Third-person POV
"KAISEEEENNNNNN!!!!"
The raw, shredded screech echoed over the rumbling tectonic plates, completely shattering John's hard-earned concentration.
John blinked. He pulled his attention away from the miles-long magical dragon currently blotting out the sun and looked to his right.
Storming out of a swirling, neon-green spatial rift was Cecil Stedman. The Director of the Global Defense Agency looked like he had just been dragged backward through a warzone and he was marching briskly toward John while hacking up a lung from the sheer volume of his own scream.
"One squirmy, tentacled, world-ending cosmic fuck-up wasn't enough?!" Cecil roared. He pointed a trembling finger at the blackened sky. "You just had to bring another one down on the goddamn Earth?! The last one controlled time to turn my best men into either wrinkle-filled senile corpses or literal crying babies! What does this one do, huh? Turn people's insides out?! Give them tentacles?!"
John just stared blankly at the irritable old man.
He really didn't have the bandwidth for government bureaucracy right now. He had just fought a war, nearly died and unlocked infinite energy. The last thing he wanted was a performance review.
"It grants wishes, Cecil," John deadpanned.
"Wi… wish… what?!" Cecil stuttered. His scarred face turned an unhealthy, apoplectic shade of purple. "Now is not the time for jokes, you arrogant, smug little git! I am looking at a reptilian nightmare the size of a continent! I am the Director of the GDA, and I demand you shut that thing down before it triggers a planetary—"
WHIP.
A heavy, segmented green tail slammed around Cecil's throat.
It gagged the Director instantly, yanking him roughly backward off his feet with a violent jerk that nearly snapped his collarbone.
"Silence, you wretched primate," Meruem hissed.
The Ant King effortlessly pulled Cecil against his chest, pinning the struggling man's arms in a vice grip. But Meruem wasn't even looking at his prisoner. His violet eyes were locked on the sky in absolute awe.
"I know your primitive kind lacks the ability to feel the Nen around us," Meruem said, his voice dropping into a low, reverent murmur. "But even a blind insect should be able to comprehend the sheer presence of the being the Master has summoned. Have you no respect or fear for true power?"
Meruem's eyes were wide with shock and a rare, burning curiosity. It was incredibly rare for the King of Ants to see something he knew, for an absolute certainty, he could never overcome. The dragon above them wasn't just a beast. It was a full-fledged god.
Beside the Ant King, the rest of Chaos Corp's inner circle was frozen in place.
They didn't dare move a single muscle.
Neel, Jason, and Sebas could feel the fundamental change in John's soul from their connection. John's infinite abyss of energy was passively suffocating them. It felt like standing next to an open white hole. Even though John was actively trying to hold the power back, the sheer density of his existence was crushing the air out of their lungs.
"He has ascended far beyond the Supreme Beings," Sebas muttered.
The always impeccably pristine butler was actually sweating. He wiped his brow with a trembling, white-gloved hand as he stared at John's back. "Such terrifying majesty. A mortal vessel holding the infinite."
"Scratch that," Jason whimpered. The Greek hero had fully retreated behind the butler, using Sebas as a literal meat shield. "He's stepped into the realm of the old gods! I dare say he could even go toe-to-toe with Gaia herself!"
Even Neel, the ever-composed corporate shark, was dead silent. He didn't comprehend the metaphysical nuances of power, but his soul-bound connection to John made sure he felt exactly what his master had now become.
'Looks like Chaos Corp is finally going far from the bounds of the multiverse,' Neel thought, a manic glint in his eye.
John took a deep breath, pulling his focus away from his terrified summons and the muffled, angry swearing coming from Cecil's gagged mouth. He looked back up at the colossal dragon.
"Sorry about that," John apologized to Shenron, casually rubbing the back of his neck. "The senile old man likes to steal thunder. It's a whole thing. He's got control issues. Anyway, can you tell me about your powers?"
Shenron's massive face lowered from the clouds. The sheer size of the dragon's snout deepened the shadows across the crater. The dragon eyed the struggling Cecil with mild annoyance, like a human looking at a loud mosquito, before turning its glowing red eyes back to John.
"I CAN ONLY BE MANIFESTED ONCE A YEAR," Shenron's voice boomed, rattling the fillings in John's teeth and vibrating the marrow in his bones. "AND I SHALL ALLOW MY MASTER TO ASK FOR ONLY ONE WISH. I SHALL GRANT IT, AS LONG AS IT IS WITHIN MY POWER."
John's confident smile slowly vanished.
'One year? One wish?' John thought. ' What kind of heavy nerf is this? I just beat a multiversal squid that was eating alternate timelines for breakfast, and I got the budget version of the Shenron?'
John frowned, his mind racing. He had a massive problem.
