Project ROWDY 2-18

The sky opened with a glitch.

Literally. 

Squares of neon blue and bright magenta light materialized out of the teleportation grid, forming a familiar shape with a familiar face. 

A teenager, maybe fifteen years old with light brown hair and bad complexion, dropped out of the sky on violently-bright wings throwing off square sparks that flickered between neon blue and magenta, hard-light energy constructs humming with a sound like a corrupted arcade cabinet.

Brick raised an eyebrow. Donny?

"H-hey!" Donald Ferguson Jr yelled loud enough to match Omnipotus, voice cracking hard on the syllable as he leveled both hands out. "Eat this, boss mob!"

A barrage of digital rockets — pixelated energy constructs glowing bright enough to light up the sky — launched from his open palms. Each one hammered into Omnipotus with the force of a cluster bomb, easily over a hundred tons of force in each one.

The deputy-director’s head snapped up, plasma cannon on his arm lowering as his jaw hung open behind mirrored sunglasses "D-Donny?! What are you doing here?!"

“Director Cecil sent me, dad!” The kid swooped around, digital wings shedding blocks of light as he dodged a blast from the extradimensional giant. “I said I wanted to help!”

"G-get out of here! Now!”

"No way!" Donny ducked a swip that would have taken his head off, air pressure tossing him into a spin he barely recovered from. “I’m part of the raid!”

Donny didn't wait for his dad to argue again as he shot downward, pixelated wings pushing him past the speed of sound. Donny Ferguson pulled his right arm back, digital energy swirling into his palm as light hardened into a 8-bit broadsword that looked like a giant glowing toy.

With a grunt, he swung it.

The hard-light weapon hit Omnipotus in the shoulder with a concussive boom that had more flash to it than force but it still shattered the air anyway, an explosion cracking the sound barrier and sending shockwaves out.

"Language warning!" Donny soared back up into the glitched sky with a yell. "But this guy is a massive asshole!"

Brick rolled his eyes, firing off a constant barrage of red flames to pepper the villain alongside a giant Rudy Robot, his brothers — blue lightning and green energy — and a dozen other gathered heroes. Too new to this. Donny hit hard enough, sure, but he didn’t have enough raw power to be scattering it like this. 

All though, to be fair, he wasn’t alone in that.

“Donny!” If his cybernetic heart would let him, the deputy director looked ready to have a heart attack. "Donny, I swear to God, you get your butt out of this airspace right now!"

"Dad, I'm doing crowd control! Just shoot him!" Donny banked hard, doing a bombing run with rapid bursts of pixel-powered energy blasts. 

“SO MANY PLAYTHINGS!”

Another set of blasts launched out, Brit and Britney maintaining perfect crossfire with white-hot plasma as the old soldier grunted. “Boy, did you pick the wrong universe!”

Commander Capitalism punched one leg alongside Monster Girl and Black Samson; Savage Dragon and Smasher hammering the other alongside Kid Thor and Knockout. Bulletproof, Neo-Capitalism and the Immortal took to the skies, the three flying in strafing runs as they did their best to hammer blows into his head. Super-Patriot blasted from a distance alongside both Penrose siblings and Donald, piling on with enough energy to slag the top of a mountain by this point.

Disaster Force and Fight Force threw their own efforts in, leaders Solar and Force blasting full-force with light and kinetic energy respectively, while their lieutenants Marka and Throwbolt did their part at long range.

“Eat this!” Rex Splode threw a sizeable rock right at Omnipotus’s skull, the small boulder charged with glowing yellow energ

“I REWRITE REALITY ON A WHIM!” The alien-god lashed out with one hand. “I FEED OFF THE ENERGY OF YOUR UNIVERSE!” He caught the rock and held it up, inspecting it with a skull-faced frown. “AND YOU THROW TOYS AT ME?”

“Me, personally?” Rex shrugged, dodging back as the ground opened up, a fissure releasing a flood of orange-winged butterflies. “I wouldn’t call them that. See why?”

The rock exploded in Omnipotus’ face with the force of a missile, the reality-warper engulfed in flames for all of a second.

“NO.” Flames that did all of nothing. “WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE MY TOYS?”

“Uh-oh.” Before Rex could be atomized by a blast of void-energy, Butch swooped in and caught the older teen. “Thanks, B!”

“You got it, King!”

The Hunk clung to Omnipotus, punching him in the waist with strength that had doubled in the last two minutes as his blows caused shockwaves. Donny was still swooping around, dropping oversized digital hammers, spears and swords onto the giant's head. 

And it wasn't enough.

It wasn't even close.

Omnipotus was barely degrading while the world itself was. Like he said, he was feeding on reality, growing stronger and healing as fast as he could get hurt. "OMNIPOTUS GROWS WEARY OF THESE MULTIPLYING INSECTS." The giant backhanded Hunk, sending the ever-growing man skipping across a newly formed lake of acid. “KNOW YOUR PLACE!”

The giant raised both hands, fingers clawed as he raked them down. Behind him, black fissures tore open in the sky, hungry stars and open void staring out.

