The Invincibles

by Michael McNichols

  ***

  The Invincibles exchanged wary glances. The entire command center tensed up at just the mention of Phoenix Bright’s name. Many technicians whispered amongst themselves or looked anxious, but nonetheless, plowed on with their work. Nightshadow admired their fortitude in carrying on with their duties. Phoenix Bright scared even him and, given he generally dealt with the bloodiest, craziest psychopaths Salome City had to offer, that was saying a lot.

  The hologram showed Phoenix Bright in great detail. Hypnotic gray eyes leered out of his robotic skull mask. Bright, bloody-red phoenix wings flamed across his black-spiked armor and matched the color of his hooded cape.

  “You guys know the deal,” Wrath said. “Sorcerer-cyborg who’s rumored to have traveled all across space-time learning the darkest, most forbidden sciences and magics. Ruler of the island nation of Danikabla floating in-between Asia and Africa with hints of both cultures showing in the people there. At his command, an army of robots, demons, robotic demons, demonic robots, or whatever the hell those things are. He’s a perennial top nominee for most terrifying man in the universe.”

  “Don’t we need Hyperman and the Whorl if we’re going to start the briefing?” Nightshadow asked, standing attentively with his hands clasped behind his back. “Sea Devil too.”

  “Sea Devil’s being briefed en route,” Wrath replied. “We’re also in contact with the Whorl. And Hyperman? Well, he’ll show up when he shows up, and we’ll catch him up real quick.”

  He registered his dislike with a grunt, which Nightshadow noted and wondered what Cal had done to upset Wrath.

  “What is our justification for taking action?” Gilgamesh asked. “After all, no matter what you want to call it, we’re going to be invading this man’s country.”

  Dynamo-Man’s faceplate lit up. “A rash of disappearances began late last night all across the world,” he said in a computerized monotone. “They included senators, scientists, writers, artists, musicians, and even mathematicians.”

  “They’re the best and brightest of the next generation,” Wrath added. “Everyone that’s in the middle of making a name for themselves. S.I.L.E.N.T.’s been keeping the disappearances quiet to avoid a panic, but we made a list of other potential targets and we’ve got the Whorl beating Bright to the punch and snatching them all off to safe houses. Beforehand though, I had Liandra there and S.I.L.E.N.T.’s mystic squad sniff out Phoenix Bright’s magic, so we could make sure it was him.”

  “Spells that powerful have to leave some residue,” Liandra said, tucking her tarot deck into a back pocket.

  “Do we know why he’s kidnapping these people?” Nightshadow asked. “This is Phoenix Bright here. He always has some insane scheme.”

  “These people represent the future and thus Bright is sacrificing the future through them,” Areva said quietly. “It’s a ritual. The stars and planets have aligned perfectly across several different galaxies and he now has the chance to summon Lucifer.”

  “Lucifer?” Gilgamesh asked. “The fallen angel? The devil himself, you mean?”

  “The individual upon whom such myths are based,” Areva replied. “He was actually one of the first Celestials of Prism. He was the renegade. The fallen.”

  Nightshadow nodded. He’d made a point of studying up on the Silver Seraphs, just so he’d understand what was going on when their business became Earth’s business. Gods (or rather the advanced super-beings who had been worshipped as gods) from all across the universe had come together centuries ago to create a utopian world called Prism. Most human beings would regard the place as Paradise. Eden, Heaven, Elysium, Valhalla, Shangri-La, Nirvana, and Kolob all existed there as major cities, and their size and beauty made it almost hurtful to look at them.

  The Celestials made Prism a center of learning and wisdom throughout the universe. Their libraries, universities, and technologies were legendary and vast. Many beings across space and time dreamed of studying there. However, the Celestials also wanted to protect the universe from itself and give it time to rise up out of its own ignorance. Therefore, they chose a select few from every universal quadrant to become Silver Seraphs that policed and protected the galaxies.

