Chapter Text
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 2nd, 2026.
Being a supercriminal in the United States of this age was a strange thing.
On one hand, you had superpowers—and that meant no one could stop you. No amount of police officers, no human being, could lay a finger on you, provided your superpower was decent, of course.
On the other hand, you had superpowers—which meant that other superpowered individuals, those usually called superheroes, or just heroes, would come and stop you if you weren't fast or good enough.
That was the rule every supercriminal knew, especially the littlest threats: those who could still dominate over normal humans, but would be annihilated by the average superhero.
Luckily for him, Crawler, as his supervillain alias went, he was one of the best in his sector.
Crawler had been a robber for as long as he could remember. From stealing money out of the cash register at the little convenience store his family owned, to stealing a potent and wildly unsafe serum that gave him superpowers.
Now Crawler had the power and strength of the greatest creatures on Earth: arachnids.
Around his right fist, a ball of white silk—a hundred times stronger than Kevlar—formed a boxing glove. He threw a punch through an armored truck, and the bulletproof body of the vehicle opened like a can under a can opener.
People screamed and ran as the armored truck was thrown against the side of a building, crashing through the windows of a small pastry shop with a deafening shriek of twisting metal and shattered glass.
The two operators inside the vehicle didn't even have time to react before Crawler was on them. He loved playing with his victims.
Like a spider when a fly is trapped in its web, he enjoyed waiting for the right moment to savor his prize—the money, of course, not the people. Still, it made him feel good to see the fear in normal human eyes.
That was his job: rob armored trucks and bring the contents back to his benefactors, powerful men and women known as the Order.
Crawler grabbed the money inside the truck—money meant to be burnt and destroyed, something he had never understood why. He glanced at a young man working in the shop.
The young man's hands trembled as he pressed himself against the counter, his eyes wide with the particular terror of a prey animal that knows escape is impossible.
Crawler's gaze drifted past him, landing on the pastries that, by some miracle, had survived the crash of the armored truck against the building.
"Pass me those!" Crawler ordered, his voice coming out distorted and chittering through the mask of his costume—a mask woven from the same silk he produced, with eight curved lenses that caught the light like the eyes of a hunting spider.
The young man, knowing better than to disobey a superpowered lunatic, did as Crawler commanded. He shoved the pastries across the ruined counter with shaking fingers, and Crawler snatched them, stuffing one into a pouch at his belt.
Behind his mask, he smiled widely. Then he prepared himself to flee. He always chose large cities for his crimes, because while they were far more heavily patrolled, he had the tall buildings by his side. He wasn't called Crawler for nothing.
The spider supervillain launched himself out of the shattered shop, the sounds of police sirens screaming all around him—a chorus of wailing red and blue that bounced off the canyon walls of the city.
He had found himself in similar situations a hundred times, and every single time he had managed to escape with the money. His very presence here, alive and free, was proof of that.
But this was not that day. This was the day Crawler would be secured to justice.
A man descended from the sky
He was old, with white, receding hair and a blind eye marked by an ugly scar that cut through his brow like a lightning bolt. Thick grey mustaches draped over his lip.
He flew downward with the finality of a god descending from Olympus to pass judgment on a mortal who had grown too bold. The air itself seemed to buckle around him.
A low, resonant hum built in the atmosphere, windows trembling in their frames, loose gravel dancing on the pavement. Then he came to a halt, hovering ten feet above the ground, and the weight of his presence crashed down like a hammer from the heavens.
He wore a superhero suit of black and gold, the fabric tight against a frame that could very well have been made in the forges of those heavens from where he came from.
A large, capitalized letter K blazed on his chest. A long white mantle—pure as fresh snow, pure as an ultimatum—flapped and rippled in the wind that followed his descent.
His right hand was clutched into a fist, and that hand was not flesh: it was bionic, gleaming with dark metal and golden circuitry, each finger articulated like the talons of an eagle.
He raised his head, his one good eye burning with a light that had no right to exist in a man so old.
"Stand ready for my arrival, Villain."
The superhero’s voice echoed, imperative and absolute. Crawler spun around, his spider-sense screaming in a way it had never screamed before. He saw the old man, the mantle, the bionic fist, and in that frozen instant, he understood that he was no longer the predator. He was the fly.
Crawler didn't even see it coming. Kindquest was on him before thought could complete itself, before the scream could leave his throat.
