Project ROWDY 23

Brick’s finger locked upward before he said a single word and by the time the words left him, it was already obvious. “More signatures. Upper atmosphere.”

The metalhead jerked to attention like he hadn’t been expecting anything else, which meant he wasn’t thinking fast enough. The new guy’s metal face tilted skyward. “What? But we just—”

Brick was already gone.

Waiting was for people who could afford it. His feet fired off the water with the kind of force that shattered lake tension and turned the mirror-still surface into violent wake. The physics flared past skin temperature—drag coefficients, altitude bands, escape velocity—and none of it slowed him. 

It just parsed into motion.

Behind him, he could feel the trails. Not just hear the thunder, outright feel it even. Blue chasing fast and wide, too loose to vector right. Green kicking harder, climbing hard and breaking through rather than slicing the atmosphere.

But they were there. They were both there. They always were.

The sky peeled back layer by layer, each one thinner, colder, quieter. He counted the drop in pressure by the drag in his sinuses. Color faded, then breath, then noise. A second passed where it was just vacuum and momentum, and then they breached it. Space.

Brick halted hard, stabilized by instinct and retinal gyro twitch. The Earth curved beneath him like a marble held too close, too fragile. Stars pulsed quiet. There was nothing soft about any of it.

Then his eyes caught it.

His breath didn’t stop.

No, if anything, it compressed.

Pressure built tight behind his ribs, an ache that climbed his spine because his brain refused to commit to what it was seeing. The thing above the Earth wasn’t moving fast. It didn’t need to. It was already everywhere. Not a ship. Not a station. Not a fleet. It was just… wrong. Segments upon segments of green-metallic armor, each massive enough to house whole city blocks if not full neighborhoods, shifted slow like muscle under plated skin.

It coiled.

Not like a snake, not even like a worm—like something trying to fake coherence, like it was designed to be recognized but never finished the thought. Trying to pass for something a brain could hold.

He didn’t realize his brothers had caught up until their colors bracketed him, just outside his peripheral.

Butch’s fists clenched together. “Son of a bitch!”

Boomer’s blue eyes went as wide as they used to be when they were still newborns. “…b… big snake.”

The armored guy pulled up seconds late, jet exhaust too hot, flight curve too shallow, posture too stiff as he froze in space, body language giving off the sort of fear and quiet stillness that only came with seeing something the human mind couldn’t understand.

Back home, they called it meta-sickness. Brick had always called it weakness.

Until now, at least.

His helmet swiveled toward the thing like maybe seeing it twice would help. “Th-that’s… not Kresh. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Of course you haven’t, Brick thought. If you did, you probably wouldn’t be here to talk about it.

Below, the Earth kept spinning, slow and dumb and entirely too breakable against the space mecha version of Jormungaand up here. Brick tried to estimate the weight of what he was seeing, literally. His mental calculus stuttered and reloaded twice against the scale of it all before it coughed up a number that didn’t feel real. 

Ten to the twentieth. 

Cecil’s voice crackled in, radio-clear, emotionless. “Brick, I know you’re seeing what I’m seeing. GDA stelllites sensors are detecting a mass signature comparable to a small planetoid.” 

Brick’s jaw clicked shut so hard he tasted blood as his tooth cracked. He didn’t bother thinking about that, given that it would seal up in seconds. “Yeah, mass to the order of a sickening level of numbers. Designation and Threat Level?” Both went hand in hand, but Brick just wanted confirmation.

Cecil was quiet for a few seconds, before the man finally spoke, the director’s drawl unsurprisingly terse and tight. “No analyst needed for this one, boys. Might not be exactly the same sort of reality-altering scale as a Chronodile situation but this… we wouldn’t know the difference.”

Of course it was. Brick nearly felt his eye twitch. Of course this was worse than worst-case.

Cecil wasn’t done yet. “I hate to tell you this but we’ve got no other option other than you boys and Invincible available in the next half-hour. This isn’t a fight I can call on Savage Dragon for. Mighty Man is unreachable fighting flooding in Malaysia.” The GDA director let out a sigh that Brick knew was real and tired. “Omni-Man is supposedly trapped in another timeline till “three days from yesterday”, and no one on the Special Operations Strikeforce has your level of power. This is an extinction event.”

“Wait—” Boomer’s voice dragged into his ears, still nervous, still cautious, sounding like a kid peeking into the wrong room. “That’s, like… asteroid-wiper level, right? Like—asteroid, dinosaurs, bye-bye.”

