Project Rowdy II – Interlude IV

The sky had turned the color of infected wounds, pink-orange bruise over a city that used to know blue. Smoke mixed alien tech-fires with burning gasoline; the air tasted like copper and ozone. Concrete dust settled on everything – robots, monsters, capes, ordinary people clutching rifles – all breathing the same poisoned atmosphere.

Robot’s HUD painted trajectory lines across his vision, calculating attrition rates that spelled extinction in clean mathematics. The data was unambiguous. “This is not going well,” he announced, voice stripped to operational minimum.

Twenty feet away, Immortal’s fist disappeared wrist-deep through purple skull. Bone and cartilage collapsed around his knuckles with the wet sound of fruit hitting pavement. “You can say that again.”

Invincible wrapped a massive alien’s weapon strap around its throat, boots planted on a sedan’s crumpled hood as he twisted. The superhuman creature’s eyes bulged, six arms scrabbling at the improvised garrote. It was different than most of the others of its kind, bigger, bulkier, superhuman while most of the others were squishy.

But it was no Viltrumite and nothing Mark felt like showing mercy to. Even still, he hated the choking sounds, hated the way their faces turned darker purple.

It didn’t stop him from pulling until it came loose in a spray of purple.

“They’re not that tough,” he said, breath coming easy between efforts, “but they’re still everywhere.” His elbow found another alien’s windpipe with practiced efficiency. “Every time we take one down, three more show up. At this rate, they’re going to beat us.”

“That is not an option.” Immortal’s voice carried the finality of stone tablets, ancient certainty that had outlasted empires. “We fight or we die!”

Two blocks over, rubble exploded outward in a perfect sphere. The shockwave rolled through the street, staggering everyone except Monster Girl, who used a burning alien tank as stepping stone. A single slap opened an alien from sternum to spine; and she hurled the halves in opposite directions without breaking stride. 

The rumbling that emerged from her throat might have been laughter if laughter could crack foundations. “YOU’RE ALL GONNA DIE!”

Rex vaulted a police cruiser’s hood, charges already palmed and armed. “Watch me nuke ‘em first!” 

“I’ve got a fucking date this week.” Monster Girl’s words ground out between serrated teeth, each syllable like crushed stone from her troll mouth. A bone fragment lodged in her jaw; she tongued it free and brought her foot down on the next alien crawling away, impact hard enough to spider the asphalt. “You gonna drag me down, boom boy?”

“Fuck no!” The former GDA assasin turned teenage hero cackled through a pair of broken goggles. “No giving up here!” His voice spiked with manic energy as he flicked another handful of explosives like deadly confetti into a cluster of aliens. The detonations painted the street in overlapping orange blooms. “Either there’s way too much at stake or I’m too stubborn to care which.”

Donald’s boots hit the curb like a launch sequence; thrusters flared silver-hot from his heels before retracting into flesh that wasn’t entirely flesh. His forearm split along seams that shouldn’t exist, multi-barrel assembly emerging as shoulder plating knitted into defensive configuration. He slid into formation beside Brit and Britney, three government assets filling the street with coordinated fire.

“Lasers high, right flank,” he reported, voice carrying that briefing-room precision even as plasma vented from his arm-mounted cannon. Three alien heads disappeared in clean circles of cauterized tissue.

Brit’s GDA-made energy cannon spoke in measured cadence, each shot placed with the unhurried confidence of someone who’d been killing professionally for over a century. “Copy that. Britney, Hit the cluster over by the overpass.”

“Already on it, old man.” Her voice rolled out lazy as summer heat, bourbon-smooth even as she drove her fist through an alien’s chest with enough force to kill the three behind it.

The battle raged across the entire city of Baltimore, heroes and monsters and ordinary humans all feeding the same grinding machine of survival. Somewhere above, more ships darkened the sky.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Britney planted her feet and turned physics into a personal grudge. The white-haired agent lifted a hundred tons of crushed tank like it owed her money, muscles barely registering the strain. She hurled it with casual malice; the projectile bisected three aliens before embedding itself in a storefront that had been selling insurance an hour ago.

One alien thought it could test her with a spear thrust. The point was needle-keen, sharp enough to draw a bead of blood along her lifeline before she caught the shaft and squeezed. Metal screamed and folded; the wielder’s arm followed the weapon into geometric impossibility.

“Cute,” she drawled, then backhanded the alien’s skull into mist.

