Nathan and Gwen spent the rest of their evening at the concert.
Not that either of them were particularly interested in K-pop or ice-themed performances—but after the crisis was resolved, the event organizers had offered them front-row VIP seats as a thank-you. And with nothing urgent on the schedule, they figured: why not?
Luna Snow took the stage in a shimmering blue spotlight, her voice rising into the air as she sang I Really Wanna Fly Away. The audience lit up in waves of synchronized cheering, bracelets glowing with each beat. Nathan leaned back, arms crossed, while Gwen tapped her fingers absently to the rhythm.
"Still not our scene," Gwen murmured.
"True," Nathan said, "but the chairs are comfy, and I think that Luna just winked at me."
"She winked at the crowd."
"Details."
They let the moment pass in companionable silence.
---
Later, both headed their separate ways home. Nathan took to the skies, soaring through the city under the red cape and hollow smile of Homelander. After the day out with Jessica recently—saving people with her—he'd gotten used to tuning his hearing for distress. The faintest scream, the sound of someone in pain, it all came through now with brutal clarity.
And tonight… he heard one.
A woman's voice. Terrified. Real.
He dove.
What he found made his stomach twist.
Six men. In an alley. No subtlety. No shame.
The moment Nathan landed, the air cracked around him as his eyes lit up like the heart of a furnace. Twin beams of searing red vaporized the nearest attacker's legs. Another screamed as his arm fell twitching to the ground. The rest didn't have time to run.
He summoned a reinforced containment pod from his inventory—a black polymer bag reinforced with nanoweave—and stuffed the twitching, screaming remains of the would-be rapists inside like garbage.
Then he flew.
Straight to an abandoned factory just outside the city limits.
"Raph," he growled.
[Already alerted authorities. Medics will reach the woman within minutes. She's going to live.]
Nathan said nothing.
He landed, dragged the bag across the floor, and opened it. Blood pooled. One of them whimpered.
He pulled out a syringe. Inside was a shimmering serum—his own design, experimental, based on Hydra's grotesque enhancements and modified with Galvan data.
He jammed the needle into the man's chest.
The result was immediate and violent. The body convulsed, twitched, then went still.
Dead.
Nathan sighed.
"Should've known. They'd already bled out too much to power the reaction."
[Confirmed. The serum demands high energy input to stabilize and reconstruct biological structure. Best subjects would be high-fat or energy-dense individuals. A sumo wrestler, for example, would be optimal. Alternatively, pre-loading the serum with a power source may reduce failure rate.]
"Yeah," Nathan muttered, disgusted, "great. Let's add that to the horror list. For now, I'm done."
He turned to leave, shoulders tight.
Then—
[Warning: H-Omnitrix is about to time out. Reverting to base form mid-flight will result in freefall.]
Nathan blinked. "Right. Thanks."
He touched down and walked. No armor. No powers. Just a guy in a hoodie, looking for a cab.
---
That's when the real storm hit.
He heard the chaos before he saw it—monsters, snarling and strange, swarming out of side streets. A girl came sprinting toward him, dark hair spiked wildly, clad in a black leather jacket and a battered tiara that clashed hilariously with her Death to Barbie shirt. A lightning-shaped earring swung as she skidded to a halt, raising a gnarled shield to block an incoming beast.
She pointed skyward. Lightning answered.
It struck the monsters like divine judgment, arcing down in jagged silver lines.
Nathan took one look at the scene and wisely started stepping away. No armor, no backup, no interest in dying tonight.
Then the lightning changed direction.
It hit him.
His entire body convulsed as raw voltage surged through every cell.
[Emergency. Order Dragon's Breathing Style failed to nullify. Attempting separation and energy redirection... Partial success. Status: critical.]
[Contacting Emergency Contacts.]
Raphael's voice rang out in the haze, but Nathan was already falling.
The girl turned, eyes widening in horror as she saw the stranger collapse, steam curling off his skin.
"No! No no no—he wasn't part of this!"
She raised her fist at the clouds.
"Why?! He wasn't your enemy! Why would you harm a mortal?!"
