Chapter Text
Mr. Incredible shoved himself through thick undergrowth, sweat pouring down his face, his breath sawing in and out of his chest. Behind him, metal claws chewed up earth and snapped tree trunks like toothpicks. The Omnidroid was relentless, all whirring gears and glowing eyes, and for the first time in a long while, Bob wasn’t sure if he had it in him to win.
God, when had he started getting so old?
The cave loomed ahead like salvation. He stumbled inside, bruised shoulder colliding with rough stone, and ducked behind a wall just as the machine’s claws scraped the entrance. He shoved rocks into the gap with all the desperate strength he had left, praying the thing’s sensors wouldn’t pick him up.
Darkness. His chest heaved. The sound of his own pulse in his ears.
When his eyes adjusted, he saw it—no, felt it first. The walls weren’t smooth stone. They were scarred, gouged out in jagged lines. He pulled a flare from his belt and lit it, the sudden red glow painting everything in blood.
Letters. Harsh, uneven. Burned into the wall with a force that could only come from a man he used to know.
KRONOS.
Bob’s stomach dropped. His throat closed around the name before it made it out.
“Simon…”
Simon Paladino hadn’t planned to die in a cave.
The NSA hadn’t given him much, just a quiet directive: investigate Nomanisan Island. Find out why so many Supers were vanishing. No cameras. No backup. Just him and his eyes.
He told himself he wasn’t afraid. He’d stared down worse. He’d stared down them.
The island was too new. Every building gleamed, every path was cut too clean. It was the kind of place that looked scrubbed, polished, artificial. When the Omnidroid came, rolling out of the trees with its spidery legs and that awful red eye, Simon felt it before he saw it: this was the graveyard of his friends.
He fought until he couldn’t. His lasers carved through armor, through jungle, through his own strength. His skull ached like it was splitting in two.
And when the machine didn’t stop, he ran. He ran until he stumbled into that cave.
The word came out in slashes of heat and light. Letters burning against rock: K R O N O S.
By the time the last line was etched into stone, Simon was shaking so hard he could barely stand. His knees hit the ground. His throat was dry, and his tongue was sticking to the roof of his mouth. His eyes flickered, fading to nothing.
The Omnidroid scanned the cave mouth. No heat signatures. No movement. He was Terminated.
The darkness swallowed him whole.
He dreamed of fire and water, of being pulled by faceless hands. When he woke, it was to floodlights and hazmat suits, voices muffled through respirators. Hands under his arms. A mask pressed to his face.
“Subject: Gazerbeam, found. Alive. Barely.”
He tried to speak, but only a rasp clawed its way out of his throat. He was alive. He wasn’t sure if it was a mercy.
Cassandra Vale, better known as Blazestone, hated hospitals. The smell of antiseptic made her skin crawl, and the steady beeping of machines grated on her nerves. She was fire, she was light, she was everything but stillness. Being strapped down, wrapped in gauze, made her feel like they’d already buried her.
Her hands itched. Even now, flames sparked faintly along her palms, caught and fizzled against the bandages. The Omnidroid had done a number on her, tearing at her with claws until she lit herself up so hard she thought she might’ve burned straight through her own bones.
They said she’d live. Recovery, though—months. Maybe longer.
When the NSA agents walked in, she didn’t even look up. They all had the same faces: blank, tired, bureaucratic. “If this is about the mission report,” she said hoarsely, “you already squeezed me dry.”
But they didn’t sit. They laid photographs on her lap. Black and white, grainy.
Cassandra blinked down at them.
A forest—no, what had once been a forest. Now it was nothing but ash and shattered earth, the ground twisted into glass. A wasteland carved into the heart of the island.
“Gamma Jack,” one of the agents began. His voice was flat, like he was reading from a script. “Fought valiantly. No remains recoverable. Termination confirmed.”
Cassandra’s hands froze on the photos. Her mouth went dry. There was no sound in the room but the steady beep of her heart monitor.
“Of course,” she gasped, shoulders shaking. “Of course he’d go out like that. You think that wasteland’s an accident? That’s Jack. That’s all Gamma Jack.”
The photos blurred as her eyes stung, collapsing into sobs. “He never—” She couldn’t finish. She pressed a hand to her mouth, tried to breathe around the hole in her chest.
The agent shifted, clearly uncomfortable. “We are… sorry for your loss.”
“Shut up,” Cassandra snapped, voice breaking.
