My heart pounded against the straitjacket of terror—ugly, feral, unyielding—as I teetered inches from the foaming orange gulf before me. It pulsed like a torn wound ripped open on the flesh of the cosmos, pouring light and possibility out on to the nothingness. I stared into it, jaws clenched so tightly they creaked with the effort, knowing that this was no random step ahead—another roll of the cursed dice. A jump, maybe, but not a wild one. Never a wild jump. This was a calculated risk, one of a thousand or so that I did with some mornings before breakfast,
The Absolute Universe. That is where it led me. Maybe a savior. Maybe a monster. Maybe both of those things. Hell, maybe even just another brick on the wall of my own failure. But I couldnt leave Earth on its own. I needed a stand-in. Not a sidekick. Not a trainee hero. I needed someone invulnerable. Someone with a spine made of the same twisted steel that made me on the streets of Chicago. Someone who could hold the line when the skies opened up.
I stepped across. Felt the tear in space shiver past me like cutting a knife through God's own gossamer curtain. Pressure at first—air as heavy as oil, socked across skin. Sound distorted. Colors punched me in the face. Everything that existed here had the volume turned up to eleven. Even the gravity was clingy, like the world needed me stuck to it with superglue but it was just the novelty. Boots came crashing down on extraterrestrial rock. Orange Greaves. Naturally. Figured it always had to be that abomination of a color. Blinked hard and breathed deep and it tasted like a blown capacitor and blood and blood and blood—I swore, coughed.
And there she stayed.
She did not stand there—she towered. Absolute Wonder Woman. Not the smiling politely and the hope speech one. No, that one appeared to have had intent only forged within her. Black and crimson armor that glinted like dark and burning obsidian. War yowled from each corner of her form. The Godrend Blade at her side stayed quiet, far too quietly, like a predator about to unleash its blow. Her form was coiled threat, and her eyes—damn her eyes—glowed like embers unearthed from some long-forgotten fire, only barely contained.
She sized me up. Not as a fellow male, but as a threat assessment.
"Who are you?" she had asked.
Words fell hard on her like a storm front. They were more of a dare than a question, daring me to get it wrong.
"Bastion Prime," I drawled, stretching out the syllables with a south side drawl. "Guardian. From a different Earth. Here with a proposal for the toughest woman in the multiverse."
It caused her to lean forward slightly. Her red eyes narrowed as they focused on a target. Me.
"What's the proposal?" she pressed. Her left eyebrow quivered minutely.
The portal behind me expired. Sputtered out like a fire left to suffocate on the air. We found ourselves in a crumbled alleyway now, the bricks fractured like old bone. Sat heavy with the scent of damp rock and burned copper here. Rain or blood, hard to distinguish.
"My Earth is a mess," I told her. No beating around the bush with me. "Viltrumites are on their way. My only shot at slowing them was to break bones across the galaxy while someone else holds down Earth for me."
"The Viltrumites," she said again, as if she knew who they were, which she obviously did not. It was more like she was practicing her pronunciation on her back molars. She leaned slightly forward on her sword—not enough to be a tell, but enough that I caught her at it—that she was listening now.
"And why," she breathed fiercely, "should I care about your Earth?"
I moved near. Footsteps crunched on gravel.
"Because if you don't," I said to her, "millions cry out and perish on my Earth while I'm out saving the ones who might still have a chance. You hold that sword, speak like a queen—be one, then. Don't you call yourself a hero? Doesn't this mean something to you?"
She did not wince. Not once. But something shifted inside her. Something ancient and deep. Not doubt, not remorse—older still. A deep hunger for purpose. For challenge.
"Heroes are not for hire, Bastion Prime," she said to me. Deadpan. Cold.
I thought that was it. But she had moved. Sheathed the sword at her backside, as quiet as a whispered killing. Then approached me and pressed a hand against the lip of my chestplate. Just the tips of her fingers, but they hit like a shock of electricity. Her eyes caught mine, and for a moment, I was no longer a Guardian, no longer a soldier, no longer anything but a man standing by a tempest that did not wish for it to pass on.
"But," she breathed softly, her tone a rich, dark, velvety rasp, "perhaps I can be... persuaded."