Brit walked through laser fire and blade work like a man late for an appointment that wouldn’t wait. Energy weapons smoked uselessly against his chest; edged weapons learned regret on contact with his forearms. He drove his fist through an alien mouth, pulled it back clean, and moved on without breaking stride.

“You thinking about something?” he asked Donald, voice carrying that bone-dry register that made small talk sound existential.

“How many are left after we win,” Donald replied, shoulder cannon cycling through targeting solutions as he spoke.

Three blocks over, Immortal flipped a city bus like a coin, squishing a ray of armed purple invaders into nothing but viscera and gore. A split-second later, his hand closed around an alien cranium and, moving on nothing but long-dead memory and Celtic instinct, used the creature’s spine like a weapon against its kin until bone became paste.

Finding he liked it, the old caveman repeated the process because ancient fury demanded thorough work.

“Enough!” The word rang with anger three blocks away as Invincible clapped his hands together, shockwave rippling outward in a perfect arc. Every alien within fifty feet learned about pressure differentials the hard way as they flew a dozen feet at least, all of them bleeding from eyes and ears as they hit concrete already dead.

Above them, Bulletproof tore through the drone formations with methodical precision, each impact ringing like a struck bell. His voice cut through the chaos with that Baltimore-tinged confidence: “Y’all stay down there and handle ground game. I got the sky locked.”

Invincible shot skyward and streaked past in the opposite direction, knee connecting with a drone’s hull hard enough to split it lengthwise. He drilled through the next formation like a thrown spear, clearing airspace with brutal efficiency. “We’ll beat them,” he said, words clipped between controlled breaths. “We always do. We have to.”

A woman’s scream pierced the combat noise from behind an overturned SUV. Rex heard it without taking his eyes off the alien trying to flank him; he tossed a charge blind over his hip, and the SUV’s undercarriage rang like a funeral bell as the creature underneath stopped moving permanently.

Robot’s micro-drones tracked the same civilian, overlay painting escape routes in real-time. “Corridor open,” he announced with mechanical precision. “Move her through.”

Atom Eve’s blasts carved pink-edged holes through alien ranks, each burst surgical in its destruction. “She’s good!” The words carried a certain warmth that didn’t fit the edge in her voice, edge only sharpening as she vaporized another squad. “Get her clear!”

Monster Girl slapped two aliens into the bank’s pillars with enough force to crater the marble, the things splattering like flies on a windshield. They stuck for a moment before gravity remembered its job. “Go,” she rumbled at the frozen shuddering civilian. “I said, go!”

The woman ran with hands over her head, as if that would stop light-speed weapons or falling debris.

A beam lanced down from a skimmer, clean as a surgical laser. Donald tilted his shoulder into it; reactive plating flared white-hot, lattice structure flexing to dissipate the energy. The beam died with an electronic whine, and several bisected ships died with it.

“Topside,” he said, and Britney was already moving.

She climbed the nearest building by punching handholds in reinforced concrete, and the skimmer pivoted to rake her position. She leapt off and the ship found nothing but empty air.

Her bare feet clambered atop the bio-metal, Britney already on top of it and regretting it as her feet sunk into it the squishy-hard material. “The things I do for my country.” She bent down, fingers piercing into the hull. An instant later, her back arched as she leveraged impossible strength against alien engineering.

The craft bucked, the entire thing screaming it’s end in a language made of stressed metal and failing systems. She ripped it free of its own propulsion mounts, swung it like an oversized club, and launched it into its wingman. Both vehicles bloomed into orange flowers against the darkening, smoke-filled sky.

“That’s two,” she said into the comm, breathing steady despite the exertion. Her brand-new blouse had already lost half of its silver buttons and Agent Britney Penrose found herself regretting that she chose today to wear her nicest bra. “Lob more my way, Donny.”

“Please don’t call me by my son’s nickname.”

She leapt off a rooftop and crashed into another alien, smiling as she stared at her reflection in the panicked purple fucker’s windshield. “Boost my expense account,” A pale arm burst through the glass and the panic came to a messy end, “and we got a deal.”

Donald’s arms reconfigured with mechanical precision, forearm plating sliding apart to reveal dual nozzles that hissed with pressurized promise. The flamethrower burst painted the entire street in temperatures that turned alien biology into educational demonstrations of combustion theory. Purple flesh blistered, then charred, then ceased being anything recognizable as formerly living.

“Invincible! We have a situation near the bay!” His voice carried that briefing-room authority even as he roasted a dozen hostiles. “Oversized ship rising from the ocean. Eliminate it!”

