Night came to the world beneath the apple tree, and the tribe learned that shelter was not warmth.
The temperature fell faster than their bodies could answer. One by one, Nakfoji's people stiffened along the bark. Mouthparts stopped moving. Limbs folded close and did not open again.
Nakfoji felt the cold enter him, too. His body responded by thickening its shell. Layer closed over layer until the armor that preserved his heat trapped him inside it.
He could no longer climb.
Above him, the branches disappeared into darkness. If the world's light had gone somewhere, he would find it. If the tree truly held up creation, then its summit had to touch whatever waited beyond the night.
He pushed himself forward, one step and then another.
The distances beneath the tree were vast at his scale. His joints slowed. The shell tightened. Before he reached the trunk, the final seam closed and left him unable to move.
Nakfoji did not surrender. His body did it for him, and he slept.
Time moved around the sealed shell. Ice climbed the bark. The last overloaded leaf froze, withered, and fell. Its edge struck Nakfoji's casing hard enough to open a hairline crack.
Blue light seeped through the crack and the shell split. Nakfoji emerged with a stronger chest, heavy jaws, horns like a beetle's, and two pairs of blue wings. His new eyes gathered what little light existed and turned darkness into shape.
He flew through the frozen air, passing branch after branch until he reached the crown of the world tree. Darkness continued above it. The tree did not hold up the world; it was one object inside a world larger than anything he had imagined.
Nakfoji opened his jaws and breathed. Frost raced across the upper limbs, sealing the apple tree beneath a glassy shell.
He searched beyond it for another survivor. There were none.
He called until the sound failed in the open dark. No answer climbed from the roots. No wing crossed the sky.
The tribe had mistaken the tree for protection; Nakfoji had mistaken endurance for rescue. He alone could remember a people who had lived for less than a night to the world beyond their enclosure.
Loneliness changed the purpose of his body. He had refused to produce offspring while he believed they would inherit only the cold death of his tribe. Now extinction left him no safer choice.
Near the edge of his journey, he found an object buried in the ice. It was harder than bark and shaped by forces he mistook for ancient hands. To Nakfoji, the discarded hoe was an artifact left by the makers of the world.
If he could take that hardness into himself, perhaps his descendants would survive what his people had not.
He bit into the metal.
His jaws tore it. His body did not forgive the effort.
Nakfoji kept eating as his outline began to blur. He consumed the artifact until his remaining life became ten blue spheres clustered beneath him.
When the tenth settled on the ice, the founder of the lineage died.
***
Michael turned into the manor drive as the system filled his vision with urgent text.
Lineage accepted.
Gene collection successful.
Designation: Nakfoji form.
Primary abilities: phasing, freezing breath.
Associated adaptations: flight, aquatic movement, poison resistance, extreme cold tolerance, reinforced mouthparts.
Warning: high-heat environments impose a significant disadvantage.
Michael stopped beside the sandbox boundary. He could see movement beneath the frost now, small blue shapes around a frozen apple tree. What had happened inside was invisible to him except for the result the system chose to report.
An image of the accepted form rotated before him. It looked familiar in a way he could not place and dangerous in several ways he could.
"Apply the Nakfoji form."
Blue light swept over his skin.
His center of balance changed first. Then came wings, armor, sensory horns and instincts without words. Michael rose from the driveway without deciding how.
Flight arrived less like a skill than a limb he had forgotten he owned.
He crossed the grounds in a blur, climbed above the roof, and banked over the trees.
The manor contracted beneath him. Roads became lines; the sandbox became a patch of winter cut into green land.
For the first time since arriving, escape felt possible without money. Michael could leave a road, a locked room, perhaps a battlefield. He did not know what might follow him, how long the form would last or whether heat would turn escape into a fall.
The night air carried pressure through his horns. He breathed, and a white plume crystallized moisture several yards ahead. When he descended, his body softened into something half present and passed through the upper layer of soil before he pulled himself back into solidity.
"That," Michael said to no one, "is indecently useful."
He flew until the horizon began to pale.
Excitement delayed the cost. It did not cancel it. By the time he landed, every new muscle felt hollowed out.
"Release the form."
The blue armor vanished. Weakness hit him hard enough that he braced a hand against the wall.
Transformation consumed his own stamina. That mattered more than the speed, the cold, or the thrill of passing through earth.
A power that left him helpless after use was not a solution. It was a trade he needed to measure.
The system offered to recycle the remaining spores now that their genetics had been recorded.
Michael looked through the boundary at the ten spheres and the scattered movement beyond them.
"No. Leave them."
He went inside and fell asleep before he reached any conclusion about why.
***
Daylight was already filling the bedroom when Michael woke.
His muscles still ached. He returned to the window and found the enclosed world locked in the same engineered winter.
"Restore the region to normal temperature."
The system obeyed. Snow began to soften. Water ran in narrow channels over the ice.
One stable gene was enough for now. Thanos remained somewhere in the future. Michael had no intention of meeting him with one exhausting transformation and a heroic attitude.
If the Titan ever stepped off his ship, surrendered the Infinity Stones and addressed Michael as his beloved father, Michael would consider accepting.
Until then, caution had better odds.
He made coffee, opened a novel, and settled onto the leather sofa. The quiet lasted less than a page.
"Mr. Clyborne," a low voice said from the dark corner of the room. "Were you planning to offer me a cup?"
Michael froze and searched the corner. He saw no one. "Who's there?"
"I'm right here."
A man in a black coat rose from the black leather chair, the colors swallowing each other until movement revealed him. An eyepatch covered one eye. The other watched Michael with practiced patience.
"Nick Fury," the man said. "Director of S.H.I.E.L.D."
Michael lowered the book.
He had acquired his first superhuman form, flown until sunrise, and survived the cost.
Fury was already inside his house.