Unsure of what else to say, and pretty sure any more explanation was unnecessary, Brick nodded slowly, letting his brother think that. “…sure.”

The Green Rowdyruff edged higher beside them, hands already lit with spiky glowing green life energy, forearms twitching as Butch was ready to shoot off barrages of ki like he usually did. His voice was rough, eager, stripped of any real question. “We hittin’ it or what?”

The thing shifted again, and Brick’s vision stuttered again as he watched it.

Not from speed.

No, from scale. It wasn’t the thing that moved. It was parts of it. 

Segments and hull-plates the size of citie unlatched like molted skin, snapped into symmetry, and started descending in coordinated silence. Shapes that looked like drones but couldn’t be—not at that size. Shapes that tracked straight for them.

They weren’t coming in to scout. They were closing like jaws.

Brick didn’t wait. “Spread. Pattern Theta!”

No debate. No time.

His brothers scattered away according to the pattern Boomer had cleverly nicknamed Flashbang Fracture —Boomer streaking sideways with a jolt of erratic light, Butch peeling off in a low arc that spun green sparks from his fists. The armored guy took a half-second too long, then adjusted, veering left with his boots still firing wide.

The first drone hit their altitude ten seconds later.

It moved like a warship and sliced through vacuum like it didn’t care about laws. One second it was behind them, next it was inches from Butch, slashing edge glowing so bright Brick’s HUD blinked static for a beat. Butch didn’t dodge. He drove forward, one hand cocked like a piston, and buried his fist straight into its face.

The impact lit the void. Metal cracked, sparking into fracture lines that arced back across the hull like ripples on broken glass. The drone staggered in space. 

Butch grinned sharp and nasty.

“Soft.”

Another came in hard from behind, then a third from the opposite flank. Brick saw the angle, screamed it into comms—“Three o’clock!”—but it was too late.

The drones collided on Butch like a clamp as the whole screen flash-glitched. Brick’s core temperature spiked.

Then a shudder ripped through the thing, a soundless burst of force following it. The plates slammed apart, spinning off their axes, and Butch erupted from the center, laughing with a ripped lip and metal shards in his shoulder.

“Soft,” he said again, more blood than voice as he licked his lips red. “All of ‘em.”

Brick pulled high, scanning flight patterns, watching the arc. They weren’t swarming. They weren’t even attacking. They were maneuvering, directing, trying to corral them. Every movement was efficient, coded, designed to force position. They were being herded.

He hissed as pressure behind his eyes flared. Brick’s vision tinted red and he let the beams fly at full force into the giant monster guiding them.

Two beams lanced from his pupils and tore through the drone ahead of him, slicing its flank open into molten lines and into the mothership. He tracked the cut, held it steady, poured power in until—

It sealed.

The metal healed over, folding shut like it was water surface tension instead of hull plating. Seamless. No evidence he’d touched it.

“It’s self-repairing,” he snapped.

The armored guy cut past him fast, suit shifting mid-turn, shoulder plating opening like a weaponized bloom. Twin cannons extended from his forearms and fired with surgical repetition, each pulse hammering one of the forward drones across its exposed joint. It jerked off-course, spiraling in tight tilt.

“Target the seams,” he barked. “Between armor plates. Weak points.”

Boomer shot past Brick’s left side at a diagonal angle, hands crackling, grinning like a sugar-high death wish.

“Like the elbows and knees?”

“Exactly!” the armored guy snapped back, already adjusting vector for a second shot.

Butch threw up his hands, a level of exasperation Brick had rarely seen from him. “IT HAS NO ELBOWS AND KNEES!”

One of the bigger drones rotated to face Boomer. It was long as a transit station and twice as wide. Spines unfolded along its edge. Its silhouette blotted stars.

Boomer didn’t flinch or veer.

Instead, his little brother grinned harder, chest vibrating from the charge building in his palms until it flickered in his eyes. The idiot wasn’t just going in. He was enjoying it.

Brick’s whole chest locked. “Boomer, fall back.”

Boomer wasn’t Butch, but that didn’t mean he knew how to listen. Not when it counted. Not when it was loud. Not when he got that look—wide-eyed, lip twitching, brain lagging behind the hit he was about to throw.

Boomer shot forward like he’d been launched from a cannon, no warning, no plan, just raw instinct sparking through that reckless little brain the second he saw an opening.

