Almost Invincible! [SI-OC] 1: It's About Time… or maybe not.

Almost Invincible! [SI-OC /Invincible/Image Comics/DC]

1: It's About Time… or maybe not.

The first thing he felt was all the air in his lungs being expelled all at once.

Then came the pain: burning and stabbing, twisting through his guts as if a damn truck had plowed into him at full speed and torn him apart from the inside.

And judging by the way he seemed to be flying through the air without control, maybe that was exactly what had happened.

Before his mind could focus on anything else, his back slammed into the ground with such force that his body sank into it, forming a deep crater around him and kicking up a thick cloud of dust and dirt.

“¡Cogh! ¡Cogh!” He coughed. Writhing like a worm, he tried to force air back into his lungs, with little success. He probably swallowed more dirt than he should have in the process, but even so he didn’t stop. Only when the sensation of suffocation eased was his brain able to start forming coherent thoughts again.

“¡Blergh!” Spitting out the dirt still left in his mouth, he looked around with a mix of panic and confusion, his blurred vision slowly clearing.

Had he really been run over? Why? How? The last thing he remembered was being back home, about to have dinner and… then what? He blinked several times, but his blank mind offered him no memory, no clue that could help him understand his situation. No matter how hard he tried, there was nothing.

‘Do I have a concussion?’ That couldn’t be good. Carefully, he checked himself over, fearing what he might find. He was already bracing himself to see blood, broken bones jutting out of his skin…

But, to his surprise, his body was intact: nothing was broken, and the only stains on his clothes were dirt.

‘Eh?’ With a low grunt, he shakily pushed himself up and brushed the dust off, his disbelief growing as he felt no discomfort beyond a faint burning in his stomach; no matter how you looked at it, he seemed to be in perfect condition.

‘And what are these clothes? I don't remember dressing like this…’ In fact, there were more things he didn’t remember. Had his arms always been this scrawny? Where had his biceps gone? Wait!

In a hurry, he lifted his shirt, ignoring the reddish mark on his skin with the vague shape of a fist, and focusing instead on the soft, smooth, completely untrained stomach that greeted him.

‘My abs!’

It was as if the weight of a mountain suddenly fell onto his shoulders; too weak to resist it, he could only let his body collapse onto his knees and hands.

This had to be a nightmare…

‘¿A nightmare?’ The thought cut through his melodrama like lightning splitting the earth.

That was it! A dream. This had to be one of those lucid dreams he’d heard about at some point. Who had he heard it from? He couldn’t remember the name… Some girl he’d dated, one who had a ton of strange ideas and hobbies. Honestly, he’d only gone out with her because of her magnificent ass and the way her hips…

‘Don’t get distracted!’ Shaking his head, he refocused on what mattered.

What did he know about lucid dreams? Well, practically nothing. His memory wasn’t very good when it came to things that didn’t interest him much, but still, he had to remember at least something, right?

‘Think, think!’ Pushing himself to the limit, he managed to pull hazy fragments of some conversations he’d had with that girl into his mind.

‘A lucid dream is… One where you’re aware that you’re dreaming and in it you can do whatever you want.’ It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

‘If this is one of those dreams, then I can imagine and make anything I want real, right?’ The idea was far too tempting, and without hesitation he tried to put it into practice, but to his bewilderment, nothing happened. He waved his hands in front of his face, muttered strange sounds under his breath, and even recited a few Harry Potter spells in his head, but nothing.

‘Wait… Didn’t she also say that in a dream you can’t feel real pain, or you’d be forced to wake up?’ Instinctively, his hand returned to his stomach. The moment his fingertips brushed the reddened skin there, a sharp pain shot through him, making him flinch.

‘Shit…’

Shock gave way to disbelief, and disbelief to denial. His mind, which until just moments ago had been clinging to the idea that nothing strange was happening, could no longer hold on, and countless wild ideas began forming in his head, barely letting him think rationally.

“Have you rested enough already?”

The unfamiliar, yet strangely familiar, voice abruptly cut short his small internal crisis.

