Project ROWDY II: Extra I

(This is an extra chapter set right after interlude. It’s not meant to be part of the story because it would fuck the pacing of this arc so it’s an extra chapter you get.)

Three boys in jumpsuits hung suspended against a sky bleeding alien fire, a chunk of the city behind them cracked and wrecked by the purple snarling bastards floating above them. Brick’s fist clenched as heat distortion wavered off his knuckles. Butch pumped his arms like they were shotguns, concrete dust falling from his jacket. Boomer just cracked his neck.

Plasma bolts froze from their perspective, superheated death hanging motionless in the split-second before chaos.

“ROWDYRUFFS!” Red burned.

“ROLL!” Blue beamed.

“OUT!” Green flared.

Then time snapped forward as three technicolor auras tore across the skies of Washington, DC.

The angriest Rowdyruff grabbed the nearest power-armored brute, and used its own momentum to ragdoll it through Lincoln’s marble steps. Stone exploded, shrapnel flying like a caveman’s idea of a hand grenade. 

Boomer springboarded off the debris cloud, tornado-heel connecting with a ship cockpit; metal shrieking as it folded around his boot. The drive didn’t stop, electrical energy surging to life around his foot as he continued the motion. The ship didn’t stop either, hurtling through the air at hypersonic speeds and taking down a half-dozen of its brothers in a firework show worthy of the day. 

Brick was a different beast to his brothers; the reddest of them all shoulder-rolling under incoming fire, palm-strike to a drone that arced too close as he threaded the world’s deadliest needle through ship after ship.

Barely twenty seconds after they started, they were a streak across the Atlantic at a Mach number that should have lit the sky aflame. Three contrails—red, blue, green—cut through cloud cover with all the resistance of sheet cake against a butcher’s knife before slamming into London’s skyline.

Boomer vaulted a double-decker’s roof, split-kick shearing a skimmer’s wing clean through. The craft tumbled; Brick redirected its fall with a forearm parry, turning metal death into alien-crushing artillery. Butch ripped a lamp post from its moorings, javelin-toss through another engine block.

The Tower Bridge shuddered as Butch belly-to-back suplexed a mech into its span, steel groaning and asphalt rippling. Boomer played hopscotch across rooftops, three kicks in one blur that left three alien heads spinning in different directions. Brick slid inside a crowd of several armored hulks, knife hands worthy of Omni-Man making quick work of the threats.

What was left of Big Ben witnessed modern warfare as Butch hurled a gunship skyward, massive hands finding purchase in twisted metal. Boomer met it mid-air, corkscrew-kick wrapped in crackling electricity. The detonation painted the sky orange, shockwaves rolling across the.

Brick hovered, eyes bleeding red-hot. Grains of crushed gravel hung in the air around him,  each one suspended in the moment before annihilation.

The world slammed forward as heat vision carved perfect lines through twin heavy carriers, slag raining molten metal rivulets on the streets below.

Butch bull-rushed an alien warlord out of a museum, shoulder-skirting a sandstone column hauled from Egypt after outlasting Napoleon’s guns. His brother in blue feinted high in the sky, dropped low, and sweeped his legs into an axe-kick with an afterimage stutter that left a half-dozen of him replicated in blue as he tore through a half-dozen drones. Brick parried a spear thrust with one arm, and flanked his attackers with speed they couldn’t track. In a red flash, the leader of the trio delivered a three-beat combination—body, body, head—repeated a dozen times that left nothing to chance and three platoons dead .

Alien HUDs flickered with retreat protocols in languages that had no words for mercy.

But mercy wasn’t on the menu.

Boomer blast-stepped forward, knee connecting with the chestplate of an enhanced power-armored invader hard enough to dent it inward and send the enemy flyng. Butch caught the alien before its flight systems could recover, and cackled at the top of his lungs before he ended the alien with an unnecessary spinebuster that sent shudders across the streets of London. 

Boomer popped vertical, and launched a cyclone-roundhouse that caved a ship in half; Butch’s short-range clothesline decapitated the hydraulics of three mechs in sequence. Brick ghost-stepped through crossfire, and redirected a railgun shot so it bisected the enemy’s own skimmer.

A commander in power armor charged, screaming battle cries in a language built for intimidation. Brick barely turned, open-hand counter with hip drive that sent helmet and skull pinwheeling into the dunes. The body stood for half a heartbeat, processing its own death, then collapsed.

Hong Kong’s skyline erupted in neon-drenched chaos, alien cruisers weaving between towers that bled light into smoke-thick air. Purple energy carved molten scars through architecture that had risen from nothing into everything.