  The idea of space angels actually existing made Nightshadow slightly uneasy and feel like he was out of his depth, but he tried to take it in stride. He was more used to street crime, terrorists, and maniac super-villains. Still, alongside the Invincibles, he had faced down a number of threats that bedazzled and broke the mind to even contemplate. Despite that, he thought that he had always held his own, but feared that he was way out of his league, even if his pride wouldn’t let him admit it. He did what he could, though, and hoped it amounted to something. Thankfully, he had Invincible teammates more used to cosmic menaces like Areva. As a Silver Seraph, it was mostly all she handled while performing her duties.

  She tightly clutched her sword by its handle. “All communications with Prism have been cut off,” she said. “I can’t even access the wormhole to get there. However, before I lost contact, I heard about some sort of magical plague that had hit everyone hard. It kills me that I can’t be there to help!”

  “Sounds like Bright’s handiwork,” Liandra muttered.

  “So I imagine the deal is Lucifer gets Prism and Phoenix Bright gets Earth, and they divide up the rest of the universe between them?” Nightshadow asked and shook his head. “I don’t buy it. Bright would never settle for anything less than the whole universe, and if Lucifer’s anything like the mythologies say, he knows Bright is going to betray him.”

  “However this all works out, things are definitely going to get ugly,” Wrath said. “The intel we have estimates the ritual needing a couple more hours to complete. The last known disappearance was thirty-seven minutes ago, so we need to get cracking, people.”

  ***

  Nightshadow and Gilgamesh pored over a holographic layout of Danikabla. They bickered a bit about when and where to deploy troops, but Wrath added a few suggestions to help them compromise. Then, finally, after fifteen hurried minutes of planning, everybody received their marching orders in holographic form.

  Wrath hit an alert. Agents pounded up and down the corridors, throwing on battle-armor and grabbing guns. The command center’s holographic charts displayed the Sky Citadel itself shifting and hovering down closer to Danikabla. Outside, sky-bikes, hover-tanks, and jump-jets launched in squadrons. The Sky Citadel’s cannons turned and swiveled, their mouths crackling with laser-fire. Wishing each other luck, the Invincibles began filing out, each with their own way of reaching the island.

  The command center’s massive front window split open for Areva and Dynamo-Man to soar out. The many zeroes on the Answer’s bodysuit glimmered before he vanished into thin air. Liandra murmured a spell in an indecipherable language and her body evaporated into green flames. Gilgamesh offered Nightshadow a ride on his flight-chariot. Nightshadow thanked him, but declined. He had his own transportation.

  He slipped through the frenzied rush of S.I.L.E.N.T. personnel rushing to and fro out of the command center. He stole around tight corners and snuck through doors few knew existed, creeping about areas of the Sky Citadel next to no one had access to without the proper clearance. Eventually, he came to an elevator. When the doors clanged open, Paul Wrath was waiting inside.

  “We need to talk,” he said, hitting the down button.

  In the cramped elevator car, Wrath leaned back against the wall and drummed his fingers against it. Nightshadow set his hands on his hips.

  “I’m assuming Danny was spotted somewhere on the Sky Citadel?” he asked.

  Wrath nodded. “Once an Invincible, always an Invincible. He couldn’t resist tagging along to help save the world. Don’t worry though. He’s sneaky and fast, but now that I know where he is, I won’t lose him.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Hiding amongst the hover-tanks. He’ll probably cling to one and ride it down to the island.”

  “He’ll probably be a big he
lp down there.”

  “You want to enact containment measures to take him once it’s all over?”

  “No, I’ll handle him myself. Keep S.I.L.E.N.T. and the other Invincibles out of it.”

  “Suit yourself, but Danny’s not the only problem. In fact, we have a much bigger one, and it’s Hyperman.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He crossed a line, Night, and now I’m worried he’ll cross another.”

  Wrath told Nightshadow everything about Hyperman visiting the Quarry, Hyperman’s worshippers, and what he’d done to El Dorado. The elevator doors banged open on the garage level, and Wrath was still talking as they strode by the hover-tanks and jump-jets in need of repairs.

  “We lost out big with El Dorado, Night,” Wrath said. “We think he’s useless now, but he could have been a big power source for a lot of underprivileged countries and we could have used his radiation power to jump-start a lot of science programs. Plus, he’d been arrested. He was supposed to stand trial. It was up to the courts to decide what to do with him, not Hyperman.”

