Flaxan Invasion Part 2
Author's Note: If you enjoy this story, come check out my Patreon at banmido. I've got many more like this, early access chapters, giveaways, and other fire content.
Chapters up to 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20. are currently available to patrons.
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Atom Eve dropped from the sky like a flare of vengeance, radiant and focused, the air around her warping pink with raw energy.
She hovered above the cracked street, hands glowing and hair snapping in the wind. Before her, the Flaxan army surged forward marching metal and alien flesh, weapons charged, their war cry rising through the ruined city.
Eve glared at them, her voice ringing out like a warning bell.
"I don't know who you are," she shouted, "but it's time to go back to where you came from."
They didn't pause.
So she lit up the street.
A column of light crashed into the frontline, flinging bodies and scrap into the sky.
From above, Robot dropped like a stone. He abandoned his cruiser bike mid-flight, letting it crash down into the nearest Flaxan war turret. The impact triggered an eruption of fire and metal, shredding the nearest squad of invaders. Alien screams cut through the smoke.
Robot landed with precision, scanning the battlefield as his HUD fed him calculations faster than human thought.
Dupli-Kate and Rex Splode hit the ground a heartbeat later.
"Eve," Robot said, voice level, "two and a half seconds after this sentence, three enemy tanks will align fifty degrees to your right."
Eve didn't even blink. "I got it."
She turned and raised both hands. A glowing spear of pink light burst into existence between her palms. She hurled it in a smooth arc. It whistled through the air, curved like a boomerang, and struck its target just as the tanks aligned.
The resulting explosion shattered the avenue, smoke curling like ink in water.
Robot ducked as a plasma bolt zipped past his head. Another struck his shoulder plate and sizzled out. He raised his forearm, deflecting the next shot, and launched himself forward. His mechanical fist collided with the skull of a Flaxan soldier, crumpling its helmet and dropping the creature like a sack of potatoes.
"Rex. Civilians to your left." Robot called.
"I got eyes too, Robot," Rex replied, already flipping mid-air. He flung three glowing spheres at the base of the street. They detonated against a group of Flaxans marching the streets, blasting them apart. "You're welcome!"
He landed, kicked over a slab, and waved the family trapped under to escape. "Go! Go!"
"Dupli-Kate," Robot began.
"I'm already on it."
Kate split into six in an instant. Her duplicates surged into the street like a flood of fists and fury. They overwhelmed a Flaxan trio, one clone grabbing a weapon, another elbowing a soldier in the neck. Her real body stayed back, overseeing, guiding them like limbs of the same mind.
"Keep doing what you're doing," Robot finished, firing twin repulsor beams that stitched a line of death across another squad.
Above them, Eve soared again. She spotted a Flaxan gunship hovering low, preparing to fire. She created a jagged platform beneath its thrusters, yanked it downward, then launched it into the air with a reverse spring. The gunship flipped, slammed into a building, and exploded in a pink burst of twisted steel.
Eve spun mid-air, catching plasma fire with a wide shield. Behind her, two Flaxans tried to flank. She conjured helmets of solid energy over their heads, cutting off their oxygen. They clawed at their faces, screamed, then went still.
"Leave this planet," she shouted at the army. "Or die on it."
Invincible stumbled from the wreckage of a flipped bus, blood streaming from his mouth. He looked up at her awkwardly.
"You're Atom Eve…" he said, awestruck.
Eve blinked, caught off guard. "What? Just get out of here we've got this!"
But Mark didn't move.
Robot's voice snapped into her comms.
"Admirable courage, Atom Eve. However, I am not confident we can hold this line for long."
Eve gritted her teeth, floating higher. A new barrage of plasma fire rained down on her shield dome as she reinforced it.
Rex hurled more bombs, laughing at first, until the Flaxans kept marching.
"…Wait, what?" he whispered.
A pulse of energy hit the street nearby. The pavement cracked. Rex dove behind a police car.
