Project ROWDY 15
ROWDY 15: LINK
Brick had sectioned off the corner of their GDA quarters like it owed him rent. Scraps of stolen tech were laid out with surgical aggression—stripped wires, fractured crystal matrices, scorched paneling that still hummed with something alien if you got too close. He’d rewired one of the light fixtures to handle overvoltage from a Flaxan capacitor three hours ago. It was still flickering.
Cecil hadn’t said anything yet, but the camera in the ceiling had started moving slower. Like it was watching its own funeral.
He leaned over the reinforced workbench, hands careful even when his mind wasn’t, red eyes scanning the guts of a dimension-stabilizer module they’d ripped out of one of those yellow-masked cowards four days ago. Flaxans. Name’d been cracked open by Robot, but it didn’t matter. Brick wasn’t after semantics. He was after structure. Stability. A map out.
Boomer slid in like static, all fidget and aimless limbs, face lit up with boredom like it was contagious. “So—sooo… what’cha makin’? Is it a bomb? Or like, an anti-bomb? Ooh, is it alien Legos?”
“Back up,” Brick muttered, voice flat and folded. “Don’t breathe near it.”
Naturally, Boomer leaned closer. Fingers twitching. Clear curiosity all over his face dragging him toward the edge of the table.
“What’s this do? Wait—wait, no, this. This glowy thing. That looks important. Important usually means explodey, right?”
Brick didn’t lift his head. “Dimensional anchor, I believe. Helps to stabilize their portal, I think. They have a bunch of them scattered around to keep the portal going strong on our end.”
Boomer blinked. “Okay, cool, yeah—but like… could it play music? Space music? Maybe if I just—”
“Boomer.” His name came out like a shot.
Too late.
Boomer’s finger hovered just too close to a crystalline wedge—jagged, half-pulsing, like it remembered where it came from and hated being here. It lit up and gave off a feedback hum that rolled through the table like a threat.
“Okay!” Boomer yelped and flinched back. “No touch! No touch! Definitely not touching!”
Brick stood fast, eyes already tracing the glow’s harmonics, pattern recognition searing into place. That energy—he knew that energy.
Before Brick could even open his mouth, the room flashed red.
Alarms flared and those same red lights began to spin. Somewhere far off, Cecil’s voice slithered through the intercom like it had teeth.
“TEAM TRINITY to Baltimore. Dimensional breach. Not a drill.”
Boomer turned, mouth open as his eyes focused on Brick. “Should I get—?”
“Get Butch. Now.”
———
Three streaks tore the air, carving color through clouds. Red. Green. Blue. No grace, no theatrics—just speed weaponized until the wind peeled sideways and left them deaf to everything but pressure.
Baltimore below them. Loud already. Sirens, panic, engines failing to flee fast enough. Brick didn’t hear it. He was already running scenarios. Every angle. Every variable. Every mistake they hadn’t made yet.
“So,” Butch yelled, voice riding the wind like it was begging for a fight, “we smashing the same dudes or new ones?”
Brick locked eyes forward. “Same species. Flaxans.”
Butch scoffed. “Dumb name.”
“You asked.”
“I didn’t ask for a vocab quiz.”
“Shut.” Brick clicked his tongue. “Up.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Boomer chimed in, the blue Rowdyruff floating fully upside-down and sideways relative to their axis. “Those green guys from last week that kept crumbling like old cereal before they went running?”
“They weren’t crumbling,” Brick snapped, “they were aging. Like flies. Their timeflow’s compressed here and that’s kinda hard to deal with in real-time. Even despite the age, it was making them sick. What looks like one day for us, has to be two years for them. Do the math.”
Boomer whistled low. “Dang. So like… they’ve had a whole high school career since we last kicked their butts?”
Brcik rolled his eyes at his little brother’s lacking skill in anything mathematical. “More like a decade, Boom-Boom.”
The blond tapped his chin. “…so more like, marriage, kids, divorce?”
Butch grinned. “Midlife crisis invasion, huh? Hope they brought sports cars.”
They broke cloud cover. Brick’s stomach turned—not from the drop, but from the skyline.
Baltimore was boiling. The whole city wasn’t on fire. Not yet, not even close to it with only one block invaded. But Brick had no doubt that it would be soon.
Becuase dead center in the plaza: the portal.
Not a fracture, a half circle even more massive than the one from a few days ago, and pouring out an army even bigger.
Flaxans poured through the thing, ready for war. Each on of them had bigger weapons, better armor. Bikes slicing through the air like knives. Tanks that floated forward over the ground intent. Drones flickering in and out of visibility. They’d learned.
The Boys landed hard—triangular formation, muscle memory locking them in place. Brick hit pavement and rolled his vision into microspectrum immediately, scanning cell degradation, heat loss, suit weave.
