The Accidental Hero

by Matt Myklusch

  “We knew,” the Rüstov said, taunting Jazen. “And we know that with this boy’s help, the Rüstov Armada will rise again. We are the future.” He held Jack up and looked him right in the face. “Apparently, so are you.”

  “Why?” Jack yelled. “Why me? What does this have to do with me?”

  “The Magus wants you,” the Rüstov said to him. “That is all you need to know. The Magus will not be denied.”

  “Oh, he’ll be denied,” Jazen said, trying with all of his might to break free of the Rüstov’s control. “He’ll be denied!” At this point, Jack noticed that Jazen was able to wiggle his little finger. It was something the Left-Behinds didn’t pick up on. At least not in time to do anything. Jazen let out a mighty roar as he broke free of the Rüstov’s control and rushed them. The Left-Behind holding Jack backed away just in time, but Jazen grabbed hold of the other two and pushed them back. “They underestimate us, Jack!” he yelled at them. “We’re stronger than they think!”

  With indomitable willpower Jazen kept going. Jack watched him drive the two Rüstov back to the edge of the broken window and out over the side. He didn’t let go of them for a second.

  “JAZEN!” Jack screamed as his best friend tumbled out of the biggest, tallest window in SmartTower. In that instant, everything slowed down. Jack couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He didn’t want to. Even the Left-Behind seemed overwhelmed by what it saw. It stared out the window, dumbfounded. After a few moments it regained its bearings and dragged Jack off to the elevator, shaking the whole way. It pulled Jack inside, looking much less confident than it had moments ago. It hit the button for the roof deck.

  Throughout the elevator ride, Jack remained disconnected from his powers. The elevator was rising. He needed to do something fast, but his mind was elsewhere, stuck on Jazen, and then on something the Left-Behind had said to him. There was something that didn’t fit.

  The Left-Behind had said that Jazen had told the Rüstov about Jack. It had said they didn’t know about him or his infection until after they had hacked Jazen’s systems. But Jazen hadn’t known about Jack’s infection until the Hall of Records. It didn’t make any sense. Someone had known about Jack before then. The Rüstov had to have known, because they had come after him at St. Barnaby’s! If this Rüstov didn’t know about the one who came after him back at the orphanage… well, who did?

  The elevator doors opened and Jack saw Smart’s corporate HyperJet. Still blocked from his powers, Jack had no way of stopping the Left-Behind from forcing him into the ship and blasting out of there. The Rüstov dragged him out onto the roof.

  The sloping spire of the tower peak curved up into the sky. It was still dark when Jack and the Left-Behind arrived on the roof, not yet morning. The flash of light that broke across the horizon was not the rising sun, but a laser blast that connected directly with the Rüstov’s head, vaporizing it instantly. The Left-Behind dropped to its knees and fell forward, dead.

  Jack looked up in the direction the blast had come from. There on the roof, hovering in the sky across from Jack, was the very Rüstov he was just wondering about. The one from the orphanage.

  Revile the Undying.

  CHAPTER

  16

  Deadly Reunion

  Jack looked down at the Left-Behind’s body. Sparks shot out of the spot where its head had been. The shiny new leg it had stolen from Cyberai twitched with lifeless spasms. The rest of it was completely still. It was dead, but Jack was not relieved at all. His situation had gone from worse to apocalyptic.

  Revile slowly lowered himself to the roof. He touched down across from Jack, not ten feet away, and walked toward him with the slow, deliberate approach of the grim reaper. Jack was still exceedingly aware that his powers were not working. He didn’t try to run.

  “You’re Revile,” Jack said as the end drew nearer, step by step.

  Revile nodded.

  Jack got a strange satisfaction out of being right about that. No one had believed him about it, but he was right. He knew that it was Revile who had tried to kill him back in the marshlands outside the orphanage. Now he was back to finish the job. “You’re here to kill me, aren’t you?” Jack asked.

  “Yes.”

  Jack gave a resigned sigh. Sometimes it really stunk to be right.

  “I thought the Rüstov wanted me alive,” he said. “For the Magus.”