They redirected their fire to him and the car exploded in a cloud of flames.
He dove out just in time, flipping over and slamming onto his back with a groan. "Oh, come on!"
Kate was being overrun.
Her clones popped like soap bubbles under the Flaxans' relentless advance. One grabbed her arm and snapped her neck. Another slammed a fist into her ribs and shot her in the face.
She fell back, gasping.
"They're killing me faster than I can make more clones," she panted.
"We bought enough time for evacuation," Eve said over the comms, voice strained as her shield flickered. "That's all that matters."
"No," Rex shouted, scrambling up from the ground as two more Flaxans advanced on him. "Me living is what matters!"
Robot turned his head. "Then I have bad news."
A massive sonic boom shattered the moment.
Above them, a shadow swept across the battlefield.
A Flaxan dreadnought.
Twice the size of the last warship.
Its engines howled. Its gates opened.
Dozens of drop pods rained down like meteors, embedding into the ground with seismic force.
More Flaxans.
Heavily armed. Larger. Faster.
"Phase two," Robot said, voice lower than usual. "Confirmed."
The street ignited again.
Eve flared bright and furious, throwing up a new shield around the team.
Kate slumped behind a slab of concrete, bloody and out of stamina. Rex had two bombs left and nothing else.
Mark still hadn't moved.
He looked up at the sky.
__________
A Flaxan brute lunged for the brave paramedics dragging civilians to cover.
Its plasma rifle was raised.
It never got the chance to fire.
The air split with a sonic crack, like a whip made of thunder.
A black-and-orange blur crashed into the giant brute's chest, through the brute's chest.
The alien's torso erupted outward. Bone, blood, and armor just gone. Its legs dropped like disjointed parts. The upper half was just missing.
The medics stared.
The civilians screamed.
But Naruto was already gone in a blur.
The next squad of Flaxans barely had time to blink.
They were six in formation, rifles humming with plasma energy.
One raised a hand to signal the advance of the city.
Naruto slammed down between them, knees bent and fist low.
Time seemed to halt in it's track.
A backfist crushed the leader's skull before the others registered the movement.
Another turned, and Naruto grabbed him by the face, lifted, and drove him head-first into the concrete hard enough to shatter both helmet and neck.
Two others opened fire.
Naruto weaved forward in a blur, blurred again mid-step, and suddenly appeared behind them, fists outstretched.
Both Flaxans exploded from the waist up.
Their bodies dropped twitching.
The last one tried to run to safety.
Naruto appeared in front of it.
"No. You don't get to run"
He chopped down with the edge of his hand.
The Flaxan's head split from its body, shearing clean off.
The corpse took a step, fell, and didn't move again.
____
Eve hovered above, shield flickering.
She couldn't see everything, just flashes and blurs. A streak of orange here. A sudden splat there. Craters. Disappearing limbs. Bodies folding.
Rex dropped beside her, panting. "Okay. Okay. WHO THE HELL is that?!"
"No idea."
"He's killing them like they're paper mache."
Robot hovered above. "His velocity is exceeding your visual processing capacity. I can barely track him in real-time."
Kate slid into cover, blood on her shirt. "Is that a new Hero?? Did we get another Omni-Man?!"
"No," Mark said, finally landing near them. "That's my friend Naruto."
Everyone turned.
"You know him?" Rex asked, breathless.
"Yeah. I always beat him at like every video game ever."
Rex blinked. "Cool. But not the part I was worried about."
Down the street, three elite Flaxans charged Naruto with plasma axes glowing.
He didn't stop.
He rushed them viciously.
He was too fast to counter.
He uppercut the first so hard its helmet embedded in its own brain.
The second swung, and Naruto dodged left, grabbing its wrist, and tearing it's arm off.
He used it to stab the third through the chest before drop-kicking both into a nearby aflame food truck.
A fourth burst from a drop pod midair, guns already glowing with energy.
Naruto zipped up to meet him and grabbed him by the throat.
