Ultra-Men No More

James Hopper--a.k.a. The super-powered member of the Ultra-Men known as “the Blur”--got the mayday signal from back home first. “I’ll check it out and get back to you guys,” the Blur said on the U-shaped intercom-pendant on his purple spandex costume. He wasn’t the closest to the home where they were all raised, but with his superhuman abilities, he was able to get there--a secluded facility deep in Northern Canada--in less than an hour. He ran so fast he was able to skim right over rivers and lakes, while the force field that engaged every time he accelerated kept him safe from air pressure, insects and the like.

The Blur skidded to a stop outside their childhood home, which looked, to most people, like a military bunker. In many ways, it was… the Ultra-Men, all brothers, were raised in secret when their mother, herself a superhero known as White Hawk, learned that her offspring would all have special abilities.

The Blur immediately sped around the perimeter of the blank, snow-covered rectangular building. In seconds he knew he was alone there, and that no one had been in or out in awhile. The panel on the outside scanned his handprint and his retina, and a section of the smooth, featureless wall suddenly slid aside. “No signs of forced entry,” he radioed the others. “No signs of apparent danger. Perhaps it’s all a systems malfunction?” Despite his skepticism, the Blur went in prepared to battle.

He had barely cleared the first hallway when he saw Prima, the cybernetic “nanny” that had raised him and his brothers, scattered across the floor. Her plastic face, the only part of her that almost resembled anything “human,” had a blank, wide-eyed stare. The rest of her body had been dismantled and spread out across the floor like she had been dissected.

“Holy…” the Blur said, panicked. He clicked on his intercom, “You guys! Prima’s down! I don’t know who--” The intercom buzzed loudly, a sign that his connection to the others was down. “Damn,” he said. “Storm was coming in, probably blocking the signal.” There was a communication center in the bottom of their home facility. He could try to raise the others on that.

“Good god, Prima, how could they do this to?” Her outer casing had been split into small plates while the wires and circuitry that composed her “guts” were lain out methodically, each separated. It would take months to reassemble her. The Blur could do it more quickly, but he had no idea how to rebuild a sentient cybernetic being.

The Blur flashed back to Prima teaching him and his brothers math when they were younger, tending their skinned knees and broken limbs, and sealing them inside their room without the use of their powers when they were disobedient. In many ways, she had functioned as a second mother to him and his brothers. He gently caressed her still face, lifting it in his hands. He didn’t care that Prima had been constructed by his stepfather; to him, she was as human as anyone else.

“ERROR--ERROR… SCANNING: Detected, DESIGNATE: HOPPER, JAMES… alias: THE BLUR…”

He nearly dropped the face when it suddenly twitched and lurched in his hands, buzzing out rudimentary error messages in an electronic-sounding “robot voice” that sounded nothing like the “woman” he knew.

“Holy shit, you’re still alive!”

“J-James?” the face finally said in Prima’s voice. “James, I can only function for… 72 more seconds… but I have to warn you… Wendell… W-Wendell…”

The Blur’s brow furrowed. Wendell was their stepbrother, a scrawny geek with a thousand ailments. He’d grown up in a bubble, unable to be exposed to sunlight, atmosphere, or bacteria. While the Blur and his brothers had left and formed a superhero team, the powerless and helpless Wendell had stayed behind in the care of Prima.

“Is Wendell here? Is he all right?” the Blur said. He wanted to immediately scan the building to find out who else was there--a task that would take him mere seconds to complete--but he was afraid to move while Prima was functioning.

“H-his… paternity… finally solved… extra-terrestrial…” She seemed to be spitting out nonsense, the Blur thought.

“Prima, just relax. I’ll get the guys here, we can get you put back together perfectly…”

“Late… manifestation… chrysalis… omega-level…”

Suddenly, the disembodied face faded to a grey and crumbled to dust, scatter along the rest of Prima’s remains.

“No--NO! Prima!” the Blur said, a sob creeping into his voice. In an instant, he had explored every room on this level. The whole place was silent, as if it had been abandoned. He quickly sped into the elevator and descended to the subterranean levels. He arrived in the dormitory in the blink of an eye.

While the other beds remained vacant and untouched for years, Wendell’s room looked very much lived in. But where his bed was now lay a massive pile of smoldering purple slime. The Blur reached out a hand, feeling the heat emanating from the pile of quivering slime through his insulated costume. He could see crumbled pieces of something scattered throughout the slime.

