. "It's not quite the Ritz, but it's home." He moved over to a raggedy old armchair and climbed onto it. One of the mole-creatures entered through an entryway at the back of the room. He was taller, more humanoid than the hunched beasts from before. He seemed more refined, wearing scavenged clothing and walking with a straight back. He wore a belt stuffed with tools under a tattered lab coat slightly too small at the arms.

He stopped as he entered, catching sight of Reed and Sue. "Father, you have guests?" he spoke with a shocked expression.

Elder nodded, turning toward the tall, lanky creature at the chamber's entrance. "Belo!" Elder called, his voice rising in a melodic tone. "We have guests. Old friends of mine. Be a dear and bring us some tea - and the honey loaf, if those greedy twins haven't devoured it all."

The Moloid, Belo, straightened at once, nodding with stiff formality. "Of course, Father." His voice could almost be described as regal, like someone who had learned English by mimicking old British academic tapes. He quickly made his way over the stove, grabbing some mugs and never taking his eyes off of the couple.

Elder gestured over to the two chairs in front of him. The two cautiously made their way over and turned the chairs to face him before sitting down. Sue broke the silence. "You have tea down here?" As if that was the most pressing question.

"Tea, dear girl is the basis of any good civilisation. And I may be many things now, but a barbarian I am not."

Reed replied. "Please, Professor Elder-"

"Please, Reed, call me Harvey. We've enough history to eschew seniority."

"Alright, Harvey. You have to understand this is all very confusing for us. We'd appreciate an explanation for what is going on here."

Harvey adjusted in his seat, taking a moment to breathe as Belo brought over the tea and stood at his side. "I suppose I should start at the beginning. Tell me Sue, do you know why your father had me removed from the board?"

She shook her head. She'd like to have said her father never told her, but she'd honestly never thought to ask. Professor Elder was never one of her favourite teachers, in fact, quite the opposite.

"Hm, I shouldn't think so. Genius is so often seen as madness by the un-initiated." He took a sip of his tea, gesturing to the two to drink theirs. Reed took him up on the offer, and was surprised to find the tea to be delicious. Sue declined, she was met with a scowl that lasted half a second from Elder. "Your father and I disagreed on very few things, besides the one thing that mattered. My great work was to create life itself, to manipulate existing cells and molecules to create something entirely new. I wanted to skip evolution entirely and instead be the first to discover the greatest invention of all - life itself."

He began to start speaking again, but caught himself as he opened his mouth, glancing up at Belo. "Belo, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could find your sisters. God knows what trouble they're getting up to unsupervised." Belo began to argue, but was quickly silenced by his father. He left the room shortly after. As strange as this whole thing was, Sue couldn't help but see the family dynamic she grew up with between Harvey and his 'children'. He continued speaking.

"Your father saw things differently. He and the others thought it was unethical, that such things shouldn't be questioned. He feared the technology being used for eugenics. I, however, saw a different future." He gently placed his mug down on the table in front of him and leaned back in the chair. "After I was excluded from the Think Tank I was at a loss. You may not know this, but I am an orphan. I had no one and nowhere to turn to, all my ties were tangled up with the Storm Foundation, after what happened I'd managed to burn all my bridges without intentionally lighting so much as a match." He laughed to himself, a sad chuckle and looked down at his clawed hands.

"It wasn't too long after that when The Reach came. Everything changed as I'm sure you're well aware. I won't mince words here, you know as well as I what the meta-bomb did to many of us." He gestured towards the two. Both of them kept shtum about the true origin of their powers, it was best to let him believe what he wanted now. "Unfortunately I wasn't turned into a dashing Superman. I suppose it's ironic isn't it, I'm sure you all thought you were very sneaky referring to me as the Moleman back then. Well..." He spread his arms out, his claws spreading. "I suppose fate has a wicked sense of humour." Reed looked down in shame, Sue averted her gaze. There was silence in the room for a few moments, neither of them wanting to fess up or feeling like an apology was appropriate. The look on their face was apology enough.

"The transformation changed my biochemistry to such a level that I became more mole than man. You'll have noticed my flash new spectacles" He said tapping them with a claw "They are more than just a fashion statement. I'm quite blind in the light, they allow me to see in the deep darkness underground, and on the off chance I ever go onto the surface they protect me from the sun." He smiled. "Anyway, enough of the past, I'm sure the pressing question on your mind is less about the moleman and more about his moles, eh?" He rose to his feet, gathering up the two finished mugs of tea and the untouched one before moving over to the sink and leaving them there. "I count what happened back at the Baxter Foundation as a blessing these days. Because of it I was able to continue my research under duress, when all the greatest discoveries are made. I continued my work in these tunnels, and what I found would astound even the most tenured of archeologist." He moved back to the two. "These tunnels are in part dug by myself and my children, but many of them were here when I arrived. I found ancient fossils, bio-matter of an ancient underground race never discovered before. Once I'd sapped enough energy from the Baxter Building it only took salvaging the right equipment and voilà - life again!"

The couple sat in stunned silence for a moment. Absorbing all of the information they had been given as best they could. Before the invasion they would have called Elder a madman and locked him away. Nowadays anything seemed possible. Reed cleared his throat, standing up from his chair.
"Harvey, this is remarkable, you're saying there was sentient life before humanity?"

Harvey smiled back. "Humanoid, yes, sentient possibly." He continued "You'll have noticed the Moloids as I've taken to calling them - the ones back in the pit were decidedly more...feral than dear Belo. They display some semblence of free thought, but are closer to a dog than a human." He rubbed his face for a moment, choosing his next words carefully. "I'm not sure if this is their natural inclination, or it's as a result of the process - reviving a species from scraps and marrow is hardly an exact science. Most emerged simple, instinctive. Only Belo and his sisters have retained or perhaps developed a higher awareness. Language, logic, even emotion. It's as though I've reignited an evolutionary spark that had long since died out."

Sue felt a stirring in her stomach. This all felt oddly wrong, although she couldn't put into words why. Maybe the thought of bringing life into the world they lived in felt cruel in the first place, let alone life that would so obviously be beaten down by Lord's regime. She remained silent, this whole ordeal felt fun at first but the joke wasn't making her laugh anymore. She felt more dismay when her partner spoke up.

"Fascinating..." Reed exclaimed, scratching his beard. "And you've been down here all this time? Was the blip we found yours then I'd presume?"

Harvey looked puzzled. "What blip?"

Sue spoke up. "We didn't come down here by chance, Professor." She stood up from the chair, sidling up beside Reed. "Our scanners picked up a beacon at this location, you're telling us it wasn't you that triggered it?"

Harvey stood in silence for a moment, collecting his thoughts. "Even if I had the resources to create such a device why would I waste my time? The entire reason I'm down here with my Moloids is so we don't get found? Such an act would be counter intuitive to everything I'm working on!"

Reed nodded, arms folded. "That's what I thought. Something isn't right. It looks like someone else is tracking you, Harvey - and that makes this urgent. We need to find out who, and fast." Reed reached into his jacket, pulling out a small notepad. He scrawled a string of numbers and frequencies onto a page and tore it off. "This is our comm frequency. If you or your Moloids find anything - any equipment, any traces, don't hesitate to contact us. We'll do the same on the surface. We'll find whoever’s behind this."

Harvey took the paper, eyes scanning it briefly before nodding. "Very well. I'll assign Belo and the twins to comb the tunnels. Thank you both for your help."

Harvey guided the two through the tunnels and up into one that opened into a concrete spillway beneath what looked like an abandoned maintenance station. Rusted metal slats covered half-collapsed grates above them, and a faint trickle of daylight leaked in through the cracks. Harvey did his best to avoid the beam of sunlight.

"This one leads out," Elder said, his voice low and serious now. "It was a runoff channel once. We've kept it mostly clear for emergencies...or, in your case, exits."

"And entrances." Reed noted, running his hand along the tunnel's frame. "That hatch isn't sealed. If we leave it marked in our system, this gives us a clean way to return without drawing attention."

Elder nodded, but said nothing. He simply stood at the base of the stairs, his clawed hands folded over his staff. "I'll keep to the shadows, as always. But if you find who sent that signal... please come back. I would like to know who threatens my children."

Reed turned back to the mole-man, a faint shadow of guilt in his eyes. "You deserved better than what the Foundation gave you, Harvey. I know it's too late to fix that, but if this threat is real, you won't face it alone."

Harvey gave a crooked smile, and for a moment something very human flickered behind his goggles. "That almost sounded like an apology."

Reed smiled back, Sue was already making her way onto the surface.

Another day, another felony took place. Surely, it wouldn’t have been Gotham without criminals raging every now and then. The city had always been known as a safe haven for the world’s most notorious felons. Burglars, mobsters, terrorists, and even the mentally unhinged were welcomed to stay and run each and every section of the city with barely any real persecution. No part of it was safe, and that included even the most remote area of Gotham.

