The Hero Code

[Thegameaholic]

The sky over Bellwood was usually a pristine, postcard-perfect blue, but today it was currently being painted with streaks of obnoxious neon pink and radioactive green.

"I'm telling you, Rhombus, the package said highly explosive, not highly flammable! You went and ruined the structural integrity of the Plumber transport before we even got to raid the good stuff!"

"Aw, shut yer trap, Octagon! A boom is a boom, and this here boom got us a whole crate of Level 5 sub-atomic disruptors! Ma's gonna be so proud she might actually let us keep our allowance this week!"

Ben Tennyson skidded around the corner of an overturned hovering semi-truck, his green and black jacket catching the wind. The Omnitrix on his left wrist gleamed with a familiar, comforting emerald hum. Beside him, Rook Blonko moved with fluent, practiced agility, his Proto-Tool already shifting into its blaster configuration.

"Vreedles," Ben groaned, rubbing his temples. "Why is it always the Vreedles on a Tuesday? Don't they have a galaxy-wide restraining order against existing within three sectors of Earth?"

"Technically, Ben, their legal counsel managed to reduce the restriction to Earth's upper atmosphere," Rook corrected smoothly, firing a non-lethal energy snare toward Rhombus Vreedle. "Regrettably, they appear to have a very loose interpretation of the word 'atmosphere'."

"Heads up!" Ben slapped the faceplate of the Omnitrix. The dial popped up, displaying the holographic silhouette of a massive, rocky brawler. "Time to weigh in!"

He slammed the dial down. In a flash of blinding green light, his form expanded. Rigid, deep-red skin erupted over massive muscles; a second pair of arms burst from his torso, and four piercing yellow eyes locked onto the bumbling clone brothers.

"FOUR ARMS!" the Tetramand roared, his voice shaking the asphalt.

"Aw, look at that, Octagon! The Omnitrix boy wants to play rassle!" Rhombus grinned, lifting a weapon that looked entirely too large for any living creature to hold safely.

Before the trigger could be pulled, a strange sensation washed over Ben. It didn't start in his body; it started in his mind. It wasn't the usual tactical overlay or the genetic echo of the Tetramand DNA. It was an agonizing, jagged spike of pure, unadulterated misery.

Ben stumbled, his four massive hands dropping to his knees. The green light of the Omnitrix flickered violently—an occurrence that hadn't happened since the universe reset.

"Someone... please..."

The voice didn't belong to anyone he knew. It was a girl. She sounded young, entirely broken, and buried under a suffocating weight of absolute terror. The sound wasn't coming from the street, or from the sky, or even from the Plumber comm-links. It was echoing directly from the core of his soul, vibrating through the very fabric of the Omnitrix.

"Ben?" Rook's voice sounded muffled, as if he were underwater. "Ben, your biometric readings are fluctuating erratically. Are you experiencing a feedback loop?"

"Please... I can't breathe... someone, anyone... be a hero..."

The desperate prayer tore through Ben's consciousness like a physical blade. A localized distortion field began to warp the space directly around Four Arms. The air pressure dropped instantly, howling with the sound of a violent, cross-dimensional vacuum.

"Rook!" Ben gasped out, his Tetramand vocal cords straining as the green energy of his transformation began to violently unravel, snapping back into human form. "Something's... something's pulling me!"

"Hold on!" Rook leaped forward, reaching out with his Proto-Tool's grappling hook, but the silver light fractured like breaking glass.



With a sound like a collapsing star, Ben Tennyson vanished from the streets of Bellwood, leaving behind nothing but a faint scent of ozone and two very confused Vreedle brothers.

Inside the dark, rusted vertical coffin of Locker 82, Taylor Hebert was dying.

It wasn't a quick death. It was the slow, agonizing asphyxiation of the soul. The air was thick, rancid, and heavy with the putrid stench of used feminine hygiene products, rotting waste, and toxic chemicals that had been fermenting in the enclosed space for days. Every breath she took filled her lungs with a biohazardous miasma that made her violently ill, but there was nowhere to turn, nowhere to vomit without it coating her own skin.

She had been screaming for hours. Her throat was raw, bleeding, scraping against itself like sandpaper. Outside, the muffled sounds of Winslow High School's hallway had transitioned from cruel, mocking laughter to the mundane drone of changing periods, and finally, to a terrifying, hollow silence.

They had left her. Emma. Sophia. Madison. The entire world.

Why? The question repeated in her mind like a broken record, a rhythmic torture device. What did I do to deserve this? Why doesn't anyone help me?

Her fingers clawed at the rusted metal slats, her fingernails tearing until they bled, leaving dark streaks against the grime. The darkness began to warp. Her mind, pushed past the absolute brink of human endurance, started to fracture.

Suddenly, her perception exploded.

She wasn't just inside the locker anymore. She was everywhere. She could feel the structural geometry of the school, the wiring in the walls, the microscopic dust motes floating in the air. And then, she saw it a massive, multi-dimensional entity, vast beyond human comprehension, unfolding like an impossible flower made of crystalline math and starlight. It was looking for a connection. It was looking for a way to express its purpose: Administration.

But Taylor didn't want to administrate. She didn't want to control. She didn't want to adapt to this filth.

With the final, dying embers of her sanity, her mind screamed out a desperate, furious counter-command to the cosmos. She didn't want a tool to survive the dark. She wanted a savior. She wanted a light.

I need a hero!

The entity paused. The crystalline network of the Shard recoiled, its algorithmic progression disrupted by an anomalous, foreign signal bleeding into the dimensional fold. A secondary anchor forged not from the entity's own energy, but from a cosmic device that held the genetic blueprints of a million worlds slammed into Taylor's nervous system.

The Shard connected and tore open a localized wormhole, dragging a living catalyst across the multiverse to answer the specific, literal parameters of her dying wish.

Ben Tennyson hit the floor hard, the breath leaving his lungs in a sharp woosh.

Instantly, his senses were assaulted. The air didn't smell like Bellwood. It didn't smell like the Undertown markets, which was saying something because Undertown smelled like sour milk and damp alien fur. This smell was foul, biological, and dripping with a malice that made his stomach turn instantly.

"Ugh... what thehell..." Ben groaned, pushing himself up onto his hands and knees.

He was in a hallway. The floors were covered in scuffed, institutional linoleum. The walls were a depressing, sickly shade of institutional beige, lined with rows of battered, olive-green metal lockers. The lighting flickered with a depressing hum that suggested a total lack of maintenance.

"...help..."

The sound was tiny. It was right next to him.

Ben bolted to his feet, his heroic instincts overriding the massive headache pounding against his skull. He spun around and locked his eyes on Locker 82. The metal door was vibrating slightly. From the narrow ventilation slats at the top, a sickening odor wafted out, alongside the faint, wet sound of a girl sobbing.

"Hey! Hang on!" Ben yelled, rushing over to the locker. He grabbed the padlock hanging from the latch. It was heavy, industrial, and completely locked.

Inside, Taylor heard a voice. It wasn't the mocking sneer of Sophia or the cold, detached dismissal of Principal Blackwell. It was a boy's voice. It sounded loud, clear, and dripping with genuine, unforced concern.

"Who's... who's there?" she rasped, her voice barely a whisper.

"My name's Ben! I'm getting you out of there right now, just hold on!"

Ben didn't waste time looking for a key. He didn't look for a crowbar. He reached for the Omnitrix, his thumb hitting the activation button. The faceplate popped up, glowing with its characteristic, vibrant green hue—a stark, almost offensive contrast to the dismal surroundings of Winslow High.

"Let's see who's up for some heavy lifting," Ben muttered, spinning the dial. He needed someone strong, someone precise. He bypassed his heavier, more destructive aliens like Way Big or Atomix. He didn't want to bring the whole building down on top of her.

He settled on an old reliable. A silhouette with a crystalline structure appeared.

"Diamondhead. Perfect."

Ben slammed his palm onto the faceplate.

A brilliant flash of emerald light illuminated the dingy hallway. From the center of the light, Ben's body rapidly transformed. His skin hardened into flawless, pale-green silicon crystal. Sharp, angular shards erupted from his back, and his clothing merged into a sleek, black-and-green uniform.

Ben raised his right hand. With a fluid thought, his fingers fused and lengthened, morphing into a sharp, gleaming blade of unbreakable diamond. He didn't even need to swing hard. He slid the crystalline blade through the heavy steel padlock as if it were warm butter. The lock shattered, pieces of metal clattering to the floor.

With his left hand, he gripped the edge of the locker door. The metal groaned, buckling under the immense strength of a Petrosapien. With a firm, controlled pull, Ben ripped the locker door completely off its hinges, tossing it aside like a piece of cardboard.

The contents of the locker spilled outward.

Ben's crystalline eyes widened in absolute horror. A young girl, gaunt, covered in horrific, unmentionable filth, with matted dark hair and broken glasses hanging from one ear, collapsed forward. She didn't hit the floor; Diamondhead's massive, crystal arms caught her gently, cradling her frail form against his chest.

"I've got you. I've got you, you're safe," Ben said, his metallic voice dropping to the softest register he could manage.

Taylor looked up through blurred, tear-stained vision. She didn't see a boy anymore. She saw a creature made of living, beautiful gemstone. He was radiating a faint, comforting warmth, and despite his intimidating appearance, his grip was incredibly gentle.

"You... you came," she whispered, her consciousness fraying at the edges.

"Yeah. I came," Ben replied. He looked at her state—the bruises, the chemical burns on her skin, the sheer trauma radiating from her small frame. A deep, righteous fury sparked in his chest. Who would do this to someone? What kind of sick monsters live here?

He realized she needed medical attention immediately. The smell alone told him she had been exposed to severe bio-contaminants.

"Hold on tight," Ben told her.

He tapped the hourglass symbol on his chest. In another flash of green light, the crystalline form of Diamondhead melted away, replaced instantly by a sleek, feline humanoid creature with blue and black fur, wearing a pointed mask and a pair of high-tech running shoes built naturally into his anatomy.

"Fasttrack!" the alien declared, his voice high-pitched and bursting with energy.

Taylor didn't even have time to gasp. Ben adjusted his grip, lifting her securely in a bridal carry. He looked down the hallway, spotting the 'Exit' sign at the far end.

"Time to jet."

To the average citizen of Brockton Bay, the world was a series of gray gradients. It was a city defined by its decay, its corruption, and the ever-present shadow of the gangs.

But to Ben Tennyson, traveling at Mach 3, Brockton Bay looked like a living nightmare of a dystopian alternate timeline.

As Fasttrack blurred through the school doors, shattering the glass with the sheer force of his sonic boom, he hit the streets. He didn't know where the nearest hospital was, but a quick scan of the horizon revealed a massive building with a glowing red cross a few miles away near the city center.

As he ran, the world passed by in a slow-motion smear, allowing him to take in the sheer, suffocating atmosphere of this new environment.

What is wrong with this place? Ben thought, his feline eyes darting from left to right.

The buildings were covered in soot, rust, and graffiti that didn't look like the artistic expressions of Bellwood teenagers it looked like territory markings. He saw symbols of stylized skulls, coiled snakes, and crude hooked crosses. The streets were filled with potholes, abandoned vehicles, and people who walked with their heads down, their shoulders hunched, radiating a collective aura of hopeless defeat.

There were no alien tourists walking the streets. There were no Plumber hover-ships patrolling the sky. There were no colorful billboard advertisements for Mr. Smoothy. Everything was bleak, industrial, and profoundly depressing. It felt more alien to Ben than Anur Transyl.

"Hang in there, kid," Ben muttered, feeling the girl's shallow breathing against his chest. "Almost there."

He pushed his legs harder, his paws striking the asphalt with rhythmic, thunderous cracks. He dodged around a rusty city bus, the passengers inside only seeing a blue-and-black blur and feeling a sudden gust of wind that rocked the vehicle.

Within less than thirty seconds, Fasttrack skidded to a halt outside the emergency room entrance of Brockton General Hospital. The friction from his sudden stop left smoking black skid marks on the concrete.

The automatic glass doors slid open as Ben walked in, still in his alien form.

The waiting room was moderately crowded. A tired-looking nurse behind the triage desk looked up, her eyes widening in immediate, practiced panic. A strange, unknown Case 53 walking into an ER was usually a sign of an impending gang war.

"Step back! Is it a villain attack?!" a security guard shouted, his hand instantly going to his holster, though his fingers trembled violently.

"Whoa, whoa! Lower the pea-shooter, pal! I'm a good guy!" Ben shouted, his Fasttrack voice dripping with urgency. He stepped forward, carefully presenting the unconscious Taylor. "She needs a doctor right now! She was locked in a school locker filled with biological waste! She's dehydrated, she's got chemical burns, and she's barely breathing!"

The nurse behind the desk looked past the alien appearance of the savior and saw the horrific condition of the patient. The sheer smell of rotten filth finally caught up with the room, causing several waiting patients to gag.

"Code Blue in the lobby! Get a gurney out here now!" the nurse yelled into her intercom.

Within seconds, two orderlies rushed out with a rolling stretcher. Ben gently, meticulously lowered Taylor onto the white sheets. As her body left his arms, he felt a strange, physical resistance like an invisible, elastic cord pulling at his chest, trying to drag him closer to her.

Taylor's hand randomly twitched, her fingers brushing against the Omnitrix symbol on Ben's chest before she was wheeled away through the double doors.

The moment the contact occurred, a violent jolt of golden-green electricity arced between the two of them.

Ben gasped, stumbling backward as the Omnitrix timed out, flashing red before reverting him back into his human form. The sleek, blue-and-black feline mask and fur melted away in a shower of vibrant green particles, leaving a completely ordinary, brown-haired teenage boy in a green jacket standing in the center of the room.

The entire hospital lobby went dead silent.

The security guard dropped his jaw, his hand freezing on his holster. The nurse gasped, her hands flying over her mouth. Several patients in the waiting chairs stood up, staring at Ben with expressions of absolute, profound shock.

"Oh my god," someone whispered from the back of the room. "He just... he just unmasked."

"Is he insane? Right out in the open?" another patient muttered, pulling out a cell phone to snap a frantic, blurry photo. "Wait... green jacket... no mask... is he a new member of New Wave? Did Carol and Mark adopt another kid?"

"He looks too young to be an independent. It has to be New Wave. They're the only ones crazy enough to walk around showing their real faces to the world!"

Ben blinked, looking around the room at the whispering, staring crowd. He looked down at his clothes, then back at the panicked, awestruck faces of the citizens.

"Uh... New Wave?" Ben asked aloud, scratching the back of his neck, completely bewildered. "Is that a band? Look, I don't know what kind of music you guys are into, but I really just need to know where the bathroom is so I can wash this smell off my hands."

The crowd only stared harder, utterly flabbergasted by his casual dismissal of what they assumed was a massive, career-ending security breach.

Ben sat in the uncomfortable plastic chair of the hospital waiting room, his legs swinging restlessly. He had spent the last two hours ignoring the blatant stares of the hospital staff, who kept looking at him as if he were a walking dead man walking.

His Plumber badge had no signal. The Omnitrix's universal distress beacon was flashing a geometric error code he had never seen before. When he had slipped outside earlier to escape the suffocating stares, he had noticed the newspapers in a nearby vending machine.

The Brockton Bay Yacht Club Bombing. Protectorate ENE Welcomes New Ward. The Year: 2011.

"Great. Just great," Ben whispered to himself, leaning his head back against the wall. "Not only am I in a completely different city, I think I'm in a completely different dimension. And the calendar is backwards."

"Excuse me? Son?"

Ben blinked, looking up. A tall, gaunt man with messy dark hair and a deeply lined face was standing in front of him. He looked like he hadn't slept in a week, his clothes were wrinkled, and his eyes were bloodshot and swimming with a mixture of terror and profound gratitude.

"Are you the boy who brought my daughter here?" Danny Hebert asked, his voice shaking.

Ben stood up immediately, extending a hand. "Ben. Ben Tennyson. And yeah, I found her at the school. I couldn't just leave her there."

Danny didn't shake his hand. Instead, the older man collapsed forward, throwing his arms around Ben in a desperate, weeping hug. "Thank you... oh God, thank you... the doctors said if she had been in there another hour... the infection... the toxic shock..."

Ben, slightly uncomfortable but understanding the raw emotion, patted Danny's back gently. "It's fine, Mr. Hebert. Anyone would have done it."

Though, looking at that school, apparently a lot of people didn't, Ben thought grimly.

"They're allowing me to see her now," Danny said, pulling back and wiping his eyes. He looked at Ben with a deeply troubled, anxious expression. "The nurse said... she said the boy who brought her in should come too. She keeps calling for your name in her sleep. And, Ben... there's something wrong with her medical readings. The doctors are completely baffled."

Ben's brow furrowed. "Baffled how?"

"They said her DNA is fluctuating. They think... oh god, they think she might be a parahuman now," Danny whispered, his voice cracking with the specific dread of a parent whose child had just been thrust into a dangerous, violent world of capes and villains. He didn't know how or why people gained powers the public only knew that some people suddenly changed after horrific tragedies but the mere reality of it terrified him. "They think whatever happened to her in that locker caused her to change."

Before Ben could ask what a parahuman was, a loud alarm began to blare from the intensive care corridor.

Beep-beep-beep-beep!

"Doctor! Her vitals are spiking! We have an anomalous power manifestation!" a voice screamed from down the hall.

Ben didn't wait for Danny. He bolted down the corridor, his sneakers squeaking against the clean floors. He followed the sound of the shouting straight to Room 104.

When he threw the door open, the sight inside made his jaw drop.

Taylor Hebert was awake, sitting upright in her hospital bed. Her eyes were glowing with a vibrant, glowing green hue, entirely devoid of her pupils. Her entire left arm had transformed into the massive, fiery, molten-rock limb of a Pyronite—Heatblast. Sparks of intense, white-hot fire were leaping from her fingers, scorching the sterile hospital sheets.

The doctors and nurses were cowering against the far wall, holding up medical trays like shields.

"I can't... I can't control it!" Taylor screamed, her voice layering into a dual resonance—her own voice mixed with the crackling, volcanic roar of a Pyronite. "It burns! No, wait, it doesn't burn, but it's too much! There's too much inside my head!"

The moment Ben stepped into the room, the Omnitrix on his wrist flared to life without him touching it. A stream of green data-energy arced from his watch, connecting directly to the molten rock of Taylor's arm.

"Taylor! Calm down!" Ben yelled, rushing past the terrified doctors. He didn't care about the fire; he had dealt with Heatblast for years. He reached out and grabbed her fiery hand with his bare hand.

The moment their skin met, the fire didn't burn him. Instead, the molten rock rapidly cooled, turning into gray ash before flaking away to reveal her normal, pale skin underneath.

Taylor gasped, her chest heaving as the green glow faded from her eyes. She slumped back against the pillows, completely exhausted, sweating profusely. She looked at Ben, her eyes wide with a terrifying realization.

"You're... you're inside my head," she whispered, her voice trembling. "I can feel your watch. I can feel... everything it holds. A million voices... a million shapes..."

Ben looked down at the Omnitrix, which had returned to its calm, green standby mode. Then he looked at Taylor, who was staring at him as if he held the keys to the universe.

"Okay," Ben said, scratching the back of his neck with a wry, nervous grin. "This is definitely a new one. I think we need to talk."

 

[To-be-hero-X]

Yeah I would like to say even og 10 old ben is actually more than capable of stomping worm vers much less teen Ben also ben is isn't above killing even given no other choice and your threat that needs to be dealt with he make that call hell he even almost killed Kevin if Gwen didn't step in

 

[Thegameaholic]

Yeah I would like to say even og 10 old ben is actually more than capable of stomping worm vers much less teen Ben also ben is isn't above killing even given no other choice and your threat that needs to be dealt with he make that call hell he even almost killed Kevin if Gwen didn't step in

Click to shrink...

Ben actually has a Massive Body Count even when he was 10 he will spare you under circumstances but he has no issues killing you

 

[Thegameaholic]

The sterile, white fluorescent lights of Room 104 hummed with a monotonous, clinical vibration that did nothing to soothe the ringing in Ben Tennyson's ears. The scent of ozone and burnt hospital sheets still hung faintly in the air, a stubborn ghost of the brief, terrifying manifestation of Pyronite fire that had nearly incinerated the room's medical equipment.

Ben sat on a squeaky plastic stool, leaning his elbows on his knees, his eyes fixed on the teenager resting in the elevated hospital bed. Taylor Hebert looked impossibly fragile beneath the heavy layers of standard-issue cotton blankets. Her face was pale, almost translucent, save for the dark, bruised hollows beneath her eyes and the angry red angry patches where chemical burns were slowly beginning to blister.

Beside her, Danny Hebert stood like a sentinel, his hand gripping his daughter's uninjured right hand with a white-knuckled desperation. The man looked completely drained, his shoulders slumped beneath a frayed jacket that smelled faintly of salt air and industrial tobacco. Every few seconds, Danny's eyes would flicker toward the closed door of the hospital room, his jaw tightening in anticipation of the inevitable storm. The PRT had been called. In Brockton Bay, when a new Cape manifested with enough force to warp reality and melt medical equipment, the authorities didn't just send a memo; they sent heavily armed men in power armor.

"So," Ben began, his voice breaking the heavy silence. He ran a hand through his shaggy brown hair, letting out a breath that was half-laugh, half-sigh. "We're waiting for the local superhero cops, I'm stuck in a city that looks like a rainy Tuesday in Anur Transyl, and my universe-hopper beacon is completely dead. I guess now is as good a time as any to exchange life stories. I'll go first, since I'm technically the alien element here."

Taylor shifted slightly, her gaze tracking him with an intensity that made him feel like he was being dissected under a microscope. "You keep saying that word," she rasped, her voice still raw and scraping against her throat. "Alien."

"Because it's true," Ben said simply, tapping the faceplate of the Omnitrix resting against his left wrist. The device sat dormant, its emerald hourglass glowing with a soft, steady pulse. "Look, I know this is going to sound completely insane, but I am not from your version of Earth. In my dimension, the year is 2019. We've got space-travel down to a science, alien refugees living in underground cities beneath major metropolitan areas, and an intergalactic law enforcement agency called the Plumbers keeping the peace. I was literally in the middle of fighting a pair of immortal, low-IQ clone brothers named the Vreedles in my hometown of Bellwood when... well, when whatever happened to you dragged me through a cosmic drainpipe."