Three figures hovering back-to-back in the eye of their own storm, eyes blazing—red fire, electric blue, toxic green. Heat vision lanced outward in a three-hundred-sixty-degree blaze of glory; raw, unyielding cauterizing energy that torched drones, bisected alien bodies and melted ships mid-flight. The vortex spun faster, tighter, building pressure like a wound spring.

Then it exploded.

Brick used the outward momentum to drop into street-level brutality, movements pure raw martial efficiency. The eldest Rowdyruff slid under the legs of a four-armed hulk, a single focused fist to a knee splitting flesh, bone and muscle all at once. The alien collapsed, screaming in its language, but its closest brother wouldn’t join it; Brick’s elbow was already finding the next throat, red-hot breath venting steam between strikes.

Boomer rode the updraft into skimmer formation’s heart, a blue human pinball ricocheting off hulls. Each lightning-amped kick was an impact that cracked cockpits, destabilized flight patterns, sent craft spinning into neon signs that exploded in showers of sparks and thick purple alien blood.

Butch plowed headfirst into the largest cruiser, a green meteor driving it sideways through the upper floors of an unfortunate skyscraper. 

Not punching, not kicking—tackling.

Butch wasn’t his brothers and he couldn’t help but slam the thing through reinforced steel and shattered glass, grin on his face so wide it would have cracked a normal person’s jaw.

Desert air replaced neon-soaked humidity as the Boys streaked back and forth across continents.

Cairo materialized around a massive tentacled warship rising from the Nile’s murky depths, its shadow falling over a city that had watched empires die. Tri-colored contrails carved through the desert sky as three figures ascended to meet an extrasolar nightmare with raw earthborn violence.

Butch was laughing again, a wild sound that probably would make any hyena in range look to the sky. He grabbed one ship’s massive tentacle, still cackling like a demon as he ripped it free at the joint. The severed techno-organic limb was still twitching, the thing dripping purple alien ichor as the Green Rowdyruff swung it like a club into the main viewport.

The enemy didn’t even have time to scream.

Brick and Boomer moved in perfect synchronization. Heat vision carved a precise glowing circle around the primary power core, a molten outline that pulsed with contained destruction. Boomer followed without hesitating for even a second, a lightning bolt the size of a telephone pole striking through the ship.

Blue-white light turned desert night to artificial day, the warship imploding in a matter of seconds. Nothing to keep it together, its metal frame began to sag, collapsing inwards as it fell and crashed, sinking beneath the Nile’s surface. 

With the desert sky clear of invaders, the boys surged out.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Moscow’s frozen skyline cracked under alien drop pods descending through gray snow, jagged lines tearing winter sky apart. The Red Square’s cobblestones shattered under Trinity’s impact, a wave of massive shock troopers standing at shoulder height with polar bears charging right at them through crystalline air.

Boomer zipped through the ranks of the invasion force, a blue whirlwind using troopers’ bodies as springboards. A grin on his face, he launched skyward, and came down a half-breath later with lightning-fast axe kicks that shattered helmets, armor and bodies alike; all the above spinning through air crystallized with his own electrical discharge.

Butch was a green battering ram meeting a charge head-on, his shoulder connecting with the lead troopers at freight train velocity. Roaring, he didn’t stop. No, he just plowed through formation after formation, sending aliens flying like bowling pins, momentum carrying him even when he could barely see.

The city jerked and sputtered with sonic booms, blows stuttering on impacts that sent shockwaves through everything.

Snow turned to slush. Slush turned to steam. Steam turned to air under fire, force and fury.

As reports crackled through their comms, the three boys looked at each other. Their heads jerked down in a firm nod, and the air split with tri-neon trails as they each went a different direction.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Taipei was under fire, steel melting and buildings screaming, as Butch Mojo elbow-dropped through the hull of a command ship. The hyperpowered preteen rode the wreckage down through cloud cover, the ship’s tentacles in his tight grip as he steered the dying engines like a massive limping horse, slamming it through a dozen others. 

Alien metal gave way as he surfed fire and twisted inhuman material toward earth that rushed up to meet him at terminal velocity.

The explosion shattered windows for three blocks around.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Boomer blurred blue up and down the sides of the Tokyo Skytree, lightning-charged feet leaving molten glass trails in his wake as he skated across it, dodging plasma blasts and returning fire of his own. 

Each step was an electrical discharge, each kick enough to detonate drone swarms like massive mosquito swatters. Glass cascaded all around him in crystalline waterfalls, sparks painting geometric patterns across the face of the tower. 

He was the nicest Rowdyruff, but that wasn’t saying much.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Ground-level chaos rocked the streets of the Jung District as Brick redirected plasma blasts with  casual open-handed slaps, kinetic force reversing trajectory back into alien battle lines. The backfire explosion shattered the windows of a previously untouched McDonalds, sending golden arches spinning through air thick with smoke. 

