Chapter 36
The morning of September 23rd greeted me with a deceptive kind of calm. A sunbeam danced shamelessly across the pillow, and my head was unusually clear, almost sterile in its cleanliness, a pleasant residual effect from yesterday's "upgrade." The insane day that had swept through like a hurricane was finally over.
In some sense, it could be called a starting point. The mechanisms of the universe had come into motion, gears turning with new force, and who knew where any of it would lead. But I still couldn't influence that. Which meant I needed to do what I could. And that started with breakfast.
After texting Peter to spend the day in the lab making more batches of Absolute Predator serum, muscle stimulator, and NZT-48, I threw together fried eggs and bacon and brewed a strong black coffee, as was fitting for any self-respecting garage tinkerer and transmigrator on a workday morning. I opened my laptop, placed an order with Lucas for healing potions to arrive tomorrow morning, and started scrolling the news to get a sense of things.
The very first headline made me choke and nearly spit hot coffee on the screen.
"HE CALLED HIMSELF HYPERION: GOD AMONG US OR NEW THREAT?!"
Below it, the feed blazed with a kaleidoscope of screaming follow-up headlines:
"New hero in the sky over New York! Everything known about the mysterious HYPERION"
"Captain America is no match for him? Analysts shocked by newcomer's power level!"
"From heaven to earth: eyewitnesses describe superhuman's appearance in the heart of Manhattan"
The gist of every article came down to one thing. Today, about an hour ago, a man had descended from the sky in the center of New York — where else, this city was the local branch of universal drama. I clicked on the most popular video, shot on someone's phone.
The quality was terrible. The camera shook, the sound was drowned out by wind and the excited shouting of the crowd. But the figure in the center was unmistakable. A tall blond man in a form-fitting yellow-and-blue costume. On his chest, three connected circles, a logo resembling an atomic diagram. On his belt, a buckle stamped with a radiation symbol.
He hovered a couple of meters off the ground with inhuman calm while onlookers swarmed around him, dozens of phones aimed in his direction. Once he was sure he had everyone's attention, he spoke. And his voice, even through the terrible phone speaker, sounded like a thunderclap.
"Inhabitants of this world! For many years you have gazed upon the stars in solitude!" His speech was solemn and precise, as if he were addressing a senate chamber rather than a crowd on a city street. "But from this day forward, that changes. I have come to be your Shield against the threats that lurk in the darkness of space, and your Sword against the injustice that poisons your earth. Among you, those like me are called Heroes. But I consider myself a Defender. My name is HYPERION. From this day forward, know that you are not alone!"
With that, he was gone. He didn't linger, didn't wave, just shot into the sky. No fire, no visible effort. He simply vanished, leaving behind a sharp crack of displaced air that made the camera shake. The video ended.
"Damn," I exhaled, leaning back in my chair. "Who the hell is this now?"
I feverishly combed through the archives of my meta-knowledge. Hyperion. Familiar name. A memory surfaced from an old mobile gacha game I'd spent a couple of weeks on back in my time. A supposedly canonical Marvel character. Flies, shoots lasers from his eyes, super strong, practically indestructible. And that was it. That was the full extent of what I knew.
No real identity, no origin story, no weak points. A clean slate. But I was almost certain he was a classic good guy, not a psychotic schizophrenic like Sentry, who could snap at any moment and unravel reality. That was something, at least.
I opened the comments section and sank into the familiar chaos of opinions.
[User] Anti-Mutie_Patriot88: ANOTHER mutant decided he's above the rest of us and thinks he's a god. Watch him start demanding virgins as tribute. I'm waiting for the government to wake up and swat this flying threat like all the other freaks!
[User] WellActuallyGuy: → Anti-Mutie_Patriot88, First, mutants are a genetic anomaly whose existence hasn't even been confirmed yet, and this individual, based on all available evidence, belongs to the "meta-human" classification. Learn the material before posting conspiratorial nonsense. Second, did anyone actually pay attention to his phrasing? "Inhabitants of this world." "Your earth." He's talking about us in the third person. That leads to some pretty obvious conclusions.
[User] JustAsking: Good point actually. And has anyone run his face through any databases? He wasn't wearing a mask. What if this is just some actor pulling a stunt before a movie release?
[User] Info_Broker: → JustAsking, Already done. Everyone with the tools to check, from the FBI to every major news outlet, ran it. Result: zero. His face doesn't appear in any database on the planet. No passport, no driver's license, not even a parking ticket. Officially, this person does not exist.
