Project ROWDY 11

The klaxons had been screaming for almost twelve minutes now, dragging metal claws through Brick’s concentration, but his posture hadn’t budged. Legs crossed on the edge of the mattress, back rounded over the triple tablet rig balanced against his thighs. The glow from the displays lit up the bruises under his eyes like war paint, flickering as the air raid lights swept red across the walls. Static-charged air buzzed low through the reinforced room, a headache hum he’d tuned out somewhere around the five-minute mark.

The math stayed. That’s what mattered. Everything else could scream itself hoarse.

Three panels. One mapping transdimensional interference through a harmonics lattice that didn’t actually want to hold still. One scraping telemetry off whatever half-broken sensors the GDA let him skim. One looping the breach sim he’d built from memory, projection, and spite. It kept breaking at the same line of code, error-riddled and cruel about it.

Behind him, Boomer kicked in his sleep. His breathing hitched. 

“—no, don’t—”

Brick didn’t look. He didn’t need to. He knew what the whimpering meant, what name was going to fall out next. He heard it every time.

“Bubbles.”

There it was. Like clockwork.

Boomer had sweat plastering his bangs to his face, whole body curled like he was trying to make himself smaller than his frame could go, fingers fisting so hard into the pillow it looked like they’d gone numb. His knees were almost to his chest. Twitchy. Gasping like he was choking on dream-air again.

Brick blinked once and refocused on the trajectory matrix. The dream wasn’t new. Boomer always dreamed about her. Always.

Butch was dead to the world on the opposite side of the room, one leg hanging off the bed, arm bent under his chest at some dumb angle, his cheek mashed flat against the pillow. His mouth hung open. A shallow pool of drool glistened under it. Every now and then his fingers sparked against the metal flooring with a soft crackle, green static fizzing up from his knuckles. He didn’t stir. He never did.

The alarms cut harder. Klaxons peeled through the room like they were trying to rattle the rivets out of the walls.

Then the door banged open hard enough to shudder the frame.

Donald stood in it, wild-eyed, damp at the collar, one sleeve half-rolled and the other still buttoned. Tie askew and glasses sliding off one ear. He looked like a man who’d tried to sprint through panic and only gotten halfway there.

“BOYS! Up now! Not a dril!” His voice cracked mid-sentence. He slapped the wall panel, and the overhead fluorescents blared to life, blasting the room with light so bright and sanitized it could have killed the Gangreen Gang in minutes. “Brick! Command center!”

Brick’s head came up. He didn’t ask for clarification. A burst of red and a sound like an air cannon on steroids and the Reddest of Rowdyruffs was gone before Boomer could even sit upright.

Boomer came out of the nightmare with a gasp that was almost a sob, hair sticking to his forehead, hands shaking like they didn’t know what to do without lightning in them. His head whipped around, eyes a big and bleary blue. “Wha—what time is it?”

Donald glanced down at his watch, glasses nearly falling off from the sudden motion. “9:17. We’ve got a global event. Trinity needs to mobilize.”

Boomer’s face drained. “Wait—where’s Brick?”

Butch groaned and rolled to his other side, tossing a pillow over his head like it could somehow shut off the powerful lights beating down on him. “Tell the global event to wait till noon.”

Donald crossed the room with three quick strides, snatching the pillow from Butch’s grasp with enough force that the thing tore right open and stuffing spilled out like a slasher scene for furniture. “NOW! Get dressed and report to command in two minutes! We don’t have time!”

“Hey!” Butch jolted upright, hair wild, sparks flaring off one wrist.

“Two minutes to suit up. Move.”

Donald was at the door before either of them had found socks. His voice hitched at the threshold.

“And boys?”

Boomer and Butch both froze.

“This one’s bad.”

The command center was chaos in full costume.

The curved wall of monitors spat out flickering images—downtowns cratered, airspace no-fly zones, black plumes turning morning to dusk. Bodies blurred under compression artifacts. Half the satellites were still recalibrating, but it didn’t matter. The damage was too big to miss. Even without sound, the disaster read like war.

Cecil stood at the central console, shoulders rigid, eyes fixed on the largest display. His face gave away nothing, same as always, but his fingers tapped a rapid, irregular pattern against the edge of the control panel—a tell Brick had catalogued weeks ago.  

Brick was already there, already halfway through the feed logs, side-eyeing a seismic signature he didn’t like the shape of. He didn’t look up when his brothers entered. Didn’t need to.

He felt them fall in behind him—Boomer’s breath still stuttering, Butch still crackling with not-quite-awake violence. Everyone else turned when they walked in. The whole damn room.

Some people stared like they expected miracles. Others didn’t bother hiding how much they hated what they were looking at.

Brick heard it all in the cracks between footsteps.

“Thank god.”

“They’re children.”

“They’re what we’ve got.”

Cecil didn’t flinch. Just gave a sharp glance toward the boys. “Prep status?”

Brick’s voice cut through the room without weight, just steel. “Combat ready.”

He turned the data feed over with one hand. “Briefing?”

Cecil’s breath left his body in the tightest sigh Brick had ever seen as the old man tapped the screen like it owed him something. The center display blinked—map gone, now a churning, orange-red vortex gnawing through downtown Baltimore.

Shit. The thing looked more like a tumor in space than a portal. Orange energy warped the edges and, honestly, colors around it just bled wrong.

“Breach just opened. Two minutes ago. Landfall already happened.” Cecil made another one of those too-tight sighs, breath not leaving him so much as it was pushed out. “Harder to fight them when they’re controlling the bottleneck and in the middle of a major metropolis.”

Butch cracked his neck loud on purpose, grin crawling up like it was wired to the part of his brain that didn’t process consequences. “Awwwwwwwww hells yeah! Finally! No more training sims and wannabe baddies in capes. Time to hit something that hits back.”

Brick didn’t answer. Eyes on the data running down the edges—radiation levels, density spikes, frequency bleed. Familiar signature. Too familiar, honestly. One too close to what he’d stared at for eight hours straight last night. His fingers twitched toward the tablet pressed against his ribs as he asked a different question than the one he was tossing around.

“Where’s Omni-Man?”

Donald and Cecil swapped a look. One of those fast, quiet exchanges that carried weight. Donald blinked first.