“On it.” Invincible was already airborne, already wrenching a skimmer by its wing assembly. The beam cannon hit him full in the face; he didn’t blink, didn’t slow, just burst forward with controlled fury. A heartbeat later, the command ship’s death bloomed orange against the horizon, visible from miles away as it listed and dropped like a falling mountain.

Immortal landed beside them with enough force to make Brit stumble back, the undying hero snapping an arm out in a lethal lariat to half a dozen of the invaders. “They’re learning,” he said, voice carrying distaste that made Donald remember this man was a Roman Emperor at one point. “I hate when they learn.”

“They’re dying is what they’re doing.” Brit’s rifle had been dead for an hour, its power cell drained by sustained fire. He snapped off a purple arm at the shoulder joint, used it to bludgeon another alien into pulp, then discarded the improvised weapon when the bone cracked. “Who cares if they learn?”

Donald’s threat overlay painted targets in descending priority. He selected the cluster with the highest heat signature, stepped into optimal firing position, and reconfigured again. Barrel shortened, bore widened, the discharge mechanism shifting from sustained burn to concentrated impact. The shot left his arm with a bell-note thud instead of a crack. The front rank of aliens folded as if gravity had suddenly become personal.

“Ammo?” Brit asked, tone carrying more curiosity than concern.

“I don’t have ammo,” Donald replied, venting excess waste in white plumes that looked like winter breath. “I have controlled fusion reactions.”

Brit made a face even as he crushed a skull. “Eh?”

His arms launched another blast of raw force that cooked another line on its path high into the sky. “Heat.”

Robot’s voice thinned across the comm network, bandwidth compressed by tactical processing demands. “Incoming on the east approach. Larger bodies. Unknown physiology.”

The street’s attention pivoted like a searchlight.

New contacts emerged through the smoke wall, taller and broader than the standard infiltration units. Massive things with muscles modified to the point of unusability, eyes set too wide, and tusks like a mammoth. Even from a couple dozen feet away, they stunk like a garbage pile in Arizona and the liquid that dripped off their bulging bulbous heads was thicker than engine oil. The lead specimen bared teeth like industrial saw blades and fired a test shot at Britney’s position.

The beam moved fast. She moved faster, bursting forward with all her strength.

Her hand closed around coherent light as if photons were something you could grip, palm blistering in ways that would have mattered to someone with normal pain receptors. Lunging forward before the big guy could move, she yanked the shooter toward her with its own weapon, then introduced her forehead to its visor. The helmet left early. 

The skull left late, in several directions.

Invincible streaked back into the formation, shoulders squared with the determination he’d been carrying in the last few weeks of leaving the hospital. “Robot, tell me something encouraging.”

“Our tactical position remains favorable,” Robot replied with mechanical precision. “However, I have updated the casualty projections. The cost curve remains unacceptable.”

“That’s not really encouraging,” Invincible said, then became a blue-and-yellow blur through the first hulk’s knee joints. Bone splintered; the creature toppled like a felled tree.

Brit met the second hulk with the same expression he’d worn all day. The alien swung a halberd that whistled through air thick with smoke and blood. Brit caught the pole mid-swing, leaned into the momentum, and redirected the creature through the storefront behind him. The building’s facade crumbled; the alien didn’t emerge.

Donald engaged his thrusters.

Pressure valves opened at his ankles, silver fire blooming as he rose to shoulder height with the remaining hulks. The street dipped under the thrust displacement. He rotated his cannon assembly ninety degrees, painted their collar sections with a sustained stream that turned alien armor into molten ceramic. Three hulks dropped in sequence, necks cauterized clean through.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Bodies opened under concentrated fire. Bodies flew through storefront windows. Bodies fell into the growing pile of purple meat that used to be an invasion force. Hours of sustained combat had carved exhaustion into even superhuman frames, but the line held.

Invincible slid through a writhing mass of alien limbs, spotted a GDA trooper pinned under a toppled traffic light, and adjusted his trajectory mid-flight. He heaved the aluminum pole, shoved the man toward a field medic who had no idea how either of them had gotten there, then hurled the makeshift spear into a skimmer that was about to turn medical personnel into crater decorations.

He touched down beside Donald, scanning the skyline for the next wave of bad news. Donald’s face carried that particular expression of a man pretending not to be in pain because the pain receptors were more suggestion than requirement. “How long have we been at this?”

Donald’s arm cycled through another firing sequence, vented excess heat, then cycled again. Steam rose from the cooling vents in his forearm. “Long enough.”

