Anansi Storytelling

Omni-Man was still wiping someone’s blood off his mustache when Scipio arrived.

The air over the city tasted like burned meat and dust. Buildings were ripped open. Streets were cracked and full of cars that looked like they had been stepped on by God in a bad mood. Bodies lay where they had fallen. Some were in parts. Some were smeared.

Scipio stepped out of the fold of space barefoot, right into the middle of it.

Concrete was slick with blood and oil. Glass cut his soles. Gaia pushed up through it anyway, slow and heavy. He let her weight settle in his bones. CRAS-9 flowed over his body in a tight black ripple, plating locking into place, then collapsing back off his feet when he told it to. Chaos Iklwa sat in his left hand, point down, metal dark.

Omni-Man floated ten meters away, hovering over the wreckage like it was a painting he was critiquing. He turned slowly when Scipio appeared. Red suit torn, gray at the temples, eyes almost calm. His hands and forearms were coated to the elbows in blood that was not his.

“You are new,” Omni-Man said. Voice easy. Like they were about to play a pick-up game.

Scipio let his senses open.

Vectors lit up. Smoke drifting sideways. Rebar hanging loose, swaying in the warm wind. Bits of torn street still falling from somewhere above. Omni-Man’s muscles humming with stored force, his heartbeat a heavy drum, air currents curling off his body.

Telepathy slid out in a thin band.

Under the calm, Omni-Man’s mind was a storm. Duty, superiority, the cold logic of Viltrumite empire. Threaded through it, ugly and bright, was real love for a son he did not know how to reconcile with orders. He had killed so many people today that it barely registered in his emotional field. Wiping out a city was a data point. Hesitating with Mark had hurt more than this.

Scipio pulled back before he took too much of that inside.

“You did all this?” Scipio asked. His voice sounded flat in his own ears.

Omni-Man glanced around like he was checking his work.

“Yes.”

“Why.”

“Because this planet is weak,” Omni-Man said. “And it belongs to us now. You are in over your head, kid. Go home. Breed. Or kneel.”

Scipio rolled his shoulders. The suit hummed as it synced tighter with his nervous system. He breathed in slow. The smell of cooked flesh and concrete dust scraped his throat on the way down.

“Name’s Scipio Okoro,” he said. “King of Amanirena. I do not kneel to men who massacre cities to impress a flag.”

Omni-Man snorted.

“I have toppled worlds,” he said. “Children always think they are special the first time they try to stand in the way.”

Scipio slid the limiter off his nerves. Myelin thickened along every nerve in his body. Time stretched. The sirens in the distance dropped to a slow wail. Ash falling from the sky looked like it was suspended.

He was afraid. Not the old scared of dying. He had made his peace with that. This was different. This was the sharp fear of knowing you were about to do something ugly and necessary, and there was no way to come out clean.

He kept it.

“Last chance, old man,” he said. “You can leave. We never talk again.”

Omni-Man gave him a genuine smile.

“You are funny,” he said. Then he moved.

To anyone watching from the outside, Omni-Man blurred out of existence and reappeared in front of Scipio with his fist already swinging. To Scipio, in dilated time, it was like watching a train come off the tracks.

He saw every angle on that punch. The way Nolan’s spine twisted. The force chained from his grounded foot, up his leg, through his hip. The vector coming for his face was thick and bright in his head.

He did not block. He grabbed the line and bent it.

Personal vector. Inertia negation.

Scipio killed his own weight and twisted sideways, sliding along the punch’s path while flipping its direction a few degrees. The fist missed his jaw by centimeters and plowed into the street behind him.

Concrete exploded. The street buckled and cratered. The shockwave hit Scipio like a shoulder check from a truck. CRAS-9 took the worst of it. His teeth rattled.

Omni-Man’s eyes widened a fraction.

“Fast,” Nolan said. “Good.”

He came again.

No windup this time. Just instant movement. He hit from above, then from behind, then from the side, trying to catch Scipio before he could reorient. Every blow carried enough force to pulp a tank.

Scipio rode them like bad weather.

He Blanked through space in tight steps, stacking his teleportation on top of his movement vectors, turning his own path into a broken line that Omni-Man’s brain had to keep chasing. One frame he was under Nolan’s arm, spear clipping at his ribs. The next he was ten meters away, bare feet skidding through blood and glass.

When punches did land, they did not land clean.

