Who would win, a zombie horde or xenomorphs from Alien? Could Ultraman go ten rounds with a Saiyan? What happens when DOTA heroes fight League of Legends champions?
Nobody was ever going to settle these arguments. Not online, anyway. That didn't stop people from trying.
Kade Lawson had just burned three hours in a forum war about whether the Transformers AllSpark could match Marvel's best tech. It had been a decent thread until some X-Men fanatics showed up screaming that mutant powers made all technology irrelevant. Three hundred posts later, nobody had changed anyone's mind about anything, but Kade had successfully wasted another afternoon.
Life after the regiment was like that. Too much free time. Not enough to do with it.
He was about to close out and find dinner when the screen flickered. A dialogue box popped up right over the forum thread:
Tired of arguing with people who wouldn't know a citation if it bit them? Wouldn't you rather prove your point with hard evidence? So why not put your theory to the test?
Two buttons. YES and NO.
"Definitely a virus," Kade said. He looked around the gaming lounge. A few kids grinding MMOs in the corner, nobody paying attention to him. "Ah, stuff it. Not my computer."
He clicked YES.
Everything warped. His vision stretched like a funhouse mirror, pulling sideways, and his stomach turned inside out. A sound like tearing metal filled his ears. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, a voice spoke directly into his head. Calm. Amused. Like someone watching an experiment they'd been looking forward to.
"The pinnacle of mechanical civilization... I wonder what it'll look like in a world of gods and monsters. Surprise me."
Something white-hot punched into both his hands. Not exactly pain. More like grabbing a live wire and having the current stay instead of passing through. It sank into his bones, fused there, and then everything went black.
Then he was somewhere else.
Sand. Sand in every direction, baking under a sun that looked like it wanted to kill everything beneath it. Kade's hands were zip-tied behind his back. His body rocked with the movement of a truck bed. Armed men sat on either side of him. AKs, chest rigs, faces covered with keffiyehs. The air stank of diesel and sweat.
Middle East. Insurgents.
Training took over before his brain caught up. Assess. Breathe. Don't react. Don't give them anything to work with.
"You're awake. I was starting to worry." A thin, weathered man sat across from him. Middle Eastern. Kind eyes, exhausted face. "You took a bad hit from the blast concussion. Lucky you. He wasn't so lucky."
He gestured toward the center of the truck bed. A man lay strapped to a makeshift stretcher. Mid-thirties, maybe forty. Dark hair, thick beard. And bolted to his chest, an industrial electromagnet the size of a dinner plate, wired to a car battery.
Kade stared at the device. Then at the man's face.
His blood went cold.
"Tony Stark?" It came out before he could stop it.
"Oh, you know him?" The doctor raised his eyebrows.
Kade didn't answer. His mind was already slamming pieces together.
That was Tony Stark. The electromagnet was keeping shrapnel out of his heart. This was the opening of Iron Man. The kidnapping in Afghanistan. The scene that kicked off the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Kade hadn't just been transported somewhere. He'd been dropped into a fictional world.
The truck stopped. Armed men shouted orders in Pashto and Arabic. The captives, eleven including Kade, were shoved off the truck and marched toward a cave entrance cut into a rocky hillside.
On the way down, the doctor leaned close. Barely whispering. "They only keep people who are useful. Engineers, wealthy hostages, women. Everyone else..."
He didn't finish.
Kade understood a moment later.
The captives were lined up single file outside the cave. A heavyset man with a thick scar across his jaw, clearly the leader by the way the others watched him, pulled out a clipboard and started reading names.
"Khorakoff." He fixed his stare on a trembling middle-aged man in a torn business suit. "Your family was wiped out last week, yes? Nobody left to pay ransom."
"No, please, I have a sports car, a villa in the States, I can take out a loan, anything, just let me..."
"We don't have time to wait."
Three rounds. Short burst. Khorakoff dropped and the sand turned dark under him.
Someone in the line broke. A young guy, couldn't have been twenty-five, just bolted. Made it about fifteen meters before a machine gun tore through both his legs. He went down face-first, screaming. They let the dogs finish him.
Kade's fists clenched behind his back hard enough to crack his knuckles. He watched. He memorized every face. And somewhere behind the stillness in his eyes, he sentenced every one of these men to death.
Not now. But soon.
The leader turned to him. "And what are you? Australian? American? What's a tourist doing out here, sightseeing in a war zone?"
"Engineer," Kade said. Flat. His heartbeat hadn't changed.
"Engineer." The leader smiled like that was the funniest thing he'd heard all day. He jerked his chin toward a wreck at the edge of the cave entrance. A desert SUV that looked like it had taken a direct RPG hit. Front end caved in, one axle snapped, engine block visible through a gash in the hood.
"Fix that. Make it run."
Kade looked at it. You didn't need to be a mechanic to see that thing was scrap. Half the engine was missing. Even if it wasn't, the fuel tank had been blown open.
"I'm not that kind of engineer."
"I didn't ask what kind you were." A rifle muzzle pressed against the back of his skull. "You have thirty seconds."
So that was the game. Not a real test. Just entertainment. The mouse in the cat's paw, allowed to run so they could enjoy the failure.
Kade exhaled and walked to the wreck. Behind him, one of the insurgents started counting down from thirty. He could feel the rifle tracking between his shoulder blades.
Fifteen seconds. Check the angles on the SUV, use it as cover, dive right, grab the...
His left hand touched the crumpled door panel.
And something answered.
Information flooded his mind like a heads-up display snapping on. Make, model, chassis number, total mass, axle configuration, engine displacement. Data streaming past in glowing text that only existed behind his eyes.
The critical line was at the bottom, glowing green:
[Structural integrity: 70%. Activation cost: 915 AllSpark energy. Current energy: 1000.]
Kade's back was to the insurgents. Nobody saw his face. Nobody saw the shock dissolve into something sharp and hungry.
Nobody saw his hand push a current of crackling blue energy into the ruined machine.