Riiing!!!
Riiing!!
Dexter groaned, one eye cracking open as his hand fumbled across the nightstand. His fingers found the smooth metal of the alarm clock, tapped it once, and blessed silence returned.
He sat up, hair a mess, eyes half-closed. Reaching for his glasses, he slid them onto his face before shoving his feet into a pair of worn house slippers. With a long yawn, he shuffled out of his room and down the stairs.
The smell of butter and syrup hit him first. In the kitchen, his mother stood at the counter, carefully sliding pancakes onto a plate. She turned, bright as morning sunlight.
"Good morning, Dexter."
"Good morning, Mom," he mumbled back, settling into a chair. He picked up his fork and knife, cutting into the pancake with precise motions before taking a bite.
As he ate, his mother added, "Oh, right, Dexter. At eleven, come with me to the grocery."
Dexter blinked. "Why not take Dee Dee?"
"She told me yesterday she has dance practice." His mom set another stack of pancakes on the table, steam curling upward.
"Alright," Dexter said between bites. "Where is Dee Dee, anyway?"
"Still asleep, kiddo," came his father's voice as he emerged from the living room, newspaper tucked under one arm.
But then Dexter froze. A chill ran down his spin as his eyes flicked toward the stairs, and an ominous thought slid into his mind: Speak of the devil and she will come.
Sure enough, Dee Dee bounced down the steps, all smiles and sunshine. She hopped into her chair, twirling once before sitting, then turned to him with that infuriating grin.
"Good morning, Dexter!"
"There is no good in morning," Dexter muttered.
She didn't hear or didn't care as she dug into her pancakes.
Dexter sighed and focused on eating… until Dee Dee's voice cut through the clink of silverware.
"Mom, did you know Dexter has a crush at school?"
Dexter nearly choked on his bite. His mother blinked, intrigued. "Oh, really?"
"Uh-huh!" Dee Dee nodded eagerly. "And guess what? It's one of the Powerpuff Girls. Can you believe it?"
Dexter slammed his fork down. "Oh, shut it! I don't have a crush on them. I was just looking at them."
"Same thing," Dee Dee sing-songed, wiggling her eyebrows.
From the living room, his father's laugh rumbled out. "Hoho! Our young boy having a crushthat's new."
"I already said it's not a crush," Dexter snapped, cheeks reddening.
"So who is it, dear?" his mom teased, hand covering her mouth as if to hide her laughter.
Dexter's glare sharpened. "Oh, come on. Not you too, Mom."
The kitchen filled with laughter his mother chuckling, his father shaking his head, Dee Dee practically falling out of her chair.
Dexter sat in silence, face burning red.
Beep!!
But before Dee Dee could fire back another round, Dexter's watch beeped. He glanced down.
[Update: requested materials processed and ready.]
Dexter's eyes lit faintly behind his glasses. He stabbed the rest of his pancake with quick precision, chewing fast and swallowing in two bites. Plate clattered into the sink as he rose.
"Mom, remind me when we're going to the grocery," he said, already halfway to the stairs. "I'll be upstairs."
She blinked at his abruptness, then smiled faintly. "Alright, dear."
---
Back in his room, he locked the door, crossed to the wall, and pressed a hidden panel in his shelf. With a hiss the bookshelf opened, revealing the concealed door. He shrugged on his white lab coat as he descended.
The chamber expanded into the sprawling heart of his underground lab. Blue consoles blinked to life, cables humming like arteries of some mechanical beast.
"Good morning, Metal," Dexter said, voice clipped.
[Good morning,] the Ultralink answered calmly from within its containment cylinder, faint red veins pulsing across its core.
Dexter didn't linger. He turned toward the computer. "Status."
[Displaying.]
Text snapped to life one by one on the screen in orderly sequence:
—The C.U.M. Inc. crate packed with dormant Sentry drone parts.
—Bio-War fragmented parts
—The vial of blood he had drawn from a mutant thug.
—And sealed in stasis, a fragment of Xenocyte flesh, still twitching faintly.
Dexter's eyes flicked across each readout. "Good."
He moved toward the far side of the lab, shelves of instruments glinting under cold lights. "Computer, bring the blood and muscle tissue samples from the DNAliens. Station them at Lab Bench Three."
[Understood.]