“Looks like…” he thought, even his superspeedy senses taking time to process this shocking scene. “Looks like a giant purple egg just… smashed…” Had someone transformed Wendell into an egg? Maybe some sort of being had consumed Wendell while he was sleeping, and this was the post-digested content.

The Blur suppressed the urge to vomit as he theorized about the grisly scene. In a moment he was outside the building, engaging “lockdown mode” with his handprint. He could be back at Ultra-Men base in forty minutes, he knew. They could all be back there before morning. Whatever hurt Prima and Wendell, it had better start running, the Blur thought to himself. He reared back, prepared to launch forward faster than sound--but instead, he fell flat on his face in the snow.

“The… hell…” he said, standing up. The tingling at the base of his skull, that urgent NEED to move at supersonic speeds, was gone. He looked at his hands, searching for an answer. What could possibly have shortcircuited his powers like this?

“JAMES,” boomed a voice from above.

The Blur shielded his eyes as he looked up at a shimmering golden light. “The--who… who’s there?”

The light dimmed just enough for the Blur to make out the human form at its core. It was Wendell, but his skin looked like it was made of shimmering gold. Bright starlight glimmered from each of his otherwise empty eye sockets. The fact that he was hovering naked in midair was the least shocking detail.

“Wendell, what happened? Prima is--”

“Taken care of,” Wendell boomed. His voice echoed as if it was projected from another dimension. “She wanted to alert the rest of you when I began my… shall we say… late puberty… even then I had the power to stop her, giving me time to become… what I am now…” The golden man examined his body as if seeing it for the first time.

“Wendell… do you have powers now?” the Blur said, his voice cracking. “We gotta get you back to base, have the other guys take a look at you. You can join the Ultra-Men now!”

Wendell’s face was blank but the sound of ominous laughter echoed around them. His mouth had never moved. “Oh, I have plans for you Ultra-Men, but joining you is not one of them.”

“What do you--”

The Blur grabbed at his stomach, feeling an intense pressure in his gut. “HNNNGGHhh…”

“You’ll be amazed at what I can accomplish now,” Wendell echoed. “James… always so fast… look at your body. So sinewy. So lean. Side-effects of an accelerated metabolism, I’d imagine.”

The Blur suddenly found himself rising off the ground, his lean limbs spread wide as if he, too, were about to be dissected. “Wendell, what are you doing?”

“Imagine if you’d been forced to stay put, the way I was all these years,” the golden man boomed.

The Blur’s eyes went wide. He groaned as his stomach suddenly bowed out. In seconds he looked like he was nine-months pregnant. He groaned as his arms and legs thickened, his face bloating with weight. Somehow his costume stretched to accommodate as he went from thin to beefy, then obese--then inhuman. He could only watch helplessly as he blew up with flab, suddenly so wide he could barely see all of himself, let alone stand on his own power.

“Oh, god, I’m so… so big…” the Blur groaned. He couldn’t move more than wiggling his fingers and toes. As he whimpered, his massive cheeks jiggled, tears streaming down his face.

“Oh, that must be an incredible burden,” Wendell said. He pointed at the Blur’s corpulent face and the tears suddenly lifted away, evaporating in mid-air. “Gravity really has a hold on you, doesn’t it? Well, mass doesn’t have to be so cumbersome…”

The Blur squealed as he felt his lower body suddenly lift off the ground. He could only stare in horror as a gentle wind spun his massive, fifteen-foot-diameter body until he was upside down, the snow-covered ground seeming to pull away from him. “No… no! Let me down!” he squealed.

Wendell only waved goodbye as the Blur, now a big balloon of a man, lifted up, up and away. Wendell watched as the purple mass grew smaller and smaller, until it was no more than a dot in the blue sky. Then, nothing.

Then WEndell, too, was gone as if he’d never been there. The only evidence of the encounter was a massive crater in the snow-covered ground, the former resting place of the biggest human in the world.

*

Darius Hopper, a.k.a. Titanio, stomped around the roof of the headquarters of U-Tower, the headquarters of the Ultra Men. He cleared the landing pad for the team’s transport jet in four long strides--at 7 feet tall everything about him was superhumanly big, even his gait--flexing his arms and pumping his fists at the air, wishing he was pummeling whatever super-villain was behind Wendell’s disappearance.

“I’m tracking him via his uniform,” came a voice from the communications pin on Titanio’s codpiece (the only item that comprised his “uniform,” other than his boots, showing off his massively inflated musculature at all times). It was Darius’ brother Tony, a.k.a. Captain Supreme. “He’s in Canada it looks like. Traveling very slowly, though, which is strange. No idea why he’s not coming up on the comm-link. Maybe it’s damaged?”

