[A/N]:Happy Mother's Day to everyone!!
[John Kaisen's POV]
The oscillating whine of the GDA teleporter had barely faded from my ears before my grief and adrenaline violently took the wheel.
The blue light washed away, revealing the sterile, heavily fortified underground command center of the Global Defense Agency.
I slowly turned my head to Cecil
I wasn't looking at the reinforced walls or the dozens of armed agents. I was looking entirely at the scarred, unapologetic face of the man who had just dropped a bombshell on me the second before we ported.
'Is he playing me here?' I thought, praying to all things holy that he was.
"Are you fucking with me?"
If it wasn't for Iron Will, I would have punched Cecil and laughed simultaneously.
"No." Cecil said, staring at me with the most deadpan of deadpans.
My hands shot out, moving faster than anyone here could track.
I grabbed Cecil Stedman by the lapels of his pristine suit.
'First Nakime, then Sebas, now Cecil? Is everyone trying to one-up each other for who could cause me the most frustration?'
Gone was the mellow and fluffy feeling from being called Nakime's boyfriend. All that remained was the most wanted man on Earth, currently clawing at the Director's collar.
The response was instantaneous. The synchronized, metallic clack of three dozen plasma rifles being taken off safety echoed through the room. Every single agent, including Donald, had their weapons raised and aimed directly at my head.
I didn't care. "I kept telling you to let me deal with him! If you were too weak to pull the trigger, you should have given me his location so I could end it while he was weakened! Now Nolan is God knows where, preparing to come back and finish the job, and you didn't even have the decency to—!"
"Stand down!" Cecil barked, his voice cutting through the tension in the room like a scalpel. He wasn't talking to me but to his agents surrounding us.
Slowly and reluctantly, the rifles were lowered.
Cecil didn't fight back. Instead, he simply reached up with one hand, gripping my wrist to balance himself.
He looked me dead in the eye, his expression completely devoid of fear.
"Look at the bigger picture will you?" Cecil asked, his voice chillingly calm. "I am the goddamn Director of the Global Defense Agency. Eight point three billion people rely on me to make this rock livable. Are you really so naïve to think I would trust the location of the most powerful and highly unstable being on the planet to an unpredictable dimensional immigrant?"
His words caused my hands to shake despite there being no threat in them. I knew I was letting my anger speak for me, the rational part of my brain telling me to stop this and let go. But after seeing Battle Beast casually crush everyone, after having to rely on stupid luck and Sebas's sacrifice just to survive, the thought of an unhinged, fully recovered Omni-Man coming back for round two was making me irrational.
"Your servants might have rotted your brain with their devotion and bootlicking," Cecil continued ruthlessly, "but you need to wake up to reality. You are not the center of the universe. You are a highly volatile asset and you'd best act like one."
His words only added more fuel to my anger.
"I don't see myself as the center of the universe, Cecil. I am the very reason your two superhero teams aren't dead. The reason hundreds of families aren't grieving their dead mothers, daughters, sons, and fathers. Whether I like it or not, I am far too tangled in this mess as you or any other person here is."
I let go of him, sucking my teeth and muttering curses under my breath. I brought my right hand to tousel my hair as I realised something that made this situation much, much, worse.
"Cecil. You fucking donut. You need to get that frequency as fast as damn possible. I get it if you don't want to trust me. But if you cannot get your hands on those countermeasures, the millions of lives that will die will be in your hands."
Cecil held my gaze for a moment. Maybe he realized my words held merit. Even if he didn't know how royally fucked we were.
He sighed, "Look John, the cat's out of the bag. Help me heal my heroes and we'll talk about Nolan later."
The fiery anger that had flared up subsided, I took a look at my surroundings.
I was standing in the middle of the GDA Headquarters, losing my temper at a group of people that just wanted to protect their world. All while they were actively looking to me as their only hope to heal Earth's defenders.
'I'm acting like a petulant teenager.'
I let out a long sigh, my head falling in disappointment—both at him and myself.
"Sorry, Director," I whispered, taking a step back.
I turned around to save face, desperately needing a moment to compose myself, only to find a middle-aged woman of color in a pristine white lab coat standing uncomfortably close to me. She was staring at me with unblinking eyes, as if I were some kind of rare collectible.