Her fingers traced the edge of the cuirass—slower, methodical. I did not move. Could not move. It was not fear. It was the aura of something larger than the two of us. Something that thrummed along the line between the two of us, like a string tightened to its breaking point. She was not heeding the call. She was measuring the caller.
There was a tension, not in the air, but between us. Like a match had been ignited in a room full of gasoline. Her hand traveled south, from steel to fabric, from threat to invitation. I should have had strategy on my mind, logistics, who would kill whom when things fell apart. But what was on my mind was her mouth. Her breath on the back of my neck was hot, tender, on fire.
"Alright," she said. "I'm in."
She did not smile, at least not exactly, but her lips curled into a look that stole my breath.
"But," she replied with her hand returning to my chest, "I expect... compensation."
I said nothing. Just opened a door with a mental picture. Back to my world. Back to my city. Orange light painted her face with a color that was like a legend. For a moment, she was a goddess stepping forth from a war nightmare.
We stepped through together.
Chicago. Home. Smelled of steel and oil and striving. Sirens blared their ever-present melody. Neon signs thrummed with a tipsy vibration of voltage. The atmosphere was thick, not with fear—but with hope. But beneath it all, the tension never eased. Never dared.
She looked out towards the skyline. Her hair whipped in gusts of wind. That armor put her in the domain of some sort of goddess conqueror—where she didn't quite fit here, but everything else seemed make space for her. Her eyes were open, but uninnocent. Simply... taking it all in.
She turned to look at me. Fingers went around my waist, holding tightly. The way she gazed at me? I forgot everything about the war. Forgot why we were here.
"Show me this city, Bastion Prime," she requested seductively. "Make me realize it's all worth fighting for."
I swallowed, not in fear, but in something else—pressure, the kind of pressure you feel just before you're going to get a headache. Sirens shrieking in the city felt like they were boring into my ear drums. Her hand—still clutched around my waist—was hot like seared flesh. My body flinched, it compelled me to close the distance between us. To take her, have her, give in to that attraction of atoms. But the universe didn't have a concept of want.
My left earpiece crackled, then hissed like a log on fire. Cecil's voice was strained, stretched out like a violin string tightened too far and about to break.
"Zandale, we have an issue."
I swallowed the thunder rumbling in my throat and forced my inner animal to sit. Concentrate. Clarity. Determination. "Speak."
There was half a beat of silence before his voice snapped back, colder than an eulogy's pillow. "There was a Viltrumite named Anissa who came to Earth. She tried to recruit Invincible to her cause."
My heart didn't sink. It plummeted. Like stone into black water, with air sucked in behind, as it fell. Anissa.
"Tried to recruit him?" I asked, although I already knew the response. Had to ask, nonetheless. Had to do something with my voice than betray my emotions. "And what'd he say?"
"He refused." That struck home with the force of a blow to the solar plexus. I didn't realize I'd been holding my breath until it escaped. "But she left word, Zandale. Informed him there's someone on the way. Someone who will make him toe the line."
His words insidiously crawled into my mind like centipedes. A warning. Clouding everything.
"Who?" I exclaimed, even though the name began yelling in my mouth.
"Unknown." The line fell silent. My gut sank. "But she's got the whole empire backing her. And she's not here for tea."
My knees didn't buckle. I fought Omnipotus and screamed in atmospheres that didn't exist. But that weight, the one he dropped in three syllables, crashed like the roof of an imploding star. No war loomed. It arrived already. Silently. Suddenly. No parade. No fanfare. Blood just waiting to flow.
This is it. It was the moment when Nolan—Grayson's dad—and Allen the Alien would escape Viltrumite restraints. This is when the war truly started. This is when the tone of the universe shifted.
I stared at her. Absolute Wonder Woman. Rigid as a thunder-hewn statue. Her gaze lingered on me— expectant, watchful, as though already knowing everything that I would say to her.
"Yeah, I found someone," I sighed into the earpiece, my voice sounding like broken glass against metal. "Someone... different"
Cecil refused to let that go. His voice became crisp. "In what way different?"