Tonight, a small-time crook had been holding a son of one of the wealthier families in Gotham captive within an abandoned warehouse. It was the same warehouse that the crook and his comrades often used to trade weapons, as it was situated in the middle of nowhere. The boy fidgeted and squirmed in his seat, trying to escape the rope that’d been tying him to a chair.

“Urgh… Let me go!” he urged, his face scrunching. “Where’s daddy?”

The crook—an assault rifle in his hands—closed in with an eerie smirk plastered by the lower half of his face. He stood next to the boy, then lowered his shoulders, raising the latter’s mandible with the tip of his weapon. He spoke closely to his brown temple, his voice soft yet threatening. “Oh, don’t worry, little one. Daddy’s gonna take you home once we get the payment,” he told the boy, then shut the latter’s mouth with a plaster. “So, why don’t you behave yourself, hm? Be a good boy, will ya?”

The crook drew the tip of his rifle out of the boy’s mandible, which prompted the latter to soften his face in relief. At least, for now. He pulled a handheld radio out of his pocket, making a call for his three stooges waiting from across the farthest section of the warehouse.

“Hey, hey, do you copy?” he asked with a stern voice, in which the stooges answered “copy” simultaneously. “Is everything under control?”

“Affirmative!” one of them answered.

“Good…” the crook responded. “Make sure nobody enters the warehouse but our target, do you copy?”

“Copy that!” all three stooges answered in unison.

As their boss concluded the call, the stooges continued to guard the front section of the warehouse, their rifles pointing at each and every corner of their surroundings. So far, nothing suspicious was caught lingering around the spacious interior. Little did they realize, somebody had awaited them from the platform above, watching from the shadows as he readied himself to claim the clueless souls patrolling beneath his crimson glare.

The sound of a loading weapon emerged, though it came from none of the rifles held by the oblivious stooges. It was slightly below a whisper, not enough to attract anybody’s attention within the building. Not like there were that many people inside, anyway. Just before any of them could anticipate…

BLAM!

…One of them received a shot to the temple, the firing bullet breaching through the cranium. The noise was silent but deadly, and the hunted prey quickly collapsed on his side, crimson fluid spilling out of the wounded area. The bloody sight was enough to attract the attention of the two remaining stooges. Their eyes bounced from one side of the warehouse to another, searching for any signs of suspicious movements. And before they knew…

BLAM!

…Another one was eliminated, becoming the second victim of the mysterious assassin and his firing weapon. The last one of the trio was alarmed, panicked and confused as to what had truly transpired. He sweated uncontrollably, widened eyes scanning the area as he took a couple of cautious strides to the back. Unbeknownst to the oblivious stooge, the mysterious assassin had approached him from behind, leaving only a silent thud formed by his descending boots. Without warning, he tightly wrapped his toned arm around the stooge’s neck, his gloved hand covering the latter’s mouth. The felon dropped his rifle and squirmed, trying to free himself from the suffocating neck lock. But before he could move any further…

CRACK!

…The assassin had twisted his neck, breaking his bone and forcing him to remain silent forever. He dropped the now lifeless stooge, watching as he clumsily collapsed on his back. With every smaller crook now eliminated, he finally stepped out of the shadows, revealing himself to be an armored masked man clad in pale blue and bright orange. The residents of Gotham recognized him as Deathstroke, the notorious Terminator and the rising world-class mercenary who’d been making waves within the criminal underworld over the past years. As he drew a sword crossed behind his back, Deathstroke approached the farther section of the warehouse, subsequently forcing the door open with an arduous kick. There, he came face-to-face with the bigger crook who’d been keeping his client’s son captive, gauging his frightened expression with a glare. The crook seemed to recognize him, too.

“Oh, no…” the crook muttered. “Not you! Y– You’re…”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Deathstroke disrupted, spinning the sword in his grip. “I’m the payment you’ve been looking for.”

The crook swallowed, then gnashed his teeth, trembling and shivering as the masked Terminator drew his strides closer and closer in his direction. Clearly, he wasn’t expecting the boy’s parents to send somebody as ruthless as Deathstroke to rescue him. Anxiously, the crook began firing the assault rifle in his hands, only for his adversary to cut down every bullet that came in his path with much precision. Although fruitless, he still insisted on doing so, thinking at least one of them would hit until…

CLICK…

CLICK…

“Shit…”

…he was running out of bullets. The crook reached out to the strap circling his torso with his hand, seizing an ammunition attached to it. Unfortunately for him, before he could load his rifle…

SLASH!

…Deathstroke had already managed to slice the weapon in half using his sword. Frustrated, the crook tossed both his chopped rifle and ammunition away, subsequently drawing a small blade from his belt. Aimlessly, he began swinging the sharp weapon in Deathstroke’s direction, but to no avail. Each and every attempt he made to wound his adversary fruited zero outcomes, as the sword tackled the blade with ease.

CLING…

CLING…

CLING…

SLASH!

Eventually, Deathstroke managed to retaliate, the sharp tip of his sword grazing against the crook’s leathery wrist. The blade was forced out of his grip, causing a massive splash of blood to escape the wounded area. The crook reflexively held his wrist, flinching.

“Argh… Fuck!”

“Game over, sucker!” Deathstroke warned, then gestured his sword under the crook’s mandible. “You’re through! Either you release the kid or—”

“Please… Please, don’t!” the crook urged, tears rolling out of his eyes as he kneeled before the Terminator. He pressed his palms together, almost as if he was begging for his life. “I’ll let the kid go, but please, don’t kill me. I– I still have a daughter back home!”

Deathstroke paused, his sword lowering and his wrinkled face softening from under the mask. All a sudden, the crook’s mention of his daughter reminded him of his younger son, Joseph. Just thinking about his younger son, he couldn’t imagine something horrible happening to him, especially after what happened to his older brother many years back. Even worse that the Terminator had involved himself in the same criminal underbelly that the crook had drowned himself into, putting his family in a risky position if or when he was ever revealed to be a retired lieutenant colonel by the name of Slade Wilson

While considering the plea, his only eye leaped between the terrified crook and the squirming boy, carefully observing their faces. The boy, in particular, was a split image of his older son, Grant, who was about his age when he passed away. Somehow, he found the physical resemblance uncanny that he could picture the boy as his older son getting kidnapped and helplessly tied to a chair. Although almost hesitating, Deathstroke finally made up his mind. Before glancing back at the crook, he shushed at the brown-haired boy, his finger raised over his barely parting lips.

“Close your eyes,” Deathstroke warned, his voice oddly quiet and calming. “Don’t open them till I tell you so, got it?” The boy couldn’t say anything but nod in reciprocation, closing his eyes and sitting still. Then, as the cold-blooded Terminator glared at the pleading crook, he caught him by surprise. He swung his sword, and the crook was ambushed.

THWACK!

Eradicated, even. Knowing that the crook had put the life of an innocent boy in danger, Deathstroke had determined he deserved to be punished rather than to be tolerated, despite the fact that the latter, too, had a child back home. While he was far from being a virtuous individual like Superman or Captain America, he still had his own set of moral codes, especially when it came to innocent children and women. Clearly, in spite of his ferocious exterior, he deeply despised those who dared to endanger innocent lives. As the masked mercenary separated the head from the body, the crook crumpled, drowning in his own pool of crimson fluid.

Fucking amateur, Deathstroke scoffed inwardly, furrowing at the lifeless sight before him. Go straight to Hell where you belong!

As the execution was completed, the masked mercenary retracted the sword close to his front, cleaning the blood staining its shimmering surface with a wipe of his wrist.

SPLASH!

His arm was slammed, and the fresh fluid scattered across the floor, painting his vicinity red. His prey’s blood might’ve been wiped away, but its noisome stench remained. Using the same sword, Deathstroke freed the boy sitting next to the crook’s decapitated form, gently slicing the rope wrapping his small frame. Standing across him, he removed the plaster that’d been keeping the boy’s mouth shut, lowering his shoulders to better reach the shorter brunette.

“Almost there,” he told the boy with a reassuring voice. “Now, I want you to count to 50. Think you can do it?”

The boy nodded, still keeping his eyes shut. “Yeah, of course!” he affirmed, “I can do that.”

“Good…” As the boy started the count, Deathstroke stowed his sword behind his back, then began cleaning up the mess he’d been causing. Thankfully, there weren’t that many corpses needed to be hidden, which means it wouldn’t be long until he could leave the warehouse with the rescued. He picked a fuel container perching by the corner of the room, spilling its oily content across every section of the building. Once done, he brought the boy over his shoulder, then drew a lighter out of his utility belt, giving ear as the boy nearly finalized the count.

“Forty seven… forty eight… forty nine…”

Just as he left and stood right across the entrance of the warehouse, the masked mercenary flicked the lighter, a miniscule trail of flame ignited across its tip. He tossed the lighter across the fueled floor, setting the abandoned building on fire alongside the corpses it contained.