  “That… is why you must die,” Revile said, “so that I will never live.” Jack cocked his head slightly. So that he will never what? Revile reached up to his faceplate, gripping it behind the jaw line on each side. Short bursts of air escaped as he depressurized his mask. Revile removed the faceplate and Jack finally had the answer to the question that had been gnawing at him in the elevator.

  Behind Revile’s mask, Jack saw his own face staring back at him. The skin was pale, nearly gray, and a black mark ran all the way around his right eye. Another line started at the inside corner of Revile’s eye and ran down his cheek. It was Jack’s own mirror image. The face was just a few years older, and the resemblance was uncanny. Despite Revile’s adult size and imposing figure, his true face was that of a teenager, and there was no denying it was Jack’s.

  “Now do you understand?” Revile asked. His voice without the mask was normal. Human.

  Jack shivered at the implications of what he was seeing. “You’re…me?” Jack said.

  Revile nodded. “And you are me,” he said.

  Revile let the words hang in the air. Jack didn’t need convincing. The truth was written all over the nearly identical face that stared back at him from across the roof.

  Jack and Revile looked at each other for a moment without saying a word. They studied each other’s differences, knowing they were the same person. One was the other’s tomorrow, and the other was the one’s yesterday. One was a six-foot patchwork collection of scrap metal in the shape of a person, and the other was an innocent twelve-year-old boy.

  “So long ago,” Revile said to Jack. He looked so sad. “This is where it began,” he said, motioning to the empty roof. “Here. This moment. This is the place in time where you died and I was born.”

  “That’s why they tried to take me?” Jack asked. “To turn me into you?”

  “That’s why they took me,” Revile said, his voice cracking a bit when trying to talk about Jack. “There,” he said, pointing to the getaway ship. “The Left-Behind. That ship.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t stop it.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” Jack said. “You were there at the invasion. I was just a baby then. How can I be you?”

  “I was present at the invasion with the same mission I have today—to end this,” Revile said. He twitched as if unable to completely control himself. “To end us,” he repeated clearly. “Listen to me now. You have a right to know why.

  “Everything the Left-Behind told you was true. The Rüstov do win the war. They win because of you, because of us. Because of our ability to resist infection. Our powers made us the perfect specimen for a Rüstov supersoldier experiment, a host body that would never burn out. When I was twelve years old, as you are now, that Left-Behind took me to Rüst, the Rüstov throneworld. There they turned me into what I was destined to become: Revile, the unstoppable regenerating warrior of the Rüstov. Just as you are in control of the parasite now, when I became Revile, the parasite finally took me over. You may think me just a few years older than you, but it is only because the Rüstov’s regenerative technology has stopped my aging. I am much older than I appear. I have killed thousands. I have ruined worlds, wiped out alien races, and subjugated entire planets. Earth was but the first.”

  Jack couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “It took years, but I eventually broke free of the Rüstov, just as Jazen did. But by then it was too late. There was so much blood on my hands… I could no longer stand it. There was only one way to make things right. You remember, Smart told us he believed time travel to be possible. That if someone were to dive
through the hole he cut in reality for his TimeScope to look through, they could do more than see through time. They could physically travel through it. Smart had no proof that his theory was right, but I… I was willing to take the chance. And it worked. I went back to the Battle of Empire City. It was too late to save myself, but it wasn’t too late to save the world from me.”

  “You came back to kill yourself?” Jack asked.

  “My plan was to kill the infant version of myself during the chaos of the invasion,” the future Jack said. “I was blown apart, I don’t know how many times, but I did not waver. I was sure no one would be able to stand up to me, but Legend…Legend did. He and Stendeval, they separated me from the baby. From you. My target was hidden from me, somewhere in Empire City. My only chance to make sure I completed my mission was to annihilate the entire city. The Omega Protocol. That’s when Legend flew me into the mothership’s engine.”

  “The Legendary Sacrifice,” Jack said.

  “The sacrifice I intended was just as noble,” Revile said. “I was trying to save everyone. They didn’t understand. It took me years to regenerate after that, but as always, I lived, festering in the grave on Wrekzaw Isle. I survived in the barest informational form—little more than a program running through the dead circuits of the mothership’s wreck. I couldn’t sense your presence anywhere in the Imagine Nation… I lost track of you, and I was foolish enough to hope. For twelve years I laid dormant on Wrekzaw Isle. Then one day it was like a veil was lifted. I saw you. I felt your power, our power, glowing half a world away. I knew then my mission was not yet complete.”

