Project ROWDY 16

ROWDY 16: LINK

Mojave heat warped the air and made everything look like it was almost underwater, that was just an unfortunate fact of the place. Miles of dead sand stretched under a bright blue sky that didn’t blink and a sun that refused to waver for even a second. The GDA’s outpost clung to a rock formation half a mile off, watching like a bunker that wanted plausible deniability. They’d marked the combat zone with nothing but scars—craters, blackened ground, and bone-dry silence. Nothing lived out here anymore.

Definitely not after the Solar Flayer incident of ’07.

Too many bodies. Cecil Stedman thought to himself. And at the same time, not enoigh to give to the families.

One of the few villains the Guardians never caught and the GDA couldn’t track, the tricky bastard.

Inside the main tent, the air conditioning hummed like it was scared. Monitors flickered with heat-distorted feeds. Every angle locked on the three streaks ripping the desert apart.

Cecil stood motionless. Back straight, arms behind, dead quiet.

Donald fidgeted with the interface again, posture stiff. “Power readings are… still climbing, sir. Butch in particular. Up another twelve percent since the last run against the Flaxans.”

Cecil didn’t turn. “Mmh. Green one’s angry.”

“Yes, sir.” Donald checked the secondary display. “And their styles are separating more distinctly now. Dr. Rosenthal thinks it’s compensatory—similar power sets pushing divergent tactics.”

Cecil’s eyes narrowed just slightly. “You’re dancing around it.”

Donald hesitated, the man swallowing a mouthful of what Cecil knew to be a special GDA-created nano-solvent that mimicked human saliva perfectly. “Puberty, sir.”

The GDA director let out a long-suffering sigh. “Of course.”

—

Three streaks blurred low across the sand, then split. Brick hooked hard left. Boomer kicked into a rolling ascent. Butch? Butch went down.

He slammed into the ground like he hated it. Sand exploded skyward, a geyser of grit and heat. Brick pivoted mid-flight, breath already syncing to the pattern he’d mapped out—

Two seconds. Butch rose as the pressure spiked, exactly like Brick expected he would. He lunged in at the only angle he knew: wide, his lead leg tilted—left side open.

Brick dove.

His elbow clipped Butch in the ribs, and redirected his momentum into a roll as he hit the ground bursting back up. Butch snarled—loud—fists flaring green as he twisted and shot forward toward his older brother, already swinging.

Brick didn’t block. He vanished sideways, sliding across packed dust and carving a half-circle before Butch’s follow-through detonated behind him.

Another crater to pockmark the half-blackened ground.

Boomer corkscrewed in from overhead, laughter trailing like static.

“HEY BRICKY—”

Brick caught the ankle mid-flip without even turning around to look. Predictable. So fast that he knew the GDA’s high-speed cameras would barely catch a red-blue blur, Brick twisted it and slammed down. Boomer let out a yelp that was far more surprise than pain as he hit the ground hard and headfirst and bounced like one of those cheap rubber balls, tumbling ass-over-teeth right into Butch’s next charge.

They collided. Sand thundered like the world’s stupidest rainstorm.

Brick didn’t give them a second to catch their breath.

He launched forward, footsteps carving triangles in the ground. Feints, redirections, misdirection built into his movement. Every strike landed somewhere soft—armpit, neck, under the ribs.

All of it controlled. Measured. Sharp. There was a reason he was the leader and it wasn’t just because he was the oldest and the smartest and the only one who knew what a plan was other than “punch it” or “blast it”. He was the leader because both of his brothers couldn’t beat his ass in a fight if their lives depended on it.

He wasn’t the strongest.

No, he darted back, narrowly escaping an angry hammer fist from his greenest brother that cracked the desert floor open. That was all Butch.

He also wasn’t the fastest.

Boomer came flying back with a spinning heel-kick that might’ve looked cool if it had any aim. No, that was all Boomer Brick sidestepped and, flashing Boomer a smirk that he saw in his accelerated vision, once again twisted Boomer’s foot, used the momentum, and full-force flung him into Butch—again.

This time Butch caught him. And suplexed him.

Boomer hit like a firework, face-first into the sand, groaning from the tag-team combo and opened his mouth wider to try and say something.

Butch didn’t wait. Scaled the nearest boulder pile like a pissed-off squirrel. At the top of his lungs, Butch yelled something wordless, feral (completely ignoring the fact that yelling at super-speed only made it harder to understand you without perfect control of your vocal chords) and leapt—full elbow-drop from thirty feet.

Butch landed shoulder-deep in a brand new crater, giggling like a lunatic. “WORTH IT.”

Boomer flipped up from the sand with a groan. “I think I bit a scorpion.”

“You’d taste it, idiot.”

“Would you taste it?”