“Well, hurry up back here with the U-Jet so we can go get him!” TItanio barked.

“I’m transporting Max Diabolo and the Rat King to a maximum security facility,” Captain Supreme radioed back. “Once they’re dropped off I’ll be back. But you should really relax, big guy.”

Titanio flexed his massive muscles and clapped his hands together so hard he propelled a shockwave of force into the sky. “Dammit, Captain, I can’t get Prima on the radio either! PRIMA, the most advanced AI in all of existence!”

“Let me finish putting these villains where they belong and we’ll get to the bottom of this,” Captain Supreme said, ending the comm-link.

Titanio flexed his leg muscles, squatting down. If he used his superhuman ability to expand his size and strength, he could possibly leap several miles in a single bound--he’d done it before. He wondered how many miles it was to Canada, but he had never been a “numbers” guy.

“Darius?” said a voice. The massive man whirled around, hurling a fist at the speed of sound. Luckily, he just missed the man behind him--his brother, Wendell. Titanio’s lantern jaw fell open. “Fuck--Wendell? What are you… how’d you get here? Who let you out?”

Wendell smiled, holding his hands up in a non-threatening stance. “Better question, big bro,” he said. “What would you do if you’d connected with that punch and you were talking to a headless corpse right now?”

Wendell approached, throwing his hands around the dense muscular abdomen of his giant brother, but Titanio didn’t return the affection. “Wendell, I’ve got about a million answers… what happened to Prima? How can you even survive out here? And how’d you get into U-Tower in the first place?”

“What, the alarm systems wouldn’t recognize your brother?” Wendell said, patting Titanio’s protruding pec shelf. “That would be just like you assholes to not put me on the guest list.”

“Wendell, what are you--”

“Shut up,” Wendell said, and suddenly Titanio’s mouth was gone, smooth, unbroken flesh where it used to be.

The big man’s eyes revealed his panic, his hands pawing at his transformed visage, grunting as if he were gagged.

Suddenly, Wendell’s body erupted with golden light. He hovered in the air.

“I absolutely hate listening to you talk, you overgrown idiot,” Wendell said.

Titanio’s body suddenly expanded, gaining a half-foot in height and nearly sixty pounds of muscle in a moment. He threw a blow with the force of a crashing meteor--but Wendell had vanished before it connected.

Titanio whirled around to see that his brother, broiling with crackling energy, was now behind him--and he was laughing! Furious, Titanio lunged forward but Wendell vanished again. Frustrated, Titanio stomped his foot so hard he left a crater in the roof.

“I’m sure you’re confused,” Wendell said, his voice echoing, “so let me explain: remember my father, the man who married your mother? Well, he wasn’t entirely honest about my biological mother’s origins. Turns out she was from another planet, and her alien genetics combined with dad’s human genes made a… potent mixture when I came of age.”

Titanio, frustrated, smashed both of his giant fists into the landing pad, leaving another massive crater. Windows on nearby buildings shattered from the sheer concussive force.

“And now I can do anything,” Wendell said as Titanio continued to flail about. “And what I want to do is show the world who my brothers really are. And since you’ve always been such a dickhead…”

As Wendell snapped his fingers, Titanio’s mouth reappeared. He gasped for breath, thankful for its return, but all of a sudden he started coughing. A viscous white fluid suddenly spurted from his mouth, dribbling down his titanic body.

“This change is going to take some time,” Wendell said as Titanio’s thick, dark curls retreated into his head. “I thought it would be an easier transition for you.”

“What are you--BLURG…” Hot white fluid belched forth again. The massive brute fell to his knees. “Oh god, it tastes like… like…”

“You know what it is,” Wendell boomed.

Titanio strained against the forces reshaping him, but try as he might he couldn’t keep his eyes open. His left eye shut first, then the right, each of them fusing with his face once they were closed.

Less than a minute later, Titanio’s shoulders heaved as his head, now a giant flaring mushroom of a cock, burped up cum all over his bare muscles.

“And since you don’t need TWO cocks,” Wendell said. He snapped his fingers again and Titanio’s codpiece crumbled to dust, scattering in the wind. Now he was as smooth down below as the action figures made of him. The muscular freak seemed overcome with calm as another volley of cum blew up and over him. He slowly rose to his feet and Wendell smiled.