  “When I was at St. Barnaby’s,” Jack said. “That’s when you came to kill me. When I blew you up.”

  “You thought you defeated me.” Revile shook his head. “After you caused that explosion, I hid. I was going to kill you there in the swamp, but… I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t like dealing with the baby. Looking at your eyes, I saw the boy I was. I hesitated. I decided to wait. To give you a chance. That chance has led us here. I hoped that if I killed the Left-Behind who abducted us, I could finish this without spilling any more innocent blood. But I have failed again. If it had worked, I would have vanished from the timestream. Obviously, I am still here. The Rüstov will not be denied. Eventually, they will take you. It has to end. We have to end it here.” Revile put his mask back on, hiding away the last vestige of his humanity.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “For both of us.”

  “Wait!” Jack said as Revile started pressurizing his mask. “You don’t have to do this. We can work together! Can’t we? Maybe now that I know about this, there’s something we can do!”

  Revile sealed his mask and primed his wrist cannons.

  “You can’t escape it,” he said. “If you could, I would not be here. Understand this, Jack… It has already happened. You are already me. I am still you. Powerful forces conspire against you. There is no escape. You cannot fight the future.”

  Jack heard Revile’s wrist cannon power up with a whirr.

  “It will be a hero’s death—a death we can be proud of,” Revile said, raising his arm to Jack’s face. The wrist cannon was fully charged and inches from Jack’s nose. There was nowhere to run. Jack braced himself for the inevitable. Twelve years ago, Legend had stopped Revile from completing his mission, but right there on the roof, there was no one left but Jack.

  CHAPTER

  17

  Superfight

  A plasma blast fired out into the early-morning quiet. It came not from Revile’s wrist cannon but blazing across the sky, originating behind the SmartTower spire. It blind-sided Revile and sent him sliding back across the roof. Before Jack even knew what was happening, a dozen more blasts pounded Revile, driving him right up to the roof’s edge and then skidding over the side. Jack looked up. In the predawn light he saw the rapidly approaching Peacemakers side by side with the Inner Circle.

  The rescue team landed on the roof next to Jack. The Peacemakers were made up of Surge, Battlecry, Harrier, Flex, and Stormfront, all of the members of the Peacemaker alpha squad except Speedrazor. The Inner Circle was represented by Stendeval, Prime, Virtua, Chi, and Hovarth, all of the Circlemen except Smart. They swooped in over the tower roof next to Jack. The fliers hovered in place under their own power, and the others jumped down to the roof from AirSpeeders and AirSkimmers.

  “Where did you come from?” Jack asked. “How did you know I was here?”

  “Emissary Knight sent out a distress signal,” Prime replied. “The Peacemakers picked it up. He said the Rüstov were attacking SmartTower.”

  “His transmission cut off midsentence,” Surge said to Jack. “It sounded like there was a crash of some kind. Is he here?”

  Jack shook his head gravely. “No,” he said. He knew full well what that crash had to be.

  “Peacemakers, detain the boy,” Surge ordered. “He may be a part of this. Go inside and find Circleman Smart.”

  The Peacemakers that were closest to Jack took a step toward him, but Hovarth blocked their way, placing his giant battle-ax out in their path. “Hold,” he said. He wasn’t looking at them. He was looking up.

  “Hovarth is correct,” Stendeval added, looking up as well. “It would appear that our combined forces have more pressing matters to attend to.”

  Surge gasped when he saw what the others were looking at. Battlecry squinted in disbelief at the rusty metal figure rising up over the edge of the tower roof. There was a glowing red circle in the center of his chest. “Is that who I think it is?”

  Chi nodded. “Revile.”

  “That can’t be,” Harrier said, extending her wings and backing up a few feet into the sky. “It can’t… Revile’s dead.”