She bent over the photographs, tracing the glassed earth with shaking fingers, as if she could feel him there, still burning, still refusing to go quietly.
Cassandra had grown used to the white noise of the ward. The hiss of oxygen, the steady beep of heart monitors, the faint shuffle of nurses in rubber soles. It was a rhythm she hated but had learned to live with.
So when the rhythm faltered—when she heard the scrape of a stretcher being wheeled in, the clipped tones of orderlies saying critical, severe malnourishment, optic damage—she turned her head.
And froze.
It was Gazerbeam, or at least, what was left of him.
They wheeled him past, and for a second she thought she might vomit. He was a shadow of the man she remembered: skin clinging to sharp cheekbones, lips cracked and bloodless. One of his eyes was bandaged, the other dull and watery. His wrists trembled against the restraints, thin and shaking.
“Jesus,” Cassandra whispered, but her voice was too weak to carry.
The orderlies must have noticed the way her machines spiked, because there was a hushed conversation, a nod, and then—God help her—they moved him into the cot beside hers.
The smell of disinfectant couldn’t mask him. The faint reek of starvation, of fever-sweat, hit her nose. She wanted to turn away. She couldn’t.
Later, when they tried to feed him, she watched him struggle to lift the spoon. His hand shook so badly the broth sloshed down his chin. He gagged, swallowing hard, bile rising in his throat. One of the nurses held his shoulders steady, coaxing him like a child. He looked humiliated, eyes burning, and still he tried again.
Cassandra had faced death a dozen times. This was worse.
Her fingers dug into her sheets. The words pressed, sharp and jagged, against the back of her throat. She tried to swallow them. They clawed their way out anyway.
“He’s dead, Gazer.”
The sound of metal hitting tile was sharp enough to make her flinch. Gazerbeam had dropped the spoon.
His face—oh God, his face. Horror etched every line, his good eye wide and glassy, the bandaged one twitching like it ached. His lips moved, but no sound came out, just a hollow rasp of breath.
Cassandra looked away. She couldn’t watch him break.
Her nightstand drawer rattled as she fumbled it open with trembling fingers. The photographs were there, the ones the NSA had left with her like evidence in a trial. She slid them across the small space between their cots, her hand shaking so badly the edges curled.
The wasteland. The forest turned to ash. Earth warped into glass.
Gazerbeam stared down at the images, his chest rising and falling in shallow, ragged breaths. His good eye filled, tears slipping unchecked down the ravaged line of his face.
His hand trembled as he lowered it, fingertips brushing against the edge of the tray. The spoon he’d dropped clattered once against the metal, then lay still, forgotten. His remaining good eye darted to the nightstand, to the photos sliding across the wood with a scratchy whisper before they rested against his wrist.
Cassandra couldn’t look at him. She’d rehearsed saying it in her head a hundred times since the NSA official gave them the report, flat and bloodless, like they were reading a shopping list. “Casualty during confrontation. No body recovered. High probability of termination.” Not a person, not Gamma Jack. Just a line item in a ledger.
Her throat burned. Her chest felt like it had caved in. And still, the words had come out anyway.
“Jack’s dead.”
She pressed her lips together, hard, and tried to ignore the sound of Gazerbeam’s breathing across from her. Too shallow. Too uneven. He was breaking apart, and she couldn’t even look him in the eye to offer him anything but proof.
His hand hovered above the stack of photographs like the air itself weighed too much. Slowly, he lifted the first one.
The black-and-white image was grainy, filtered through the NSA’s cautionary tech. But the destruction was clear enough: an entire swath of jungle flattened, trees uprooted, the earth gouged raw. Charred stumps dotted the edges of the frame like gravestones. The ground itself seemed scorched.
For a moment, Gazerbeam said nothing. His lips parted slightly, and then pressed together again, his jaw quivering with something he was fighting to contain.
Cassandra finally turned her head. She couldn’t help it. She needed to see him, needed to know if he was holding together better than she was.
He wasn’t.
A tear cut a jagged line down his cheek, carving through the dirt and exhaustion clinging to his skin. He blinked hard, but his hand shook so violently that the photograph fluttered, nearly slipped from his grasp.
“He… he did that?” His voice was barely audible, hoarse from disuse and dehydration, scraping out like gravel.
Cassandra swallowed. “Yeah.”
Silence pressed heavily over them, save for the faint, sterile buzz of machines and the occasional muffled footstep of a nurse down the hall.
