Derrick made is way across
Hell's Kitchen never slept. but it listened.
Jessica Jones was halfway through a bottle she didn't need when the air in her apartment shifted.
like gravity briefly remembering it had opinions.
She turned slowly, her instincts screaming danger, when she finally turned around, Derrick was already there.
No words were exchanged as Derrick didn't come to play around.
A shadow crossed her face for less than a second before a Blacklight tendril speared through her chest and into her mouth as they bloomed outward, ripping her to shreds.
The consumption was fast, almost disrespectful in its speed.
Her strength had flared once, mostly out of the instinctive fear, but it was useless.
She was now food for a monster who didn't give a fuck about who she is or what she stood for...
Her memories detonated in Derrick's mind,
Investigations. Aliases. Contacts.
Street-level hero dynamics and nd one glowing thread Derrick wanted immediately.
Luke mother fucking Cage.
Within half a second, Jessica Jones ceased to exist before the bottle hit the floor.
Derrick stood alone in her apartment, already parsing the data.
Enhanced durability. Alcohol resistance. Trauma-driven psychology.
Intelligence acquired.
He turned and vanished into the night heading towards his next snack to enhance his durability and explosive strength.
He thought of all the crazy feats this guy would have done in the future but to bad his future ends with consumption...
Harlem
Luke Cage felt it before he saw it.
A pressure change. A wrongness.
He rose from the bar stool just as Derrick descended through the ceiling like a meteor that decided to walk the rest of the way down.
"Hold up, I ain't going out like that" Luke started.
Black spores burst outward.
A microscopic attack.
They sank into Luke's mouth, eyes and ears, probing, analyzing, rewriting at microscopic levels faster than his invulnerability could reject them.
Luke swung his hardest right hook ever, his fist connected with a BANG!, sending a wide shock wave pushing back to parked cars..but Derrick didn't move an inch, only his jacket fluttered thanks to the shockwave.
"What the...." luke attempted to say..
Before Luke could continue, the spores activated.
A brutal Consumption followed.
Luke's unbreakable skin folded inward, durability data unraveling as Derrick devoured him from the inside out, strength, resilience, Harlem's protector was quickly reduced into biomass and memory in seconds.
Silence followed as no one came outside to check the commotion.. This was Harlem, people minded their own business here..
Seconds later Derrick straightened...
Dermal density absorbed.
And then out of nowhere the world screamed inside his head, like a bunch of people yelling at him at the same time..
Krakoa. Cerebro Helm
Professor Charles Xavier gasped.
His body convulsed in the Cerebro chair as psychic feedback ripped through his consciousness. On the display, something massive, writhing, impossible.
"By the stars…" whispered Jean Grey, clutching her temples as she tried to stabilize the professor .
Xavier focused, pushing through the noise.
A mind. No... Rather a crowd of screaming minds.
Billions of souls overlapping. Memories screaming. Instincts clashing creating a tornado of mental essence..
He reached in anyway.
"This thing must be stopped" we thought
He tried to impose control over Derrick's mind..
For a fraction of a second.
Derrick felt it.
A foreign pressure. An invasive hand trying to reach for his mind and rewrite it's will..
Derrick exhaled as he felt Insulted by the attempt. The things Derrick hates are people who try to take away his freedom and impose their own will on him..
So he quickly focuses on all the horrific memories of everything he consumed in the invincible dimension and let them take the forefront of his mind.
....
Xavier screamed as psychic backlash slammed into him like a tidal wave of death, rage, terror , and billions of fractured thought-patterns.
Cerebro overloaded so the influx of thoughts hit Xavier, Alarms blared.
"Disconnect professor!" Jean shouted. "NOW!"
Xavier tore himself free, gasping, blood trickling from his nose.
"I—" He swallowed hard. "I couldn't do anything to him… there are too many voices. Too many lives taken".
The present mutants stared at each other, unsure of what to do next.
And somewhere far away...
Derrick smiled.
Psionic intrusion detected.
Source identified.
Krakoa.
The Mutant Island he once read about in his teenage years...
Derrick hovered high above the city, spores drifting invisibly from his skin and riding global wind currents, minor failsafes for when he needs to go all scorched earth on the mothefuckers.
As he spread his much more e potent senses across the planet using the recently spread spores,that's when he felt the mutants, not as scattered factions but as a concentration.
All located in one spot...
Power stacked on power. Unique genomes.
Evolutionary shortcuts waiting to be harvested by Derrick.
"This time," Derrick said quietly to himself, voice echoing like 2 people speaking at the same time, "I won't be distracted by telepathy."
He turned toward the ocean.
Toward a place that believed it was safe from someone like him because it was united.
Krakoa. The Quiet Council Chamber
The chamber was alive with tension.