Crack. Brick barely clocked the angle before the drone’s entire frame lit up—blue veins of current ripping through its plates as Boomer slammed into it at hypersonic speed. Flash.

Then the light cracked apart, webs of current surged through the hull, and for a split second the thing twisted like it was feeling it. “HAHA!”

And there he was—Boomer tearing out the far end, trailing smoke from one shoulder and laughing like he’d just broken a window instead of a war machine. Contact.

His voice punched through the comms before Brick could reorient, static and adrenaline blaring into his ear. “Found a weak spot, Bricky! They don’t like lightning in their circuits! Not properly sealed off. Big one’s probably the same—”

The idiot coughed mid-shout, still flying, still climbing, still grinning through it, laughing like the dummy his little brother was.

Brick didn’t respond. Nothing to say to that.

The angle was already locked into muscle memory, his body pivoting mid-air as three more drones moved in formation around him, weaving into overlapping lanes designed to trap him between their bulk. His eyes flared hot—heat vision lancing through the air like a scalpel this time, tracing the seams Boomer had unintentionally exposed with his hypersonic lighnting tackle. The metal glowed white in a breath, then cracked under pressure as Brick dove under the first drone and came up fast, fist cocked, blood singing with kinetic overload.

Red lanced across the drone’s plating. Thin, surgical.

The metal flared white.

He dropped altitude, curled under the lead drone’s belly, and hit the glowing fault line like it owed him. Fist straight through. No hesitation. Elbow-deep in tech that sparked around his skin, screaming feedback through his gloves. He wrenched back and the drone split like pressure glass.

It was a clean kill, a useful lesson.

Very useful, considering here were more.

The field changed.

The drones weren’t behaving like garbage anymore.

He felt it before he processed it. A shift in rhythm, movement patterns tightening where they’d been loose, formations collapsing into tighter phalanxes. Their slop was gone.

He scanned for his brothers.

Butch was off-center, spiraling hard through a scatter group of the smaller ones—throwing fists like cannon shells, getting clipped, clipping harder. Brick caught him out of the corner of his vision tearing through a new pack, fists moving like sledgehammers tied to rockets, grinning sharp with every hit. One drone got too close, clipped his shoulder, and he responded by grabbing its arm and using it to slam another out of the sky. Boomer was lower, following a fraction of a second behind, cutting arcs through a swarm, arms sparking with static buildup as he tore through the densest cluster, weaving between claws and plates, leaving burnt-out wrecks like electric breadcrumbs. The idiot was still laughing.

Suit Guy —still too new, still lagging behind just enough to annoy— held his lane, flying cleaner than expected. Brick had written him off too soon. His suit shifted with each motion, panels adjusting, weapons unfolding and sliding back into place between strikes. Shields pulsed on reaction, absorbing scatter-fire before flickering out. His thrusters adjusted micro-angle by micro-angle, allowing for mid-flight rebalancing like the suit was reading his intent before he fully committed. It was smarter than he was. Maybe smarter than it should’ve been. But it was still in the fight, and that mattered more than whether Brick trusted it yet.

No matter what he thought, the thing was impressive. Modular. Fast. Not sloppy. And not dead yet.

But the drones weren’t on autopilot anymore.

They adjusted formation again. The battlefield was changing too fast to trust anything for long. The drones tightened again, this time into a formation that didn’t look like a combat line. It looked like a net, then a cordon, then a goddamn funnel—every movement pushing them toward a fixed central vector. Brick saw the new arrangement and understood it a second before it locked into place: a trap.

No, worse. A funnel.

Their spacing narrowed, vertical cuts collapsing into V-shaped press points. Nothing wide enough to punch through. Nothing open enough to bait. A killbox shaped like invitation.

And deeper in the dark, the real threat moved.

He’d thought the mass was still dormant—still too far out to factor. He’d been wrong. The coil unfurled. Not all of it. Just enough to show scale. Sections that had looked inert were glowing now. Tendrils unfolded like fingers stretching after a nap. Each one larger than most of the cities he’d lived in. The surface shimmered with the same energy the drones carried. Matching design. Matching rhythm.

He calculated angle, size, velocity. Ran it twice. Then once again just to be sure.

Not a ship.

Not just a ship.

A system.

“Concentrate fire!” he barked. “Same target, maximum output!”

He flagged the largest of the second-wave drones, already curving toward them like it wanted to be punched. His trajectory locked. He didn’t look behind him—he didn’t need to.

