The dust settled with agonizing slowness. At the bottom of the vast, deep crater, Heracles lay facedown. Motionless. Only the biting, frigid wind swept over the hollowed earth.
Then, from the distance, came the wail of sirens. Flashing blue and red lights cut through the gloom as a police cruiser screeched to a halt at the crater's edge.
Officer Dmitri, a thirty-year-old in a dark blue uniform, stepped out. He stared into the abyss, his breath hitching. He grabbed his radio.
"To all units on the Northern Highway. We have a massive sinkhole blocking the road. It looks like... a meteor strike."
He began to descend cautiously, his boots sliding on the loose, frozen soil. The closer he got, the more the scale of the destruction dawned on him. Whatever had hit this spot was colossal.
As the last of the dust cleared, he saw the man.
Dmitri recoiled, his hand instinctively flying to his holster. A man. Completely naked. Long red hair fanned out in the dirt. His body was covered in intricate, alien tattoos. He lay there, deathly still.
Dmitri scanned the area, gun drawn, half-expecting an ambush. But there was no one. Only the silence. He turned his attention back to the stranger, realizing the description matched the "madman" reported by the truck driver.
He keyed his radio again. "I believe I've located the target. Taking him into custody now."
He approached with extreme caution, pressing two fingers against the man's neck. A steady pulse. He snapped the handcuffs onto the man's wrists.
"Target is unresponsive. Dispatch an ambulance," he signaled.
Suddenly, Heracles snapped his eyes open.
Dmitri lunged back. Those blue eyes... they were fixed on him with a terrifying, absolute calm. For several seconds, Heracles didn't move a muscle.
Then, as he attempted to rise, he felt the cold steel binding his hands behind his back. He looked at the officer and offered a thin, ghost of a smile.
"It is not very polite to bind a sleeping man. Did you know that?"
Heracles brought his hands forward.
SNAP.
The handcuffs shattered as if they were made of damp paper.
"Backup! I need immediate backup!" Dmitri screamed into his radio, stumbling back with his service pistol raised. "Don't move! I'm warning you!"
Heracles stood. He looked at the officer... and began to walk toward him. Slowly. Deliberately.
"Stay back! Don't come any closer!" Dmitri's voice was a frantic tremor. His hands shook as they gripped the weapon.
BANG!
A warning shot tore through the air. Heracles stopped. He looked in the direction the bullet had flown, then back at the officer.
"Is that all you have in your quiver?"
Heracles opened his palm. In the empty air before him, a rift tore open. A void of absolute black—darker than any shadow, a pocket of pure nothingness. From within that darkness, a sword emerged.
It was as black as the portal that birthed it. No light touched its blade; no reflection marred its surface. It looked like a shard of eternal night given physical form.
The portal hissed shut. The sword remained in his hand.
Dmitri's heart stopped. For one literal second, it simply ceased to beat. He dropped his gun, turned, and ran for his life.
He tilted his head slightly, watching the officer flee. He arched his right eyebrow in confusion. I haven't even done anything yet, he thought.
But before he could ponder further, the world converged on him.
More police cars arrived. News vans skidded to a halt. Journalists scrambled with their cameras. Within minutes, the scene was exploding across social media.
"Naked Man Stops Truck with His Body in Siberia!"
The livestream was going viral globally. Tens of thousands of viewers became hundreds of thousands, then millions. On YouTube, TikTok, and X (Twitter), the feed spread like wildfire.
The comment sections were losing their minds: "Is this real?!" "Definitely CGI." "No way, it's a livestream! Look at the lighting!" "Who is he?!" "Is this a promo for a new Marvel movie?"
High above, a news helicopter began to circle, broadcasting every second in high definition. Back in the studio, the anchor spoke with breathless excitement:
"Viewers, what we are witnessing is unprecedented! An unidentified man, completely naked, appearing to possess some form of superhuman strength..."
Heracles looked up at the strange metal bird—the helicopter—with genuine curiosity.
"What manner of fowl is this?"
Everything here was irritatingly loud and strange. Other police officers surrounded him, forming a tight perimeter, their weapons aimed at his chest.
"Сдавайся!" (Surrender!)
Heracles understood their intent without needing their tongue. And he would not permit it.
"It seems the mortals of this realm are in league with the monsters," he mused, his eyes sharpening as he swept them over the surrounding officers. "It matters not. You are still so very weak."
