This outing couldn’t happen without consequences for me.
First, in the heat of battle, I didn’t notice that I’d broken my space camera.
Along with it, I lost the shots from my last two outings.
I should have handed it to someone before the fight.
Second, too much attention was drawn to the incident.
The gathering of heroes from different countries, while not completely exceptional, was still a rare event.
And Ave Maria was already known as an extremely dangerous monster.
She’d proven it again, showing the complete inability of the assembled mix of heroes to stand against her.
Even the strongest of the Guardians, the Immortal, who had a truly legendary backstory, from rumors that he’d been with Columbus among the discoverers of America to his presidential term, turned out to be just a snack for the monster without the support of his teammates.
And all of this became public knowledge in record time.
Just like the time when my father and I fought, when he said terrible things about Mom and admitted his plans to conquer Earth, the recording ended up online despite Cecil’s assurances that a leak was impossible.
Though this time it was even worse.
Media helicopters were there, if not from the very beginning, then certainly before me.
And although the quality was worse than Darkwing’s drones, they filmed everything.
The Guardians of the Planet’s rating dropped significantly after this near-defeat.
If before they, as a whole team, of course, were roughly on par with Omni-Man, now people’s faith in the international alliance had fallen a bit.
But Invincible got all the attention and belief.
Now I was officially in the big leagues, with all that entailed.
A serious rise in popularity of my superhero alter ego, which in turn caused an increase in views on my channel.
Except now the comments were mostly filled with arguments about my identity and which heroes I could beat.
These people on the internet treat us, who risk our lives saving them, like some kind of Pokémon in a TV show.
And although I understood that such attention was inevitable, it was still a bit annoying.
Overall, I didn’t mind being popular, but right now it was a bit inconvenient.
What if I made a big mistake somewhere, and some overly attentive and perceptive fan figured out my real identity?
Not to mention that Invincible was being directly compared to Omni-Man, noting the similarities in both powers and preference for being a lone hero.
And that was all damn dangerous.
If internet guys noticed the similarity between Invincible and Omni-Man, then Nolan could too.
***
My father came home only the next day.
By then, I’d almost fully recovered from the fight with Ave Maria and was living a completely ordinary, unsuspicious school-teenage life.
Doing homework, zoning out on the computer and console, hanging out with William, Eve, and Richard.
But Nolan, on the contrary, was strangely thoughtful and detached.
I’d bet it was because of our meeting.
But he barely paid attention to me.
Although he’d never been a candidate for father of the year, still, what was he thinking?
I expected him to try to check if I’d secretly awakened my powers, but…
one day, two days, three, Nolan did nothing, barely even spoke to me.
Stranger and stranger.
Anyway, I temporarily laid low.
I even refused the subsequent offers for space jobs from NASA, citing the need to recover from the fight with Ave Maria.
Luckily, I already had so much money that it would be enough to pay for college without loans and still have as much left over.
Plus, all that money was just sitting there.
I couldn’t explain to my parents where it came from yet.
Two weeks after the fight with Ave Maria, Cecil contacted me again and asked me to help with, as he put it, “evaluating a promising new project.” The last such project was the damn Cerebro, which almost killed Eve.
So I immediately assumed that Stedman wouldn’t be asking for my help if the promising project didn’t have the potential to get out of control and show its creators a thing or two.
And I didn’t use Khrushchev’s famous phrase for nothing.
The coordinates he sent me pointed to the ill-fated Bikini Atoll.
An island in the Pacific that served as a nuclear weapons testing ground during the Cold War.
But that’s not all it’s known for.
The name of the bikini swimsuit came from this atoll.
And it’s been referenced countless times in world culture, in books, movies, and even cartoons.
This is where *SpongeBob SquarePants* takes place, for example.
Apparently, the Global Defense Agency had taken over this place after the Cold War for their own, less well-known but no less dangerous, testing.
“I’m here,” I reported as I flew up.
Figuring out which island I needed wasn’t hard.
The atoll’s surface was almost completely devoid of vegetation, but it was full of military structures, which really stood out among its neighbors in the archipelago.
“Good,” Stedman replied through my earpiece.
“Go under the dome.”
The huge dome-shaped building, like the one around the asteroid crater in the movie *Evolution*, was visible from afar.
Upon closer inspection, the structure wasn’t a full-fledged building.
It was something like a fabric dome covering the testing site.
Inside, there were no corridors or rooms, just a huge space, lots of equipment, and the “promising project” itself, taking up about a quarter of the available area.
Ave Maria.
Defeated, bound by an insane number of chains, but judging by her infrequent breathing, still alive.
Around the sleeping monster, structures resembling scaffolding were erected.
People in protective suits scurried about them, busily and efficiently, like a colony of ants.
Most of the structures were around her head, with a still-unhealed hole in her skull, revealing a clear view of her exposed brain, from which various foreign objects protruded.
And overseeing all of this was a man I recognized from my past life, Alex Sinclair.
A completely insane psychopathic scientist responsible for creating the ReAnimen.
Except he should still be in college, just developing his technology, possibly conducting first experiments on corpses.
In my past life, Cecil recruited him after he’d moved on to living people and I’d neutralized him.
But recruiting a killer-psychopath wasn’t the worst part of the story.
The worst part was that Cecil had known about Sinclair and his experiments for a long time but, as with Erickson, hadn’t intervened, believing the potential benefits of these assholes’ actions justified such permissiveness and some victims.
“Are you people completely insane?” I couldn’t hold back.
“That’s what I said,” a grumpy male voice echoed.