Mechanical arms slid out from hidden compartments, carrying two stasis cylinders, one filled with a crimson swirl of preserved blood, the other with strands of grey-green muscle fibers suspended in nutrient gel. They locked into ports on the bench with pneumatic clicks.
Dexter pulled on gloves, picked up a sterilized pipette, and retrieved a drop from the thug's blood vial. He set a glass slide beneath the digital microscope, carefully lowering the droplet onto its surface.
"Now," Dexter muttered, adjusting the focus. "Let's see your secret."
The microscope's display lit up, magnifying the blood cells. Familiar shapes moved across the screen: red cells, white cells, the standard architecture of human blood. But interlaced among them like glowing threads stitched into fabric was something else.
Dexter's eyes narrowed.
There it was. The supergene, a genetic cluster he had identified once before in Monkey's blood. It pulsed faintly under spectral scanning, almost like it resonated with energy.
But there was something different. Something attached to it.
"This is…" Dexter muttered, adjusting the wavelength filters.
The image shifted. The genetic strand sharpened in detail. Wrapped around the super-gene was an array of tiny, hexagonal constructs—angular, metallic, and in constant motion. They latched onto the DNA like microscopic armor, branching and retracting with a rhythm almost mechanical.
Dexter froze. His breath caught.
"How?"
He zoomed further, recording every frame. The nanoscopic entities pulsed with faint light, clustering and uncoiling as though aware of observation.
They weren't just mutations. They were machines.
Dexter leaned back from the scope, mind racing.
"Nanites," he whispered.
Not the same as Monkey's blood. Not just a raw super-gene.
These… were something else entirely.
_______
When you live in a world stitched together from different cartoons, you can't help but wonder.
How do the monsters exist?
The ones taller than buildings, stronger than tanks, the kind the Powerpuff Girls fight on a Tuesday morning as if it were routine. In their shows, they just appear, with no rhyme or reason. A villain presses a button, a lab accident happens, and suddenly a creature the size of a skyscraper is tearing up the city.
But standing here—living here—Dexter couldn't accept "they just pop out of nowhere" as an answer.
Maybe, he thought, they were like Godzilla. Ancient titans buried deep, awakened by chance, rising to bring ruin. That would've been easy... simple.
But the truth was worse.
He hacked into sealed files, pieced together fragmented reports, and leaned on the knowledge of his past life and eventually he found it.
Fifteen years ago, a team of scientists dared to dream too big. They imagined a future where machines smaller than dust lived inside every human being. Nanites, they called them: Microscopic miracles.
The vision was beautiful on paper: nanites would heal wounds instantly, cure diseases once thought incurable, make people stronger, smarter, better. Humanity would never fear sickness, weakness, or frailty again.
But dreams collapse fast when reality bites.
Something went wrong... fatally wrong. The experiment spiraled out of control, and the nanites slipped the leash. They didn't just stay in test tubes. They spread out of the labs, out of containment, bleeding into the air, the soil, the oceans. And once they were loose, there was no pulling them back.
The public never knew. The truth was buried under government lockdowns, black ink, and cover stories. But Dexter remembered as in his past life he had watched this unfold on a TV screen, called it fiction.
But here? It was history.
Through those nanites, every living thing became a potential host. People, plants, but especially animals. They were the most unstable cases—their biology twisting until monsters erupted in cities, tearing through streets like natural disasters with claws.
And with superheroes banned by law, humanity had to build something new. That was how the GDN created Providence—an organization tasked with isolating outbreaks, hunting and containing the infected, and desperately searching for a cure to restore them to normal.
Dexter's hand tightened around the microscope lens, his eye pressed close as the truth stared back at him from the slide.
"…But this is impossible," he muttered.
Because according to everything he knew from his past life, nanites had spread to everyone. Every living being should already carry them, dormant but present, like a hidden second bloodstream.
Yet when he tested his blood, nothing. His parents' blood? Nothing. Even Monkey, with all his enhanced genes, showed none.
So why was he now staring at them here?
The blood sample under his scope writhed with activity—nanites clustering like living code. Worse, they weren't just floating free. They had latched on, tangled into the very fabric of the man's supergene. The same genetic spark he'd seen in Monkey.
They weren't just infecting anymore.
They were evolving.