High in orbit directly above Earth, a massive alien warship, a very familiar regular on this stage – hovered silently in the void.
If one peered closely at its underbelly, they would notice it deploying two sleek, spider-like robotic drones, launching them straight into the atmosphere.
(Inside the Dreadnought)
“The drone units have been deployed, Lord Vilgax.
They are equipped with our most advanced sub-dermal scanning and tracking telemetry.”
“They should encounter no complications in locating and retrieving the Omnitrix.”
Hearing this, Vilgax, who was currently floating inside a fluid-filled stasis capsule to regenerate, let out a harsh, gravelly hiss.
“Locating it is well within their parameters.”
“But wresting it from its host will not be so simple.”
“Whoever currently commands the power of the Omnitrix…” Vilgax ground his teeth, his burning crimson gaze hardening into a terrifying glare as he stared down at the blue planet below.
“…that individual will inevitably become the most dangerous adversary I, Vilgax, have ever faced.”
Meanwhile, back on Earth, Blake sat inside the Rust Bucket, staring blankly into space.
The visceral intensity of the nightmare he had experienced the previous night still felt overwhelmingly real, leaving him completely out of sorts.
Ben and Gwen were currently browsing the aisles of a massive mega-mart.
Ben had secretly scoured the clothing section in hopes of finding a decent dress or some female apparel, but unfortunately, a standard grocery store carried absolutely nothing of the sort.
“Ugh…
I am literally about to starve to death,” Ben groaned, rubbing her entirely hollow stomach.
Her eyes drifted toward a massive, meticulously stacked display pyramid of chocolate chip cookie boxes, and she carelessly yanked one from near the bottom.
Predictably, that single box happened to be the structural linchpin of the entire display.
The moment it was removed, the mountain of cookies collapsed in a thunderous avalanche of cardboard, burying a deeply unamused Gwen entirely.
Clawing her way out of the heap of snacks, Gwen glared at Ben, who was innocently clutching her single box of cookies.
“Brilliant job, Ben.
Truly a tactical masterpiece.”
Ben offered a sheepish grin.
“Heh…
my bad.”
After checking out, the girls hauled their snacks back to the parking lot, where Grandpa Max was busy scraping off a series of spray-painted graffiti tags from the side windows of the RV.
“A real artistic triumph, Ben,” Max noted dryly, gesturing to the vandalism.
Ben popped a cookie into her mouth, chewing casually.
“Hey, it’s called self-expression, Grandpa.”
Before Gwen could offer a snarky retort, a deafening explosion shattered the peace of the parking lot.
A high-security armored bank truck down the street was violently torn open by a searing bolt of purple plasma energy.
Gwen winced, deadpanning, “Now *that* is what I call self-expression.”
The sheer kinetic shockwave of the blast violently shook the Rust Bucket, snapping Blake out of his daze.
He sat up, blinking in utter confusion as he scanned the chaos outside.
Through the smoke, three heavily armed bank robbers wearing high-tech helmets and wielding massive plasma cannons were rapidly looting the armored truck.
One of the thieves spotted the Tennyson family watching them and, purely out of malice, leveled her cannon and fired a plasma bolt straight at them.
“Gwen, Ben, get down!” Max roared.
Springing into action, Max violently shoved the two stunned girls behind the heavy iron chassis of a nearby sedan, while he threw his own weight in the opposite direction, crashing heavily onto the asphalt.
(I have to get Grandpa out of the line of fire!)
Seeing her grandfather down, Ben didn’t hesitate for a fraction of a second.
She rapidly spun her dial and slammed her palm down, a flash of green light instantly transforming her into Four Arms.
Towering over the asphalt, the Tetramand raised all four of her massive fists and brought them down against the concrete with catastrophic force.
The localized shockwave rippled through the earth, instantly knocking the three thieves off their feet.
A dazed security guard managed to crawl out of the armored truck’s smoking cabin.
Ben leaned down, her booming voice trying to sound reassuring.
“Hey, you okay?”
But the sight of a four-armed, red-skinned behemoth standing over him scared the living daylights out of the guard.
He let out a blood-curdling shriek and bolted down the street at a dead sprint.
“Wait, I’m…
on your side?” Ben muttered, scratching her head.
Before she could finish her sentence, the remaining thieves coordinated their fire, unleashing a concentrated barrage of plasma bolts that blasted Four Arms backward through a brick wall, simultaneously rupturing a nearby fuel line and igniting the entire gas station in a roaring inferno.
Seeing the massive explosion and the rising column of thick, black smoke, Max cried out in sheer panic, “Ben!”
Fortunately, the universal law of smoke-screens held true.
In a burst of motion, Four Arms lunged out of the flames completely unscathed.
She closed the distance in a blur, pinning two of the thieves to the ground.
With a swift flick of her fingers, she ripped away their high-tech helmets, only to reveal two very human teenage girls.
“Wait…
you’re girls?
Ugh, great.
Look, I really don’t want to hurt you ..”
But Ben’s fatal flaw of talking too much during a fight bit her in the back yet again.
The third female thief sneaked up behind her, driving a high-voltage stun baton directly into her lumbar spine.
Electricity crackled across her massive muscles, sending Four Arms crashing to her knees.
The thief sneered, spinning the baton in her hand.
“Well, aren’t you just a little sweetheart?”