“Good musclecock!” Wendell said, rubbing the underside of the cockhead, making the brute’s whole body shiver. “I bet no one in the world would be surprised that you can actually function quite well without a brain. And you’ll make an amazing pet, now. Don’t worry, you hideous beast. I’ll be back to rub your sensitive skin again later. If you behave, I might make your whole muscular body into one massive cock. Would you like that?”

More cum drooled out of the cockhead’s hole.

*

“Titanio?” Captain Supreme said once again into the comm-link. There must have been some sort of systems malfunction. “Blur? ANYONE?”

The Ultra-Men weren’t responding at all.

Captain Supreme adjusted his metallic blue helmet as he turned around from his pilot’s chair to the “precious cargo” he was transporting: Max Diabolos wore a tuxedo and an eye-patch (to cover up the hole left behind when Captain Supreme confiscated his laser eye); next to him, the filthy Rat King, dressed in rags, hissed and contorted his gnarled face. They were up to high for the Rat King to summon his vermin hordes, rendering him an otherwise powerless old man.

“Once I get you fiends behind bars where you belong,” Captain Supreme said, rising to his feet and dusting off his blue armored costume, “I can investigate whatever’s happening to the Ultra-Men. And if either of you two had anything to do with it…”

He sneered at his two shackled prisoners, safely contained behind force fields. Diabolos rolled his eyes. The Rat King hissed again.

“Engage Autopilot,” boomed a haunting voice that seemed to come from all around him. Captain Supreme whirled around, trying to find the source of the spectral sound.

“You can’t see me because I’m not here,” said the vaguely familiar voice. It sounded like… but it couldn’t be…

“WENDELL?” Captain Supreme suddenly blurted out. He checked his comm-link to find it unresponsive.

“In a sense, I’m everywhere. My power has grown so much!” said the voice. “And look at you, up to your superheroics as usual.”

“Wendell, are you okay? I heard that Prima--”

“As usual, you’re slow at adding up the obvious,” Wendell snapped. “But the short story is that I’ve got powers now, and the Ultra-Men are no more.”

“But Darius--James…”

“Both alive, but both very different from the way you remember them. And now it’s time for you to receive your gift--payback for abandoning me, for ignoring me, for letting me suffer in silence while you three went on to worldwide fame and celebrity, punching meteors out of the atmosphere and preventing extradimensional invasions.”

Captain Supreme couldn’t move a muscle. He could barely breathe. Some force held him in place. He glanced over at the dashboard indicators and saw that the U-Jet had flown past their destination. The two prisoners watched, fascinated by the suddenly panicking hero.

“I can do anything, brother,” Wendell said. “I could make you a stone statue, eternal, aware, but frozen in place. Maybe then you’d feel trapped the way I always did. Or I could make you a thousand years old. Your invulnerability would keep you alive, of course--Captain Supreme is unkillable! But imagine how that would feel…”

A bead of sweat traced its way down Captain Supreme’s bewildered face. The Rat King licked his lips. Max Diabolos rubbed his hands together, desperate to see what would happen next.

“Despite all that bluster, you’ve always been such a small man,” Wendell said. Max and the Rat King suddenly looked down to see that their shackles were gone, They stood, shocked but free.

“So I think it’s time for the world to see how small you are.”

Captain Supreme blinked as he was suddenly able to move again. He spun around, trying to figure out where he was--some warehouse? Had Wendell teleported him somewhere? Then he glanced up--and nearly tumbled over when he realized the building-sized construct he was staring at was the pilot’s seat.

He felt tremors in the ground as feet the size of buses stomped down behind him. He looked up to see the horrifying faces of Max Diabolos and the Rat King, as big as skyscrapers, free and looming down at him.

Captain Supreme tried to run, but the Rat King snatched him up in a gnarled hand, his long, filthy fingernails scratching against Captain Supreme’s armored costume.

“Don’t worry,” Wendell said, “I didn’t remove your superhuman powers. You’re still invulnerable, for all the good it will do you now.”

Then Wendell’s voice was gone. Captain Supreme struggled against the crushing fingers of the Rat King as Max punched in a new destination in the autopilot.

“Let’s put him in a microwave,” Max said gruffly.

“I want to give him to my pets to play,” hissed the Rat King. “Imagine having a thousand starving rats dragging you through the sewers, little hero!”

“I wanna swallow him,” Max finally said. “Have him take a nice little trip through my digestive system.”

“No, no, let’s dunk him in cement up to his neck and cover him with roaches!”

As Captain Supreme suddenly realized the horrifying future that lay ahead, he sadly knew that none of his superhuman brothers would be coming to save him. The Ultra-Men were no more.