The Invincibles

by Michael McNichols

  Abruptly, the ice freezing the Spider-Specter in place cracked, and he shook it all off. Hyperman’s mouth gaped open at what he was seeing.

  “How?” he mouthed.

  Zeroes flamed across the Spider-Specter, and he transformed into the Answer. “How?” he asked. “How did we pull off this huge, world-sized illusion with all our magic, telepaths, and insanely-advanced hologram technology?”

  “No!” Hyperman snapped. “You’re dead! You’re all dead! This is just some sort of trick! A leftover illusion! A final trap! Something to spit at me with from beyond the grave!”

  “Think what you want. Either way, as we speak, the real Spider-Specter’s sneaking into a MorsWorld lab to free the Whorl. Bet you thought we didn’t know about that, did ya? Once he stopped moving, the Whorl was easy to find too, thanks to Liandra and our telepaths.”

  Hyperman coughed and shook his head. He couldn’t believe he’d been played like this.

  The Answer pulled out a pair of glittering brass knuckles. Each knuckle shone with a different shade of Diatomite-x. He reared back to swing at Hyperman. Casually, Hyperman caught his fist with one hand and flung the Answer across the planet.

  Hyperman took a breath and steadied himself on his shaky legs. His eyes and head hurt. His skin burned and his teeth chattered. He hoped he’d eventually heal from all this. He’d taken so much damage and had been exposed to so much Diatomite-x that he couldn’t be sure. Nonetheless, he launched up into the sky. He still had work to do, and he couldn’t let his injuries stop him.

  Chapter 20: BREATHING IN THE SUN

  The hard light holographic projections and telepathic illusions faded. The magic spells misted away. Actual reality reasserted itself, and it was grim to see. Medi-carts wheeled all around the Martian devastation, stopping, expanding, and transforming into full medical stations. Jump-jets landed and relief workers climbed out. Mystics formed circles and chanted healing spells. Their regenerative vapors wafted about, and their anti-septic stench filled the air.

  Still somewhat dazed, Nightshadow staggered aimlessly about on the hard-packed, orange-brown Martian dirt. The sun sprayed down hot white light onto his sweat-soaked, torn, and burnt up wing-suit. He had no idea where his mask was, and his face felt beaten in. Simply blinking hurt. For once however, he let himself completely feel the pain. It ached, flared, moaned, burned, and pinched all across his body. Thanks to it, he felt alive and awake, more so than he had in some time. With the aid of his wing-suit’s servos, he was even able to stand.

  He surveyed the miles and miles of destroyed vehicles, wounded, and dead. Blasted mountaintops had crumbled. A scorched landscape stretched on halfway across the planet. In the far distance, smoke grayed up from some burning ruins he thought was the Quarry. Fortunately, before the battle, they’d moved all prisoners and staff to the prisons still under construction on Titan, Neptune, and Pluto.

  Nightshadow grew dizzy and hunched over. A couple of nurses helped him into a medical station where they rubbed healing salves onto him and began stitching and bandaging him up. Though they shot him up with antibiotics and nutrients, he refused any painkillers. Nonetheless, a mystic waved his hands over him and summoned up cool, comfortable vapors that enhanced the healing process and helped him deal with the pain and discomfort.

  While lying back and breathing in the vapors, Nightshadow flagged down a couple S.I.L.E.N.T. agents and asked for a rundown of the damage and death counts. The death count staggered him. Despite the medics’ concerns, Nightshadow forced himself up out of bed and stumbled outside to see how his friends were. He recognized the surviving superheroes pitching in where they could to clean up the devastation, if they weren’t too injured or shell-shocked to do anything other than shamble aimlessly about.

  Despite a broken arm in a sling, Ghosteyes cried over the Briar Bowman’s mangled body. The Silver Swords were praying over their fallen two teammates. The remaining members of the Pact and Titan Brigade were helping S.I.L.E.N.T. personnel cart the bodies off onto jump-jets to be taken home despite the many wounds and burns they themselves bore. Tiger Strike asked anyone she saw if they’d discovered Redemption’s body yet and clawed frantically through the wreckage to find him. Her brother, the Golden One, watched but shook his head and wept. At least Watcher Wiseman was re-growing a new body out of the burnt-out stump Hyperman had left him.