[User] FFF_Ranque_Fan_Forever: → WellActuallyGuy, AN ALIEN?! FINALLY!!! Reed Richards and his team will be back from their expedition soon, then we'll get the truth! If he picked up any intel out there in space, he's already building theories!
[User] SpideyFan_HornetQueen: I don't know, guys. All that pompous speech, that costume like a circus performer. Sure, he's powerful, but our Spider-Woman feels a lot closer to home, you know? She's here, on the streets, with us. This guy is broadcasting from the heavens like some kind of messiah. She's ours. He's an outsider.
[User] PowerLevel_9000: → SpideyFan_HornetQueen, LOL, another spider-worshipping basement-dweller, log off! You're comparing a street-level hero to this guy?! He'd wipe your spider girl out with a flick of his wrist! You saw how he launched himself into the sky?! Breaking the sound barrier from a standing start takes unreal strength! Pray it never crosses his mind to start a genocide! HYPERION IS THE NEW GOD OF THIS PLANET! ALL HAIL HYPERION!
[User] Skeptic_Dent: → PowerLevel_9000, Spiders are arachnids, not insects, you ignoramus. And dial back the fan fervor. There's no such thing as an omnipotent being. They found a way to handle Captain America, and he seemed invincible too. This is just a flying, steroid-enhanced version of Cap. There'll be his own kryptonite, or whatever the equivalent is for super-powered aliens.
I slammed the laptop lid shut. Enough. That comment section could swallow hours. What did Hyperion's arrival actually mean for me, right here, right now? A major new figure on the board at Queen level, sure, that was interesting. But I had my own list of tasks, clearly defined. It was time to start working through them.
I got up, rinsed my dishes, and walked to the garage with a steady step. The world could go as crazy as it wanted. My work wasn't going to wait.
First things first. The foundation. The thing without which all my grand plans were nothing but incoherent scribbles on a whiteboard. A power source.
As much as I appreciated lithium-ion batteries, they weren't going to take me far. I needed something orders of magnitude more powerful. Compact, stable, and capable of producing energy in the hundreds of thousands, or better yet, millions of watts.
The first thing that came to mind was, of course, Tony Stark's crown achievement, built in a cave. An arc reactor on a palladium base. The engineer in me chuckled warmly and confirmed that yes, in my garage, this was more than realistic. Especially given that I already had the ore. There were a couple of nuances around handling radioactive palladium, but those were solvable. The end result would be a miniature star running on beta decay of isotopes, producing gigawatts of energy with almost no heat and no waste. The downside was that this would eat the entire day and push everything else back. But was that really a downside? To be the first person in this world to create such a technology? The craft points alone should pour down like rain.
I mentally ran through the other options just to be sure I was making the right call. A micro-fusion fusor generating a plasma ball for deuterium fusion? Elegant and beautiful, but unstable, and the output was only a couple of million watts. A nano-graphene hypercapacitor built from old CDs and batteries? Clever, and very much in the spirit of a garage engineer, but that was more of a sprint battery delivering powerful pulses, not a marathon runner that could feed a system continuously.
"Yeah, they all lose to the grim genius of a desperate Stark," I muttered into the empty garage. The choice was made. Today I would repeat Tony's feat, albeit shamelessly cheating with the help of system-granted knowledge, and tomorrow... maybe my first suit wasn't as far off as it seemed.
Some of the components I pulled from old electronics, but the rest required a trip to the city. A short shopping list: hydrochloric and nitric acid, a vacuum pump, a small jewelry furnace, a cylinder of deuterium, and of course reinforced protective gloves and filters. About six hundred dollars and an hour later, I was back in my sanctuary.
On to stage one: extracting the pure metal. I pulled the piece of palladium ore from my inventory and broke it down with a hammer into small chunks. About fifty grams went into an old but powerful blender. The motor roared, metal shrieked, and within a minute I had a fine, dusty powder. Pulling on a mask, I carefully poured it into a flask and filled it with aqua regia, the brutal cocktail of hydrochloric and nitric acid, which I heated to 80 degrees Celsius. A chemical solution capable of dissolving even gold.
Under the full blast of my jury-rigged exhaust hood, I stirred the hellish brew. The solution hissed and belched caustic orange vapors. After half an hour it finally turned a deep, saturated yellow, the palladium converted into chloride. I filtered it through ordinary paper, then added strips of zinc foil to the flask. Simple chemistry: zinc is more reactive, so it physically displaces the palladium from the solution, taking its place. After fifteen minutes, an unremarkable gray powder had settled on the bottom of the flask. Purest palladium. I dried it with a hairdryer, poured the powder into a crucible, and sent it into the jewelry furnace. At a thousand degrees it melted and solidified in the shape of a clean rod weighing about eight grams.
