Mason Holt was nobody. And for a long time, he was okay with that.
At twenty years old, his life was a quiet loop. Wake. Work. Walk home. Sleep. Repeat. He lived in a shoebox apartment tucked above a half-burnt laundromat in Old Detroit—a rusted corner of the city no one visited unless they had nowhere else to go. The peeling wallpaper smelled of dust and old dreams. The radiator clicked like it wanted to speak.
He had no girlfriend. No close friends. Just a few passing neighbors who nodded and disappeared behind their own doors. Yet Mason wasn't bitter. He had his music, late-night anime, books half-read, a secondhand guitar that never stayed in tune. He made do.
His job? Janitorial sanitation at a scientific corporation few knew existed.
"NEXUS Genetics."
The name sounded sleek and modern, but Mason knew better. The underground levels where he worked weren't public. They didn't do promotional tours. Security was tighter than anything he'd seen outside a heist film. He was told to mop, not look. Sanitize, not ask.
So, he didn't.
He showed up early, wore his ID badge, kept his headphones low, and never crossed red-taped thresholds. The world didn't expect anything from him, and he didn't expect much back.
Until one night… he made the wrong turn.
Accident or fate—doesn't matter.
He followed a trail of coffee spilled from a rattled intern and found himself in Sublevel 9. There, through a narrow viewing slit in a sealed lab door, he saw the future:
A man screaming in a stasis chamber. Machines pulsing. Scientists scrambling. A glowing, unstable vial shattering. The lights went red.
Then someone saw him.
They called it a breach.
And just like that, Mason Holt the janitor ceased to exist.
He awoke shackled to a medical table—naked, trembling, violated by needles and questions he never understood.
"What was the breach?"
"How long did you watch?"
"Did you tell anyone?"
He didn't even know what he saw.
But it was enough. Enough to be disposable.
So they repurposed him.
Project DEIMOS needed new test material. Something low-profile. Untraceable.
They injected him with a fluorescent black serum that hissed on contact. His veins burned like fireflies trapped under his skin. He was exposed to radiation bursts, bio-engineered parasites, sonic-frequency waves that made him convulse for hours.
His screams echoed into the walls until even he forgot what they sounded like.
Time became meaningless.
There was no clock in the dark. Only pain. Isolation. He didn't even know if he was still human.
And then—she came.
Dr. Lindsey Carter.
At first, she was just another white coat in the sea of monsters. He didn't even look at her. But she was different. She lingered after injections. She asked if he was in pain—and not to log a reaction time.
She brought him water when others brought sedatives.
She spoke softly to him, even when he snarled in response.
And one day, when she thought he was asleep, she whispered: "I'm going to get you out of here."
He didn't believe her.
Until he heard her thoughts.
A fluke—maybe. A side effect. But when she passed by, her voice wasn't in her mouth. It was in his mind. "You're not a monster. You're a victim."
He replied with a single word: "Thanks."
Not aloud. Just thought. It was the first human connection he'd had in months.
From there, everything changed.
She visited more. Brought books. Whispered the world's headlines. Told jokes. She even smuggled in music on an old MP3 player.
She was hope. Light in a place that had none.
Mason—the creature he had become—started to feel again. He told her about his old apartment. About how he used to play guitar, badly. She told him about her college days, her dog, her terrible cooking.
Eventually, she confessed her plan.
She had created a stabilizing compound. A cure—not perfect, but functional. It could allow him to control his appearance, stabilize the mutation, even blend into society again. The process couldn't reverse what had been done, but it could give him choice.
He asked her why she was risking her life.
She answered plainly: "Because you deserve to be loved. Not locked away."
Mason wanted to believe it.
They never kissed. He wouldn't allow it. Not like this. But she loved him anyway. She didn't see the monster. She saw him.
Then the experiment was discovered.
Surveillance flagged her anomalies. Security found her extraction plan. Before he could say goodbye—before she could administer the final phase of the serum—she was gone.
Silenced.
Mason's world turned red.
He shattered his containment cell. Tore through guards. Burned every lab floor with fury they had created.
He escaped.
He had the cure—but not her.
And when he emerged into the world above, a city celebrating a new solar-powered hero—Solari—he only saw lies.
His rampage leveled buildings. Screams replaced air. Panic consumed the streets.
And Belle Kersey, standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, was caught in the wave of his vengeance.
Present Day – Fusion Core Ruins
The ground trembled as Solari descended in a streak of gold and red, his eyes burning with fury and loss.
Before him, among the shattered reactor towers and crushed piping, stood the thing that had haunted his nights and shaped his grief.
Dreadmaw.
Still breathing. Still monstrous. Still standing.
"You should've stayed buried," Solari said coldly.
Dreadmaw's voice rumbled like gravel and thunder. "You think you're the only one who lost something?"
"You killed her."
"I didn't mean to. I just wanted out."
Solari's hands ignited with solar energy. "I don't care."
The air rippled. Dust curled into spirals. For a heartbeat, the world paused.
And then all hell broke loose.
Solari surged forward, a living meteor, slamming his shoulder into Dreadmaw's chest with explosive force. The impact blasted them through twisted girders and melted steel.
Dreadmaw retaliated with a thunderous backhand, launching Solari across a broken energy pylon. Sparks erupted, the ground splitting as he landed in a crater.
The two titans clashed again in mid-air—fists meeting like hammers of gods.
Solari blasted beams from his eyes, searing through armor-flesh, but Dreadmaw regenerated fast. He grabbed a torn pipe and hurled it like a javelin—Solari narrowly dodged, the weapon impaling a tower behind him.
They fought through the skies, crashing through the skeletons of buildings, spiraling through smoke and fire. Every punch echoed like thunder across the wasteland.
Solari dove from orbit, encased in solar fire, a lance of light—
Dreadmaw caught him mid-plunge, spinning and driving him spine-first into the concrete, cracking the Earth.
Solari gasped. Dreadmaw's fist raised—then Solari headbutted him, igniting the air with another flare burst.
Both staggered.
Both bled.
Breath came in pained bursts. Muscles shook. Their silhouettes were burned into the landscape, gods crumbling under their own wrath.
"You think you're justice," Dreadmaw growled. "But you're just the pretty face of their fear. I was made for one thing—destruction."
"And I was made to stop it," Solari spat.
Their final charge shook the horizon.
Both screamed. Both collided.
The shockwave knocked satellites out of orbit.
And then—
Silence.
Smoke drifted. Flames crackled. Rubble shifted.
A bruised and bloodied Solari hovered above a half-buried crater, looking down at Dreadmaw's motionless form.
Chest heaving. Arm torn. Lip split.
He didn't smile.
Didn't feel victory.
He simply turned and flew—into the haze, into the rising dawn—leaving the extraction team to handle the rest.
And far below, beneath the ruins and steel...
Dreadmaw's closed eyes flickered open.
The reptilian slits thinned to slivers of gold.