"—asualties reported along the Magnificent Mile. Too many to properly count, r-right now.” The feed from the chopper camera jerked wildly, Chicago skyline smeared as the rotors beat to avoid the sudden pass of a saucer moving fast enough to blur in its pass. “God, it’s been barely an hour, b-b-but they’re still pouring out of the sky over Chicago! I-I don’t even know what to call them! Unconfirmed visuals of wh—"
The anchor’s voice cracked as another saucer circled them, the wind from its rush enough to buffet the newscraft.
"—hey look like... brains? Brains in glass jars? God, they’re just vaporizing th—"
The chopper vanished to nothing in a blinding beam of vomit-colored green as it cored the skyline.
– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
Air pressure was a solid wall at an uncontrolled Mach Three.
That much was a fact, the sound barrier a bomb going off inside a sealed oil drum as he broke it over and over. Red flared out in a fiery aura, the broken halo of his energy fighting and failing against the invisible telekinetic force that sent him airborne. His body folded backward on itself by the time he hit ground.
Asphalt tore open like a wet zipper, a half-mile peeled back in jagged chunks of kaleidoscopic shrapnel as Brick Mojo skipped across the interstate like a ruby-red stone.
A rusted Honda Civic scattered apart as he tore through it, both halves airborne as he skid through the northbound lane on his face. The second half-mile introduced his forehead to a concrete highway divider that became a fog of gray powder on impact. By the third, his boots finally met solid ground for the first time in three miles, the parking lot of an empty strip mall glowing a bright red-hot as his soles plowed a melting trench through it until friction finally bled him to a stop.
Brick stood in the trench, one knee planted in the rubble as he breathed through his teeth. The smoke was thick enough to choke most and toxic enough to kill normals.
Brickford Mojo wasn’t normal.
Unfortunately, neither was this week’s chosen asshole.
“Correct!”Red gloves wiped a smear of red from his nose as the sound echoed deeper than his ears, his brain-meat rebelling as something poked inside it; a wet pressure he wanted dead.
As soon as possible.
If possible.
The sky was a sick crimson, bruised from the infection spread by all the rifts floating over downtown Chicago as the world tore itself apart again. Fleets of silver flying saucers poured out of the bleeding holes, each chrome circle swarming the city armed with neon-green death rays the kind Brick had only ever seen in the hands of Mojo and…
Well, cartoons.
The blue freak floated down the highway towards him, seven feet of superhuman sapphire skin and muscle with a pulsing mass of brain tissue as his sick little crown. “You don’t like it?” A smile turned down his way as Brick’s nose kept bleeding in a thick stream that had him unsteady on his feet as the words echoed in his skull. “Took me a little while getting used to, but I had all my childhood to become accustomed to my appearance. Thankfully, it came along with all this power.”“We get it! You’re psychic!” Another sonic boom shattered all the remaining windows of the strip mall, a sandpaper scream carried by a jade meteor tearing out of the crimson sky. Butch swung at empty air; an oversized construct of just his knuckles appeared around his right hand aimed right for the floating blue giant. “Get over yourself!” The being that called himself DarkLord didn’t even flinch. A single blue hand raised, a ripple of telekinetic force distorting the air. Watch this.
Brick’s brain rebelled, stomach almost going with it from the command, but his eyes forced themselves open to witness Butch hit nothing and stop dead. His construct vanished back into the ether as the sheer force that was his brother flattened against a hard ring of displaced oxygen.
The shockwave from Butch’s momentum didn’t stop with him, though.
That rippled outward on its own, folding a row of nearby cars like they were grass in a windstorm as they were torn free from their parking spaces. “C’mon!” Despite his position, Butch didn’t stop his barking. “Fight me!” He threw a left hook, then a right, then another left; each blow recoiled back into him and the environment as he kept slamming into a wall of pure kinetic resistance. “Stop hiding behind the gl—"
Cobalt lightning screamed and sizzled across the parking lot as Boomer reappeared as a jagged blue smear, the world skipping frames behind him. For a split-second, Brick managed to catch sight of his little brother’s dirt-smeared face and wondered how far into farmland DarkLord must have launched him.
