Project ROWDY 2-19

“Coming in hoooooot!”

A silver streak shined bright as it tore through the bleeding clouds above Illinois, shredding space and atmospheric friction. Displaced air flattened the nearest patch of terrain as the self-guided missile decelerated with a shockwave and straightened up.

“Sorry for being late, guys!” Tech Jacket touched down in the center of warped reality, alien power armor gleaming as he extended his arms out. Metallic plates shifted and slid back, the configuration unfolding and reforming into an oversized array of all sorts of futuristic beam weapons. “Was fighting space pirates!”

“Shut up!” A hundred feet away, Butch absorbed a back-hand from a cosmic nightmare that had grown another six feet, the green Rowdyruff growling as he swung himself around the giant’s wrist with pure momentum. Sandpaper rasp loud as ever, Butch flared green energy from hisshoulders as he locked both arms around the limb and tugged Omnipotus off balance into a flying kick from Boomer wreathed in lightning.  “Nobody asked, TJ!”

Tech Jacket didn’t bother with a replay as his suit vented bright white exhaust as he swooped through the sky around Donny and boomer, chaining shoulder-missiles into a barrage of blinding arm-beams that hammered Omnipotus’ purple-plated chest. Zack Thompson was no genius — more a teenager with the keys to a galactic superweapon — but the suit compensated for his lack of brains with enough raw plasma per second to boil a lake. 

The flyers with nothing more than fists — Venture, Immortal, and Bulletproof — were treating the giant’s skull-face like a heavy bag; each one hit hard, pulled back, and hit again, a drumbeat of superhuman knuckles against superhuman bone.

Brick wasn’t up in the sky with the rest, throwing fireworks and fists, as much as he wanted to be. But hitting things wasn’t going to fix this.

The redhead stood behind a bright orange drop-pod workstation Rudy had called down into the dirt, eyes down as he kept his focus firm on what was in front of him. The metal table was a mess for good reason; the space in front of him littered with wires, stripped plating and an energy core that pulsed like a heart inside an orange-plated casing tech the size of Brick’s own torso. 

His fingers stayed steady, microwelders attached to the tips of his fingers keeping his motions tight and precise as they spit small blue tongues of flame. Fusing a conduit line into the central housing of the device was a job almost done, minutes of work accelerated with Rudy’s tools and expertise.

What was once a dimensional anchor lock had been re-rigged for the exact opposite; a non-targeted launch, a blind doorway into the dark.

“Align the module… cesium timing…” Rudy was practically vibrating next to him, energy in his limbs frantic and disjointed as his hands hovered over the open chassis. “Overheating of the diode laser… tuning… ambient current in the supercapacitor…” A high-pitched laugh that Brick had never heard from the genius-in-a-clone-body spilled out, sweat dripping down Rudy’s temples. “I… It may be obvious, but I have never attempted a field-assembly of this magnitude under active fire. Amanda, uh, Monster Girl, she calls this ‘nerves.’”

Yeah. I bet she does. Brick continued sealing a circuit board with a quick burst of heat from his index finger. “Hold this coupling steady.” 

Rudy clamped hands down on a metal joint, his knuckles white as Brick’s fingers sealed it by pressing the micro-welders down again. Brick’s jaw locked tight, the ground shuddering every time Butch took a hit. He hated leaving his brothers out there. He hated the noise Boomer was making too — frantic, breathless shouts that spiked his own heart rate more than he liked or ever wanted  to admit. 

But he forced his eyes back to the wiring. 

A small buried part of his brain couldn’t help but remember Mojo Jojo as he kept at work. The mutated monkey with the hyperactive mouth was a megalomaniacl pain in the ass for many reasons, especially the way he used to ramble into Brick’s ears for hours about sub-atomic routing and energy conversion while Brick just wanted to smash his brainplate. Thanks for the headaches, Dad. Turns out you weren’t completely full of crap.

“Brick.” The comm bead in his ear crackled, Cecil’s drawl sliding in with calm that didn’t seem to factor in the cosmic entity reshaping the Midwest. “Care to explain why my point man is playing with spark plugs in the middle of a warzone?”

“Because, Cecil, hitting him is pointless.” Brick snapped a heavy casing into place, hands locked on the welding seam as he let Rudy handle this one. “Not gonna pretend like I know how Omni-Man did it other than hitting him really really hard, but the longer this guy is on the planet, the more energy he gets from extradimensionally terraforming the planet to his will. As it is, we’re barely breaking even right now.”

The background chaos only emphasized his point as Omnipotus stood strong and twice the size from when all this started. Even with Venture, Immortal, and Bulletproof hammering his head in with supersonic blows, Boomer blurring as he treated the giant’s torso like a heavy bag with too many kicks for Brick to count and Butch — “DIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIE!” — being Butch, things weren’t looking good.

“So, what are you doing about that?”

“Well, seeing as Doc Noble fucked off to some other dimension for summer vacation with his family, it’s just me and Rudy working on the best plan we’ve got.”

“…and what plan is that, Agent Mojo?”

“Cecil…” Rudy spoke into the microphone embedded in his collar, the words bunching up fast as they left him. “We are currently completing the finishing touches on a Stochastic Brane-Injector. By utilizing Casimir pulse-bleed and to bypass standard interstitial boundary pressure, the resulting quantum shear across th—”

“We’re making a dimensional tear,” Brick cut him off with a grunt as punctuation. “Like breaking the lock off our universe, basically. Something to shove this guy through and make it harder for him to come back. It’ll work, probably.”