"You shouldn't have come here to my planet."
He drove the Flaxan straight through three floors of a parking structure before letting go.
The alien hit bottom with a wet crunch.
He turned toward a crumbling department store.
Inside, a young mother was trapped under rubble, shielding a screaming child.
Naruto blurred again.
He appeared beside her and lifted the concrete beam with one arm like it weighed nothing.
The woman stared up at him, eyes wide.
He didn't look at her. Just muttered, "Get out of here."
She grabbed the child and fled before muttering a small 'Thank you.'
Naruto turned, expression unreadable.
"Don't look at me like that," he said quietly. "I'm not a hero."
Flaxan reinforcements arrived through a massive central portal.
He didn't wait for them to spread.
He shot forward, arm cocked back.
One punch. Full-speed.
The leading soldier exploded.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
Gore sprayed across the pavement. The force sent the others toppling like dolls.
Naruto landed in the middle.
Cracked his knuckles.
"Let's end this."
He tore through the line.
Elbows. Kicks. Palms shattering spines. Hand chops slicing off arms. He ripped one in half by the waist and hurled the two halves into two more charging from the rear.
He blurred behind one and crushed its heart through its back.
Grabbed another by the head, twisted, and popped it like a melon.
He moved too fast for fear.
Too fast for resistance.
The Flaxans broke.
They were aging. Failing. Falling apart from Earth's time distortion.
A high-pitched order barked across the battlefield. Retreat. All remaining units activated their return pods.
And Naruto?
He just stood there, breathing steady, suit streaked with dirt and alien blood.
One Flaxan staggered past him, trying to sneakily escape.
Naruto grabbed its arm and broke it.
"Tell them next time... don't come back."
He hurled the alien into the open portal.
It screamed the whole way through.
And then the battlefield was dead quiet.
Smoke drifted through the ruins like breath from a dying beast.
Ash floated in the air, soft and silent, falling like snow over scorched concrete and shattered glass.
The Teen Team gathered what strength they had, limping toward each other—bloodied, burnt, coughing through the wreckage. Mark wiped grime from his face and took a step forward, his lip split and one eye nearly swollen shut.
"You alright?" he asked, voice hoarse.
Naruto didn't look at him. His gaze stayed on the horizon, where the last of the enemy's dimensional gate flickered and collapsed in on itself.
"I'm not hurt," he said quietly.
Mark frowned. "That's not what I meant."
Silence settled between them. Smoke curled around Naruto's shoulders like a cloak.
"I still don't know if I want this," he muttered.
"Then why did you come?" Mark asked.
Naruto finally turned to face him.
His eyes weren't angry. Just tired. Tired and clear, like the sky after a storm.
"…Because I remember what it's like to lose everything," he said.
And with that he turned and walked away.
Rex, slumped against a broken streetlamp, called after him. "Yo, wait! What do we even call you?!"
Naruto didn't stop or look back.
"Just call me…"
He vanished. A blur into the sky, swallowed by clouds and smoke.
Maelstrom.
All that remained was the silence, and the twisted corpses of the Flaxan army beneath a city of lit aflame by chaos and death.
___________________
The hospital was loud in all the wrong ways.
Stretchers rolled by with bloodied sheets. Nurses barked orders. The air stank of antiseptic, plasma burn, and panic. Families waited with hollow stares and held each other.
Then the front doors slammed open.
Invincible stumbled in.
Suit damaged. Arms shaking. Face still streaked with debris and dried blood.
"I need to see her," he said hoarsely.
The nurse at the desk blinked up at him. "I'm sorry, who?"
"The old woman. From the invasion. I caught her.. She was hit."
The nurse hesitated. "Sir, this is a secur-"
"Please!" Mark's voice cracked. "I need to know if she's alive!"
Another nurse leaned closer to the first, whispered something. Then both looked at Mark again. There was a long pause.
Finally, the second nurse nodded.
"This way."