He clipped Scipio in the ribs once. Pain tore through his chest as two ribs snapped. CRAS-9 creaked. Scipio took the hit and flipped the momentum back, using Omni-Man’s force as a pivot to sling himself up and over, driving the butt of the Chaos Iklwa into Nolan’s jaw.

The sound was like someone dropping a sledgehammer on a stone wall.

Omni-Man’s head snapped back. He stopped dead in the air, more surprised than hurt. A thin line of blood showed at the corner of his mouth. Scipio saw his eyes go cold.

“That actually hurt,” Omni-Man said. “Good.”

He grabbed Scipio by the chest plate faster than any human eye could track and launched.

The world smeared into streaks of color. Buildings tore past. Scipio’s stomach slammed into his spine. Omni-Man drove him through three high rises in a row, bodies and furniture bursting around them, glass shredding his exposed feet and face. They came out the other side trailing dust and screams.

Scipio tried to kill his own momentum. Omni-Man did not let him.

He twisted in mid-air, brought Scipio around, and hammered him into the ground headfirst.

The impact cracked the earth. The shock went all the way up Scipio’s spine. For a second his vision whited out. His brain tried to bounce around his skull like a loose ball. CRAS-9 screamed and auto-sealed. Blood poured into his mouth.

He tasted his own teeth.

Regeneration hit like a bomb. Telepathic regeneration layered over it, stitching neurons before they could die. His skull knit in real time. Blood pumped backward, sliding out through his nose as fresh tissue pushed it out.

He could not breathe for a second. Then he could. He rolled, hacking, and spat a mouthful of blood and tooth shards onto the cracked street.

Omni-Man dropped down in front of him, hovering a meter off the ground. He was breathing harder now, but he did not look winded. There was a split in his lip, another along his jaw where the Iklwa butt had tagged him. Their blood looked almost the same on his face.

“You are lucky you can heal,” Nolan said. “Most people just stop.”

Scipio pushed himself up to his knees, then to his feet. The fear was louder now. He did not push it down. He needed it sharp, right at the edge.

“I do not call this lucky,” he said, voice raw.

He set his feet. Felt Gaia under the cracked street, pissed off and awake.

He opened his telepathy wider.

Presence. Predict. Telepathic awareness.

He let Omni-Man’s focus wash over him. There was no hesitation here. Nolan meant every hit. There was regret buried under it, but it was the regret of a man burning down a house he had liked. Not enough to stop him.

Scipio tasted something else. Pride. The same shit fathers used when they hit their sons in the name of “tough love” and then went out for a beer.

He hated it.

“You talk about your son while you do this,” Scipio said quietly. “How the fuck does that work in your head.”

Something flickered in Nolan’s eyes. Then he shut it down.

“You are not him,” Omni-Man said. “You are not my problem. You are just in the way.”

Red lit up in his eyes.

The Omega beams in Darkseid’s face had been complicated. These were simple. Heat and power riding on Viltrumite biology. They were still a problem.

The beams snapped out, twin lines of bright energy cutting the air where Scipio stood.

He bent them.

Vector manipulation. Reflection. Velocity shifts.

He did not have to outrun light if he could tell it where to go. He grabbed the beams’ paths, twisted them around his own space, and sent them curving upward. The air burned his cheeks. The street behind him turned into molten rock.

He rode the curve, split the beams around himself, then snapped them together again behind his back so they slammed into Omni-Man’s own flank as he charged in.

The blasts caught Nolan in the side. His suit charred. Flesh split. He snarled in surprise and veered off, dropping half a block away so hard the shockwave knocked Scipio back on his ass.

“Fuck,” Scipio muttered. “Okay.”

He pulled power up from Gaia, from every concrete pillar and steel beam sunk into her back. Gravity vectors, support forces, the subtle tensions inside the ruined city all came into focus.

He flicked his hand.

The building Omni-Man had crashed into sagged. Support beams snapped. The whole structure folded sideways on a vector Scipio chose.

One hundred thousand tons of steel and glass came down on Nolan like a hammer.

Scipio did not kid himself. It would not kill him. He did not need it to. He needed it to stack damage.

He Blinked up and back, floated on bent gravity, and watched dust roll up in a dirty wave. For a second there was nothing but noise and broken concrete.

Then Omni-Man tore his way out.

He was bleeding now. Not badly, but enough. One eye swollen. Suit shredded. There were chunks of rebar poking out of his torso that he had not bothered to pull yet. He was also smiling.

“Mark never hit this hard,” he said. “You are giving me a workout.”

He came again.