WHOOSH…

“And… Fifty!”

As he expected, the count ended by the time the warehouse was engulfed in flames. Deathstroke turned against the fiery vicinity, his strides swift yet steady as they drew away from the burning building behind. Hopefully, by the time the boy reopened his eyes, he didn’t get to see the fiery sight that he’d just created. It’d always been his habit to leave no traces behind so as to not get caught by the authorities.

“You’re safe, kid,” he reassured. “You can now open your eyes.”

The boy did as the masked mercenary told, opening his eyes just to see a distant glow emitted by the flames devouring the warehouse. He scratched his eyes, then blinked. “Where am I now?” he asked.

“On our way back home,” Deathstroke simply answered, readjusting the smaller figure burdening his shoulder. “Just stay put, you hear me? It shouldn’t take long.”

“Oh…” As the boy looked down, he’d only noticed just now that he’d been carried atop the mercenary’s shoulder this whole time. He might’ve thought that Deathstroke was one of the felons holding him captive early on, considering his not-so-friendly appearance. It couldn’t help when the Terminator’s armored form was decked with weapons, ranging from pistols and rifles to swords and blades. He gasped, then scrunched his face in exasperation, trying to squirm his way out of the protective grip. “Hey, what are you doing!?” he asked, his squealing voice raised. “Put me down, you moron!”

Hearing the boy’s demand, Deathstroke laughed. Not only that the boy resembled his older son, he even acted the way he used to behave, too—both abrasive and loudmouthed. The masked mercenary decided to ignore his demand, still carrying him on his shoulder, anyway, despite the resistance. “Oh, look at you spoiled, little punk, scoffing and yelling at me just like that. Who do you think you are? My boss?” he retorted, then sighed, rolling his only eye. “I’m not one of those bad guys here. ’Least not in this particular scenario. You should’ve been grateful that somebody’s here to save you. Otherwise, you could’ve just died out there.”

The boy frowned and stuck his tongue out at his rescuer, still trying to free himself. “Oh, yeah?” he asked back, a hint of challenge in his voice. “I saw what you did to the guy back there. Do you really think that I was going to keep my eyes closed the whole time?”

Deathstroke’s eye widened in surprise. If he knew that he was rescuing an obnoxious brat, he wouldn’t have trusted him in the first place. He glared sidelong at the boy, now legitimately furious. “You little scum!” he cursed, then huffed. “I can’t believe you… You were peeking at what I did this whole time?”

The boy nodded, playfully smirking. “Well, just a little…” he joked, bringing his thumb and index closer to form a pinching gesture. “Do you know that my dad is friends with Commissioner Gordon? I can just tell him what you did to those guys back there, putting you in Arkham Asylum where you should be.” However, despite the threat, Deathstroke was unfazed, remaining silent as his strides slowed down when the burning warehouse became way too distant. He frowned and frowned, wanting to hand the little delinquent back to his client as fast as he could. “What? Why so serious?” the boy asked, his eyebrows arching. “Are you scared?”

The masked mercenary huffed again, peering over the boy on his shoulder. “Do I look like I’m scared?” he asked back, his voice stern. “I’m not a coward, kid. I’ve been through wars back then. Still am. You think Commissioner Gordon’s ever been to Afghan before?” He gauged the boy’s expression, finding that he’d been listening intently. “And I know that your dad’s probably not gonna snitch me to the GCPD. We, too, are friends, y’know.”

“Ooh… so scary…” the boy answered, then giggled, feigning fright and astonishment. “Okay, so you guys are friends. Cool.” He playfully nodded, then stopped squirming around. “But hey, I have to admit that was the coolest fight I’ve ever seen. Like… like it was straight outta comic books or something!” Abruptly, he stopped talking, reminded of one particular masked hero he’d always admired. He gasped, covered his mouth, then widened his eyes in realization before glancing sidelong at the man who’d been carrying him around. “Wait a minute… are you who I think you are?”

“What?” Deathstroke asked back, arching an eyebrow at the boy.

“You’re Batman, aren’t you?” he asked with narrowed eyes, inspecting the masked mercenary.

Deathstroke snorted. He shook his head. “Nah, kid,” he answered, “I’m just the guy your dad sent to rescue you.” He didn’t know whether to be flattered or exasperated when the boy compared him to Batman. While he’d always respected the Dark Knight for what he’d done to the city, he couldn’t deny that he often felt threatened by his presence, knowing he could’ve been the person locking the Terminator behind bars someday. After all, Batman was the second—and perhaps, the main—reason why he never left traces of his murders.

Then, as the two continued to part ways with the secluded area, a growling noise attracted the mercenary’s attention. No doubt, it must’ve come from the boy, knowing that he’d been held hostage for days. “Hey, kid, you’re hungry?” he asked, his voice slightly softening.

The boy hesitated, noticing that his stomach had just growled. He seemed embarrassed. “Well, kinda…” he answered.

“I see,” Deathstroke responded, closely approaching the motorcycle he parked just half a mile away from the burning warehouse. “Want some ice cream?”

“Erm… Sure!” the boy accepted, his face lighting up at the thought of eating his favorite delicacy. He glanced down, noticing that his small frame was still carried above the mercenary’s shoulder as they were closing in on the two-wheeled vehicle ahead. “Uh, excuse me, ‘Mr. Scary Mask,’ you know that I can walk by myself, right? Can you just put me down already?”

“Jesus Christ!” Deathstroke retorted. “Will you please just shut up!?”

FIN.

The Blonde Man, the young man, the boys head exploded into a fine red mist. Jim couldn't even turn away as the minigun spun up, his HUD disappearing as the gun swept around the room. People screamed and shouted as they ran for cover, bullets catching them and soaking the floor and walls with blood. He shouted in his helmet, though nobody could hear it. He did his best not to close his eyes; he would have to live with the image of this for the rest of his life. He clicked his fingers together, but nothing happened. Tap forefinger to index, nothing. Tried moving his legs, his arms. Nothing, the armour had completely locked up. Clicking his tongue against the faceplate, he could hear other shots now in the distance. Over the firing of his weapon, the screams and the shouts. The faint ringing in the distance of automatic weapons fire, explosions and electric sizzling.

Jim fought and strained against the suit, but it refused to give. The servos locked in place, holding him there. Scanning his mind for ideas. "Priority override" His HUD flashed up for a second, before disappearing again. "Priority Override: John Rhodes, password WarMachineRox123." The gun continued to fire, but he instantly felt his legs and arms release. He lifted his hand as the HUD started to reboot. The gun continued to fire as the rest of his systems came back on.

Not entirely sure how long his control would last, or even if it would let him shut down the weapon. He reached up and grabbed the barrel with two hands, alarms blared, and warnings flared as he pulled. Ripping it from its mount and then throwing it away. He stood.

The room was silent, and the whole area was deathly quiet. All he could hear was his heartbeat and breath rattling around the inside of the suit. He felt numb, a cold pit forming in his stomach. The death, destruction. This was all because of him, because of the suit. Jim didn't know what had happened, but there was one thing for sure he wasgoing to know. He turned around as he heard a laugh and a shout Taggert lowered his gun. "Clear!"

Taggert looked around at the piles of bodies, and some of the mutants still moaned and groaned. Alive but wounded, Jim had managed to disable his gun in time to save their lives. If only- No. He stopped himself. This wasn't the time to spiral; he held onto his anger, swallowed his rage. Now was the time for answers, without even turning to Taggert he looked up, activating his flight systems. "Y'know Colonel, if your problem with me killing 'em was that you wanted first digs, you could have just-"

Jim didn't have to listen to the rest of that statement, as his repulsors fired and he shot up through the roof leaving a cloud of dust, debris and blood.

---

Tony sat, one arm propping him up against the side of the chair while the other held the cup up to his mouth. Lips fastened firmly around the straw as he drank, the thick liquid practically oozed. The taste wasn't much better, it tasted like it oozed. Oozed was the correct word; it was a thick, moist ooze. Above him synapses flared in a holographic representation of a brain; some of them flashed brilliantly, and others dimmed. Occasionally, a bolt would flash along a path and then just die out before it got anywhere. It was a brain, but it wasn't a healthy brain.

It was his.

"How we looking Jarvis?" Tony called to the abyss, as the sooth calming voice came over the speakers he had in the walls.

"Integrity is at 90% and falling. At current rate we won't reach maximum stability before your brain is beyond the point of no return, perhaps we should tell-"

"No!" Tony bolted up at the suggestion, coughing and spluttering as he choked on his ooze. Putting the cup down and sitting himself back down slowly. "No. I'll tell them when I have a solution. That's what they expect from me, I'm the guy who offers up the solutions. Not the problems."

"Sir, this may be one of the times where-"

"Mute."