Brit.
Expected that he’d be here.
He was always brought in for such things as a mercenary.
Though it was unclear what use he’d be if something went wrong with Cecil’s plan.
Britney was also there, standing off to the side, talking on her phone.
Wait, that wasn’t a phone.
It was Becky, their sister, who was something like an energy life form that lived inside electronic devices.
I honestly wasn’t sure I understood that correctly.
Britney had only briefly “introduced” me to her sister at that party, saying I’d made a good impression.
***
“I thought she was dead!” I said, walking over to Cecil and Brit, who were watching the unconscious monster from a respectful distance.
“I scrambled her brains.”
“We thought so too at first,” Cecil replied calmly.
“But soon we noticed she was starting to recover.
Our experts say her brain is much simpler than a mammal’s, but she has neural networks in her tentacles.
They were enough to live with a damaged brain and even begin to regenerate.”
“That’s all fine and good,” Brit interjected grumpily.
“But why the hell did you drag her here and let her recover instead of finishing her off?”
Because she’s damn strong.
And if they could sic her on Omni-Man, it would be worth any effort.
I’d bet that’s exactly the logic Stedman was using.
“We didn’t just let her recover,” Cecil answered.
“We worked on her nervous system.
We implanted several electrodes and a charge of explosives in her brain.
But most importantly, we intervened in her cell regeneration process.
That part is really complicated, and I don’t understand it all myself.
But in the end, it should be something like thought control over this creature.”
Yeah, that’s about what I thought.
“How precise is the control?” I asked.
“So far, we’re only talking about the most primitive commands.
For example, right now, the command ‘sleep’ or ‘inactivity’ is being transmitted to her brain.
Something like a hibernation mode.”
“I take it the desire to attack some object is also a primitive command?”
“Yes, inducing uncontrollable rage is very simple.”
“And what do you want from us?” I asked.
“To fight her again while you test your monster gamepad?”
“It’s just a precaution.
We just need to make sure we haven’t made any mistakes.
Better to do it now while she hasn’t fully recovered.
We’ll wake her up, but keep her suppressed.
And if something goes wrong, we have electrodes in her head and a bomb.
But that’s a last resort.
We wouldn’t want to lose all the money and effort invested like that.”
“Then you should have called more heroes,” the blonde stated, walking over to us and hanging Becky on her belt.
“No one invited you…” Brit muttered, barely audible.
“This is a top-secret project,” so that my father, against whom they planned to use the monster, definitely wouldn’t find out about it.
“None of the heroes except you know about its existence.
And besides…” The old man’s voice hinted at a smirk.
“The two of you are more than enough.”
“You’re not…” Brit was stunned.
“Are you fucking kidding me?
I’ve already become a laughingstock for the whole world after last time.”
Yes, Brit’s hopes that his moment of fame would remain in obscurity were not to be.
Now not only his malicious sister but the entire internet community was teasing him about what happened.
“Come on, brother,” his sister patted him on the shoulder.
“You don’t even have to do anything.
And the pay is triple.”
“Go to hell, Britney.
And you too, Cecil.
Shove your money up your ass!” The old man finally lost it.
“I didn’t sign up for this.
I’m a soldier, not a…”
Not waiting for him to finish, I flew up to the console platform.
Maybe I should quietly kill this psycho before anyone gets hurt because of him?
His ReAnimen, of course, are unpleasant opponents, but far from a match for a Viltrumite.
On the other hand, he could churn out a whole army of those freaks, and that’s a real force.
“What?” Alex noticed my interest.
“What are you staring at?”
“Are you sure you can control her?” I asked.
“If anyone can, it’s me!” He answered smugly.
“I’m the best at this.”
“It’s in your best interest for that to be true, because those chains…” I decided to intimidate him.
“Don’t count on them holding her for long.”
“Alright, Sinclair, Invincible, let’s begin,” Cecil gave the order.
He’d managed to convince Brit to stay.
I looked down.
The old veteran stood off to the side with a dissatisfied look but didn’t leave, waiting for the experiment to start.
Amazing.
Sinclair nodded to Stedman from his platform and, taking on an inspired look, turned to the monster with the exposed brain and the control panel.
“Prepare yourselves!” He announced to everyone.
“Our beauty is about to wake up.”
He flipped a couple of switches, then turned a dial, apparently with some voltage, and froze, staring unblinkingly at his latest victim.
***
For the first few seconds, nothing happened, which only increased the tension.
You know, like in horror movies.
Someone below, apparently with relief, bleated, “It didn’t work?”
But the next second, the monster’s tentacles began to move, sluggishly, even uncertainly.
First one, then another.
Finally, the movement spread from her facial appendages to the rest of her body.
The huge carcass stirred, making the chains wrapped around it groan.
Without eyes or a face, it was hard to tell how aware Ave Maria was of the situation.
And with those things sticking out of the hole in her skull, it all looked incredibly barbaric, monstrous.
I felt a little sorry for the animal, which wasn’t even allowed to rest in death.
And if I died?
My corpse would surely end up on this psycho’s table the same day, and they’d try to turn me into another ReAnimen.
Not just me, either.
Any sufficiently strong hero, after death, risked becoming the object of such experiments.
My imagination immediately conjured up a team of resurrected zombie Guardians of the Globe, led by the already undying Immortal.
That could easily become a reality if Cecil decided to recruit Sinclair earlier.
“It worked!” Sinclair shrieked below, literally jumping for joy.
“I did it!”
So he hadn’t been sure of success?