I raised my hand awkwardly to wave.
"Uh... hi?"
Before I could even finish the greeting, she snatched my hand, aggressively rubbing her thumbs all over my palm.
"Fascinating," she muttered rapidly, pulling a small penlight from her pocket and shining it at my skin. "There is no strange texture, no lingering radioactive isotopes. The light source you emitted during the Chicago incident... It defied standard thermodynamic emission. How did you stabilize the cellular degradation of a bisected torso without inducing rapid, uncontrolled mitosis? What is the bio-energetic conversion rate?"
"Dr. Riya, please," Donald said, stepping forward and firmly pulling the woman away by her elbow. "Assets are to be managed by field operatives, not the medical staff."
Cecil walked up beside me, "Don't mind them, Kaisen. Half the people in this building are secretly your fans after watching you and Sebas go toe-to-toe with Battle Beast. Especially Dr. Riya, with your literal miracle of healing."
I glanced around the room. The armed agents were glaring at me with open hostility, their hands resting rigidly on their holstered weapons.
"They really don't look too pleased to see me," I noted dryly.
"What do you expect?" Cecil replied, adjusting his tie. "You just assaulted their boss. Heroes may hate my guts, Kaisen, but my people love me…I am a charmer, after all."
'Yeah, right. And the Immortal can pummel Omni-Man,' I kept the sarcastic thought to myself as we began walking down the sterile, brightly lit corridors.
The atmosphere grew noticeably heavier as we approached the medical wing. The pristine white walls gave way to the frantic, bloody reality of the Intensive Care Unit.
It was a gruesome sight.
Black Samson was lying unconscious in a reinforced bed. His left arm had been completely ripped off at the elbow, the stump wrapped in bloody gauze. His neck was immobilised by a heavy metallic brace, barely keeping his severed spine connected.
A bed down, Shrinking Ray was encased entirely in a massive, full-body plaster cast. Apparently, Black Samson had managed to catch her during the fight, but hadn't accounted for the momentum of Battle Beast's strike. The resulting whiplash had crushed nearly every bone in her tiny body.
Monster Girl was strapped to a reinforced steel table in her troll form. Heavy bandages wrapped her jaw, and a dozen IV lines pumped sedatives into her thick veins just to keep her stable.
And then, standing at the end of the ward, I saw her.
Dupli-Kate, the original. She was wearing her standard uniform, but this one had a distinct '1' printed on her chest.
She looked up as we entered. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy.
'Was she crying?' I thought, wanting to go and once again apologise.
When her gaze locked onto me, her expression hardened into one of pure loathing.
I tried to offer a small, sympathetic wave with an awkward smile.
But Kate just huffed, turning her head sharply in disgust. She reached out, clamped her hand onto the wrist of a confused and heavily bruised Rex Splode, and forcefully dragged him out of the ward, refusing to even be in the same room as me.
Rex the poor lad, was too battered and shocked to even utter a word about having the Butcher of Guardians here.
Donald cleared his throat, breaking the heavy silence. "Dr. Riya will monitor their vitals and oversee your progress to make sure everything is working properly."
I just stood there, looking at the broken bodies.
"Well? What are you waiting for?" Cecil asked impatiently. "Get to it."
I turned to him, clicking my tongue in exaggerated disappointment.
tsk tsk tsk
"Director, did you really think it's that simple? Just wave my hands and poof, everyone is better? There are incredibly strict system requirements that need to be met before a miracle occurs."
Dr. Riya's ears perked up instantly, her clipboard at the ready. "Oh? And what biological or energetic catalysts are required?"
A wide capitalist smile spread across my face as I held out my open palm to the Director.
"Come on, Cecil. Let a brother hold another dollar."
[A/N]: Alright guys, real talk for a sec- we got absolutely COOKED last week 💀
Like bro, the week before we were literally sitting at the ALL-TIME #1 spot… and then last week? We dropped to 9th. FUCKING 9TH 😭
We cannot let that slide man. We gotta lock tf in and push this thing back to the top where it belongs. So if you've been enjoying the fic, now's the time to go crazy with the reviews, comments, and Stones. Every bit genuinely helps a ton.
Let's take back that #1 spot boys 🔥
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