For decades, Hyperman and Gilgamesh had spared on the moon, Mars, at Gilgamesh’s palace, and in the Sky Citadel. They traded wins back and forth and kept up a healthy competitive rivalry full of playful taunts and each pressing the other to become better. Other superheroes enjoyed watching and even betting on their bouts. However, it had been years since Gilgamesh had won a sparring match on his own merits. Hyperman’s powers had surpassed the demigod’s, but not wanting to hurt Gilgamesh’s pride, he’d let him win a few fights here and there. However, Hyperman judged that now was not the time to be looking out for the demigod’s feelings.
His eye-beams flashed over Gilgamesh’s armored feet and set them aflame, which caught him decidedly off-guard. Yelping, Gilgamesh hopped about, giving Hyperman the chance to super-speed into him with a haymaker punch. That sent Gilgamesh battering through a few trees and an abandoned hover-tank.
Hyperman’s side had already started healing and knitting itself back together. The wound glowed bright and a surge of renewed strength flowed through him. So he grabbed up Gilgamesh’s enchanted spear and charged. With a hoarse cry, he thrust the spear right into Gilgamesh’s throat. It hit the scarab, but didn’t penetrate through into the tender flesh of the demigod’s throat. With a good, hard jerk, Hyperman flicked the scarab off and sent it flying out over the ocean.
It left blackish-red claw marks on Gilgamesh’s throat, but once freed from its influence, the demigod’s eyes blinked and shone golden again like his armor. He came stumbling out of the hover-tank wreckage past Hyperman, refusing his helping hand. Gilgamesh fell heavily to his knees and tore at his hair.
“
I ripped them apart, Calvin!” he said, quivering and choking up. “More than 180 good men and women serving S.I.L.E.N.T.! I dismembered them! The scarab had me counting each victim! It even made me go after the other Invincibles! I crashed my flight-chariot into Dynamo-Man! I…I just started beating on the Answer and I couldn’t stop! I don’t even know if that poor boy’s still alive!” His face darkened and contorted. “It made me enjoy it too! That accursed scarab made me love every single second! By the heavens, I was laughing the whole time!”
From the nearby trees, Phoenix-bots fired at Hyperman and Gilgamesh with ray guns. Their fire ranged wide and only a few beams hit Hyperman and Gilgamesh but with little effect. A quick cold breath from Hyperman blew them all flying back through the trees. However, his hyper-vision saw several more Phoenix-bot squads converging on this location. They didn’t have a lot of time to screw around here. He lowered himself down to one knee and offered Gilgamesh his spear back.
“
It was Phoenix Bright, not you,” Hyperman said. “He used you as a weapon. Stole your dignity and power and twisted your mind around to put you under his control. It wasn’t your fault and we can‘t change what happened, but we can avenge our friends. We can avenge ourselves.”
Snorting, Gilgamesh nodded. He snatched up his spear, stood, and twirled his centuries-old weapon with the sunlight flickering sharply off it in hard, sharp shards.
“
PHOENIX BRIGHT!” he roared. “I’M COMING FOR YOU!”
He barreled into the trees after the Phoenix-bots.
Hyperman looked toward Phoenix Bright’s fortress. He was tired of playing around. He needed to go right for the head of the snake and kill all this evil at its source.
***
He slammed into the fortress’s force field at full hyper-speed and strength. He pounded away with his fists and repeatedly eye-blasted it while shrugging off multitudes of cannon-fire. Though crackling and blinking, the force field still held, so he beat against it even harder. His fists actually bled.
Finally, Areva came screeching down out of the heavens. Her sword sparked and flared with star-fire. She thrust it through the force field and slashed down, tearing open a jagged, gaping hole. Both she and Hyperman scurried through before the force field knitted back together and resealed itself.
They took out several cannons before busting through a fortress wall. Areva then paused and needed a moment. She jammed her sword down into the floor and leaned heavily upon it. Burn marks and thick, dried blood covered her crystal armor, which had chipped and cracked in multiple places. She panted and practically drooped with exhaustion.