“…they’ve adapted,” he muttered. “They’re not agin anymore.”
“Dumbasses look the same to me,” Butch said, stretching his neck until it cracked.
“No cellular decay. They’re anchored now. They’re not burning out.”
Butch grinned, no real humor in it. “So they’ll last longer in a fight? Good.”
Baltimore had teeth again. They were back in it before Brick even recalculated.
The sky above the city rippled. Pried open. Portal light shearing out over buildings like a sick second sunrise, red and mean. Flaxans swarmed through like they remembered everything. And this time, they’d come to finish it.
Boomer was already talking, voice clipped with nerves. “There’s way more now. Like, way more more. Like I don’t think they fit in there.”
Brick didn’t answer. Too busy watching the commander spot them—tall, armored, mouth-plate twitching in something that looked close enough to a snarl. One barked order, and the squad fell in behind it, weapons spinning up with shrieking blue cores.
“Split!”
They broke formation. Brick veered low, skimming heat off broken asphalt. Butch peeled hard right, plowing through a hoverbike mid-turn and sending the rider flipping into a wall. Boomer whipped vertical, lightning tracing behind him like nerves misfiring in the sky.
Second breach cracked open ten blocks east—ripped out of thin air with a stomach-sick pop. New squad pouring through before Brick could reroute.
“They’re flanking,” he muttered. “Boomer—east! Now!”
“Got it!” Boomer peeled off, trailing static.
Brick caught a pulse cannon out of the corner of his eye, pivoted midair, and scorched it dead with heat vision. Impact chewed concrete behind him. A Flaxan slammed into his flank and Brick twisted midair, grabbed its arm, bent it backward until something broke, then flung it at a cluster of its own.
Shockwave hit two seconds later—Mark dropping in too fast, landing like a bomb. Brick’s vision snapped white from the blast.
“Hey!” Mark shouted, already moving, already punching. “Looks like you guys started early!”
Brick didn’t look. “You’re late.” His voice was iron. “And still calling yourself Invulnerable?”
“It’s Invincible!”
Eve dropped behind them, barely slowing, shields flaring as she caught a falling civilian and redirected debris with a flick. “Mark. Less talking, more punching.”
“Right! On it!”
Flaxan tanks shifted forward. Brick burned through one—heat vision cutting along the seam—then moved again before the explosion could blind him. Eve passed overhead, painting the air with glowing platforms. Civilians scrambled up and vanished into rooftops. Rex flung a cluster of charges, only half of them landing clean.
“C’mon, did none of y’all pack armor-piercing this time?”
“They adapted,” Brick snapped. “Shield harmonics are different.”
“Oh good, smart aliens.” Rex huffed. “Love that for us.”
Butch slammed down next to Brick like a hammer, shoulder-checking a Flaxan hard enough to fold it around a car. “Where’s more?”
“Everywhere.”
Boomer dropped into a skid beside them, crackling with loose lightning. “They’re learning from each other now. It’s like… like they have playbooks.”
Brick gritted his teeth. “Good. Makes ‘em predictable.”
Robot buzzed in overhead, calm and clinical. “Confirming evolved pattern recognition and adaptive countermeasures. They’ve trained for us.”
“Let’s untrain them.”
Brick torched two more tanks with a roar of fire and moved on. Boomer flared an EMP burst that shut down three drones. Butch grabbed one of the shield generators and ripped it out of the ground, smashing it into a Flaxan squad so hard the street cratered.
Rex and Butch were now side by side, trading punches, blasts, and insults.
“That’s three!”
“I just took out five, you jackass!”
“Yeah, and one of ‘em was already bleeding!”
“Still counts!”
Eve created a launch ramp midair and Boomer launched off it, flipping upside-down mid-jump, tossing a lightning bolt through the viewport of a tank mid-glide, the alien weapons platform blowing up like the world’s biggest firework.
Kate’s clones blurred through the mess, grabbing kids, elders, and everyone else too slow to get out of the way in time while Robot tracked structural collapse zones in real time.
And then—flash.
A blast arced from the commander, precise and screaming through the air. “Aaaaaaaah!” The red blast shot Eve in the back mid-air, and all her constructs buckled and gave way as she dropped like a marionette with its strings cut.
Mark saw it.
Everything in him changed shape.
Brick felt it like a second sun behind him, the raw force rippling like a shockwave. Mark hit the Flaxan that fired, and the Flaxan… disappeared. Not disintegrated. Not broken. Gone.
Butch blinked from across the plaza. “Yo, Boomer.”
“Yeah?”
“He fights better when he’s mad. Like you.”
“What?” Boomer pulled a face.
Butch rolled his eyes and slapped his arm back, fist cracking into an alien face in a backhand with enough power to send its head flying into a building like a bullet. “Like you!”
Mark’s knuckles were still dripping when Brick clocked the shift.
