Brendon had lived three lives in the last month.
The CEO, smiling across boardroom tables, balancing budgets and whispering innovation.
The vigilante, ghosting through alleys as Morpher, leaving whispers and melted steel.
And the tinkerer, the lone mind hunched over alien schematics until dawn, pushing the Omnitrix further than its makers probably intended.
Tonight, all three lived at once.
The Alibi
At exactly 8:00 p.m., his company's board gathered on screens across the globe. The virtual conference room shimmered with Brendon's projected face, his voice calm, precise, even a little impatient as "he" fielded quarterly reports.
In reality, the VI, AEGIS, puppeteered the projection. Hours of recorded speech, inflection maps, and movement studies had been stitched together. To anyone watching, Brendon was locked into another dull night of corporate wrangling.
No one would guess that the real Brendon was kneeling in a hidden chamber beneath his workshop, armor sliding into place over his body.
The Morpher Armor
It wasn't bulky, like Hammer's clunky exosuits. It was sleek — matte black panels laced with shifting circuitry that shimmered faintly green where Upgrade had etched himself into the design. Cloaking fields hummed soft and low, bending light around his frame. His visor flickered once, then calibrated, syncing with AEGIS.
"Stealth systems at 93% efficiency," the VI intoned. "Minor heat bleed, masked with decoys. You are invisible to Hammer's thermal scans."
Brendon flexed his fingers. The Omnitrix pulsed beneath the gauntlet like a second heart.
"Time to break the spine," he muttered.
Infiltration
Hammer's newest facility sat on the waterfront, a sprawling compound dressed up as a shipping hub. Containers stacked like Lego blocks, cranes creaking in the salt air, guards pacing with rifles they barely knew how to hold.
From a rooftop across the bay, Brendon studied the layout through telescopic feed. Drones hovered silently at his command, mapping guard rotations, pinging every camera and sensor grid. AEGIS whispered confirmations into his ear.
"Blind spots established. Window for infiltration: 37 seconds. Shall I initiate?"
"Do it."
The first wave of disruptors pulsed. Cameras fuzzed into static. Sensors spiked false readings of empty corridors. Guards blinked in confusion as their radios spat garbled nonsense.
And in that moment of chaos, Morpher slipped inside.
Cutting Deep
He didn't waste time with the periphery. This wasn't about scaring Hammer anymore. This was about breaking him.
XLR8 carried him through the compound in bursts of blur, slipping between beams of light, scattering files across desks faster than anyone could register. When alarms tripped, Upgrade bled into the walls, rerouting security systems to lock doors against their own guards.
He planted disruptors in key junctions — not explosives, but corruptors, devices that would fry Hammer's servers, scramble comms, and siphon data straight into Brendon's network. Every step forward was a knife in Hammer's empire.
When he finally reached the heart of the compound — a reinforced bunker buried beneath steel and concrete — he slowed. Cloak engaged, he slid past biometric locks. His armor bent the light until he was nothing more than a shadow on the wall.
Inside, Justin Hammer stood, ranting at a cluster of engineers.
Brendon paused, breath steady. The target was right there, flailing in his arrogance, unaware that the storm he feared had already arrived.
AEGIS murmured in his ear: "Optimal strike opportunity. Capture or disable?"
Brendon's eyes narrowed. "Neither. Not yet."
He wanted Hammer to watch it collapse.
Alibi Maintained
Back at the workshop, the virtual Brendon leaned forward on the conference call, chastising a department head over quarterly losses. One of them joked about how "their CEO never sleeps."
They weren't wrong.
The Ghost
Inside the compound, Brendon triggered the last phase.
Every screen in the bunker flashed green. Numbers spiraled, contracts erased, weapon schematics dissolving into static. Files shredded themselves, patents corrupted, bank accounts drained.
Hammer froze, eyes wide as his empire bled out in front of him.
"Who the hell is doing this?!" he screamed.
Morpher stepped just close enough that Hammer's frantic gaze brushed the distortion of his cloaked form. Not enough to see clearly. Just enough to know.
A ghost. A nightmare. A storm in human shape.
Then he was gone.
Exit
By the time Hammer's men scrambled, Morpher was already miles away, armor flickering out as he collapsed into his workshop chair. Sweat soaked his shirt, his pulse thundering, but his eyes gleamed sharp.
The Omnitrix dimmed, and for a moment Brendon was just… Brendon again.
AEGIS whispered through the speakers: "Hammer's systems are in freefall. Estimated recovery: impossible. He will retaliate."
Brendon leaned back, jaw tight. "Good. Let him try."
The boardroom projection ended with polite goodbyes. The company never knew their CEO had spent the entire meeting dismantling a rival's empire.
And somewhere on the waterfront, Justin Hammer realized — the walls weren't closing in anymore. They were already gone.