Armored mechs burst from the smoke, a dozen of them erupting from the bellies of downed ships like newborns, slick with thick indigo liquid that dripped from all the aliens and most of their tech like easy-flowing slime.

Brick clicked his tongue.

It sounded like a match being lit.

Fire tore from his mouth, a rip-roaring torrent of flame with the force of a battering ram.

Three seconds later, there were no more walker mechs left to cause mayhem in the streets of Seoul.

Just one boy.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Momentum carried them west and they all met above the skies of Los Angeles.

The letters of the white Hollywood sign were burning, each massive pyre a white-hot testament to alien target practice. One four-legged walker was still using the iconic sign for artillery training, legs adjusting elevation with hydraulic precision while its main cannon charged for another volley.

A green comet landed on the walker’s head with enough force to flatten plating designed to survive re-entry. Butch burst out of the impact crater, green trail rocketing toward the next.

His hands gripped the main housing of another mech’s cannon, a slight grunt leaving him as he tore free weapon systems that weighed as much as a small house. Servo cables snapped and purple hydraulic fluid sprayed in pressurized arcs across a line of walkers at the bottom of the hills.

Butch didn’t mind.

The Rowdyruff shoved the cannon barrel into another walker’s cockpit, metal grinding against metal as a grin spread across his face.

Boomer provided a spark—a single playful lightning bolt that ignited a nearby power cell with surgical precision. Three walkers exploded, hydraulic fluid igniting with violent flames that threatened to spread into still-standing homes until Brick took control.

Those same flames launched skyward, a half-dozen drones and a still-standing ship lanced through with tightly controlled pyrokinetic lances, and c

In a matter of seconds, the Hollywood Hills became a cleanup operation, three different approaches leading to the same violent conclusion.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Low Earth orbit burned with tri-colored fury as the three of them streaked toward a city-sized behemoth of dark metal and pulsating purple pustules. The star-scattered void hung around them as a swarm of smaller craft poured from hangar bays, bleeding from wounds in alien architecture on a direct path toward their planet.

They didn’t stop for a single second, all three of the boys aiming themselves right at the invasion’s beating heart, auras burning bright enough to shine like triple suns.

Brick took point as always, heat from his eyes a searing beam that carved aside metal and sent organic components bubbling. Ships fell apart as the red lance swept left, bisecting the spines of a dozen cruisers; it swept right, and a squadron of fighters detonated in a chain reaction, fuel cells painting vacuum orange.

Boomer zipped through chaos, a sparking blue comet threading between hostile fire while barfing lightning with less grace than simply throwing it. 

But Boomer wanted his hands free.

Lightning arced ship to ship, an electrical web connecting power cores that overloaded in sequence. One bolt, five explosions; physics became his weapon as he turned enemy proximity into tactical advantage. He corkscrewed through the debris field, each spin generating an electromagnetic pulse that fried navigation systems, and left alien craft spinning blind.

Butch was a green battering ram, zero-gravity brawler who grabbed the destroyer’s prow and used momentum to swing the entire vessel into its wingman. Hull met hull at velocities that turned starship-grade armor into expanding gas clouds. Bare hands tore through bulkheads designed to withstand asteroid impacts, strength making mockery of engineering principles while vacuum carried screams no one could hear.

The first wave shattered. The second wave emerged from the mothership’s deeper bays—heavier craft, better shielding, coordinated formations that spoke of tactical adaptation.

They moved as a three-headed dragon of destructive energy, movements blurring color and light across star-scattered battlefield. The alien fleet broke before coordinated assault, organized invasion becoming a panicked retreat as ships scattered toward deep space with drives overheating from desperate acceleration.

But mothership remained.

Organic sections pulsed with bioluminescent fury while mechanical weapons systems swiveled to track targets that moved too fast for conventional targeting. Main cannon charged, energy signature visible from lunar orbit as power built toward planet-killing discharge.

Trinity converged.

In moments, the mothership’s hull was breached, atmosphere venting from the main cannon in crystalline geysers that froze instantly in vacuum. Explosions tore across the main ship, the continent-cracking shot sent back with nowhere to go. 

Engines failed one by one, massive vessel listing as gravity wells shifted around dying power cores. Internal explosions bloomed through transparent sections, showing organic matter burning while mechanical systems collapsed in cascade failure.

Remaining ships turned, fled, disappeared into infinite black as faster-than-light drives engaged in retreat. Last but not least, the mothership drifted past, a dark hulk listing past the moon with no way to attack and almost no way to defend.

The boys stared, waiting till it vanished from sight.

Then they turned, a tri-colored star against infinite black streaking toward the atmosphere in three lines of light that carved victory across Earth’s curve.