“Fighting some transdimensional entity in North Africa. Thing called itself… Omnipotus,” Cecil said. Drier than bone. “Omni-MAN got pulled through another portal about two hours ago. Radio silence since.”

Brick’s fingers stilled. Cold metal under skin. Omni-Man gone. Great. That explained the twitch in Donald’s shoulder, the weird pacing in the room, the agents’ eyes darting like flies in a bottle.

Boomer shifted beside him, arms loose, expression stuck somewhere between ‘awake’ and ‘kid caught sneaking cookies.’ “Wait—Omni-Man’s just… gone?”

The blondie was still looking at Cecil like he was waiting for a but. None came.

“Okay… so Omni-Man’s gone,” Butch shrugged. “Big whoop. No Mr. Mustache. We still got the Guardians?”

Cecil’s mouth pulled tight. He didn’t answer fast. Brick already knew before the man started speaking that this was going to be some shit news.

“The Guardians of the Globe were found dead this morning,” Another too-hard sigh, like gettin rid of bad air was the priority. “HQ was quiet when our team arrived. No footage. No alarms. Just… bodies.”

Boomer’s breath hitched. Brick heard it. Butch stopped moving. That’s what made it real—Butch going still. He didn’t do still.

“All of them?” Brick’s voice didn’t crack. Really, it barely even counted as a question, especially when he knew the answer.

Cecil gave a slow nod. “Every single one. No forced entry. No signs of resistance. Preiliminary autopsies say that they all died in the same second or two. Whatever happened—it was fast.”

The screen flickered again but Brick didn’t blink, not even as numbers filled the edge of his vision. Redline thresholds. Breach harmonics. Too close to theirs. Like someone’d taken their accident and ran it through an industrial printer.

He did the math faster than the software could. “We’re all you got left. Your only nuclear option.”

The Red didn’t even look at the others when he said it. There was no need to, honestly. The words had landed like a ten-ton weight on a coyote and nobody argued.

Cecil didn’t try to remind them they were twelve or bring up PR optics or civilian casualties or what people would say if they saw kids covered in alien blood on the five o’clock news.

No, the old man just nodded, with yet another one of those hard breaths that started in his throat and not his chest.

“Lethal engagement approved,” he said. “I don’t care how it gets done, as long as it doesn’t leave a crater the size of downtown D.C. Understood?”

Butch made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. His fists clenched and unclenched like his muscles were itching to tear something open.

Boomer stepped forward, less certain. “Uh—what about Invincible?”

And Brick’s jaw locked. Hard.

Three days. Three days since the rooftop. Since that fight. Since the older kid took away their one source of stress relief and called them babies after the fact. Like they were just dumb kids playing at capes.

Cecil’s eyes didn’t twitch, despite his anger that very day. “He’s been out of costume since your very first tussle. Either way, we’ve sent someone to try and loop him in. But right now? You’re what we’ve got.”

Brick just glanced to his left. Boomer blinked and nodded. To his right. Butch cracked his neck again, grin sharp.

No words needed.

“Baltimore. Now.”

The launch bay doors barely had time to open. They didn’t wait.

Three streaks—red, blue, green—snapped through the sky like loaded rounds, blowing past the speed of sound in seconds and leaving it behind as they crossed triple digits Mach, easily meteor speed. Windows screamed. Clouds sheared sideways.

Brick took point as they met Baltimore seven seconds later. He always did. Tactical run-ups spun in his brain as the street in the heart of the city came into view like an ant hill from over a dozen miles up. Buildings slumped inward. Roads curled upward. Sewer lines cracked open like veins. And in the center of it—

The breach. Still there. Still hungry. At least a hundred and twenty feet tall and at least as wide in the heart of a mangled plaza, twisting orange-red like a glitch in reality.

The first wave of aliens had already landed. They were tall, but then most people were compared to them. Green-skinned, sure. Uniform but not identical. Some armored, some wearing what looked like muscle-tight jumpsuits with no seams. All of them carried rifles that fired red beams strong enough to punch holes through concrete and send cars clean into the air.

Which they demonstrated.

With glee.

“Brace for landing,” Brick called, not needing to yell. “Formation three.”

Butch peeled off instantly, trailing green, spinning mid-air like a warhead with a personality problem.

Boomer shot higher, arcing like a slingshot about to snap.

Brick dropped into a dive so fast the air fractured around him, pressure bending glass in nearby towers as he dropped like a warhead.

“Remember,” he said, voice tight through comms. “Cecil said we can full send. So full send these suckers down to HIM!”

People first. Always people first. 

That was what Cecil prioritized in their training and what Brick tried his best to do—before the math, before the strategy, before the monster. Half of him was pretty sure that Cecil didn’t care as much about collateral as the old man usually claimed— lives, sure, but property?. Judging by the looks Donald often gave him he thought too fast for no one to notice, that was new for the Director.

Which meant it was a lesson for them.

Teaching them to be careful.

The red one rolled his eyes. He knew careful.

Brick tracked the civvies falling out of frame like sparks kicked from a grinding wheel. Faces turned wrong, slack and peeled back by wind or terror or both. Half of ‘em didn’t run, just… froze as the aliens attacked. Half-stuck in the middle of Baltimore like someone paused the street and forgot to hit play again. A dad with a stroller. A chick on her phone. A dude mid-sip with his coffee splashed across his jacket like blood.

“Boomer, evac pattern,” Brick said, already watching him break formation without waiting. “Butch, containment. I’ll hit command.”

No questions. Boomer zipped off with a “Yep!” half-mumbled, half-sung, the kind of distracted tone he always used when his brain was already ahead of his mouth.

Butch didn’t say anything. Just cracked his knuckles loud enough to register over the comm and dropped like a meteor.

They hit in sync. Triangle formation.

Perfect.

Brick low and fast, Butch loud and higher, Boomer streaking between like a skipping stone on fire. The crater they left behind was a statement. Asphalt gone, aliens under them splattered like pinatas filled with purple jelly. Hell, just the edge of the shockwave sent a wave of aliens tumbling like bowling pins.

Brick didn’t stop moving. He quickly hovered up just enough to see the whole board. His eyes flared hot—numbers in motion, layout bleeding through the chaos and then flared hotter as a red laser cleared the platoon attempting to flank him and opened the space up for him to pay more attention. The big ones stuck out first.

Not size, not armor, just posture.

