“Trist, hurry up, hurry UP!” Gali went bouncing out onto the street ahead of him like a rabbit let off a leash, and watching her hop along in the morning light, all silly energy and swinging arms, it was genuinely difficult to connect the picture with the facts.
Because the facts, as of last night, were these: the small person currently skipping over sidewalk cracks was an alien.
Last night she had drunk the Biceps King serum and suffered exactly no consequences whatsoever, and since the system could not hand out counterfeit goods, the anomaly had only ever had one possible address.
Under the pressure of his coldest raised-eyebrow stare, and facing the imminent loss of a warm bed and delicious food, Gali had cracked and confessed.
Half-confessed.
The half she gave up was this: she was an alien, and her father was an extremely, *extremely* big deal.
Everything past that, she refused to say, and delivered instead, with great solemnity, the classic line: *knowing less is for your own good.* Trist hadn’t dug.
Fair was fair; he hadn’t explained where the Light Ball came from either.
Everyone at that table had secrets, and secrets didn’t need to be talked through to the bottom.
What she had explained was her ability, and her ability was *eating*.
The higher the energy content of a thing, the better it went down, which was why a giant-transformation serum had registered to her as a rare delicacy rather than a hazard.
And that one fact rearranged Trist’s entire picture of his household, because a body that could drink down an ocean of energy like that and metabolize it to nothing without so much as a burp was, in all probability, already one of the strongest things standing on this planet.
It also made him curious about the father, whom he had, until yesterday, comfortably assumed to be dead.
Gali had to be a comics-side character.
And Trist, strictly speaking, had never been a true Marvel comics fan.
What he actually knew was the film universe, plus the X-Men movies, and that was the whole library: the comics’ logic-free settings and the endless parallel universes had stood in front of him like a mountain range, and his old life hadn’t left him time to climb it.
Of the great powers above it all he knew only hearsay: the One-Above-All at the top, the Living Tribunal below that, the creator gods below that, and supposedly things stranger still that he couldn’t even remember the names of.
He’d even tried to make the system cough up the comics themselves through the search function.
Nothing.
Not one page of Marvel anywhere in it.
It had found DC just fine.
*Well.
I’m here now, so here is where I live.* Trist sighed inwardly, and then, a beat later, quietly started grinning, because look at how the cards had actually fallen: his real trump card in this universe wasn’t the system at all.
It was Gali.
They came out onto the edge of Times Square, where the big screen on a tower face was running the morning news.
“The New York Times comments: the comics market has turned overnight.
One-Punch Man’s popularity continues to surge, and its overturning of the traditional hero has stunned readers.” “The Washington Post comments: the company calling itself Marvel Comics launched its new magazine, Shonen Jump, into a nationwide buying frenzy yesterday.
Experts estimate the mania will hold for at least a week.” “The Los Angeles Times comments: One-Punch Man’s premise runs directly opposite to the values of Captain America, and readers are calling the experience ‘unreasonably satisfying.'” “USA Today comments: a dark-horse comic has begun to challenge Captain America’s standing.
Its chaotic, nonsensical premise has some battlefield veterans refusing to allow the comparison at all; they say the book is corroding the American spirit, and are calling for it to be banned.” Trist listened to the last one all the way through, and no anger arrived anywhere.
What arrived was a smile.
This was a country that sold guns over the counter and sold books cursing the sitting president off the same shelf.
One comic with an unorthodox take on heroism was going to get *banned*?
That wasn’t how free America worked.
What controversy actually did was advertise: every person who hadn’t read the book would now pick it up specifically to find out what could possibly be compared to Captain America.
Which suited him perfectly.
All of that was fan value.
Then the anchor’s face changed mid-sentence, and her voice picked up speed.
“We interrupt with breaking news.
Tony Stark, chairman of Stark Industries, went missing yesterday.
The relevant departments have opened an investigation.” The words landed, and Times Square went briefly, collectively silent, and then erupted.
Stark Industries was the country’s number-one arms manufacturer; a missing chairman meant a cratering stock, and every pedestrian in earshot had a theory by the second sentence.
The screen cut again, this time to a televised debate on the mutant question.
The speaker at the podium was a red-haired woman who carried herself with an elegance the camera loved.
Jean Grey.
“Ladies and gentlemen, mutants are simply a product of the human evolutionary process…” A senator on the panel cut straight across her.
“Are mutants dangerous, or are they not?” The two of them went at it from there, and the senator’s mutant-threat line won cheer after cheer from the studio audience, and out in the square, the pedestrians watching the screen applauded right along with them.
The mutant problem had been sharpening by the week.
The registration act proposal sitting in Congress had kicked up waves through the whole society, and plenty of mutants, wanting their anger seen, had started acting out in exactly the ways that made ordinary citizens despise them more, and against a backdrop like that, standing on a stage to say kind words about mutants was labor poured into sand.
Trist’s eyebrow ticked up as he steered Gali across the street.
*Once Tony comes back, the superhero era begins for real, and next to what’s coming, the mutant “threat” is a child’s problem.* And there was the other thing, the thing the debates never touched: the future had been perfectly clear that most of humanity carried the latent X-gene anyway.
Everyone down there applauding was, odds on, a mutant who hadn’t switched on yet.
Run the debate again with that fact on the table and the whole broadcast turned into a joke.
They cut down a side street, and that was where the day changed.
Several gang toughs came off the walls and folded in around them, casual and practiced, tattooed skin showing at every collar and cuff.
“Kid.” The lead one strolled forward with his chin up, enjoying himself.
“Be smart.
Hand over the little girl behind you and walk away.
Otherwise…” Because a child with a face that fine would move through the gang’s channels for a very good price, and every man in the circle knew it.
Trist did not produce the fear the script called for.
His face stayed level, and then, of all things, he smiled.
“Gangsters.
First time meeting any in person.” *Traffickers.
Putting their ideas on Gali.
There are corpses with more survival instinct.* Gali curled her lip in open disdain and started to step forward, and Trist pressed her back with one hand.
“Looks like you’ve made your choice,” the lead thug said.
The circle’s eyes swept the street once, confirmed that nobody was watching, and the biggest of them, a man built like a bear walking upright, came to stand directly over Trist, looking down from his full height with cruelty settling comfortably into his face.
The huge hand rose, unhurried, to swat the skinny kid off his feet.
There was a soft crackle of sound.
A faint coolness crossed the big man’s abdomen.
And then his mind simply went out.
The men beside him had seen it and would spend the rest of their short lives failing to process it: one flash of white light, and a hole the width of a dinner plate stood clean through their companion’s torso, the blood flash-dried to nothing by the passage of the sphere, and the emptied body dropped to the pavement like a coat slipping off a hook.
“Mutant!
He’s a MUTANT!” “MONSTER!!
He’s a monster!” “RUN!” The circle broke all at once, voices cracking into hysteria, shoes hammering for the far end of the alley.
“Stop them,” Trist said.
“‘Kay!” A curtain of purple light dropped across the alley mouth, seamless, and the running men slammed into it and rebounded and beat their fists against it, and it stood there like the face of a mountain and moved not at all.
“I came all the way to the Marvel universe,” Trist said, mostly to himself.
“How could I go without killing anyone.” Energy streamed off him in currents, gathering, and sphere after sphere of white light condensed into orbit around his body, and under the glare of them his face had gone cold as frost.
“Wouldn’t you agree.” In the next instant, the little alley filled with the sound of despair.