On one hand, he needed to save the planet from literally dying. The core was freezing, the oceans were boiling, and meteors were falling. On the other hand, this was his only chance to bring back all the innocent casualties of this war.
It wasn't just the humans he was worried about. It was the flora, the fauna, the Atlanteans, the subsurface beasts, and the myriad of unnatural species unique to the Invincible universe. He couldn't just leave them dead.
His new Mansion of Boundary was great. But it couldn't act as refugee camp forever. Eight billion people crammed into an interdimensional IKEA was a 'Backrooms' nightmare waiting to happen.
He needed more wishes.
John passively engaged his Mind Palace trait.
Time slowed to an absolute crawl as he accelerated his thoughts to inhuman speeds, desperately weighing the pros and cons of every single scenario.
'If I wish to rebuild the Earth, the dead stay in the ground. The planet is pristine, but empty,' John calculated, his eyes darting back and forth. 'If I revive the dead right now, they respawn on a planet that is currently on fire and choking on ash. They just die again. Goddamn it, these mechanics are bullshit.'
While deep in his hyper-speed calculations, a cold finger tapped his shoulder.
John's flow state completely shattered as the world halted back to normal speed. He turned around, incredibly annoyed by the second interruption in three minutes.
Pepsiman was standing right behind him.
The silver mascot took a quick step back and brought his hand toward John's face.
He was holding a single, fragile blade of green grass.
"Pepsi."
The mascot pointed the grass directly at the floating dragon.
"Pepsi-Man, I don't have the time to play charades right now, I need to—"
John stopped.
His brain clicked the pieces together as he looked at the blade of grass. Then he looked up at the meteors still falling around the dragon.
The Unlock ability.
'Oh.' John's eyes went wide. 'Oh shit. That's genius.'
He realized exactly what the silent hero was suggesting.
He jumped to his feet and tapped directly into the infinite ocean of energy roaring inside his soul, throwing the metaphysical floodgates wide open. He brought his vessel to the absolute maximum output it could handle without actively melting the remains of the Earth into radioactive slag.
He pointed his right hand straight at the legendary dragon.
"UNLOCK!"
BOOM!!!
Torrents upon torrents of blinding purple energy exploded out of John's soul. The infinite mana manifested as conceptual hacking. Glowing strings of ethereal code and shifting binary spun violently around John's arm, flowing upward into the sky. He wasn't just hitting the dragon with a supernova; he was actively unraveling the fabric of the universe, rewriting the dragon's magical limits in real-time, and forcefully unlocking the hidden potential of a god.
And the audience was in shambles.
Meruem desperately flared his Nen. He forced a massive dome of energy over the area to block John's ambient radiation from instantly vaporizing Cecil and the other humans.
Even with the Ant King's immense strength, the onslaught of John's energy was causing the Nen dome to aggressively crack and spiderweb. Meruem, the apex of all biological beings, was gritting his teeth, his exoskeleton groaning under the pressure as he barely held it together.
Behind him, Sebas, Neel, and Jason were bracing themselves against the gale-force winds. They were shielding their eyes, still trying to process how their Master had reached this level of absurdity.
Meanwhile, Cecil was still actively trying to curse through Meruem's tail. Blood was trickling from the Director's nose from the pressure, but he was still screaming muffled obscenities about John destroying the rest of Earth.
On the other side of the crater, Pepsiman and Supermom threw themselves in front of Nakime to shield her from the flying debris.
The Demon Queen didn't even flinch. She was wide-eyed, her pink eyes glowing as she stared up at John with intoxicating pride.
Mark and Allen? They had gone way past shock. They were sitting on a rock, resisting the force, comfortably numb.
After five agonizing minutes of blinding light and roaring winds, the process finally completed.
A brilliant, golden flash enveloped the entire sky, forcing everyone to look away. When the light finally faded, the green dragon was gone.
In its place stood a new, impossibly bigger beast.
Its scales were pure, radiant gold. Its sheer size was incomprehensible. It dwarfed the planet itself, its massive coils wrapping through the vacuum of space, casting a shadow over the entire Western hemisphere.
'Holy shit,' John thought, blinking away the spots in his vision. 'It's Super Shenron.'
John dropped his hand. He was wheezing slightly from the sheer mental strain of funneling that much infinite energy with precision without blowing himself up. He reeled his aura back in, letting the dust settle.
"So," John called out to the sky, wiping a bead of sweat from his chin. "How's the upgrade?"
The golden dragon looked down at John in a daze. It blinked its massive red eyes. It slowly lowered its continent-sized head in deep, ancient reverence.
"THIS ONE FAILED TO RECOGNIZE MOUNT TAI, MASTER."
[A/N]:
If you want to read Chapters in advance, check out my P@treon - Max_Striker.
If you wanna hang out, join my Discord server- https://discord.gg/XxGEYk2PM5