He should never have given the damned A.I assistant anything beyond a basic personality. All he wanted to do was help, and it was a pain in the-

"Unmute. Jarvis, give me a visual representation of your current state."

There was a brief pause, before it appeared. A swirling mass of light and colours. "Now overlay it with my most recent scan." The two images blended together, flaring brilliantly in a flash of light. "I'll be damned." There was a bang from the garage doors, Tonys eyes darting to a nearby suitcase that was dropped haphazardly in a corner. A moment of panic across his face, before he saw the red white and blue of Rhodeys armour come flying down the ramp. He clapped his hands together and the hologram disappeared from view. Wincing as he stood up he held his arms out in greeting to his friend, but before he could get a word out the suits faceplate opened, Rhodey doubled over and threw up all over the floor.

It was concerning how much the vomit reminded Tony of his ooze. Rushing to his feet, making his way over to Rhodey as quick as he could, only to be pushed back by his friends palm. He tried not to show how much that simple strike had winded him.

"What the hell did you do Tony?"

Confusion spread across Tonys face. "What, what are we talking about?"

"JARVIS!" Rhodey shouted, looking up at the ceiling. Rage, fear and terror clouded his eyes, and it chilled Tony to the core. In all his years, even through the war with the Reach. His eyes had never seemed so intense, so betrayed.

"Sir?"

"Iron Patriot playback. Thirty minutes."

The warehouse, the blood. The killing. Tony sank to his knees, everything he had feared. Everything he had fought to get away from since his time as a prisoner, seeing his weapons kill innocents and American Soldiers. Now, seeing his most powerful weapon turned on the destitute and the homeless within America. Seeing them mowed down and destroyed by his best friend, who had no control over anything. He saw the arms cross the faceplate as Rhodey reached up for the weapon before tearing it from its mount and casting it away.

Tears threatened the edge of Tonys vision, but he couldn't look away. Looking away would be the worst thing to do, it would betray those who lost their lives, and when Rhodey spoke again ending playback. When he turned to look at his friend on the floor, tears in his eyes and rage in his heart Tony could say only one word.

"Trask."

---

Sue had barely spoke on the way home. Reed's mouth was moving a million miles an hour speaking about Elder and his Moloids. Theorising and conceptualising how he'd managed to create life and where these ancient creatures had came from. Sue's mind was elsewhere. The thought of all of this being beneath their feet for so long frightened her, why would any new sentient race be content living underneath the earth? The question of if they'd ever breach the surface felt more like 'when' would they breach the surface to her. Or worse yet, when Lord and his troops would find them. She stared out the window of the bus as it rumbled through New York toward their safehouse, the skyline was blurred and grey under the cloud-choked sky. Her reflection in the glass looked pale and drawn. She barely recognized herself.

Reed continued rambling as they opened the door to the Baxter Annex and peeled off their field gear. "-the bioluminescent mycelium isn't just for light, it's a neural mesh. He's networked it. That's why the walls felt like they were humming, Sue. It's living architecture - it's got to be. Symbiotic, probably semi-sentient. Elder might not have just bioengineered those creatures - he might've shaped them! Do you realise what this means?"

Sue slumped down onto the couch, barely looking at him. Herbie Jr. floated out of his charging dock and glided over to her like a curious pet. She rested her hand on the white robot's smooth dome, absent-mindedly stroking it as if he were a cat. Reed hovered nearby.

"Sue, are you listening to me?"

She glanced up at him. "Yeah, Reed, I'm listening."

Reed had seen this face a few times. The last major time was when Johnny had left them. Sue was the smartest woman Reed had ever met, but she had a terrible poker face. She wore her heart on her sleeve, you could almost always tell what emotion she was feeling by the slightest glance at her face.

Reed stopped his train of thought. Thinking for a moment before perching himself on the arm of the sofa. "Okay, what is it? You're clearly upset. Just say it."

Sue didn't answer at first. She looked back out the window with her chin resting on her hand, the clouds were hanging like smoke over the city. "I don't trust him."

Reed blinked. "Who? Elder?"

"Yes. Elder." She spoke with a sigh. "That man isn't a victim. He didn't just fall into the Earth and become some tragic figure surrounded by misunderstood mole-children. He's playing you, Reed."

"Playing me?" Reed echoed, baffled. "Sue, he's deformed. He's half-blind. He's living underground surrounded by the last remnants of some extinct civilization he alone brought back to life!"

"Yeah. That he engineered into servitude."

Reed opened his mouth to argue but Sue cut him off.

"Did you even look at them? Those Moloids aren't a new species, Reed. He admitted it! They could have been people once. Maybe not human, but maybe close. And now they're just...feral husks. Do you really think they just chose to follow him? How do you explain Belo? Why is he the only one we saw that could speak?"

Reed frowned. "There's no evidence he enslaved them. They're imprinted - possibly epigenetically. We don't know their baseline. They could be-"

Sue raised her voice, emphatically standing up from the couch and moving to the other side of the room from Reed. "Don't do that! Don't sterilize it with scientific jargon. We both saw the way they flinched when he raised his voice - the way they huddled. That wasn't imprinting, Reed. That was fear."

Reed's brow furrowed, but he didn't reply. Herbie Jr. rotated in midair, sensors dimming, as if trying to avoid the tension.

Sue stepped forward, lowering her voice but keeping a firm tone. "You want to know the real reason I don't trust him? It's not just the Moloids. It's because I remember who he was at the Think Tank."

Reed's eyes narrowed slightly. "Sue-"

"No, let me finish!" She snapped. "He used to sit in judgment of every girl who walked through those doors. All the boys? You, Victor, even that creep Wittman! He nurtured you, encouraged you, gave you freedom. But the girls? Me, Gloria, Sharon, Aiko - we had to beg for scraps of approval. He second-guessed every proposal we made. He rolled his eyes when I corrected him. You ever wonder why the best I ever got from him was b B+? I remember he once said to Gloria that women 'lacked the true competitive drive' to change the world!"

Reed took a breath, barely opening his mouth to speak. "I never heard him say that."

"Of course you didn't!" she said, incredulous. "Because you were the golden boy. You were everything he wanted to mold. You're still defending him, Reed. Even now. You're making excuses for a man who built an empire underground and turned sentient life into furniture!"

Reed ran a hand through his hair, pacing. "Maybe he was biased. Maybe he is a bastard. But he also cracked a code that could change biology itself! Do you understand what that means? Sentient architecture. Regenerative infrastructure. We could cure disease, feed the planet-"

"Oh my god, listen to yourself!" Sue snapped. "You sound just like him. And what if he uses this technology for evil? What if he buddies up with Osborn and Lord and the rest? Helps them bio-engineer the X-Gene out of mutants?"

Reed stopped cold. He had no reply.

"You're so obsessed with what it means that you won't look at how he did it. What he sacrificed. Who he hurt. Do you ever think about the cost of these ideas, Reed? Or do you just catalogue the upside and call it progress?"

His voice sharpened. "That's not fair."

"No? How do I know every time we find someone like Elder you won't want to understand them first before we stop them? How are we going to fight back against Lord if you're so focused on figuring out what makes monsters tick instead of stopping them from hurting people?"

"Because understanding is the first step to-"

"To repeating their mistakes. You're a step away from becoming like them with that mindset!"

"What makes you think I want to fight Lord in the first place? What's wrong with what we've been doing? Newsflash Sue the Fantastic Four are done - were done years ago! Even before Ben and Johnny left it was done! We are not heroes and we never were!"

Sue gasped at the mention of her brothers name. She felt tears welling up in the corner of her eyes. "Yeah well Newsflash brainiac-" She parroted back with venom in her voice. She grabbed her phone and unlocked it, tapping away before turning the screen displaying emerging reports of their infiltration to the Baxter Building towards him. "-We might not have a choice! You think they don't have footage of our face? What are we gonna do hide somewhere else? Let everyone around us die while we sit underground with the Moloids?"

Reed stood silent. His hands were clenched. For once, his mind didn't have an instant answer. He could see the pain across his partners face. It hurt him to see her so upset, but he couldn't let this go, whether it be pride or stubborness he felt like this was one argument he couldn't resolve so quickly.

"I thought you'd changed." Sue said quietly. "But maybe some part of you is still that kid trying to impress monsters like Elder."

That was the one that landed. Reed's face dropped, he had pure anger displayed across his features and yet he remained silent. He moved toward the door, grabbing the data tablet off the charging dock, ignoring Herbie's soft chirp of protest.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm going to find whoever's been tracking Elder. If there's another player in this, we need to know who." He said in monotone.

"Reed-"

He didn't turn around to answer her. "I'll be back when I have something useful."

The door hissed open. And then Reed was gone, leaving Sue standing alone in the low hum of the Baxter Annex, Herbie Jr. whirring softly beside her as she began to cry.