Then, so sudden it startled her, she laughed. A short, sharp, and brittle thing. She clapped a hand over her mouth, but the sound still echoed.
Gazerbeam turned his head, that one good eye wide and lost.
“Of course he did,” she whispered through her palm, shoulders trembling. She lowered her hand, still half-laughing, half-sobbing. “Of fucking course Jack wouldn’t go quietly. Not him. He had to leave a crater in the earth to let them know he was there. God, that’s just—” Her voice cracked. “That’s just so him.”
Gazerbeam bowed his head, clutching the photo tighter, as though he could absorb the image into himself, as though it might bring their friend back if he held it long enough.
Cassandra’s eyes burned, and this time she didn’t fight it.
Watching Gazerbeam struggle through recovery was like holding a mirror up to her own ordeal: the tremors in his hands, the hollow set of his cheeks, the stubborn rise and fall of his chest, even when his body screamed to give in.
He was awake tonight, barely. They had managed to get a little broth into him, though he still looked pale, shadows carved under his eyes. His good one was glassy, darting around the room in restless fits before settling back on her.
Blazestone now, not Cassandra, swallowed, her voice catching before she even started.
“Hey, Gazer… do you remember anything? Before the NSA got to you?”
He frowned, lines deepening around his mouth. His fingers flexed against the thin blanket, then stilled. “I—” He stopped, closed his eyes as though the effort of dragging the memory out cost him too much.
After a moment, he tried again, voice hoarse and unsteady. “Bits. Not much. Just… hands. Quick. Steady. Wrapping something around my arm.” His free hand twitched, as though remembering the tug of fabric. “And—” He faltered, brow furrowed. “Something heavy, warm, being laid across me. Felt like…”
He trailed off, shaking his head, frustrated.
Blazestone’s throat tightened. She didn’t interrupt. She couldn’t.
Gazerbeam’s eye opened again, glassy with exhaustion. “It’s all flashes. I thought… maybe it was a dream. Or the NSA, but—” He gave a rough laugh, bitter and empty. “The report said I was alone when they found me. Cape had slid off by then. Nothing but stone and dust.”
Blazestone looked down at her hands, gripping her blanket so hard her knuckles blanched. She remembered those photographs. The scorched wasteland. The impossible crater. Jack’s crater.
Her chest ached like a wound reopening. She wanted to tell Simon. Wanted to say, it was him, dummy. It was Jack. He was there, and he tried for you, even if no one else will ever know it.
But the words lodged in her throat like broken glass. She forced herself to breathe, slow, steady. She couldn’t lay that weight on him. Not when he was still so fragile.
So instead she said, tired but gentle, “Sometimes the mind hides things when it’s too much. Maybe it’s better you don’t remember it all.”
Simon nodded faintly, letting the memory slip away, though his fingers still twitched restlessly against the sheets, as if clinging to a thread he couldn’t hold.
Blazestone looked at him, and in her mind she saw Jack’s grin, heard his voice, felt the scorch of heat in the photos. She bit the inside of her cheek until the taste of copper bloomed on her tongue.
“He’s dead, Gazer,” she whispered again, but this time only to herself.
And the machines kept humming.
The jungle was burning.
Gamma Jack’s chest heaved as he staggered through the underbrush, sweat slicking his brow, his suit scorched and clinging to his skin. Every breath dragged fire into his lungs, but he forced himself forward. The Omnidroid’s footsteps echoed behind him, thunderous and unrelenting, shaking the earth like an angry god demanding tribute.
He ducked into the first gap he saw—a shadowed crack in the cliffside—and half-fell inside, bracing a hand against the damp stone to keep from collapsing entirely. His vision swam. His muscles screamed. He had minutes at best before the thing caught up.
But the cave wasn’t empty.
Jack froze, heart lurching, as his eyes adjusted.
A body.
No—worse than that. Not a body, not yet. A man, crumpled against the stone floor, skin pale and tight over his bones. His costume was torn, streaked with dried blood and dirt, but Jack knew that crest. He’d seen it a hundred times in the newsreels, a thousand times in briefing files.
“Simon?”
The man stirred weakly, one eye clouded and unfocused, the other darting toward Jack like it cost him something to move.
Gazerbeam. Alive. Barely.
Jack dropped to his knees beside him, shock cutting through the haze of exhaustion. He reached out, pressing his fingers against Simon’s throat, and almost sobbed in relief when he felt the faint, stuttering beat.