Brick said nothing. His breath was even, but his pulse was spiking. He adjusted his stance, weight shifting, realigned posture. No, he didn’t have the most powers and no, he wasn’t naturally the best when it came to fighting either.

That was, once again, Boomer and Butch.

Boomer sprang again—this time a low flip, foot-first, spin-kick blurring toward Brick’s head.

For the third time in twice as many seconds, Brick caught the knee and rolled his eyes as he twisted under it, before delivering a hard shoulder check to his little brother’s undefended torso. Boomer grunted, flipped again mid-air, landed sideways and kicked up sand as cover. A fraction of a second later, he surged back in—punches this time, fast ones. One hundred in two seconds.

Brick blocked ninety-nine The one-hundredth hit his jaw.

He didn’t flinch, just blinking as he stepped in and tapped Boomer in the solar plexus, the blow fast and controlled. Never mind that it was strong enough to shatter a small hill, that was just the cherry on top.

“Ow.” Boomer dropped.

No, the reason he was leader was the simple fact…

Butch, meanwhile, wasn’t waiting. He launched again, this time with both fists up like a barbarian from a side-scroller.

Brick didn’t move.

Right before impact, Brick dropped. Butch overshot, hit air, landed in a skid that turned into a roll, turned into a sprint right back into Brick’s side—

Fist caught him. Diagonal jab. Made Butch stagger, but not fall.

Boomer yelled something incoherent and cartwheeled into both of them, legs wide.

Brick ducked.

Butch didn’t.

The impact sent them flying in opposite directions. Butch flipped twice, skidded, then sat up laughing.

“HAHA!”

… the simple fact that he was the only Rowdyruff that paid attention.

—

Cecil hadn’t blinked in a good three minutes.

Both his eyes were fixed to the monitor wall, like it held the cure for quick hair loss and age reversal, his fingers folded just low enough that it seemed like he was almost holding himself back from jumping into the tussle in front of him. The Boys were mid-spar, sand flying in pulsed detonations across half a klick of desert floor—red, green, and blue blurs moving and sounding like the best part of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture.

Behind him, Donald adjusted the readouts like they were going to give him better news if he just squinted right.

“Sir, about the Guardians…”

Cecil didn’t turn. “What about ’em.” Cold words for the World’s Greatest Heroes, especially considering they were dead, Cecil would easily admit that much, but he had to focus on the other eight billion people still living and the three in front of him were pretty much his best bet at keeping the world a-turning.

“The media… the media embargo’s cracking, sir,” Donald answered, once again almost stunning Cecil with how human someone that was more filament than flesh could sound. “We’ve had seventeen press hits in the last hour. If one more outlet calls from New York, I—”

“I’m aware.”

Donald hesitated, lips tight. “Should I prep the statement, sir?”

“It’s already been prepped,” Cecil answered back. “Check my private files you think I don’t know you look at. It should be marked ‘Obit’. Push it at five.”

Cecil could almost hear Donald blink from behind his glasses as he took in everything his superior just said. “S-sir, that’s in four hours.”

“Exactly,” Cecil said with a scoff that had some humor to it. “Evening cycles’ll clear, we’ll own prime time.”

Donald thumbed his tablet, then looked up again. “And if they want the truth?”

Cecil exhaled through his nose. “They’ll get what we give.”

Onscreen, Butch clotheslined Boomer mid-spin. Dust and static rippled across camera three.

Donald swallowed. “And them?”

“Push ’em harder.”

“They’re kids, sir.”

Cecil’s voice didn’t rise. Didn’t have to. “And they’ll be kids after we push them as hard as they can go. But they’ll be kids on a living planet, Donald.”

The feed showed Brick pivoting under Butch’s elbow, then ramming a palm into his solar plexus like a pressure-release valve. Butch grunted. Boomer crashed into the same spot two seconds later.

Cecil’s jaw flexed, voice still low. “They’re the line now. Fight Force is a bunch of pretentious pricks looking to be in front of the camera. Disaster Force is no better, and most of our in-house contractors couldn’t kick it in the big leagues if we pumped them full of roids and dumped them in radioactive waste.” Cecil shook his head. “They’re our prime time. Until we find ourselves a second set. And even then—”

Cecil paused to watch Butch leap into the air off a boulder and came down elbow-first, his green trail right behind him. The crater spiked seismographs in three outposts.

“—the second won’t be better than these tiny little disasters. We won’t be that lucky..”

Donald made a noise that wanted to be a protest and landed as a nod.

“Besides,” Cecil murmured, “they’ve seen worse.”

“How do you—”

“Just a hunch, Donald.” Director Stedman nodded to himself. “Just a hunch.”

—

Brick pivoted as Boomer rushed him again. Feet skating over superheated grit, he tracked his brother’s wind-up, waited for the tell. There. Wrist angle wrong. Again.

“Third combo’s soft,” he said flatly.

Boomer flinched. “It’s not!”