Raising his gaze slowly, his eyes widened when they met the sight of a figure impossibly suspended in the sky.

The sunlight behind him concealed his appearance for a brief moment, plunging him into deep shadow. But when he began to descend with indifference, he was finally able to make out who was standing before him…

¿¡J. Jonah Jameson!?

Wait, no! Narrowing his eyes, he studied him more carefully, a feeling of an unprecedented crisis beginning to throb inside his chest.

That Austrian mustache…

Those incredibly well-toned muscles.

That red-and-white suit with an “O” on the chest, and the cape on his back billowing in the wind.

¿¡Why was Omni-Man flying toward him!?

“Come on, Mark. We don’t have all day, get up.”

Mark?...

A chill ran down his spine. It was only at this moment that his brain began to fit together the pieces that had previously seemed disconnected.

Looking at himself, he noticed how those small changes he had been brushing off as insignificant stopped being so small and became far too noticeable.

The clothes he had never worn, the lack of muscle, the absence of the scars on his arms and the calluses on his palms, and how the ground seemed closer to his eyes than it should be.

Putting it into clear words was difficult, but ever since he woke up, aside from the initial moment of pain and confusion, everything else about him felt distinct and strange, very different from usual, incredible even. As if he were now…

Almost invinci-

‘Oh fuck no.’

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Had he hit him too hard? Looking at his son, who still seemed disoriented, Nolan’s brow furrowed slightly.

At first he had wanted to take it slow, start bit by bit, but the more he watched Mark’s pitiful attempts to fight him, the more that idea faded away.

Mark… was weak. It pained him to admit it, but from what he had seen so far, his son was barely qualified to be… well, his son.

It was as if he lacked something, something primitive: an instinct that every Viltrumite needed to possess in order to thrive in every battle, in every war.

It was frustrating how slowly he seemed to adapt to his new powers, the clumsy way he flew, how pathetic his punches were. Nolan couldn’t accept it. If things continued like this, Mark would never survive the Empire.

Only now did he realize the mistake he had made by not preparing him earlier, by having waited and hoped that nothing would change and that his powers would never awaken.

He had already allowed his true education to be delayed for far too long. He needed to correct him, to teach him to be strong, to make him strong. That was why he couldn’t be gentle; that was why he had hit him so hard from the very beginning.

Even so… watching him fall and writhe in pain on the ground, Nolan couldn’t help but hesitate for an instant.

A doubt he quickly crushed, hardening his heart.

If Mark wanted to earn his place in Viltrum and prove himself worthy of the blood running through his veins, then he needed to go beyond this and unleash the true potential that was undoubtedly sleeping within him… somewhere.

“Come on, son! There’s no time to waste. Didn’t you say you wanted to be like me? To do the same things I do? Then get up! Villains won’t give you a time-out, nor will they be kind. You must learn to take the hits, to be ready for anything! Do you understand?”

His voice was loud at first, harsh as well, but toward the end he couldn’t help but soften it just a little, though not too much. He needed Mark to understand. Maybe he was confused now, but in the future, he knew he would thank him.

With the sound of a heavy swallow, Mark, who had almost begun to tremble, suddenly seemed to pull himself together. His gaze, until then clouded by panic and fear, slowly cleared. His blue eyes, identical to his father’s, fixed on his imposing figure with a myriad of emotions that Nolan couldn’t fully decipher.

At last, his expression hardened, growing more serious.

“You’re right… I need to become stronger.” he said, nodding slowly. There was something strange in his tone, but Nolan didn’t have time to pay it much attention, because Mark had already launched himself at him at great speed.

Of course, to Nolan his son was still moving like a snail.

Lifting his arm casually, he blocked the incoming blow with absurd ease. The air rippled and a shockwave burst forth, sending strong gusts of wind in all directions.

“Oh?!” Nolan’s eyebrows rose, this strike had felt different, more stable, more precise and forceful.

“It seems you’re starting to understand it” he couldn’t help but smile slightly, maybe this wouldn’t be as complicated as he had imagined.