Brick pulled back, ignoring Boomer’s annoyed shout as he left his little brother unsupported for a second to hover in the glitching air. Raw force… it’s not working. He frowned deeper, red eyes narrowed. If he’s drawing power by destabilizing our universe…

Well, obviously, they couldn’t just beat him to death. 

That’d be like trying to punch a concept. They had to…

They had to…

Blood-red eyes went wide again as a thought landed as hard as one of Butch’s aura-fed punches, his mind flashing back to the pile of scrap he’d been working on. The Flaxan-derived tech; that same dimensional key he’d been putting together back at Malcolm Dragon’s stupid birthday party.

Butch joined Boomer in shouting at his back as Brick shot up, exploding skyward in a streak of furious red light. It took a fraction of a second to scan the airspace till Brick found what he was looking for; the hulking form of Robot’s box-truck-sized mech suit.

The mecha hovered a good half-mile out, the genius orchestrating the drone swarm from the cockpit of his heaviest assault mech. Each of Robot’s robots laid down yellow bolts of suppressing fire, but they weren’t doing anything but making Omnipotus blink.

Brick slammed to a stop in the air directly in front of the mech's optic sensors, holding his position perfectly still.

"I need tools," Brick’s words came hard and fast, simple demands delivered with strength that could back them up. "Micro-welders. And a heavy-duty power source. Whatever runs this giant piece of scrap."

“I… Brimstone, I do not have time for this.” Inside the mech, Rudy's synthesized voice buzzed out of the external speakers as they hummed with enough volume to be heard over the chaos of the battle. “I am currently managing sixty-four separate defensive para-"

“Tin can, did I ask?” His question came simple and sharp, enough to shut up the man-in-a-boy’s-body.

“I have those materials in my secondary drop-pod.” Robot’s answer came quick. “May I inquire as to the tactical objective?"

"Just prep them," Brick snapped back. "If you want a planet to save."

Brick didn't wait for an answer as he broke the sound barrier so hard the sonic boom cleared the clouds around him.

Body a red arrow of pure kinetic intent, he was already across the Chicago border in the blink of an eye. The skyline was a jagged line on a heart monitor by the time he was already dropping altitude, angling down toward Paul Dragon’s backyard.

He didn't slow down fully until he was fifty feet above the grass, deceleration enough to displace enough air to flatten the hedges, overturn a patio table, and shatter three of the large bay windows at the back of the house with a sharp, cascading crash.

The party had mostly stalled with confused civilians and lower-level heroes who hadn't deployed still standing around, watching the news on their phones or staring at the discolored sky to the west.

Brick landed softly on the grass, uncaring of the hurricane he’d just caused as he zeroed in on Debbie Grayson.

She was standing near the overturned patio table, shielding her eyes from the dust and grass clippings Brick had just kicked up, staring at him with clear confusion.

"The device.” Brick walked straight up to her. “The device I was working on. I need it."

Debbie blinked, mouth working silently for all of a second before two decades of being in the superhero world took over. She reached into her purse, pulling out the jagged, rewired chunk of Flaxan crystal and steel. "Brick? Wh-what's going on?"

He took the device from her hand, fingers running over the exposed wiring to ensure he hadn't damaged the matrix when he handed it to Debbie. "Maybe the end of the world."

Debbie stared at him, seemingly both exhausted and relieved as her shoulders dropped a fraction. "Again?"

"Yeah."

"Yo, Bricky?" Justin Armstrong rounded on Brick, blue eyes blinking as he pushed his twin sister aside. Libby squawked, shooting her brother a look, but Justin clearly didn’t care. “So, when you say the word’s ending, uh.... do I still have to finish my AP Summer homework? Because that feels like, you know, a waste of time."

Claire Armstrong just looked down at her son, mom-authority carrying strong. "Young man, you are doing that homework as soon as we get home. Apocalypse or no apocalypse."

Brick rolled his eyes. Not even the time.

Without another word, he just bent his knees, flared his aura, and launched himsef right back into the sky. When he arrived back over what was once Illinois farmland, things had somehow gone even worse; the horizon completely wrong.

The sky was fractured, huge tears of black void staining the atmosphere above like shattered glass. Gravity was completely inverted, a chunk of a highway that didn’t exist anywhere near here floating upside down a mile in the air, cars raining into the sky in an endless loop. 

Brit and Britney were crushed down by shifting gravity and piles of red-colored snow both, the siblings grunting with both the Dragon and Smasher seeingly unconscious on top of them. A blond head of hair poked out from beneath a mountain of gears, each one moving independently, yet somehow attracted to each other. Donald was still screaming Donny's name, the cyborg dad desperately trying to shoot down floating chunks of asphalt while his son used his pixelated wings to shield Boomer from a massive energy wave.

Butch was still wrestling Omnipotus by the arm, but his movements were sluggish, the green aura flickering for whatever reason. And in the center of it all, Omnipotus stood tall, laughing loud and proud. "OMNIPOTUS DRINKS THE MARROW OF YOUR REALITY."

Brick flew down in a tight arc, dodging a stray blast from Donald as he slammed down directly onto the shoulder plating of Robot's orange mech.

The giant metal head turned to look at him, optic sensors whirring as they focused on the redhead clutching what looked like a piece of alien scrap metal.

Brick stared right back into the glowing mechanical eyes.

"We need to build."