It was. He overcommitted and Brick twisted in, redirecting him straight into Butch’s path.

“Tag,” Butch barked, and hit them both like a sledge.

All three skidded, tumbling across desert until dust swallowed the world. Brick hit first, flipped, rolled, landed clean.

“Again.”

He heard Butch laughing before he saw him. “Why fix what’s not broke?”

“Because you’re dumb and I’m tired of fixing your mistakes.”

Butch jerked up, teeth gritted. “What’s that ‘sposed to mean?”

Brick raised an eyebrow. “You’re not that dumb to be asking me that.”

Boomer bounced on his heels, clearly uncaring of Brick’s taunts. “Wanna race to that mesa?”

They didn’t get a response off. The comms chirped in unison.

Cecil, low and clipped: “Trinity. Command. Now.”

Everything went still. No breath. No movement. Then Brick turned.

“Move.”

Three sonic ruptures cracked the world apart. They hit the outpost ground like meteors.

The tent flaps fluttered. Three boys, dirt-streaked and still sparking ozone, stood sharp and silent.

Brick stepped forward. “Flaxans?”

Cecil nodded. “Flaxans.”

Brick’s jaw locked. “Rowdyruffs. Roll out.”

Butch snorted. “Seriously?”

Boomer lit up. “That was sick.”

“Shut up,” Brick muttered, and launched.

The ground didn’t just crack. It cratered.

Cecil watched the trails burn across the sky. “We ever figure out why they fly like that?”

Donald checked notes. “Uh. No, sir.”

“Figured.”

—

Baltimore again, a full week after the last attack. Different day. Worse mess.

The Flaxans weren’t stupid. Not anymore. Power armor had clearly been handed out like candy. Super-guns and personal force-fields were all the rage in the Flaxan army now apparently. And the personal shield walls?

Well, those looked tough enough to take a punch.

Clearly, they’d adapted.

Brick clocked the threat matrix in under three seconds.

“Boomer, east. Butch, west. I’ll center.”

They scattered.

Boomer intercepted a bolt meant for a family sprinting between debris. It caught him in the ribs and sent him spiraling. He came up wheezing.

“Okay—ow. That actually hurt.”

Butch elbowed a Flaxan into a wall and followed with a knee that cracked reinforced plating. “Wait, really?”

“Kinda?”

Brick’s voice cut sharp across their comms. “Less commentary. More body count.”

Butch grinned and shattered someone’s helmet with an uppercut. “I am multitasking.”

It was kind of annoying how persistent these green bastards were.

Scratch that, it was very annoying.

Extremely angry-making, is what Boomer might have said.

Hell, the skyline wasn’t even all the way rebuilt from last time and the Flaxans came back like roaches that’d learned to wear steel. Power armor, heavy suits, smarter spacing. Layered the streets with formation drills and shock tactics that looked like they’d actually been training this time. Like someone told them the third try’s the charm and made sure they brought their A-Game.

Boomer bounced off a light post—bent it in half with his ribs, yelped, kicked it down mid-spin like that made it better. “Cheese and rice, they do hit way harder now! Ow! Ow—Butch, watch your left!”

Butch didn’t watch his left. He ate it, grunted, and grabbed the guy who’d tagged him by the arm, spun him like a hammer throw, and launched him through the third floor of a parking garage.

Brick didn’t even have to check to know his armor’s shields failed after the first two walls he went through and splattered him inside it by the fifth.

“Stop whining,” he barked, ducking under a blast that vaporized part of the sidewalk. “You sound like a microwave.”

Boomer zapped the guy who shot it with a chainbolt that fried three others. “A microwave? What does that even—?!”

Brick didn’t answer. He was too busy mapping lines of fire, marking suit types by glow pattern, counting drain lag on their shields. Forty-two up, six downed, two recovering. That one with the dual shoulder cannons had a three-beat reload, and the one tracking Rex had a weak point at the collar seam. They weren’t just armored. They were synced. Controlled. This wasn’t desperation—it was war prep.

And it was working.

Eve was getting pushed back even with her best tricks. Asphalt spikes, density traps, suit sabotage—she buried five in concrete, only for seven more to blast out behind her. Air too thick to breathe. Ground too soft to run. Everything she tried felt like it was buying time instead of stopping anything.

Rex detonated another street corner. His new throws were meaner, louder—more kinetic force behind them now, like someone finally let him off the leash—but every time he cleared a space, another Flaxan filled it. Even as he let out an explosion that Brick knew would have rocked him a little, even more Flaxans just poured out of the portal to take their place.

“Come on,” Rex yelled, hurling a glowing fastball that splashed fire across a shield wall. “How many of these assholes are there?!”

“Too many,” Dupli-Kate muttered, splitting again mid-leap to haul civilians out from a collapsing diner.