Danny and Taylor shared a brief, heavy look. It was a silent communication born of years of shared grief and mutual understanding, but right now, it was dripping with a profound, quiet skepticism.

"Ben," Danny said, his voice slow and deliberately gentle, the way one might speak to someone standing too close to the edge of a roof. "We know about parallel worlds. Everyone does. There's Earth-Aleph.They're a few years behind us technologically, sure, and they don't have many capes, but... they don't have aliens, Ben. No one has aliens. The only things that come from the stars are... well, things we don't like to think about."

"I'm not talking about Earth-Aleph, Mr. Hebert," Ben insisted, leaning forward, his tone earnest. "I'm talking about a completely separate multiverse structure. And this watch? It's called the Omnitrix. It doesn't give me superpowers because I'm special. It's a highly advanced genetic catalog. When I slap this dial, it literally overwrites my human DNA with the genetic code of a completely different species. The crystal guy you saw? Petrosapien from the planet Petropia. The fast cat? A Citrakayah from Chalybeas. It's a diplomatic tool designed to let the wearer walk a mile in another species' shoes. Or, you know, paws."

Taylor closed her eyes for a long moment, a faint, weary sigh escaping her lips. When she opened them, there was a profound sense of pity in her expression. To her, the story made perfect sense through the cruel, distorted lens of her own world's logic.

He's a Tinker, she thought, a wave of cold certainty washing over her. A high-level Tinker who suffered a horrific psychological break during his own Trigger Event. His brain couldn't handle the strain of the data influx from his passenger, so it built a massive, elaborate delusion to protect itself. He built a watch that lets him change shapes, and his mind invented an entire sci-fi universe of aliens and space-cops to justify why he has those forms. He thinks it's 2019 because his internal clock is completely shattered.

"It's a beautiful piece of technology, Ben," Taylor said softly, her voice laced with a gentle condescension she didn't mean to project, but couldn't entirely hide. "The watch... it's amazing Tinkertech. Truly. The way you changed in the lobby, the way you bypassed the lock on the... on the locker... you must have spent months, maybe years, designing the blueprints in your head before it finally came together. But you don't have to lie to us. You don't have to pretend you're from space. The PRT is going to evaluate you anyway. They'll probably classify you as a Tinker/Changer."

Ben stared at her, his jaw slightly slack. He looked down at the Omnitrix, then back at Taylor's utterly convinced face. "Tinkertech? You think I built this?I can barely wire a DVD player without my cousin Gwen yelling at me. This was made by Azmuth! He's a Galvan! He's basically a three-inch-tall super-genius frog who lives on a planet called Galvan Prime!"

"Ben, please," Danny interrupted, placing a comforting hand on Ben's shoulder. The grip was heavy with a father's exhaustion. "We understand. Cape minds... they work differently. The stress of gaining powers can do strange things to a person's memories. We aren't judging you. You saved my daughter's life today. If you want to tell the PRT you're from the year 2019 and that you work with space frogs, that's your business. But you're safe here. You don't need to keep the act up for us."

Ben opened his mouth to argue, the sheer, ridiculous irony of the situation threatening to make him laugh. He was a universal hero, a guy who had literally held the weight of the Big Bang in his bare hands, and here he was being treated like a confused teenager who had read too many comic books. But as he looked at the profound weariness in Danny's eyes and the absolute conviction in Taylor's, he realized it was a losing battle. They were trapped in their own worldview, conditioned by whatever messed-up reality they lived in.

"Alright," Ben muttered, throwing his hands up in a gesture of temporary surrender. "Fine. We'll circle back to the 'space frog' conversation later. If I'm in a different version of Earth, you guys owe me an explanation. What is this place? Because from what I saw out there on the highway, Brockton Bay looks like it's one bad day away from falling into the ocean."

Taylor let out a dry, bitter sound that might have been a laugh if her lungs didn't burn so badly. "It is. That's just Earth-Bet for you."

For the next twenty minutes, Danny and Taylor took turns painting a picture of their world, and with every sentence, Ben felt a cold weight settling deeper into his chest. They spoke of Scion—a golden, silent god who had descended from the sky three decades ago, handing out miracles but offering no real answers. They spoke of the PRT, the Protectorate, and the strict, unyielding laws of the Cape subculture.

But it was when Danny mentioned the Endbringers that the atmosphere in the room completely froze.

"Behemoth. Leviathan. the Simurgh," Danny whispered, his hands trembling slightly as he recited the names like a dark prayer. "They're... monsters, Ben. Walking disasters. Every few months, one of them appears at a random major city on the globe. Leviathan sinks landmasses. Behemoth burns cities to ash. The Simurgh... she drives people mad just by singing. We lose thousands of heroes every year just trying to slow them down. Humanity is losing. We're losing a slow, agonizing war of attrition, and there's nothing anyone can do but watch the clock tick down."

Ben listened, his typical lighthearted demeanor completely evaporating. His mind raced, comparing these 'Endbringers' to the threats he knew. Vilgax, the Highbreed, Malware, even the Diagon he had faced world-ending entities before. But the way Danny spoke of them wasn't the way people spoke of a villain who could be defeated. It was the way people spoke of the weather. It was an inevitable, malicious force of nature that the entire planet had simply accepted as a tax for existing.

"That's... horrible," Ben said softly, the wit completely gone from his tone. "A whole world just waiting to die. No wonder this city feels like a tomb."

He turned his gaze back to Taylor, his green eyes sharpening with a sudden, localized focus. "Which brings us back to you. Your dad said you 'triggered' because of what happened in that school. How did you end up inside a locked container filled with... with that kind of biological nightmare, Taylor? Who did that to you?"

Taylor's entire body went rigid beneath the blankets. The fragile peace she had found in the room shattered instantly, replaced by a suffocating wall of defensive panic. Her fingers curled into the fabric of the hospital sheets, her knuckles turning stark white.

No, her mind screamed. No, no, no. I can't tell him. I can't tell my dad.

If she told them the truth if she told them that Emma, her former best friend, the girl her dad still thought of as a second daughter, was the architect of her torment—it would destroy Danny. He was already hanging on by a thread, blaming himself for his inability to provide for her, blaming himself for his grief over her mother. If he knew that the bullying had escalated to a literal attempted murder while the school administration watched and smiled, he would go to the school with a pipe or a gun. He would get himself killed, or thrown into the Birdcage, and she would be entirely alone.

And Ben? Ben was a literal superhero, whether his memories were broken or not. He was a boy who looked at the world with a bright, unclouded confidence that she couldn't even begin to comprehend. If he knew how pathetic she was how she had spent months taking the insults, the ruined homework, the shoved shoulders, the stolen clothes, only to end up weeping and begging in a box of human filth he would look at her with disgust. He would see her as a victim. A charity case. A broken, useless girl who couldn't even stand up for herself.

"It... it doesn't matter," Taylor muttered, her eyes darting away to fixate on a generic landscape painting on the opposite wall. "It was just... some people at school. Some miserable people who wanted to make someone else miserable. A prank that went entirely too far."

"A prank?" Danny's voice rose, a dangerous, trembling edge cutting through his grief. "Taylor, they locked you in a hazardous waste dump! You have internal infections! You almost died! That isn't a prank, that's attempted murder! I need names, Taylor. Tell me who did this. Tell me who Blackwell is protecting!"

"I don't know!" Taylor lied, her voice cracking as a single, hot tear escaped her eye and slid down her cheek. "It was dark, Dad! I was shoved from behind before first period! I didn't see their faces! It could have been anyone from the gangs, or just... just random kids who thought it would be funny to pick on the quiet girl! Please, just... let it go. It's over. I'm out."

Ben watched her closely. His experience with a wide variety of liars—from intergalactic warlords to Kevin Levin trying to explain why his car was covered in pink spray paint—told him instantly that she was hiding something massive. The specific way her shoulders hitched, the defensive posture, the sheer terror not of the memory, but of the admission. She wasn't protecting her attackers out of loyalty; she was protecting something else. Her own pride, or perhaps her father's safety.

He opened his mouth to press her, to tell her that heroes don't let monsters get away with stuff like this, but Danny let out a ragged, defeated sigh, burying his face in his hands. The man was too exhausted to fight her right now, and Ben realized that pushing a freshly traumatized girl into a panic attack wasn't going to solve anything.

"Alright," Ben said gently, throwing a warning glance at Danny to signal that they should drop it for the moment. "We'll let it rest for now. But for the record? Where I come from, guys who do stuff like that don't get to just walk away because they call it a prank."

He leaned back, shifting the topic to something more technical. "So, you asked what your powers are. From what I saw when you woke up, whatever happened to you in that locker... it didn't just give you a standard ability. When your mind was breaking down, looking for a way out, it tapped into a massive energy source. Specifically, it hijacked the wireless configuration matrix of the Omnitrix."

Taylor blinked, looking down at her left arm, which still felt strangely warm, as if a faint current of electricity was constantly humming just beneath her skin. "I... I can still feel it. It's like a phantom limb, but instead of an arm, it's a massive, shifting library of... shapes. When I panicked earlier, I didn't mean to turn into that fire thing. I just wanted the doctors to step away, and my arm... it just became that."

"A Pyronite," Ben corrected with a grin. "Heatblast. You only shifted your arm because your body isn't configured to handle a full transformation yet. The Omnitrix has a built-in safety protocol that prevents genetic degradation. Since you're tapping into it without the actual watch interface on your body, your brain is acting like a firewall, throttling the power so you don't accidentally burn your own nervous system out. You're like a mini-Omnitrix, Taylor. You can shift parts of yourself, or maybe even do brief full transformations eventually, but it's going to take a lot out of you."

Before Taylor could respond, the heavy atmospheric pressure in the room shifted. It wasn't a superpower manifestation; it was the unmistakable, deliberate sound of heavy, rhythmic footsteps echoing down the tiled hallway outside. Heavy steel plates clanked against the linoleum, accompanied by the lighter, swishing sound of a fabric cloak.

The door to Room 104 clicked and swung open.

Standing in the doorway was a man who looked like he had stepped straight out of a military-industrial sci-fi convention. He was clad in massive, meticulously polished blue power armor accented with silver filigree. A heavy, high-tech visor covered the upper half of his face, glowing with a soft blue status light, and in his right hand, he held a massive, mechanical halberd that looked entirely too complex to be a simple melee weapon.

Beside him stood a young girl, perhaps a year or two older than Taylor. She wore a simple white cloak adorned with a stylized red cross over her ordinary clothes. Her face was dusted with freckles, her brown hair pulled back into a messy, utilitarian ponytail. She looked utterly exhausted, her eyes carrying a deep, cynical weariness that seemed entirely unnatural for someone her age.

Ben didn't move from his stool, but his entire posture shifted from relaxed to alert in a fraction of a second. His left hand hovered naturally over the dial of the Omnitrix.

"Mr. Hebert. Miss Hebert," the armored man spoke, his voice modulated through his helmet's speakers into a deep, authoritative baritone. "I am Armsmaster, leader of the Protectorate ENE. This is Panacea of New Wave. We received reports of a high-tier Changer manifestation and an unmasked rogue Cape operating within the hospital parameters."

The armored hero's visor shifted, the blue light tracking across the room until it locked directly onto Ben Tennyson.

"And you," Armsmaster said, his halberd shifting a fraction of an inch in a calculated display of readiness. "Must be the individual the internet is currently calling 'The Emerald Kid'. We need to have a very long conversation about your lack of a mask, your lack of registration, and the highly illegal piece of unauthorized Tinkertech on your wrist."

Ben slowly stood up from his stool, stretching his arms over his head with an infuriatingly casual air. He offered Armsmaster a sharp, entirely unbothered grin.

"Look, armor-guy," Ben said, tapping the Omnitrix. "First of all, the name is Ben 10. Second of all, I don't know what kind of tech budget you're working with here, but this isn't Tinkertech. And third? If you think a fancy tin suit and a oversized butter knife are going to intimidate me, you should talk to a guy named Vilgax."

Panacea let out a faint, irritated scoff from behind Armsmaster's shoulder. "Great. Another arrogant brat with an ego bigger than his rating. Armsmaster, can I please just do my job so I can go home? I have thirty more patients waiting at the university hospital."

Armsmaster paused, his visor cycling through several diagnostic scans as he evaluated Ben's biometric data and the strange, impossible energy signatures bleeding from the watch. "Very well. Panacea, check the victim for biological stability. Subject 'Ben' will remain stationary for questioning."

Amy Dallon rolled her eyes and stepped past the towering armored hero. She walked over to the side of the bed, entirely ignoring Ben, and looked down at Taylor. Her expression softened just a fraction, a brief flash of genuine medical concern breaking through her cynical exterior.

"Hey," Amy said softly to Taylor. "I'm going to look at what's going on inside. This won't hurt, but you might feel a weird tingling sensation. Just try to relax."

Taylor nodded numbly, her eyes wide as she looked at the famous healer.

Amy reached out, her bare hand making contact with the skin of Taylor's uninjured right forearm. Her power, a deep, instinctual understanding of biological systems down to the cellular and genetic level, instantly flooded across the connection. Normally, a human body was a map she could read in a glance a standard blueprint of blood vessels, organs, DNA strands, and the occasional anomalous parahuman corona pollentia in the brain.

But the moment Amy's power touched Taylor Hebert, her entire world exploded into absolute, incomprehensible chaos.

Amy gasped, her eyes flying open as her body jerked violently backward. She snatched her hand away from Taylor's arm as if she had just touched a white-hot stove. She stumbled, nearly tripping over her own cloak before slamming her back against the hospital wall, her chest heaving as she stared at Taylor with an expression of pure, unadulterated terror.

"What... what the hell are you?!" Amy shrieked, her voice cracking with a panic that none of them had ever heard from the stoic healer before.

Armsmaster immediately raised his halberd, the weapon humming to life with a crackling blue plasma edge. "Panacea! Report! Is the subject a biological threat?"

"No!" Amy screamed, her hands clutching her head as she tried to process the impossible data her power had just fed into her brain. She pointed a trembling, white-knuckled finger at Taylor, and then at Ben. "Her DNA... it's not human! No, wait, it is human, but there's... there's an active evolutionary engine stitched into her genetic code! I tried to read her biology, and my power gave me the blueprints for a thousand different species that shouldn't exist! They aren't Earth biology! They don't have carbon structures that make sense! One of them is a living silicon crystal structure, another is a localized volcanic core, and there's... there's something in there that looks like a star-spawn!"

She locked her eyes onto Ben, her face completely drained of color. "And it's all coming from him. She's a mirror, Armsmaster! Her power isn't a normal Changer form! She's tethered to whatever is inside that watch on his wrist, and if that connection stabilizes... she won't just be a parahuman. She's going to be something completely outside the laws of nature!"

Ben simply crossed his arms, his confident grin returning in full force as he looked at the terrified healer and the utterly stunned leader of the Protectorate.

The silence that followed Panacea's frantic declaration was heavy, suffocating, and punctuated only by the rhythmic, clinical beep of the heart monitor attached to Taylor Hebert.

Armsmaster did not move. To a casual observer, the leader of the Protectorate ENE appeared as an unyielding statue of blue and silver steel, a monument to law and order. But inside his helmet, a cascade of data was violently overwhelming his heads-up display. The auxiliary sensors built into his power armor designed to analyze energy outputs, structural density, and localized radiation were cycling through error codes. The algorithms that usually categorized Parahuman abilities into neat, predictable boxes were stuttering against the sheer impossibility of what they were trying to scan.

"Panacea," Armsmaster said, his modulated baritone dropping into a dangerously sharp, analytical register. "Clarify your assessment. Are you stating the subject exhibits a high-level Changer state, or is this a localized Master effect altering her baseline genetic structure?"

Amy Dallon was still pressed against the far wall of the hospital room, her hands trembling as she rubbed her palms against the fabric of her white, cross-adorned cloak. Her face was entirely bloodless, the freckles across her nose standing out like drops of ink on parchment. She looked at Taylor, then darted her eyes toward Ben Tennyson, who remained standing with his arms crossed, a look of mild amusement dancing in his green eyes.

"I'm saying she doesn't have a baseline anymore, Armsmaster!" Amy hissed, her voice cracking with an anxiety she rarely allowed the public to see. "When a normal Changer shifts it rearranges their existing mass, or borrows material from a breaker state to mimic an animal, a monster, or whatever. But her? Her cells are... they're resting on a razor's edge. The moment I touched her, her biology was trying to compute a million different evolutionary paths simultaneously. It's like her body was handed an encyclopedia of impossible lifeforms and told to choose one at random. And the tether...It's radiating from that thing on his wrist."

Armsmaster's visor slowly turned back toward Ben. The mechanical lenses clicked, zooming in on the dormant green faceplate of the Omnitrix. "An external power battery with genetic broadcast capabilities. Highly advanced. Distinctly Tinkertech in nature, regardless of your claims."

Ben let out a long, theatrical groan, tossing his head back. "Oh my gosh, you guys are like a broken record. Look, I'm going to say this one more time, very clearly, so the guy in the tin suit can understand I did not build this. It is not 'Tinkertech'. It's an Omnitrix. It was built by a three-inch-tall alien frog-genius named Azmuth who lives on a planet that would make your entire civilization look like it's still playing with pointy sticks in caves. It doesn't broadcast 'power' to Taylor. Her... Powers or whatever must have hitched a ride on my watch's wireless genetic sync network when she dragged me into this dimension."

"A Trigger Event," Armsmaster interrupted, his voice dropping into a formal, lecturing tone that suggested he was reciting a manual from memory. "Since you claim to be entirely ignorant of our world's dynamics, listen carefully. A Trigger Event is the precise psychological and physiological breaking point of a human being. When an individual is subjected to an amount of trauma, terror, or despair that the human mind is fundamentally incapable of processing, a latent anomalous potential within their biology activates. They gain parahuman abilities powers designed, ironically, to reflect or address the specific nature of the trauma that broke them."

The armored hero shifted his weight, his heavy gauntlets resting on the shaft of his mechanical halberd. He cast a brief, disapproving glance toward Taylor before looking back at Ben.

"In Miss Hebert's case, she experienced a severe, prolonged confinement within a biohazardous space. Under normal circumstances, a parahuman triggering in such conditions would manifest a Mover classification to escape, a Shaker classification to alter her surroundings, or perhaps a Master classification to command the minor biological organisms within the space. Instead, her psychological collapse somehow breached a dimensional vector, anchoring onto you and utilizing your device as a biological template. It is an anomalous, highly irregular event, but it remains a Trigger."

Taylor pulled the hospital blankets higher around her chest, her chin trembling. Hearing the leader of the city's greatest heroes speak about her absolute breaking point in such cold, clinical, mechanical terms felt like a fresh violation. To Armsmaster, she wasn't a girl who had been tortured by her peers while her school ignored her screams; she was a data point. A "highly irregular event" with a set of classifications.

"But that does not excuse your current conduct, Ben 10," Armsmaster continued, his visor locking onto Ben with an icy intensity. "You operated in a public space. You utilized high-tier Mover and Changer abilities to traverse the city at supersonic speeds, breaking the sound barrier over a civilian highway. And worst of all, you entered a public medical facility and allowed your transformation to lapse entirely in front of civilian witnesses, exposing your face, your age, and your unmasked identity to the public."

Ben blinked, entirely unfazed by the armored man's mounting anger. "Yeah? And? I was trying to save a girl's life. Pardon me for not stopping at a costume shop to pick out a matching set of spandex and a leather mask while her lungs were shutting down."

"It is not a matter of aesthetics!" Armsmaster snapped, his gauntlet tightening around his halberd with a sharp clack. "It is a matter of the Unwritten Rules. This city—this entire world—maintains a delicate, highly precarious balance between parahuman forces. Heroes wear masks to protect their civilian lives, their careers, and most importantly, their families. Villains respect the mask because they understand that if they cross that line—if they target a hero's home, their parents, or their children—the heroes will strip away their own restraints and retaliate with lethal, unrestrained force. By walking into this hospital with your face uncovered, you have violated the foundational safety net of the parahuman community. You have invited every gang in Brockton Bay to search for your records, your home, and anyone associated with you."

"Let them try," Ben said, his voice dropping its sarcastic edge, replaced instantly by a quiet, absolute confidence that made even Danny Hebert look up in surprise. "Look, armor-guy, I get that your world is built on fear. I've been listening to you and Mr. Hebert talk for the last hour, and honestly? It sounds miserable. You're all hiding in the dark, wearing masks, terrified that some lunatic is going to show up at your house because you did the right thing."

Ben stepped closer to Armsmaster, entirely ignoring the humming plasma edge of the mechanical halberd. He tapped his own chest, right over his green jacket.

"In my world, I haven't had a secret identity in over a year. A ten-year-old kid named Jimmy Jones found out who I was and posted it on the internet. At first, everyone panicked. My parents were worried, the government wanted to put me in a cage, and every bad guy I ever locked up came knocking on my door at the exact same time."

Ben smiled, a bright, triumphant expression that seemed entirely alien to the grim atmosphere of Brockton Bay. "And you know what happened? It worked out absolute wonders. Because when the bad guys realized that everyone knew my face, they also realized they couldn't hide in the shadows anymore either. They couldn't just target 'Ben 10'—they had to face the reality that if they came after my family, the entire world was watching. And more than that, it meant the people didn't have to look up at a mask and wonder if the guy saving them was a monster underneath. They knew exactly who I was. They knew my name was Ben Tennyson, they knew I liked green, and they knew that if they screamed for help, I'd show up. No secrets. No hiding. Just a guy doing the right thing because he can."

"This is not your world," Armsmaster said coldly. "Your lack of caution is a liability. If you refuse to operate within our parameters, the PRT will be forced to classify you as a rogue element, or worse, a threat to public safety. However, given your apparent displacement and Miss Hebert's recent manifestation, there is a protocol designed specifically for situations like this. The Wards."

Armsmaster turned his gaze slightly toward Taylor, though his focus remained broad enough to include Ben.

"The Wards program is the youth division of the Protectorate," Armsmaster explained, his tone shifting into a practiced, promotional delivery. "It offers a safe, structured, and legally protected environment for parahumans under the age of eighteen. By joining the Wards, Miss Hebert, you will receive an immediate, comprehensive medical evaluation, direct protection from the Protectorate ENE, a monthly stipend, and an escorted education plan. Your civilian identity will be completely protected by federal law, and you will be trained by seasoned professionals to understand, control, and utilize your abilities safely. For you, Ben, it offers a path to legal registration, a controlled environment to evaluate your... unique technology, and an opportunity to integrate into our society without facing immediate criminal charges for vigilantism."