Higher position, thicker gear, skull tech pulsing red like it was alive. Three command nodes, all flanking the breach like it was sacred. That’s where it started.

“Not random,” he muttered, quiet to himself as he watched one direct fire with a flick of a wrist. “Not raiders. Not scouts. This is coordinated. We’re not the only ones full-sending here.”

His focus jolted as Boomer flashed across the left side of his vision, dragging a pair of kids out from under a shattered walkway, yelling something cheerful like they hadn’t just almost been turned into pancakes. One kid waved. Boomer waved too, already gone before Brick could roll his eyes.

“Northwest clear!” Boomer’s voice cracked through his comms, half-laughing, breathless. “I think—I think I got all the people in that block!”

“South too,” Butch barked, and the ground shuddered as he slammed a white alien tank into a building and kept going as he used it like a giant hammer, the alien inside already shaken to death and far past being a single cohesive organism anymore. “You shoulda seen it, Brick. Thing was armored like a vault door—now it’s a souvenir.”

“Stay focused.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Butch huffed, already slamming into another group of soldiers like a green lightning strike with fists. “Tell that to these guys tryna laser my face off.”

Brick didn’t reply. He was already rising, wind shrieking against him as he popped up into high air and locked on to the first node. Heat vision charged up again. He saw the flicker before it fired. Three hits, precise and pointed. The alien tower cracked open like a ribcage.

He blinked across the air and landed in the middle of the command group before their tech had stopped sizzling.

They fired. He moved. Not all that fast but quick enough, to the right. A sidestep that dropped the leader’s shot past his head and got him inside their guard in half a heartbeat.

Brick’s fists moved like blueprints. Left arm to disrupt the rifle, spin kick to drop the guy behind. Didn’t kill. Didn’t even maim. Enough force to break ribs without puncture. Precise.

They needed a couple aliens to interrogate and he doubted the other Rowdys would care or remember with their blood up.

One got off a lucky blast. It skimmed his side and left heat behind like a sunburn. His vision flared red for a split second.

“They’re learning,” he snapped through the comm as green skin turned to ash and dust in front of him. “Spreads are tighter. Don’t stand still.”

“Copy,” Boomer breathed. “Gonna—gonna try to short the tech . They got charge packs, I think.”

Butch was yelling something incoherent. Sounded like a challenge, maybe a song lyric, possibly just “GET SOME!” screamed at the top of his lungs as he broke another tank in half over his knee.

Brick snapped the last comms unit with his boot and jumped.

He scanned the skyline. Scanning, again. It wasn’t right. Something was—

“Bri, I got movement northeast tower—”

Boomer’s voice cut off with a crackle and a scream of static. Brick’s head whipped around. Blue streak, knocked sideways. The blur tumbled through three glass windows and vanished into an office block, debris fountaining out like confetti.

“Boomer!”

His body reacted before the thought finished. He blurred through air, red streak carving through the sky toward the source. Rooftop. Heavy Sniper unit. Five. No, six. One recharging.

He crashed into them like a missile. No finesse. He was done with finesse.

First one got hit in the ribs so hard he split in half, the top half dissapearing into purple mist. The second tried to scream before Brick’s uppercut took his head off and sent it a good five miles up. The rest scattered. Two got laser-eyed, clean through.

One dove for cover. Like that would help.

Brick didn’t speak. He just landed where Boomer had hit and tore through the floor until he found his brother under a flipped conference table.

Boomer pushed himself up, blond hair smoking, one eye blinking too slow.

“I’m good,” he gasped. “I—uh—ow. But I’m good.”

“You sure?” Butch’s voice snapped in through the comms, static shredded behind it. “Cause I’m ‘bout to break someone’s entire family tree over this.”

Brick grabbed Boomer’s arm, hauled him up, shoved him out the hole.

Butch hit the street like a goddamn bomb. Brick felt it more than saw it. One of the tanks went airborne, spinning like a bottle rocket with no trajectory control.

“YOU DON’T HIT MY BROTHER,” Butch howled, the words wild and huge in a voice he didn’t usually use unless he was winning a fight too hard to enjoy. “ONLY I HIT MY BROTHER!”

Aliens scattered. Like actual scattered. Lost formation. Too many variables. Brick saw them panic as Butch started throwing rubble like boulders and using bodies like battering rams.

Boomer blinked back into the air. Still smudged up, but smiling now, the corner kind. “Back in. I’m fine. Kinda.”

“You got zapped through buildings,” Butch snapped.

“I said kinda.”

“Focus.” Brick’s voice sliced through both of them. “They’re not here for resources.”

He hovered again, just high enough to see the flow. The spread. How they moved. Not just shooting, not just looting.

They were securing. Claiming.

Boomer looked up at him, face still half-dust. “Wait… you said they’re like us?”

“No, don’t compare us to ants like this.” Brick muttered, laser eyes taking out several more green-skinned soldier goons with pinpoint accuracy. “We got dumped off a giant cosmic accident.”

His eyes tracked three fresh units forming around the breach, like laying bricks. “They’re exactly where they wanna be.”

Brick hovered above the swarming chaos, scanning for any sign of a command structure that might be holding this alien incursion together, his mind automatically sorting the battlefield into threats and non-threats, moving shapes color-coded by muscle mass or weapon charge. The swirling edges of the dimensional breach still spat out troops in bursts of red-orange energy, while the rest of Baltimore reeled under the onslaught. He resisted the urge to check on Butch and Boomer again, trusting his readouts and comm logs to know neither of them had screamed or gone radio-silent yet.

He noticed a flicker of blue and yellow slicing the air beyond the breach’s perimeter, overshadowed by the acrid smoke and flickering fires. Invincible, of course. Brick recognized that still-shaky flight path and the street-scraping landing that left cracks in the asphalt as the older teenager touched down near a row of wrecked cars. A fresh crater spider-webbed outward under Invincible’s boots, showing more power than sense.

He had better not get in the way again, Brick thought, resisting the impulse to remind him who was stronger. The battered city around them groaned with every new weapon’s impact, each building another potential coffin for the civilians still scattered on the ground. Brick could feel the adrenaline chewing at his nerves. If Invincible decided to mess up a serious op like this one, Brick wasn’t sure he had it in him to hold back this time

He tried to ignore the bright spandex posture that looked so… practiced. Invincible stood with fists braced on his sides, chin tilting up in that classic pose—like maybe he’d rehearsed in front of a mirror. The teenager cleared his throat, voice carrying over the bedlam in a forced show of confidence. “Need some help?”