Back by the RV, Blake stumbled out of the doors, his head still swimming with exhaustion.
Assessing the battlefield, his tactical instincts immediately identified the threat.
He raised his left arm, intending to dial up a heavy hitter to end the skirmish.
But the moment his fingers touched his wrist, the Omnitrix went absolutely haywire.
A violent, blinding purple static erupted from the faceplate, the core rapidly heating up until it felt like a branding iron against his flesh.
No matter how hard he hammered the dial, the core refused to pop open.
(What the hell is wrong with you today?!
I’ve always taken perfect care of your matrix!)
(Man, my luck today is absolute garbage.)
Before he could attempt a manual reset, the two robotic drones deployed by Vilgax reached the coordinates.
Utilizing alien plasma rifles far more advanced than the human thieves’ weaponry, they opened fire on Four Arms, pinning her down in a crossfire of laser beams.
Seeing Ben struggling to fend off the robotic ambush while dealing with the thieves, Grandpa Max refused to sit idly by.
He scanned the ground, grabbed a heavy, discarded truck tire, and hurled it with surprising force, knocking one of the female thieves clean off her feet.
Enraged by the interference, the leader of the thieves spun her plasma cannon around and aimed it directly at the defenseless old man, pulling the trigger.
“Grandpa Max!”
Abandoning his malfunctioning watch, Blake didn’t think twice.
He launched his human body across the asphalt, tackling Grandpa Max to the ground a split second before the plasma bolt tore through the space where he had been standing.
But their relief was short-lived.
The stray plasma bolt blasted into the structural support of an overhanging concrete awning directly above them.
The heavy masonry cracked violently, and a massive slab of solid concrete came crashing down, burying both Blake and Max beneath a pile of rubble.
“No!”
Seeing them go down, a torrent of unadulterated fury consumed Ben.
She ignored the laser fire biting at her armor, lunged forward with all four arms, grabbed Vilgax’s two automated drones, and violently crushed them into a singular, tangled ball of scrap metal.
Wasting no time, she sprinted to the collapsed structure, her four massive hands moving like a construction crane as she frantically tore away the heavy blocks of concrete to pull the two unconscious figures out of the debris.
As she reverted back to her human form, Gwen rushed over, her face stark white as she took in the sight of her unconscious grandfather and a bloodied Blake.
Her fingers trembled as she pulled out her phone.
“We need to get them to an emergency room right now!
I’m calling an ambulance!”
“There’s no time for that!” Ben yelled.
Before Gwen could even finish dialing, Ben scooped up her cousin with one arm and hoisted both her unconscious grandfather and Blake over her shoulders, sprinting toward the nearest medical center at a breakneck, adrenaline-fueled pace.
A short while later, after the authorities had cleared the scene, the leader of the female thieves – a cyborg mercenary known as Rojo – limped back through the wreckage.
Her eyes caught the smoking, half-destroyed chassis of one of Vilgax’s drones.
“What kind of high-tech freak show were these things?” she muttered, reaching down to pull a glowing cybernetic core out of the wreckage.
The moment her flesh made contact with the alien hardware, the parasitic drone code activated.
The metallic components liquified, violently burrowing into her skin and fusing directly with her nervous system.
It was a brutal, forced cybernetic ascension.
Within seconds, her biology was overwritten, her limbs and torso replaced by sleek, red-and-black alien metal.
Inside the local hospital, Ben and Gwen stood quietly outside the examination room, listening intently as the attending physician flipped through his charts to deliver his prognosis.
“Your grandfather has sustained a rather severe concussion from the impact,” the doctor explained, his tone measured.
“He also has a significant amount of scar tissue from old injuries that seem to be complicating his recovery.
It’s highly likely he will remain in a comatose state for the next few hours.”
The doctor turned the page of his folder, adjusting his glasses.
“As for your young friend…
his condition is remarkably less severe.”
“He has a minor hairline fracture in his left fibula and a very mild concussion from the debris.
However…
there is an anomaly.
The charts suggest a severe case of…
acute sleep deprivation?”
Hearing this, Ben’s heart clenched with worry.
“Are they going to be okay, Doctor?”
The physician offered a reassuring smile, looking down at Blake’s diagnostic reports with a trace of professional awe.
“To be completely honest, for a man of your grandfather’s age, his physical constitution is absolutely astonishing.
With a few days of strict bed rest, he will make a full recovery.”
“And your boyfriend’s situation is even better.
His vitals are perfect.
He should be waking up any minute now; his current unconsciousness isn’t a medical coma – his body has simply entered a deep, natural sleep to recover from pure exhaustion.”
Meanwhile, far out in the cold vacuum of space, Vilgax listened intensely to the data stream transmitting from his flagship’s communication array.
“My Lord, it appears our primary drone unit has successfully integrated with a native organic host.”
“We are currently receiving a stable synaptic uplink from the fusion.”
“Furthermore, the target’s energy signature is on the move.”
Down on Earth, the newly mutated Rojo was currently tearing through a commercial district, her mind directly enslaved by Vilgax’s telepathic command interface.
A booming, monstrous voice echoed within her skull, threatening her with an existence far worse than death if she failed to secure the Omnitrix for him.
Bound by a terrifying cosmic leverage, Rojo turned her cybernetic gaze toward the city center, setting a direct course to hunt down Ben.