Year Six:
The Citadel's portal room hummed with the ambient thrum of dimensional energy. For five years, I had bled in a sterile, artificial sandbox. It was time to step into the real world.
Or rather, worlds.
"Coordinates locked," Angstrom announced from the control console, his hands flying across the holographic interface. "The target is an anomaly designated 'Subjugation Earth.' In this timeline, Mark Grayson joined his father on day one. He killed the Guardians of the Globe himself, and rules the planet as a proxy for the Viltrumite Empire."
I didn't answer right away. I was busy making final adjustments to my wrist gauntlets.
I couldn't walk into these dimensions looking like Invincible. If the resistance fighters or the evil variants saw my face, it would cause unnecessary psychological complications.
So, the Maulers and I found a solution.
I was clad in a menacing, high-tech fusion of customized Flaxan armor and nanotech-forged heavy alloys. The suit was entirely matte black, with thick, segmented plating. And the helmet was a solid, faceless dome of reinforced kinetic glass with a dark, glowing visor.
I didn't look like a superhero; I looked like a walking nightmare, heavily modeled after Snake Eyes from the G.I. Joe franchise.
"Send me through," I said, my voice modulated into a deep, metallic rasp by the helmet's external speakers.
The green dimensional tear ripped open, and I stepped through.
In the Dimension - Subjugated Earth
The sky was choked with thick, black ash.
I hovered silently above what used to be New York City. It had been leveled and replaced by brutalist, gray Viltrumite processing centers. Below, millions of humans were corralled into global labor camps, strip-mining their own planet to feed the expanding Empire.
It didn't take long for the planet's warden to notice a new blip on his radar.
A sonic boom shattered the heavy air, and the Imperator arrived. He wore the pristine white-and-grey Viltrumite uniform. He looked exactly like me, just older, with a sadistic, arrogant smirk plastered across his face.
"I don't know what kind of scrap-metal you're wearing, alien," the Imperator sneered, floating a few yards away, his arms crossed. "But this planet belongs to the Viltrumite Empire. And you just trespassed on my property."
The Imperator launched forward and closed the distance in a microsecond, driving a continent-shattering punch directly into the center of my armored chest.
BAM!
A normal combatant would have been turned into red mist. A normal Viltrumite would have been sent flying through three city blocks.
I, however, didn't move an inch.
The Imperator's smirk vanished, replaced by sheer, uncomprehending shock. My mutated smart atoms—honed through thousands of hours of artillery fire in the Citadel—simply ate the kinetic payload. The force of his strike washed over my bio-electric field, traveling down my arms and pooling in my fists as pure, supercharged thermal-kinetic energy.
"My turn," the modulator rasped.
I unleashed his own stored energy, combined with my dense muscle mass, directly back into his jaw.
BOOM!
The impact sounded like a thunderclap inside a vault. The strike hit with double the force he had given me.
His skull shattered. The Imperator's lifeless body dropped out of the sky, crashing into the ash-covered streets below.
Yeesh, I even held back a bit at the last minute, I thought as I looked around.
The Imperator was dead, but the infrastructure of the Viltrumite Empire was still deeply embedded in the planet. Worse, once the Empire realized their agent was dead, they would eventually send a detachment to reclaim the world.
I had no desire to rule these people or prolong my stay more than necessary. But not helping them would defeat the purpose of teaming up with Angstrom, plus I wanted assets.
"Angstrom," I radioed back to the Citadel. "The target is neutralized. Initiate the Blackout."
Within minutes, Angstrom and the Maulers pushed through a secondary portal, executing a surgical strike on the planet's Viltrumite communications array. We completely blinded the Empire to this sector of space.
Next, I descended into the ruins of the city to meet the shattered remnants of the local human Resistance. They were led by a battle-hardened, heavily scarred version of Rudy Conners (Robot), who looked at my towering, faceless armor with a mixture of terror and desperate hope.
He does always finds a way to survive things doesn't he?
"I killed your tyrant," I told him, the mechanical rasp echoing through the ruined bunker. "But his masters will return. I will give you the weapons to defend yourselves when they do. In exchange... I take one of those Viltrumite ships in orbit."
Rudy didn't even blink. "Deal."
Angstrom opened massive logistical portals. We flooded the human resistance with stolen Flaxan plasma-tech, heavy ordinance, and advanced energy shielding—weapons entirely capable of hurting and killing Viltrumites; leveling the playing field for humanity here.
By arming this alternate Earth, I hadn't just saved them; I had effectively created a heavily fortified proxy-war meatgrinder. If the Viltrumite Empire of this world returned here, they would walk blindly into a heavily armed death trap, bleeding their numbers across the stars without me having to lift a single finger.
Angstrom, the Maulers, and I hijacked the intact Viltrumite Warship left in the planet's orbit, portaling the massive dreadnought—armoured battleship—directly back to the Citadel's dimension.