Twelve seats. Twelve powers that had shaped mutantkind's rebirth.
Charles Xavier sat at the center, hands folded, expression carefully neutral but the strain behind his eyes betrayed him.
Magneto stood beside him, arms crossed, posture rigid, every inch the general who had survived too many genocides to underestimate a new threat like Derrick.
Storm leaned forward, fingers steepled. "This being did not simply resist your telepathy," she said. "It seems to have figured out where it came from and traced it back to you professor."
Sinister smiled, chin resting on his hand.
"Oh, it noticed plenty, darling. The question is whether it finds us appetizing enough to attack."
Mystique shot him a warning glare. "This isn't a joke, Essex."
"On the contrary," Sinister replied lightly. "It's a test."
Jean Grey closed her eyes briefly, recalling the psychic backlash. "There are too many minds inside it. I couldn't isolate a dominant personality. It's like trying to shout into a hurricane made of screaming ghosts."
Exodus scoffed. "Then burn it to ashes . Faith and fire solve many problems, especially something like that thing out there.".
"Not this one," Magneto said coldly. "It consumes. Every attack strengthens its understanding of it's opponents."
Emma Frost crossed her legs, expression sharp. "It's already taken non-mutants and mutants alike. Jessica Jones. Luke Cage. Master Pandemonium. That wasn't random. It's pruning and also seems to be building up to some kind of end goal ."
Xavier nodded slowly. "And it attempted to breach Cerebro, I felt something trying to attach itself to the brain waves flowing through the machine."
A murmur rippled through the chamber.
"That makes this a Krakoan matter," Storm said firmly. "Not an Avengers problem anymore nor a human one."
Kate Pryde frowned. "We can't just pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist. Yellowstone alone was.... "
" It was a message," Magneto finished. "One meant for them. Not us, I feel like this creature is methodical in its approach."
Hope Summers spoke up quietly. "If it comes here, resurrection protocols won't save us. If it consumes us completely, there's nothing to bring back."
That silenced the room.
Xavier inhaled. "We must consider escalation, we can't sit by and wait for death."
Sinister's eyes gleamed. "Mars."
Storm's gaze sharpened. "You mean Arakko."
"Yes," Sinister said. "War-tested mutants. Planetary-scale powers. If this thing wants biomass and conflict, we might as well drown it in both."
Magneto nodded slowly. "If it reaches Krakoa, we call Mars for back up, no hesitation."
Xavier closed his eyes.
"Then we prepare," he said. "And pray we're not already too late to stop this thing... ."
Elsewhere
ORCHIS Command
Cold. Sterile. Human.
ORCHIS headquarters buzzed with controlled chaos as analysts and commanders stared at feeds of Yellowstone, Hell's Kitchen, and psychic anomaly reports.
Dr. Alia Gregor stood at the center of the room, hands clenched.
"So," she said bitterly, "the mutants weren't lying."
A technician nodded. "The entity matches neither mutant nor baseline human. Viral, adaptive, hostile."
A commander sneered. "Let them fight it. Mutants, Avengers, gods, good riddance I say."
Gregor's eyes hardened. "No. Haven't you realized it yet.. That thing doesn't discriminate on which faction to choose from, It consumes anything it considers valuable.".
She turned to the main display.
"And if it learns to optimize us next, then what?"
Flashback The Rise of ORCHIS
ORCHIS had been born from fear.
From the ashes of Hydra, AIM, remnants of S.H.I.E.L.D., and black-budget programs that believed humanity had slept too long while mutants inherited the future.
Sentinels. Nimrod. Post-human supremacy.
Every Krakoan miracle, every resurrection had been an existential insult to them, they couldn't accept that a powerful race was growing outside of their control, especially when that very same mutant race began developing technology beyond their control and understanding.
They had infiltrated. Sabotaged and Burned Orchards and habitats alike.
Mutants responded in kind.
Xavier's dream hardened. Magneto's warnings came true. Mars rose. Human governments watched, terrified and furious.
And ORCHIS adapted.
Present. ORCHIS Strategy Room
A hologram of Derrick rotated slowly.
"This thing," a scientist said, "represents an extinction-level wildcard."
Gregor nodded. "Which means it's not just a threat."
She smiled thinly.
"It's an opportunity for us to capitalize on."
Failsafes were activated and old Sentinel blueprints reloaded.
"If it attacks Krakoa," Gregor said, "we let it weaken the mutants for us ."
"And if it survives the assault ?"
She turned toward the screen.
"Then we learn how to kill mutant gods."
Far Above the Ocean
Derrick flew silently toward mutant territory, spores drifting unseen, mind cataloging everything he had learned.
He was getting himself ready for the upcoming harvest not sure how difficult this will be for him..