  “You are free to tell him that,” Stendeval said calmly. “Jack did warn us otherwise.” Revile stared the group down from across the roof. Mainly, he stared at Jack. He didn’t try to reason with the Inner Circle and explain the righteousness of his cause. He didn’t try to justify what he felt was his right, perhaps even his duty, to do. Revile said absolutely nothing, but to Jack, his intentions could not be more clear. All the heroes in Empire City would not be enough to deter Revile. There would be no escape for Jack this time. Revile’s metal frame was riddled with holes from Prime’s plasma blasts, Surge’s energy attacks, Battlecry’s sonic booms, and Harrier’s explosive shells. They all should have been lethal wounds, but Jack and the others watched as Revile’s circuits grew out and wove together, filling in the gaps and making him whole again. Harrier was wrong about Revile. The fact was, he just didn’t know how to die.

  “I think we have to teach this one the error of his ways,” Hovarth said. “The dead should stay dead.”

  Surge searched for his voice, but nothing came. His unit had been created to fight the Rüstov, but he never imagined he would face Revile. This was more than he and his men bargained for. “We have to work together,” Chi told everyone. The Peacemakers all mumbled out distracted responses in the affirmative.

  “Get behind us, Jack,” Virtua said as the Inner Circle took defensive positions around him. Jack did as he was told, feeling pangs of guilt for the Inner Circle, and even the Peacemakers, as they prepared to put themselves in harm’s way. They didn’t know it, but they were protecting him from himself. Jack wondered what they would do if they knew the truth about him. Would they still protect him? Jack wasn’t even sure if protecting him was the right thing to do. Not after what he had just found out about his future. Jack’s entire life, all he ever wanted was to know who he really was. Now he knew. He had learned more about himself than he ever thought possible, and oh, how he wished he could unlearn all of it.

  Revile flexed ominously in the sky, fully prepared for battle. Jack looked around, trying to spot Smart’s nullifiers. Maybe if he could disable them, he’d be able to do something. Unfortunately, he had no idea what the nullifiers looked like. He was totally powerless.

  Surge found his voice. “Peacemakers, ready,” he said. The
Peacemakers held their position as Surge looked to Stendeval. Stendeval, in turn, looked to Prime. They would move on his word. Stendeval may have been the most powerful member of the Inner Circle, but Jack realized that, because it was still several minutes before the dawn, Stendeval’s daily power bank was at its lowest level and would not be recharged until the sun again rose over the Imagine Nation. He’d have to use any power he had left sparingly until after sunrise, assuming they lived that long. Prime steeled himself and raised fists that glowed with power. He was more than ready for this fight. “For Valor,” he said to himself quietly, then shouted out the call to arms: “CIRCLEMEN, STRIKE!”

  Superfights were common occurrences in Empire City, but this was no minor skirmish between random super powers. This was Revile. This was the Inner Circle and SmartCorp’s toughest Peacemakers. The combined superhuman firepower of everyone involved in this fight was enough to bring Mount Nevertop crashing to the ground.

  Jack watched as Prime unleashed wave after wave of devastating plasma blasts. He saw biokinetic energy pour out of Surge’s hands, eyes, and mouth as he unloaded his power cells in a blinding display of lethal force. Chi harnessed the sum total of his being into blue fireballs that he pushed through outstretched palms at Revile. Some of the attacks connected with Revile, but most areas damaged by the shots regenerated quickly. As for the rest of the offensive, Revile was fast enough to dodge it. He was incredibly quick and agile for something so big and clunky. He had the advantage of flight over the majority of combatants, and he knew how to use it. As they opened fire on him, he immediately launched an aerial counter-attack, flying over the roof and strafing the heroes with rapid-fire pulse blasts. His wrist cannons opened up again and again as the plasma blasts came out, closing up tightly in between each shot. Stendeval spent some of his precious energy casting a protective shell over Jack.

  Battlecry was shouting out sound waves with all the air in his lungs when Revile scored a direct hit on his regulating apparatus. His sonics went from tightly focused bursts to all-encompassing shockwaves that took out the AirSkimmers, broke every window for miles, and brought everyone on the roof to their knees. Pressing his advantage, Revile dive-bombed into the center of the roof as his enemies struggled to find their footing. He hit with such impact that Jack flew into the air, landing a few feet away from the protective enclosure of the Circlemen. Between that and the sonic boom, Jack felt like he had gotten run over by a rhino. With the Circlemen and Peacemakers down for the moment, Revile again went after Jack.