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‘This is insane!’ he thought, feeling his knuckles crack. Hitting the man who now called him son was like trying to punch a damn wall made of pure, indestructible steel. It didn’t matter what he did or how much strength he put into it, his fists didn’t leave even the slightest mark.

Any sense of invincibility this new body might have given him vanished faster than cotton candy hitting water.

‘And I’m supposed to beat this monster?!’ He almost laughed at the sheer absurdity of it.

His head was a mess right now. He wanted to scream, curse, maybe even cry a little, but he couldn’t… or rather, he didn’t dare to.

Honestly, all of this felt unreal, like a really bad fever dream you’d never want to have again, but no matter how much he wanted to deny it, everything pointed to the opposite. This was real, far too real.

Had he died? He didn’t remember, and maybe that was a good thing, because right now he didn’t have time to mourn or to ask himself how the hell he’d ended up in this situation. He needed to stay firm, set aside any existential crisis, and focus on the immediate problem.

That is, the man who in the not-too-distant future would try to enslave the entire planet.

It’s not like he had a great plan right now to deal with him. In fact, he had nothing.

The moment he realized he had been “reborn”, “sent to another world”, “isekai’d”, or whatever other bullshit label could be slapped onto this, he knew he was in trouble. Serious trouble.

There was no random omnipotent being who, with infinite charity and benevolence, granted him gifts, wishes, or any of those perks that usually come bundled in the standard package for situations like this.

He was alone.

Alone in a universe he barely understood.

To his fucking bad luck, he had only managed to watch the first season of the series and the first four episodes of the second, all because damn Amazon did that weird pause that left everyone waiting for the remaining episodes.

If he ever got the chance to return to his world, he was going to have a long, hard talk with the people who decided to pull that shit.

That left him with only a very basic understanding of this world, his new body, the powers that came with it, as well as his memories.

Memories that were nothing more than a psychedelic mix of images and sounds that still made no sense to his mind. He didn’t know if that meant he would never recover them; he hoped he would, but if not, then he was even more fucked than he already thought.

He didn’t fool himself; he wasn’t a great actor, at least as far as he knew. If Mark’s memories didn’t return, then no heart-to-heart talk was going to stop Omni-Man from turning him into pulp in the near future.

Without that father-and-son connection to save his ass, his future prospects didn’t look very promising. For a brief second, he considered joining Omni-Man, accepting all that Empire bullshit and growing the stupid mustache, even if he thought it looked ridiculous.

But it only took digging a little deeper into his memories to discard that idea.

He might have only seen part of the series, but thanks to the spoilers he kept running into unintentionally in YouTube Shorts and TikTok videos, he remembered something extremely important.

He didn’t have it very clear, a lot of the details escaped him, but he knew with fairly solid certainty that, at some point in the story, something designed to kill Viltrumites would take care of wiping out the vast majority of them.

That meant that, most likely, choosing their side would be choosing the losing option, which made a lot of sense, because otherwise he couldn’t see any way the original Mark, and by extension Earth, would have even the slightest chance of winning against an empire with millions of other ‘Omni-Mans’ among its ranks.

And, if you wanted to be even more optimistic and stick to comic-book logic, the Viltrumites were the ‘villains’ and, as has been proven time and time again, villains always lose.

¿Right?

……

There were many more factors to consider, of course, but the core of it was clear: if he wanted to survive and, perhaps more than that, he had to choose the side that would ultimately allow him to win.

And the greatest obstacle and threat that would decide whether he could or couldn’t do that was standing right in front of him, beating the hell out of him.

‘He’s playing with me,’ he thought through clenched teeth, barely managing to raise his arm to block another incoming blow. His unsteady body couldn’t withstand the impact and, in a blur, he crashed back into the ground, forming yet another crater.

“Ugh!” he grunted, his vision now half-blurred.

Maybe, if someone else were watching, they’d think he was a masochist, but in truth the reason he had thrown himself so recklessly into the attack wasn’t a death wish. No, his choice had been made coldly and calculatedly… or at least that’s what he would say if anyone ever asked.