Brick exhaled through clenched teeth, scanning the next wave of alien foot soldiers nearing from the west side of the street. “People are dying, Vince,” he called, not bothering to hide his impatience as he pummeled another set of green-skinned soldiers with a flurry of short, brutal hits. Their rifles clattered away, half-charged blasts firing off into nothing.

Butch’s laugh sounded from somewhere behind the blazing husk of a bus, loud enough to compete with gunfire as he lifted the wreck above his head. “What, you run outta kittens to rescue, or old ladies to help across the road?” With barely a grunt, the Green sent the burning thing flying hard into a group of aliens. “Not enough warm fuzzies for you?”

Invincible’s jaw tensed. Brick could see the muscle twitch from this distance, even amid the swirling smoke. “I’m Invincible. I can help,” the older teen insisted, though the slight waver in his voice hinted that he remembered how they ended things last time.

A fresh wave of aliens rushed them from two directions. One group was pinned down by Boomer’s crackling arcs of lightning that shielded a group of bystanders making a break for safety. Another bunch peeled off to focus on Invincible, apparently drawn to the new guy’s bright uniform. Brick caught himself rolling his eyes, certain the older kid had no concept of situational awareness in a war zone.

“Hey, great, he can soak a few blasts,” Butch barked after a jab that splattered an alien into purple gore against the side of a wall like graffiti. “If he keeps them busy, that’s better for us.”

Invincible turned, clearly picking a spot to jump in. A half-second later, Brick rolled his eyes as he immediately got pegged by a random beam that left a smoldering streak across his chest and sent him spinning back.

Credit to him though, he quickly shoved through, tearing into the alien squad with raw force that almost made you forget his inexperience. Hell, it was enough for Brick to note the difference from a few days ago: the older boy had grown a bit more used to his powers or at least fighting with them, hitting harder than before. 

He was still behind the Rowdyruffs, but the gap had shrunk… by a fraction.

Aliens adapted in seconds, reorganizing around a cluster of parked vehicles that half-blocked the street. Invincible pelted them with wide swings and direct hits, but they coordinated to press him back with crossfire he only partially dodged. The repeated blasts rattled him obviously, his movements becoming less certain.

“Rookie,” Brick muttered, turning from the scene to deal with a specialized assault vehicle that rumbled over broken asphalt. Its giant tires rolled on a carpet of rubble. He recognized it as one of the alien tanks with organic plating that fused to the occupant’s nervous system. Possibly the same design as the others he’d disabled earlier. He tensed his fists, then heard Butch roar a laugh from across the street.

Butch had lunged forward, tackling the vehicle’s front end so hard it reared up like an enraged beast. He wedged his fingers under the barrel, hoisted it with a grunt of savage satisfaction, and lifted the entire white alien tank overhead by that single protruding cannon. Armor plating shrieked, sparks flew, and Butch whirled around with the tank clutched in both arms like a makeshift club. He roared something incoherent and brought the tank crashing down on a squad of aliens who made the dire mistake of standing too close. Concrete and plating exploded outward in a wave of dust that stung Brick’s eyes.

Boomer zipped past overhead, depositing another handful of trembling civilians near an evacuation route and flashing Brick a breathless grin. He was gone again before Brick could say a word, probably off to shield another corner of the battlefield with lightning or yank someone else out of rubble. The entire scene blurred with screams, alien roars, electric arcs, and laser pulses that hissed by.

A blast from a tank caught him on the side of the head, making Brick turn as he blinked the stars from his eyes, sliding back from the force. It was then Brick saw Invincible pivot from the fight toward a battered sedan pinned under debris, flames licking toward the gas tank. Inside, a father sat slumped at the wheel, mother screaming in the back seat, kids pressed to the windows. The mother’s voice cut through the noise so sharply that even Brick winced. 

“I’m coming!” Invincible shouted, launching himself across the street with single-minded focus, posture brimming with the raw desire to do something heroic. Brick picked out an alien sniper leaning out from the edge of a half-collapsed building, red muzzle flash already forming. He tried to warn Invincible, tried to bark a direction: “Three o’clock, move!” 

But the beams lanced out in a storm of light before the older boy could react.

The first blast tore into the sedan’s undercarriage, igniting the leaking fuel. Fire blossomed in a whoosh of heat and thunder. The entire vehicle erupted, hurling Invincible backward in a plume of fiery shrapnel that shredded the surroundings. Brick heard the mother’s scream swallowed by a thunderous roar, along with the father’s body vanishing intothe fire.

Smoke churned outward in a black wave, stinging Brick’s nose with the tang of burnt plastic and worse.

Invincible crashed into a chunk of pavement and slid for yards, goggles partly shattered so Brick could see his wide, disbelieving eyes. 

Torn pieces of metal clanged around him as the remains of the sedan rained down in chunks. The teenager stared through the swirling smoke at the annihilated car, breath hitching in his throat. He looked to Brick, or maybe past him, mouth opening silently before sound emerged.

“No… no, no, no!”

Brick didn’t wait. Three red beams—tight, clean, silent—sliced the air and punched straight through the aliens’ necks, just below the armor plates. They dropped without dramatics. No smoke, no screams. Just meat hitting the ground. One was still twitching when Brick turned away.

Not the time. Couldn’t afford it. Not when Butch was foaming at the leash and Boomer kept dipping too low between buildings, chasing screams.

Invincible scraped himself off the rubble pile like he’d only just remembered how legs worked. Blood in his teeth. Dust smeared across his chest emblem. Kid looked at the bodies like he’d just watched them choke to death instead of being flash-fried clean through.

“You… you killed them!” His voice cracked—too high, too loud. “They’re dead because of you!”

Then he came. Not smart, not strategic—just heat and noise and raw, teenage rage, flinging himself forward like his body could carry his grief faster than his brain could catch it.

Dumbass.

“Butch,” Brick snapped, already half-shifting to intercept but calculating angles, impact, momentum, collateral. Boomer was busy. Too far off-course. Civvies in the line.

“The rookie needs backup. He’s gonna get himself killed.”