Scipio did not try to go punch for punch. He would lose that trade. He had already taken a taste of it. Omni-Man had the edge in raw strength. He might even have him in straight line speed if Scipio stayed inside normal time.

So Scipio stopped playing inside normal time.

He cranked the myelin all the way up.

The world froze.

Raindrops that had been falling from a cracked main hung in the air like beads. Dust was a sculpture. Omni-Man’s charge up the street went from blur to slow, ugly lunge.

Scipio stepped sideways into superposition.

He split himself into possibilities across one stretched out second. In one, he dodged left. In another, he Blinked up. In another, he took the hit and died in a smear.

He rejected the last one. He watched the others play out in probabilities. The one where he dodged left made this fight last another brutal ten minutes and ended in both of them dying in orbit. The one where he Blanked up and pressed gained inches.

He collapsed into that one.

He appeared above Omni-Man’s line of attack, Chaos Iklwa drawn back, spearpoint aimed at the back of Nolan’s neck. He poured vector energy into the thrust, gravity and kinetic force and every bit of spite he had.

He drove the blade down.

Viltrumite biology was a nightmare. Dense. Tough. Close to invulnerable. The Iklwa did not care.

It punched through flesh and cartilage and bone, slid between vertebrae, and came out the front of Omni-Man’s throat in a spray of blood and spit.

Time snapped.

Omni-Man’s momentum carried them both. Scipio rode his back for ten meters before Nolan’s body finally admitted something was wrong and crashed to the ground.

They hit hard. The spear pinned Nolan’s neck to the broken street.

Blood pulsed out in thick red waves. Real blood now. Human enough to steam on the cracked asphalt.

Omni-Man clawed at the haft. His mouth opened and closed, clogged with red.

Scipio could feel his heart still pounding, his lungs trying to fight around the hole. Regeneration was trying to work, but the Iklwa carried its own rule set. Where it cut, things did not heal right.

Scipio flicked Chaos Iklwa out of his neck and stepped back.

Omni-Man rolled, gasping, clutching at his throat. The wound started to close in bursts. It was obscene, like watching time-lapse of a flower bloom and die over and over.

Scipio did not give him the chance.

He grabbed Nolan’s head with telekinesis and personal vectors both, locking his body in place. Bones creaked under his grip. Nolan’s eyes went wide.

“You could have left,” Scipio said. He was breathing hard. Blood ran down his own side, sticky and hot, from a cut he had not even processed yet. “You could have gone home. You could have stayed a father.”

Nolan tried to speak. Blood bubbled in his throat.

“You chose this,” Scipio said. “You chose to call people pets and smash them like animals.”

He raised his left hand.

Chaos Iklwa jumped into it, called out of nothing. One second it was lying in blood, the next it was in his palm, humming. The spear liked this. It liked being where it was meant to be, doing the thing it was built for.

Scipio did not like it.

He drove the spear through Omni-Man’s chest, straight into his heart. No flourish. No speech. One clean, ugly push.

Bone shattered. Flesh split. Blood erupted.

Nolan’s body convulsed. His eyes met Scipio’s and held there for a second. In that look, Scipio saw flashes he did not want. Debbie. Mark. Flight. Laughter. A man who had actually loved his family and still decided to do this.

He stayed in that look anyway.

“No more cities,” Scipio said quietly.

He pulled the spear out.

Omni-Man shuddered. Then he went still. Regeneration tried to restart the engine. The Iklwa’s cut did not allow it.

For a long time, the only sound was distant sirens and the tick of cooling metal.

Scipio stood there, spear down, blood on his bare feet, breathing like he had run a marathon. His regen kept trying to drag his body back to normal even while his mind sat there in the wreckage.

He had killed plenty of people. Men who deserved it. Men who maybe did not. That was part of the job, if you called what he did a job.

Something about this stuck harder.

Neswt’s voice slid into his head, soft.

You alive.

He swallowed.

“Yeah,” he said. It came out low and rough. “He is not.”

You okay.

He looked around. Mangled bodies. Crushed cars. A father who had chosen genocide over his own son lying dead at his feet.

“No,” he said. “But the world is a little safer than it was an hour ago. I will call that enough.”

He wiped the blood off the Chaos Iklwa on what was left of Omni-Man’s cape, then rested the spear across his shoulders. Gaia hummed under his feet, steady and slow.

Scipio looked down at the body one last time.

“Your boy deserved better,” he said.

Then he turned away, bare feet slipping a little on the blood before finding purchase, and walked back into the broken city he was going to have to help rebuild.