Alex wasn’t having a good day.

It had actually started off great. Sure, being the most powerful hero in the city didn’t pay much, but he’d just scored an unbeatable deal on an apartment—with rooftop access, no less. Perfect for flights without having to worry about that open window.

The weather was warm, the sky clear and blue. No schemes to foil, no arch-nemesis to grapple with. Just the usual: a few cats to rescue, a few old ladies to help across the street. Everything was calm. Easy.

And then, of course, something had to happen. Sod’s law.

Alex had felt fourth-dimensional phenomena before. It usually happened when Geniuses went off the deep end.

But never this strong. Never this much.

And never, never without a cause—without some machine he could break to stop it.

There was nothing he could do. Nothing anyone could do.

So they did nothing.

Then it stopped. He didn’t know why. As far as he knew, nobody knew why. It just… stopped. And somehow, of course, it had to ruin his day.

The city was shuffled around, almost beyond recognition. How the hell was he supposed to close on that apartment deal now? Property disputes were going to be endless. Thank God he wasn’t a lawyer.

Unfortunately, leaving the city wasn’t an option. It had just been merged with, at a glance, the capital of every country in the world. There were far too many vulnerable, innocent people here now—all mixed together, desperate, and scared. He had to stay to keep things together; he couldn’t justify leaving.

He began to regret that decision the moment he saw the plane.

The sky was clear and calm. Alex drifted over the city, enjoying a rare moment of peace, the hum of distant traffic the only sound. But an old instinct, honed to perfection, told him to glance upward. Something caught his eye—a glint, trailing a strange blue light, high above and falling fast.

His superhuman vision revealed the truth in an instant. It was a plane—a huge one. He’d seen big planes before, of course. Cargo planes were the only thing that came close to the sheer size of this behemoth. But this was different; it didn’t lumber. It was moving faster than a fighter jet, accelerating toward the ground.

Without a second thought, Alex flew toward the spot where it was going to crash. And it was going to crash. The city was too big now; he couldn’t cross it in a flash anymore, and the plane was falling far, far too fast.

Suddenly, a shockwave blasted through the city, windows rattling and setting off car alarms in a cacophony of noise. Alex felt the pressure in his chest like a thunderclap right overhead.

But that’s all it was—a thunderclap, the sound of the plane roaring past faster than sound itself. There was no searing heat, no explosion.

In a move of pure insanity, the plane had pulled up. It twisted, broadside to the ground, catching the air to slow its descent as a wave of hot, pressurized air surged outward from its thrusters. A ghostly trail of blue light streamed behind it, dissipating just before it reached the buildings below, though the wind it kicked up blasted dust and debris across the streets.

The roar of the engines was overwhelming, even from high in the sky, a wall of sound vibrating through everything in its path.

The plane levelled for just a moment, and Alex caught sight of its mirrored surface reflecting the city back at itself. Suspended in time, it hovered there, a massive shape against the sky, before angling skyward once more. With a burst of blue plasma, it shot upward, leaving a trail of spectral light hanging in the air as it disappeared back into the stratosphere.

Alex let out a shaky breath. Someone had finally made a move. They were probably trying to establish a new pecking order in the chaos.

He’d sooner let hell freeze over than allow someone this reckless to gain even an inch of power in his city.

Most capital cities had sprawling gardens or parks of ceremonial or cultural importance. This new, merged capital didn’t differ—except in scale. Here, entire landscapes stretched within a single city, with prairies, forests, meadows, swamps, and even a lake large enough to accommodate large-scale shipping.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

It was into one of these prairies, a short distance from a small gazebo, that Alex descended—a short walk from the hulking, enigmatic plane.

Annoyingly, whoever had designed it had clearly accounted for X-ray vision. He couldn’t see a thing inside or make out what powered the giant, silent figures stationed outside, each clad in the same impenetrable, reflective material.

“So, what’s the plan? Show you carry a big stick, then land for a parlay? Weird way to establish a pecking order.”

The large robots said nothing. Instead, the one at the front activated a tablet in its hands, the screen flickering to life with bright colours.

Of course. Whoever sent these things in would never risk themselves—they’d just video-call. Typical.

But it wasn’t like that. There wasn’t a person on the other end. Instead, the screen displayed a map divided into sections, like provinces. Most of it was grey, except for two adjacent areas: one lit up where he stood, showing his face hovering above the city, while the other displayed the giants in a mountainous region.

Weird. Definitely not what I was expecting. Why aren’t they talking?