Not the gore. That was background noise—pink splash, fractured torso, nerves catching fire in air. The Flaxan hadn’t died so much as deatomized.
It was the power spike that hooked him.
Brick didn’t flinch, didn’t comment. Just logged it. Rage-triggered strength multipliers. Emotional stimuli: Eve. Emotional state: protective, escalating. Useful.
But the real intel was lower. Wrist-level.
Bracelets. Not decorative. Not status-based. Uniform. Synced. And now? Glitching.
Cracks spidered through the crystalline cores like sweat fractures under stress. One soldier’s started pulsing arrhythmically. Another’s sparked.
Gotcha.
Brick tapped his earpiece. “Boomer. Sonic. Tight frequency, wide dispersal. Not a scream—resonance. Stay centered, draw them in.”
Boomer froze mid-hover, blinked, then nodded hard and zipped thirty feet up and out, centering himself like he was bracing for a trust fall. Deep inhale. Then—
The shriek that came out wasn’t even loud.
It hurt. Clean, high, sharp enough to make bones hum. Flaxans twitched. Their gauntlets twitched harder. The sound slashed through their stabilizers like it was custom-built to shatter.
And Brick knew it was.
He’d guessed the harmonic instability. Boomer just proved it.
Bracelets started failing. One soldier aged a year in half a second—wrinkles folding into deeper cracks, posture collapsing in real-time. Another’s fingers snapped inward like old twigs. Someone screamed. A third Flaxan clawed at his own wrist, then dropped, bones liquefying before impact.
It was clean. It was fast.
It was awful.
They broke ranks. Ran for the portals like they knew what was waiting on the other side might still be better than this.
Brick didn’t watch. He moved.
Slipped through the holes in the fight like water—too fast for crossfire, too small for notice. The leader of the team grabbed a still-glowing shard from the busted tank. A second later, he yanked a cracked stabilizer off a twitching corpse. A half-second after, deft hands pried loose a bracket still linked to half a forearm.
And immediately pocketed the only intact one without a pause.
The last portal collapsed with a noise like a collapsing lung—one final implosion, tight and surgical. The silence hit harder than the blast. Streets still smoking. Concrete peeled like fruit skin. Air sharp with heat-warped ozone.
Sirens on the edge of things.
Brick’s blond little brother landed near Eve, dropping to the ground and skidding to a stop as the already cracked ground gave way under his impact. “Yo, pink lady! You good? You took a raw hit back there.”
Atom Eve sat up slow, the matter manipulator breathing heavy and clearly tilted, if not outright tired. “Atom Eve, actually. And yeah. I’ll live.”
Boomer scratched his head. “Yeah okay, Atom’s cooler. Kinda science-y. Better than Invulnerable, right?”
“Invincible,” Eve corrected, grinning anyway.
“Right. That one.”
Across the lot, Butch was replaying his own greatest hits at Rex like he was on commentary. “Then I decked that big one—like boom, right in the gut. He skipped like a rock.”
Rex crossed his arms, not quite unimpressed. “Yeah? My chain blast took out a whole cluster.”
“Cluster of what, whiners?” Butch smirked. “You blinked and missed mine. Shoulda filmed it.” The bragging didn’t even sound hostile.
Brick didn’t join in.
He was crouched near what used to be a Flaxan sergeant, the red-eyed Rowdyruff extracting a last chip from a shattered wrist device. Brick turned it over once in his fingers.
Robot walked over without a sound, which was impressive for a quarter-ton hunk of metal. He just appeared beside him like a math problem solved itself.
“Your sonic strategy was effective.” His voice carried no weight, but the sentence landed with surgical precision. “You exploited the harmonic vulnerability of their stabilizers.”
Brick didn’t look up. “Yeah.”
“A well-executed improvisation. Efficient.”
Brick pocketed the chip.
Robot’s head tilted two degrees. “Your scientific aptitude continues to exceed age expectations.”
“Don’t care.”
“You should. Recognition ensures future autonomy.”
Brick finally looked at him. Just a flick of red eyes. “If I did anything for recognition, you’d know it.”
Robot’s sensors scanned him top to boots. Paused, almost imperceptibly, on the intact bracelet tucked under Brick’s jacket line.
He said nothing… which kinda said a lot on it’s own.
Brick rose to his full height, and cleared his throat.
“Indeed.” Robot’s voice didn’t change. “This conversation was interesting, though.”
“Sure.”
Mark’s wrist buzzed. His face shifted.
“I gotta go,” he said to Eve. “My dad—he’s awake.”
And right on cue, Cecil’s voice crackled into the Boys’ comms like molasses over broken glass.
“Trinity. Report back to the medical wing. Now.”
Brick turned and saw both his brothers already looking at him, waiting for his order.
He nodded once. “Let’s move.”