_____
The hallway was quieter than the lobby, but not peaceful. Machines beeped behind curtains. Doctors spoke in low tones. A gurney was wheeled past, covered completely by a white sheet.
Mark didn't look at it.
He followed the nurse to the end of the corridor. Room 217.
The door opened.
She was there.
Small. Frail. Surrounded by blankets and IV lines. Her legs were elevated, wrapped in thick casts, one of them suspended in a sling.
Her eyes were closed.
Mark stepped inside nervously like he didn't belong there.
The nurse touched his arm. "She's stable. Pelvic fracture. Both femurs shattered. Some spinal stress but… she's lucky to be alive."
Mark didn't respond.
He took one step closer. And then..
He dropped to his knees.
Right there, beside her bed.
His hands hit the tile with a soft thud. He trembled. His head hung low.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
His voice barely made it out.
"I'm so sorry…"
He clutched the side of her bed like it was the only thing keeping him tethered. Tears spilled freely now, sliding down dirt-streaked cheeks.
"I tried. I really.." his breath hitched. "I saw the shot coming and I moved. I thought I had her. I did have her. I didn't see the pole. I didn't think she'd-" he broke off. Swallowed hard. "I didn't think she'd break so easily."
The machines beside the bed beeped steadily.
She didn't stir.
"I didn't stop the others," he choked out. "So many people died. I saw their faces. I should've been faster. I was supposed to be faster."
He wiped his face with the back of his hand, streaking tears through soot.
"I'm Invincible," he said bitterly. "That's what they call me."
The room didn't answer.
Only the woman's shallow breaths. The soft hiss of oxygen.
Mark bowed his head again. Silent. Just a teenage boy at the foot of a hospital bed. Not a hero. Not a symbol. Just someone who tried and failed.
The nurse stood at the door for a moment longer, eyes soft.
Then she closed it gently, leaving him alone.
With her.
And the guilt of today.
_________
The door clicked shut behind him.
Naruto stepped into the silence of his apartment, the muffled hum of the city outside barely reaching through the walls. The lights were off. He didn't bother turning them on.
His feet scraped against the old tile as he crossed the room, body still humming with the echo of violence he enacted on the Flaxans.
The apartment was small. One bed. One shelf. No photos. Nothing personal, save for a houseplant wilting in the corner and a single folded blanket on the couch.
He walked past them without a glance.
Straight into the bathroom, he turned on the lights.
The mirror above the sink stared back at him, cold and blank.
Naruto stood there, breathing slow.
His black-and-orange bodysuit was stained now, plasma burns across the shoulder, dark Flaxan blood splattered across his chest. His blonde hair was matted with dirt and smoke.
He looked like a killer.
He was one.
He ran water from the sink, cupped a handful, and splashed it across his face. The cold hit hard. He let it drip down his face.
The mirror stared back.
And for a moment it wasn't his face reflected there.
It was hers.
His mother.
Kushina.
Radiant red hair spilling over her shoulders like a wildfire. Violet eyes burning with stubborn warmth. The soft tilt of her lips. A crown of woven crystal circlets resting on her brow.
She didn't say anything.
She didn't have to.
Naruto froze.
His throat tightened.
Then another voice, younger, his own, but small, bitter, echoed in his head.
"She would've been disappointed with you, y'know…"
His hands came up slowly. He cupped his face. Let out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh. But there was no humor in it.
Only something hollow.
"Are you proud of me now, Mother?" he whispered.
The lights buzzed.
The mirror cracked.
A thin line ran down the glass, splitting his reflection in two.
He stared at it.
One version of himself looking back, bloodied and worn.
The other warped, slightly crooked.
He touched the crack lightly with two fingers.
"…Guess not."
The faucet dripped.
And the loneliness returned in full force.
_____
Author's Note: If you enjoy this story, come check out my Patreon at banmido. I've got many more like this, early access chapters, giveaways, and other fire content.
Chapters up to 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20. are currently available to patrons.