Chương 1: Arrival on Earth

The solar system. A ship... no, calling it a ship was generous. Stripped to nothing for the sake of running fast, this was a lifeboat. A shuttle-class pod with its power core bleeding out. The alarm ticked over, steady and shrill, and inside the cryo chamber a black-haired teenager stirred behind the frost. The pod registered him waking. White vapor pulled back into the walls, and a slow, heavy heartbeat rolled through the chamber like something surfacing from deep water.

The lid split down the middle and slid open. A pale hand pushed up through the drifting mist and caught the rim. Stiff. So damn stiff. Kaelvorn's mind came back online in pieces. How long was I under? Then the pain arrived, unhurried, crawling up his body like ants under the skin. Torn flesh ran in jagged lines from his right shoulder down across his stomach, the wounds crusted over in blood-red crystal that cracked and flaked with every small movement.

His heart came back to full strength as his nervous system rebooted, blood surging hard through his veins, and with it came pain sharp enough to put an ordinary man on the floor. Kaelvorn's face barely moved. He looked bored, if anything. He propped himself up on one arm and used the other hand to take stock. Getting out had cost him.

He'd killed several of his own age group during the coming-of-age trial, boys a few years older than him, stolen a lifeboat that didn't even belong to Viltrum, and vanished into the dark. Viltrum's own ships came with proper medical bays. But the moment those warriors shook off the civil war and traced a Viltrumite beacon, they'd come for him as a traitor.

So his only real option had been an escape pod built by some shattered civilization, the kind whose population the coming-of-age slaughter had already cut in half. To shake anything still following, he'd ditched that ship mid-flight and jury-rigged this pod instead, crude and quick, hauling a cryo unit aboard just to keep his wounds from rotting further across the long haul. All of that, and his condition hadn't improved at all.

The second the cold quit working on him, the wound splitting his chest and gut wide started spreading again. That wasn't the worst of it. Four ribs snapped through. A mild sprain along his spine. His nose caved in. Twenty-some injuries, every one of them fatal on a lesser species. Not enough to kill a Viltrumite, though. Especially not one carrying blood from a warrior who'd stood out even in the middle of the civil war. A man Viltrum itself had called unmatched, and Viltrum did not hand that word out for free.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. Kaelvorn ran through the damage, then stopped to let his strength rebuild. When the last of the cryo-fog cleared, he braced on the chamber's edge and pulled himself upright. The chamber faced the pod's main viewport. Reflected in his bloodshot eyes was a planet, blue all the way through. Hope hit him like something physical.

"Finally. Finally made it."

"Screw Viltrum."

"I jumped too early, that's the only problem. Viltrum doesn't even know if the civil war's over yet, which means Earth hasn't got Omni-Man, hasn't got Invincible, none of the walking apocalypses that could actually give me trouble." His mind was racing now, giddy with it. Landing this early had cost him over a decade of hell to survive. But with that miserable rock finally behind him and this fragile little "hometown" swelling in the viewport, he couldn't hold the rush down.

"At this point in the timeline, no Omni-Man, no Invincible, no Atom Eve, not one of the original heavy hitters. Not even the knockoff Justice League has gotten its act together yet. The only thing on this whole planet that could be a problem is that Immortal guy." Viltrum's archives had files on Earth. All of them agreed: centuries away from qualifying as even a mid-tier threat. Not worth the fuel to conquer. Kaelvorn's plan was simple, and in his head it was beautiful. A few small lies.

Heal up quietly while everyone assumed he was just some guy. Nobody was going to stop him from just... living. And if the Immortal wanted to make it a problem, Kaelvorn had zero issue getting creative. A blindside. One clean kill. Then seal whatever was left of him, to be thorough about it. A Viltrumite body, even a rank-and-file one, was more than enough to make himself undisputed king of this rock at this point in its history. Then his face fell.

All at once, like a switch, matching the pod's interior, which had just gone completely dark. Viltrum's technology was genuinely impressive. All of it built for one thing: war. They had researchers. That job went to the ones born without a gift for combat, or to warriors so chewed up by the empire's meat grinder that they couldn't fight anymore and got filed into a lab instead.

Viltrum's competition had ground Kaelvorn down plenty, but not enough to make him want to end up crippled and writing reports in some windowless department forever. Which meant his time after the jump had been expensive, and none of it had gone toward the actual science. So when he'd run the numbers on his power reserves, he'd gotten them wrong. The pod was almost dry, and he was carrying a body that had been opened up.

A Viltrumite could cross open space on nothing but his own two fists, sure, but the stamina he had left might not stretch far enough to reach Earth. Not breathing, anyway. His mouth twisted into something that wasn't quite a smile.

"Come on. I made it this far. It's right there." He was already dragging himself out of the chamber, ready to tear the hull open and finish the trip under his own power, when it hit him. A pressure closed around his whole body, and he shuddered. Years of clawing up a food chain built on knives in the back had sharpened his instincts to a razor's edge, and every one of them was screaming the same thing. Something powerful was closing in fast, and its presence had already wrapped around him like a fist.

Maybe already locked on. What the hell has an aura like this? Every hostile he'd ever crossed, every alien holdout defending their own dirtball, all of them carried that same ice-cold edge of murder. This wasn't that. This was warm. Sunlight warm. Cold or warm made no difference. Kaelvorn knew, without a shred of doubt, that whatever this was, it was strong. Strong enough that muscles already running on empty wouldn't stop shaking.

He'd felt something close to it exactly once, from a distance, watching Viltrum's future strongest during a war mobilization. The future Regent had swept his flat, unbothered gaze across a line of young warriors about to be fed into a trial designed to kill most of them, Kaelvorn included. And this thing, throwing off heat like it had its own personal sun. Weaker than that? Don't bet on it. Kaelvorn's hands slowed on the chamber's edge. Earth at this point in its history. Maybe not even Earth.

Somewhere further out. Where does something like this come from? Through the pod's viewport, he watched the shape closing in, still just a silhouette. His enhanced eyes found the detail first: a thick, heavy beard. His mind tore back through every scrap of memory he had, and there was exactly one match for a face that furry. The Immortal. The guy he hadn't bothered ranking as a real threat five minutes ago.

"Oh, come on. Seriously, man?" He couldn't keep the shock off his face. Since when is the Immortal THIS strong?