---

Reed felt the cold night air bite his face. He was following the data tablet like a blood hound, it kept his mind off of the argument with Sue. Somewhere in his heart he felt, or perhaps knew he could be wrong about Elder. That Sue was right. But something bigger was stopping him from admitting it.

Every few blocks, Reed stopped to recalibrate the device. He rerouted through a low-level satellite relay, bypassed two security nodes without thinking. The deeper he followed the signal, the more anomalous it became. At first, he'd assumed it was a leak, something primitive in Elder's jerry-rigged architecture made up of salvaged tech. But now he was sure this was something deeper, the source of all of this was being protected.

He stepped into a shadowed alley off Canal Street and knelt down tapping into his device. For every security measure he'd bypass another would pop up. It was getting quicker and quicker, loading up more than he could handle alone. God damn did he choose the worst time to argue with Sue.

Suddenly the screen went blank. For a moment he thought his tablet had been overloaded. He hit the side of it with his palm hoping to jig it back into life. Suddenly the console opened on the screen. A line of code scrolled across the interface - one he hadn't written.

[Welcome, Dr. Richards. I estimated a 94.6% probability you'd follow.]

Reed's breath caught in his throat. He rushed to sever the connection but it was too late too late. The tablet screen went black once more. And then flickered as a new window opened. It was a map of him. Or more accurately, his movements since leaving the Baxter Annex.

Footprints traced every movement he'd made over the last hour. Time-stamped, even with the altitude tracked. It was like a running app he'd never asked for.

At the center of the map, a blinking point labeled only:

[YOU ARE HERE.]

Then it changed:

[YOU ARE LATE.]

Suddenly, the tablet chirped and rebooted. An address appeared on the map leading to the docks. Reed zoomed in with two fingers and rushed to the old Warehouse at the end of the pier.

He pushed open the rusted door to the warehouse a short while later to find it surprisingly empty, save for a glowing terminal at the end of the room. The whole place felt off, like he was about to spring an ambush. This was a necessary sacrifice. If the person on the other end of his tablet had been tracking him they'd know where the Baxter Annex was. This was no longer just about helping Elder, it was about protecting Sue.

He took a deep breath as he stepped further into the empty space, his eyes darting around the room as he slowly made his way through the darkness and to computer. As he approached he placed a hand on the old dentists chair sat in front of the monitor. He inspected it briefly, it had a tangle of wires hanging out the back and some sort of harness system around the arms.

"Don't sit." he muttered to himself. "Definitely don't sit." He glanced at the screen, a blinking cursor in the top right of the console. The person on the other end began to type.

[Hello, Dr Richards.]

Reed stood still. His own reflection stared back at him in the glass.

[You are not being watched. Not in the way you think.

You are being measured. Modeled. Replicated.

And, if possible, improved.]

Reed leaned forward over the desk. He instinctively moved to type on a keyboard, but found none available. He scanned the room again, looking for anything that could have been monitoring him. He ventured a try at speaking.

"Who are you?"

[Unimportant.

You are more machine than man, Reed. A soft machine. Even your grief follows geometry.

Let's test that.]

The monitor flickered again and two folders appeared side by side. One labeled: "/Personal/Archive/Shared_Memories/" and the other: "/Security/Protocols/Four_Scramble/"

Reed felt a surge of anxiety as his shoulders tensed. He recognized both of these filepaths instantly. 'Shared_Memories' was exactly what it sounded like. A private vault Sue had asked him to build. Hidden files from their years together. Photos, voice notes. Moments that had slipped through the cracks of grief and survival. And most importantly, the last recorded memories they had of Ben and Johnny.

'Four_Scramble', on the other hand, was the system they had built to keep them invisible. A location scrubber Sue had coded to hide their movements, decoy identities built into Lord's metahuman census, and a voice-cloaking keyed to distort their speech patterns across tapped comms. Everything they needed to operate under the radar and without too much hastle from Lord.

The cursor pulsed and then began to type.

[You may keep one.]

[The other is overwritten.]

[Not copied. Not moved. Not archived. Gone.]

Reed's mouth felt dry. "You can't-"

Another line:

[Can't I?]

The Shared_Memories folder opened itself and began opening and cosing various documents at random:

• sue_laugh.wav
• annex_first_night.mp4
• johnny_last_sighting.mp4
• graduation_photos.zip
• Ben_Argument.mp3
• storm_family_photos.zip

The cursor typed again.

[Keep the life that built you — or the life you hold onto now.]

Reed took a slow step back from the screen, his head racked with thoughts. "They're not separate." he muttered.

[They are now.]

[You can save your past.]

[Or you can protect her future.]

He froze in place.The wording was deliberate. Not his future, her future.

[You love her. Predictable. She makes you human.]

[But she is not invisible without this.]

Reed stood in silence. Shellshocked. His mind was scattered. For a few moments he stood staring at the text in front of him desperately wishing he could wake up from this nightmare.

The cursor blinked again.

[When you are ready to make your decision, please take a seat.]

Reed looked behind him at the dentists chair and took a deep breath, before sliding back into the chair and being locked in place as the metal clamps tightened around his wrists and ankles.

---

Sue sat on the floor beside the workbench with her knees pulled to her chest. Herbie Jr. hovered at her side, chirping quietly in a rhythm that almost felt comforting. She hadn't cried like that in a long time. Not since Ben walked out. Not since the moment Johnny told her she wasn't his sister anymore.

Now Reed was out there chasing ghosts again. Her fingers trembled as she reached for the console. She had half a mind to shut it all down, the scanners, the monitors, the data. Just turn it all off. Maybe Reed was right, they were scientists for gods sake not superheroes. Even with their powers they barely made it out against the security force back at the Baxter Building. And now Reed was out there, probably about to get himself killed without her there to protect him.

She rubbed her nose with her forearm. The time for feeling sorry for herself was over. Her partner might've been bullheaded, but he was still hers. It was time to track him down and help him, even if his plan was crazy. She rose to her feet and turned to the computer on the workstation, furiously tapping away at the keyboard as she began trying to track the tablet Reed had taken.

She was having an unusual amount of trouble, like something was blocking her. She was faster though, especially with Herbie by her side helping with the hack. Finally she managed to break through, tracking Reed to a warehouse at the docks. Her brow furrowed, what was he doing there?

She stared at the blinking dot on the screen. "Herbie." she spoke. "Ready for your first field mission?"

Herbie let out a happy chirp, spinning in place as Sue rose from her chair, wiping the remaining tears from her cheeks.

"No more crying. We're doing this my way now."

_{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

Roscoe Hynes sat hunched over a laptop, the blue glow from its screen painting his face. Lines of text scrolled like electronic rainfall, and every so often he tapped a key to pause the stream, brows tightening as he sifted through cloned fragments of Lieutenant Gil’s digital life. Line after line of endless metadata was parsed through algorithmic filters he’d cobbled together with borrowed code and an overindulgence of caffeine. It was mostly junk, but he kept digging.

The stink of mold and rust still clung to the walls of the basement, which had become his home over the last five months. Not that he considered it as such. It was just the only place left where the Agency wouldn’t drag him out in the middle of the night and lock him in a box again. Roscoe still flinched when doors opened too quickly; still woke up sometimes thinking he was back in that sterile white room with the humming lights. He still remembered the sting of their needles, the way they whispered to each other behind mirrored glass like he wasn’t human, as if he were something to be solved. At night, strapped to a slab under harsh fluorescents, he’d wondered if they’d ever planned to let him go, or if the only exit was a toe tag and a closed file. Compared to that, the basement was paradise. But even paradise, when you couldn’t leave, started to look a lot like a cage.

When he had been rescued from the Agency’s makeshift detention facility, Roscoe thought he’d be able to get his life back, but the Agency had other plans. It turns out that once you’re labeled as a terrorist and fugitive, with your face plastered across every screen in the city for months, there wasn’t much of a life to get back to.

So Roscoe remained in hiding, in the basement of a condemned bar, far from windows and prying eyes. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d been outside in the last few months, a precaution Leonard insisted was necessary. Although Roscoe agreed, he’d be lying if he said the isolation wasn’t eating away at him.

At least Lisa was here.

Lisa Snart’s legs were tucked beneath her on the couch nearby, arms folded, chin resting on her knuckles as she watched him work. She didn’t talk much when he was in this mode, but she stayed close. And when he worked too hard, staring at the screens without blinking for too long, she’d tether him back to the moment with her honeyed voice and warm smile. It was grounding and helped more than he could ever put into words.

Roscoe knew that the only real way he could ever get out of this hole-in-the-ground was to crack the military-grade, government-issued flashdrive they’d stolen during his escape from the Agency’s facility. Packed tight with firewalls and layered encryption, the device had proven too difficult to crack, hundreds of hours of work yielding only a single prompt for Agency authorization. Without better equipment and programs, he had come to terms with the fact that it was beyond his capabilities.

Gil’s phone on the other hand?