Now for stage two: enrichment. This was where the magic began, magic that this world had no access to. Natural palladium was like a bag of mixed nuts. Everything was in there together, but for this specific application I needed only one sort, a rare isotope called Pd-107. In the ore it made up only about one percent. It was an energy source, but it decayed agonizingly slowly. For the reactor to produce gigawatts the way Stark's did, I needed to do two things: increase the concentration of the "right" palladium and make it decay faster.
Using simple electrolysis, passing current through a solution containing the palladium rod, I made the target isotope Pd-107 settle out on the cathode. It was like using a magnet to pull specific iron filings out of a pile of mixed metal. Then came the most interesting part. I pumped deuterium, heavy hydrogen, into the porous structure of the enriched palladium.
Essentially, I was "feeding" the palladium catalyst. The deuterium absorbed into the metal and, at the atomic level, started jostling the lazy isotope, forcing it to decay thousands of times more actively. Without this step, the reactor would produce about as much energy as a candle. With it, I was waking up a sleeping giant.
Stage three, and the final one: shielding. Now I needed to lock all that power and radiation inside. Once again, improvised materials came into play. I grabbed a stack of old CDs and used ordinary tape to peel off the thinnest metallized graphite layer from each disc. I ground it in the blender with vinegar and salt to produce graphite oxide. After filtering and calcining it in the furnace, I reduced it down to pure, sparkling graphene.
I mixed the powder with pharmacy-grade alcohol into a paste and applied it with jewelry precision in three perfectly even layers over the palladium rod, using an ordinary brush. To make the coating as dense as possible at the nano level, I used ultrasound from a simple speaker, turning it into a makeshift high-tech compactor. Done. That thin film would now absorb 99% of the beta radiation. Safe on the outside, and on the inside, a sun being born.
Just to be safe, I poked the rod with multimeter probes. Resistance, almost zero. Everything was in order.
The reactor core was ready. That said, it was only the first stage, albeit the most important one. A quiet monster sleeping in its graphene cradle. The hard part still lay ahead: building the engine that would turn its radioactive whisper into a roar of lightning.
I needed a beta-voltaic cell. Essentially, it was like a solar panel, except instead of light photons it would catch beta particles flying out of the palladium. A particle hits a semiconductor, knocks out an electron, and there it is: electric current. Simple and elegant. But to hit power levels in the gigawatt range, even in a pulse, that elegance alone wasn't enough. I needed doping. Plasma. The idea was something I'd partially glimpsed from DIY physicist bloggers who built nuclear fusors in their garages out of junk.
First, a vacuum chamber. I took a durable titanium cylinder about the size of an AA battery as the base. Carefully securing the palladium rod inside, I connected the vacuum pump. After ten minutes of humming, my homemade manometer read 0.1 atmospheres. Ideal. The beta particles could now fly freely without slamming into air molecules.
Next, the heart of the converter: the p-n layer. I laid out a handful of diodes and transistors I'd desoldered from an old motherboard. After clipping away everything unnecessary, I selected several clean crystals of silicon and germanium. My semiconductors. With jewelry precision I soldered them into a thin, flexible tape: one layer p-type, with a deficit of electrons, and one n-type, with an excess. When a beta particle flies into that sandwich, it creates an electron-hole pair and forces current to flow.
I carefully wrapped the tape around the vacuum chamber. I still needed to run wires inside to connect to the core. I drilled a microscopic hole, threaded the thinnest wires through it, then sealed the joint with a small drop of two-component heat-resistant epoxy resin, cured under a directed UV lamp beam. It came out hard as glass, hermetic and reliable.
For the trim: I wanted the particles to hit the target precisely rather than scatter randomly, so I wound copper coils stripped from an old microwave transformer around the chamber. The magnetic field would act like a lens, focusing the energy flow. For charge accumulation, I soldered four large capacitors from the same microwave in parallel. They'd work like a dam, storing up energy for one powerful, crushing pulse. On the side of the housing I mounted a small fan from a hairdryer since even microscopic plasma generates heat, and cooling never hurts.
And then the final boss: the plasma itself.
I connected the magnetron from the microwave to the chamber. Inside was inert gas, and the magnetron would now ionize it, turning it into a glowing, super-hot clot of matter. This was the most dangerous moment. Too much power and the chamber would explode, splashing radioactive palladium across the garage. Too little and nothing would happen. Relying on the precision of my system-granted knowledge, I slowly turned the power regulator.
Inside the chamber, a tiny point of lilac light flashed into being, like a distant star. It pulsed, filling the vacuum with a ghostly radiance. Plasma. It would catch the beta particles and accelerate them to incredible speeds, boosting output power by orders of magnitude.
