I really hate falling.
My entire career was built on keeping my feet planted on solid ground. I pulled the strings and anticipated threats before they made the six o'clock news. Despite all the fantastical elements on this forsaken blue marble, I was the one that kept the global order.
But over the last few months, dealing with John Kaisen meant I spent an uncomfortable amount of my professional life being dropped through magical trapdoors.
And today, I seemed to never stop falling.
Thump
I hit a wooden floor hard and rolled across a woven tatami mat, groaning as my bad knee flared up.
I pushed myself up and dusted off my trench coat. Three minutes ago, I was in the deepest bunker beneath the Pentagon, watching satellite feeds of Mount Rushmore turning into a warzone. Then a glowing blue tentacle whipped through twenty feet of reinforced concrete, turning everyone in sight to dust. I should have followed suit, when a wooden sliding door swallowed me.
I looked around, and as expected, I was inside Nakime's Infinity Castle.
Usually, this place was a quiet, shifting labyrinth. Right now, it was a hot mess.
Hundreds of thousands of screaming soldiers, wedged in between what I could only assume was Earth's entire population, and my own battered GDA agents that were crammed onto floating wooden platforms across this infinite space. Sebas, the butler who usually stood menacingly behind John, was sprinting through the crowds. With his sleeves rolled up past his elbows as he was frantically applying healing magic to bleeding victims.
A few levels above him, Neel was pacing back and forth. The CEO of Chaos Corp was furiously tapping on a tablet, occasionally glancing around and trying to calm the world leaders who were also frantically pacing around him. He couldn't take two steps before one of them almost bumped into him.
They were panicking.
That unsettled me more than the space squid. Chaos Corp always operated with an infuriating yet smug confidence. Seeing Sebas, the stoic butler, lose his composure and watching Neel sweat buckets meant things were completely out of their control.
Suddenly, a deafening crack echoed above us.
A massive blue tentacle pierced straight through the ceiling of the pocket dimension. The once impenetrable and unreachable wooden walls started peeling away as the wood rapidly aged and rotted, raining thick clouds of dust down on the screaming crowds.
"Get Back!" Sebas roared, looking up at the collapsing ceiling. "Get the children as far as possible!"
Two new players stepped up to the edge of the central platform. One was a floating, mutated brain encased in shadow with glowing purple streaks. The other was the green bug-creature that was supposed to be fighting Thragg of Viltrum back on the Moon.
The creature raised a hand while the shadow's brain pulsed in a rather grotesque manner.
Dozens of neon-green portals ripped open across the platforms. I recognized that weird color anywhere. It was Angstrom Levy's portal, the madman who let loose monsters from a dozen different worlds. I didn't get a chance to dwell on that realization.
The platform under my boots tilted violently as the castle's geometry failed. Gravity shifted suddenly and I didn't even have time to grab a handrail before I tumbled head-first into one of the green rifts.
Down I went. Falling into the unknown. Again.
'I'm really starting to hate this whole porting thing, and that's coming from someone who loves teleporting.'
After falling for I don't know how long, I landed face-first into dirt.
I spat out a mouthful of dry soil and pushed myself up on my hands and knees. The smell of fresh manure and growing corn hit my nose. I stood up, brushed the dirt off my slacks, and adjusted my tie.
Only to find I was standing in the middle of a vast, open pasture with miles of tall cornstalks stretched out in every direction. A rustic, white farmhouse sat a few dozen yards away. Several members of the Guardians of the Globe, a dozen GDA agents and Kaisen's circus of henchmen, were groaning in the dirt around me.
"GDA Command, this is Stedman. Report," I said, tapping my earpiece.
Static. Looks like we're not anywhere near Earth… at least our Earth.
A bulky, broad-shouldered man wearing faded denim overalls and a plaid shirt was walking toward a large red barn. But that was not surprising; the surprising thing was that he was casually carrying a rusted John Deere tractor over his shoulder with one hand.
He stopped when he heard us groaning in the dirt, blinking at the pile of strangers in costumes scattered across his front yard.