Roscoe and the others were under no illusions that they’d find the codes necessary to access the drive on the lieutenant’s personal cellphone. The Agency was cruel, not stupid. Still, there was likely to be something usable on it, something they could act upon or leverage to get further answers. It was simply a matter of sifting through all the irrelevant bits, of which there were many.

“This could take all day,” Roscoe muttered to himself as he allowed the cascading stream of digital information to resume.

“Y’know, if that’s too difficult for you, there’s another way,” said a gruff voice from the opposite end of the room.

Mick Rory occupied a far corner of the basement, perched on a battered folding chair with his feet up on a crate of scavenged and obsolete electronics. An old, dog-eared copy of Dracula rested in one calloused hand, half the pages curled from water damage.

Roscoe didn’t even glance up. Rory had made it a habit to sit there, slowly reading and offering some variation of the same suggestion each time anyone else voiced a thought.

“We’re not setting Lieutenant Gil on fire, Ror,” Lisa simply told the brute.

Rory grunted. It was the same answer he’d been given numerous times since Leonard had decided on the plan to snag the officer’s phone.

Roscoe blinked hard, eyes sore, as he dug further into the data. The file tree cracked open another directory. Then another. It was more of the meaningless text logs he’d been scanning through for hours now. Sighing, he slid the cached conversation through a rudimentary decryption program. If history was anything to go by, this would be yet another chat between the lieutenant and one of several dozen women who had to endure painfully awkward flirting and cringeworthy pickup lines.

As he scrolled through the recovered message log, however, his program isolated two strings of text. It had picked up two of the keywords Roscoe set it to look for. Colonel and Eiling. He glanced at it, scanned the following texts, and then scrolled back up to the start of the exchange before rereading it.

“I think we’ve got something,” Roscoe said.

Lisa slid in next to him, one hand resting on his shoulder. “What is it?”

Just then, the basement door slowly creaked open, and heavy boots descended the concrete steps. Leonard Snart appeared, looking tired but focused.

“Phone’s gone,” he announced to the others. “Scrambled and dumped.”

_{“Should have just let me melt it.”}

Leonard nodded toward the laptop in front of Lisa and Roscoe, ignoring the pair moving to put a few extra inches of distance between themselves. “Results?”

“Maybe,” Roscoe answered. He turned the screen toward Leonard, “see for yourself.”

Leonard stepped closer and peered down at the text files on the computer.

Up for a drink tonight? 🍸 Or are you gonna ghost
me again, Harper?

Tonight’s another test cycle. You’ll have to wait.

C’mon, cancelt he lab work

I’ll make it worth your while 😈

Sorry.

Colonel’s giving a full burn on the Dilustel prototype
tonight that’s gotta count as a reason to celebrate

After the test tonight, we blow off steam

My treat

You in?

Short skirt required 🥵

Celebrating what? Last time we ran the experiment
it almost cooked the volunteer from the inside.
You saw the vitals, Joe.

He lived didn’t he? Barely even screamed

That’s what progress looks like, Harper.
You want clean, go work at a hospital

You’d fill out scrubs nicely 🍑

It’s not about clean. I just don’t think anyone fully
understands what that metal does to people, and Eiling
doesn’t want to follow the proper scientific protocols.

He knows what he’s doing

And if this works we won’t need to tiptoe around
metas and mutants anymore. One soldier in Dilustel
could end a riot before it even begins.

Or start one we can’t put out.

You worry too much, Harper

How about this

Finish your shift and put on something fun. Then
I’ll pretend I didn’t hear you questioning command

I can’t.

You can

See you tonight 😘

“God, what a fucking creep,” Lisa shuddered.

_{“Bet you wish you let me burn him now.”}

Leonard’s eyes narrowed on the screen. “Dilustel.” He repeated the word like he wanted to memorize how it tasted.

_{”Sounds flammable.”}

“Never heard of it before,” Roscoe said, already opening a new search tab. “Names not in any official logs. No public patents. Not even anything on that conspiracy blog that leaks all the government secrets. Which probably means it’s either brand new or scrubbed.”

Leonard nodded. “Even if it’s nothing, it’s a lead. And we don’t have many of those.”

“So what, we follow Gil again?” Asked Lisa.

“No,” her brother answered. “We go after her, not him. She’s nervous, which means she knows stuff. We can use her to find answers.”

“How long ago did this test happen?”

“It hasn’t yet,” Roscoe told Leonard. “These texts were from this morning, just an hour or so before we nabbed the phone.”

“Ew,” Lisa frowned. “This asshole was being that pervy first thing in the morning? What’s wrong with him?”

_{“He’s still not burning, that’s what’s wrong with him.”}

Lisa shifted uncomfortably on the couch as she considered the implications behind the lieutenant’s words. “That poor woman.”

“Don’t worry,” Leonard said, his tone hardening as a plan began to form. “We’re going to make sure Gil gets stood up tonight.”

---

Sue approached the warehouse with caution. She didn't exactly look like the type to hang about the docks at night, even with her collar popped up and hands stuffed into her jacket pockets. Herbie glided along the ground next to her, having spent the majority of the journey hidden in a duffel bag slung over her shoulder. Sue kept her eyes fixed on the warehouse almost in tunnel vision. Her heart was in her throat thinking about what awaited her behind that door, so much so that she did not notice the flickering street light in front, or the distant sound of water slapping against concrete, or the eyes that seemed to trace her every step from up above.

She knew better than to walk straight into an ambush. She felt a bit scraped and bruised from their previous adventure today, but there was no time to waste. She'd learned today that mole people existed, which meant whatever had Reed had a good chance of being worse than what she could imagine, all the more reason to go in prepared.

Sue ducked into the space between the warehouse and its adjacent twin. She unslung the duffel bag from her shoulder and lay it in front of her, obscured from the dock behind a dumpster. Soon she had stripped from her disguise and left it inside the bag, the cool blue of her supersuit striking out against the murky darkness of the dock. For a moment she allowed herself to glance down at the logo on her chest, the faint '4' still emblazoned across her front.

"And then there were two..." She murmured to the night air. If they were really stepping back into this business they'd need to either add two more members or get a change of uniform. Maybe even a different name, 'The Terrific Two' didn't really roll off the tongue very well. Regardless, now wasn't the time to brainstorm, if she left it any longer she'd be saving people as "The Only One".

She gave the building a quick once over, tracing around the perimeter looking for anything unusual or any way in other than straight through the front door. A fire escape led up to the second floor from the back of the building, she made sure to turn invisible before making her way up to the old rusted door at the top. She tried the handle, no luck, and almost thought to try and throw it off its hinges with enough force had it not been such a loud way of entering. She glanced around, there was no keyhole to pick in the door, it was becoming more and more apparent that she might need to spring this trap if she wanted to get in.

She turned to make her way back down the stairs, but was stopped by Herbie frantically tapping at her knee with one metallic hand and pointing upwards with the other. She glanced down at her mechanical friend and then up and around the area he was signaling to until she saw the open window he was directing her to. She looked at him and smiled.

"Herbie, you are one crazy little bastard, you know that?" The little robot happily chirped back in reply. "Honestly think Reed must have been watching old episodes of The A-Team when he made you." She scooped up Herbie and after a brief word of reassurance, tossed him underhand through the window. He had enough energy to hover along the ground, but flight wasn't something he was capable of. Next, she deftly climbed up onto the railing of the fire escape, using one hand to steady herself against the side of the warehouse as she stood straight up. She glanced down, far enough to break a bone or two if she didn't catch herself. She took a breath, lining up her jump before leaping towards the open window.

She caught the frame with her fingers, her body swinging past the window slightly as the inertia carried her. She dug her boots into the side of the wall, slowing and steadying herself. She glanced down and then back up again before pulling herself up and through the window and into the upstairs office.

It was the kind of room you'd expect a dockyard foreman or mob fixer to keep. It was overlooking the main warehouse floor, windows coated in grime, blinds half-snapped and yellowed with age. There was a desk, but no papers. A chair, but no indentation. A coat hook on the wall that hadn't seen a coat in years.

Sue moved in low, scanning the corners first, then the ceiling. Herbie whirred beside her in near silence. The dust hadn't been disturbed. No footprints. No heat residue. No signs of a struggle. She turned to Herbie and whispered "No boss, no thugs, no welcome mat. That's either really good news...or incredibly bad." Herbie flicked his optics once in what could only be interpreted as a shrug.

Sue crept to the interior window that overlooked the warehouse floor and peered through the slats. She could see the top of Reed's head below her, laying back on a chair. She allowed herself a smile for a moment, before glancing around the room once more. She knew better than to take all of this at face value.

Her eyes landed on the grime-caked window to her right. Beyond it, barely visible in the dark, were the metal support beams that crisscrossed the ceiling. Not built to stand on, but she was half-sure they would hold her weight, even in their unmaintained state, and more importantly give her a better view of Reed and the inside of the warehouse.