A chop worthy of the most expert of fighters—precise, economical, devastating—caught the supervillain square on the side of his neck. Crawler’s legs buckled. His eyes rolled back behind his silk mask. He was unconscious before he hit the ground, the stolen money and the pilfered pastries scattering around him like offerings to an unforgiving god.
Kindquest flew away immediately after. His intervention in Philadelphia had not lasted even a full minute.
The sirens continued to wail, the people continued to tremble, and the old man with the blind eye and the white mantle vanished into the grey April sky, leaving nothing behind but the echo of his voice and a villain already forgotten.
Conquest. No, no—that was not his name anymore. He was Claude now, not Conquest. Never again was he going to be Conquest: a Viltrumite without even a real name, let alone a life that could be called a life.
The name Conquest had been a brand, a collar, a declaration of purpose that erased every whisper of selfhood beneath its thunder.
For millennia, he had been that purpose: a fist wrapped in metal, a hammer swung by an empire. But now, for the first time in millennia, he flew through the skies of this planet not as a harbinger of war, destruction, and… conquest… but as someone else.
As a superhero, as the inhabitants of this world called him. The title still felt foreign on his tongue, like a borrowed coat that did not yet warm him. Yet the wind against his scarred face, the clouds parting around his broad shoulders, the soft blue of this planet’s sky—none of it demanded blood.
None of it asked for screams. And that silence, that terrible and beautiful silence, was the strangest freedom he had ever known.
Conquest landed on the soil of the city he now called home in rural France. His feet touched the grass of his château’s backyard—cool, damp, alive beneath his boots. Here, things were peaceful. Very peaceful.
Most of the inhabitants were farmers, their hands calloused from soil rather than weapons. Few things happened. Crime was very low. It was the strangest of places for an individual like Conquest, who had been forged in the thrill of battle on countless alien planets, slaughtering or enslaving civilizations that sprawled across continents, all for the sake of the Viltrumite Empire.
He had stood in the ashes of burning cities and felt nothing but satisfaction. He had heard the death rattles of species and called it music. And now he stood in a field of flowers, listening to the distant chime of a church bell, and something inside him—something he had thought long dead—began to stir.
A happy bark echoed through the courtyard of Conquest’s—Claude’s—house.
The sound was small, breathy, absurdly cheerful. A French bulldog with black short fur and high, bat-like ears hopped toward Conquest, the tall grass of the courtyard rising above the small creature’s back like a green sea.
For an instant Conquest was about to crush the poor creature under his foot, to smash the life out of the dog’s body with the same reflexive brutality that had ended worlds.
His foot had already begun to rise. His muscles had already tensed for the kill. Then he stopped.
The anger that flooded him was not the cold rage of battle, but something hotter, more shameful: fury at himself for daring to think about hurting his little dog.
His little Destroyer.
His breath came hard through his nose, and for a moment he simply stood there, trembling, the ghost of a million atrocities whispering in his ear.
The bulldog seemed to sense none of this. She went up on her rear paws, her front ones kicking the air as she hopped comically, a clumsy, joyful little dance, and then she landed on Conquest’s right leg, her tiny claws gripping the fabric of his boot.
"Destroyer!" Conquest exclaimed, his voice cracking on the name.
He opened his strong, muscular arms—arms once made for galaxy-wide killing, arms that had torn through starship hulls and rib cages with equal ease—and now he opened them for something else entirely.
For petting his beautiful bulldog. He went down on one knee, catching Destroyer with his hands, lifting her high toward his face.
The little dog began to lick him—his chin, his cheek, the deep scar that cut across his blind eye. That face. A face that so many had feared. A face that had been the last thing millions of people saw before that same face killed them.
A face feared even by other Viltrumites, scarred and blind in one eye, a mask of violence carved into living stone. Yet Destroyer did not know about any of that. And even if she did, she would not care. Her tongue was warm, small, relentless. Her tail wagged so hard her entire body wiggled.
Conquest had never thought that such a lowly creature could be so, so beautiful. He held her for a long moment, feeling the rapid thrum of her heartbeat against his palm—so fragile, so brief, so utterly unafraid.
Then he put Destroyer back on the ground, and she hopped once, twice, her ears flopping. He walked toward the entrance of his door, and Destroyer hopped by his side, a tiny shadow in the tall grass, asking for nothing but his presence.