His name was Larry Friedrich, but they called him Captain Cobalt. He was a German Jew from Philadelphia, born to immigrant parents in 1922. He joined the Navy in 1940, the day he turned eighteen. Larry was good with machines, so they put him on the Arizona and stuffed him in the engine room.

There weren’t many metahumans in 1940. No screening program. No blood tests. Nobody knew Larry was gifted. He was an ordinary boy for eighteen years. Then the Japanese sank his ship.

At 0800 on December 7th, 1941, an eight-hundred kilo bomb hit the Arizona on her starboard side. The forward powder magazine exploded, and the ship went down. Most of the crew was killed in the explosions, but Larry and his bunkmates were trapped below.

The men pounded on the door, screaming for help, with their cries getting louder as the ship went down. In minutes, the door was covered in blood from their fists.

Larry braced himself against his bunk and slammed the door with both feet. The hatch popped open and went spinning down the hall. He never felt the change. Larry had the strength of thirty men, but he didn’t know that yet.

The Smithsonian has the dented bulkhead door on a pedestal, with Captain Cobalt’s famous quote written in giant letters overhead. It says, “I looked out my porthole, and all I saw was water and fire.” That bunk is a rusted chunk of metal now, still molded in the shape of his body.

The men took a breath of stale air and trudged through the corridor, searching for a way out. Larry forced another hatch open and swam for the surface. His mates were right behind him, but Larry didn’t realize how fast he was going. He broke the surface and popped into the air.

His ship was burning in a dozen places, and the sky was gray with bullets. He felt a tap on his ankle, but he didn’t realize what it was. It took him a while to realize he was bulletproof as he was soaring through the air, three feet above the water.

That’s the best thing about being religious. You spend your life expecting miracles, so when you finally get one, you know what to do. Larry caught his breath and went back for his buddies. Two of them died on the way up, but the other three made it out. Larry carried his friends to safety and kept going down. He rescued forty men that day.

At 0900, he saw a flight of Japanese planes about to start a strafing run. Larry leapt in the air and started killing Zeroes, using other ships to launch himself. He didn’t want to drop planes in the harbor, so he grabbed them by the wings and flung them out over clear ocean. He destroyed seventeen fighters before they turned around. Larry followed them for eighty miles and collapsed from exhaustion. They found him in the ocean, floating face down with his lungs full of water, but alive. His uniform was hanging in strips. He’d been hit by a thousand bullets, but there wasn’t a mark on him.

Men on the ships swore they saw Larry flying, hovering in mid-air, chasing after planes, but he was never able to fly like that again, even at the height of his power.

I watched an upscaled recording of his first interview. Larry was barely nineteen - nervous, patriotic, and painfully humble. The media grilled him for three hours, then the Navy took him to Project Cobalt in New Mexico. He emerged three months later with a fresh uniform and a symbolic promotion. They transferred him to Intelligence and made him a Captain. An editorial called him “Captain Cobalt” as an insult, but the name stuck.

Larry hated the promotion, but he never complained in public. He fought in every major land battle of World War II. He was offered a dozen medals, but he turned them all down - said it wasn’t fair to give medals to a bulletproof soldier.

In 1945, they sent him to Berlin with orders to grab Hitler, but he failed. Reporters badgered him about it and Larry lost his temper, one of the few times we ever saw him angry in public. This led to his second famous quote, written in neon script over his uniform: “I said he got away. I didn’t say we were giving up.”

But Larry never got a chance to redeem himself. Hitler committed suicide in April of the same year. There is some debate, even among his close friends, about whether Larry would have brought Hitler to trial, or killed him on sight.

After the war, Larry married his childhood sweetheart and moved to DC. Her name was Sally Houseman - a shy, simple girl from Pittsburgh. She spoke to the press three times in her life: once at her wedding, once when she met the queen, and once in 1960 - the day Captain Cobalt got his GED.

The couple talked about having a child, but they decided it would be too dangerous. The government wanted him to try it, but Larry was afraid the baby would be born with his strength. If the power was proportional, the fetus would tear Sally apart.

Thousands of Jews and Christians named Larry as an inspiration in the 1950s, convinced that Captain Cobalt’s power was a gift from God. Larry clearly believed this. He rejected all forms of praise and personal compensation. He turned down medals, knighthood, and a dozen honorary degrees.

Larry spent four months in Vietnam, but he missed the worst of it. Kennedy signed the Metahuman Resources Accord in 1962, a UN resolution that made it illegal to use metahumans in war.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Sally died in 2005, at the age of 82. Larry gave the eulogy. He was the same age, but he didn’t look a day over thirty. The power that made him invulnerable had kept him young for a hundred years. Doctors say if he hadn’t been killed, he might have lived forever.

He married three more times in his life but left no children.

He couldn’t fight wars anymore, so Larry spent his time in DC, training new heroes and making corny speeches. He was still on the news every month or so, rescuing people from plane crashes and hurricanes.

Larry came out of retirement in 2043, the year Lagos Sembala unleashed his famous curse on Washington, DC. The attack wiped out the legislature, the Supreme Court, and most of the cabinet. The president died in mid-sentence, addressing a joint session of Congress, then the CDC did everything wrong. They thought it was a disease, but it was a magical curse called Houngan Majher - Revenge of the Priest.