All that was left was to pack everything into a case. I took an empty shell from an old smartphone and built the construction in modules. The first module, "Core," held the vacuum chamber with the palladium rod and plasma. The second, "Converter," held the p-n layer and coils. The third, "Output," held the capacitors and a USB connector I'd desoldered from a charging cable. I connected the modules with quick-release clips, completing the circuit: palladium emits particles, plasma accelerates them, the magnetic field focuses them, they strike the p-n layer, current flows to the capacitors, and from there to the output.
Soldering took half an hour. My hands didn't shake. Every contact was perfect. I closed the case. In my hands was a plain plastic box, unremarkable to the extreme.
Final calibration. I tuned the coils until the focusing was ideal, then drew a syringe of deuterium and, through a special micro-valve, injected a single drop into the chamber. The palladium rod absorbed it like a sponge. The decay rate would accelerate by more than a thousand times. Using a resistor, I set the output limiter: a constant baseline of one megawatt, with peaks of up to one gigawatt when the capacitors discharged.
The palladium non-arc reactor was finished.
I held it in my hands, feeling the faint vibration. Before I could even think about testing it, a blue system notification flashed in my vision:
[Created unique power source "Palladium Reactor" (Uncommon). Technology previously non-existent in this world, unlocked! Received +800 OP!]
Compact beta-voltaic generator using deuterium-catalyzed decay of enriched isotope Pd-107. Generates a stable energy field with plasma particle acceleration for ultra-high power energy pulse emissions. Fundamental technology for next-generation energy systems.
Yes.
I'd done it.
Earlier than Tony Stark. In my garage. Practically out of trash.
I had no words for it. Only the feeling. The thing in my hands wasn't just a power source. It was a key. A key to everything that came next.
The solemnity of the moment was ruthlessly shattered by the sharp trill of my phone. Peter.
"John, did you see?! Are you even watching the news?!" His voice was agitated, almost cracking.
"Okay, calm down, Pete. If you're talking about our flying boy scout Hyperion, then..."
"Hyperion?!" He cut me off impatiently. "Who cares about him? The whole world already knows about him! I'm talking about what's happening right now! Open the news feed!"
I went back to the living room, set the reactor on the table like a priceless artifact, and refreshed the page. The feed was packed. My eyes caught the first screaming headline: a robbery at several jewelry stores downtown. On blurry surveillance camera stills, a figure seemed to be crumbling into a whirlwind of sand. Flint Marko. Another meta-villain. This world had clearly decided not to give Gwen a moment's peace.
"I see it. Sandy meta-human," I played dumb. "Interesting, but I don't know anything about him, if that's what you're asking."
"Sandy? No, not him! Although that's also insane, obviously... Go lower! Scroll down, John!"
Why the suspense? And the fear in his voice. I scrolled. And my heart dropped somewhere around my heels.
"Damn," I breathed.
A photo of a destroyed laboratory. The headline read:
"Tragedy in the scientific world: Dr. Otto Octavius missing after experimental installation explosion."
"He was supposed to have his conference on October fourteenth," I said aloud, more to myself than Peter. A key date in my mental timeline had just been ripped out by the root.
"Yes! Exactly!" Peter's voice was shaking. "No body, no trace of him. John, Octavius is a genius. He gave lectures at our university sometimes. I even spoke with him a couple of times. He had such ideas. I'm worried something terrible happened to him."
"I'm afraid, Peter, the most terrible thing already happened," flashed through my mind. That brilliant scientist who shared his knowledge with the next generation had most likely burned in that explosion. What had crawled out of the wreckage in his place... Peter was better off not knowing. Not yet.
"I'll try to find out something through my contacts," I promised, doing my best to keep my voice steady.
We said our goodbyes. I put the phone down and stared at nothing.
What in the name of everything holy had happened on that damned September 22nd? Richards. Hyperion. Gwen. Shocker, Blade, Harry. And now Sandman, and the birth of Doctor Octopus. The universe had hit the fast-forward button. None of this was acceptable. I needed to get stronger, and I needed to get stronger now.
My balance sat at 1,300 OP. Enough for two spins in the system. Two chances to pull something that would give me an edge.
But first things first.
The roar of a powerful engine came from the street, slowing smoothly near my house. Headlights swept across the living room windows for a moment.
First, I needed to talk to the man who'd just pulled up. He'd supposedly promised me a surprise.
I genuinely hoped whatever Blade had brought turned out to be good news. After a day like this one, I was desperate for some.
//==============//