In reality, it was more of a sudden idea, mixed with several doses of panic and recklessness.

Since he wasn’t wearing Mark’s hero suit and Omni-Man didn’t seem enraged or unhinged, he assumed this was just an initial training bout, not the life-or-death fight that would come later.

With that in mind, his brain, still in the middle of a crisis but desperately searching for ways to survive, decided that his best course of action was to test the waters, to find out just how big the gap between them really was.

To know how strong he would need to become in order to kill his “father”.

Needless to say, the idea hadn’t worked out quite as well as he’d hoped. What the hell had he been thinking?

‘I don’t know… maybe about not letting him notice that he just sent his son straight to the other world and that, as a result, another guy took his place by accident?’ another part of his mind thought. And, without a doubt, that reason sounded more convincing… though not necessarily better.

Any other thought he might have wandered into was cut short by the sound of air being displaced. If he were still human, his reflexes wouldn’t have even been enough to warn him; but now, with his new super-senses slowly starting to settle in, his reaction speed had increased to an absurd degree.

It didn't do him much good when the gloved punch landed squarely on his cheek and sent him flying through the air.

“Don’t get distracted!” the shout from his ‘father’ barely registered in his ears.

The coppery taste of blood flooded his palate. The pain was immense, but he didn’t let it cloud his mind: he’d suffered worse injuries in the past, more brutal fights. Well… maybe nothing comparable to being ‘Superman’s’ punching bag, sure, but back then he also hadn’t been ‘Superboy.’

‘It hurts, but not as much as it should,’ he thought. His new durability was no joke: a hit like that should have knocked out one or two teeth if both fighters were human, but that wasn’t the case here. The blood in his mouth was mostly because he’d just bitten his tongue by accident.

‘He’s still playing around, but he’s more excited.’ He didn’t know if that was good or bad: maybe it was good for keeping him from suspecting anything, but it was definitely bad if he was going to keep taking hits like that.

While all of this ran through his mind, he didn’t just sit there doing nothing: his body was still spinning out of control, and he needed to stop it.

Up to now, he had no idea how he’d managed to fly. At first he had only jumped and, in the middle of that, his body on its own had stayed afloat while being battered back and forth.

He didn’t know whether it had been instinctive or, on the contrary, an ability Mark had left behind along with that whole mess of still-confusing memories. Either way, now he needed to learn how to control it consciously.

Clumsily, he tried to stop his momentum, but it was far harder than it looked.

Trying to do it the way Omni-Man had explained it in the series didn’t help either; I mean, how the hell is intentionally pissing yourself supposed to be comparable?

‘Alright, time to try it my way.’

He knew it was risky, but he closed his eyes anyway and focused, trying to look for something different: a feeling, a sensation that hadn’t been there before.

To his surprise, he found it pretty quickly. It was like discovering an extra limb, ready to move at his will.

In an instant, his body came to a dead stop, just in time, because Omniman was already right in front of him with another punch ready.

It was a good thing he was already waiting for it.

Twisting awkwardly, he barely managed to shift aside to dodge the attack and, with all the speed he could gather, he threw his own counterattack. It wasn’t elegant or skillful, but it landed squarely on that annoying, smiling face.

BANG!!

The air exploded as if a missile had just hit. His entire arm trembled, from his knuckles to his shoulder; a dull ache set in, and his ‘father’, who had barely moved an inch, looked at him with astonishment and a stupid smile that grew wider and wider.

“I felt that,” he said with obvious pride, but to ‘Mark’ it sounded more like a taunt.

Then he hit him again.

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Later in the evening.

“How was your day?” The question made Mark stop, holding back a groan as he turned toward where the voice had come from.

‘So that’s my mother, huh?’ Seeing her in the flesh was certainly very different from seeing her on a screen.

Not just because she was now “real”, but also because of the differences in the “design”, so to speak.

She didn’t look like a woman over thirty at all; in fact, if he’d run into her in his previous life, he wouldn’t have even thought she was older than twenty-five, much less that she was a mother.