“
Nightshadow used Dynamo-Man to hack into Bright’s systems and open a back door into the pyramid,” she said, trying to catch her breath. “He took a whole S.I.L.E.N.T. regiment in with him. They’re all somewhere in here, looking for Bright. I think Wrath’s with them too.”
“
We’ll find them,” Hyperman replied.
He scanned all the fortress’s maze-like corridors, seeing how they twisted in and around, making it almost impossible not to get lost while wandering through them. Firebombs, Phoenix-bots, cyber-dragons, toxic gases, and laser-guns lay hidden amongst all the many, many paths they could take. Despite how it looked from the outside, the fortress’s interior seemed to go on forever and ever like it was its own universe. Traps were even set that would send intruders back in time or scuttling off to a different dimension.
“
Follow me,” Hyperman told Areva.
He blurred down the corridor, bashing down walls, dragons, and monstrous robots. He punched through force fields and continued hyper-scanning ahead, staying focused and not allowing any magic spells and strange swirling lights to lead him astray. So many comforting, familiar voices called and sang to him. They sounded hypnotic and alluring, but he knew they were only trying to lead him into some sort of trap.
He even heard the haunting hum of the ship that had birthed him and was now calling him back home again. He so wanted to believe it was here, ready to take him back up into its warm womb where he could sleep soundly and feel loved without any worry. However, that was far too good to be true. Though it tore at his soul, Hyperman bludgeoned on, not thinking, only fighting and scraping ahead.
Areva floundered after him, throwing orbs of star-fire from her sword and slashing her sharpened, spike-spitting wings at anything and everything. Due to Bright’s mind-warping magic, she probably didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. So she simply attacked everything. She even hit and sliced at Hyperman a few times, but he easily dodged or brushed the attacks off. Nonetheless, she kept up with him and followed his lead down deep into the pulsing darkness ahead.
***
Finally, after destroying a good portion of the fortress, Hyperman and Areva kicked down the doors to the throne room. Inside, Phoenix Bright stood before his mountainous, flame-blackened throne, chanting in a mysterious language. A ring of black computers mounted up into short towers surrounded him, all repeating the chant in synthesized voices. The computer monitors flashed and flickered with chaotic strings of numbered code. A variety of sick and ancient-looking occult symbols were carved into the floor, walls, and ceiling. They lit up star-bright red, blue, and green. Overly strong, foul-smelling incense burned in each.
Cages dangled down from the ceiling, all packed with the people Bright had kidnapped. The bars were made of bright, twisting flames, which crowded the hostages in uncomfortably together. A gloomy wraith that resembled Liandra Dark fogged up inside of a jar near the throne. Nightshadow and Paul Wrath hung in misty-glowing chains from the ceiling, the both of them unconscious.
Above Bright, a watery-blue wormhole twisted open on a pristine world bathed in dusty orange light. Perfectly cut crystal towers stalked high up through the clouds and faint rainbows glinted off them for miles and miles out. The towers exploded into showers of shards and light. The sky filled with bloodied, burning Silver Seraphs warring against their monstrous, undead Blood Seraph counterparts.
“
Prism!” Areva cried.
“
What’s that?” Hyperman asked, pointing at the electric-black vortex opening across the floor. Chaotic, marshy red misted out and two hands clawed up through it.
“
BURN!” Bright yelled in a hollow, mask-filtered voice.
The fire cages flared white and their flames enveloped the hostages. Hyperman blew at the fires, but couldn’t put them out. He saw the screaming men, women, and children twitching and spasming as the flames spread across their bodies, burning but never consuming them.
Areva grabbed Hyperman’s arm. “Lucifer needs them to suffer, not burn to death!” she said. “He feeds on their agony and that’s how he reforms a physical body!”
“
ARISE!” Bright shouted.