I glanced over at her. She did not blink. Her piercing, ageless, stare bored into me as though seeking to unearth something in my very bones. "Someone... absolute."
There was silence. The type that makes you wonder if your technology has broken. Then, speaking in a low, strained voice, "How absolute?" asked Cecil.
"More powerful than any living being in this Universe. Even myself," I declared bluntly. No need for show. No need for fanfare. "And with the determination to support it."
There was only breathing. Only thought. Processing.
"That is quite terrifying, Zandale."
He didn't know. This woman could sneeze the wrong way, and she could slice the Earth's surface in half like they do in restaurants. Fears do not disturb me, though. No longer. You do not become Bastion Prime and still flinch at everything larger than you. You stay alive so that you may keep the threats close. Closer than lovers.
"Take her to Pentagon," said Cecil at last, with a wearying sense of strategy. "We need to strategize."
I nodded, my chin barely moving. My mouth betrayed me, the corner of it curving into a half-smile. "Sure thing," I replied. My syllables were weighted with implication. It wasn't about geography.
She heard. She understood. Her gaze didn't drop. The air around us became heavy, charged. Like an electric storm about to burst into flames.
I shattered the grip of gravity with my mind alone, and we both flew into the void as projectiles. My cape streamed behind us like a war banner. Wind buffeted our faces like fists, but she didn't wince. The city lay below us in ravaged light and darkness-streaked streets—beauty and ruin woven together like an embroidered quilt of blood and ambition.
I marked locations as we flew. The Sears Tower like a knife in the sky. The lake shining like moonlight on shattered glass. Places I remembered bleeding. Places others never departed. She looked with soldier's eyes. Tallying landscape. Quantifying risk. But I saw something else—awe, or perhaps reverence as she perceived the world.
We flew over the Grand Canyon. That great gash in the earth. Cruel. Gorgeous. Carved out of time and violence. Her eyes widened, and she didn't even try to hide it. That touched something inside of me—something under armor and cynicism.
We drifted, suspended in nothing but silence and stars. She leaned in slightly. But it was enough. It was enough to sense her warmth, to know in that instant that she sensed mine.
"Was there ever anyone, Bastion," she asked, and the wind wrapped around her hair, which was as black as the night. "Who understands you? Who would not want to chain you?"
I didn't answer her right away. Couldn't. The city stretched out below, the coastline looking like a model town spread out beneath the hand of a titan. I let my mind drift—back into the past. Five. Five women who I'd slept with. Bodies. Secrets. Some, thrills. Others, usefulness. None of them, though, knew me. Not the real me behind the mask. Some knew Bastion Prime. Some even knew Zandale. But none of them knew the one behind all that. The isekai cheat code. The outlier. The fluke.
"Well, I've had my fair share of company," I replied at last. My voice caught the air with the effort of a kite struggling to remain aloft.
She didn't have the slightest idea. I could see it in the look in her eye. She scanned my eyes like they held forbidden words. She looked for the truth. Truth that I wasn't going to tell her. I owed her nothing, even though my adaptive talent already calculated her as an equation that I solved in my head.
She hummed, the low note, sounding like distant cello chords, half-amused. Then leaned in, mouth to ear, her breath warmer than it would have been were we at lower altitude. She whispered:
"Take me somewhere more... private, Bastion Prime,"
I should have refused.
My apartment was the very last place on earth where I would have ever thought of accommodating a goddess of war. But the alternative would have been an underground bunker, and bunkers lack soul. So, yes, I consented.
We flew through the air again, silent, fast. The wind screamed past us, tearing the air with hooks. We landed on the roof of my former building. The concrete cracked. The railing rusted. My apartment held secrets. The front door hung on there out of stubbornness. A kick and it would crash to the ground like it owed someone money.
But it was home.
Or it was.
You would expect someone who negotiated their salary with the United States government to be whatever I want it to be, would have bought himself outlandish penthouses or an island. But I didn't need to. Stayed at the Pentagon when I needed power. My first Guardian's bedroom when I needed familiarity. Carla's apartment when I needed comfort. This location?
This is where I returned to remember who I used to be.
And now, I was escorting in a goddess.