Taylor listened, her mind whirling. The Wards. She knew about them, of course. Vista, Gallant, Clockblocker, Aegis. They were the golden children of the city, plastered on billboards and trading cards. For a split second, the offer sounded like a life raft. It meant safety. It meant she wouldn't have to go back to Winslow High. It meant she wouldn't have to face Emma, Sophia, and Madison alone in those depressing hallways.

But then she looked at Armsmaster's rigid, unyielding armor. She remembered how the school administration had ignored her. The PRT was a government agency. The school board was a government agency. Were they really any different? Would they just turn her into a weapon? A political tool to be paraded around until she broke again?

Before she could speak, a sharp, bitter laugh cut through the room.

"Oh, please, Armsmaster, don't give them the corporate brochure," Amy Dallon said, stepping away from the wall, her arms crossed over her chest as she walked toward the foot of Taylor's bed. Her tone was dripping with heavy sarcasm. "You forgot to mention the part where they muzzle you with public relations meetings, dictate exactly what you can say to the media, and turn your entire life into a government-owned brand. If Ben here joins the Wards, the first thing your bosses at the PRT are going to do is drag him into a laboratory, strip that watch off his arm, and spend the next five years trying to reverse-engineer it for the military while keeping him locked in a basement under 'protective custody'."

Armsmaster's visor flared. "Panacea. You are walking a very fine line regarding Department of parahuman Affairs protocols."

"I don't care about your protocols" Amy snapped. She turned her attention entirely to Ben and Taylor, her expression dead serious. "Look, if you want an alternative a real alternative where you aren't treated like government property you should look at New Wave."

She took a breath, straightening her white cloak. "My family... we founded New Wave on a simple principle: total transparency. We don't wear masks. My mother, Brandish, and my aunt, Lady Photon, unmasked themselves to the public years ago. We don't hide behind secret identities, we don't take government paychecks, and we don't let bureaucrats tell us who we can and cannot save. We operate as a family. We protect our own, we live in the real world, and the public trusts us because they know exactly who we are when we're at the grocery store or at home."

Amy looked directly at Ben, her eyes softening just a fraction. "The people in the lobby already think you're one of us because you don't wear a mask and you have a brain. If you and Taylor come with me if you join New Wave we can protect you. My mom is one of the best parahuman defense lawyers in the country. She can tie the PRT in legal knots for months before they can even think about touching that watch. We can teach you how to be heroes without turning you into soldiers."

Ben listened to both pitches, his head tilting to the side as he evaluated the two local parahumans. He looked at Armsmaster the rigid, rules-obsessed soldier who saw everything as a tactical equation. Then he looked at Amy the exhausted, cynical healer who clearly hated the system she was trapped in but loved the freedom her family fought for.

"Wow," Ben muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. "You guys really have a whole system set up here, don't you? Government squads versus independent families. It's like the Plumber Academy clashing with a bunch of rogue Bounty Hunters, except everyone is way more stressed out."

Ben stood up straight, his easygoing smirk returning as he looked at Armsmaster. "But I think you're both missing the bigger picture here. You keep talking about my watch like it's some weapon I built in a garage, and you're trying to figure out how to fit me into your little Cape ecosystem. So, let me give you a quick summary of where I actually come from, and what I can actually do. Maybe then you'll realize why your little rules don't really apply to me."

Ben took a step toward the center of the room, his voice taking on a narrative, commanding quality that immediately drew the attention of everyone present, including the quiet, observing Danny Hebert.

"Like I said, my name is Ben Tennyson. In my world, I'm a Level 5 Plumber which means I'm an officer in an intergalactic peace-keeping force that spans across thousands of galaxies. My hometown, Bellwood, is a place where humans and aliens live side-by-side. We've got an entire underground city called Undertown where species from across the universe trade, open restaurants, and live their lives. I don't deal with 'Capes' or 'Parahumans'. I deal with intergalactic warlords, rogue geneticists, mutant dictators, and cosmic entities that eat stars for breakfast."

He held up his left wrist, displaying the Omnitrix proudly.

"And this? The Omnitrix doesn't just 'change my shape'. Inside this watch is a direct connection to a universal digital database that holds the pure, uncorrupted DNA profiles of over one million distinct alien species from across the cosmos. When I activate it..."

Ben tapped the outer rim of the dial. The faceplate popped up, casting a vibrant, deep emerald light that illuminated the sterile white walls of the hospital room, washing over Armsmaster's blue armor and Amy's white cloak. A series of microscopic, green holographic icons began to scroll rapidly above the watch, displaying silhouettes of creatures that defied every law of Earthly biology

"...I can choose any of them," Ben said, his voice echoing with a quiet power. "If I need to put out a fire, I turn into a Pyronite. If I need to fix a machine, I turn into a Galvanic Mechamorph a living bio-mechanical construct that can merge with and upgrade any piece of technology it touches. If I need to move a mountain, I turn into a To'kustar."

He looked directly into Armsmaster's visor, his smile sharp and confident. "The girl you saw me carrying earlier? I used Fasttrack to get her here. He's a Citrakayah. He can run fast enough to outrun a localized explosion without breaking a sweat. And the reason Taylor's biology is acting up? It's because the Omnitrix is designed to protect life. When she triggered and called for a hero, her power didn't just give her an ability it recognized the Omnitrix as the ultimate survival tool. It connected her to my watch's database. She isn't a 'Changer' or a 'Tinker', Armsmaster. She's a user of the most powerful diplomatic and survival device in the known universe."

Armsmaster stood entirely motionless, his onboard computer system working at absolute maximum capacity to record and process Ben's statement. The internal lie-detectors built into his helmet's vocal scanners designed to track micro-tremors, heart rate, and pupil dilation were returning a steady, unyielding result: TRUTH.

The boy wasn't lying. He wasn't experiencing a delusion. He genuinely believed every word he was saying, and his physiological responses matched those of a seasoned officer delivering a tactical brief.

"A million distinct species," Armsmaster repeated, his voice devoid of its earlier lecturing tone, replaced by a profound, cold realization of what such an asset would mean for the global balance of power. "An alien database. If what you are saying is true, Ben Tennyson... you are not a parahuman. You are an unquantifiable foreign context. A single individual possessing the strategic versatility of an entire global army."

"Exactly," Ben said, hitting the faceplate back down, the emerald light snapping off and leaving the room in the mundane glare of the hospital lights. "So you can see why I don't really care about your masks, your registration papers, or your Wards program. I'm here because she called for help. And until I figure out how to get back to my Bellwood, I'm going to make sure she's safe."

Amy Dallon stared at Ben, her jaw slightly loose as she slowly digested his words. She had spent her entire life surrounded by the greatest heroes on Earth her adoptive father, her mother, her sister Glory Girl who could fly and shrug off bullets like flies. But the way this boy spoke... he didn't talk about his powers like they were a burden, a curse, or a weapon to be managed. He spoke about them like they were a gift. A beautiful, expansive tapestry of life meant to protect others.

She looked down at her own hands-hands that could reshape flesh, cure cancer, or create plagues with a single thought, hands that she terrified herself with every single day. For the first time in her life, she felt a profound wave of envy toward someone else's power.

"Ben," Danny Hebert spoke up, his voice trembling but clear as he stepped forward, placing himself between Armsmaster and the two teenagers. "I don't care about space, or aliens, or your government programs, Armsmaster. My daughter is lying in a hospital bed because her school let her get tortured. Right now, the only person who actually lifted a finger to save her life was this boy. So if he says he's going to stay and protect her, then as her father, I am telling you that he has my permission to be here. Now, unless you're going to arrest us for surviving, I want you out of my daughter's room."

Armsmaster's visor remained fixed on Danny for a long, tense three seconds. The mechanical hum of his power armor seemed to grow louder in the quiet room.

"The Protectorate will not force a conflict within a medical facility," Armsmaster finally declared, his voice returning to its rigid, modulated baritone. He turned toward the door, his heavy boots clicking against the floor. "However, do not mistake this for dismissal. Director Piggot and the PRT youth division will be informed of this encounter. A formal evaluation of Miss Hebert's parahuman classification and your legal status, Ben Tennyson, will be conducted within forty-eight hours. I advise you to use that time to consider the consequences of operating outside the law."

With a sharp, precise turn, the leader of the Protectorate walked out of the room, his heavy armored footsteps fading down the hallway.

Amy Dallon lingered for a moment, looking at Taylor, then at Ben. She reached into her cloak, pulled out a small, crumpled piece of paper with a phone number scribbled on it, and tossed it onto the bedside table next to Taylor's IV line.

"That's my mom's direct office line," Amy said, her tone returning to its guarded, cynical default. "If the men in the blue suits show up with a warrant or a cage before those forty-eight hours are up... call her. She hates the PRT bureaucrats as much as I do. And Taylor? Try not to use that fire arm again until your body stops shaking. You look like hell."

Without waiting for a response, the young healer turned and vanished out the door, her white cloak swirling behind her.

The room was suddenly quiet again, the immediate threat of the authorities passing like a summer storm, leaving behind a deep, lingering tension that promised far greater challenges on the horizon.

Ben let out a soft whistle, turning back toward the bed and hopping back onto his plastic stool. "Well. They seem lovely. Especially the guy with the glowing stick. Very charming."

Taylor looked down at the piece of paper Amy had left, then up at Ben. A strange, small feeling of warmth was beginning to take root in her chest, displacing the cold, hollow despair that had defined her existence for the past several months. She wasn't safe not really. The gangs would be looking for the unmasked hero, the government was writing up files on her biology, and her own power felt like a sleeping volcano inside her mind.

But as she looked at Ben Tennyson who was currently trying to figure out if the hospital's mechanical bed controls could make him hover she realized she wasn't alone in the dark anymore.

"Ben?" Taylor asked softly, her voice steadying.

"Yeah, kid?"

"What's the name of the alien that turns into fire again?"

Ben grinned, his green eyes flashing with an unmistakable, heroic spark. "Heatblast. And trust me, once you get the hang of him... he's an absolute blast."

 

[Thegameaholic]

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Boards > Regional > United States > New England > Brockton Bay

Topic: Holy shit did anyone else see that blue streak?! Sonic booms downtown! (VIDEOS ATTACHED)

Bagrat (Original Poster)Posted on January 4th, 2011:
Okay, so I was literally just sitting in my car near the intersection on 5th when my entire chassis started violently shaking. I thought it was an earthquake or Leviathan waking up early, but then this massive CRACK happened. A literal sonic boom. Blew out the windows of the electronics store across the street and set off every car alarm within three blocks.
A second later, a massive gust of wind almost flipped a cyclist over. I looked toward the highway and all I saw was this blurry blue and black streak tearing absolute ass toward Brockton General Hospital.
My dashcam caught a few frames of it, and my buddy who works security at the hospital sent me a clip from their exterior loop. Look at the speed on this guy.

[Attachment: Dashcam_Clip_01.mp4](The video shows a stationary car. Suddenly, a massive, deafening acoustic boom rattles the audio receiver. A blur of neon blue and black zips through the frame, kicking up a violent vortex of trash, leaves, and dust that leaves the trees bending backward.)

[Attachment: Hosp_Lobby_Secure.mp4](The video is grainy security footage from Brockton General's ambulance bay. A blue, sleek, humanoid figure with feline features arrives in a literal instantaneous skid, completely ignoring the laws of friction. In its arms is a teenage girl covered in grime. The blue figure dashes through the sliding doors. A second later, a blinding flash of emerald-green light floods the entire camera sensor, whiting it out. When the light clears, the alien figure is gone. Standing in its place is a normal-looking teenager in a green jacket, completely unmasked, yelling for a doctor.)
Any idea who this is? New Protectorate recruit? Velocity on steroids?

Tin_Mother (Global Moderator)Posted on January 4th, 2011:
MOD NOTE: READ BEFORE POSTING
This thread is being heavily monitored.
The individual in the video chose to de-transform in a public area, but Rule 1 and Rule 4 are strictly in effect for this thread.
Do NOT attempt to reverse-image search the teenager's face. Do NOT speculate on his real name, his age, his school, his potential family members, or his civilian identity. Do NOT try to identify the girl he brought into the hospital. Any violation of the Unwritten Rules or attempt at doxxing will result in an immediate, permanent IP ban from Parahuman Online and your details will be forwarded to the local PRT cyber-division.
Per an official press advisory just released by the PRT ENE, the confirmed alias for the blue-streak Mover form is Fasttrack.
Keep the discussion strictly to his capabilities and cape actions. You have been warned.

CapeWatch_BB (Unverified User)Posted on January 4th, 2011:

Bagrat: Blew out the windows of the electronics store across the street and set off every car alarm within three blocks.

Click to shrink...

Jesus. Breaking the sound barrier at street level inside city limits? That's not just a Mover, that's a walking public hazard. If he's a hero, the PRT is going to fine him into the next century for property damage. If he's a villain... well, good luck to the Wards trying to catch someone moving at Mach 1 down the boardwalk.

Specific_Gravity (Verified PRT Corporate Liaison)Posted on January 4th, 2011:
The PRT ENE is currently assessing the situation. We ask that all citizens remain calm. The individual known as 'Fasttrack' is not currently classified as a hostile threat, but an investigation into the property damage and the unauthorized deployment of parahuman abilities within a civilian zone is underway. If you have any information, please contact the PRT hotline.

Point_Me_The_Way (Wards Enthusiast)Posted on January 4th, 2011:
Wait, did anyone watch the second video carefully? Look at the flash of light.
That wasn't a standard Mover deceleration. The blue cat-guy turned into the kid in the green jacket. Is Fasttrack a Breaker form? Or is he a Changer who just happens to have insane speed in that specific shape?

X_Gamer_Tag_X (Local BB User)Posted on January 4th, 2011:

Hosp_Lobby_Secure.mp4 at 0:14Standing in its place is a normal-looking teenager in a green jacket, completely unmasked...

Click to shrink...

Bro, he literally didn't even try to hide his face. He didn't look around for cameras, he didn't pull up a hoodie, nothing. He just dropped the form right there in the middle of the lobby. He's either completely suicidal or he's the cockiest rogue to ever step foot in Brockton Bay.
Does he not know what city he's in? The Empire or the ABB are going to map his face to a residential address by midnight.

Rebel_Yell (Independent Cape Fan)Posted on January 4th, 2011:

X_Gamer_Tag_X: Does he not know what city he's in? The Empire or the ABB are going to map his face to a residential address by midnight.

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Honestly? Based on the video, he looked like he didn't give a single shit. The girl he was holding looked like she was dying. Maybe he valued a human life over keeping his secret identity safe? If so, respect. We need more capes who care more about saving people than keeping up appearances for the PRT cameras.
Glow-worm (Unverified User)Posted on January 4th, 2011:

Tin_Mother: Per an official press advisory just released by the PRT ENE, the confirmed alias for the blue-streak Mover form is Fasttrack.

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"Fasttrack"? Sounds a bit basic, but it fits.
But what about the girl? Anyone know what happened? The video shows her covered in... I don't even know, looks like toxic waste or sewage? Was there an attack downtown that the PRT is covering up?

Line_Cook_Hero (Local BB User)Posted on January 4th, 2011:
I work down near the hospital, and Armsmaster's van was parked outside the emergency bay about twenty minutes after that blue streak hit. Panacea was there too—someone saw her rushing into the back elevator.
If they called in Panacea and Armsmaster, whatever that kid brought in was a major deal.

Worm_Food (Conspiracy Board Regular)Posted on January 4th, 2011:
Calling it now: Case 53.
Look at the blue form. Feline ears, spikes on the arms, completely non-human anatomy. Then a massive green flash and he looks like a normal human? It's got to be some kind of weird, unstable biological trigger. Maybe the green light is his actual power, and "Fasttrack" is just a meat-suit his power grows around him.

Bagrat (Guy in the Know) (Original Poster)Posted on January 4th, 2011:

Worm_Food: Calling it now: Case 53.

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Nah, Case 53s don't usually turn back into normal teenagers, do they? Every Case 53 we know about is stuck in their monstrous form. Weld, Gregor, Newter—they don't get to just put on a green jacket and blend into a crowd.
This feels different. The unmasking is what's melting my brain. The sheer confidence it takes to just stand there in a public hospital lobby with no mask, yelling at the nurses while looking like a regular high school junior. He didn't even look stressed about the cameras. It's like the concept of a secret identity doesn't even exist to him.

Tin_Mother (Global Moderator)Posted on January 4th, 2011:

Worm_Food: Deleted for violating Rule 4 (Speculation on Cape Origins/Triggers).X_Gamer_Tag_X: User warned for hinting at tracking methods.

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Keep the thread clean, people. Focus on the facts. We have a new high-speed Mover/Changer in the city, an unknown civilian casualty, and a massive PRT/Protectorate response at Brockton General.
Any further deviations or attempts to dig into the kid's background will result in this thread being locked permanently.

 

[Thegameaholic]

The air in the secure briefing room of the PRT ENE headquarters was thick with the sterile scent of ozone and stale coffee. On the primary wall-mounted display, the grainy security footage from Brockton Bay General Hospital's ambulance bay played on a continuous, maddening loop.

A streak of neon blue. A blinding flash of emerald light. And then, a teenage boy in a green jacket, completely bare-faced, shouting for medical personnel.

Director any-but-fragile Emily Piggot shifted slightly in her specialized chair, her sharp eyes narrowing as she slapped a heavy manila folder onto the center of the frosted-glass conference table. The sound cracked through the room like a pistol shot.

"The internet is a total containment failure," Piggot growled, her harsh, authoritative voice cutting through the hum of the cooling fans. She glared across the table, her eyes locking onto the members of New Wave. "The Parahuman Online thread has over ten thousand hits already. The local media is screaming about a rogue sonic boom downtown, and half the city thinks the Protectorate is hiding a Case 53 at Brockton General. Care to explain why your daughter was handing out legal lifelines to an unregistered, unmasked kinetic missile, Carol?"

Carol Dallon, seated rigidly in her civilian suit with her hands clasped tightly in front of her, didn't flinch. Beside her, her sister Sarah—Lady Photon—leaned back with an expression of calm defiance. The rest of the New Wave roster—Mark, Neil, and Victoria—sat in a united front. Amy Dallon sat at the far end of the table, looking pale, her right hand still loosely wrapped in a tensor bandage.

Across from them sat the heavy hitters of the local Protectorate. Armsmaster stood in full, unyielding armor. Miss Militia sat with her arms crossed, her expression stoic. Beside them sat Assault, leaning back with a rare, uncharacteristic frown; Battery, tracing a finger over the table; and Dauntless, his shield and helmet resting beside his chair. On the far side of the table, Velocity sat forward, his eyes glued to the security footage. Above them all, a glowing green emblem on a secondary monitor indicated that Dragon was patched into the meeting via a secure feed.

"Director, I've looked at the telemetry Dragon pulled from the municipal dashcams," Velocity spoke up, his voice tight. He shook his head, looking visibly shaken. "This isn't just a high-tier Mover. This kid is fast. Much faster than me. When I push my speed and enter my breaker state, I lose mass. I lose the ability to affect the world with real physical force I can't even carry a heavy object without dropping out of it. This 'Fasttrack' broke the sound barrier at street level while carrying a passenger, and he didn't drop a single fraction of his physical momentum. The kinetic displacement alone should have torn that girl apart, but somehow he kept her completely structurally stable. It defies everything we know about kinetic acceleration."

"Which makes him an extreme public safety hazard," Piggot snapped, turning her gaze toward the head of the table. "Armsmaster. Give them the data. Let's disabuse New Wave of the idea that they're dealing with a standard rogue teenager."

Armsmaster tapped the console on his forearm. The security loop minimized, replaced by a series of complex biological charts and a transcribed block of text.

"At approximately 1642 hours, I commanded Panacea to perform a targeted biological evaluation of the individual identifying himself as Ben Tennyson," Armsmaster stated, his mechanical baritone echoing off the walls. "The objective was to identify the presence of a Corona Pollentia and a Gemma Pollentia, thereby establishing his parahuman classification and identifying any potential cognitive instability related to his trigger."

Piggot leaned forward, her gaze landing heavily on Amy. "Tell them what you found, Panacea."

Amy swallowed hard, shifting uncomfortably beneath the collective gaze of her family and the city's top heroes. She kept her hands close, careful to frame her response entirely around her public persona as a touch-based diagnostic healer, burying the terrifying true depth of her biokinetic control deep down.

"He doesn't have them," Amy said softly.

Carol blinked, her sharp demeanor cracking slightly. "What do you mean he doesn't have them? Is he a Tinker who built an external interface?"

"No, Mom, you don't understand," Amy said, her voice rising with an undercurrent of genuine anxiety. "My power lets me map out an organism's biology so I can understand what's wrong and heal it. When I checked his brain, it was completely, flawlessly baseline. There is no Corona Pollentia. There is no Gemma Pollentia. On a neurological level, he is completely devoid of the physical biological structures that every single parahuman on Earth possesses. He has no physical connection to a power source."

"But he transformed," Victoria chimed in, her brow furrowed as she leaned forward, her fingers tapping against the table. "We all saw the footage. He crossed half the city in three seconds. If he doesn't have a parahuman biology, how is he doing that?"

"The device on his wrist," Armsmaster answered, bringing up a high-resolution, enhanced capture of the Omnitrix. "According to Tennyson's own testimony—which my helmet's internal vocal and physiological scanners verified as absolute subjective truth—the device is an external archive containing over one million distinct non-human DNA profiles. It alters his baseline genetic structure on command, converting him entirely into foreign biological entities."

"A million?" Mark Dallon muttered, his jaw dropping slightly as he looked at Neil, who simply stared at the screen in disbelief. "That's... that's statistically impossible. A single cape with a million high-tier Changer forms?"

"It gets worse," Piggot said grimly, leaning back and crossing her arms. "Panacea, tell them what happened when you tried to evaluate his deeper cell structure."

Amy instinctively pulled her bandaged hand closer to her chest. "When I confirmed his brain was baseline, I tried to look closer at his cells to see how the watch was anchoring to him. But underneath the human anatomy, woven into his deeper genetic code, I hit a massive reservoir of pure, blinding energy. It wasn't a parahuman signature, and it wasn't radiation. It felt like raw, concentrated Life Force. It was completely alien."