Butch was already moving. Boomer, too.

Suit Guy followed. Late, but not late enough to matter.

They hit together.

Brick led with heat vision, tight-focus, zero margin. Butch slammed into the flank like a railgun with arms. Boomer lit it from the inside out with a shockwave that burst through the plating in spiderweb fractures. Suit Guy’s cannons fired clean into the mouth.

The drone broke.

No debris. Just vapor and twist.

“Again.”

The next one dropped.

Then another.

They found rhythm. Held it. Four angles. Four strikes. Tactical violence. He didn’t allow himself to feel it. He let the system run.

Until it didn’t.

The mothership snapped.

One of the tendrils came down—not slow, not ponderous like something that size should move. Fast. Intentional. Surgical. It caught their formation clean, not slapping them, but knifing—cutting vectors, splitting momentum.

Brick lost balance. Tumbled into vacuum, torque spiraling through his spine. Vision stuttered. He righted himself. Checked spacing. They’d been scattered.

Baited.

The drones weren’t attacking now. They were enclosing.

He looked down.

At the center of the coil, something had opened. A circle. Ringed in those same segmented plates—but set like teeth. Rotating teeth. Glowing inside.

Not a hangar. Not a launch bay. A mouth.

A goddamn mouth.

“It’s trying to consume us,” the suit said, voice sharp in Brick’s ear. “The maw—it’s funneling us—”

Brick was already calling it in. “Cecil. It’s opening for—”

“We see it,” Cecil snapped. “Satellites tracking. Every GDA node is on alert. We’ve got nothing else in the field, no assets on range that can match your sheer powerscale and wouldn’t be pasted in seconds. It’s you three… and your friend.”

Of course it is.

Pressure started in Brick’s throat and sank to his gut. He didn’t name it, pushing it down as far as he could. Nothing productive came from naming problems you couldn’t kill.

Suit Guy pulled alongside him, jets whispering into position. “We need to blind it. Target its sensory network. If we can’t kill it—”

“Where?”

“Those glowing nodes. Could be optics. No confirmation.”

Brick scanned, micro-and-eagle vision working in tandem as he confirmed visual consistency. Clusters of green-lit bulbs near the forward curl. Dozens. Maybe hundreds. Enough to see everything.

“Trinity! New targets!” He pinged three and dumped the coordinates through the GDA net.

His brothers didn’t respond. They didn’t have to.

Suit Guy hovered mid-lag, flickers of hesitation in his output timing. “I’ve got tech that might—”

“Then shut the fuck up and use it,” Brick snapped, already moving.

Beside him, the suit unfolded. Panels cracked open across the shoulders and back, extending alongside with launchers and a cannon expanded from under the right arm as shield arrays folded wide like turbine fins. Tracking systems shifted to wide-sweep mode as microdrones deployed like metallic pollen from a side vent.

Brick didn’t look back. That thing can’t be human-make.

The first node hit like a wall, but Brick didn’t slow. He hit it again. Then again. Force ramped behind every strike, pressure feedback coiling up his arm like live wire, but he didn’t stop. Couldn’t. The alien alloy cracked at the edges, flexed around his fist like it was trying to hold form, like it knew it wasn’t supposed to break. There were forcefields layered under it, some kind of reactive kinetic dampening—he could feel the resistance in the vibration cycling up his bones. Didn’t matter. He kept going.

By the fourth hit, the casing deformed inward. By the fifth, plasma leaked out. By the sixth, he wasn’t punching anymore. He was excavating. Tearing through armor, past plating, into whatever counted as ocular structure for something that shouldn’t have eyes in the first place.

Behind him, Butch slammed into his own node like a meteor had picked a direction and just committed. No subtlety, no sequence—just green-flared fists and bodyweight weaponized into collision. The whole segment blew out on contact, shrapnel chunking into nearby plates as the casing shattered. One shard spun past Brick’s head, still glowing. He didn’t flinch.

“BOOM!” Butch barked through the comms, giddy like a kid snapping action figures in half. “BOOM!”

No follow-up. He was already moving to the next.

Boomer’s vector curved lower. He didn’t engage direct—he built charge. Palms pressed, sparks dancing, static scream climbing as the orb between his hands swelled until it dwarfed his frame. It surged electric-white, then he let it fly, laugh cracking on the upswing as it left his fingers.