Thunder rolled, echoing her pain. It felt... angry. She cursed under her breath. The remaining monsters, sensing the storm's fury, fled into the shadows.
The girl knelt beside Nathan's twitching body. Her shield vanished. She pressed her fingers to his neck. Still breathing. Barely.
"Hang on, dummy," she muttered. "You better not die from this."
She hoisted him over her shoulder—surprisingly strong—and broke into a run.
"I can't take you to a hospital. That'll just attract more monsters. But Will's nearby. He'll fix you. He has to."
After nearly an hour of trudging through half-lit streets and forgotten alleys, Thalia's strength finally gave out. Her legs shook, her breath ragged. Carrying a fully grown man—especially one as solidly built as this—had tested even her demigod stamina. Sure, she was stronger than any normal human, but that didn't mean she had super strength. She wasn't Wonder Woman.
With a frustrated grunt, she gently lowered Nathan to the ground, leaning him against the peeling brick wall of a crumbling building. Her pulse pounded in her ears, and for a second, she considered just sitting there and screaming into the void. Instead, she dug into her jacket pocket and pulled out a single golden drachma, its surface dulled from age and grime.
"Alright," she muttered. "Let's try this."
She raised her hand and focused. The mist around her coalesced, forming a shaky rainbow in the air. It wasn't perfect—definitely not Iris's best work—but it would do. With a practiced flick, she tossed the coin into the light.
"Oh Iris, goddess of the rainbow," she said breathlessly, "please show me Will Solace."
The rainbow shimmered and twisted, the light bending in unnatural ways. Then, the image began to form—but not of Will.
Instead, the call was hijacked.
A towering figure appeared on the other end of the connection—bearded, radiant with divine authority, and immediately recognizable. The rainbow light hardened into cold silver-blue tones as thunder echoed faintly in the background.
Zeus.
"You will not help that mortal," the King of Olympus bellowed, his voice like a lightning strike. "He is an enemy of Olympus—he has mocked our authority, disrespected our rule."
Thalia's jaw clenched. "What… Is that why you redirected my lightning? You used me to try and kill him?!"
Zeus's expression didn't change. "Hmph. And yet he still lives. I had hoped Athena would've finished the job that day. No matter. Stay away from him, Thalia Grace, or you will learn that even blood ties cannot protect you from my wrath."
The connection cut abruptly with a final thunderclap, the rainbow dissolving into mist. Silence followed.
Thalia stared at the fading light. "As if I don't already know that," she whispered. "You turned me into a tree, remember?"
But there was no fear in her voice—only defiance.
If anything, Zeus's warning gave her something she hadn't felt in a while.
Hope.
Maybe this was a sign. A test. A rebellion waiting to happen. Olympus didn't fear him for nothing, for what he had done to Percy and Annabath, giving the true freedom, she couldn't say she wasn't envious of it.
She turned her attention back to the unconscious young man. But hope didn't solve her current problem—he was still badly injured, and she had no way to heal him or move him farther.
Then something sparked in her mind. A half-memory. She'd been briefed about him—well, more like warned. The gods had painted him as dangerous, a rogue, someone to be watched. Which, in Olympus-speak, usually meant "a problem they couldn't control."
They'd said his powers came from a strange alien device. A watch.
She eyed the strange device on his wrist—the H-Omnitrix. Her fingers hovered over it uncertainly.
"…Maybe there's something in here that can help."
Thalia knelt beside him and began fiddling with the dial. She wasn't a tech expert by any stretch, but after five minutes of trial and error—and one solid whack on the side—she accidentally hit the right (or wrong) combination.
The dial clicked.
The device activated.
Nathan's body began to glow as the transformation overtook him—not into a healing alien, or something soft or passive—but into something completely different. Something Raphael had warned might never be safe to use.
A cybernetic humanoid formed—tall, green-skinned, covered in integrated circuitry and glowing nodes. His eyes flickered with streams of code. This was Brainiac.
Nathan's body jolted. His consciousness surged awake as if rebooted. In an instant, he wasn't just awake—he was everywhere.
He was linked to every signal, camera, radio, and piece of tech connected to internet. His mind, already sharpened by Raphael, now operated on levels that defied human understanding.