‘Asian genes are insane,’ he thought, though he knew there had to be more to it than that. He’d already noticed it on the way to his new “home”: people in this world were different. He couldn’t quite pinpoint why, but it was as if everyone had some kind of built-in filter that made them more… pleasant to look at.

Of course, there were still ugly people, but not as ugly as they would have been in his world.

And the attractive people… well, they were definitely much more attractive.

“It was productive,” Nolan replied in clearly good spirits as he walked up to his wife and gave her a quick, though surprisingly passionate, kiss.

“Definitely,” Mark added, not wanting to stay silent in case that raised suspicion.

“It’s good that you had fun,” she told them, and Mark nodded with a smile.

He wondered if she would say the same if she had seen him before he wiped all the blood off himself. On the other hand, he didn't have any bruises to show either; they had all disappeared on the way back. Such recovery speed was quite nice, though he could still feel the phantom pain in every part of his body.

“But I’m exhausted, I think I’ll go to bed early,” he said, letting out a yawn he didn’t have to fake. A perfect excuse to finally be alone.

His parents didn’t stop him, and soon his figure disappeared up the stairs.

“You were out much longer than I expected. Everything okay?” Debbie asked, and Nolan nodded enthusiastically.

“Everything went perfectly. Well, at first we had a few setbacks, but Mark is a tough kid… tougher than I thought possible, and he adapted quickly. We made a lot of progress today!” he said to reassure her.

“I thought it would be more complicated, but I was wrong. Him finally getting his powers might be the best thing that could have happened…” he added, looking toward where Mark had gone, with a mix of emotions that were hard to decipher.

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Closing the door behind him, ‘Mark’ stepped into his ‘room’, looking around the place with slight discomfort.

Being there felt wrong somehow, like he was invading someone else’s space, which, given his situation, was more true than anything.

The posters on the walls, the clothes on the floor, the action figures on the furniture, as well as the books: all of it belonged to a life that no longer existed, that would never return, and there he was, ready to take ownership of everything without hesitation.

The worst part was that he didn’t feel any guilt at all.

Sure, it sucked for the original Mark, but it wasn’t like he had chosen for this to happen; he was a victim here too. He’d lost everything: his life, his body, his family.

They weren’t perfect or ideal, but they were his, and now they’d been taken from him without him being able to do anything, just to throw him into another world where he didn’t even know if he’d survive more than a year or two.

“Tch!” Clicking his tongue, he shook his head to clear those thoughts away. It wasn’t that it didn’t hurt, but he’d already vented more than enough during the ‘training’, and continuing to wallow in it wasn’t going to help.

‘They’re not dead, they’re just far away.’ That fact made things easier to bear. Maybe he’d never see them again, but knowing they were still out there somewhere was a great comfort.

‘On the other hand, maybe I am dead.’ Now that thought wasn’t pleasant.

Normally, in stories like this, death was the reason you woke up in another world, right? He didn’t remember dying, but now that he was alone and could focus on himself, he could feel it. Deep down, there was something telling him so. He wanted to deny it, but the certainty was too strong.

He had died.

That was much harder to accept, but what choice did he have?

“I need some air,” he murmured, walking over to the room’s only window. He threw it wide open and leaned halfway outside to take a deep breath.

The cool breeze was like a gentle caress; the phantom aches in his muscles began to fade under its touch.

He relaxed so much that his body lifted on its own, floating up toward the clouds as if nothing else mattered.

‘This is incredible!’ He hadn’t been able to fully appreciate it before, but flying was the coolest thing he’d ever done.

“WOOOA!!!” he exclaimed, taking control as he propelled himself forward, doing a flip in midair that carried him straight through the clouds; his clothes got soaked, but he didn’t care. He kept flying, free as the wind.

Soon he climbed so high that, when he looked down, the world seemed tiny: the houses, the buildings, the streets, the cars, even the people… everything looked so small. Fragile.

The smile that had formed on his face faded, replaced by a solemn look.