She took a shaky breath, remembering the sensation. "The moment my power brushed against that energy, his biology reacted like an immune system spotting a virus. It didn't just block me It discharged a massive spike of magenta light, threw me across the room, and completely short-circuited my mapping sense. I couldn't perceive biological structures for a solid ten minutes afterward."

(Pretend this happened offscreen i added this in so last minute and i forgot to change the other chapters)

"Analysis of the energy spike recorded by Armsmaster's armor confirms Panacea's assessment," Dragon's calm, synthesized voice echoed from the overhead speakers. "The energetic discharge does not match any known parahuman wavelength or kinetic output on record, Director Piggot. It appears to be an entirely unique, biological defensive mechanism."

A heavy, stunned silence descended upon the briefing room. Assault whistled low through his teeth, while Battery and Dauntless exchanged a deeply concerned look.

"An unquantifiable foreign context," Miss Militia spoke up quietly, her tone far softer and more analytical than Piggot's aggressive posturing. "He claims to be an officer in an intergalactic peacekeeping force called the Plumbers. He speaks of a universe where humans and aliens co-exist. And Armsmaster's lie detector readings were completely clear. He isn't delusional, Director. He genuinely believes he is a global protector from another reality."

"And he doesn't wear a mask," Sarah Pelham said, a faint, thoughtful smile touching her lips as she looked at the transcript of Ben's speech. "'The people didn't have to look up at a mask and wonder if the guy saving them was a monster underneath.' I have to admit, Carol, his philosophy aligns almost perfectly with our foundational principles."

"Except his world didn't have the structural realities of ours to contend with," Carol countered sharply, though her eyes remained fixed on the data regarding the watch. "He's operating on an idealist's playground. Brockton Bay is divided by volatile gang lines. Walking around here without a mask isn't just brave; it's a structural liability to everyone around him."

"Which is precisely why the PRT must take immediate administrative custody of both Tennyson and the Hebert girl," Piggot demanded, leaning forward over the table. "Taylor Hebert triggered in a biohazardous environment, but her biology somehow hijacked Tennyson's device as a biological template. She's currently exhibiting erratic, highly volatile Changer capabilities derived from his watch. We have an unknown teenager who can turn into a walking thermodynamic meltdown, and a boy who commands a million alien forms, both sitting in a public hospital room entirely outside our legal structure."

"You aren't touching them, Director," Carol said, standing up from her chair, her eyes flashing with a cold, legal fury. "If you issue a dynamic containment warrant for a boy who just saved a civilian life and a girl who was a victim of institutional negligence at a public school, New Wave will take this entire brief directly to the media. We will represent them pro-bono. We will have a federal injunction on your desk before your PRT squads can even load their containment foam."

Piggot glared at Carol, her jaw tightening as she calculated the political fallout. She looked at Armsmaster, who gave a single, almost imperceptible nod of agreement. Fighting a foreign entity with unknown capabilities over a legal technicality was a logistical nightmare the department could not afford.

"Forty-eight hours," Piggot spat, her voice dropping into a dangerous register. "Armsmaster gave them forty-eight hours for a formal evaluation. I will honor that window. New Wave has two days to convince Ben Tennyson to cooperate with local authorities, register his transformations under standard PRT classifications, and establish a secure, managed routine. If he refuses, or if he violates the Unwritten Rules again by causing another sonic boom over a civilian area, I will classify him as an S-Class rogue element and request external assistance from the Triumvirate."

"We'll take those terms," Carol said coldly. She gathered her legal documents, tucking them neatly back into her briefcase. She looked down at her daughter. "Amy, let's go. We have a lot of work to do."

As the members of New Wave filed out of the secure room, Victoria lingered by the door for a moment, looking back at the frozen image of the boy in the green jacket on the screen.

"A million different shapes," she muttered to herself, a mixture of awe and competitive excitement swirling in her chest. "And he doesn't even wear a cape."

The door slid shut, leaving the Protectorate heroes alone with their Director in the darkening briefing room.

"Do you think they can manage him, Colin?" Miss Militia asked softly, turning to her partner.

Armsmaster watched the security loop reset, the blue flash of Fasttrack tearing across the screen once more. "The boy is an anomaly. His psychological profile suggests an extreme resistance to institutional authority but a highly developed altruistic drive. New Wave's structure may appeal to him, but if his claims regarding his world's technological capability are accurate... we aren't managing him, Hannah. We are merely tolerating a cosmic exception."

The cheap, government-issued laptop Carol Dallon had pulled from her briefcase before she left sat on the hospital overbed table, its screen casting a pale, clinical glow over Ben Tennyson's face. The room was quiet, save for the hum of the laptop's overworked fan and the steady, reassuring rhythm of Taylor's heart monitor. Danny Hebert had finally succumbed to sheer exhaustion, currently dead to the world in a nearby recliner, snoring softly.

Back with Ben:

Ben stared at the screen, his green eyes reflecting lines of text, graphs, and casualty statistics. His usual easygoing smirk was entirely gone, replaced by a hard, tight line. His brow was furrowed so deeply it looked like it was carved from stone.

"Holy crap," Ben muttered under his breath, his finger scrolling aggressively down a public wiki page. "This place is an absolute shit fest."

He had spent the last three hours doing a deep dive into Earth-Bet's history, and the more he read, the more his stomach violently churned. He had fought intergalactic warlords, multidimensional tyrants, and literal gods, but the sheer, systematic misery of this world was unparalleled.

First, there were the Endbringers. Leviathan. Behemoth. The Simurgh. Ben read the logs of their attacks, his chest tightening at the sheer scale of the horror. Leviathan sinking the entire island of Kyushu. Behemoth turning metropolis after metropolis into irradiated radioactive tombs. The Simurgh driving entire populations into homicidal madness. The sheer feats of these things were horrifying monsters that didn't want to conquer or rule, but just existed to slowly grind human civilization into dust.

But it wasn't just the giant monsters. It was the people.

Ben scrolled through the profiles of the global villains. Warlords ruled entire continents in all but name. There was the Slaughterhouse Nine, a roving band of literal psychopaths who tortured and murdered their way across the country like a sick road trip, and the authorities just... let them? They couldn't catch them?

Then he looked at the local files for Brockton Bay.

"Actual Neo-Nazis," Ben whispered, a dark, dangerous spark igniting in his eyes as he read about Empire 88. It reminded him uncomfortably of the Forever Knights with their bizarre, fanatical obsession with purity, or the early Highbreed before he had literally been forced to rewrite their entire genetic code to fix their little inbred problem. To see humans doing it to other humans over something as stupid as skin color made him want to turn into Four Arms and start cracking skulls.

And they weren't alone. You had the ABB, a gang run by a pyrokinetic dragon-man who forced girls into brothels. You had the Merchants, a bunch of heavily armed drug dealers turning teenagers into addicts.

Globally, it only got stupider. The Three Blasphemies living constructs destabilizing European governments. Ash-Beast—a walking, screaming explosion wandering across Africa. And Heartbreaker a man who used emotional manipulation to enslave women and build a cult of forced adoration. Ben's jaw clenched so hard his teeth clicked. As a guy who valued free will above almost everything else, the concept of Heartbreaker made him physically sick.

And what was the government doing about it? The PRT, the Protectorate, the global authorities?

"They're twiddling their thumbs," Ben growled, tossing his head back against the wall in frustration. "They're playing defense. Just sitting on their hands, waiting for the next disaster to strike."

The sheer mathematics of the world were insane. Villains vastly outnumbered the heroes. It wasn't even close. In his world, the Plumbers kept the peace because the law had teeth. If a warlord tried to take over a city, a strike team of elite alien officers would drop from orbit and lock them in a specialized sci-fi containment cell by dinner time. Here? The villains ran the streets, and the heroes just established 'containment zones' and hoped for the best.

And then he found the page on the "Unwritten Rules."

Ben let out a sharp, bitter laugh that was entirely devoid of humor. The Endbringer Truce? Okay, that made sense. When a giant, planet-killing water lizard shows up, you put aside your differences and fight together. Even Vilgax and he had teamed up when Za'Skyar came knocking on the Warlord's Home World. That part was logical.

But the rest of it? The 'cops and robbers' dynamic? The idea that heroes shouldn't push too hard, that villains shouldn't target civilian identities, and that everyone should just let the status quo drag on because the heroes needed the villains to help fight the Endbringers?

"It's so stupid," Ben muttered, rubbing his temples. "It's a giant, sick cycle. You're letting monsters walk away from fights so they can terrorize more people, just so you have extra bodies for the next kaiju attack. You aren't saving anyone. You're just managing the expiration date of the planet."

He clicked on another link. The Birdcage. A maximum-security, inescapable pocket-dimension prison where they threw the worst of the worst, completely abandoning them to lord over each other instead of actually fixing the systemic issues or doling out real, permanent justice.

He couldn't stop reading. The sheer weight of Earth-Bet's despair felt like a physical pressure in the room.

"Ben?"

A soft, raspy voice broke through his spiraling thoughts.

Ben blinked, snapping out of his trance. He looked over at the hospital bed. Taylor Hebert was awake, leaning back against her propped-up pillows. Her eyes, magnified slightly behind her glasses, were fixed on him. She looked exhausted, but the frantic, terrifying biological fluctuating from earlier had completely settled down.

"Hey, kid," Ben said, his tone instantly shifting, dropping the intense, dark edge and adopting his usual casual, easygoing demeanor. He slid the laptop closed, cutting off the grim statistics of Earth-Bet. "How are you feeling? Body still trying to figure out how to turn into a giant blue cat?"

Taylor offered a tiny, tentative smile. "No. Everything feels... quiet now. Like my brain finally figured out how to lock the door." She looked down at his left wrist, where the Omnitrix sat silently, its green faceplate dark. "I was just... watching you. You looked really mad. What were you reading?"

"Ah, just the local news," Ben said, waving a hand dismissively as he spun his plastic stool around to face her. "Turns out your world's political system is kind of a mess. And by a mess, I mean it's a total garbage fire run by lunatics."

Taylor let out a weak, hollow breath. "Yeah. That sounds about right. Brockton Bay isn't exactly a vacation spot." She paused, her eyes lingering on the watch again. Her curiosity, a spark of life that had been buried under months of bullying and trauma, finally broke through. "Ben... can I ask you something?"

"Shoot."

"How did you get that? The Omnitrix. You said an alien frog-genius built it, but... how did it end up on your wrist? Are you a super-soldier? An astronaut?"

Ben let out a genuine laugh this time, leaning back and locking his hands behind his head. "Oh, man. I wish. No, way better story. You want story time? Anything to keep our minds off this depressing place."

Taylor nodded, shifting under her blankets to get more comfortable.

"Alright, so boom," Ben began, his green eyes flashing with fondness as he went into classic storytelling mode. "I was ten years old. Total dork. I wore a white t-shirt with a black stripe, spent all my time playing video games, and was completely dreading summer vacation because I had to spend it on a road trip in a giant, beat-up RV called the Rust Bucket with my Grandpa Max and my cousin Gwen."

"A cousin?" Taylor asked.

"My twin cousin. Well, not twin, we just have the same birthday. And let me tell you, back then, we hated each other. We argued about everything. Anyway, first night of the trip, we camp out in the woods. I'm annoyed, so I go for a walk in the forest to blow off some steam. I'm looking up at the sky, and suddenly, I see a shooting star."

Ben grinned, pointing a finger dramatically upward. "Except, it wasn't a shooting star. It changed direction. It was a space pod, crashing directly toward Earth. It hits the ground right in front of me, blasting a giant crater into the dirt. I climb down, entirely expecting to find a satellite or something, and the pod opens up. Inside, resting on a pedestal, is this weird, glowing green watch."

Taylor listened, completely captivated. For a moment, the sterile hospital room vanished, replaced by the image of a ten-year-old boy in a dark forest.

"So, being a dumb ten-year-old, what do I do?" Ben chuckled, tapping his wrist. "I reach my hand out to touch it. The second I get close, the watch literally jumps out of the pod, wraps itself around my wrist like a metal parasite, and fuses to my skin. I panicked, tried to rip it off, hit a button by accident, and—BOOM—the dial pops up. I push it down, and suddenly my skin turns to molten rock, my head catches fire, and I'm a seven-foot-tall living volcano shouting about how I'm burning alive."

Taylor's eyes widened. "Heatblast."

"Exactly! Heatblast. I accidentally set half the forest on fire before I figured out how to shoot blocks of flame instead of just melting everything. My grandpa and Gwen had to put it out with fire extinguishers." Ben's smile softened, a distant look entering his eyes. "At first, I thought it was just a cool toy. A way to play superhero. But then the bad guys started coming. Vilgax—this giant, terrifying alien warlord with octopus tentacles for a face—sent drones to rip the watch off my arm. I had to learn, real fast, that having this thing wasn't a game. It was a massive responsibility."

"Did you ever get it off?" Taylor asked softly.

"A few times," Ben admitted. "I actually took it off for a few years when I wanted to try being a normal teenager. But destiny has a weird way of knocking on your door. When Grandpa Max went missing, I had to put it back on. The watch recalibrated, gave me a whole new set of aliens, and I've been wearing it ever since. I've saved the universe a bunch of times, rebuilt broken planets, and like I told the tin suit earlier, I eventually lost my secret identity. Now, I'm just Ben."

Taylor looked at him, her expression a mix of awe and a strange, deep-seated envy. "You've been a hero since you were ten. You knew exactly what to do."

"Trust me, I had no clue what I was doing half the time," Ben said honestly. "I made a million mistakes. But you learn. You figure it out."

He looked at Taylor, his eyes drifting back toward the closed laptop.

Originally, his plan had been incredibly simple. He was going to sit tight in this hospital room, help Taylor get her newly copied alien DNA under control so she didn't accidentally vaporize a nurse, and then use one of his smarter transformations—like Grey Matter or Brainstorm—to build a dimensional trans-phasic engine out of hospital equipment and wireless routers to get back to Bellwood. Back to Rook, back to his parents, back to Mr. Smoothy.

But now? Looking at the data on that laptop? Looking at the sheer, unadulterated nightmare this world lived in every single day?

He couldn't leave.

Ben Tennyson may not act like the smartest guy in the room. He actively preferred to play the goofy, video-game-loving teenager. He let his friends think he was impulsive, and he let his enemies think he was arrogant and short-sighted.

But people forgot. They forgot that he had successfully navigated intergalactic politics, organized global defense strategies, and possessed a deeply tactical mind that could analyze an enemy's weakness in a fraction of a second while dodging plasma fire.

He wasn't an idiot. He just liked to make people think he was, because enemies who underestimate you make catastrophic mistakes.

This world, Earth-Bet, was bleeding out. It was a sick patient being treated by doctors who were too terrified of the disease to actually operate. The PRT was trapped in its own bureaucracy, the heroes were handcuffed by their own 'Unwritten Rules', and the villains were running rampant because nobody had the spine to completely tear up the rulebook and start fresh.

Well, Ben Tennyson didn't give a single, solitary shit about their rulebook.

If he left this world right now, he wouldn't be a hero. He'd be a coward walking away from an active war zone. He was going to stay. He was going to help Taylor stabilize her powers, yeah, but after that?

He was going to clean up this town. And then, he was going to clean up this planet.

"Ben?" Taylor asked, noticing the sudden, heavy silence that had fallen over him. "Are you okay?"

Ben snapped out of his tactical calculations, the easy, confident smirk instantly plastering back across his face. He reached out, gently patting her blanketed shoulder.

"I'm great, Taylor. Better than great." He stood up, stretching his arms over his head until his spine popped. "I was just thinking. I'm gonna be sticking around a lot longer than I thought. This world needs a serious reality check, and honestly? I think a guy with a million alien options is just the right person to deliver it."

He turned back to the laptop, a plan already forming in the back of his mind. If the local gangs and the PRT thought they knew how the game was played, they were about to find out what happened when the rules were rewritten by a cosmic exception.

 

[SteelBone16]

Okay, I love this idea. I rarely get to see Ben 10/Worm crossover fanfics that feature Ben Tennyson rather than a self-insert with an Omnitrix. Consider me a massive fan, and this story watched.

 

[Thegameaholic]

Danny Hebert had woken up somewhere around the part where Ben was explaining how his watch could mistransform him if he hit the faceplate too hard, and now, the older man was leaning forward in his vinyl hospital chair, looking at the teenager with a expression of profound, near-paralytic bewilderment.

But Taylor wasn't bewildered. She was envious.

In fact, Taylor was so goddamn envious of Ben Tennyson in that exact moment that she felt like she could be mistaken for a fresh coat of bright green paint. It was a ugly, toxic, suffocating feeling that pooled right in the center of her stomach, burning hotter than the literal alien fire that had raged through her veins just hours prior.

She watched the way he moved. Even sitting on a cheap plastic stool, Ben possessed a fluid, effortless grace, completely unburdened by the weight of the world. She listened to the way he talked his voice carried a natural, easy rhythmic confidence that didn't need to be forced or practiced. He spoke about saving the universe the way normal people spoke about finishing a difficult math test.

And now, he was casually dropping a story that made the entire concept of Earth-Bet's physics look like a joke.

"So, I was ten, right? Total kid, still figuring things out," Ben was saying, using his hands to animate the story while Danny watched with wide eyes. "And suddenly, boom, I get dragged through a temporal tear. I end up thirty years in the future, in this massive, hyper-advanced city, and I run face-first into my future self. Ben 10,000. The Hero of Heroes."

Ben rolled his eyes, leaning back on the stool. "And let me tell you, future me? Total hardass. Always working and no fun. He just stayed as an alien twenty-four-seven, never smiled, didn't joke around, treated saving lives like a punch-clock corporate job. I had to literally remind him how to have fun. But, hey, we teamed up, I unlocked a couple of new guys, and together we beat Future Vilgax who by that point was basically a giant, cybernetic mass of anger."

"You... you traveled through time," Danny said, his voice faint, his mind clearly struggling to process the implications. "At ten years old."

"Oh, yeah. That was just the first time," Ben chuckled, waving a hand offhandedly. "I've met multiple versions of my future self since then. Ben 10K changes every single time I team up with him, because the timeline is constantly shifting based on the choices I make in the present. They all technically still exist due to the multiverse but eh. Met one version who built a 'Biomnitrix' to fuse two aliens together, met another who could use his alien powers in his human form... it's a whole thing. Time travel is a headache, honestly."

Taylor stared at him, her hands tightening into white-knuckled fists beneath the hospital blankets.

Time travel.

Multiple futures. Fighting cyborg space tyrants at ten years old. Helping his own adult self remember how to be a hero.

What was she compared to this? How could she even dare to breathe the same air as him?

The contrast between them was a physical ache. Ben had been a savior, a cosmic protector, since the fourth grade. And her? She was a pathetic, broken teenager who, just last week, had spent her entire lunch period hiding inside a locked toilet stall in the third-floor bathroom of Winslow High, quietly eating a soggy peanut butter sandwich while checking her shoes under the door to make sure nobody was coming in to dump a bucket of dirty mop water over her head.

She had been the victim of a systematic, agonizingly cruel bullying campaign for over a year. She had curled up on her bedroom floor and cried multiple times until her chest felt like it was cracking open, all because her ex-best friend, Emma, had smiled and insulted her dead mother.

The worst part the part that made Taylor's throat tighten with a bitter, hysterical rage was that most of the insults Emma, Sophia, and Madison hurled at her didn't even make sense. They called her a waste of space, they called her disgusting, they made weird, irrational jabs at her hair, her clothes, her very existence that defied any form of logic. They were just senseless, chaotic cruelties meant purely to twist the knife, and yet, Taylor had let them break her. She had let them push her into a biohazardous locker until her mind snapped and she had powers.

She was standing in the presence of a literal comic book tier bullshit superhero. A silver-age, larger-than-life savior who re-wrote timelines and wore a smile while doing it.

And she was a girl who couldn't even stand up to three high school mean girls.

The jealousy was an ugly monster clawing at her ribs. She didn't want to feel it Ben had saved her life, he had carried her out of that hellhole, he had stood up to Armsmaster for her but she couldn't stop it. She wanted his confidence. She wanted his lack of fear. She wanted a universe where the bad guys wore bright colors and could be punched into a sci-fi jail cell, instead of a gray, miserable world where the villains ran the docks and the heroes told you to follow the 'Unwritten Rules' while your school got covered in filth.

"Wow," Danny murmured, rubbing his face with his hands, looking older than his years. "Ben... I don't even know what to say to that. A universe with aliens... time travel... it's a lot to take in."

"Eh, you get used to it," Ben said with a bright, easy smile, entirely oblivious to the toxic storm brewing inside Taylor's head. He looked over at her, his green eyes softening with genuine concern. "Hey, Taylor, you're being pretty quiet. You okay?"

Taylor forced her face to smoothen out. She swallowed the bile in her throat, plastering a blank, neutral expression over her features. She absolutely, under no circumstances, wanted to tell him the truth. She didn't want to tell him about the locker. She didn't want to tell him about Emma, or the garbage, or how utterly, profoundly pathetic her life was. If this cosmic savior looked at her and realized just how small and weak she really was, she thought she might actually die of shame.

"I'm fine," Taylor lied, her voice sounding tight and hollow even to her own ears. "Just... tired. Trying to understand it all." Which was honestly true all things considered

"Fair enough," Ben said, stretching his arms out. "It's a lot of sci-fi nonsense. Just get some rest, kid. Like I said, I'm sticking around. We're gonna get your powers sorted out, and then we're gonna figure out what to do with this city."

Taylor nodded, slowly sinking back down into her hospital pillows, turning her face away from the pale light of the room.

As she lay there, listening to the steady, mechanical beep of the heart monitor, she felt the invisible weight on her shoulders grow significantly heavier. It wasn't just the trauma of the locker anymore. It wasn't just the threat of the PRT, or the gangs.

It was the fact that she was now anchored to a living god. Her power had copied his DNA. Her future as a parahuman was completely tethered to the most powerful device in the universe, and she was expected to live up to that. She was expected to stand beside a guy who fought cyborgs at ten years old, while she was still trying to wash the scent of Winslow High's toxic waste out of her hair.

Closing her eyes, Taylor pressed her cheek against the rough hospital pillow, the green monster of envy whispering in the dark of her mind, reminding her just how far she had to climb.

 

[Ink]

Good luck to her i guess,
She's gonna need it if ben gets upto half the bullshit he does regularly,
Cause even by marvel/dc metric the things he gets upto are in the upper echelon of them.
Also would love to see his annodite side explored.