Three tri-colored bursts of light shot off into the Baltimore skyline.
Robot didn’t move.
But his sensors stayed locked on Brick’s pocket.
– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
He could already hear one of the machines start beeping faster as they entered the GDA medbay. Donald’s voice cut in as the three boys flashed into the room, Mark already there a good second or two before them . “Sir, spike in neural activity. Respiration’s syncing.”
Butch grunted. “Plain English, Don.”
“He’s waking up.”
Debbie surged forward again, both hands on her husband’s arm now. “Nolan? Hey. It’s me. I’m here.”
His eyes opened like it hurt, slow and flickering. “Debbie.” He sat up as he said it, with only a slight groan.
“Hold,” Cecil said, tone dull and low.
“I’m fine.” Nolan’s eyes weren’t on Debbie anymore. Instead, they moved around to lock onto them. “You three.”
Not a question.
Brick nodded. “Engaged post-breach. Extracted from rift.”
Nolan studied them with new interest, his gaze lingering on Brick. There was something calculating in that look, an assessment that went beyond simple gratitude. Brick met his eyes steadily, refusing to be intimidated despite knowing the vast power difference between them.
“The Rowdyruff Boys, correct?” Omni-Man asked.
“Trinity,” Cecil corrected quickly. “Their official designation is Trinity.”
Butch snorted. “Still stupid.”
Nolan didn’t smile, but something shifted in his eyes. “You helped me. That’s no small feat.”
Boomer puffed up like a balloon, voice cracking, “You were—uh—yeah, you’re like, super heavy, dude. Like, not in a bad way, just in a Viltrumite way, you know? Muscle-mass heavy. It’s a compliment.”
Butch let out a cough that sounded like idiot.
Brick didn’t look at either of them. “Mission completed successfully.”
Cecil gave the nod. Medical stepped in. Brick caught the movement before the order was spoken.
“Let’s give them the room,” Cecil said. “Let him breathe.”
They turned. Quiet, but not orderly, only to stop as Debbie’s voice landed behind them.
“Boys?”
They stopped.
She was still watching them, eyes tired but clear. “Why don’t you come by sometime. For dinner. We owe you at least that much.”
Dinner. Dinner. Brick didn’t know what to do with that. They’d never sat around a table for a meal—not with Mojo, who was always too busy with schemes, and certainly not with HIM, whose realm didn’t exactly feature kitchen tables.
“Wait—wait, like… actual dinner?” Boomer blinked as he blond’s voice cracked mid-sentence, shot up again on the last syllable. “Like with… um, like with the mashed potatoes and spaghetti and meatloaf? Like, do people still eat those?”
Butch shot his brother a look, holding back a laugh and doing a pretty good job at that, honestly. “Yeah, Boom. People still eat spaghetti.”
“Ma’am,” Brick said finally, voice flat as he tried not to look at the Grayson woman’s soft eyes. “We have scheduled duties.”
Debbie’s smile didn’t waver. “The offer’s open. And it’s Debbie, not ma’am. You’re not soldiers.”
Brick nodded once and immediately turned on his heel, not trusting himself to say anything else as he started walking. As expected, the Boys followed with him.
Behind him, he felt it again—eyes. He turned his head just slightly and yeah. Nolan. Omni-Man. Watching him. Not casual. Not grateful. Not soft. Measuring. Assessing. Like a man memorizing weak points in armor he might have to break later.
Brick met the gaze. Didn’t drop it.
Didn’t win either.
He turned back.
Boomer, still twitchy with emotional aftershocks, jogged up beside him. “She said dinner. Like, for real. I mean, do you think she knows how weird that sounds? Is it a trap? What do people do at dinner? Do we have to talk?”
Butch grunted. “It’s fake. Probably just PR. Get the freak trio in front of a camera and go ‘look, they’re normal, they eat spaghetti.’”
“Spaghetti would be dope though,” Boomer muttered.
Brick exhaled slowly, clipped. “We stay sharp. Especially around him.”
“What?” Boomer frowned. “But he seemed chill. Big guy, good hair. Woke up and didn’t start punching anybody. That’s a win, right?”
Brick shook his head once. “He clocked us. Before his vitals stabilized, he already knew who we were. Where we stood. What we could do. That’s not normal. That’s trained. And that smile wasn’t thanks. It was calculation.”
Boomer stopped bouncing. Butch didn’t say anything, which was louder.
They moved through the GDA corridor—lights humming overhead, sterile white giving way to darker blues as night cycle engaged. No sound except their footsteps and Boomer breathing too loud. Brick didn’t tell him to stop.
His brain spun sideways, replaying the hug, the tone of voice, the dinner—like that was something kids like them were supposed to be offered without contingency clauses.
This dimension was becoming more complicated by the day.
ROWDY 15: LINK