“Babysitting? Seriously?” Butch’s reply buzzed over the comm, jagged and loud and too casual. “That what we’re doing now? Fine. Whatever.”

But his blur was already cutting a sharp green wound through the smoke, the sound barrier tearing behind him like paper.

Brick moved to cover—rotated mid-air, eyes on the fire zones, counting seconds. Something flickered behind the smoke line.

Color.

Pink.

A dome snapped into place across three city blocks, bright and humming. Alien rounds hit it and vanished. No scatter. No ricochet. Just gone.

Then she dropped. Through the haze like some kind of Sunday school painting—arms glowing, cape fluttering, voice too calm for the situation.

“Everybody back! Get behind the shield!”

Pink. Red hair.

If Brick hadn’t already gotten over his sense of Deja Vu weeks ago after seeing her file, he might have frozen. He didn’t, obviously, as he blurred forward to rip apart an alien in his uncontrolled speed wake before it could fire its gun his way. Still, it was weird seeing what looked like an older Blossom right in front of him.

Weird in a lot of ways.

Aliens aimed. She flicked a hand in their direction. A thick beam of red light hit her concave wall of pink, only to bounce back just as fast and erase three of the bastards in the same second.

That wasn’t luck. That was math. Geometry. Control.

She didn’t flinch.

A shriek of turbines, then a flying platform hissed in overhead—sleek, military, GDA-funded if Brick had to guess. Or at least built with what had to be real money. That wasn’t a junk build by any means.

Riding it was akull-face robot pilot, with orange-red plating and green optics sweeping the battlefield like it was solving a crossword puzzle. Two others sat behind it. Brick squinted—a masked redhead with a cocky lean and fists already lighting up with sparkling yellow energy, and a Chinese girl in tactical gray and black who didn’t look old enough to be that done with everything but somehow was.

“Look at this mess!” the redhead yelled, already mid-jump. Yellow sparks followed him down, trailing from his hands. “Y’all started without us? Rude.”

The gray one—split. Literally. 

Bodies peeled off her like soap bubbles popping backwards. Each hit ground in sync, no fanfare, already herding civvies like they’d done this a hundred times. 

They hadn’t. But they moved like it.

Robot’s voice cut through the din, calm as a corpse: “Extra-dimensional origin confirmed. Unknown energy matrix. Proceeding with containment.”

Brick had read the files. Teen Team. The GDA — aka Director Stedman — kept them off-book, pretending they were freelancers. Most weren’t in on the joke. Hell, seventy-five percent of the team weren’t in on the joke, most likely. Seriously, as if three teenagers who all had deep connections with the GDA just happened to magically find each other.

Brick wouldn’t have believed it even if their file didn’t say so.

Pink girl: Atom Eve. Gray clone-girl: Dupli-Kate. Redhead bomb freak: Rex Splode. The bot? Just Robot.

Eve floated up on a hard-light platform. Scanned the chaos. Paused when her gaze hit blue.

“Who are they? With the trails?”

“Don’t care,” Rex muttered, palming a rock and supercharging it until it buzzed. His eyes locked on Butch and rolled his eyes. “They’re in my way.”

He hurled it at an alien standing by the Green Rowdyruff.

Fast.

Dumb.

Butch caught it like he’d expected it, hand snapping out—boom—light flashed, smoke swallowed everything. Brick felt the impact in his teeth.

When it cleared, Butch stood still. Glove burned open, skin untouched as smoke rose off his enclosed fist.

His head tilted, almost slow. “That supposed to hurt?” His voice was as flat as Butch could ever manage, aggravation tamped down just enough to be mocking.  “You throwin’ pebbles now, red boy?”

Rex Splode blinked, almost stumbling back. “That… should’ve taken your hand off. What the flying fuck are you made of?!”

Brick didn’t give him the dignity of a reply. He dropped altitude, and cut between both brother and ally like a blade. “Coordinate or get benched. Friendly fire again and I will put both of  you through a wall.”

Eve moved first. A barrier snapped into place in front of Boomer, catching a sniper shot aimed center-mass. Energy fazed against pink and dissipated, but not without leaving a major crack in the shield.

As he saw it, Boomer lit up like a Christmas tree.

“WHOA! Thanks, uh—pink girl! Lady!” He waved both hands, eyes wide behind the glow. “You’re awesome!”

Eve squinted, took him in fully now and realized that Boomer would only come up to her waist if standing on the ground. “Are you… kids?”

Butch grunted something indistinct and melted another alien in a flash of green. “No,” he said, not even looking at her. “We’re Trinity. Now fight.”

Brick didn’t yell. He didn’t need to. The weight of his voice hit like something dropped from orbit, clipped and cold. “I give the orders here. Now fight.”

Nobody clapped. Nobody high-fived. No heroic team-up pose. No nothing. It was just noise after that—motion and reaction and two teams pretending not to size each other up even as they slipped into sync like predators circling the same wounded animal. No one liked it, but they moved like they did.

Invincible was still an angry screaming mess, his brush with death having him dart back and forth punching any alien that got near him and more than a few that were running away. Brick could tell this was his first time seeing people kick it, but the guy was already getting pretty used to it, judging by the way he wasn’t pulling his punches.

“Whoa, what’s that guy’s problem?” Rex was the first to run his mouth, naturally, the former GDA black ops child assassin shrugging his shoulders. Without missing a beat, the former government killer ripped a jagged hunk of concrete from a blown-out curb, eyes gleaming. “That’s nine!” he called out as the chunk exploded mid-air, taking out three bug-eyed rifle freaks.

Butch didn’t even look his way. “Eighty-two,” he said, and turned a whole rooftop into plasma with a green-laced shockwave that vaporized the structure and everyone on it. “Keep up, sparklehands.”

“That’s not even a real number,” Rex shot back, recharging another rock.

“Your mom’s not a real number,” Butch muttered.

Rex actually laughed at that. “You’re right, my mom’s a total bitch anyway.”

“Guys,” Eve snapped, breath tight, eyes glowing as she diverted a laser from catching Rex off guard with another pink wall, “less whatever this is, more saving civilians?”

A second later, she whipped a pink ramp under Dupli-Kate’s feet mid-sprint, not even looking, like they’d rehearsed it as the move landed clean. Kate and three of her copies used it like springboards, launching through the smoke toward a skimmer squadron flanking the east tower.