 

[Thegameaholic]

Song:Soul Eater Resonance by Natewantstobattle

[0:00 - 0:15] INTRO / THE HOOK

(The screen is pitch black. A heavy, rhythmic electronic bassline begins to throb like a digital heartbeat.)

Lyrics:

Two become one, our souls have been connected

A bond that's stronger than words

Visuals:

0:00: A drop of dark, oily water falls in ultra-slow motion, hitting a surface and rippling out. Inside the reflection of the ripple, we see a close-up of Taylor Hebert's eye behind her cracked glasses, wide with terror and drowning in darkness.

0:04: MATCH CUT to Ben Tennyson's vibrant green eye, sharp and focused.

0:07: A stylized, split-screen animation. On the left, Taylor is curled up in the pitch-black claustrophobia of the locker, surrounded by rusted iron. On the right, Ben is standing under the starry sky of Bellwood.

0:10: A brilliant, glowing neon-green circuit line erupts from the center of the screen, violently shattering the barrier between the two sides like breaking glass. The circuit line wraps around Taylor's wrist and locks directly onto the faceplate of the Omnitrix on Ben's arm.

Lyrics:

And now in sync we scream, our fates will come together

And it will not go unheard

Visuals:

0:12: The camera pulls back into a massive, panoramic orbital shot of Earth-Bet. The planet is shrouded in a depressing, dark purple mist.

0:14: Suddenly, a massive beam of emerald-green light pierces straight through the atmosphere from deep space, striking Brockton Bay and blowing the dark clouds away in a violent shockwave as the song's main guitar riff kicks in hard.

[0:15 - 0:35] VERSE 1: THE TWO WORLDS

(The tempo settles into a driving, steady rock rhythm.)

Lyrics:

Locking eyes, becoming intertwined

You'll be sharing your fate with mine

Visuals:

0:15: A panning shot of the Brockton Bay boardwalk under a miserable, drizzling rain. The civilians walk with their heads down, completely shadowed.

0:19: Ben walks through the crowd. He's wearing his signature green-and-white Omniverse jacket, hands casually shoved into his pockets. He looks up at the gray sky, entirely unfazed by the gloom, a smirk tugging at his lips.

0:22: As he walks past a puddle, his reflection doesn't show a human teenager—it rapidly cycles through the silhouettes of Feedback, Swampfire, and Diamondhead.

Lyrics:

Side by side, we'll battle through the night

And soon enough we'll find our way

Visuals:

0:25: Cut to the interior of the hospital room. Taylor is sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at her trembling hands. Microscopic green embers and sparks of magenta light dance between her fingertips.

0:29: Ben steps into the frame, silhouetted by the window. He extends a hand toward her. Taylor looks up, the harsh shadows fading from her face as she reaches out to take it.

0:32: The camera spins 360-degrees around them, transitioning the setting from the sterile white hospital room to the gritty, rain-slicked streets of the city at twilight.

[0:35 - 0:45] PRE-CHORUS: THE NIGHTMARE OF EARTH-BET

(The music builds tension, the drums accelerating into a frantic, driving beat.)

Lyrics:

When the sun has set, we'll battle through nightmares

We won't give up

Visuals:

0:35: Rapid, stylized cuts of the local threats. Lung stands in an alleyway, his body erupting into molten metallic scales and roaring into the sky as flames consume the camera.

0:38: Kaiser stands on a skyscraper, his arms crossed as massive, jagged steel blades sprout from the concrete around him like a forest of iron.

0:40: A horrifying, ink-blot transition shows the silhouettes of the Slaughterhouse Nine walking down a fog-filled road, their eyes glowing an ominous red.

Lyrics:

I will stay by your side as we slip into madness

Visuals:

0:42: The sky turns a blood-red color. The colossal, terrifying shadow of Leviathan looms over the Brockton Bay bay, its massive tail cutting through the water.

0:44: Taylor falls backward into an endless ocean of darkness, looking overwhelmed. But a hand catches her wrist tightly—it's Ben. The Omnitrix on his wrist flashes with a violent, protective green light that blindingly whitens out the screen.

[0:45 - 1:15] CHORUS: THE ROAR OF THE COSMIC EXCEPTION

(The beat drops with maximum intensity. Heavy guitars, screaming synths.)

Lyrics:

Two become one, our souls have been connected

A bond that's stronger than words

Visuals:

0:45: SMASH CUT TO ACTION. Ben's hand slams down on the raised dial of the Omnitrix in a hyper-stylized, high-frame-rate close-up.

0:48: A brilliant green explosion sweeps across the screen. Out of the smoke, Fasttrack tears forward! He becomes a neon blue-and-black blur, sprinting down the highway at Mach 1, leaving a trail of shattered glass and sonic boom rings in his wake.

0:52: Right beside him, Taylor leaps into the air. Her body shifts dynamically, encasing in dark, molten rock and bright magma—she transforms into Heatblast! She thrusts her hands forward, unleashing a twin torrent of brilliant pyronite fire that incinerates a wave of incoming ABB thugs.

Lyrics:

And now in sync we scream, our fates will come together

And it will not go unheard

Visuals:

0:57: Back-to-back combat. Fasttrack circles around Hookwolf, moving so fast he creates three after-images, striking the metallic brute from all sides with concussive force.

1:02: Taylor (as Heatblast) flies through the air on a surfboard of solid fire, dodging a barrage of Kaiser's iron spikes, leaving a streak of beautiful, roaring flame across the night sky.

1:06: The camera tracks a single, continuous shot: Ben drops out of his alien form, hits the watch again, and instantly shifts into Four Arms, catching a thrown car, while Taylor lands right beside him, her hands glowing with white-hot plasma.

[1:15 - 1:30] POST-CHORUS / OUTRO

(The music begins to wind down, transitioning into a melodic, lingering guitar solo.)

Lyrics:

Yeah, I-I-I could care less where it is you came from

'Cause we see what's waiting ahead

Visuals:

1:15: Cut to a high rooftop. The members of New Wave—Glory Girl, Lady Photon, and Brandish—stand under the moonlight, looking down at the city with expressions of profound awe. Panacea stands slightly behind them, looking down at her bandaged hand with a complicated, thoughtful expression.

1:20: Cut to the PRT building. Armsmaster stands behind a glass window, his blue visor reflecting the distant green glow of an alien transformation in the city below. Miss Militia stands beside him, looking toward the horizon.

Lyrics:

I knew from the first time that we became connected

I'll be with you 'til the end

Visuals:

1:24: The battle scene fades away. The camera pans across the legendary line-up of the Omnitrix aliens—Bloxx, Rath, Humungousaur, and Feedback—all standing as towering, translucent statues in the starry cosmos.

1:27: The final shot pulls back to the real world. Ben and Taylor (back in their human forms) are standing side-by-side on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ruined boardwalk of the Docks. The wind whips through Ben's green jacket and Taylor's dark hair.

1:29: The heavy, depressing gray clouds of Brockton Bay finally crack open, allowing a single, brilliant beam of golden morning sunlight to wash over them both.

1:30: Ben glances at Taylor and flashes his signature, confident hero smirk. Taylor looks at him, the envy fading from her eyes, replaced by a quiet, fierce determination. She nods back.

(The screen fades to black as the final guitar chord echoes out, revealing the title card written in a bold, metallic green font: HERO CODE.)

A/N:I'm sorry if this is going way to slow for you guys but i'm trying my best to keep it as evenly paced as possible but i can't go too fast i honestly don't know about this chapter i've been contemplating it and if you guys don't like it imma scrap it and remake the whole arc

The rhythmic, clinical beep of the patient monitor in Room 104 was the only sound anchoring the space to the present. Outside the window, Brockton Bay lay sprawled like a dying leviathan under the midnight sky a jagged silhouette of rusty shipping cranes, dark water, and crumbling industrial architecture, illuminated only by the sickly orange glow of sodium streetlights.

Inside the hospital room, Taylor Hebert slept fitfully. Her brow was tightly furrowed beneath her dark curls, her hands twitching against the starched white sheets as if she were still fighting off an invisible nightmare. In the corner recliner, Danny Hebert was entirely dead to the world, his gaunt face lined with an exhaustion that went deeper than simple lack of sleep. He looked like a man who had been hollowed out by grief and worry, his breathing heavy and ragged.

Ben Tennyson sat on his plastic stool, his green-and-white Omniverse jacket draped over the back of the chair. He wasn't looking at the cheap laptop Carol Dallon had left behind anymore. He was looking at Taylor.

When she had briefly awakened earlier, she had brushed off the entire locker incident with a quiet, hollow shrug. "Just a prank, Ben," she had muttered, her voice cracking as she turned her face toward the wall, trying to hide the tears leaking from beneath her eyelids. "A stupid high school prank that went too far. It doesn't matter. It's over."

Ben had nodded, smiled his classic, easygoing hero smile, and told her to get some rest. He had played the part of the oblivious, comforting teenager perfectly.

But the moment her eyes closed and her breathing evened out into sleep, that easygoing smile vanished entirely.

Ben Tennyson had spent six years dealing with some of the most deceptive, manipulative, and downright sociopathic beings in the known universe. He had negotiated with the treacherous Incurseans, traded wits with his dark mirror Albedo, and stared down the genocidal fury of Vilgax. He knew exactly what a lie sounded like. More importantly, he knew what a victim of severe trauma looked like when they were trying to bury the truth to protect whatever shattered dignity they had left.

A prank gone wrong was his cousin Gwen accidentally turning his hair neon blue with a miscast spell. A prank gone wrong was Kevin filling his plumbing truck with packing peanuts.

A prank gone wrong did not leave a teenage girl's biology so profoundly, violently traumatized that her mind fractured, triggering a parahuman connection that nearly caused her to spontaneously combust into a walking thermodynamic nightmare.

Ben stood up, his sneakers making absolutely no sound against the linoleum floor. He glanced at Danny, ensuring the man was deeply asleep, before stepping out into the dim, quiet hallway of the hospital's secure wing. The night nurse was busy at her station down the hall, her back turned as she typed away at a monitor.

Ben reached down, his thumb brushing the dial of the Omnitrix. The faceplate slid open with a soft, mechanical hiss, emitting a localized green glow that illuminated his sharp features. He rotated the dial, scrolling past the silhouettes of his heavy hitters until he found the distinct, hooded form he needed for an undercover excursion.

He didn't slam the dial down. Over the years, he had learned precision. He pressed it with a practiced, silent click, a faint flash of green light washing over his skin before collapsing inward, swallowing his physical form entirely without a sound.

Where a human teenager had stood a second ago, there was now a tall, ethereal, ghostly figure. His skin was a deep, midnight blue, patterned with small, white spots that resembled a distant galaxy. Folded over his chest like a heavy cloak were four large, insectoid wings, hiding his long, slender limbs. From beneath his deep hood, a pair of large, pupilless green eyes glowed with an icy, supernatural intensity.

Big Chill.

Without uttering a word, the Necrofriggian drifted forward. His body shifted its density, passing cleanly through the solid concrete wall of the hospital room and stepping out into the cold, open air of the Brockton Bay night. He spread his massive wings, the membrane catching the bitter wind as a frigid mist trailed behind him, instantly freezing the moisture in the air into tiny, glittering crystals.

He had pulled Winslow High's address from the laptop before leaving. It didn't take him long to find it.

Even from the air, Winslow looked less like an educational institution and more like a low-security prison. It was a ugly, sprawling concrete block covered in faded graffiti, surrounded by a sagging chain-link fence topped with rusty barbed wire. The windows were small, dark, and heavily barred. The entire place oozed a heavy, suffocating aura of institutional neglect and systemic failure.

Big Chill dropped from the sky like a falling leaf, his wings folding back over his torso to form his cloak. He glided straight toward the heavy, reinforced steel front doors of the school. He didn't bother looking for a key or trying to pick the lock. He simply walked forward, his density shifting to absolute zero as he phased cleanly through the metal, stepping into the dark, silent main corridor.

The interior of Winslow smelled like mold, cheap floor wax, and old dust. It was completely silent, the kind of heavy, unnatural silence that felt like a secret being kept in the dark.

Big Chill drifted down the hall, his glowing green eyes scanning the rows of identical, battered metal lockers. He didn't know the exact locker number, but he didn't need to. He followed the faint, lingering scent of industrial chemicals and bleach. Even after days, the smell was a glaring anomaly in a school that clearly neglected its janitorial duties.

He turned a corner into the junior hallway, and his eyes locked onto a specific locker near the center of the row.

It stood out instantly. While every other locker in the hallway was dented, covered in scratched-in obscenities, or coated in layers of old grime, this specific locker was pristine. It had been scrubbed raw. The metal was unnaturally bright, completely stripped of any personal markings, and the distinct, sharp stench of industrial-strength bleach and chemical neutralizers hung heavily in the air around it.

Big Chill drifted closer, hovering an inch off the linoleum floor. He reached out a long, three-fingered hand, his clawed fingers passing through the vents of the locker door.

"They cleaned it," his voice echoed out, a chilling, dual-toned whisper that vibrated with a raspy, low-frequency growl. "They bleached the whole thing. Tried to wipe it all away like it never happened."

The anger in his chest flared, a cold, icy spike. They had tried to erase the physical evidence. The school, the administration, whoever had done this they wanted this atrocity to vanish into the background noise of a failing city.

"Fine," Big Chill whispered, his wings expanding. "We'll just have to look a little deeper."

A bright green flash erupted from the center of his chest, expanding outward until it swallowed the ghostly form. The midnight-blue wings vanished, replaced by a heavy, metallic weight that slammed down onto the linoleum floor with a solid, echoing thud.

The new form was short, stocky, and built entirely out of thick, ornate brass and copper plating. Heavy, interlocking gears turned smoothly within his transparent torso, ticking with a steady, rhythmic cadence. A large, circular winding key sat on top of his head, rotating slowly, while a single, large green lens stared out from the center of his metallic face.

Clockwork.

The Chronosapien raised his thick, mechanical arms, his three-jointed fingers spreading wide as the gears inside his chest began to spin at a blinding velocity. A deep, resonant hum vibrated through the metal of the hallway, a sound that transcended physical space, echoing through the very fabric of time itself.

From the green lens on his face, a brilliant, shimmering wave of golden, chronokinetic energy erupted, washing over the bleached locker and the surrounding hallway.

"Let's zee ze truth," Clockwork's voice rumbled, a deep,German mechanical baritone

The golden light didn't illuminate the dark hallway it unraveled it.

Suddenly, the darkness of the night began to violently rewind. The shadows on the wall shifted, spinning backward like a time-lapse video. The sun rose and fell in a fraction of a second, the hallways filling with blurred, ghostly silhouettes of screaming teenagers running backward, trash flying out of bins and into students' hands, before vanishing into the past.

Clockwork focused his energy, narrowing the chronokinetic field down to yesterday

The golden light stabilized, freezing the temporal playback into a vivid, hyper-realistic holographic projection of the past. To anyone else, it would look like a ghost story. To a Chronosapien, it was reality, replayed with absolute, unyielding precision.

Clockwork watched as the hallway filled with the morning rush of students. And then, he saw her.

A past version of Taylor Hebert walked into the corridor. She looked incredibly small, her shoulders hunched inward as if she were trying to occupy as little space as humanly possible. She was clutching a worn backpack to her chest like a shield, her eyes cast downward, completely avoiding the gazes of the people around her.

She walked over to her locker, her fingers trembling slightly as she reached for her combination lock.

And then, three other girls entered the frame.

Clockwork's single green lens tracked them. One was a tall, athletic Black girl with a fierce, intensely aggressive posture, wearing an expensive leather jacket. Another was a short, plain-looking girl with a clipboard, looking around layout nervously but with a cruel, smug smirk on her face. And the leader a strikingly beautiful girl with vibrant, cascading red hair and a smile that looked like it had been synthesized in a laboratory to look perfect while hiding a black, rotten core..

The Chronosapien stood perfectly still, his internal gears ticking with a heavy, ominous rhythm as his top piece turns as he watched the scene unfold.

The three girls approached Taylor. There was a brief exchange of words. The holographic playback didn't carry perfect audio, but the chronokinetic resonance allowed Clockwork to catch the sharp, biting frequencies of their voices. He watched Taylor try to ignore them, her jaw tightening as she reached for her locker door.

The red-headed girl, Emma, gave a subtle, practiced nod.

The athletic girl, Sophia, stepped forward. She didn't just push Taylor aside. She reached out toward the lock on the locker door. Clockwork watched closely, his mechanical eye zooming in with microscopic precision.

As Sophia's hand touched the heavy steel padlock, her entire physical form suddenly shifted. For a fraction of a second, her body lost its solid consistency, turning into a dark, smokey, translucent shadow state. She phased her hand directly through the solid steel housing of the lock, manipulating the internal tumblers from the inside out with an effortless, practiced motion. The lock clicked open instantly, completely undamaged on the outside, but entirely compromised.

Clockwork's gears stalled for a microsecond. A parahuman, he realized, a cold, lethal calculation running through his brass mind. She used a shadow-phasing power to break into the locker.

What happened next was a genuine, unadulterated what the fuck moment.

Sophia slammed the locker door open. Inside, the locker wasn't empty. It was filled to the absolute brim with a rotting, horrific, shifting mass of brown and black filth. Even though the chronokinetic playback carried no physical scent, the sheer visual density of the material made Clockwork's internal systems register a phantom biological hazard warning. It was a toxic, biohazardous cocktail of rotting garbage, used feminine hygiene products, stagnant septic waste, and decomposed organic matter that had clearly been festering in a sealed container for weeks.

Taylor took a step back, her face turning pale with absolute horror, her hands flying to her mouth.

The three girls didn't hesitate. Sophia grabbed Taylor by the hair, her grip brutal and uncompromising. Taylor screamed, struggling, her hands flailing wildly as she tried to break free. But Sophia was stronger, more aggressive, shoving her backward with terrifying, calculated force. Madison and Emma blocked the hallway, their bodies forming a barrier, their faces twisted into expressions of pure, unadulterated sadistic glee.

They shoved Taylor forward. She tripped, falling backward directly into the rotting, biohazardous filth of the locker.

The stench must have been instantaneous, a suffocating, blinding assault on her senses. Before Taylor could even scramble out, Sophia slammed the heavy steel door shut. The padlock was thrown into place, clicking locked with a definitive, metallic snap.

Inside the locker, the ghostly silhouette of Taylor began to violently beat against the metal door. The metal rattled, her muffled, desperate screams echoing through the temporal playback.

Clockwork watched the hallway. He watched as Emma, Sophia, and Madison walked away, laughing, high-fiving each other as if they had just won a prize. He watched as the minutes ticked by. Ten minutes. Thirty minutes. An hour.

Students walked past the locker. They heard the banging. They heard the desperate, muffled crying. Some of them paused, looked at the locker with amusement, whispered to their friends, and walked away.

A teacher walked past. A heavy-set man with a mustache. He stopped, looked directly at the vibrating locker door, shook his head with an expression of profound annoyance, and walked away.

Inside the locker, Taylor's thrashing grew weaker. The oxygen was running out. The toxic fumes of the chemical waste and rotting biological material were filling her lungs. The holographic projection of her body began to glow with an erratic, terrifying purple and magenta light—the physical manifestation of her mind fracturing under the absolute, claustrophobic terror, her brain screaming for escape until her parahuman connection slammed into place.

"Enough," Clockwork rumbled.

He dropped his arms. The golden light snapped back into his lens, the holographic past shattering into thousands of glittering particles before vanishing entirely. The hallway returned to its dark, quiet, bleached reality.

Ben Tennyson was pissed.

No, pissed wasn't the right word. He was absolutely, white-hot, explosively furious.

In his six years of being a hero, Ben had fought every flavor of villain imaginable. He had fought megalomaniacs who wanted to rule galaxies, warlords who wanted power, and bounty hunters who did it for the money. But he absolutely, fundamentally hated bullies. Bullies were pathetic, small-minded creatures who tore others down simply because they were too weak and insecure to build themselves up.

But what he had just witnessed wasn't just bullying. It was an attempted execution. It was a systematic, institutionally tolerated torture campaign that a public school administration had actively chosen to ignore. Those girls weren't just bullies Ben genuinely questioned if they even deserved to be classified as human. To look at another living, breathing person and do that to them, to laugh while they suffocated in filth, was a level of casual malice that made space pirates look stable.

"Two years," Ben whispered, his brass fingers clenching into fists so hard the metal groaned. "Danny said this has been going on for almost two years."

He didn't have the time to sit around and manually gather the evidence he needed. He couldn't spend weeks playing detective, interviewing students who were too terrified of social suicide to speak, or digging through paper trails that the school principal had probably already shredded. He could use Clockwork to literally travel back in time and do it or undo it entirely make no mistake he had the power to rewrite the timeline completely.

But rewriting the past wouldn't fix the rot. If he just stopped the locker, those monsters would still be walking the halls, looking for another victim. The school would still be a corrupt, failing institution. The system would remain completely broken.

No. He didn't want to change what happened. He wanted to completely destroy the people who let it happen.

"New plan," Clockwork said, his voice dropping an octave as his internal gears began to turn backwards.

The brass armor didn't just flash green; it expanded, dissolving into a blinding, transcendent white-hot radiance that didn't cast shadows it eliminated them entirely. The physical walls of Winslow High seemed to lose their meaning, bowing outward as if the very architecture of the building was kneeling in the presence of what was coming.

The light faded, revealing a figure that didn't belong in this universe.

He was tall, perfectly proportioned, and entirely black, his body resembling a flawless, solid silhouette cut directly out of the deep cosmos. Infinite, glittering stars and distant nebulae shifted and spun within his skin like a living galaxy. Three sharp, horn-like protrusions grew from his head, and his eyes were pure, piercing pools of solid green light.

Alien X.

The moment the Celestialsapien manifested, the entire world stopped. Literally. The hum of the wind outside died. The falling rain froze in mid-air. The steady passage of time ceased to exist within a three-mile radius, locked in a perfect, unbreakable stasis.

Inside the vast, infinite ocean of Alien X's internal consciousness, Ben Tennyson opened his eyes.

He was floating in a purple, star-lit void. Floating directly in front of him were two colossal stone faces. To his left was Serena, the Voice of Love and Compassion a beautiful, serene female face with soft, weeping eyes. To his right was Bellicus, the Voice of Anger and Aggression a jagged, terrifying male face twisted into a permanent, roaring scowl.