Brick gritted his teeth. “We need to split their front. They’re herding us.”

“Working on it!” Boomer shot back, then got tackled out of the sky by a white-armored Flaxan, their power armor not a joke. The tackle shook windows and Brick lost visual for three seconds. Boomer came back up with a nosebleed and a grunt, static-crackling through the comms as he tore the head off the belligerent Flaxan, the thing clearly not smart enough to keep his distance from a pissed Boomer Mojo. “Okay, okay, yeah—they’re mad this time! They remember us!”

“Good,” Butch muttered, leveling a building with a single slam. “Let ‘em be scared.”

Brick saw it before Mark did. Ten feet tall, bulkier than the rest, a red cape around it’s shoulders, armor customized like a grudge—left side heavier, counterweighted for balance. Red eyes widened as he recognized this one, the one Invincible disarmed for daring to get in his way during one of his rages last figth.

It roared and charged. Mark didn’t dodge fast enough.

Brick’s stomach dropped.

Invincible got hammered into the pavement. Kept trying to get up. Got stomped. Hammered again. That power armor was designed for him—counterpressure plating, kinetic thrusters, reinforced servos for power-brawling. And Mark was losing.

“Invincible” Eve shouted, voice strained. Her blast fizzled off the giant’s shoulder. Useless.

“Invincible—get outta there!” Kate snapped, breaking formation.

And then the air shifted.

The Flaxan stopped mid-swing, the alien in the massive armor basically keel-hauled off Invincible and tossed up into the air, swinging wildly like a five year old held by his collar.

Only in this case it was his cape.

Brick’s gaze jerked upward. Another red cape, this one without white fur trim, and a chest that was the size of a car’s grill.

The strongest superhero on the planet hovered over his downded son like a storm cloud with a mustache. He didn’t look anywhere else or at anyone else when he spoke. “You alright, Mark?”

Mark coughed, pulling himself to his feet. “Y-yeah. I think so.”

“Lati M’oi!”

Then came the barrage. Every Flaxan in visual range opened fire at the command from the struggling alien. White-hot plasma lit the skyline as each and every blast hit Omni-Man’s figure.

Nolan didn’t flinch. The beams bounced. His cape didn’t even wrinkle.

Brick’s eyes could only widen. HOW.

“My turn.”

And then the sky ripped.

He moved like gravity was a rumor. Flaxans folded in half, broke against buildings, vanished in blood sprays. One got dragged through four floors of a hotel. Another got torn from its armor and tossed into the harbor like a skipping stone.

Butch exhaled. “Okay, maybe he is universal.”

Brick didn’t answer. Just breathed once, shallow, and turned back to the map in his head. Flank pressure easing. Fewer targets in motion. Time to press again.

“Back to it,” he muttered.

Together, they moved. Brick took the left. Butch broke through center. Boomer strafed the far side with lightning arcs and reckless speed. They didn’t win—they swept. Until the Flaxans turned, finally, and bolted for the portal like it was home and fire and all they had left.

Omni-Man followed them in.

Mark shouted after him, “Dad!”

Rex blinked. “Wait—Omni-Man’s your dad?!”

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Brick stepped out of the GDA showers with a towel draped like a cape and hair still dripping into his eyes. This was not a good fight. They hadn’t won this one.

No, Omni-Man had won this.

And he hated that for them.

For himself.

Not like his brothers gave a shit. They were gonna get a treat anyway.

He grit his teeth. Hell, he wasn’t even sure why it bothered him so much. He didn’t even want to stay here. This whole thing was just a way to keep his brothers occupied while he found them a way home, but despite that simple fact, it didn’t change that he hated not winning every challenge Cecil put in front of them.

It made no sense. He knew Cecil was using them like weapons, and doing everything short of training them like dogs. He could pinpoint all the psychological tricks the old man was using. Hell, he wasn’t giving them anything The Boys couldn’t just take.

Yet, it was still working. They were aligning their goals with the GDA. Even the jokes Boomer made weren’t all that fake when it came to serving his country, and again Brick wanted to melt Donald’s circuits for talking to his little brother too much. Butch was loving all the opportunities Cecil gave them to punch new people and things and it was obvious how psyched he was, declaring every other misison the “coolest thing ever”.

And then there was him, the leader.

He couldn’t help it too. He wanted to prove himself to Cecil. Every failed mission paremeter was a black mark on Cecil’s mental scorecard of him and he just couldn’t stand the thought of that.

Brick walked out of the bathroom proper, the last thought spinning around in his head for a few seconds before another one rose up.

…Do I have daddy issues?

“Agent Mojo.”

His head snapped up and, as if summoned by his thoughts, Cecil waited at the corner of his room like a ghost that paid rent.

“We should talk.”

Brick didn’t blink. “Talk about what?”

The man didn’t shift.

“About where you really came from.”

ROWDY 16: LINK