Chương 2: The Superman in Black

Viltrum's brutal excuse for an education had drilled one thing into Kaelvorn more times than he could count. A Viltrumite throws the punch. Always. Not just against someone weaker, where you swing without a flicker of pity in your chest. Even against someone you cannot possibly beat, you swing. That specific brand of insanity made Viltrumites fight like a skin infection. Patient. Cold. And absolutely unbothered by the concept of dying.

Case in point: when the future Regent wanted sparring partners, Viltrumites volunteered. Knowing full well the "sparring" might end with them dead, because dying while proving your fighting spirit was somehow the better outcome. Some of them just wanted to fight someone strong, to be fair. And if they died doing it, they intended to take a chunk of meat off him on the way down.

Which was why young Thragg, already so far above the average Viltrumite that comparison felt insulting, never took more than four of them at once. Not fear. Thragg had bigger plans, and he wasn't interested in dying stupidly on the road to them. Because five ordinary Viltrumites jumping him at once? That could genuinely kill him. Didn't matter how badly their faction needed him to lead them through the civil war.

Dying in a sparring match only proved one thing: you'd overestimated yourself, you couldn't read reality, and you were weak. That was it. You died, so you were weak. Didn't matter what training you'd survived before, or how much grit you'd shown getting there. And Kaelvorn had been born during the civil war, which meant the version of Viltrumite upbringing he got was the extra-bloody edition. God only knew what that did to someone who'd spent a previous life in a peaceful society. He'd survived it.

He'd even shown the bloodline talent for it, promoted early at fourteen to stand alongside seventeen-year-olds in that red coming-of-age ceremony. But for over a decade, every waking moment, he'd dreamed of getting back to Earth. Of getting out from under the Viltrumite nightmare. Underneath everything, he was still stained a little bit blue. Which is why he didn't immediately swing on the Immortal.

He sat there a moment, mouth twisted, trying to work out how a guy who got cut in half at the waist by Omni-Man in the source material was strong enough to make him feel like he was suffocating from this far away.

"Unless the survivors back on Viltrum went through some evolutionary jump after the plague thing that I don't know about..." Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"Which would mean I got the gap between me and Omni-Man wrong, and I got the Immortal wrong at the same time." Then a memory from a life a very long time ago reminded him there was another way out of this. Throw the entire Viltrumite worldview in the trash. Grovel. Beg, pathetically, at the feet of someone stronger. The Immortal had a peaceful streak of his own somewhere in there, and no matter how suspicious he got, he probably wasn't going to just execute a wounded kid. Earth had its own survival rules.

Same as the Viltrumite survival rules he'd figured out at five years old, when he'd shoved everything he'd learned in a peaceful society straight out of his head. Don't struggle. Don't hurt. Don't hesitate. Never show a single crack of weakness. Do that and you survive on Viltrum. You survive long enough to see a way out. The Immortal finally reached the outside of the escape pod. Black hair worn a little too long. A beard thick enough to bury whatever his face was doing. But his eyes said it clearly enough. Wary.

Suspicious. The Immortal at this point in history wasn't necessarily a hero. He was just a guy on Earth who happened to not die. Enough centuries will rearrange anyone's insides. The kind of ideological pivot most people manage once in a lifetime probably felt like a Tuesday to someone who lived forever. And nobody looks at a strange alien ship pointed directly at their home planet and thinks well, that seems fine. Maybe the whole idea that groveling would save him was just a coward's way out.

In the end, Kaelvorn's knees didn't bend. He'd done all of this for today. Swapping out one worldview for another should have been easy for him. It should have been nothing. He clenched his fist anyway and started pulling power out of a body that was already falling apart, wringing it out like a filthy rag. Then wringing it tighter. Rough fibers came apart along with a decade of accumulated dust, and the act of gathering that strength shoved his life closer to the edge. Blood loss started dragging his brain under.

Fourteen years of a longing buried somewhere below conscious thought made him turn his eyes one last time toward that blue home. Even if she might not be the same home he'd left. His wounds cracked open and bled freely. The pod's hull tore with a shriek that set teeth on edge, and blood came pouring out into zero gravity, a wide crimson ribbon unfurling in the dark. He pushed off. Light, almost weightless, straight at the black silhouette peeling aerospace-grade alloy apart like it was a napkin. He swung.

Kaelvorn's pupils had gone dull and gray from squeezing power out of a broken body, and between the blood loss and the long freeze damage, the punch landed softer than anything his five-year-old self could have thrown. He was too hurt. Maybe the whole escape, the whole plan, the whole dream of getting home had always been exactly that. A dream. Maybe he'd never had the strength to reach Earth in the first place. The stranger caught his fist without effort.

The difference in power was a hydraulic press closing around a brittle old matchstick that had been forgotten in a corner for decades. The man was clearly being careful. Kaelvorn's bones creaked anyway. Why is he this strong? His lips had lost all their color. His pupils blew wide as the last thought fired off in his head. Then a warmth several times more massive than anything he'd felt before rolled over him and held him there, right at the edge of dying. His pupils contracted slowly.

The wariness that had been in the bearded man's eyes when he first flew up to the pod was gone. Completely. In its place was something Kaelvorn had forgotten existed. Something no Viltrumite had ever once directed at him.

"Sorry about tearing your ship open. But you weren't going to last long enough for me to push you and the ship back together." A warm, enormous hand pulled Kaelvorn against a chest that felt broader and more solid than anything should.

"You're hurt badly. I have to keep you pressed against me. The bio-force field will buy you maybe another fifteen seconds." A word that had absolutely no business being said out loud snagged on whatever was left of Kaelvorn's mind. His unfocused pupils rolled sluggishly, then locked onto an emblem on the man's chest. An emblem that could not possibly be there. Not in the same comic that had a planet called Viltrum in it. Branded onto a black undersuit, catching the light in silver. An S.

The starlight stretched out into a thousand scattered threads of color, and a second later the whole universe swapped itself out for a dim room. Gravity that felt so familiar it was almost comforting. None of that cramped, crushing weight Viltrum kept on everything. Earth. A silhouette moved through the last few seconds of light his eyes could still reflect.