It detonated across a full surface section. Lightning webbed across the node’s skin, surged through seams, leapt to adjacent panels like a virus. The whole area shorted hard, blew out with a blink. Sparks spilled for a full kilometer.

“Did you see that?!” Boomer shouted, voice pitching up like it couldn’t decide whether to brag or break. “That was—ten city blocks worth! All at once!”

Brick didn’t answer. Filed it. Moved on. His node finally gave way with a collapsing snap and a gust of vapor that left his fists wet with coolant. He wiped it against his sleeve, already shifting trajectory.

Then the suit fired.

He felt it more than heard it—some ripple in the background noise of space, a difference in vibration. It made him turn, made him register what he shouldn’t have paused for. The chestplate on the armored guy split open mid-glide, and a cylinder emerged like a spine unfolding. Then light. Bright and focused, but flat, tight, surgical.

The beam hit the node. Didn’t scorch it. Didn’t dent it. Just passed through like it belonged there—and then the node collapsed. Not shattered. Imploded. Plates turned inward like lungs deflating. Gone.

Brick blinked.

“What was that?” he snapped, swinging around.

“Antimatter warhead,” Suit Guy replied, voice strained like his suit had to steal something to pull it off. “Small yield. Only got three more. They’re… not easy to generate.”

Useful, Brick thought, already marking possible follow-ups.

The next few minutes turned into rhythm—move, strike, pivot, track. Node after node went offline. Their blows carried further. The serpent’s movement grew slower, less coordinated. Brick tracked energy dispersal rates through the mothership’s upper layers and confirmed—damage was stacking. It wasn’t blind yet, but it was hurting.

But hurting didn’t mean helpless.

The drones changed again. Not formation. Function. They weren’t intercepting anymore. They were suiciding. Diving full-speed into trajectories that put them directly into Brick’s path, Boomer’s path, Butch’s—then triggering micro-detonations mid-contact. Enough to knock them off course. Delay. Distract.

Brick adjusted mid-dodge, firing off a counterburst to destabilize a suicide drone before it clipped his jawline. The explosion still rocked him, pushed him half a meter sideways. He corrected, growled low in his throat, didn’t say a word.

Below, more plates moved. Nodes that had been destroyed were regenerating. Slower than they could break them, but not slow enough.

“It’s a holding pattern,” Brick muttered, mostly to himself. “We’re not making enough progress.”

The suit pulled up alongside him, armor dented, singed across one shoulder. “Got any better ideas?”

Brick scanned. Mapped energy readings. Drones. Openings. The mouth.

“We hit the control system,” he said. “Central processing. Nerve center. Whatever runs this thing.”

“And that is…” Butch raised an eyebrow. “where?”

“Near the maw. Highest energy readout on the field. That’s where it’s running hot.”

Suit Guy hesitated. “You want us to go into the thing that’s trying to eat us?”

Brick didn’t look at him. “You got a better target?”

Brick flipped comm channels. “Trinity. New approach vector. We’re hitting the core brain.”

“The what now?” Boomer said, jittery with residual charge.

“The brain!” Brick barked. “Near the mouth. Highest output. We hit it together. Max force.”

Butch’s laugh barreled through the line like it’d been waiting. “Finally! I was gettin’ bored with these little fish!”

They regrouped without being told. Formation tightening as they angled down, toward the mouth—toward the spiral of crushing plates that had only widened, stretching now into something that looked too deliberate, too mechanical to be a digestive system but too violent not to be.

Grinders moved in clockwise patterns. Each one could chew a building like candy. One wrong step—

“Direct approach is suicide,” Suit Guy cut in. “We’ll be torn apart before we breach the outer ring.”

Brick scanned for options as drones rotated in coverage spirals. One pass left a blind angle. A gap.

“There,” he said. “Right edge of the field. Fifteen-second opening.”

“That’s cutting it close,” the suit warned.

Finally, Brick shot him a dirty look, irritated at the constant backtalk. “You got something better, suit guy?”

Suit Guy had nothing to say.

“Trinity, formation gamma.” Brick locked trajectory as he turned back towards his brothers. “We punch through on my mark. Suit Guy, with me.”

“Name’s Tech—”

Brick didn’t care.

He dropped, full speed. His brothers fell in beside him. The suit followed behind, heat trails flaring white-blue behind his shoulders.

The gap approached. Drones pivoted. Timing narrowed.

Brick’s vision narrowed with it. “NOW!”