“Strong and silent types, huh?”

The map zoomed in on the mountainous region, showing a lush, idyllic valley filled with people—almost superhumanly beautiful in appearance—enjoying a life of peace and calm. Then, the image panned out, a clock appearing on the screen as the scene rewound, spinning backward in time. The valley reverted to a perfectly ordinary-looking city.

It didn’t stay ordinary for long.

A single spore mutated, something deep within it shifting. It drifted down into a damp, forgotten corner of some basement, and, in seconds, it began to grow. A clock ticked in the corner of the screen, tracking the mutation in minutes, not years.

Tendrils crept across the walls and floor, devouring everything in sight. The growth was relentless, unfolding in real-time. A rat scurried into the room, and the camera zoomed in as a single spore landed on its fur. It burrowed in, tearing through the rat’s immune system and multiplying at an impossible rate. Within moments, it had colonized the rat’s entire nervous system, a twisted, mockery of life.

What followed was horror beyond anything Alex had ever seen.

He’d seen death. He’d seen gore. But this—this was the death of an entire world, played out in brutal, unflinching detail.

It was obviously computer-generated, they couldn’t have filmed such things, yet it was disturbingly photorealistic and well directed. Every frame a painting—one of bedlam and horror. The scene showed cities overwhelmed, last desperate holdouts flailing and panicking, launching attack after attack, missile after missile, but still crushed under a relentless tide, bodies twisted and consumed, lives contorted beyond recognition. Then came the adaptation—the grotesque changes of those infected by the spores.

Then finally, it showed the giants.

They weren’t robots at all. The video froze, lingering on an armoured figure descending from the mountain, clad in the same reflective plating that had concealed so much.

The giant holding the tablet then turned, handed it over to another, and removed their helmet.

Despite everything Alex had seen, his breath hitched when he saw what lay beneath the reflective plating. The giant looked like every ancient stonemason’s dream, the ideal that sculptors had carved into marble for centuries. His face was flawless yet fierce, framed by thick, golden curls that tumbled around his shoulders like a lion’s mane, catching the light so they seemed almost molten.

His skin was smooth and tanned, unmarked by blemish, as though untouched by time or hardship. But his eyes—sharp and blue as the sky before a storm—betrayed something ancient and weary. His gaze carried the weight of untold battles, horrors witnessed and endured, lending him an intensity that no marble statue could ever convey.

But the beauty wasn’t what made his breath hitch.

X-ray vision had a side effect most people didn’t consider. It had essentially made him a walking MRI machine. He’d seen more brain scans than any career neuroscientist, diagnosing cancers and serious conditions in countless bystanders. He scanned the giant instinctively, expecting bone and muscle, enhancements to support their size. He’d seen super-soldier programs before. But what he saw was… wrong. Beneath the skin, its anatomy was entirely unnatural. His muscles were densely layered, almost metallic in texture—unique, but not wholly unexpected. What struck him was the fibres themselves, arranged with unnatural, mechanical precision.

It wasn’t just that they lacked the inefficiencies of a naturally grown body; every element of its anatomy possessed an intentionality that nature could never produce. Muscles didn’t simply overlap; they twisted in elegant, braided patterns, like woven steel cables, each fibre perfectly aligned in patterns too complex for DNA to encode. Tendons and ligaments arched and coiled, forming sweeping curves and taut lines that connected joints with an engineered grace, a symmetry so flawless it bordered on the surreal.

Even this had a frame of reference, vat-grown soldiers, maybe, or lab-bred organisms designed purely for combat. But never to this extend, and its brain…

There was no comparison. Where a human brain was a chaotic web of synapses and grey matter, its mind was structured like an impossible latticework of filaments and neural pathways, each one interconnected with a logic-defying precision. Axons extended in perfect spirals, branching at sharp, intentional angles. It was less a brain and more a hyper-advanced circuit board.

You simply couldn’t mod a brain this way. It was too complex, too interconnected. You couldn’t iterate on it; you’d have to build it from scratch, fully formed.

And here he was, this perfected being, sculpted by the hand of God themselves—yet standing before Alex with wet eyes and shaking hands, begging for help.

The video continued. Missiles streaked toward the border between the two regions, mushroom clouds rising high into the sky.

This wasn’t an attack. This wasn’t some petty genius trying to establish a new pecking order.

This was something far worse. This was a plea.

Alex exhaled, feeling the weight of it settle over him like a shroud. Maybe the lawyers don’t have it so bad.