Too long hung in the smoke-thick air between them, unspoken but understood.

Immortal bull-rushed an alien hulk with the casual violence of someone who’d perfected the art over centuries. His dropkick carried them both through three more hostiles; he rode the collision like a surfboard, laughing without showing teeth. 

Brit examined an alien helmet with the curiosity of a man who collected trophies from every war he’d survived. Almost gentle, he compressed the metal to a flat sheet with a single squeeze and let it fall. Just another piece of debris in a city learning what urban warfare really meant.

The wave finally hesitated.

Not by much, not for long, but the rhythm broke. A half-second stutter where advancing bodies questioned whether forward was still a viable direction. Robot’s probability matrices flickered green for the first time in hours. He rerouted fire teams to exploit the opening.

“Now,” he said, voice maintaining that mechanical precision even as his teenage operator’s adrenaline spiked inside the armor. “We press.”

Britney pressed her shoulder into a hulk’s chest, located the wall behind it with the creature’s spine, and introduced them at high velocity. Masonry powdered; the hulk discovered that sitting down for the rest of its life was a moot point when life ended abruptly.

Rex scaled three broken alien faces to gain line of sight, flicked his final cluster of charges with theatrical precision, then threw both arms wide. “Ta-da!” he announced to the empty air, then ducked as Monster Girl lobbed a severed torso over his head.

But it was Invincible who carried the moment forward.

He moved faster now, hit deeper, each punch opening space that hadn’t existed seconds before. His lungs burned; copper and ozone coated his tongue. The taste of his own limits, but limits were suggestions when people were counting on him. Each step forward cost three more to pay, but for the first time since the sky had turned the color of puke, the street looked like it might belong to Earth again.

His fists carved through alien armor with nothing but raw focus. No wasted motion, no unnecessary force; just unbroken determination. Purple ichor painted his knuckles, his chest, the broken pavement beneath his boots. The math was simple: they kept coming, he kept breaking them, and eventually one side would run out of numbers.

He intended to make sure it wasn’t his.

Donald’s cannon arm cycled down from white-hot to dull red, metal breathing as nano-structures redistributed mass and repaired microfractures. He flexed his fingers to maintain the illusion of humanity. The gesture felt natural, even if the underlying mechanism wasn’t entirely organic.

“Status,” Robot requested, tactical overlay painting friendly positions in blue.

“Standing,” Immortal replied, beard singed but eyes steady.

“Standing,” Brit confirmed, already scanning for the next threat.

“Still pretty,” Rex said, blowing ash off his goggles with theatrical vanity.

“Hungry,” Monster Girl rumbled, wiping alien viscera from her muzzle.

“Angry,” Britney drawled, and it sounded like a promise the city could bank on.

Invincible said nothing. His attention was locked on the horizon where new black shapes tested the edges of vision. Farther out now, uncertain. His jaw worked as he processed the tactical implications. He rolled his shoulders, set his feet in the cracked asphalt, and made a decision that would echo through whatever came next.

“I’m not giving up.”

“We’ll beat them,” Eve called out, pink energy crackling around her hands as she swept past. “We always do. We have to.”

Robot logged the sentiment alongside probability calculations. “I have done the math. The odds favor eventual success. But at what cost…” A stolen alien rifle discharged in his hands, suppressing fire into a formation that was targeting Immortal’s exposed flank.

“What are you talking about, mini-me?” Rex asked, casual humor cutting through tactical chatter.

“The property damage will require years to repair. The lives lost will take even longer to atone for.” Robot’s external speakers carried that mechanical precision even as Rudy’s thoughts churned inside the armor. “The events of today will not be forgotten. Not for many years.”

“Lucky me,” Invincible said, voice carrying weight. “I’ll still be around for that.”

Eve spun mid-flight, green eyes wide as she pointed skyward. “Hey, what is that? Up there, you see that?”

Invincible glanced up to see a red trail tear through the sky.

A heartbeat later, green followed.

Then blue.

In the space of three seconds, a dozen alien ships fell from the air, cratering the ground where they landed. For each command ship that died, a hundred drones collapsed with them, electronic corpses raining from a sky suddenly clear of threats.

Three figures descended through the wreckage, small but undeniable, all with glowing technicolor eyes that spelled trouble for anyone wearing purple.

“Hey,” Brick smirked.

“Guys!” Boomer grinned.

Butch, of course, yelled at the top of his lungs. “DID YOU MISS US?”