The priest in question was a metahuman warlord who controlled half of Africa at the time. None of these countries were U.S. client states anymore, so nobody in the West cared very much. Sembala controlled the stuff in the middle, so at first, nobody cared but China.

The president sent a thousand troops to Dongala after the attack. Most of them are still there, shoveled into mass graves by Sembala’s faithful, with maybe a hundred still walking around as zombies. Lagos Sembala was a card-carrying Necromancer. The real thing. Even the angels are scared of him.

I use the present tense because he’s still around, haunting the plains of Africa, waiting for his chance to rise again. He was trying to be a god, and he almost succeeded. He needed a million souls killed in battle; a million lives sacrificed in his name. He got half of those before we took him out.

Sembala attacked Washington in March. In June, the new president decided to openly violate the MRA. He recruited a team of metahumans and brought Captain Cobalt out of retirement. The Captain took them through an accelerated version of boot camp and hitched a ride to Africa. Larry wanted to capture the beast, but a member of his team killed Sembala in cold blood.

Two years later, Larry was dead.

No one knows who killed him. Sembala is the obvious suspect, but his followers would have used magic. Larry was killed by technology, killed with a method so simple, no one at the DMA ever imagined it. Or maybe one of them did imagine it, and Larry’s death was an inside job. The question has been open for so long, it’s become a running joke. In any airport in the world, you can buy a t-shirt that says, “I killed Captain Cobalt,” but I never thought that was funny.

Larry was sustained by the same kind of energy that mages use to cast spells. Every cell in his body was infused with magic. He only had one weakness - the weakness we all have - vulnerability to tantalum.

The DMA makes cages out of it. Street vendors sell it as a protection against curses. Most of the time, it doesn’t work. Left in the open, tantalum alloys will absorb a certain amount of magic and become inert. To stay potent, they have to be magnetized, refreshed by a magnetic field.

It sounds like a big weakness, but in practice, tantalum weapons are slow, brittle, and hard to use. A lot of villains tried it, but Larry was so powerful, it would have taken a ton of tantalum to bring him down. He got shot with a tantalum bullet once, but the coating burned off, and the scratch healed in a week.

Tantalum weapons were so clumsy, they weren’t even considered a threat in modern times. Larry’s handler never scanned for them, and the Defense Department didn’t know what to look for. They didn’t take it seriously until Larry got sick.

They tore his house apart. That’s where they found the first cylinder. It was empty by then - a twelve-ounce magnetized container about the size of a thermos, hidden in the air ducts of his house. The cylinder had been filled with tantalum dust on a slow-release timer. Larry had been breathing the stuff for years. His skin could stop a tank shell, but the dust had been eating him from the inside. The DMA found eight cylinders. Two in his house, three in his training shed, two in his favorite restaurant, and one in the mausoleum, three feet from Sally’s grave.

Who would do such a thing? Who could do such a thing? You would need a villain smart enough to think of this, sneaky enough to infiltrate the most secure buildings on Earth, and patient enough to wait ten years for his revenge. Who killed Captain Cobalt? Question of the century. I asked Azael about it the first day I got here. He gave me an answer, but I don’t believe it.

He says Captain Cobalt was killed by an angel.

* * *

I spent a solid week training every morning, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, getting a little better, a little stronger each day. Jeeves said the real Captain Cobalt could have run that course in eighteen minutes in 1955 and could have run it in eight minutes before he got sick in 2045.

Once I had my route worked out, I ended my first run at fifty-eight minutes. By the end of the week, I had it down to thirty-eight minutes. I was so thrilled with the improvement, I ran inside to tell Lydia, and forgot to turn my projector off. A black and white hologram of Captain Cobalt phased through the door behind me, until the dead man was standing calmly in my living room.

Lydia tensed up a little, but only a little, as she recognized him.

“You know who this is?” I asked, gesturing at the image.

“Of course,” she said.

“I really don’t want to know the answer to this, but I guess I have to ask. You were with Stefan through the whole war? Did you actually meet Captain Cobalt? Did my great-grandfather fight him?”

Lydia said, “No,” thank god. “Stefan was at sea while your Captain fought on land. They never met. I believe their respective governments were keeping them apart, afraid to lose one or both if they faced each other directly.”

“But if they had faced each other directly, who would have won?”

“Stefan,” Lydia said immediately.

“What makes you so damn sure that my great-grandfather could have defeated the most powerful hero who ever lived?”

“Stefan would have had to fight a lot smarter if he had faced your hero at the height of his powers, but in 1945, your superman was brand new, barely trained. And your Captain was limited by the level of background magic present on Earth. Stefan was not.”

“Because he was pulling power directly from Hell, through you.”

“Yes,” Lydia confirmed. “It gave him a tremendous advantage. The level of background magic is typically high in cities, but almost zero in rural or abandoned areas like the middle of an ocean. That’s why your hero teams congregate in urban areas, and why bigger cities spawn so many more heroes than small ones. Even if they had sent a team to fight Stefan, they would have quickly run out of energy to fight, while Stefan could pull an almost infinite amount of power through me. They would have had to send an angel or a godling to stop him, and even then, Stefan would have likely won.”

“So, my great-grandfather was a serious badass. You think I could be that strong?”

Lydia just said, “Yes.”