  “He overreached,” Nightshadow replied. He pulled a covering off a parked vehicle in a small, isolated corner, revealing his own sleek-black, self-designed sky-bike. It resembled a motorcycle with thrusters instead of wheels and a larger carriage and sharp wings. Thin, spiraling missile launchers and force field generators also poked out of its body.

  “He came pretty close to playing god, Night!” Wrath said. “He overrode whatever authority he had, and I don’t know if there’s anything we can do about it! I mean, can we even arrest him? Would he let us?”

  “If he’s not thinking clearly, it might be best to avoid a direct confrontation for now,” Nightshadow said. “I’m assuming only I and a few other people know about this?”

  “Of course! Even the other Invincibles might panic if they hear Hyperman’s acting up! He’s potentially a bigger threat than Phoenix Bright!”

  Nightshadow mounted the sky-bike and fired it up. Wrath hobbled back as scratchy-blue flames erupted from the sky-bike’s thrusters.

  “Enact containment protocols for Hyperman as soon as we’ve neutralized Bright,” Nightshadow said. “This is still Cal though. He’s going to show up and help us, and we’re probably going to need him to. I’ll try talking to him afterwards and see what he has to say. Maybe if I point out how frightening it is to the rest of us for him to be using his powers in a haphazard, irresponsible way, he’ll turn himself in. He has to understand the implications of what he’s done. He knows we can’t just leave someone as powerful as him free if they’re violating laws.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t care anymore!” Wrath shouted over the roar of the sky-bike engine.

  “We have to prepare for that as well,” Nightshadow replied. “Access my store of Diatomite-x. I’ll email you the codes and locations while in-flight. If we have to, we’ll get rough with Cal.”

  His sky-bike lifted noisily off.

  Chapter 9: UNSHEATHED

  Hyperman bulleted across Antarctica’s icy white lands. A clear, chilly blue sky loomed above. Penguins squawked as he jetted over them. Polar bears gazed up from swimming and fishing to roar at him in passing. With his hyper-vision, he watched the Sky Citadel in the far, far distance swooping down upon Danikabla, which indicated that Phoenix Bright was up to something again.

  Thinking of Bright’s god-like power and how he wasted it in these stupid world-conquering schemes, Hyperman sighed. Bright could cure every disease and ailment and remake life itself if he wanted. Didn’t he see that? Didn’t he want that, or was it all about personal glory and ego boosting for him?

  While lost in thought, Hyperman at first didn’t notice the shimmering shadows appearing around him from out of nowhere. Pulse beams then blasted into him from all sides. The stinging-cold, misty-purple energy lashed against his invulnerable skin, sinking down into his pores and trying to blacken, wither, and rot his flesh. He screamed in actual pain, having almost forgotten what it felt like.

  “AAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHHHH!” he roared, twisting and twirling around at hyper-speed, slashing eye-beams out at his assailants. They teleported here and there, blinking in and out of existence to dodge his fire. That forced him to spin around even faster, whipping up a huge gale-storm vortex of snow, ice, and wind that crashed into them. That disrupted their motions enough that his eye-beams could catch and burn them. When that didn’t put them all down, Hyperman flew toward his closest assailant and tore right through it. Whatever it was exploded into a mess of limey yellow guts and weird glowing-green metal that splattered all over Hyperman.

  After wiping his face clean, Hyperman finally got a good look at his attackers, who were already re-growing the parts his eye-beams had sliced off, both metallic and organic. He clenched his teeth, recognizing them as Phoenix Bright’s cyber-demons. They resembled floating lumps of lopsided meat bolted together and armored with burning, chaotic green metal. Their huge mouths howled open, showing sparking circuitry within. Flaming eyes spotted their coarse, webby plastic flesh and their many, many tentacles. Their programming drove them to destroy life, sucking away all vitality and power, becoming only stronger, hungrier, and more vicious over time. As commanding as he was, Hyperman offered them a delectable smorgasbord of power that’d potentially never run out.

  His skin glowed as he healed from their earlier attack, but the cyber-demons quivered joyously and grinned with crooked, gun-metal-gray teeth as they tasted the power his aura gave off. Their tentacles snapped out at him, and their many, many eyes twinkled, signaling more pulse blasts.