Long ago, Ben had convince them to give him complete full control of Alien X's reality-warping capabilities to him. He didn't need their permission anymore. He didn't need to argue, plead, or wait for a vote. He held the keys to the kingdom.

He had simply popped into the mindscape to say a polite hello.

"Hey, guys," Ben said, giving a casual wave as he floated in the cosmic space. "Just stopping by to say greetings. Got a quick piece of business to take care of down below."

"Ah, the boy returns," Bellicus rumbled, though there was no real venom in his voice anymore, merely his usual gruff demeanor. "Do what you must, Tennyson."

"Be kind, Ben," Serena whispered softly, her massive eyes shining with starlight. "Fix what is broken."

"Count on it," Ben said.

In the real world, Alien X raised his right hand. His cosmic fingers aligned, and with a simple, effortless motion, he snapped his fingers.

The sound of the snap didn't create a physical shockwave. It created a profound ripple through the baseline data of reality.

Instantly, the Celestialsapien power reached out across the entire infrastructure of Brockton Bay. It bypassed local firewalls, tore through hidden desktop directories, and completely reconstructed deleted hard drives. It retrieved encrypted text messages from Madison Clements' phone, pulled erased emails from Emma Barnes' personal computer, and extracted every single shred of data regarding the systemic harassment of Taylor Hebert.

On the floor of the dark hallway, right at Alien X's feet, reality began to fold in on itself.

Dozens of high-capacity flash drives, pristine legal manila folders filled with thousands of pages of printed emails, cross-referenced receipts, and internal administrative logs materialized out of thin air, stacking themselves into a neat, perfectly organized pile.

Alien X's eyes drifted to the locker door. He reached out with his mind, tracing the temporal path of the items that had been stolen from Taylor over the two-year campaign.

He saw it. A beautiful, handcrafted silver flute, tucked away inside a velvet case. Annette Hebert's final gift to her daughter. He saw Sophia Hess phasing her hand into Taylor's locker months ago, stealing the case, and tossing it into a dumpster behind a grocery store downtown, where it had been crushed and destroyed by a garbage truck days later.

Alien X focused his gaze. The cosmic energy surged.

In a flash of soft green stasis, the molecular structure of the crushed, melted silver reassembled itself. The atoms aligned perfectly, the velvet case restoring its pristine texture, the silver flute polished to a mirror shine, completely untainted by time or destruction. The flute materialized gently on top of the pile of evidence.

"Done," Ben's voice echoed through the cosmic form.

A bright green flash consumed the hallway once more, and Ben Tennyson stepped out of the light, back in his human form. Time instantly snapped back into motion with a loud, sudden intake of air as the frozen rain outside slammed back into the asphalt.

Ben looked down at the massive pile of evidence at his feet. He picked up the velvet flute case first, opening it slightly. The silver caught the dim light of the hallway. He closed it with a soft, bittersweet smile, tucking it securely under his arm.

Then, he reached down and picked up the top folder of the evidence pile, which contained a series of private, unindexed documents from Principal Blackwell's personal filing cabinet and a secure, non-government hard drive belonging to a specific PRT official.

Ben flipped it open, scanning the text by the light of his phone. His expression darkened all over again, a deep hiss escaping his teeth.

"Wow," Ben whispered, flipping through the pages. "It's not even the whole PRT. It's way sleazier than that."

The evidence pulled by Alien X revealed the exact mechanics of the cover-up. Director Piggot and the higher-ups at the PRT ENE department didn't actually know about Sophia Hess's horrific behavior or the locker incident at all. The corruption was entirely localized.

Sophia Hess's assigned PRT Probation Officer had been actively burying every single incident report, police notification, and complaint that came out of Winslow High. The probation officer was doing it entirely to protect their own career; if their star probationary Ward asset was revealed to be a violent, unhinged torturer violating her juvenile parahuman parole, the officer's record would be ruined, and Sophia would be sent straight to juvenile detention or the Birdcage.

And Principal Blackwell was actively colluding with the handler. Blackwell had suppressed the school records, threatened teachers who wanted to report the bullying, and ordered the janitors to bleach the locker immediately. She didn't do it out of love for Sophia Hess; she did it because Winslow High received massive, specialized federal grant funding specifically for hosting a Ward under its roof. If Sophia was removed or exposed, the school would lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in institutional funding.

They had literally sold Taylor Hebert's safety and sanity for budget allocations and career security.

"A sleazy principal and a corrupt handler," Ben growled, slamming the folder shut. "They buried a girl alive so they could keep their hands in the cash register. Unbelievable."

Ben crouched down, gathering the heavy stack of manila folders and the bag of flash drives. It was a massive pile, weighing at least thirty pounds, but his baseline physical conditioning allowed him to carry it effortlessly.

He tucked the flute case tightly under his arm and hoisted the box. "Alright," Ben whispered into the empty hallway, his green eyes burning with a cold, calculated fire. "Let's see how your little financial arrangement holds up when a real lawyer gets ahold of your throats."

The Dallon household in the upper-class neighborhood of Arcadia was completely dark when the soft, rhythmic knocking began on the front door.

Carol Dallon was already awake, sitting at her kitchen island in a silk robe, a mug of black coffee cooling in her hands as she reviewed the legal precedents for parahuman custody cases. Her mind was a chaotic storm of worry. The arrival of Ben Tennyson had completely thrown the delicate political(Delusional fr fr) balance of Brockton Bay into jeopardy, and the sheer hostility Director Piggot had shown during the briefing was a clear sign that the authorities were preparing to move aggressively against the teenagers.

When the knock came, her hand instantly froze. She stood up smoothly, her internal power humming slightly beneath her skin, ready to manifest the hard-light barrier of Brandish at a fraction of a second's notice if the PRT had sent a containment team to her home.

She walked to the front door, peering through the security peephole.

Standing on her porch, illuminated by the porch light, was Ben Tennyson. He was wearing his green jacket, looking completely relaxed, a large, velvet case tucked under his arm and a massive, overflowing cardboard box resting on the deck beside his feet.

Carol blinked in surprise. She deactivated her power, unlocked the deadbolt, and pulled the heavy wooden door open.

"Ben?" Carol asked, her voice low but sharp as she looked past him into the quiet street, checking the treeline for any signs of PRT surveillance vans. "What are you doing here? It's three in the morning. You're supposed to be at the hospital with the Heberts."

"Hey, Carol," Ben said with his signature, easygoing grin, waving a casual hand. "Sorry for the late-night drop-in. But, honestly? I couldn't sleep. And once I start a project, I kind of have to finish it."

Carol's eyes drifted down to the massive cardboard box at his feet. Through the open top, she could see hundreds of neatly organized legal folders, bundles of printed documents, and a plastic bag filled with high-capacity USB drives.

"What is this?" she asked, her sharp lawyer instincts instantly flaring as she noted the sheer volume of the paperwork.

"This," Ben said, his grin shifting into something much colder, much more deliberate, "is a legal nuclear bomb. And since you're the best lawyer in town who doesn't like institutional nonsense, I figured I'd deliver it directly to the launch pad."

Carol stared at him for a long moment before stepping aside, opening the door wider. "Bring it inside. Quickly."

Ben hoisted the heavy box with one arm, walking into the pristine, modern kitchen and setting it down on the granite island with a heavy thud. Carol closed the front door, locking it securely before walking over to stand across from him.

"Explain," Carol commanded, her eyes narrowing as she crossed her arms.

Ben leaned against the counter. He knew he needed to tell her an absolute, flawless line of sci-fi bullshit. If he told her that he turned into a giant brass clock and a cosmic space god to manifest this data out of thin air, she'd think he was either insane or an apocalyptic threat, which would instantly make her treat him like an enemy. He needed to frame the evidence around the advanced technological capabilities she already knew he possessed.

"Alright, so after you guys left the hospital, I started talking to Danny," Ben began, his voice adopting a perfect, serious-but-casual storytelling cadence. "He was telling me about how Taylor's been having a really rough time at school for the last two years. Grades dropping, isolating herself, coming home with ruined clothes. And then Taylor tells me the locker was just a 'prank gone wrong'. My dad's a businessman, Carol. I know what people look like when they're hiding a total disaster. So, I decided to do a little off-the-books investigation."

Ben reached into the box and pulled out the primary file on the Winslow administration, sliding it across the granite counter toward her.

"The PRT higher-ups like Piggot don't even know about this," Ben explained, his eyes narrowing. "One of the girls who shoved Taylor into that locker is Sophia Hess—the probationary Ward known as Shadow Stalker. It turns out, Sophia's specific PRT Probation Officer has been actively intercepting and burying every single police report and incident notification that came out of Winslow regarding her. The handler did it to keep their own career record clean and protect their star asset from being thrown into juvenile detention."

Carol snatched the folder, her eyes tearing through the pages.

"And Principal Blackwell went right along with it," Ben continued, pointing at a highlighted spreadsheet. "Winslow High receives massive federal and PRT grant funding specifically for hosting a Ward under probation. If Sophia got pulled out or exposed as a monster, Blackwell loses her funding. So, the principal ordered the cameras wiped, threatened the staff, and had the locker bleached immediately after Taylor was taken to the hospital to protect her pocketbook."

The Heroine's sharp eyes tracked the signatures, the financial receipts, and the encrypted message logs between Blackwell and the specific PRT handler. The sheer, systematic corruption printed on the pages made the color completely drain from her face.

"My God," Carol whispered, her voice trembling with a mixture of profound professional disgust and white-hot fury. "This... this isn't just a school disciplinary issue. This is a localized criminal conspiracy. An administrative handler and a school principal actively colluding to suppress the ongoing torture of a minor to preserve corporate funding and career advancement."

"There's more," Ben said, pointing to the flash drives in the plastic bag. "I compiled every single text message, every private chat log from the bullies' phones, and the complete, unedited security footage from the hallway that morning. I've already organized it all. There's video evidence of Hess using her shadow power to phase through the locker locks to steal Taylor's personal property. There's footage showing the teachers actively walking past the locker while she was screaming inside."

She slammed the folder down on the granite counter and looked up at Ben, her eyes boring into him.

"Ben, do you have any idea what you've actually done here?" Carol asked, her voice dropping into a tense, dangerous whisper. "Setting aside how completely horrific this locker situation is... look at how you obtained this. You just admitted to illegally hacking a public school's network servers. You've intercepted private text messages and invaded the privacy of three minor girls without a warrant. And worst of all? You're using that data to unmask a Ward. That is a direct, catastrophic violation of the Unwritten Rules."

Ben didn't flinch. He just leaned back against the kitchen island, crossing his arms with an utterly relaxed, cocky smile.

"First of all, I didn't unmask her," Ben said smoothly. "Sophia Hess unmasked herself the exact second she decided to use a classified parahuman ability to commit an active felony on a public high school security camera. The Unwritten Rules are supposed to protect capes in their civilian lives, right? Well, she brought her cape life into a school hallway to torture a regular girl. If a speedster robs a bank without a mask on, you don't blame the camera for catching their face."

Carol opened her mouth to argue, but Ben waved a hand, cutting her off to drop his explanation for the technical side of things.

"And as for the hacking and privacy stuff? I didn't actually touch their network files directly. Before I went in, I used an alien form called Grey Matter. He's about six inches tall, gray skin, and has a brain that operates on a cognitive frequency that makes Earth's supercomputers look like a bunch of pocket calculators. He built this tiny, pocket-sized device out of a few spare junk i found." Ben tapped the watch on his wrist.

"I slipped into the school's server room as an invisible ghost and attached Grey Matter's device—a Galvanic data-siphon directly to the primary broadband trunk line. It didn't crack their firewalls it just absorbed the raw, microscopic electromagnetic echoes of every file, email, and text that had passed through that building over the last two years. It even reconstructed the deleted hard drives by reading the magnetic polarity left on the server ribbons. Technically, the school's hardware volunteered the data to an advanced interstellar receiver. It's entirely external data retrieval. Completely legal by deep-space standards."

Carol stared at him, her brain spinning as she tried to process the absolute absurdity of a teenager using alien engineering and outer-space property laws to justify a complete lack of a search warrant. Yet, looking down at the pristine, indisputable data sitting on her counter, she knew a federal judge wouldn't care about the physics of a data-siphon once they saw the text logs.

"Fine," Carol sighed, rubbing her temples as she felt a massive headache forming. "Let's say I can spin this as an independent, third-party discovery that bypasses standard police protocols. Everything here is in perfect legal order to absolutely destroy Blackwell, the handler, and those girls. If we play our cards right and present this cleanly, we might actually get lucky. Director Piggot is a pragmatist. She hates loose cannons, and Sophia Hess was only a probationary Ward anyway her leash was already incredibly short."

Carol leaned forward, her eyes narrowing slightly as she studied Ben's face.

"If Piggot sees this mountain of evidence, she'll realize Hess is a massive institutional liability. She will gladly toss that girl to the wolves if it means protecting the PRT's reputation and, more importantly, getting on the good side of the Eidolon of Changers."

Ben kept his expression perfectly still, nodding slowly with a confident, knowing look.

The Eidolon of Changers? Ben thought to himself, a massive question mark popping up in his head. Who the heck is Eidolon? Is that some local hero? Whatever. Just play it cool.

"Yeah," Ben said out loud, tossing out a casual shrug. "Makes sense. Keep the big guys happy."

"Exactly," Carol said, turning her attention back to the papers. "But even with Piggot potentially cutting Hess loose to appease you, there is still one major, insurmountable issue."

She tapped her fingers against the thick stack of manila folders.

"Money, Ben. As much as I want to take this case and personally drag these people through the mud, a federal lawsuit against a school board, a teacher's union, and a shadow division of the PRT is going to be a long, nightmarish, bureaucratic war. It takes an astronomical amount of money to fund a case like this court fees, independent depositions, expert testimonies, security details. I can't fund a multi-year federal battle out of my own pocket.I assume you don't exactly have a bank account in this dimension."

Ben's smile faltered for a second. The realization hit him like a bucket of cold water.

Think, Tennyson.

She was right. He didn't have a single dollar to his name here. Plumber credits were completely worthless on Earth-Bet, and he couldn't exactly walk into a local bank and ask for a stack of cash. If they couldn't pay the legal fees, all this flawless evidence would just sit in a box while the corrupt system swept Taylor under the rug.

Wait a minute...

Ben blinked, his mind flashing back to the hours he had spent scrolling through the laptop Carol had lent him back at the hospital. He had been looking up the local laws, trying to understand how capes operated under the government.

Oh, that's good. That is really good.

A slow, brilliant, incredibly dangerous grin spread across Ben's face. He remembered the specific legal loophole he had come across while skimming the government's parahuman legislative database.

Kill Orders.

On Earth-Bet, when a parahuman threat became too destructive, monstrous, or completely unmanageable, the government declared them an S-Class threat and issued an official, legally binding Kill Order. It was essentially a state-sanctioned bounty. And because the government was absolutely desperate to get rid of these monsters, the law was written with zero restrictions: anyone who eliminated an active Kill Order target whether they were a hero, a rogue, a villain, or a completely unregistered civilian was legally entitled to the payout. The government was constitutionally obligated to pay the bounty regardless of the hunter's 'Cape Status.'

Ben reached over, tapping Carol's laptop screen to wake it up. He quickly typed in a search query, pulling up the current active bounties for the most infamous S-Class threat roaming the country: the Slaughterhouse Nine.

He looked at the numbers glowing on the screen. Between Jack Slash, Siberian, Crawler, and the rest of the psychotic circus, the collective bounty placed on their heads by the federal government added up to roughly half a billion dollars.

Five hundred million dollars. More than enough to fund a thousand lawsuits, rebuild Winslow High from the ground up, and buy Taylor Hebert her own private island if she wanted one.

Ben looked up at Carol, his green eyes burning with a sudden, lethal intensity that made the veteran hero take a half-step back. He tapped the faceplate of the Omnitrix, the green dial popping up with a sharp, mechanical hiss.

"Don't worry about the money, Carol," Ben said, his voice dropping into a calm, confident, and terrifyingly casual tone. "Go ahead and draft those filings. Build the strongest case you can."

Carol looked from the laptop screen back to Ben, her eyes wide as she realized exactly what he was implying. "Ben... you can't be serious. The Slaughterhouse Nine are monsters. Entire protectorate teams have been wiped out trying to—"

"They've never fought me," Ben interrupted smoothly, turning back toward the front door. He paused, looking over his shoulder with a sharp, fearless grin. "The government legally owes half a billion dollars to whoever sweeps those trash bags off the streets. Tell your clerks to get to work it's time for me to go hunting."

The Universe's greatest hero was not planning on fighting them now however it sems like he has no choice now he was a man on a mission

Hopefully they live up to hype

 

[Thegameaholic]

To Jacob Black, the world was nothing more than an exceptionally poorly constructed stage, and its inhabitants were merely bad actors begging for a director who understood the true value of a tragedy.

He had long since discarded the name Jacob, burying it deep in the dirt of the dark, suffocating bunker where his half-mad parents had raised him to fear an apocalypse that had already come and gone. When he had stepped out of that hole into the light of the real world, he hadn't found a society; he had found a playground of soft, fragile things that broke if you pressed them in just the right spots. He had taken a straight razor to his old life, carving out a new identity from the raw, bleeding throat of the parahuman underworld.

Jack Slash.

It was a name that carried a weight heavier than the iron cranes lining the rusty shores of Brockton Bay. It was a name that caused veteran heroes to wake up in a cold sweat, their hands trembling as they checked the locks on their windows. To Jack, every wide-scale atrocity he coordinated, every small-scale piece of personal torment he inflicted, was an act of pure artistic expression. He possessed a playful, almost whimsical demeanor that remained entirely unbothered whether he was casually skinning a local gang leader alive or directing the systematic slaughter of an entire town.

Every single move, every calculated glance, every flick of his wrist was designed to afflict change on the world around him—and always, without fail, for the worse. Humanity was a stagnant, boring pool of water; Jack considered it his sacred duty to throw massive, jagged rocks into it just to watch the mud swirl to the surface. He didn't just want to participate in the end of the world. He wanted to orchestrate it. He wanted to carve his name so deeply into the collective consciousness of the human race that if the sky split open and the world burned to ash, the very last word whispered by the survivors would be his. He would ensure that the name Jack Slash was synonymous with absolute, paralyzing fear.

Right now, the maestro was at work in his temporary theater.

The hideout was an abandoned, salt-crusted marine warehouse on the desolate edge of the Docks. The air inside smelled of rotting wood, rusted iron, and the sharp, chemical tang of the horrific experiments currently bubbling away in the makeshift laboratory below. Moonlight filtered down through the shattered glass of the skylights, casting long, skeletal shadows across the concrete floor.

Jack sat casually on an overturned wooden crate, his long legs crossed, his fingers effortlessly spinning a pristine, ivory-handled straight razor. The silver blade caught the moonlight, flashing like a tiny, lethal mirror. Around him, the nightmare circus that was the Slaughterhouse Nine loomed in the dark, a collection of living gods and broken monsters waiting for their cues.

"Brockton Bay is an absolute goldmine of potential, my family," Jack murmured, his voice smooth, theatrical, and dripping with an easygoing warmth that entirely contrasted his words. He gave a small, playful smirk, looking around the room. "The local flavor here is so delightfully... volatile. You have the structural decay, the desperate gangs clawing at each other's throats, and a local Protectorate department that is practically begging to be shattered into pieces. I do believe our little vacation here is going to leave a lasting impression."

From the shadows near a rusted support pillar, Shatterbird shifted, the delicate, intricate silks of her costume rustling softly. She ran a pale, elegant hand through her brilliant hair, a soft, musical chime echoing from her lips. "The architecture of this city is remarkably fragile, Jack. So much glass. Miles and miles of pristine, structural silicon just waiting for the right pitch. I could sing a song that would blind half the population before breakfast."

"And a beautiful symphony it would be, dear," Jack chuckled, flipping his razor closed with a soft click. "But we mustn't rush the opening act. Pacing is everything in a masterpiece."

"I want to play with the local capes," Bonesaw chirped, her sweet, childlike voice echoing unnaturally in the vast, hollow space. She was sitting on a stained medical gurney, her small legs swinging back and forth, her hands busy stitching a pair of rotted canine ears onto a human scalp she had preserved in a jar. "The Wards here look so adorable! I think it would be so much fun to open up Pancea don't you think that would be pretty, Jack?"

"I don't care about the children," Hatchet Face grunted, his massive, hulking frame leaning heavily against a stack of moldering shipping pallets. He ran a thick, calloused thumb over the edge of his brutal, blood-stained hatchet, his breathing a heavy, wet rasp. "I just want to find their heavy hitters. Let me get close enough to stifle their little sparks, and I'll split their skulls open. Simple. Clean."

"You always lack a certain poetic nuance, Hatchet," Cherish purred, stepping out from the edge of the moonlight. She leaned against a crate, her fingers tracing the edge of her collar, a cruel, mocking smile playing on her lips. She could feel the ambient emotions in the room the stagnant, terrifying vacuum of the Siberian, the burning furnace of Burnscar, the chaotic itch of Crawler. She turned her focus toward the city outside, her eyes narrowing. "The emotional landscape of this bay is absolutely delicious right now. It's like a bruised fruit, ready to burst. I can feel the despair radiating from the wards downtown. I could make half the city walk into the ocean with a single tug."

"A tempting offer, Cherish," Jack said, his eyes dancing with amusement. "But we must allow them to hope first. Despair is far more potent when it's preceded by a sudden, devastating loss of hope."

Across the room, Mannequin shifted his weight, his white, porcelain-plated joints clicking and whirring with a sterile, mechanical precision. He didn't speak—he couldn't—but the slow, deliberate tilt of his spherical head toward Jack conveyed a cold, calculated agreement. Beside him, Burnscar sat on a pile of charred timbers, a tiny, flickering flame dancing between her fingertips. Her eyes were glazed over, staring blankly into the fire, her mind clearly wandering through the black, scorched memories of the towns she had reduced to ash.

In the furthest, darkest corner of the warehouse, completely removed from the discussion, sat a massive, grotesque shape. Crawler. The multi-limbed, heavily armored monstrosity shifted, his colossal bulk scraping against the concrete, a low, rumbling growl vibrating deep within his chest. His multiple glowing eyes stared out into the dark, entirely uninterested in the politics of the gang, his biology aching, pleading for something—anything—that could actually hurt him enough to force a new adaptation.