Boomer blurred across the sky just under them, the blond boy crackling blue like a blown transformer, intercepting a blast that would’ve fried the whole formation. “Whoops—gotcha! I mean, you’re welcome! Wait—am I shielding you or—”

“You’re in the way,” Kate said flatly, diving past him with her copies already landing blows. “But… thanks, I guess?”

Eve exhaled. “You okay?”

Boomer beamed, face smudged, hair sparking, hands twitching from the voltage still riding his veins. “Yup! Totally. Just doing my part! Y’know—saving girls and stuff.”

Kate gave him a look.

“What?” he added quickly. “Are you… not a girl?”

Brick closed his eyes and sighed as he shot up into the sky and began to triangulate angles. Too many airborne pods. Too many blind spots. He needed oversight, but the ground was crawling. Robot drifted beside him on his hover-cycle like a ghost with weapons.

“The dimensional breach is self-replicating,” Robot stated, voice as inflectionless as a scalpel. “Continued incursion guaranteed without intervention.”

“Already seeing it.” Brick’s reply was clipped. “If we collapse the outer seams first, the internal lattice can’t stabilize.”

“Adequate hypothesis. Syncing parameters.”

The breach pulsed again—red, then orange, then something uglier. Energy bled into the sky like it wanted to replace the sun.

“We need to cut the feedback loop,” Brick said, recalling what he’d unwillingly learned from being the only child of Mojo who paid attention to the powered primate’s hour-long rants. “Localized overload, sharp frequency variance.”

“Convergent pulse strike,” Robot confirmed. “I am adjusting the weapons platform.”

They didn’t get to try.

Because then the street exploded.

The eastern flank turned to fire. One second it was combat—lines, shots, screaming. The next, it was gone. Just crater and flame. Then something moved inside the burn zone. Walked out.

He wasn’t subtle.

Long white hair in a ponytail behind a full-face flag mask patterned after the stars and stripes. Shoulders like reinforced steel beams stacked with dual paldrons with the same American iconography. One arm was already mid-shift into a gatling cannon as the new arrival raised it up and by the time he did, the gears locked with a metallic shriek.

“Finally!” the man yelled, voice rough and grinning like a war crime. “Been dying for a real fight!”

Hell broke loose as plasma energy bullets tore through the air like glowing metal teeth, each shot a hyper-accurate kill as purple brains and hearts were blasted out of bodies before the greenies knew what was happening.

Second by second, aliens died before they could even scream.

Butch slowed mid-punch, spinning around instead and delivering a human-speed backfit that was still powerful to disintegrate an alien arm. “Yo. Who’s Robo-Rambo?”

“Super-Patriot,” Rex called, uncharacteristically respectful. “Fought the Nazis in World War II. He’s, like, a hundred years old and still beats ass.”

“Dude’s killin’ it,” Butch admitted, nodding once.

Super-Patriot launched himself into the fray, cyberlegs kicking off like springs as he surged fifty feet up, flipping mid-air with the casual grace of a man who used to do this before everyone else’s parents were even born. He landed with a flamethrower already lit, spraying fire in a perfect arc.

“Not Nazis this time, but close enough!” he yelled. “Aim low, boys! Or high, whatever works!”

Another flash lit up near the breach—tight, cold and crackling white. Brick’s eyes narrowed. GDA teleports. As far as he knew, only two people were authorized to use it; one of them freely, and the other for tactical insertions.

Which meant…

Brit materialized, rifle slung over the 127 year old muscular old man’s red jumpsuited shoulder, jaw clenched, walking like the ground pissed him off.

“You’re late,” Brick said. He’d only had a few encounters with Brit over the last couple of months but he knew him well enough to know the man didn’t trust him yet.

Brit didn’t slow. “Didn’t feel like making a damn entrance.”

An alien beam tagged him dead in the chest. His shirt scorched. Skin refused it.

“Cute,” he muttered, then charged up his own weapon and eviscerated his attacker’s body with a beam the size of his arm.

Super-Patriot caught the movement and called across the battlefield, “Look who finally showed! You bring pie, sweetheart?”

“You’re lucky I brought a pulse,” Brit shot back, driving his boot through an alien’s face. “You old toaster.”

“Still mad about Budapest?”

“You brought up Budapest.”

“Never should’ve trusted you with the map!”

Brick tuned it out. He was triangulating threat clusters, ignoring the bickering, except Butch was grinning way too wide now.

“I like those guys,” Butch said, blocking a laser beam from tagging Rex with his bare hand, his gloves blasted to all hell as they hung on by threads.

Boomer skidded in beside Kate and Eve, hair wild, grin wide as he spun around in a lightning tornado, taking out half a dozen fliers. “Okay! That was awesome, right? Right? Not just me?”

Kate blinked. “Are you always like this?”

Boomer puffed his chest. “Mostly! You’re, like, cool too. Like scary-cool. It works.” He waved and zoomed off again, electricity charging around his arms again as he let it fly.

Eve just sighed. “We’re letting children handle alien invasions n-?”

The pink girl didn’t get to finish as Invincible screamed past her, Eve’s eyes going wide as the hybrid Viltrumite slammed through a flier heading her and Kate’s way.

Breathing heavy, he looked at the both of them, one goggle gone and costume torn up from all the fighting. “Y-y-you guys okay?”

Eve blinked back. “U-uh-huh, yeah.”

Brick didn’t hear Kate’s response. He was already moving. Already locking onto the next line of fire, internal calculations adjusting.

Feelings were a luxury. He didn’t have time for luxuries.

He knew the portal wasn’t just leaking aliens anymore. It was folding. Buckling in at the edges, like skin blistering around a burn. He could feel it in his teeth, the way light bent wrong and sound got all stuttery near the breach. They were breaking it. 

Finally.

“Trinity, push north! Keep ’em boxed!” He didn’t shout, didn’t need to. The comms carried the tension in his jaw.

The battlefield blurred.

His brothers weren’t even pretending to hold back anymore. Butch was laughing. Not the good kind. Not the funny kind. The kind that meant someone was about to get pulped. He ripped an alien in half by the antennae, and used one half as a projectile to rip through the rest of a squad. His hands sparked green and never stopped moving.