  Having only a nanosecond to think, Hyperman breathed in a humongous gulp of freezing, prickling air. Corkscrewing around, he spat it all out in one humongous gust that fluttered and blew chunks of snow everywhere. Within seconds, the cyber-demons all froze. Then he burned them all away to nothing with eye-blasts. Vibrating at hyper-speed cleaned all the blood and guts off him before he bolted through the clouds to Danikabla.

  ***

  At a rapidly approaching distance, Hyperman saw the war erupt. S.I.L.E.N.T. had unsheathed all its forces like a sword and slashed them down at the island. Troops stormed the beaches and flew through the tropical trees. They lit up force fields around the small villages and cities, trapping the Danikablan citizens inside before they could unleash their swirling blood magic defenses and bulky robot armor. Sky-bikes darted down from the sky. Hover-tanks swept through the fields of wild, overgrown grass. Jump-jets bombed the docks, highways, and anything that even remotely resembled a military installation.

  Phoenix Bright’s armies retaliated. Cyber-demons fried soldiers with eye-beams. Phoenix-bots, brighter-colored cyber-clones of their master, fired ray guns. Magical gateways exploded open and snake and crocodile men poured out. S.I.L.E.N.T. troops sank into quicksand and were choked by vines. Hidden bombs went off. Fireballs erupted. Poisonous gas leaked. Bright’s mountainous, upside-down pyramid-shaped fortress crested the horizon. Fiery bird emblems burned yellow, red, and orange across its shining black walls. Triple-barreled cannons on floating platforms surrounded the structure and vomited out laser-fire.

  A two-headed, sallow-skinned cybernetic dragon swooped up from around the pyramid. One of its heads hissed flames and the other vile toxins at S.I.L.E.N.T.’s forces. Hyperman appeared and punched both its heads off. He grabbed it by its tail and repeatedly slammed its body down against the fortress’s force field. Finally, he whipped its limp, broken body into a gang of snake and crocodile men patrolling the jungle below.

  Hyper-speeding around the island, Hyperman eye-blasted Phoenix-bots, froze cyber-demons with his breath, and busted up giant heavily armed robots. Yet, more and more enemies emerged, two for every one that was destroyed. He couldn’t believe it. They had almost overwhelmed him with their numbers! He couldn’t do this alone. So he scanned around for the Invincibles.

  In orbit, Areva hacked away at Phoenix Bright’s satellites with her burning sword. Her crystal-sharp wings fired spikes at a
half dozen “Blood Seraphs.” These blood-caked, flesh-rotted zombie versions of the Silver Seraphs still raked at her with their scythes and spat acidic blood fire. Yet Areva was holding her own.

  Though scratched up and scorched, Dynamo-Man flew sideways and launched an array of stinger missiles at a Phoenix-bot squad down a long winding Danikablan beach. His wires drilled into the one Phoenix-bot fallen at his feet, likely trying to steal its data and hack into Phoenix Bright’s communications network.

  Sea Devil in his Atlantean seashell armor swam through the waters off the Danikablan coast. Here and there, the gilled, blue-skinned hermaphrodite stopped to blast away at monstrously mutated sharks with his trident-rifle. His own trident-shaped submarine exploded behind him, taking out a boat full of rampaging Phoenix-bots that were seeking to board it.

  Miles out from the island and safely away from all the fighting, Liandra Dark’s body hovered above the ocean. Waves lashed against the protective, gleaming orb that completely encased her. Her face was blank and pale, and her eyes had gone opaque. It looked like her spirit self had leaped out of her corporeal form onto the astral plane to challenge Bright there.

  The Whorl repeatedly blitzed through all of Danikabla and back across the whole world. He had become like a ghost, and his normally bright blue skin and purple treads had even faded in color. He was more a blur than a man. He crackled with electricity and never slowed down enough for his particles to coalesce back together into a solid living, breathing person. Nothing could touch him while he was in that ethereal state, and he passed through walls, buildings, trees, cities, people, and robots with almost no one noticing him. He simply ran on and on without stop, mumbling nonsense.

  “On my way, Paul.”

  “They wouldn’t think I was much of a god.”

  “BRIGHT! PHOENIX BRIGHT! WHERE ARE YOU?”