Boomer didn’t have the time or patience for questions or words of his own, zig-zagging up the side of a light pole. With a burst of blue, his brother launched himself as an angry bolt from the blue, surging directly toward the back of DarkLord’s exposed head.
Yet the closer he got, the slower he seemed to move. “LET ME HIT YOU!” Butch’s roar came with veins bulging as the solid wall became psychokinetic molasses both he and Boomer had to push their way through, green hate and blue lightning chewing their way through but barely managing to move faster than an off-guard Invincible. “BOOMER, YOU BETTER FRY HIS BRAIN, I SWEAR!”
“I’m trying! I’m trying! It’s like swimming in super glue!” Boomer spun into a wheel kick as soon as he neared the villain, a hyper-velocity set of strikes aimed at the side of DarkLord’s head with all the heat he could manage. Each one landed with a crack of thunder, blue afterimages flickering and dying against the alien’s TK shield that refused to even flex.
“Half-alien, by the way.”Brick forced his breathing to slow as the villain forced his way into his mind again, fighting the massive urge to just scream louder than Butch ever could and blast everything in a five-mile radius into glass.
“Please do. Make things easier for me.”More blood trailed down his nose as Brick rose into the air, red eyes tight as he scanned the warzone that normally went by the title of Chicago.
DarkLord wasn’t just fighting them.
That was the stupidest part of all this. The blue giant was multitasking across the whole city with that exposed brain of his; the thing pulsing white every time another dimensional tear opened high above the Chicago skyline to allow in another stream of silver saucer-ships and big-brained… Brain-Iacs.
“...Interesting name.” DarkLord hummed aloud, one hand swatting Butch away with telekinetic force again as Boomer still hammered at him pointlessly. “But they’re Martians, actually.”Red eyes narrowed to slits as Brick kept his focus. Brain-Iacs.
Distant explosions thumped against the horizon as they lit up the city, the low whump-whump of SuperPatriot’s artillery audible to his ears even as it blended in with the high-pitched ack-ack-ack of the alien ground troops currently flooding the Magnificent Mile.
He knew Savage Dragon and his wife were both down there somewhere in the mix of things, tossing alien tanks like lawn darts, the Guardians of the Globe holding the shoreline with Freak Force as backup. Honestly, they were pushing back the vanguard from the looks of it.
But out here, on the suburban edge of the hellscape, it was just the Boys.
And they were losing.
And none of that mattered if DarkLord kept the door open.
"Dividinghisattention." Brick did his best to keep his mind blank, words leaving his lips fast enough to speak past the sound barrier. "Fieldshakeseverytimeashipcrossestherift."
"Who cares about any of that?!" Butch peeledhimself off the invisible wall with snarl as he flipped backward. It took all of a second for him to find his balance in mid-air, before he pushed forward with a sonic boom. "Just break his stupid weird head!That weird head snapped his way and the half-alien’s hand flicked.
A lance of white tore from DarkLord’s hand, erupting with speed enough to match the charge as it slammed dead-center into Butch’s chest with a sound like a train derailment. The air sizzled as air molecules burned to vacuum and Butch went flying into the highway the same way Brick had, enough force to melt the asphalt with the impact.
“Fine. I got it." Brick launched from his ditch, flying with more than just his own force. A continuous explosion of heat fired off behind him, red flame snapping from his boots in concussive bursts. A fraction of a second was all it took for him to hit the telekinetic field from the left flank; air around his fist warping and superheating until it screamed on impact against the invisible wall.
It flashed orange, thermals flaring around it as the air burned bright.
DarkLord’s pupil-less eyes shifted toward Brick, the whites not even showing surprise as he remained untouched.
"Inefficient," DarkLord’s voice violated Brick's skull again. A backhand swat of pure telekinetic pressure caught Brick in the shoulder.
Brick spun with the blow; inertia forced into a faster spin as eyes pulsed in time with his hand and a glowing red palm met the alien's jaw. "Get out of my head, freak!"