Making a portal big enough to fit a dreadnought that massive nearly put Angstrom in a coma, but the payout was worth it.
We now possessed actual Viltrumite subjugation tech to reverse-engineer.
Some Time Later…
Years rolled by in the Citadel, but to us, time was just a metric for efficiency. Over the next decade, the hunts became part of our routine. I wasn't just surviving anymore. Angstrom, the Maulers, and I had established a multiversal shadow empire. Angstrom acted as my Grand Vizier, coordinating the logistics, trading tech between dimensions, and organizing the rescues. Every doomed timeline was a testing ground for my mutating biology, and a treasure trove for our growing shadow empire.
In Year Eight, Angstrom opened a gateway to a mechanized graveyard.
The sky of this Earth was a toxic, bruised purple, and the oceans were thick with heavy metal sludge. Trillions of cybernetic Reanimen patrolled the ruined continents, all linked to a central hive mind: a mutilated, half-machine version of myself. "Cyber-Mark."
This variant felt no pain, possessed zero morality, and his cybernetic enhancements allowed him to process information with terrifying precision. When I stepped through the portal, he didn't boast like the Imperator. He just sent a tidal wave of a million Reanimen at me, followed by his own mechanical strikes.
It was the ultimate marathon, a live-fire test of my Thermodynamic Equilibrium.
I didn't bother throwing standard punches. Every time a Reaniman struck me, my bio-electric field absorbed the kinetic energy. I channeled that stored solar-kinetic fuel directly into my grip. My hands superheated, acting like localized solar flares.
When Cyber-Mark finally tried to grab hold of me, his indestructible cybernetics meant nothing. I grabbed his metallic skull and melted straight through the alloy, burning out his CPU from the inside before his processors could even register the thermal spike.
With the hive mind severed, the billions of Reanimen across the globe froze.
That was where my architects went to work. The Maulers plugged directly into the global network, rewriting the hive-mind command code to answer only to my biometric signature. Meanwhile, Angstrom opened portals to a dimension that had perfected climate tech, importing massive atmospheric scrubbers to slowly clear the toxic smog.
I smiled behind my dark visor. I was a bit worried about taking on infinite armies by myself. But now? I walked away with an absolute monopoly on billions of semi-indestructible, fearless shock troops. An endless army, waiting to trek across the multiverse.
By Year Twelve, the hunts evolved again. I didn't just want dead variants and stolen tech. I wanted live practice.
Angstrom found a world that had been completely ruined. In a desperate bid to stop a psychotic, unhinged version of me—a variant who had killed Nolan and wore his cape as a twisted trophy—the world's governments had launched their entire nuclear arsenals. But, It didn't kill him. It just reduced the planet to a highly irradiated desert where nothing grew.
When I arrived, the "Broken King" came at me like a rabid animal. He had centuries of trauma and fought with absolute, frantic savagery.
But this hunt wasn't about fighting. It was the ultimate test of my pseudo-Kryptonian mutation.
The ambient nuclear radiation of the dead world would normally weaken or sicken a Viltrumite over time. But my enhanced smart atoms treated the wasteland like an all-you-can-eat buffet. I didn't even have to fight aggressively. I just stood my ground.
Every frantic, desperate punch the Broken King threw fed my kinetic reserves, while the irradiated atmosphere constantly supercharged my cells. I was a fully charged battery facing a starving, degrading animal. He exhausted himself against an immovable object until he literally collapsed at my feet, gasping for breath.
I didn't end him: I had a better use for him.
"You might wanna get the collars ready," I radioed the Maulers through the comms.
They stepped through the portal in custom made hazmat suits, hauling a heavy, modified Flaxan restraint collar retrofitted with our 400x Earth hyper-gravity tech. We locked it around the Broken King's neck, instantly pinning the unconscious variant to the ruined earth under the crushing weight of localized gravity.
Angstrom determined the planet couldn't be saved, but the people could. He located a "Pristine Earth" in another timeline—a lush paradise where humanity hadn't evolved yet—and opened massive, city-wide portals. I physically herded the starving, irradiated human survivors through the gates to their new Eden, leaving them with Mauler-designed terraforming kits to start over.
As for the dead, radioactive Earth, I kept that for myself. Because of my mutation, it became my personal hyperbolic charging station. Whenever I needed to max out my solar and radiation reserves before a massive fight, I just stepped into that dimension to soak.
And the Broken King? We dragged him back to the Citadel. He became the first of many.
We started kidnapping the worst, most evil variants we could find, locking them in hyper-gravity collars to use as live, disposable sparring partners. Training dummies who could and would hit back.
By the end of my Sixteenth Year, the exotic stars of multiple dimensions had fully matured my physique. My density was off the charts. The sheer amount of energy my smart atoms stored created a latent bio-electric field just millimeters above my skin, making me almost impossibly durable to anything short of a high-tier Viltrumite brute's strength.
I was no longer just preparing for a war. I was already laying out counter measures for the one that would happen in my dimension.