  The Silver Seraphs took care of their own dead, covering them in golden sheets and flying them back up through a small, sparkling, watery-white wormhole in the sky. Without needing to be asked, they also helped with the other wounded or dead, whether it was transporting bodies, giving medicine, or stitching and bandaging someone up. They did whatever was asked.

  Nightshadow had trouble processing the Invincibles’ casualties. The S.I.L.E.N.T. agents had been hesitant in telling him what they were, but he had insisted. Hearing about what Cal had done to his teammates had broken Nightshadow’s heart, but he refused to shed a tear. He needed to be strong for himself and everyone, since they were all having trouble picking themselves back up.

  Still, inside, he wept. Cal couldn’t be forgiven. That poor girl Areva had been so bright and full of potential, and Cal had ripped her apart. Nightshadow couldn’t believe that Sea Devil was gone either. Sure, he and Nightshadow had often butted heads over battle strategies, but they’d always respected and backed each other up. Nightshadow couldn’t imagine the Invincibles without Areva or Sea Devil. They had saved the world and so many lives so many times.

  On the other side of S.I.L.E.N.T.’s relief camp, Nightshadow saw both the Answer and Gilgamesh being loaded up onto gurneys for jump-jet transport. As with so many others, their injuries needed more medical support than could be provided here at the scene of the battle.

  Gilgamesh looked pale and gray, but still gripped his big, mighty hands around his spear’s shaft, keeping the blade stuck there right through his heart. It prevented him from bleeding out. Nonetheless, the demigod boasted to the nearby medics about this not being the first time his sacred weapon had been turned against him. He proceeded to launch into a story about a life-or-death duel on the moon centuries ago with his arch-nemesis, the Bull of Heaven.

  Despite the many, many times he’d heard this tale and had been bored by it, Nightshadow now found that he loved it. He shuffled up while Gilgamesh was in mid-tale and respectfully banged his fist against the demigod’s.

  “Good fight, Night,” Gilgamesh said, pausing his story.

  “You too,” Nightshadow quietly replied.

  Without missing a beat, Gilgamesh dove back down into his epic tale. Nightshadow left him to it, hoping his small moment of glory helped him deal with his injuries. Nightshadow limped over to check on the Answer. The medics had needed to cut away the remains of his inviso-suit to get at his wounds. However, pieces of the suit had been burned onto his heavily bruised and bloodied skin. Nevertheless, his eyes cracked open at Nightshadow’s approach. His hand touched Nightshadow’s and tightened around it.

  “Did…did I do well?” he asked.

  “You did excellent,” Nightshadow said. “Your illusions threw Cal off and made him think me and Paul were worse off than we were. Then you baited him perfectly into going after the Whorl and luring him right into our other trap.”

  “Good. I’m glad I helped. I…I got to know Stephanie a little, you know? I…I couldn’t save her. When they got to her safe house, I mean. It was hard, posing as her.”

  Nightshadow nodded. “We can’t save everyone.”

  “No,” the Answer said, choking up and coughing. “We can’t.”

  Tears splashed down onto his sunken-in, black-and-blue cheeks. He rolled his head away to sob and Nightshadow gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. The medics needed to look him over, so Nightshadow backed away to give them some space.

  He wandered off away from everyone and found a huge, chunky rock to hunker down on. Sitting with his chin in his hands, he watched Dynamo-Man in the near distance, reassembling himself out of th
e burned-black hover-tank and jump-jet wreckage scattered around.

  Liandra strolled up, tugging off her new body’s helmet. Only a few scratches slashed across her cute, impish face, and she looked strong and healthy. Her healing and transformation spells had done away with much of the body’s burns. Short, brownish-blonde hair knotted across her head. Her new lean, athletic body wore the S.I.L.E.N.T. trooper’s armor well. Her new beautiful, bright dragon-green eyes lit up her whole face.

  “So I’m a white girl now,” she said with a quirky, defiant smile. She used the same haughty British accent as before but with a gentler, softer-pitched voice. “It’s not the body I’d have chosen, but the former occupant’s soul had left it, and it was the best option for me to work with.”