The GDA mics weren’t sensitive enough for it but Brick didn’t doubt that Cecil’s old heart skipped at least one beat. “…Probably?”

“You have any better ideas, Cecil?” Brick pulled back the microwelders, other hand flipping the safety latch down. “Because we can punch him till our hands break and not get any closer to killing the giant purple skeleton.”

A heavy sigh ghosted over the line, twenty good years of exhaustion in one breath. “…Brick, promise me you’re not building a doomsday weapon that’ll… I dunno, implode the Earth or something.”

Brick’s hands stopped for a second, red eyes flicking sideways to share a look with a suddenly-swallowing Rudy. Well… Brick looked back at the machine. “Best bet, it won’t take out the solar system.”

“Jesus H. Christ, Brick!”

Red eyes rolled. “It’s a Hail Mary, Cecil. You love those, right?”

“You’re not good at jokes, Brick.”

“I’ll try harder when we’re all not dead.”

“…Fine.”

Brick pulled the microwelders off his hand as he grabbed the orange casing, Robot’s spare power core pulsing and humming with enough power to threaten an entire neighborhood. Let’s hope this does it. 

Because if it didn’t, he’d be wasting all the work he spent trying to get them home.

One final diagnostic on Rudy’s wrist-pad later, the man-boy-genius breathed out. “I… I think we’re finished.” A black streak of grease on his cheek, he nodded again. “I really do think this will do it.”

“I think so, too.” Brick grabbed the heavy scrambler key from the center of the rig. “Now we just need a heavy hit to get him off balance. A big one.”

“Listen up.” Brick tapped his earpiece, switching the frequency to the central channel and broadcasted to the entire superhero airspace. “We have a plan to kick the ugly purple bastard out of our universe, but we need some real flying bricks for a big push. Butch, Boomer, T-”

Tech Jacket took that moment to get swatted a half-mile away, Brick’s eyes twitching. Dammnit, Zach. “Tech Jacket, Immortal, Bulletproof, Venture. Get ready to move on my mark.”

“A big push?” Down in the dirt, Black Samson’s voice roared over the channel, raw and completely winded. “I think I can help with that!” The muscular hero looked up at the sky, hands cupped around his mouth. “Blue kid! I’m gonna need you to hit me good! As much lightning as you can give me!”

Boomer aborted a flying spin kick, his brother a confused hummingbird as he stared down at the shouting Samson. “Wait, what? I can do some biiiig hits. Are you sure?!”

“Boomer, don’t ask questions in an apocalypse!” Brick’s jaw clenched, shouting over the open line. “Hit him with the big one!”

Boomer didn’t bother with a reply, his brother shooting straight up in the sky and twisting immediately into a high-speed-vertical spin. High in the air, black clouds gathered out of absolute nowhere, swirling violently around the ascending blue Rowdyruff as his blue aura charged up. Static electricity condensed around him, pulled straight from the unnatural weather system, until you couldn’t even make him out anymore.

He was just a giant churning circle of glowing blue lightning.

The air pressure dropped, ozone overpowering everything else with the raw smell of static. 

“BOOM-BOOM BOLT!” The words crashed down like thunder.

A blast of lightning the size of a skyscraper tore down from the clouds, Black Samson screaming as he vanished beneath the white-blue pillar of power. The ground melted immediately, soil burnt to a smooth smoking sheet of glass for the single second the lightning struck.

The lightning faded a moment later, smoke clearing to show Black Samson still standing unharmed. He was, at least, but his clothes were gone — completely vaporized — leaving him completely naked and leaking a condensed aura of yellow lightning from every inch of him, eyes included. 

“I…” Samson clenched his fists, air around him popping with both new strength and static discharge. “I can work with this.”

Brick grabbed the dimensional scrambler and pulled back. With a grunt, he hurled the device high into the air, the arc of it sending it right over the towering form of Omnipotus.

“Trigger it! Now!”

Rudy slammed his hand down on his datapad.

A sound like a cruise ship foghorn blasted directly into Brick’s brain as the air being the giant folded into two and then snapped in half. An instant later, a jagged tear edged in gold ripped open in the fabric of reality, fifty feet tall and fifty feet wide, howling with the cold vacuum of nowhere.

“NOW!” Brick launched himself off the ground.

“You heard the boy!” Immortal dove out of the clouds, fist extended out.

Every heavy hitter hit the giant all at once with enough combined pressure to turn a city to nothing but rubble. Omnipotus’s feet actually lifted off the ground, staggered backward as heavy boots dragged deep trenches through the still-shifting earth. “OMNIPOTUS WILL N-!”

Dark purple armor groaned, purple blood flying into the air as the heroes drove him backward inch by inch, punches synchronized to hammer him all at once.

“OMNIPOTUS WILL NOT BE BROKEN B—!” 

And then he fell backward.

The golden portal swallowed the twelve-foot nightmare whole and the world shuddered all at once as the fractured reality of glass, snow, lava, parking lot, and desert vanished in a single blink like it had never been there at all.

All at once, the landscape returned to how it was before the fight started — a boring flat cornfield under the summer sun.

“Oh my God.” Rex Splode limped out from behind a tipped-over tractor, goggles cracked to the point there was barely glass left in them. “Did we win? I hope we won.”

Brick dropped down to the dirt, red glow fading from his eyes as he stared up at the giant gold portal that had shrunk, but still had yet to vanish.

“I hope so too.”