Just as everything seemed to be spiraling out of control—Hex mutating, the seal destabilizing, and the very air warping with cosmic dread—the tension snapped.
With the sound of casual footsteps.
A man strolled into the corrupted house like it was a Sunday market. His jeans were faded, shirt flannel, half-buttoned over a plain T-shirt. Messy brown hair framed a bearded face that looked too relaxed, too ordinary. But his eyes—blue and ancient—held galaxies behind them. There was something both approachable and terrifying about him, like a friendly neighbor who just so happened to be omnipotent.
Chuck.
God.
From Supernatural.
"It seems Dad's getting desperate," Chuck said dryly, his voice carrying the weight of eternity with the apathy of a bored writer. "Using a street magician to crack open her cage. Tacky."
He waved his hand with all the concern of brushing off dust.
The barrier that had kept Nathan and the witches out? Gone.
More importantly—the four of them were hurled across the room as if they were paper cutouts. Gwen and Charmcaster slammed into the far wall, crumpling unconscious. Morgan barely caught herself with a burst of green magic, only to drop to one knee, blood running from her nose.
Only Nathan, still transformed into Orian, managed to rise again—arms trembling, Astro Force raging in coils around his limbs, barely contained.
But Chuck paid him no real mind.
He stepped directly through the ritual field as if the ancient seals meant nothing. The barrier didn't even flicker at his approach—it simply acknowledged his presence and ceased to exist.
Inside, Hex floated in the air like a puppet on black strings, his body a grotesque mess of molten veins and bubbling flesh. The Mark pulsed violently on his arm, threatening to finish what it started: not just transforming him, but detonating the seal. The entire chamber hummed with apocalyptic potential.
Chuck raised a hand. Reality folded like cloth.
The Mark froze.
"You poor idiot," Chuck muttered as he looked at Hex with casual disgust. "Already modified. Rigged to blow like a god-bomb. Typical Demiurge move. Always the drama."
With a flick of his fingers, Chuck forced the Mark out of Hex's body, pulling it like black fire being exorcised from his flesh.
Nathan, still panting, stepped forward.
He tried to speak.
But Chuck didn't even look at him. He just raised one finger and brought it to his lips.
Shhh.
Nathan's voice vanished.
No sound. Not even the hum of his Astro Force. Even the air refused to respond to his presence.
"You might not know me," Chuck said, finally turning to him. "But I know you. You interfere. In everything. Every story you step into gets rewritten. Every narrative bends to fit you. Do you know how excited I was for the brothers' face-off? All the buildup. The tension. Then you showed up and—poof—derailed it."
He shook his head like a disappointed playwright.
"But maybe… maybe you're still good for something."
Chuck didn't give him a chance to react.
The Mark—still writhing like a sentient brand—was shoved into Nathan's chest.
Nathan screamed silently. His body seized up. The Astro Force inside him roared in protest as it met the Primordial Darkness of the Mark. His Orian form began to fracture—red and black veins of corrupted energy webbed across his arms and face. His armor warped, melted and reformed, caught in a war between order and entropy.
Inside his mind, Raphael's voice vanished—overwhelmed and submerged by the incoming chaos.
The energy clash was so volatile, so violent, that even Chuck blinked. A tiny flicker of surprise broke through his otherwise omniscient expression.
"Huh."
Then, like it was no big deal, he turned and walked away—vanishing into a doorway that hadn't existed before, leaving nothing behind but silence and cracked reality.
Morgan, the last conscious one, gasped as her strength failed her. She collapsed, eyes wide, just in time to see Nathan fall to his knees.
The H-Omnitrix pulsed in panic—flashing green in distress, trying to initiate a reversion.
But the Mark refused.
It flashed with dark, spidery light as it etched itself into Nathan's chest—rooted now, bound.
The transformation sequence failed.
The room fell still.
Only Nathan remained upright—barely—his Orian form glitching between divinity and decay, his breath ragged, his mind on the brink.
Nathan collapsed.
His Orian form cracked under the pressure, body seizing as the conflicting forces tore through him. At last, the H-Omnitrix blinked furiously, overloaded by the chaos surging through its host. In a desperate pulse of green light, it forced a reversion, returning Nathan to his human form.
But it wasn't a victory.
Black sparks—like corrupted electricity—continued to dance across the device, crawling over his wrist like vines made of static. The Mark hadn't been rejected. It had rooted itself deeper. The problem hadn't been solved—just momentarily buried.
The room was silent, littered with bodies.