[Warning, Nathan. We've triggered a full Brainiac protocol. Your mind is stable, but the origin of the Template itself carries a strange code, which had generated the original Vril Dox.]
Nathan's expression didn't change. His face was unreadable—pure data processing. He understood everything in a second: the girl before him was Thalia Grace. He hadn't been struck down by her, but by Zeus. And now wasn't time to focus on them.
Now he could feel something else inside the transformation. Not just power.
A presence.
Vril Dox. The original Brainiac. A fragment of the cosmic tyrant's will had piggybacked on the transformation—hidden within the origin DNA of the alien form.
[I am are attempting to isolate the will. However, its nature is viral. On transformation, it created thousands of micro-backups across the connected internet.]
"Can we delete them?"
[I am trying. Some networks went dark mid-transfer. Millions of copies of data in pockes of 9.2 mb are scattered around the internet. If left alone, it could reform a pseudo-intelligence.]
Nathan processed it all in under two seconds.
Then he vanished.
Through the internet.
Literally.
His digital form streamed into fiberoptic lines like lightning, surging through routers and servers as if they were roads. Firewalls bent around him. Encryption cracked under the weight of his alien intellect.
Within moments, he reappeared—deep underground in a place where no one could track him.
Wakanda.
Not even its state-of-the-art defenses noticed his arrival. No alarms. No alerts.
Silent as thought, Nathan began working.
He accessed the H-Omnitrix's core systems, cracking open its interface and integrating it into the temporary cybernetic network formed by the transformation. His fingers danced like a pianist across a floating console of data.
Lines of alien code scrolled past his eyes.
Within half an hour, he'd rewritten the protocols.
The 24-hour cooldown?
Disabled.
The H-Omnitrix would never limit him that way again.
Yet now, watching the cascading lines of alien code in front of him, Nathan realized just how much the H-Omnitrix had been holding back. Other than the transformation feature, every other function was locked down. Even the scanning function, which he'd used a few times, had only ever been partially open.
He was able to immediately activate a few basic utilities—Universal Translation, Flashlight, Image Projection, Communicator, and Manual Timeout. They came online one after the other with a soft hum and flickering green interface.
But other functions were buried behind multiple firewalls. These weren't simple locks that could be bypassed with brute-force hacking—they were adaptive, coded to respond to tampering.
Some abilities were also dependent on others. Life Form Lock, for example, required the DNA Repair Function to be used safely. Staying locked in a particular form for too long could gradually damage his base DNA, corrupting it with time.
He still activated it—just in case. Life Form Lock might pose a long-term risk, but if it could save his life in the short term, that was always a better trade than dying.
While Nathan worked on unlocking the H-Omnitrix's hidden features, Raphael had diverted her attention to a different battlefield.
Using Wakandan technology—borrowed without permission but definitely for a good cause—Raphael constructed a custom server system. It wasn't meant to destroy the AI. That would've required either divine-level magic or a cosmic virus.
Instead, the system deployed a persistent, low-level antivirus across the web.
Its job was simple:
Anytime Brainiac's fragmented mind tried to decompress—rebuilding itself by expanding across networks—the antivirus would detect it and interrupt the process, corrupting the unpacking operation just enough to force it into stasis or scatter the fragments.
It wouldn't kill Brainiac.
It wouldn't even slow him forever.
But it would buy time.
However, the real danger wasn't the open internet. If Brainiac ever found his way into a local network—like a secret lab, a corporate mainframe, or worse, a spaceship's onboard system—he could decompress in full and then spread outward like a viral explosion.
They had created a stalemate. For now
As Nathan returned home, just before his timeout approached, he informed Jessica and Gwen that the emergency had been resolved.
Meanwhile, in an abandoned house miles away, Thalia Grace was still standing where he'd left her—arms crossed, expression unreadable, the dusty air unmoving around her.
She wondered if Nathan had misunderstood her sudden appearance—if he thought she'd attacked him, and fled. Or maybe… he simply didn't want anything to do with the Greek faction.
She didn't know which it was. Either way, he was gone. And he hadn't looked back.