“You’re alive. Christ—you’re alive.”
He fumbled with his cape, tearing a strip free with shaking hands. He pressed it against a wound on Simon’s arm, trying to slow the bleeding, but it was like trying to dam a river with a handful of sand. Too little. Too late.
“Stay with me, alright? Don’t you dare quit on me now.” His voice broke, harsher than he intended, desperate to fill the cavern with something louder than his own panic.
Simon’s lips moved, but only a rasp slipped out. A word Jack couldn’t catch. His head lolled weakly, eyes half-rolling back.
“Don’t talk. Save it, pal.” Jack tore off another strip of fabric, his movements clumsy, frantic. “I’ll get you out. I’ll—”
The ground shook. Dust rained down from the cave ceiling. The Omnidroid was close.
Jack’s heart stuttered. He looked down at Simon, who was trying, failing, to focus on him.
He couldn’t carry him. Not like this. Not with the machine on his heels. If he tried, they’d both die before making it fifty feet.
Jack’s hands hovered over him uselessly, shaking with rage and grief. He wanted to scream, to tear the world apart for putting them here.
Instead, he draped the remainder of his cape over Simon’s body with trembling care, as though it were armor. Or a shroud. He pressed it against Simon’s chest, leaving the man with the last thing he could give.
“I’ll come back,” he whispered, voice rough, uneven. “Do you hear me, Simon? You’re not done yet, pal. You’re not—” His throat closed, his words drowned out by the pounding in Simon’s ears, the way his head lolled to one side, face slackening with exhaustion.
Jack swallowed hard, forced himself to his feet. His legs shook. His heart hammered. The jungle roared outside, the Omnidroid’s silhouette moving like a shadow of doom across the treeline.
He looked back one last time. Simon’s good eye fluttered, catching a blur of motion, of firelight. He tried to lift a hand, tried to call out, but his body betrayed him.
Gamma Jack turned away.
And then he flew—out of the cave, into the fire, into the waiting arms of a monster built to kill men like him.
Gamma Jack shot out of the cave, cape flaring, lungs dragging in hot, wet air. The Omnidroid was waiting—massive, hunched, its red sensors flaring like twin suns in the dark. Its claws flexed, metal screeching against metal, and the forest seemed to shrink around it.
Jack clenched his fists, the radiation already thrumming under his skin, begging to be loosed. “Come on, then big guy,” he muttered, broken by the smoke in his throat. “Let’s dance.”
The first strike came fast, way too fast. A claw tore through the air where he’d been standing a half-second before. Jack blasted upward, leaving a smear of green-white light in his wake. He hurled a burst of radiation down, hitting the joint. Sparks flew, but the machine barely stumbled.
It turned, tracking him with terrifying precision.
Another claw shot out, catching him across the ribs. The air left his lungs in a grunt, vision blackening at the edges. He tumbled, caught himself, and forced the burning in his chest down with a grunt.
“Not… done yet.”
He lifted both hands. The world narrowed to the pressure building in his veins, his bones, the unbearable heat in his marrow. When he released it, the blast tore through the treeline like the wrath of some vengeful god.
Trees disintegrated into splinters. The earth buckled, cracked, and smoked. The Omnidroid staggered, its plating glowing red-hot where the energy hit.
Jack was already moving, already charging another blast. He didn’t stop. Couldn’t. The machine was learning him, adjusting, its claws beginning to anticipate. Every second it stayed online meant Simon’s chances bled away.
So he poured more in, more than he had.
His skin blistered. His breaths came ragged, shallow. His vision swam with spots of light. But he didn’t stop.
The Omnidroid lunged. He screamed and unleashed everything.
The jungle lit up like daylight. For one impossible moment, the machine’s silhouette burned against the glare, claws splayed, sensors searing. And then the explosion consumed it—metal shrieking, trees collapsing, the earth itself blackening under the storm.
When the light faded, the Omnidroid lay half-melted in the crater, twitching feebly before going still. Around it, nothing remained. No green. No life. Just ash and ruin.
Jack crashed to his knees at the crater’s edge, chest heaving. His hands shook violently, skin raw, blood dripping from his nose.
He spat blood into the scorched dirt, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and forced himself upright. He walked on unsteady legs toward the smoke, vision swimming, his suit torn and filthy against the wasteland he’d made.