Then…
Miles away, an alarm rang.
Jessica stirred under her blanket on the couch, groaning as she sat up and glanced at the clock. 5:23 a.m.
She'd fallen asleep waiting. Gwen had been busy with her magical stuff. Nathan had gone out on one of his 'quick errands.' But now she was alone. And something in her gut didn't sit right.
She blinked blearily, reaching for her phone—and froze when she saw the texts.
---
4:52 a.m.
If I'm not texting you every 20 minutes, there have been some complications. In this case, you must visit this location (🌐) and survey the area. If you find anything dangerous, inform the Sorceress at (🌐). If there's no danger, try to find out what happened.
5:12 a.m.
Check.
---
Jessica stared at the screen.
Nothing after that.
Her fingers tightened around the phone.
"Something went wrong," she muttered.
But she didn't panic.
Instead, she stood and began preparing herself. She suited up—not in a flashy superhero way, but with a tactical mindset. Boots. Light armor. Grapples. Webbing. A comm-link. She didn't know what she was walking into, and that was exactly why she didn't want to go in blind.
Nathan was powerful. If something could knock him out of contact, it wasn't a prank-level emergency. It was potentially lethal. And that meant one thing:
Be ready to run.
Be ready to call in real help.
She followed the GPS location he had included in the message. It led her to a lonely stretch of woodland, the house there long abandoned—or so it should have been.
What she found instead made her stop cold.
Four people, unconscious.
Gwen—unmoving but breathing.
Nathan—lying flat, shirt torn, dark scorch marks around the H-Omnitrix.
The other two women took a second longer to place. One of them was the girl who had visited them yesterday—Charmcaster, Gwen had called her. The last woman, cloaked in green robes and radiating a quiet hum of leftover magic, was a stranger.
Jessica took it in silently.
There were no monsters, no destruction, no magical barriers. But the air felt… wrong. Like the aftermath of a battle too big for normal people to even notice.
She pulled out her phone and quickly called for backup. First, an ambulance—then, SHIELD. She gave them the coordinates, flagged the urgency, and stayed on the line as she checked their pulses, one by one.
Everyone was alive.
But shaken. Drained. Changed.
She glanced down at Nathan again, frowning at the twitching sparks still crawling over the Omnitrix.
"What the hell happened to you…?"
And what kind of problem was this… and why the fuck did they go out without informing her at all?
Two weeks.
Fourteen days.
336 hours since that night.
Gwen stopped counting after that.
The room smelled of sterilized plastic and recycled air. Cold light from the overhead fixtures buzzed softly—too soft to cover the faint hum of machines surrounding the tank in the center of the room.
Nathan floated inside.
Suspended in an emerald-blue solution, veins of dark energy still pulsed faintly beneath his skin like ink spreading through water. Tubes were attached to his mouth, wrists, and chest—feeding him, breathing for him, keeping his vitals stable.
His body was fine. More than fine, actually—heart rate optimal, muscles healed, no internal damage.
And yet… he wouldn't wake up.
Because this wasn't about flesh. Not anymore.
On a nearby monitor, green readouts blinked—waves of gamma radiation bleeding subtly from his body, as if the H-Omnitrix had tapped into something it couldn't contain. In the center of his chest, faint black markings still coiled outward like a spider's web—the Mark. Muted now, but still there.
Gwen sat on the bench against the far wall, slouched forward with her hands clasped between her knees.
She hadn't moved much in hours.
Her hair was pulled back in a messy knot. She hadn't bothered with makeup or clean clothes. Her hoodie was stretched from days of being clutched. Her eyes, once fiery with purpose, now looked sunken and dulled.
She kept her eyes on him. Afraid that if she looked away, he might slip further.
Dr. Bruce Banner stood beside the monitors, scanning through the latest diagnostics with furrowed brows. The reflection of the screen flickered across his glasses as he muttered to himself.
"He's stable. If you can call this stable."
Gwen's voice came out hoarse. "Is the gamma still increasing?"
Banner nodded slowly, jaw tight. "Incrementally. Whatever's inside him… it's not just radiation. There's something else tangled in his biology. Something old. Reactive."
He paused before adding, "This isn't coming from the Omnitrix. It's coming from him."
Gwen didn't respond.
What could she say?
The moment haunted her.
She kept replaying it in her head.
Nathan had asked her to walk away.
And she hadn't listened.
"Since the danger is so high, think of the consequences…"
She had said that. Like it meant something. Like that would justify this.