Sue cracked the window open slowly, easing it upward with gloved fingers until there was just enough room to slip through. Herbie gave a soft chirp of concern behind her, but she didn't look back.

'And next up for the flying Graysons, Sue Storm!' She thought, imagining herself as a tightrope walker in the circus. She stepped out and crouched low, balancing on a narrow I-beam slick with condensation and rust. The whole thing trembled under her weight, just enough to remind her that these beams weren't built for footsteps. She lowered herself to a crawl, using her hands to steady her as she inched her way towards the centre of the warehouse.

She kept her eyes on Reed, discovering the computer monitor flashing green light at his unconscious face. Herbie was making his way down from the office as quietly as he could. That's when she saw it. She turned and was met face to face with what looked like a blank cinderblock on the body of a huge man.

The Awesome Android stood motionless atop the steel like it had grown there, crouched and silent, a sentinel of the rafters. It had no eyes, but it was still looking down at Reed.

Sue froze mid-step. Her breath caught in her throat and she tried to stop herself from screaming out in fear. Then her foot slipped. The rust flaked under her sole and her center of gravity vanished. She dropped in a sudden, sharp blur of motion between the beams, but her instincts kicked in.

She threw out a hand and formed a hard-light construct just beneath her, invisible to everyone but her. It hit her like a trampoline, catching her with a jolt that rattled her teeth. She gritted her jaw and forced her limbs still, pressed flat against the surface of her own invisible shield like a spider clinging to glass.

Above her, the Android's featureless face moved to track her, before rising to his feet. Sue rolled backwards to her a standing position as it leapt down after her, crushing the spot where she had fallen and sending concrete splintering out around him. She glanced back for a second at Reed, she had to keep this thing away from him. He was a sitting duck in his current state.

Sue took off in a sprint across the top of her still-active construct, building another platform mid-step just ahead of her. The instant her foot left one shield, it dissolved behind her, only to reappear in front a stuttering staircase of invisible force leading away from Reed, and around and above the android back up to the rafters.

The Android didn't roar. Didn't growl. Didn't make any sound at all. It simply moved. It launched after her, its metal frame hitting her last platform with a sound like a car crash inside a drum. The beam under her shuddered from the impact. Sue ducked low and rolled, hurling herself through a narrow break in the crossbeams and catching herself with another field just before her ribs would have slammed into a steel pipe.

"Okay, okay!" she gasped, scrambling upright. "Tall, dark, and featureless. Not exactly my type!"

She dropped back down to the warehouse floor, flipping midair, and caught herself with a cushion of force, sliding across the surface like it was made of glass. She wasn't trying to beat the thing yet. She just needed space, to keep it away from Reed and formulate a plan. She called out to Herbie. "Herb! Wake up Reed!"

The little robot nodded, hurriedly making his way over to Reed. The Android adjusted course in the air, its body morphing and sliding until it was facing down towards her. His hands turned into hammers as he dove down towards her

She veered left, skimming the side wall, leapt again and made a mistake. The next shield cracked under her feet before she could reinforce it. She tumbled sideways, slammed into the wall with her shoulder, and dropped to the floor, twisting mid-fall to land in a crouch.

Pain bloomed across her ribs and shot down her arm, but she bit it back, gritting her teeth. No time for that now. The Android hit the ground with a concussive boom, its hammer-fists cratering the floor where she had just been. Dust and broken concrete sprayed in every direction. Sue staggered to her feet, coughing, just as the thing straightened its back and started toward her again.

"Herbie!" she shouted, bracing herself. "Status on Re-" She caught herself mid-sentence. Worried she'd be giving away his identity if she spoke any further. "Status on Mr. Fantastic?!" The name was the first one that came to mind. She was sure Reed would hate it.

Herbie, now hovering beside Reed's chair, let out a flurry of distressed beeps and nudged Reed's face gently. For a few seconds nothing happened. Then a flicker, Reed's head stirred, a low groan escaped his lips.

"Come on, genius!" Sue shouted. "Any time now!"

The Android was nearly on her. Sue threw up a wide forcefield wall just in time to intercept a massive, piston-driven punch. The impact rippled across the shield like a drum skin under a mallet, sending out a low whump that cracked nearby windows.

The Android didn't react, it just continued it's assault. Like it was testing the field's tensile strength. Her field shimmered violently under the pressure.

"I leave Reed alone for 5 seconds and he goes and pisses off the T-1000. Just my luck." She muttered to herself.

Her shield was close to breaking and she knew it. It had never happened before, but she wasn't looking to find out what happened when it did. She pressed the shield out a bit, expanding it's size towards the automaton as he hammered down upon it. Quickly she faked it getting bigger and instead dropped it entirely and ducked under to her left. The android was mid swing and fell forward, clattering against the wall with a mighty thud and breaking through in a shower of bricks. The sound echoed through the night air against the sound of lapping waves.

Sue scrambled behind a row of rusted cylinders and thick industrial piping - ancient refrigerant lines, marked with frostbite warnings and faded chemical hazard symbols. She glanced at one of the pressure valves. She prayed it was still active.

"Okay." she whispered, "let's see if you like the cold."

The Android's thundering footfalls closed in fast. She reached up, formed a small shield around the valve like a wrench, and wrenched it sideways. The pipe groaned and then ruptured.

A jet of white freezing gas exploded outward, howling like a wolf as it started enveloping the Android mid-step. It began to freeze in place. Crystals starting to form across its torso and limbs, joints locking as cold mist hissed around its body. Sue didn't wait, she summoned a forcefield like a battering ram and slammed it into the Android's side with everything she had.

The blow connected with a crack like shattering ice. The Android stumbled, its left arm breaking free in a spray of brittle, frozen shrapnel. It staggered, systems glitching, one leg dragging behind it as it turned toward her, movements stiff and uncoordinated.

"Didn't like that, huh?" she muttered, breathing hard. The Android's remaining arm morphed violently, blades folding out albeit slower this time.

Sue backed away slowly, keeping herself between it and Reed, who still hadn't stirred. "Herbie!" she called. "Wake him up now!"

The little robot beeped frantically, doing everything it could to wake his Maker nudging his shoulder and chirping a sharp alert tone. Nothing was working. The little robot began to panic, and with one mighty thwack smacked him across the face. The scientist woke with a startle, glancing down in confusion at a very worried looking Herbie who was pointing frantically at Sue.

He craned his head around the chair just in time to catch her throwing up another shield as the Android lunged again, slower this time. Anger surged within him, he rose from the chair, breaking the clasps that held his arms and legs as his limbs increased in size.

Soon he stood at the same height and width as the Android, approaching behind it like a shadow taking shape. The machine hadn't even registered him yet. It was still focused on Sue, trying to muscle through another one of her shimmering constructs. Reed didn't utter a noise before he struck.

He wrapped two massive, elongated arms around the Android's torso and ripped it backward in a single, brutal motion. The Android staggered, caught completely off guard - the first miscalculation it had made all night.

Sue's eyes widened. "Reed?"

The scientist-turned-golem didn't answer. He slammed the Android into the floor once, then again, the warehouse trembling with each impact. The second hit cratered the concrete beneath them, the third broke it further, the android reaching out to grab onto something, anything that would make the beating stop.

The Android tried to shift its limbs, morphing one into a blade mid-swing, but Reed caught the arm before it could fully form and twisted. A wet-metal sound rang out as the mechanism bent in a direction it was never meant to go.

"You laid a hand on her." Reed snarled, his voice deeper, more strained. "That's the last thing you'll ever do."

The Android's body morphed, its remaining arm switching sides and swiping toward Reed's neck, but his shoulder stretched and absorbed the impact like dense rubber. His other hand morphed into a hammer-like mass and came crashing down onto the Android's chest, cracking more ice away and caving in one of the outer plates.

"Sue!" he barked, "Get ready!"

"For what?!"

He lifted the Android overhead with both arms, every tendon in his reshaped body straining against the weight. "To finish it!"

Sue nodded, her breath still heavy from the androids previous assault. She threw out her hands and built a tunnel of forcefields, a gauntlet of shimmering violet walls, aimed directly at the broken wall the Android had fallen through.

Reed let out a final grunt and hurled the machine through the air like a shotput. The Android smashed through each barrier, exploding through the final one with a thunderclap of kinetic force, and was launched out the side of the warehouse into the night.

Silence returned, to the room. The only noise was the collective panting of a super couple who had just defeated their first villain. Reed stood breathing with his hands on his knees, the stretching mass of his shoulders slowly retracting, his form shrinking back to his natural appearance. Sue let her shield fade and took a long, shaking breath.

Reed turned to her, face flushed with adrenaline and fear. "Are you okay?" He asked, rushing over to embrace her.

Sue nodded against his chest, still catching her breath. "Yeah. You?"

He pulled back slightly, searching her face for injuries. "Better now."