"Hey, Carl," the farmer called out in a warm voice. "These friends of yours?"
A heavy thud echoed through the grass behind me.
I spun around. My hand dropped smoothly to the hidden sidearm holstered inside my coat as my survival instinct kicked into overdrive.
Standing a few feet away was a massive, heavily scarred man, a man I could recognize anywhere. He had a ruined, milky-white eye and a missing arm.
Conquest.
The psychotic Viltrumite who had nearly killed John back in Chicago.
Except he wasn't wearing his blood-stained Viltrumite armor. He was wearing a red plaid flannel shirt tucked neatly into a pair of worn-out jeans, holding a mundane wooden pitchfork.
'I was wondering where John's green portal threw him….'
"Don't you worry, Mr. Clark," Conquest rumbled. His gravelly voice sounded surprisingly calm as he waved his metal hand at the farmer. "These guys are with me. We won't disturb Maa Kent."
The farmer smiled and set the multi-ton tractor down on the grass without making a sound.
"Any friend of John Kaisen is welcome; after all, I can never repay what he's given me", he said as he touched his locket, which, from what I could make out, had a photo of a woman with a baby in her arms.
I stood there in paralyzed silence. My hand slowly fell away from my weapon. I had read the psychological reports. I knew Brit and his strangely accommodating family had taken the butcher in after Kaisen shattered his mind. But reading a document and actually seeing the deadliest warrior in the Viltrumite Empire dressed like a farmhand were two very different things.
The Brit family and their weird kink for domesticating alien partners was officially going into their superpower entry.
Conquest jogged over to the farmer… with a pep in his step?
"Now, Mr. Clark," Conquest said, leaning on his pitchfork. "How exactly are you planning to fix that cracked axle? I didn't see you bring the blowtorch out from the shed."
The farmer pushed his glasses down the bridge of his nose. "Just takes a little heat, Carl. Nothing a good weld can't fix."
I watched closely as the farmer knelt beside the tractor. He didn't pull out a tool; instead, he just looked at the cracked iron. For a fraction of a second, his eyes glowed a vibrant, blinding red. The thick metal instantly fused together in a perfect, seamless weld.
Conquest audibly gasped.
The Viltrumite who had slaughtered entire worlds looked like a kid at a magic show.
"Well, I'll be," Conquest muttered, his one good eye wide with awe. "You didn't even need a torch! That is just incredible, Mr. Clark. Truly efficient work."
"Just doing my chores, Carl," the farmer chuckled, wiping his hands on his overalls. "You want to help me lift the silo back onto its foundation before lunch?"
"I would be honored, sir," Conquest said earnestly.
"Say, Clark," Conquest added, scratching his scarred chin. "If you don't mind me askin'. Back on Viltrum, we push our 'Smart Atoms' to the brink of death to gain strength. We bathe in planetary cores and tear through cosmic dust just to force our biology to evolve. What kinda brutal training did you put your vessel through to hit that level of power?"
Clark paused, wiping a speck of grease from his knuckle. He looked at Conquest with a mild, slightly embarrassed smile.
"Oh, I don't really train, Carl," Clark said easily. "My cells act like solar batteries. As long as I'm under a yellow sun, I can passively absorb the radiation. To be honest, I spend most of my time trying to avoid accidents."
Conquest froze.
The former vanguard of the Viltrumite Empire stood in the dirt, his jaw slightly open, trying to process the concept that the strongest being he had ever encountered got his power by sunbathing in a Kansas cornfield.
"You mean..." Conquest swallowed hard. "You don't fight for it? You just have to... stand in the light?"
"Pretty much," Clark shrugged gently. "It takes discipline, though. You have to think of the world like it's made of cardboard. Always take care not to break it. Consciously holding back, every single second of every single day."
"Cardboard..." Conquest whispered, staring at his amputated hand as if he had just received divine enlightenment. "I spent thousands of years breakin' cardboard... when I could've been buildin' birdhouses."
[A/N]:
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