She hadn't seen Chuck arrive. She'd been unconscious by then. But when she woke up and saw Nathan lying broken and burned, black sigils etched into his skin, the guilt hit her like a mountain.
Now he was in a tank. Barely even human. Mutating into something she couldn't understand.
Charmcaster came to visit sometimes, but even she seemed lost, retreating into herself more and more. Jessica kept busy, checking in between missions, offering food Gwen never ate.
And Morgan… vanished.
Just disappeared after they were rescued. Like she had never been there.
Gwen felt like she was the only one still stuck at the bottom of that basement, even if her body had made it out.
Banner finally broke the silence. "You know, I've seen transformations. Seen minds split under cosmic pressure. But whatever did this… it branded him. That's not science. That's myth pretending to be biology."
He looked at her. "You know anything more? About the symbol?"
Gwen shook her head, voice a whisper. "I saw it… I saw it jump to Hex. I know it did. But when I woke up… it was on him."
Banner closed the file. "Then whatever happened wasn't meant for you to see."
Gwen slowly stood up and walked toward the tank. She pressed her palm lightly to the glass.
"I told him we had to do this," she murmured. "That we couldn't back out."
Nathan floated silently, his eyes closed. The Mark across his skin pulsed once, barely visible beneath the green light.
"I said we had to fight it," she whispered. "But I never thought it would fight back like this."
Her voice cracked.
"I never thought it would take him."
Sometime Later…
The air shifted.
It was subtle at first—a quiet hush that silenced even the faint mechanical hums of the lab equipment. The shadows on the far wall deepened unnaturally. And then—
A golden portal bloomed open midair, radiant and spinning with delicate, impossibly precise movements.
Jessica instinctively reached for the retractable baton on her belt.
Dr. Banner turned, frowning. "That's not one of ours…"
Out from the swirling light stepped a figure—robed, bald, calm as a mirror lake. The Ancient One.
She glanced around the room, taking everything in with a single measured gaze. Then her eyes settled on the tank.
On Nathan.
"Where were you?" Banner stepped forward. "Who even are—"
The Ancient One raised her hand without a word. With a flick of her wrist, the containment glass shattered—not violently, but like a soap bubble pricked by air. Liquid poured out, the tubes detached themselves with a hiss, and Nathan's limp body sagged forward into her waiting arms.
"Hey! You can't just—" Banner started again, but his voice faltered. Something in her expression — ancient, patient, and immovable — made him take a step back instead.
She laid Nathan flat on the examination bed, placing her palm gently against his chest, right over the black sigil.
Gwen and Jessica held their breath.
The Mark pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
Then something happened.
The web-like tendrils began to shrink. Not fade—but recoil, pulling back like frightened roots. They slithered in reverse across Nathan's skin, coiling toward the H-Omnitrix on his wrist, disappearing into the device with soft crackling light.
With a gasp like a drowning man reaching air, Nathan jolted upright. His eyes wide. Gasping.
"Wha—" he coughed, "Where am I?!"
Jessica let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding. Gwen was already at his side.
"Nathan!" she grabbed his shoulder, her voice cracking. "You're okay!"
But before anyone could celebrate—
Nathan twitched.
A ripple of distortion ran across his body. His limbs elongated, his fingers split. His skin turned blue, fur sprouting along his arms. For a moment, he was Spider-Monkey—or half of him was. Legs still human, arms alien. His face mid-shifted.
Then it stopped.
He gasped again, and the form collapsed back to normal. Sweat dripped down his temple. His pupils flickered—green, then black, then green again.
"What… what was that?" he muttered, shaken.
The Ancient One finally spoke.
"Your device," she said, calm as ever, "took most of the Mark's burden. It adapted. Mutated. For now, it contains the seal—but it has been scarred. It will behave… unpredictably."
She turned slightly, her robe catching the light.
"You should not be human," she said. "That you are is a sign of resilience. Or design."
Nathan tried to sit up straighter. "So what now? Fix it?"
She shook her head.
"You've been tethered to something beyond comprehension. Your path is no longer your own—it curves around a god's prison. If you wish to remain sane… live quietly."
There was something gentle in her voice. But beneath it, finality.
"Because the darkness within you," she said softly, "is patient. And it remembers."
With that, she turned, stepping back into her portal.
Gone as suddenly as she arrived.
Nathan slumped back, exhaling deeply.
"Yeah," he muttered to himself, eyes on the ceiling. "Quiet life. That's gonna happen."