  “Do you miss the way you used to look?” Nightshadow asked.

  She shrugged. “Hard not to. I looked that way my whole life up until now.”

  “Couldn’t you cast a glamor to make this body look like your old one?”

  “The level of concentration would be too much for me to maintain all the time, so I guess I’m stuck like this for at least a little while.”

  “You’re actually quite pretty,” Nightshadow said.

  “Really?” she asked. “Wait! You didn’t think I was pretty before?”

  “To be honest, I never liked all those tattoos and piercings.”

  She laughed. “You should have said something.”

  She reached forward and lightly touched his roughed up face. He didn’t flinch.

  “I can help your face heal faster,” she said. “I can make it good as new in fact. Those medics are amateurs compared to me. I can also smooth out a few wrinkles and maybe take care of that gray hair too. It could all take some time though, but I wouldn’t mind spending a few months with you.”

  “Go help somebody else first,” Nightshadow replied. “I heal well enough on my own, and right now, I need to find Paul.”

  Liandra nodded. She cradled her hands together and blew into them. A hot, pink-glistening little orb formed and shot off, leaving a trail of vapor in its wake.

  “That will take you to him,” she said.

  She leaned in and kissed Nightshadow on the cheek.

  “I’ll see you later, I hope,” she said.

  A small, quaint smile spread across his mouth. He couldn’t believe it, but he wanted to see her later too. He achingly got up from his rock, listening to his bones moan and crack. His burns, breaks, and bruises exploded with pain. Nonetheless, he nodded to Liandra and made off after her orb, moving slowly and carefully, hoping he wasn’t showing too much of his age.

  ***

  Wrath stood in the shadow of a large medical station, reading information off floating holo-screens and taking reports from various S.I.L.E.N.T. agents who dashed up. He was heavily bandaged up under a new set of lighter, thinner robo-armor garments.

  “This is a horrible, horrible game we’re playing,” he told Nightshadow when he approached.

  “And it’s still not over,” Nightshadow replied.

  Wrath nodded. “So while we’re here licking our wounds, we’ve got Hyperman chasing his tail out in space? You and Liandra called it a reality trap, right?”

  “Yes. With our magic, holograms, the Silver Seraphs’ wormholes, and your telepaths, we’ve got him flying from one small constructed reality to another. None of them will last forever though, and he’s Hyperman. He’ll see through them eventually. We just need to keep him occupied and away from Earth long enough for the Silver Seraphs to reverse their world engine and start draining him of his power. I’m glad they were able to restart their wormhole network to contact us and suggest that. It wasn’t a part of any of my original plans, but it became key to my strategy.”

  “What if Hyperman breaks free before they can do that?” Wrath asked.

  “Danny will have freed Don by then. Together, they might be able to take Cal down or maybe occupy him long enough until the Seraphs get everything together.”

  “You think the Whorl will be able to help? He lost his freaking legs!”

  “Danny has a set of mechanical legs he can attach to Don. They should work for a while before Don burns them out. That could at least buy us enough time to regroup. Maybe Liandra can find the power to cast a spell and exile Hyperman. She said she needed more time and power to do that though. She’s been summoning mystics and elder beings from across the universe to help. Also, Gilgamesh has been trying to get in touch with his family to see if they want to return to this reality and take care of Hyperman before he becomes a problem for them. We’re going to work this out, Paul. We just need more time. It’s a game of chess. I put the pieces in motion and now we see what happens to the board.”

  Chapter 21: REALITY TRAP

  The faster Hyperman flew, the farther and farther the Earth seemed to dangle away from him. It was as if he could never reach it! What had Night and the others done? Was this some kind of magic spell they’d had Liandra cast? Had they exiled him from his home and were now taunting him with an image of it?

  In frustration, he beat his fists together and gave off thundering shockwaves in all directions. To his surprise, his surroundings quivered like disturbed water. Curious now, he bashed his hands together again with as much force as he could muster. Again, reality all around him wobbled. Parts of it shattered like glass, and he glimpsed something bright and burning through the cracks. He bashed through the shiny-black, glass-like wall with his fists in that direction.

  Before him, Phoenix Bright sat ensconced on his throne, his armor crackling with eldritch fire. The cyber-sorcerer laced his gloved hands together and a hollow chuckle erupted from out of his skull-mask.