And right beside Jack, sitting completely still on a rusted steel beam, was the Siberian. The naked, tiger-striped woman didn't make a sound. She didn't breathe. She didn't blink. She was an absolute, terrifying void in reality, a living weapon that defied every known law of physics, watching the maestro with an unreadable, feral intensity.

"So," Jack said, standing up smoothly and spreading his arms wide as if addressing a packed auditorium. "Our agenda is clear. We squeeze the bay until it snaps. We—"

The warehouse door didn't just open. It ceased to exist.

A sudden, deafening CRACK of displaced air tore through the structure, a sound so violent it shattered the remaining glass in the overhead skylights, sending a rain of sharp shards clattering to the floor. The massive, reinforced corrugated steel doors of the warehouse were violently torn from their hinges, buckling inward like cheap tinfoil as they flew across the room, slamming into the concrete with a deafening, metallic roar.

The members of the Nine didn't panic they were gods of ruin but every eye instantly snapped toward the cloud of dust and pulverized concrete settling at the entrance.

As the dust began to clear, a figure stabilized in the center of the doorway.

It wasn't a hero(Not that they knew of). It wasn't a villain. It wasn't even human.

The creature was built entirely for terrifying, unnatural velocity. It stood on two long, slender legs, balanced perfectly on a pair of rolling, spherical black orbs where feet should have been. Its body was a sleek, aerodynamic frame of deep midnight blue and obsidian black, its long, lithe torso tapering up into a pointed, helmet-like head. A dark, translucent visor covered its face, reflecting the pale moonlight. From its back trailed a long, prehensile tail striped in black and blue, twitching with an erratic, restless energy. Its arms ended in three sharp, scissor-like claws that clicked together with a fast, rhythmic precision.

The creature reached up with a claw, sliding its dark visor upward. Beneath it, a pair of sharp, expressive reptilian green eyes locked directly onto Jack Slash.

"Man, chirp, you guys are seriously a pain to track down," the creature spoke. Its voice was light, raspy, and completely alien, punctuated by a distinct, high-frequency cricket-like chirp every single time it uttered a sentence. "You'd think a bunch of colorfully dressed psychopaths would leave a bigger electronic footprint, chirp, but you were actually somewhat well-hidden. Too bad for you, chirp, when you can run across the surface of the ocean and travel the world in a few seconds, it makes finding things a whole lot easier."

A/N:I Actually like how Omniverse XLR8 sounds like a cricket

Jack didn't move. He kept his straight razor loosely in his hand, his expression remaining entirely nonchalant, a soft, amused chuckle escaping his lips. "Well, well. What a delightfully exotic little creature. Did one of the local heroes lose their pet tinker project? Or are you a brand new flavor of mutant deviation?"

Outwardly, Jack looked perfectly calm. He looked like a man who was entirely in control of his surroundings.

But deep within the hidden, subconscious architecture of his mind, a profound, terrifying anomaly was occurring.

For over twenty years, Jack Slash had survived the parahuman world because of a secret, secondary power that even he didn't know about at all. His shard, the Broadcast entity, was the primary communications hub of the entire parahuman network. Whenever Jack was in the presence of a parahuman, his shard was constantly working behind the scenes. It spoke to the shards of his enemies, reading their intents, predicting their attacks, and subtly nudging their hosts.

A/N: No Jack doesn't know about shards or this ability this is just me explaining the Power in general to you and how it works and feels for him

If a parahuman tried to attack Jack, Broadcast would alert his instincts, giving him a perfect, supernatural awareness of the danger. It would whisper to the hostile parahuman's shard, causing them to hesitate, to misaim, or to feel a sudden, overwhelming sense of dread that ruined their offensive momentum. If Jack was isolated, Broadcast would manipulate the shards of the other Nine members, drawing them to his location like moths to a flame. It would even liberally interpret the existing drawbacks of an enemy's power, causing their abilities to work sub-optimally just to ensure Jack walked away without a scratch.

Jack Slash was unkillable because the entire parahuman system was rigged in his favor.

But right now, as Jack looked at the black-and-blue creature standing in the doorway, the Broadcast shard was dead silent.

It wasn't whispering. It wasn't negotiating. It was screaming into an absolute, empty vacuum. The creature in front of him had no shard. It had no connection to the entities. It possessed no passenger, no broken psychology to manipulate, no parahuman architecture to exploit. It was a completely independent, foreign biological organism from a completely different universe.

For the first time in his entire life, Jack Slash was completely, entirely on his own. His supernatural instincts were gone. His perfect evasion was gone. The safety net that had kept him alive through a hundred battles had vanished into thin air.

He didn't show it. He couldn't. He kept his theatrical smile plastered across his face, though his knuckles whitened slightly around the handle of his razor.

"I'm not anyone's pet, chirp," the velociraptor-like being said, clicking its claws together as its tail lashed behind it. "The name's XLR8. And I'm here because I did a little reading on a laptop earlier, chirp, and it turns out the government has a really, really large stack of money waiting for whoever sweeps you guys off the streets. Half a billion dollars, chirp, to be exact. That's a lot of legal fees."

"Money?" Jack laughed, a rich, mocking sound that echoed through the warehouse. "You broke down our door for a bounty? How terribly mundane. I expected something a bit more... righteous."

"Oh, the righteousness is just a bonus, chirp," XLR8 said, his visor sliding back down over his face, locking into place with a sharp click. "You guys are serial killers. You hurt people because you think it's funny, chirp. Where I come from, guys like you get locked up in the Null Void. But here? The rules are a lot simpler."

Before Jack could even utter a response, the massive, grotesque bulk of Crawler erupted from the shadows.

The colossal monstrosity let out a deafening, wet roar that shook the very foundations of the warehouse, his multiple limbs tearing chunks out of the concrete floor as he charged forward. Crawler was an engine of pure, unadulterated destruction, his massive jaws dripping with a highly concentrated, corrosive acid that hissed as it hit the air. He didn't care about bounties, he didn't care about space laws he just wanted to feel this fast, strange creature tear into his flesh so he could adapt to it. He wanted the pain. He wanted the evolution.

XLR8 didn't move. He didn't run. He didn't even shift his stance.

He stood perfectly still on his rolling black orbs, watching as the mountain of mutated flesh and armor hurtled toward him at a terrifying speed. Crawler was fifty feet away. Thirty feet. Ten feet. The monstrosity raised a massive, clawed appendage, ready to slam it down and paste the speedster into the concrete.

Right as Crawler was a single microsecond away from crushing him, XLR8 raised his right claw and slammed it directly into the glowing green hourglass symbol situated on the center of his chest.

A brilliant, blinding flash of emerald-green light erupted from the symbol, illuminating the entire warehouse with the intensity of a dying star. The light was so bright it forced Jack to shield his eyes, a sharp hiss escaping his teeth.

When the light snapped back into nonexistence a fraction of a second later, XLR8 was gone. The doorway was completely empty.

Crawler's massive claw slammed into the empty concrete where the speedster had been standing, pulverizing the linoleum into a massive crater of dust and debris. The giant monstrosity skidded to a halt, his multiple eyes spinning around in confusion as he looked for his target.

"Where did the little lizard go?!" Jack called out, his voice sharp, his theatrical mask cracking just a fraction as he scanned the rafters. "Shatterbird, check the roof! Bonesaw, get back!"

Crawler didn't move, though.

The colossal monstrosity stood perfectly still in the center of the warehouse, his massive limbs locked in place. He didn't roar. He didn't turn around. He just... stopped.

"Crawler?" Jack asked, his brow furrowing as he took a step forward. "What are you doing? Find him."

Crawler didn't answer.

A second later, the colossal, unkillable engine of destruction went entirely, completely limp. The multiple glowing eyes in his head went dark, the vibrant, chaotic energy leaving his massive frame in an instant. His colossal body fell forward, hitting the concrete floor with a massive, earth-shaking thud, rolling onto its side like a cut tree or a heavy sack of potatoes.

He wasn't breathing. He wasn't regenerating. The heart that had survived tank shells and parahuman strikes had simply ceased to beat.

"Well," a raspy, bone-chilling voice echoed from the deep shadows near the ceiling, a sound that felt like a freezing hand sliding down Jack's spine. "That's one down."

Jack's head snapped upward.

Floating effortlessly twenty feet in the air was a being that looked like it had been pulled directly out of a nightmare's nightmare. It was a tall, eerie, phantom-like alien with a pale, almost bone-white body and a slender, floating physique that gave it the appearance of a restless spirit. its head is elongated and curves backward like a twisted hood or skull, featuring a single green eye set within a black, jagged marking that resembles a crack or stitched wound. The beings arms are long and thin, ending in sharp, branch-like claws that look more like skeletal fingers than hands. Black vein-like lines run across its body, contrasting with the ghostly complexion, while bright green bands encircle its neck, wrists, and waist, with chains crossing the torso and connecting to a strange hourglass symbol at its chest. Instead of legs, the lower body tapers into a wispy, tail-like form, making the being seem as though he is perpetually levitating above the ground. It's very presence evoked a sinister specter or imprisoned wraith the single, piercing eye moved with a slow, mechanical precision, tracking the remaining members of the Nine with a cold, supernatural intensity.

And in its long, clawed right hand, the entity was holding a glowing, vibrant pinkish-purple ball of pure, swirling energy. The light from the sphere cast eerie, flickering shadows across the creature's pale hide.

"What... what are you?" Cherish whispered, her voice trembling as she staggered back a step. She reached out with her power, trying desperately to sense the emotions of the floating nightmare. But the moment her parahuman senses touched the entity, she was hit with a wave of absolute, freezing emptiness. There were no human emotions inside that form. No fear, no anger, no joy just a vast, infinite, alien void that threatened to swallow her mind whole if she looked too closely.

"The name's Ghostfreak," the Ectonurite rumbled, his voice a layered, dual-toned whisper that sounded like a dozen dead men speaking in perfect unison. He tilted his upside-down eye toward the massive, lifeless corpse of Crawler below him. "You know, I did some digging into your little powers on that wiki page about you all. And while i'm positive there was a lot of data it probably didn't cover... it seems the notes were right about one thing. Crawler's adaptation powers take time to process physical damage."

Ghostfreak raised the glowing pinkish-purple ball, his clawed fingers tightening around it.

"But I guess the big guy couldn't adapt to getting his soul ripped straight out of his chest in time, huh?"

With a sudden, brutal motion, Ghostfreak squeezed his claw.

The pinkish-purple sphere didn't pop it shattered like cheap glass, a sharp, resonant chime echoing through the warehouse as the fragments of Crawler's essential life force dissolved into tiny, glittering particles before vanishing into absolute nothingness.

The moment the soul shattered, all hell broke loose.

"Kill it! Kill it right now!" Jack screamed, his theatrical demeanor completely evaporating into a raw, white-hot panic. He didn't have his instincts. He didn't have his warnings. He was completely blind, and one of his strongest pieces on the board had just been eliminated without a single drop of blood being spilled.

From the dark corners of the warehouse, Bonesaw's stitched horrors—grotesque, multi-legged abominations made from the combined body parts of dozens of victims—burst from their cages and rushed toward the floating ghost, their rusted blades and bone-needles snapping wildly in the air.

"Burn, you freak!" Burnscar roared, her face twisting into a manic, terrified grimace as she unleashed a massive, roaring torrent of white-hot flame from both hands. The fire erupted across the warehouse, a blinding furnace of heat that consumed the rafters, turning the old wood into a roaring inferno within seconds.

Beside her, Mannequin launched himself into the air, his porcelain limbs detaching on high-tensile wires as his built-in blades extended, spinning like a localized blender as he swept toward the entity's position.

Shatterbird let out a high-pitched, shattering scream, a sound frequency so precise, so devastating, that it tapped directly into the molecular structure of every piece of silicon in the area. The remaining glass in the skylights, the sand lining the old foundations, and the concrete walls of the warehouse began to violently vibrate, before shattering into a swirling, lethal storm of millions of microscopic siliceous blades that circled the room like a localized tornado, completely under her perfect control.

Hatchet Face let out a guttural roar, his massive frame bounding forward as he expanded his anti-parahuman aura to its absolute limit, a field of energy designed to instantly choke out the connection between a cape and their shard, leaving them entirely human and defenseless.

And Jack Slash flicked his wrist, utilizing his kinetic blade projection to extend the cutting edge of his straight razor across the vast room, a localized tear in space designed to slice cleanly through Ghostfreak's neck from thirty feet away.

The entire warehouse exploded into a chaotic maelstrom of fire, shattered glass, spinning blades, and raw, destructive parahuman power that completely obliterated half of structure, turning parts old building into a burning, hollow shell open to the midnight sky.

But Ghostfreak didn't even try to fight them head-on.

The Ectonurite simply drifted backward, his green form turning completely translucent as he phased through the roaring wall of Burnscar's flames without taking a single scratch. The white-hot fire passed cleanly through his spectral biology, unable to find any physical matter to consume. Jack's kinetic blade projection sliced through the air exactly where the ghost's neck had been a second ago, but the invisible edge passed through the intangible form like a knife through smoke.

Hatchet Face slammed his heavy boots into the concrete right beneath the ghost, his dampening aura flaring with a violent intensity. He looked up, expecting to see the creature collapse to the ground, gasping for air as its power failed.

But Ghostfreak didn't even notice. The anti-parahuman field washed over him, completely unable to find a parahuman connection to sever. The Omnitrix wasn't a shard it didn't rely on the entities' network. The alien biology remained completely unaffected, floating effortlessly above the hulking brute.

A/N:Again just describing how the powers operate none of them have knowledge of the shards

"Is that really the best you guys can do?" Ghostfreak mocked, his eye tracking the chaos below.

Suddenly, the green skin on his torso split wide open along a jagged seam, revealing a mass of writhing, muscular black and purple tentacles that burst out of his chest like a nest of hungry serpents. The tentacles extended with a terrifying velocity, moving with a strength that defied their ethereal appearance. They wrapped tightly around Bonesaw's stitched monsters mid-air, their clawed tips digging into the dead flesh. With a brutal, fluid twist, Ghostfreak slammed the abominations into each other, ripping them into bloody, useless ribbons of meat and bone before tossing them into Burnscar's fire.

The Siberian let out a feral roar, her striped form leaping off the rusted beam with a force that shattered the metal beneath her. She flew through the air like a localized comet of absolute, unyielding destruction, her hands extended to tear the ghost to pieces.

Ghostfreak didn't dodge. He stood his ground, letting the naked tiger-woman slam directly into his chest.

He didn't try to block her physical force. Instead, he utilized his natural Ectonurite abilities, attempting to phase into her body to take full control of her mind and motor functions from the inside out. He had read the wiki the notes said the Siberian was a practically invincible force on the outside, a living boulder that couldn't be harmed by conventional weapons.

Fine, Ben thought within the ghostly mindscape. If she's unkillable on the outside, let's see how her organs handle an alien possession from the inside.

Ghostfreak's translucent form slipped cleanly through her striped skin, sinking deep into her torso.

But the moment he fully entered her physical space, Ghostfreak's internal systems hit an absolute, incomprehensible wall.

There were no lungs. There was no heart. There was no brain, no nervous system, no blood vessels, no biological tissue whatsoever. The interior of the Siberian wasn't a body it was an absolute, hollow vacuum of pure, localized spatial distortion. It was like trying to possess a hole in the universe. There was literally nothing there for his spectral form to latch onto, no biology to manipulate, no mind to control.

Ghostfreak violently phased back out of her body, his single eye widening with a look of genuine, unfiltered shock as he hovered in the air, narrowly dodging a swipe from Mannequin's detached blade.

"What the fuck?!" Ghostfreak exclaimed, his raspy voice cracking into a high-pitched yell of pure confusion. "What kind of biology is this?! There's literally nothing inside of her!"

The Siberian turned in mid-air, landing gracefully on a piece of debris before leaping at him again, her movements entirely unbothered by his attempt. Ghostfreak drifted backward at a sharp angle, his mind racing as he narrowly avoided another torrent of fire from Burnscar.

He tried to phase into her a second time as she passed by, his hand sinking into her shoulder, but the result was exactly the same pure, unadulterated nothingness. He couldn't possess her because there was no her to possess.

"This makes absolutely no sense!" Ghostfreak growled, his chains clattering violently as he spun in the air.

As he turned, Hatchet Face let out another guttural roar, leaping off a crumbling concrete block to swing his massive axe directly at the ghost's head. The heavy iron blade whistled through the air, dripping with the blood of a dozen previous victims.

Ghostfreak didn't look back. He simply reached out with one of his long, thick tentacles, wrapping it tightly around Hatchet Face's thick neck mid-dive. The impact carried a massive amount of momentum, but Ghostfreak didn't try to fight the weight.

Instead, he gripped the brute's throat, turned himself entirely intangible, and dove straight down toward the floor.

Because the tentacle was wrapped around Hatchet Face, the ghost's localized intangibility field extended to the villain's neck, dragging his massive body down through the solid concrete floor of the warehouse as if it were nothing more than water. Hatchet Face's eyes widened with a look of absolute, claustrophobic terror as the physical world swallowed him whole, the dark, solid earth closing around his limbs.

Once they were twenty feet deep into the dark, subterranean bedrock beneath the Docks, Ghostfreak stopped his descent.

He solidified his physical form just enough to regain his mass, while keeping Hatchet Face trapped within the solid dirt. With an uncompromising, brutal force, Ghostfreak slammed Hatchet Face's head forward, driving his face directly into a massive, jagged shelf of subterranean concrete and solid rock.

The impact was deafening in the enclosed space. The brute's skull cracked, the blunt force shattering his nose and jaw instantly. Before Hatchet Face could even attempt to struggle or choke out a sound in the suffocating darkness, Ghostfreak raised his razor-sharp, clawed right hand.

With a single, fluid, and lethal strike, his claws pierced straight through Hatchet Face's visage, tearing through the flesh, bone, and brain matter with absolute, unyielding precision. Blood splattered across the dark subterranean dirt, instantly staining the earth. The massive villain's body went entirely limp, his connection to his shard snapping forever as his mind went dark.

Ghostfreak released his grip, leaving the corpse buried deep within the dark foundations of the city.

A second later, the pale, grey ghost floated back up through the concrete floor of the ruined warehouse, stepping out into the smoke and moonlight. He shook his clawed hand, wiping a few drops of dark blood onto the floor, before looking back at the remaining members of the Nine.

"Two down," Ghostfreak whispered, his single upside-down eye tracking Jack Slash, who was now backed up against a crumpled steel beam, surrounded by Shatterbird and Cherish.

Shatterbird unleashed another massive wave of glass shards, the millions of microscopic blades flying toward the ghost like a silver cloud. Burnscar filled the space with a localized firestorm, while Cherish continued to scream in frustration as her emotional manipulation failed to find a single target. The Siberian bounded forward once more, her tiger-striped form an engine of unyielding, unstoppable physical force.

Ghostfreak weaved through the advances, shifting his density to absolute zero whenever an attack came too close, his gray hide remaining completely untouched by the desperate onslaught.

But as he dodged, Ben's mind was working at a blinding velocity within the Ectonurite form.

He looked at the Siberian. He watched her tear through a concrete support pillar to get to him, her physical force completely ignoring the laws of momentum and mass. And then he remembered the absolute nothingness he had encountered when he tried to possess her. There were no organs. No blood. No heart. It was a hollow shell of distorted space.

Think, Tennyson, Ben told himself, his single eye narrowing as he floated out of the reach of a swirling vortex of glass. I read about this on the laptop. There are capes who can create physical illusions, duplicates... projections.

The realization hit him like a lightning bolt.

The Siberian wasn't a human cape wearing a costume. She wasn't an invincible mutant. She was a projection. A hyper-advanced, solid-light or spatial manifestation controlled by a Master-class parahuman hiding somewhere in the background. Her insides weren't there because she didn't exist as a biological entity at all. She was just a puppet.

And if she was a puppet... that meant the puppeteer had to be close. A Master who could control a weapon this powerful wouldn't risk being too far from the action, but they certainly wouldn't be standing out in the open where they could get their skull cracked. They had to be hiding, tucked away in the shadows, watching the battle through the puppet's eyes while keeping their own fragile, human body safe from harm.

Ghostfreak weaved through another desperate swipe from the Siberian, his single eye shifting away from the immediate threat of the tiger-woman.

He began to scan the surrounding dark terrain, the ruined containers, and the shadows lining the edge of the Docks, his alien vision searching for the true master of the nightmare.

Jack Slash looked up at the floating, monochromatic specter, his breath catching in his throat as he realized the creature wasn't even looking at them anymore. It was looking for something else. It was calculating. And for the first time in his life, Jack felt the icy, suffocating grip of a target on his back with absolutely no rules left to protect him.

The roar of the collapsing remnants of the warehouse was a deafening symphony of tearing metal and shattering concrete. The massive structure bowed under the intense heat of Burnscar's roaring flames, the remaining support beams groaning before the entire roof caved inward, sending a mountain of burning debris and choking ash cascading down onto the floor.

Jacob Black stood amidst the ruin, his ivory-handled straight razor clutched tight in a white-knuckled grip. For the first time since he had taken the name Jack Slash, the stage was entirely out of his control. His Broadcast shard was spinning in a useless, frantic loop, offering him absolutely no insight, no premonitions, and no edge against the entity hunting them.

Under the cover of the cascading rubble and the blinding wall of fire, Ghostfreak slipped away. He drifted through the outer perimeter of the ruined facility, ducking behind a massive, jagged ridge of bedrock that lined the edge of the Docks.

The moment he was obscured from the Nine's line of sight, a brilliant flash of emerald light erupted behind the stone. The ghostly form vanished, replaced by a small, short, stubby alien built of white, silicon-based armor with headphones integrated into its head and a speaker-like mouth.

Echo Echo.

Without wasting a single microsecond, the small alien planted his feet and let out a sharp, vibrating hum. In a fluid, overlapping blur, his form split perfectly down the middle, producing an exact physical clone of himself.

The prime Echo Echo pointed a stubby hand out toward the dark, labyrinthine rows of shipping containers and abandoned buildings surrounding the docks. "Search for any leads in the area!" he commanded, his voice carrying a metallic, high-frequency resonance.

The clone gave a sharp, decisive nod. "Got it!"

The clone slammed its hand down on the green hourglass symbol on its chest. In a brilliant flash of light, the small white form expanded into a sleek, muscular, feline-like humanoid creature clad in a deep blue and black bodysuit, with sharp black patterns resembling lightning bolts running down its limbs.

Fasttrack.