The blast should have killed it.
Gamma Jack staggered ti his feet, ribs screaming, his body a live wire of pain. But the Omnidroid twitched—shuddering back to life, claw gouging into the dirt as it dragged itself upright. Smoke poured from its joints, metal warped and half-melted, but it was still moving.
Jack tried to lurch back, but the claw snapped out, faster than he could dodge. The impact slammed him against the broken earth, knocking the air from his lungs. The claw pinned him there, pressure crushing into his chest. He wheezed, his vision going black around the edges.
Then a flicker—red light washed over him, scanning, dissecting. And with a sinking weight in his gut, Jack realized he wasn’t just fighting a machine.
He was performing.
Through the glowing lens of the Omnidroid’s sensors, he saw it: a feed, distant but sharp. A face framed in static. A boy’s face, too young for the fury twisting it. Striking red hair slicked, jaw set tightly, eyes burning as they tracked every inch of Jack’s body with clinical obsession.
Syndrome.
Of course.
Jack coughed, blood spattering his teeth. The red glare burned down on him, the crushing weight of the claw grinding against his ribs. But then he grinned, wild and sharp, because if he was going to die here, then he’d do it his way.
“Buddy?” His voice came hoarse but mocking, rolling out of him with a laugh bubbling under it. “What’s the matter? Mr. Incredible not answering your calls?”
The boy’s face on the feed flickered with something—recognition, maybe, or rage and humiliation fused together.
Jack cooed. “What’s the matter, huh? He tell you to get lost? And now here you are, playing god with a tin can and a kill list. All ‘cause Daddy Incredible wouldn’t let you tag along.”
Syndrome’s lips thinned to a bloodless line. His eyes narrowed, something dangerous sparking behind them.
Jack threw his head back, the claw digging into him deeper, but he laughed anyway—loud, unhinged, laughter bubbling like blood in his throat. “Pathetic. You think this makes you strong? A toy doing your dirty work? You’re not a genius, kid. You’re a parasite with daddy issues.”
The Omnidroid’s claw pressed harder, ribs creaking under the force. Jack’s laugh broke into a ragged cough, but he spat blood into the dirt and smiled up at the lens, sharp and feral.
“Go on, then. Kill me. But you’ll never be him.”
For the first time, the boy’s face cracked. A snarl twisted Syndrome’s mouth as he jabbed at the controls, barking orders too sharp to hear through the interference.
And in that moment—rage, pride, obsession—he overrode the Omnidroid’s adaptive programming. He forced it to strike without calculating, without learning.
That mistake gave Jack his opening.
A flare of radiation ripped from his body, not clean or precise this time but desperate, wild. The claw cracked back, sensors overloading, the feed warping with static. Jack rolled free, every bone screaming, but alive.
By the time Syndrome restored the connection, the crater was already a storm of fire and smoke. No vital signs. No body in sight but ruin.
And in the control room, Buddy clenched his fists so tight his knuckles cracked, eyes blazing with a fury he couldn’t name.
He leaned over the console, eyes narrowed as the monitors flickered with static. The feed from the Omnidroid’s sensors came back in bursts: scorched jungle, warped metal, waves of radiation distorting the picture until it was nothing but white noise.
No heartbeat.
No heat signature.
No Gamma Jack.
The machine’s diagnostics scrolled in neat green lines across the screen: Subject neutralized. Vital signs absent. Termination confirmed.
Syndrome sat back slowly, exhaling through his nose. The adrenaline still buzzed through him, but the sharp edge of humiliation had dulled. Jack’s words—those teeth-bared jabs about Mr. Incredible, about being nothing but a parasite—still rang in his ears.
But the record was clean. Gamma Jack was gone.
“Mark it,” he said, voice clipped and brittle.
The AI chirped an acknowledgement, the database already updating. Another name crossed out. Another line added to the tally under Project Kronos.
On the screen, the crater still smoked, black and barren, an ugly scar carved into the island. It should have been satisfying, a proof of victory.
And yet Syndrome lingered, fingers tapping an erratic rhythm against the console. He could still see Jack’s grin, hear that laugh bubbling from a throat slick with blood. Buddy? Mr. Incredible not answering your calls?
Syndrome’s jaw clenched until it hurt.
“Piece of trash,” he muttered, cutting the feed entirely.
The entry finalized with a chime:
TERMINATED: GAMMA JACK.
The island returned to silence.