Boomer was everywhere at once, streaking through the smoke like a glitch in the air. Blue lightning trailed behind him in jagged stutters. He grabbed two civvies, vanished, reappeared with a new burn on his shoulder and zero explanation.

“We’re winning!” he yelled mid-flight, as if it wasn’t obvious. As if Brick hadn’t already factored in the collapsing formation and the alien line snapping under pressure like wet cardboard.

Invincible was… “I’LL KILL YOU!”

Invincibling.

Teen Team held. Surprisingly.

For a bunch of GDA-manipulated teenagers and Robot, they were actually pretty effective at their jobs.

Eve’s shields pulsed hard-pink against the wave of retreat fire, creating a moving bubble around the support team and civvies still stumbling through the wreckage. She looked wrecked herself—hair clumped with sweat, jaw set. Not blinking enough. She didn’t flinch when the fliers dove for her. She just flicked one wrist and re-routed her hard-light into a fan of darts that nailed each of them center-mass.

Kate was in four places at once, all of them tired. One clone caught a laser in the thigh and fell to the ground as gore and flesh puddled on the ground. Another rolled into position without losing pace, catching a toddler out of a crumbling minivan like it was a relay handoff. No comment. No complaints.

Rex threw another overcharged brick like he was trying to impress a ghost. “That makes sixty! Or sixty-one? Depends if that first guy lost his legs.”

Butch didn’t miss a beat. “That’s cute. I stopped counting at four hundred.”

Brick said nothing. He didn’t have time to babysit egos.

He did the math instead.

Vectors. Retreat trajectories. Heat signatures dimming in clusters. Alien movements weren’t just sloppy—they were deteriorating.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. His voice crackled through comms, low. Focused.

He zeroed in with his optics, narrowed to the pixel. Green skin paling. Limb movements jerky. The shimmer around their armor plates thinned like whatever powered them was leaking out of sync with the environment.

They were dying.

Not from them.

From here.

The portal pulsed again, shuddering like a heartbeat made of static. The structure wavered, like a half-built engine tearing itself apart mid-startup. The aliens didn’t hold the line. They ran.

Not aimless. Strategic. Some of them covered the retreat. Others shielded a collection of weird tech boxes, glowing faintly with blue core light and shielded plating.

Brick clocked it. Immediately.

“They’re not just leaving. They’re taking their stuff with them.”

He didn’t wait for agreement.

The world blinked red behind his eyes and he snapped toward the central tech platform like a round out of a gun. Three aliens moved to block. One got close.

Too close.

Brick twisted mid-air. He didn’t vaporize it. He avoided it.

That’s the part that pissed him off.

He should have gone through. But they needed data. They needed salvage. So he turned.

It cost him the play.

The last of the equipment cleared the breach and the portal imploded like a lung collapsing inward. No noise at first—just light. Then the sound caught up, slapped them all backwards in a thundercrack.

Air folded. Sky went white-orange. Debris snapped into the blast and spat back out across the whole district.

Boom.

And then stillness. The kind that made Brick’s ears ring and his brain scream move.

He got up first. Then Boomer, wobbling like he just spun around nine-hundred forty-two times trying to find his limit again. Then Butch, brushing purple crust off his shoulder like dust.

The plaza was carnage. Half the towers pancaked. Roads curled. Sewers bleeding. Fires and black water and too many things that used to be people and now weren’t.

Teen Team regrouped fast, all of them quickly coming together.

Rex made a show of breathing heavy, the teenager pulling his mask back and dragging a hand through his sweaty, filthy mess of hair. Once again, he was the first to break the silence, motor mouth supreme. “Well, that sucked major balls,” he said, almost at the top of his lungs for no reason. “Like, big-time. I vote nap.”

“Aww,” Butch drawled, fake-sweet, brushing soot off his cheek with a crackle of static. “Redhead need a blankie?”

Rex flipped him off without heat. “I still dropped more than you.”

“Nah,” Butch grinned. “Not even in your dreams, bro.”

Pink light shoved between them. Eve. Glowing. Done.

“Can you two not? Just for five minutes?”

They both flinched. Slightly.

Super-Patriot strolled in like the last hour hadn’t happened, mask half-off, cyber-eyes whirring as they adjusted to the gloom. He looked the Boys over. Long pause. Then a bark of a chuckle. “Cecil’s crew, huh? Figures.” The cyborg shook his head as he clicked his tongue. “That old spook wouldn’t flinch at child soldiers if they could do the job.”

Brick straightened. Not that it helped. He still barely came up to the guy’s ribcage.

“We’re Trinity. GDA-affiliated.”

“Quite the name. You boys stupid or confident?”

Brit limped in on his left, rifle slung, face tight. “Still think it’s both.”

“We handled it fine,” Butch growled. “Didn’t see you till the last five.”

Super-Patriot barked another laugh. “They got teeth, at least.”

Boomer floated down with a bounce, trailing arcs, eyes big on the cybernetics as they reconfigured back to normal, weapons vanishing in place of segmented steel prosthetics. “Whoa. Your arms do the spinny thing? That’s so rad.”

Brick rolled his eyes.

Invincible landed on the street like someone broke his steering, with a hard crunch and knee to pavement. He stood slow.

His costume was shredded. One goggle gone. Red blood crusted under his chin. Purple blood staining his chest and hands. His eyes were red, but not from dust.

Brick didn’t mock him. “First real one?”

Invincible nodded. Didn’t look up.

“You learn.”

Robot hovered in from the smoke, sparking, analyzing like nothing had changed.

“Incomplete engagement. Premature withdrawal inconsistent with known tactics.”

“We wrecked them!” Boomer said brightly, fists up.

“Negative.” Robot didn’t pause. “Their speech patterns suggested swarm tactics. Their departure was not defeat. It was preservation.”

Eve was already working on doing her part to fix the skyline. Pink scaffolding, pink cranes, pink support beams. Efficient. Careful.

She paused just long enough to glance back. “You guys were… impressive. Considering.”

Butch scowled like she’d kicked him in the pride. “And here comes the kindergarten line again. People keep acting like we belong back in Pokey Oaks.”

Kate rejoined them, two dozen duplicates behind her. Some treating wounded. Some organizing. One walked over and looked at the three of them with tilted-head curiosity.

“How old are you anyway?”

“Twelve. Thirteen next year,” Boomer said it with no filter, no hesitation. Why would he have either of those? After all, it was just his age, right? Why wouldn’t he tell someone curious?