There was a pause. Then she smirked faintly. "You could've warned me before going full Kaiju."

He huffed something between a laugh and a groan, his hands dragging down his face. "Look...I'm sorry. About earlier. About Elder. I shouldn't have dismissed what you were saying."

She shook her head. "I'm sorry too. I didn't have to come down on you so hard. I just..." she hesitated, then admitted, "I've seen people like him get away with too much for too long."

Reed nodded slowly. "I get it. I do. But I can't just walk away from what he's discovered. There's potential there, Sue, not just scientific, but...maybe even for redemption. If we can steer it. If he'll let us."

"Then we don’t walk away." She said, a little more guarded. "But we don’t stop asking questions, either."

Reed gave a small nod. "Fair."

Herbie let out a proud chirp and hovered over to the cracked console still glowing faintly with green light. Reed followed it, flexing his sore hand. "I'd bet a million dollars whoever built that thing is the same person who brought me here."

They both looked at the screen in front. Flashing green letters read:

[TEST PASSED. I WILL BE IN CONTACT.]

---

Back at the Baxter Annex, the silence felt heavier than usual. The hum of distant city traffic barely touched the windows. The lights in the lab were dimmed, save for one pale projection glowing in the middle of the room.

Reed sat alone. His eyes were locked on the screen before him, paused on a single frame from a video almost a decade old. Their first day in the Baxter Annex. Before the mission. Before the powers. Before the split.

Sue had her legs draped over the back of the couch, tossing popcorn at Johnny, who was pretending to deflect it with a kitchen glove. Ben was eating pizza straight from the box, crust-first, and shouting color commentary from behind the camera. Reed himself stood off to the side, distracted with a makeshift antenna for the Herbie's first prototype, multitasking as always.

The only thing Reed thought while looking at it was how young they were, and how happy they were.

Reed unpaused the feed. The grainy footage played back through the tinny recording. Ben moving the camera over to reed and slapping a large hand against his back, laughing.

"The world's not gonna fix itself, Stretch."

It was the first time Reed had heard Ben's voice in years. He blinked slowly. That line had played on repeat in his head ever since they'd made it out of the warehouse. Ever since the fight. Ever since he'd stood in front of the console, and the parting message had flickered across the screen like a challenge.

Reed sat back, eyes glassy. There had been a moment, before the fight, just after the console gave its message where he'd had to make a choice. He could've reactivated Four_Scramble, kept their digital trail hidden, their past scrubbed and safe.

But he didn't. He chose to keep the memories instead. Chose to let the world know they were still out there. Even with all of the danger it brought. Heroes again.

Their security was gone now. Replaced with open files; Old images, articles, interviews, family photos. Even that terrible daytime talk show appearance Johnny had appeared on - having blagged his way onto the set by pretending to be a famous racecar driver. It was all still there.

Reed's hand floated above the interface and gestured again. A second projection lit the room, their suits -unstable molecule blends keyed to their unique bio-signatures, floated midair in ghostly outline, shifting slowly as he adjusted the structure. The traditional blue was bleeding away, replaced with clean white, edged in black and silver. The logo on the chest was clean and minimalist: not a '4', but three hexagons. He'd spent hours thinking about that shape. Three hexes - each six-sided, perfectly tessellated, endlessly repeatable. A pattern found in nature, in chemistry, in structure. They stood for cohesion under pressure. For balance. For adaptation. One for the past. One for the present. And one for the future. A new formula, built from what remained.

The Annex door slid open. Sue stepped into the room, her damp hair tucked behind her ears, dressed in a simple black tee and sweatpants, toweling off her arms. Her eyes adjusted to the light.

"Reed?" she asked. She followed his gaze to the paused frame still frozen on the screen. Her eyes softened. "Is that?"

He nodded. "First day."

Sue moved beside him, folding her arms. She smiled faintly at the sight of Johnny and Ben clowning around on-screen.

"I remember this." she said. "God, Johnny was always so cocky."

"Yeah. But he always believed in the mission. Even when I forgot what it was."

He tapped a few keys on the keyboard, and a hardlight projection of the new suits and the white-on-black hexagonal emblem began drifting in midair. "When I sat in that chair, in front of that terminal, they gave me a choice. Either save the security protocols...or save our memories." Sue glanced at him, a sudden seriousness in her expression. "I chose the memories." he said.

She didn't say anything at first. She was shocked to tell the truth. She'd never known Reed to ever look at those files. Let alone be so affected by the prospect of losing them.

Reed stood, walking slowly toward the projection. "We built Four_Scramble to keep us invisible. That was the deal, hide long enough to survive. Hope someone else topples Lord so things can go back to the way they were. But that's not what Johnny wanted. That's not what Ben believed in. And when it came down to it, I couldn't erase what little we still had left of them. I wouldn't."

He reached up and rotated the floating schematic slowly with his hand, the white suits glinting faintly in the lab light. "Things will never go back to the way they were. It's time we start looking forward rather than back." Sue moved over to inspect the new suits next to him. "The hexagons weren’t just an aesthetic decision." He continued. "I've been thinking about the structure. What it means."

He pointed to the logo, three black hexagons intersecting in a triangular pattern. "Hexagons are found everywhere in nature. In carbon lattices. In honeycombs. In snowflakes and crystal formations. They're efficient. Resilient. They bind together under stress and distribute pressure perfectly. And they replicate. Not just as a pattern...but as a principle."

Sue took a step closer, listening. "One hex for the past." Reed said pointing to the left hexagon. "For Johnny. For Ben. For everything we lost." He pointed to the second. "One for the present. For you and me. For everything we still have." And then the third. "And one for the future. For what we will build next. For the people we help along the way."

He turned to face her, the faint light of the projection casting a glow across his tired features. "I didn't just choose the archive because I was sentimental, Sue. I chose it because it reminded me that we're not here to disappear. We're here to endure. To make a difference."

Sue looked at the symbol for a long time. "Not a four anymore." she said.

"No." Reed replied. "But something that can hold more than four. Something that can grow. Fit together again. Whatever this team becomes next...we're not going backward."

Sue smiled at him. "I knew you'd come around eventually, genius." Before embracing him in a kiss.

---

---

Sue turned on the TV, hoping for static, for weather, for anything that would quiet her brain for a while. Instead, the channel flickered into a late-night news segment. The Daily Bugle's, judging by the dramatized footage and pointed narration. A female reporter was speaking over grainy footage of flashing lights and blurred security camera stills.

"A classified breach occurred last night at the former Baxter Building, now operated under federal jurisdiction. Eyewitnesses report a short, intense firefight between security forces and two unidentified Meta individuals. No fatalities have been officially reported. Eyewitnesses claim to have seen two agents taken away in ambulances, though federal sources maintain the injuries were minor and non-lethal.

Surveillance footage, which has not been released to the public, allegedly shows one suspect manipulating some form of energy barrier, while another appeared to stretch his limbs beyond normal human limits. Department officials have refused to comment on the authenticity of these claims.

The building, once home to the infamous Baxter Foundation think tank and later the former short lived superhero group known as the Fantastic Four, has remained under lockdown since the program's abrupt dissolution years ago after President Lord's election. This marks the first recorded incident of unauthorized access since its closure.

While federal sources deny any connection to the disbanded team, speculation is mounting online. Digital analysts have noted similarities between the intruders' tactics and archived footage of the Fantastic Four's operations during the The Reach Event.

No suspects have been identified, and no group has claimed responsibility."

The reporters voice trailed off. Seems there was no escaping it now, they were in it for the long haul. Sue rose from her seat shaking her head. Her gaze drifted to the projection still hovering in the air, their new suits, pale and crisp, edged in silver and marked with the triad of hexagons.

She stepped forward, brushing her fingers across the edge of the hardlight interface. The panels shimmered at her touch. Her eyes glanced towards the computer screen Reed had been using to work on them.

Below the schematic, Reed had left the command line open. The same one he'd used to rewrite their suits. Sue sat down in the chair he'd vacated and pulled the keyboard toward her. She browsed a few news sites, the details of their incursion were few and far between, but some leaks had got through as they were always bound to. Next she went a bit more off grid, various online forums where people were arguing over whether or not they had been the real thing or copycats. She tried to stay off sites like those, the users who hated metas were bad enough, but the ones obssessed with superheroes were just weird.

Her fingers hovered over the keys for just a second before she began to type. The interface was crude and outdated. A relic from the early darknet boards used by off-grid metahumans, buried behind dead protocols and false DNS returns.

A single open thread pulsed faintly: [ THREAD 267.14 | SUBJECT : FUTURE FOUNDATION | ] She began to type.

Tired of running?
So are we.
The Future Foundation is active.
Reach out, or don't.
We'll be there.

She hit send. The screen stuttered, then blinked back to black. No trace of the message remained. But the right people would see it. It was time to help the world again.