It was alarming: knowing that, before long, this whole world would be swallowed by crisis after crisis; being aware of what was about to happen and of everything that could occur, and of all the things he didn’t know.

And he would be in the middle of it. One way or another, he would be involved, there was no doubt about it. It’s not like he could run away; Omni-Man wouldn’t allow it, the Viltrumites wouldn’t allow it.

And where would he even go? His home was Earth, whether in this universe or the other. This was his planet; he couldn’t just abandon it to its fate.

Maybe it was stupid, but that was how he felt. He had no grand purpose, he wasn’t a hero, nor did he think of himself as a villain. He was just himself, and here and now, the only desire that remained inside him was to preserve his ‘world’ and his ‘people’ as much as he could.

‘Am I still human?’ he wondered.

Not in body, because obviously flying and lifting thousands of tons wasn’t something normal humans did, but in spirit, was he still human?

He didn’t know if, with time, the answer would change. But at least for now, he still felt human. He still believed he was.

And, as a human, there was only one thing he could do when a race of supremacist slavers with delusions of grandeur threatened to conquer his world.

Fight.

It was as if a flame began to burn inside him. Before, he had already chosen a “side”, but that had been more of a choice built on vague hope and logic; there had been no conviction there, only the desire to survive. But this… this was different: he no longer just wanted to survive.

He wanted to thrive, to live the life he never got to live, to achieve things he never expected to achieve, to make the impossible possible, and, in the end, become truly invincible.

‘It won’t be easy, but well, nothing worth having is easy, right?’ he thought, smiling again, but this time, more fiercely.

He was going to have to train a lot more, to the point of almost dying, become stronger, tougher, much faster, and...

“Faster?”

His growing excitement came to a sudden halt when a strange yet fascinating thought struck his mind.

This…

It was insane, something absurd, but…

“This world is from a comic, right? Or at least the Amazon series was born from one.”

He didn’t know which of the two he was in, but they had to be connected somehow.

And if they were connected…

“No, that’s stupid. It can’t be that simple,” he told himself, letting out a nervous laugh. Even so, the idea lingered, persistent, like a tempting whisper.

He would probably just make a fool of himself, but if he didn’t try, if he didn’t test every option… then did he really deserve this second chance at life?

“Just one test. It’s not like I lose anything by trying,” he murmured, convincing himself before cautiously looking around. He was very high up in the sky; they probably couldn’t even see him from below, much less hear him. Still, he brought a hand to his mouth, covering his lips, just in case.

He had never been an avid comic reader, and he certainly had never read the Invincible comics, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t read other comics or watched other superhero series.

He didn’t have a perfect memory of all of it, but there was one thing that had stuck with him thanks to his younger brother, who really was a full-on nerd about that stuff.

It was something pretty childish, a game they had invented so they could have fun together when they were kids.

Since he was shorter, less athletic, and, overall, slower than him, his little brother had looked for some way to even the odds. He hadn’t minded indulging him; on the contrary, it was more fun when things were balanced, and so, after digging through their grandfather’s old comics, the kid had found his special “trick”.

“If I want to catch you, I just have to make myself faster! And if I want to be faster, I just have to use the formula!!” He still remembered the excitement-filled words spoken the first time he came to him with the idea, eagerly showing him that old, almost faded comic page.

And of all the things that could have remained intact in his memories, maybe that was the most important one of all. If it worked, it wouldn’t just be the advantage he’d been looking for, it would be the key to his survival, to his victory.

Almost trembling, he began to whisper, slow at first, but soon with more force.

“3x2(9YZ)4A=?”

The sound was lost to the wind. Disappointingly, nothing happened… or at least that’s how it seemed. But in the very next instant, something changed.

And everything around him came to a dead stop.

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Note:

And to properly celebrate Christmas, I bring you here as a gift the long-awaited return of one of many people’s favorite series!!! ;DDDDDD

I don’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said before. I hope you enjoy it. The next three chapters will be released right after this first one with a gap of ten to fifteen minutes, so stay tuned!