An ugly, starchy-white creature climbed up out of the black vortex. He seemed perpetually aflame, and shadows shifted across his face and chest. Six arms battered about his brutish body. His thick goat legs ended in hooves. Hairy leather wings corkscrewed up out of his back and flapped, propelling him up through the wormhole to Prism.
“
NO!” Areva screamed and flew up through the wormhole after him.
“
Areva!” Hyperman shouted. He almost chased after her, but saw Phoenix Bright lighting up with an unearthly glow, which couldn’t have been good news. Hyperman barreled forward at him, going at full hyper-speed with cosmic-blue radiation raging in his eyes. With an elegant, almost effortless flick of his hand, Bright raised up a thick, pulsing energy shield that Hyperman ricocheted right off of and banged up toward the ceiling. The wormhole’s swirling pull caught and sucked him up through it.
Chapter 10: ALL HELL
Nightshadow moaned, and the world hazed back into being before him. He watched a wormhole suture itself closed on the ceiling while a chaotic black vortex swished and swirled away to nothingness below. It made his eyes hurt. His wing-suit smelled charred and bloody. His body felt weak, beaten, and ragged. He noticed Paul Wrath dangling next to him, wearing only blackened, burned shards of his robo-armor. Wrath had yet to wake up.
A clenching pain seized Nightshadow’s head, but he remembered the firestorm Bright had thrown at him, Wrath, and their entire S.I.L.E.N.T. squad. It’d killed everyone but them. Bright had spared them for some reason. Nightshadow tested his bonds. The chains glowed misty-blue and gave off mystical vapors that stank of strong anti-septic. They gripped him too tightly to break them off or slip out of. His hands searched for locks to pick, but found none.
The throne room burned skull-white. Faces formed in the flames. They screamed and moaned. Nightshadow squinted and recognized those faces as the hostages. He blinked and focused to better see the fire cages strung across the ceiling.
“
You’ve awakened,” Phoenix Bright said, his eccentric accent adding a lilt to his words as he glanced up at Nightshadow. He stood surrounded by black, garishly glowing computers. His armor shone with bloody-red light. “I was hoping we could talk,” he said. “I believe us to not be very different and that we could achieve much together.”
Nightshadow’s head throbbed dizzily, but he thought he saw a flickering shadow crawling on the far wall. It appeared to be there, then gone. There, then gone. Then on that other wall! Now gone! He feared he was seeing things. Whatever it was, Phoenix Bright hadn’t noticed it.
“
Are you actually asking me to join you?” Nightshadow asked.
“
I thought you and Wrath would be open to the truth,” Bright replied.
“
The truth being what?”
“
The three of us trained and perfected ourselves. We sought power out and, thus, were truly able to master it. The other Invincibles were born with or happened upon their powers. They never earned them nor have any of them ever properly understood them or what they should be doing with their gifts. Instead, these gods interfere in the affairs of mankind and prevent us from seeking our own destiny. They rule over us as much as the Olympians and Asgardians did in their day.”
Nightshadow grunted. “The Invincibles aren’t gods. The gods weren’t even gods. They’re people. They’re all just different kinds of people.”
Phoenix Bright chuckled. “Of course, they aren’t divine. Nothing truly is. Yet, their power is troubling. I’ve looked into your dreams and know that you feel the same way. You’ve planned countermeasures in the event that they go rogue and you were completely right to! They wield too much might and there must be consequences for their actions. You see what I do as trying to conquer worlds, but that is too narrow-minded a perspective. I view myself as proactively striking out against the powers that dominate us. If I don’t fortify the universe against these gods, nobody will ever be safe.”
“
You made a deal with Lucifer!” Nightshadow spat. “The devil!”
“
Nonsense. I made him my tool. He thinks himself immune to my nano-virus and that he could grant protection to the Celestials who wished to join him, but they are all infected. None of them can be allowed to continually warp our existence. The universe will be much better off without all of the gods, whether they claim to be good or evil.”