  “Did YOU think that the GAME was OVER?” he asked. “That YOU could WIN?”

  Hyperman shook his head. The illusion was good, but his hyper-senses registered the magic and hologram technology piercing through everything. He even felt a slight needling in his head that meant telepaths were digging into his thoughts. He launched right at the throne, slamming into it at full force. To his shock, he found himself ripping through a series of fiery-electric force fields like they were paper and crashing into another illusion.

  Here Mutagen reared up over New Daedalus with all his mouths spitting radioactive spikes and his clawed tendrils battering down buildings. Hyperman swept up and knocked him over with one ultra-powerful uppercut. His fingers then raked across the air, scratching with enough force and intent to peel down the layers of that false reality, before he crawled through the gap into the next one.

  In this reality, El Dorado had taken over the Quarry. His golden flaming sludge slopped everywhere. Blackened bones piled up and melted fat dripped off the burning walls and floors. As before, Hyperman froze El Dorado with a breath, but this time, punched and broke him into a thousand pieces.

  From there, Hyperman shattered through one false reality after another. Lucifer stabbed a glistening-white pitchfork at Hyperman’s chest. On Prism, the Silver Seraphs swamped and surrounded him. Alexander Mors in gigantic black battle armor fired off an entire arsenal of missiles and warheads. The Invincibles chased him across the sky.

  Each time, Hyperman torched his enemies with eye-blasts or ripped them bloodily apart with his bare hands. Somewhere along the way, he heard his mothership’s hum leaking through the fragments of the busted, fading realities around him. At first, he thought it was another ploy, but the tune tugged at his heart too much to be anything but real.

  He followed the hum, rocketing through one reality after another, blasting and smashing them to bits, checking every corner and crack for the ship. The hum grew stronger and stronger, singing more and more alluringly, and led him on through the maze of illusions, twisting this way, turning there, and then zigzagging.

  Finally, he crashed out through a sickly green wormhole with a whirling, misty corona. Earth floated before him, glowing heavenly blue and crowned by bulbous white clouds. Both his instincts and hyper-senses told him it was the real de
al, and besides, he wasn’t still under attack. He had escaped whatever trap had been set for him, but he hoped he hadn’t wasted too much time doing so. He zoomed toward home.

  ***

  The Romulus MorsWorld Headquarters lay in fiery ruins. Flames shivered and danced about the wreckage, which had sunk down into a gaping hole in the ground. A quick hyper-scan showed that almost everyone had gotten out alive, but the Whorl was missing from his cell. Hyperman scanned the planet for him and something odd caught his eye. He flashed off to Paris to investigate, confident the MorsWorld Emergency Services could handle the disaster here at Romulus.

  Notre Dame Cathedral, monstrously huge and with haunted-looking, smoky, old stained glass windows, bulged up like an ancient tumor over the River Seine. On its rooftop, stone gargoyles prowled in place, looking gruff and intimidating, despite the sweltering-bright sunlight beating down upon them.

  Hyperman floated above the cathedral, studying the messy mesh of webbing strung up between the gargoyles. Roughed up and bruised, the Spider-Specter hung unconscious in the midst of it, caught and tangled in his own webbing. After slicing through the web cocoon with his eye-beams, Hyperman snatched the Spider-Specter up and flew off above the world. He dangled the Spider-Specter by his shirtfront up over the clouds and ripped his mask off. He lightly shook the Spider until he awoke.

  The Spider-Specter moaned and stirred. His eyes blinked open and widened. His whole body convulsed as his danger sense must have been going berserk and threatening to give him a head-exploding seizure once it realized just how far up he was

  “HOLY SHIT!” the Spider-Specter yelled, fumbling and clawing wildly at Hyperman’s arm for purchase. The Spider-Specter’s fingers slammed down against his palms, trying to fire his web shooters, but they’d been emptied out on the Notre Dame rooftop by whoever had strung him up there. So he clung to Hyperman’s arm with all his spider-enhanced strength. Little spikes jabbed up out of his hands and pricked at Hyperman’s flesh, firmly attaching themselves to his forearm like it was a wall.