With a explosive burst of speed that kicked up a localized shockwave of dirt and gravel, the blue-and-black speedster vanished into the night, tearing through the docks like a streak of cerulean lightning to hunt down the hidden Master controlling the Siberian.

Back behind the rock, the main Echo Echo struck his own chest symbol. The green light flared once more, and the pale, shrouded, chain-wrapped nightmare of Ghostfreak materialized back into existence.

He wasn't a second too late.

"Over there!" Cherish's voice suddenly screamed from across the clearing. Her parahuman senses had finally locked onto the sharp, alien spike of intent radiating from behind the bedrock.

Before the echo of her voice could even fade, a massive, concentrated torrent of compressed glass and kinetic force slammed directly into the boulder. The massive stone was violently blown to absolute bits, exploding into a lethal cloud of jagged shrapnel and pulverized dust.

But the crater was empty.

Ghostfreak had already faded into complete, absolute invisibility. Shifting his density to zero, he glided effortlessly through the air, completely undetected by the frantic parahumans. He drifted directly through the swirling storm of ash and fire, slipping silently behind Cherish as she stood near the edge of the clearing, her face twisted in a mask of manic concentration.

She didn't hear the soft clink of his heavy iron chains. She didn't feel the sudden, freezing drop in the ambient temperature around her neck.

With a brutal, unyielding motion, Ghostfreak shoved his completely intangible, clawed hands straight through the back of Cherish's skull.

The moment his spectral, alien fingers materialized inside her brain tissue, he violently disrupted the delicate bio-electric currents running through her nervous system. Cherish's eyes instantly rolled back into her head, her pupils disappearing as her body went completely rigid. Before Mannequin or Burnscar could even register the movement behind them, a massive, hyper-acute lethal seizure racked Cherish's entire frame. Blood leaked from her nose and ears as her heart gave a final, violent spasm.

She collapsed forward into the dirt like a dropped doll.

Three down.

"Cherish!" Burnscar roared in a pitch of pure, unadulterated rage. The fragile, shattered psyche of the pyromaniac completely snapped at the sight of her teammate's lifeless body. She lost all semblance of tactical restraint, her eyes burning with a blinding, manic white fire as she threw both her hands forward, unleashing a colossal, roaring blast of apocalyptic flame that threatened to turn the entire coastline into slag.

Ghostfreak floated backward, his single eye tracking the incoming inferno. He dodged and weaved through the chaotic, desperate advances of the remaining members. Jack's kinetic blades sliced through the empty space centimeters from his shroud; the Siberian lunged with feral fury, her hands clawing through his translucent form Mannequin's porcelain limbs spun like a blender, and Shatterbird's glass storm tore up the earth beneath him.

But Ben Tennyson was completely in the zone. Reacting with the flawless precision of a universal protector, Ghostfreak stabilized his position in mid-air.

The jagged seam running down the center of his textured grey chest violently split wide open. Instead of tentacles, a swirling, volatile vortex of deep, dark, necrotic energy began to coalesce within his exposed chest cavity.

"Let's see how you handle a real blast," Ghostfreak rumbled.

A massive, devastating beam of dark, purplish-black energy erupted from his chest, tearing through the night sky with a terrifying, hollow roar. The necrotic beam collided head-on with Burnscar's column of fire. There was no explosion, no struggle of dominance the alien energy completely and effortlessly overpowered her parahuman flames, swallowing the fire whole and aging the very air around it to absolute dust.

The dark beam slammed directly into Burnscar before she could even attempt to step through her flames to escape. The raw, cosmic force completely vaporized her upper half in a fraction of a second, leaving nothing but her lower half.

Four down.

Before the remaining members could even process the absolute annihilation of their pyromaniac, Ghostfreak extended multiple thick, muscular black-and-purple tentacles from his torso. With a brutal, whip-like motion, he slammed the appendages violently into the shattered concrete floor.

The impact created a massive, towering cloud of pulverized dust, soot, and blinding gray ash that instantly blanketed the entire clearing, completely blinding Jack Slash, Shatterbird, and Bonesaw.

When the thick shroud of dust finally began to settle under the moonlight, the sky was empty. The ghost was gone.

"Move! Book it! Right now!" Jack Slash barked, his voice losing all of its theatrical, smooth cadence, replaced by a raw, jagged panic that he had never experienced in his entire life. His mind was screaming at him to run, to get out of this cursed city, to find a way to regroup. "Shatterbird, cover our retreat! Mannequin, get the girl and—"

Jack's orders were violently cut short by a sharp, horrific shredding sound.

Through the thinning dust, a swirling ribbon of razor-sharp glass daggers suddenly erupted from the perimeter. But the weapons weren't flying toward the empty sky. They flew directly inward, piercing straight through the delicate, porcelain-plated joints of Mannequin's neck and chest core.

The microscopic silicon blades sliced through his high-tensile wires, severing his internal machinery and fluid lines with surgical precision. Mannequin's white, spherical head tumbled off his shoulders, hitting the dirt with a hollow, ceramic clink, followed immediately by his heavy, metallic torso. The great tinker of ruin dropped completely dead.

Five down.

What the fuck?!

Jack's jaw dropped, his eyes widening in absolute horror as he whipped his head around to face his remaining heavy hitter. "Shatterbird! What the hell are you doing?!" he screamed, his voice cracking with a terrifying realization.

Shatterbird didn't answer him with a song.

She stood perfectly rigid in the center of the clearing, her head tilting to a grotesque, unnatural angle. Slowly, her eyes rolled forward. Her brilliant pupils had turned a piercing, glowing emerald green. The white sclera of her eyes had completely darkened into a deep, purplish-black void, with thick, pulsing veins of the same horrific color spreading across her pale skin like a localized infection.

When she spoke, her elegant, musical voice was entirely gone. Instead, the raspy, dual-toned, bone-chilling whisper of the Ectonurite emitted directly from her throat.

"Sorry," the ghost spoke through her stolen lips, a cruel, mocking edge in the tone. "She's not home right now."

Before Jack could even attempt to throw a blade, Shatterbird's physical form went entirely limp, her muscles turning to mush as she collapsed straight into the dirt.

A fraction of a second later, the pale, shrouded form of Ghostfreak phased cleanly upward out of her back, hovering effortlessly over her corpse. In his long, clawed right hand, he was holding another vibrant, glowing pinkish-purple ball of pure, swirling energy Shatterbird's essential life force.

With a slow, deliberate smirk hidden beneath his shrouded face, Ghostfreak closed his claws, crushing her soul into absolute nothingness.

Six down.

The Siberian let out a terrifying shriek of feral rage. Her tiger-striped form crouched low, her legs coiling like heavy iron springs as she prepared to launch herself into the air to tear the ghost's throat out, her absolute, physics-defying invincibility ready to crush anything in her path.

She leaped.

But mid-air, right as her clawed fingers were inches away from Ghostfreak's face, the Siberian suddenly... snapped.

Her solid, terrifying form simply popped out of existence like a fragile soap bubble, leaving absolutely nothing but the empty night air behind.

Ghostfreak paused, his single eye blinking as he looked at the space where the living weapon had been a microsecond ago. A low, raspy chuckle escaped his chest cavity.

"Oh?" Ghostfreak murmured, tilting his head toward the distant, dark rows of the shipping yard where a faint trail of blue lightning had just vanished. "Guess he found the Master."

Jacob Black had never been so afraid.

He stood entirely alone in the blood-stained, scorched clearing, the ashes of his family swirling around his boots like a mocking shroud. The Broadcast shard inside his head was completely inert, offering him nothing but a cold, heavy sense of absolute isolation. The grand coordinator, the maestro of the apocalypse, was nothing more than a pathetic, fragile man with a pocket knife, standing in the shadow of a god that didn't play by his rules.

Beside him, Bonesaw had completely cowered to the side, her small body curled into a tight, shivering ball against a piece of crumpled steel. The sweet, childlike confidence she always held had been utterly shattered. She had nothing left. The monster in the sky had systematically slaughtered every single one of her toys, dismantled her family, and left her entirely defenseless in the dark.

Ghostfreak slowly drifted downward, his heavy iron chains clattering softly in the dead silence of the Brockton Bay night, his single, piercing eye locking onto the remaining leader of the Nine.

"Now," the ghost whispered, his voice echoing like a death knell. "Where were we?"

Meanwhile during the battle

A few blocks away from the burning ruin of the warehouse, nestled deep within the labyrinth of rusted shipping containers and overgrown weeds of an abandoned railyard, sat a faded, dented white panel van. To any casual observer, it was just another piece of industrial junk rotting away in the Docks.

But inside the cramped, windowless cargo bay of the vehicle, an old man sat in the absolute dark.

William Manton His mind was permanently, intricately wired into the consciousness of his masterpiece. His eyes were completely glazed over, staring blankly into the pitch blackness of the van as his awareness existed miles away, experiencing the world through the eyes of the Siberian.

She was his grief made manifest, a projection of absolute spatial distortion. She was entirely capable of operating autonomously—hunting, tearing, and killing on her own feral instincts—but Manton could step into the driver's seat whenever he pleased. More importantly, no matter how far she roamed, he was her physical anchor to reality.

Until tonight, he had been an untouchable ghost.

But through the mental link, a cold, hollow dread spiked deep within Manton's chest. He felt the phantom sensation of the shrouded ghost back at the clearing trying to phase into the Siberian, only to find an absolute, hollow vacuum.

He knows she's empty, panic screamed in Manton's brain.

Manton didn't need to manually command her to return; the Siberian's autonomous instincts immediately flared with a protective urge, preparing to lunge at the ghost to defend her creator. Manton just needed to stay hidden. As long as his fragile, sixty-year-old human body remained tucked away in this van, the Siberian would remain an unstoppable force.

BOOM.

The heavily reinforced, locked steel rear doors of the panel van were violently torn open with a screeching, metallic roar. The sheer force of the decompression ripped the doors completely off their hinges, sending them flying into the dark railyard outside.

The sudden rush of cool night air and bright moonlight flooded the dark cargo bay, blinding Manton. He gasped, his heart hammering against his ribs as he instinctively cringed backward.

He didn't even have time to scream.

There was no witty banter. There was no casual monologue. The entity that burst through the threshold was a blur of pure, terrifying hypersonic motion a sleek, muscular, feline-like humanoid creature clad in a midnight-blue and black bodysuit, its green eyes burning like twin stars.

Fasttrack.

The speedster had to make this quick. He had zero way to communicate with his prime self back at the warehouse, meaning every second he wasted was another second his original form had to dodge an invincible tiger-woman.

In a fraction of a millisecond, Fasttrack closed the distance. As he blurred across the floor of the van, his arm extended, his razor-sharp claws catching the moonlight. His raspy voice was a rapid-fire, overlapping blur of words delivered in the exact same heartbeat as his lethal strike.

"All the anomalies within the Siberion points to a projection, which means a Master anchor hiding within a Three-mile radius," Fasttrack hissed, the words coming out in a single, breathless second. "Enhanced feline senses followed the heartbeat. Found you."

Pft.

Before Manton's brain could even process the shadow crossing the light, Fasttrack's claws pierced cleanly through his sternum. The raw kinetic force of the hypersonic strike completely crushed the old man's ribs, tearing through his human heart in a microsecond.

Manton's eyes widened, a sharp choke of air escaping his throat as his life force instantly evaporated. He didn't know who this alien was, and the alien didn't care who he was. He was just the anchor. And the anchor had just been cut.

Miles away, mid-air, the Siberian's fingers were a millimeter away from Ghostfreak's face. But the exact moment Manton's heart ceased to beat, the spatial connection severed. The invincible, terrifying matriarch of the Nine suddenly popped completely out of existence like a fragile soap bubble, leaving absolutely nothing but empty air.

Inside the van, Fasttrack smoothly retracted his claw, wiping the dark blood onto the floor. He looked down at the lifeless, slumped body of the old man, completely confident that back at the warehouse, his prime self had just watched the puppet vanish.

The speedster tapped the green hourglass symbol on his chest, dissolving into a flash of emerald light as the clone prepared to sprint back to the theater of war.

Seven down. Two to go.

The Citrakayah retreated back to the battle scene in a blur of blue and black

Back to the Present:

FUCK. FUCK. FUCK.

The mantra screamed in a frantic, non-stop loop inside Jacob Black's mind. It shattered the elegant, theatrical architecture of his thoughts, leaving behind nothing but the raw, primordial panic of a cornered animal.

It was all gone. The grand stage, the masterpiece, the slaughterhouse—obliterated in a matter of minutes. He needed to get out. He needed to survive. He always survived! For over twenty years, he had danced through rainstorms of capes and stepped over the corpses of heroes because the world was rigged in his favor. He was Jack Slash! He was the director! The world was supposed to bend to his whims!

But as he backed up against a crumpled, half-melted steel support beam, his boots slipping in a pool of mixed parahuman blood, reality slammed into him with the weight of a dying planet. His USELESS power was completely, utterly dead

He was just a man. A pathetic, fragile, middle-aged man holding a bloody piece of ivory-handled steel.

"Bonesaw! Riley! Do something!" Jack shrieked, his voice completely stripping away its smooth, charismatic cadence, cracking into a desperate, high-pitched wail. He whipped his head toward the dark corner of the clearing. "Unleash the atmospheric plagues! Where are the flesh-eating parasites?! Get up and fight!"

But the brilliant little bio-tinker didn't move. Riley had long since abandoned the theater of war. She was curled into a tight, shivering fetal position beneath a jagged sheet of corrugated tinfoil, her small hands clamped over her ears as she wept hysterically. The entity in the sky had systematically slaughtered every single one of her "toys." Her stitched abominations were nothing but smoking piles of charcoal; her family was dead. She was just an eleven-year-old child left entirely defenseless in a nightmare of fire and ash.

The pale, shrouded, chain-wrapped nightmare of Ghostfreak floated downward from the smoke.

He didn't rush. He dragged it out, moving with a slow, agonizingly deliberate velocity that felt like a physical weight pressing down on Jack's chest. The heavy black iron chains wrapped around the Ectonurite's torso clattered softly against each other, a rhythmic, metallic death knell echoing through the ruined railyard.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

Jack's knees buckled. The ivory-handled straight razor slipped from his trembling fingers, clattering uselessly against the scorched concrete. The pride, the malice, the decades of cultivated terror—it all evaporated, leaving nothing but a pathetically weeping coward.

"Please! Please!" Jack cried out, dropping directly into the dirt, his hands clasping together as he looked up at the floating specter. Tears cut clean tracks through the soot on his pale face. "Spare me! Whatever you are, I can give you anything! Power, wealth, information! I know about Cauldron! I can help you rule this world! Just let me live! Please!"

Ghostfreak hovered exactly five feet above him. His smooth, green-shrouded head tilted to a chilling angle, the single, eye shifting slowly within its dark vertical track to look down at the groveling villain.

When the entity spoke, his raspy, dual-toned voice cut through the howling wind like an icy razor.

"Tell me, Jack... how many of your victims begged you exactly like this?"

"Thousands!" Jack confessed frantically, his voice a desperate, breathless stammer as he tried to pray to the dark god floating above him. "Thousands of them! But it wasn't me! It was my power it twisted my mind! It forced me to do it! I'm just a victim of the system! Please, have mercy! Please, please, please!"

The dark god didn't care.

The jagged seam running down the center of Ghostfreak's textured grey torso violently split wide open. Before Jack could even attempt to scramble backward, another thick, muscular, purple-and-black tentacle shot out of the chest cavity like a striking viper.

The appendage coiled brutally around Jack's head, clamping down tightly over his mouth and nose, instantly silencing his pathetic, muffled whimpers. The physical strength behind the alien biology was absolute, locking Jack's skull in an unbreakable, supernatural vice.

Ghostfreak lowered himself slightly, his single eye staring directly into Jack's terrified, wide-open pupils.

"God forgives," the ghost whispered, a dark, final serenity in his layered voice. "Tell him I said hello."

With a sudden, wordless surge of force, Ghostfreak violently constricted the tentacle.

CRACK.

The pressure was instantaneous and catastrophic. Jacob Black's skull popped like a ripe balloon under the immense, crushing weight of the Ectonurite's grip. Blood and gray matter splattered across the scorched concrete, the headless corpse of the Slaughterhouse Nine's grand maestro collapsing forward into the dirt with a hollow, definitive thud.

Eight down.

Ghostfreak smoothly retracted the tentacle back into his chest, the jagged seam closing shut with a sickening squelch. He turned his cold, monochromatic gaze toward the corner of the ruined facility where the sobbing, hyperventilating form of Bonesaw was still hiding.

He drifted over, his translucent form passing cleanly through the sheet of tinfoil before extending a pair of smaller tentacles to gently, but firmly, lift the weeping child into the moonlit air.

"No! No! Please don't open me up! Don't make me pretty!" Riley screamed, her eyes tightly shut as she flailed her small limbs, expecting the same brutal execution she had just witnessed.

Ben Tennyson looked at her through the Ectonurite's eye, and a profound, heavy weight settled into his chest.

Shit.

He couldn't do it. As much as he wanted the full half-billion-dollar bounty, and as much as this girl had participated in some of the most horrific, nauseating bio-tinker atrocities across the continent... she was a literal child. Biologically, she was an eleven-year-old kid. Ben was a hero. He didn't execute children in the dirt, no matter what their rap sheet looked like. The bounties from the other eight members would total up to nearly four hundred and fifty million dollars anyway more than enough to pay Carol's legal fees, rebuild Winslow, and take care of Taylor for life.

But he couldn't just hand her over to the authorities either. If he dumped her at the steps of the PRT, Director Piggot would either have her summarily executed as an S-Class threat or lock her away in a dark, subterranean hole for the rest of her miserable life. And he certainly couldn't let her run free her bio-tinker knowledge was a walking, ticking apocalyptic plague waiting to happen.

Ben let out a long, mental sigh. He was going to have to do something he never, ever thought he'd do to a human being.

"Hold still, kiddo," Ghostfreak whispered.

Shifting his density to absolute zero, the Ectonurite flew straight forward, diving directly into the small girl's chest and possessing her physical form.

Instantly, Ben found himself standing within the internal mindscape of Bonesaw. It was a labyrinth of pure, unadulterated horror a house of mirrors filled with blood, severed limbs, ticking gears, and screaming ghosts, all wrapped around a tiny, terrified version of Riley crying in the center of the dark.

Utilizing Ghostfreak's profound telepathic control, Ben didn't just suppress her motor functions. He went to war with her memory banks.

Surgically, deliberately, and with absolute finality, Ben began to tear down the walls of her mind. He targeted every single memory associated with the Slaughterhouse Nine. He burned away every recollection of Jack Slash, every horrific medical surgery she had performed, every plague she had engineered, and every shred of her identity as Bonesaw. He wiped the slate completely and totally black. She would never regain them the neural pathways containing the nightmare were completely dissolved into nothingness.

He left only her basic, baseline human memories intact how to speak, how to read, how to walk, and basic childhood knowledge. And during the massive psychic sweep, deep beneath layers of forced trauma and psychological conditioning, Ben uncovered her true name, long forgotten by the world.

Riley Grace Davis.

A sudden, sharp crack of displaced kinetic air echoed outside the van as a blur of blue and black lightning materialized in the clearing. The Fasttrack clone had returned from the railyard, his breathing steady as his green eyes scanned the absolute carnage of the clearing.

"Prime!" the clone called out, looking around at the headless corpse of Jack and the upper half ashes of Burnscar. "The Master's dead. The Siberian is officially out of the script. Are we—wait, what are you doing?"

The little girl slowly opened her eyes. The brilliant blue pupils were gone, replaced by a pair of piercing, glowing emerald green irises, with thick, purplish-black veins tracing across her sclera. When she spoke, Ghostfreak's raspy, layered voice vibrated out of her small throat.

"Yes. It's over," the possessed Riley said, tilting her head. "Eight down. But we have a situation with the kid."

The clone frowned, crossing his arms. "What's the play? We can't leave her here, and we can't kill a kid."

"I know," Prime explained through her lips. "I just did a full psychic sweep. I used Ghostfreak's power to completely erase every single memory of the Slaughterhouse Nine and her time as Bonesaw. It's gone forever. She doesn't remember a single crime, a single surgery, or a single villain. Her real name is Riley Grace Davis. Right now, she's just an innocent girl with a clean slate."

The clone looked down at her bloody, grease-stained dress. "Okay... but if the PRT finds her, they'll still see her face and throw her in the Birdcage."

"Exactly. Which is why you're taking a little trip," Prime commanded. "Grab her. Run across the ocean. Go to Europe, Asia anywhere completely outside the jurisdiction of the PRT or the American capes. Find a good, well-funded, safe orphanage under a fake name where she can grow up normal. But change her clothes first. Get her a regular sweater or something from a store downtown so she doesn't look like a walking crime scene."

"Got it," the clone nodded seriously.

With a soft, fluid motion, Ghostfreak phased cleanly upward out of Riley's back, his pale, shroud-like form materializing in the moonlit sky. The moment he left her body, the small girl's eyes closed, her limp physical form dropping toward the ground.

The Fasttrack clone blurred forward, catching her gently in his muscular arms before she could hit the dirt. He adjusted his grip, ensuring she was secure, before looking up at his prime self. "See you back at the hospital, Prime."

"Keep it under the speed limit," Ghostfreak joked raspy.

With an explosive sonic boom that kicked up a localized cloud of dust, the blue-and-black speedster vanished into the night sky, carrying Riley Grace Davis toward a brand new, peaceful life far away from the horrors of Earth-Bet.

Ghostfreak floated alone in the center of the silent, smoking crater of the area

The Slaughterhouse Nine—the absolute apex predators of the parahuman underworld, the monsters that had terrorized the continent for decades—had been completely wiped off the face of the earth in less than an hour.

The Ectonurite drifted downward, his single upside-down eye scanning the wreckage. He had a lot of physical evidence to collect if he wanted to cash in those federal checks. He'd need to gather Jack's unique straight razor, secure the bodies of the capes, and make sure everything was neatly wrapped for the government claims adjusters.

He raised his clawed hand, tapping the glowing green hourglass symbol on his chest.

"Alright," Ben muttered as the emerald light began to consume his form, shifting him into an alien far better suited for heavy lifting and cargo transport. "Let's get these trash bags packed up. All in a night's work."

A/N:And that's it for this chapter hope you guys enjoyed i had a lot of trouble writing that fighting scene again let me know if you have any issues with the fic and peace out everyone