The black sword in his left hand evaporated into mist. He raised his right hand toward the cold, grey sky.
Suddenly... the heavens shifted.
A wind came from nowhere. It began to swirl, accelerating, growing. Within seconds, a massive, towering vortex formed around him—a wall of rotating air and churning snow rising dozens of meters into the air.
Then, his body began to glow.
Faintly at first, then with a blinding radiance. A brilliant golden light erupted from beneath his skin, as if a small sun had been ignited within his marrow.
His long red hair began to change. Strand by strand, the deep crimson dissolved, replaced by a shimmering, incandescent gold that whipped in the gale like tongues of living flame.
His eyes closed for a heartbeat. When they opened, they were entirely white—shining with a pure, primordial light, like twin stars set in a human face.
His body began to rise. Slowly, then with terrifying speed. Heracles floated in the air—upright, serene, wreathed in his golden aura and the howling tornado—ten meters above the earth.
In the studio, the anchor stopped talking. There was a three-second silence that felt like an eternity. Then, he whispered to millions of viewers:
"...He... he's flying."
From his vantage point, Heracles looked down. He thrust a single hand outward.
BOOOOM.
A massive shockwave of energy erupted from him in every direction, carving a perfect circle of destruction. Armored police vans were tossed twenty meters into the air before crashing down in balls of fire.
The news helicopter was pushed back like a leaf in a storm, tilting dangerously as its engines shrieked in protest. The feed suddenly cut out.
Black screen. "CONNECTION LOST."
But millions of people had already seen it. A man floating in the sky, wreathed in a golden god-light, before the image vanished.
When the wave settled, Heracles remained alone in the hollow space he had created. The vortex still spun; the golden light faded gradually. He closed his eyes and let out a soft, pained laugh.
"This is what you always wanted, Gaia," he whispered, his voice thick with a hidden agony.
Silence. Only the cold wind.
"I know you never accepted me." "Yet, I never deemed you my enemy." "But now... you have made yourself my foe."
"GAIA! YOU ARE MY ENEMY! DO YOU HEAR ME?!" he roared.
His fury caused bolts of lightning to crackle violently around him like a web of jagged glass. But suddenly, the tattoos became alive once more. They turned a dark, blood-red, crawling across his skin.
They choked him from the inside and out. They squeezed with such violence that it felt as if his heart were on the verge of exploding. It was as if Gaia had heard him, and this was her personal response.
But Heracles did not yield.
He tried a different way this time. Bringing both hands to the center of his torso, he didn't merely reach toward his chest—he plunged his golden fingers into his own flesh. With a horrifying, wet wrench, he pried open the skin, crimson geysering over his forearms.
He ignored the agonizing scream of his own body. Concentrating every ounce of his monolithic will, he reached deep inside the gaping wound. His golden-white eyes flared as his fingertips brushed against his fiercely beating heart. There, they writhed—the dark red lines of the curse, coiled around his ventricle like abyssal vipers. He snarled, gripping the pulsating, living threads, and pulled. He attempted to rip the cursed serpents away from his heart, determined to sever Gaia's hateful grip on his life, no matter the cost to his physical form.
The tattoos fought back, constricting further. He didn't loosen his grip. He pulled harder. The veins in his neck bulged with the effort.
In that moment, a high-pitched, terrifying whistle pierced the air, growing louder with horrific speed. He looked to his side.
A streak of white flame was hurtling toward him from the horizon—a slender metal cylinder trailing a brilliant exhaust.
A ballistic missile.
Launched from a military base dozens of kilometers away, carrying a massive high-explosive warhead. It was locked onto him with absolute precision.
BOOOOOOOOOOM.
The explosion was gargantuan. A massive fireball tore through the grey Siberian sky. The shockwave leveled trees for kilometers. The ground itself shuddered as if struck by an earthquake.
Then... stillness.
In a distant Russian command center, soldiers stood frozen before their monitors. The blip on the radar had vanished.
Then, the room erupted.
"Target hit!" "Confirmation of impact!" "Target neutralized!"
Laughter and cheers filled the ops room. Generals shook hands, their faces alight with triumph. "We got him! We took him down!"
The earth beneath the blast was now a blackened, charred pit. Silence reigned.
But then... in the command center...
On the radar screen...
The blip reappeared.
To be continued...