But it was what he said next that Brick was dreading. “But we weren’t, like, born. Not the usual way.”

And just like that, the air pinched. Brick felt it. Like tension pulling teeth.

Teen Team froze mid-breath. Rex’s eyebrows jumped like a cartoon character who just found out the pie was a bomb. “Wait—what? Made? You guys like clones or robots or some shit?”

Boomer blinked. “No? I mean—kinda? Wait, is that bad?”

Before Butch could open his mouth and say something so much worse and somehow even more wrong, Brick cut in. “Humanoid chemical constructs. Artificially accelerated development. Made, not born. Sentient, autonomous, a whole new type of human. Transhuman, basically.”

He didn’t blink. Didn’t give Boomer space to add whatever dumb follow-up was loading behind his teeth. “Or demonic homunculi, if you’re the religious type.” He smiled. It was about as warm as Blossom’s breath.

Kate made a face. Rex choked a laugh. Eve just stared with a look on her face that felt… sympathetic.

Robot, though—Robot tilted his head. His whole face was unreadable but the optics got brighter, which Brick had learned meant interest. Or threat calculation. “My scans did indicate your molecular structure is non-standard. Your explanation supports several anomalies I observed.”

“I don’t even know what the hell half of that meant,” Rex muttered. “Chemical what now?” He squinted. “That some kind of punk band or—?”

“A chemical found in toxic waste,” Brick said, dry as carbon. “Refined, stabilized, mutated. Works better than gamma radiation.”

“Wait, like—actual waste? Like trash juice? That’s nasty, dude.”

Butch snorted. “Made us better than you, though.”

“Yeah, okay, robo-Spawn,” Rex shot back. “You ever smell like a normal person?”

Eve stepped forward, arms crossed, voice all soft edges and steel under it. “Wait, so… the GDA just uses you? Like that’s normal?”

“We’re twelve,” Boomer said brightly, like he hadn’t just admitted to being a weapon. “And we save people. Sooo.”

“Don’t mean ya ain’t kids,” Brit said, walking up from the edge of the crater with the casual gait of someone who’d seen worse and didn’t care to talk about it. “Still got milk teeth. Still too small to reach the good liquor shelves.”

“You done?” Brick asked without looking at him.

Brit shrugged. “Wasn’t talkin’ to you, kid.”

“We made our own choices,” Brick added faster than he meant to. It hung there. He smoothed his tone. “We could leave if we wanted.”

“Yeah,” Butch added, cracking his neck with an audible pop, “like, we chose to outscore y’all by triple digits. That’s called freedom.”

Rex barked a laugh. “Man, shortstack, you really think you scored higher?”

“I know I scored higher.”

“Liar.”

“Babyhands.”

“Third place.”

“Your face is third place.”

Kate groaned so hard it carried.

Eve made a barrier out of pink light and didn’t say a word. Brick appreciated her restraint. It was… unfamiliar.

Super-Patriot walked up like he had nothing better to do than judge Brick from ten feet up. His eyes were cybernetic but still managed to narrow. “You the one callin’ plays?”

Brick nodded.

“Good formation discipline. Smart calls. Clean work,” the old man said, surprising him. “Tight triangles. Good fire control. Most grown men can’t get that right.”

Butch made a noise like a muffled cough. “Told you we don’t need babysitters.”

“No, what you need is a leash,” Dupli-Kate muttered, one of her clones wiping blood off her sleeve. “You tossed a tank through a building.”

“It was empty,” Butch said. “Mostly.”

Brick’s eye twitched. He was going to log that later.

Brit just grunted nearby, tapping a busted alien gauntlet like he was checking for resale value. “Cecil’s collecting weirdos like trading cards.” He glanced over. “Need a lift?”

“We fly.”

“Suit yourself.”

GDA cleanup hit the ground like ants—black suits, white masks, hazmat teams moving with the kind of precision Brick trusted more than most people. VTOLs bleeding steam, medics fanning out. The battle was over, which meant the posturing was starting. GDA agents swarmed the wreckage, locking down tech, tagging bodies, sweeping for data. Stretchers dragged out civvies, portable containment bubbles rolled in. Smelled like scorched ozone and red tape. Brick knew the play. Extraction was next.

One of the hazmat guys dragged a fried alien cannon past Boomer, who immediately crouched down to poke at it.

“Whoa—do you think we could, like, fix this? Or turn it into a bike?”|

“No,” Brick said, already scanning the perimeter.

“But like—”

“No.”

SuperPatriot’s arm whirred as it folded back into place. “Y’know, for lab rats, y’all ain’t bad.”

“We’re not rats,” Butch said, voice flat.

Eve’s voice gentled, the same way people talked to stray dogs. “You guys okay? Like, after all this?”

Boomer blinked at her. “Oh. Yeah. We’re great! I mean—some bruises, a little crispy maybe. But hey, we got good bones.”

“You’re still bleeding,” Kate said, pointing.

Boomer checked. “Oh. Cool.”

Brick watched Mark drift in, shoulders slumped, one goggle gone, suit shredded. He looked like he’d swallowed smoke and guilt in the same breath and hadn’t figured out how to spit either out.

“You good?” Brick asked.

Mark started to nod, then stopped, then shrugged. “I—I tried. There were these kids, and I—”

“We saw,” Brick said. “You’ll be better next time.”

“Right. Next time.”

Time to bounce. He turned. Looked once more at the others.

“Not bad for amateurs.”

Rex nearly tripped over his own ego. “Okay, what?! We’ve been in this game for years, kid!”

Boomer waved like it was a parade. “Bye pink lady! Bye copy girl! Bye Mister Unbreakable! Bye robot dads! Bye sword gramps!”

Butch shot Rex a nod like they hadn’t been trying to kill each other twenty minutes ago. “Try not to blow yourself up before round two, sparklefist.”

Then they were airborne. Three streaks—red, green, blue—ripping the sky like brushstrokes through smoke.

Brick didn’t look down again. Not yet.

But he was still thinking. Still tracking. Still re-running the feed.

Guardians. Gone.

Omni-Man. Gone.

The dimensional tech that could’ve pointed them home?

Gone.

Too many gaps. Too much coincidence.

He grit his teeth. “Townsville was easier.”