Stand Ready For My Arrival, Worm!

After getting his ass handed to him by Plot Armour and Deus Ex Machina—and spontaneously isekai'ing as a result—Conquest took the L, dusted himself off, and decided Earth BET looked like the perfect place for some soul-searching and good old-fashioned Viltrumite therapy.

Prologue

Pain.

The memory surfaced like bile, acrid and unwelcome. Pain. Pain. Pain… Sharp and visceral, cutting through centuries of accumulated indifference. Conquest's first sensation was pain. Not the biting, stinging ache of a wound, but the raw, ragged fracture of existence itself. Memories tore through him—fractured recollections of bone and fury. A beam of pearlescent death had struck him, stripping flesh from Viltrumite sinew. The child—whelp, really—had summed him up at a glance and shattered his skull with that obstinate, juvenile arrogance. His own blood, dark and ancient, painting the rubble of the battlefield.

Defeat.

The word sat in his mind like a tumour, malignant and impossible. He had not lost. Could not lose. He was Conquest, the Iron Fist of Viltrum, the sword that carved empires from the bones of the weak. He had broken worlds before that boy drew his first breath, had crushed civilisations before he could even crawl.

Yet the memory persisted, sharp and undeniable. 

Conquest had known the sting of defeat only twice before: the first, the searing agony of the plague boiling the strength from his blood, and the second, the bite of Rognarr fang, tearing an arm from its socket, claw pulverising an eye. This… This, however, was different: sharper, colder, crowned with disbelief.

He recoiled against the tide of recollection. He could taste the ash on his tongue, feel the heat of the girl's blast peeling skin as though it were parchment. He could hear the sickening crack of his own face collapsing inward as he was defeated. The memory twisted and distorted. Terror—an alien thing—seeped in. Not of death—death was honest, clean, final. A soldier’s wage. This was a terror of the ending. Of this being the final record. Conquest, the Empire’s Fist, brought low on a backwater planet by children. The thought was a poison that seeped into the memory, warping it. The rage, the pain, the disbelief—they all curdled into a thick, black dread. His legacy, his entire existence, reduced to a humiliating footnote. A warrior dies gloriously or not at all, but a Viltrumite dissolving into a forgotten smear on some backwater mud-ball? Unacceptable! Across the emptiness of whatever limbo held him, emotions churned: rage, disbelief, the chewed-glass taste of dread.

Then his mind, saturated with volatile emotions, collapsed inward, snuffing out the light, the sound, the very feeling of self. His consciousness plunged into a perfect, silent, featureless black. Nothingness.

For a time. 

Drifting in that void, Conquest saw… things. Glimpses. Fleeting. Colossal crystalline figures existing just beyond sight, shapes too vast for mortal geometry. One radiated molten gold, the other silver and void, and together they coiled in corkscrewed ribbons through the vacuum. Conquest had no name for them, no frame of reference. His warrior-instinct named them prey, but some deep, instinctive shard whispered otherwise; a word of caution.

Then, as if prodded by the stark warning, his consciousness returned like a slap.

Blinking his eyes open, Conquest found himself floating, drifting in the cold vacuum of space, Earth hanging below him like a blue-white marble streaked with clouds. The sight should have been familiar—he had seen it from this vantage point before, had looked down on that pathetic little world and felt nothing but contempt for its inhabitants.

Now he felt something else. Confusion. How had he gotten here? Why was he in space? The last thing he remembered was the battle concluding somewhere around sea level. He shouldn't be up here drifting in the emptiness, suspended in a grave of stars.

His vision began to blur at the edges. Confused, he turned his focus inward. His lungs strained, heaved, and found nothing. A vacuum. It was then he realised he was suffocating, darkness creeping in to claim what the boy's fists had not. Centuries of conquest, of empire-building, of blood and glory—all ending with the whisper of failing organs.

Unacceptable!

Rage steeled him as he flexed muscles that screamed in protest. It was a pathetic nudge, a twitch. But it was enough. His trajectory shifted. A slow, decaying orbit that quickly became a fall.

Gravity, the great equaliser, took him.

The seconds stretched into an eternity. Lungs burning for air as he fell. The blackness consumed his vision until only a pinprick of light remained. So this is it, a detached part of his mind observed as he teetered on the edge of mortality. This is how it ends—

Contact.

Fire.

The heat began as a whisper, a gentle warming against his skin as the outermost wisps of atmosphere caressed his falling form. Then it became a roar as he struck the air boundary at hypersonic speeds, a sheet of incandescent plasma that enveloped him, painting his vision white and setting every nerve ablaze. The atmosphere. The friction was immense, a scouring heat that burned away the cold of the void. For him, even in this broken state, it was a mundane sensation.

And with it came air.

He regained breath in a rasping gasp as layers of atmosphere peeled him free of the void. The world rushed up to meet him—cities shrinking into a grid, oceans glittering with afternoon light. The impact came then without ceremony. Concrete and asphalt gave way beneath him, a parking lot cratering like soft earth. He lay there in the ruins of his landing, feeling pulverised rock settle around him, steam rising from his flayed flesh. For a long time, that's all there was. The hiss of cooling earth. The thrum of his own failing heart. The struggle to remain.

Eventually, a sound intruded. A soft, airy disturbance. Conquest forced his one good eye to focus.

Someone was here.

Floating.

A woman, suspended in the air a few meters away. Tall. Muscular build, clad in costume. Black and a light grey, with a strange tower emblem on her chest. A skirt, boots, gloves. A heavy cape that draped past her feet. and a bizarre steel helm that covered most of her face, leaving only eyes like polished onyx, a severe mouth and jawline visible. Her hair was long, straight, and black, drifting around her as if underwater.

An earthling, undoubtedly. But not one he recognised. She spoke, her lips moving to form words he could not parse, syllables lost in the haze of his injuries. He tried to speak, to answer this creature's presence with the threat it deserved, but his body refused. His limbs were lead. The last flicker of awareness guttered, sputtered, and died as he finally fell unconscious.