Fuxer 7 – The Rift
"What is this place?" Todd asked. He had lost his mask, just like Xander. And he smelled a little singed.
"I think this is the phantom zone." Xander let the sidekick go and they floated next to each other. He was sweating from the battle and the magenta fog was a bit moist. He pushed his singlet down to his hips, letting droplets run through his abs separation.
He was lost in thought for a second. "Zeal was trapped here in issue #112. Phantomicum tried to assassinate the Fortuna ambassador aboard the diplomatic vessel from Fortuna. Zeal saved him, naturally."
"Right. How did he leave the phantom zone?"
"Oh, the whole ship was trapped here so they reconfigured the warp drive."
"Right..." Todd said.
Xander didn't want to say it but he had no idea what to do.
If he could see... Of Course! His 4D vision penetrated the fog just fine. "I see multiple huge crystals floating around us. Maybe if we find a pure enough one we can use it like Torrent-Man, when the Grand Cosmicus brought him to the phantom zone to test him."
He wanted to sound confident but he had no idea how to replicate Torrent-Man's feat from issue #302.
"Wait, there's someone."
Todd looked in the direction even though he had no chance to see through the misty pink.
Xander grabbed his teammate and flew toward the figure.
"Omen! Hey, Oliver."
"Ah, Xander," Oliver said. He had ditched the helmet, too, and wiped sweat from his brow. "I'm in telepathic contact with the others but we're not sure where everyone is in relation to each other."
Filipe was easy to spot, sitting on a house sized crystal. His singlet's taint had torn apart so he had pushed it down to wear it like a skirt. His little dick print was clearly visible.
Will and Akio had found each other and Oliver could use his mind powers to triangulate their position. They both had lost most of their uniforms, torso's bare. Akio's boots were gone.
This left only Zeal. He didn't try to find them. They were supposed to come to him.
The captain of the Manly League was already working on their escape.
"Of course," Xander said as he saw what Zeal doing. "Heat vision! He's burning out the impurities from those crystals."
"How does that help?" Todd asked.
"Warp drive uses Hypercrystal fusion," Akio said. "He's building a tiny warp drive."
"What?" Todd said. "But that's too high-tech for humans."
Akio shook his head. "Nuclear power is also highly sophisticated but even a monkey can poor water on a uranium deposit."
Will laughed. "Are you that water monkey, Aqua Boi?"
Their captain answered with a huff.
"It's ready," Zeal said, monotone.
"I'll guide us," Oliver said. "But I'm not confident about seeing the future here in the phantom zone. It's only somewhat connected to our reality."
"I'll create the fissure that way," Zeal said and pointed. The purified crystals – both the size of a car – moved apart.
"What's he doing?" Todd whispered.
Xander grabbed the sidekick who lacked flying powers. "He'll smash them together to make a dimensional fissure."
"Just like that?"
"Zeal's telekinesis is extremely precise. He can ionize a single atom, like in issue #198."
"Fanboy," Todd said with a grin. "Why don't you go suck his fat, sweaty hero cock?"
Xander wanted to drop the twink and leave him in the fog. "Language," he said, cold.
The crystals shattered with a roar and the fog quivered as waves traveled from the fissure where the crystals had met.
"Now," Oliver said and headed into the glowing rift.
The fog rushed past Xander as he dragged Todd into the portal and... Cold air hit them.
They came out over a mountain range.
Zeal was the last to escape, just as the portal closed.
Within minutes, Ranger responded to their call and brought them home.
The worst part of the day was that he had nobody with gush over Zeal with.
No, the worst part was that he hadn't even gotten to talk to Zeal or gotten a single nod from him.
Xander sat in the lounge, surrounded by celebrating teammates, and sulked.
He'd had this elaborate fantasy of Zeal recognizing his potential and becoming his mentor and friend. He'd also had a fantasy about wrestle-fucking Zeal into submission but that was beside the point.
Today sucked. But he had to act satisfied since they had beaten a dark angel and survived a hostile dimension. Well, really Zeal had done it all for them and they were being dumb by not worshiping the ground he walked on – or flew over.
Xander retreated to his room to have a calming wank.
In the gym showers, Xander's more-than-soda-can-thick 8 incher was still the subject of stares when he showered facing the other boys with his eyes `closed', observing their envious expressions with 4D vision.
He stayed under dicksplosion threshold most of the time but showed off in the showers. The other bois dropped occasional comments about how fucking him would be like getting fisted and feigned pity for his future girlfriend.
Aside from the last part, he loved the comments that were dripping with hidden envy.
"Yo Xander," Todd said. "Wanna join us this weekend? We're going clubbing again."
"Come on," Will added. "You've never been. You need to check it out."
Xander liked Will a lot, but he didn't like sharing the attention in the shower. At least the tall Korean muscle god's dick paled in comparison.
"I guess I should, huh?" Xander said. "Maybe next month. I'm still figuring out my secret identity. But I'm not muscling down much. I want my civilian looks to match the real me. And it's not like you," he opened his eyes to look at Will, "are getting smaller before you go out."
Will chuckled. "But I'm also not swinging a murder weapon between my legs."
"Hehe, yeah," Todd said. "Any bitch who sees that is gonna run, bro. The hoes don't want a forearm up their pussies. What are you overcompensating for, huh?"
That little bastard was entirely too confident around him, Xander decided.
"Can't help it," Xander said and swung his hips to jiggle the mega-dick, "it just turns out like that."
Just like you can't help having a twink ass screaming to get fucked, Xander thought to himself.
The alarm almost made Xander fall out of bed. Why couldn't crises happen at reasonable times?
He slipped into his singlet and out the door. Notorious morning person Aqua was already waiting by the elevator.
"What is it?" 4X asked.
"A rift to another world has opened near the Bering strait. Hero-U is closing it. We're backup in case anything hostile comes through.
One augmented Todd-teleport later, the Boi Wing was racing across ocean.
"What's the situation, Charlie?" Aqua asked the screen.
The man on screen wore the white and gold Hero-U costume without the mask. He had a pale face and a lithe body with developed pecs. 4X wished his vision worked through screens.
"We now think it's a tear in time. A parallel timeline must have suffered a catastrophe and it broke through to us."
"What can we do?"
"Just stand by."
4X recognized the voice, now that he thought about it. This Charlie was Cheetah, the flying brick speedster, Captain of Hero-U.
They approached the barren, rocky island and disembarked flying. Half the island was covered in a shimmering rift. Sometimes that part of land was differently lit as the time of day didn't match up between timelines, sometimes it didn't even exist for a few seconds.
Five guys from Hero-U were using equipment on the ground. Six women in dark purple bodysuits set up nearby, overseen by a flying one with a cape – the Noble Nymphs.
"It's bad," Charlie aka Cheetah said, levitating closer to them. "We measured at least six timelines overlapping. From about 40 years in the past to 20 years ahead."
"Can you close it?" Aqua asked.
"We're trying but there isn't a team of heroes in every timeline so we can't tackle it from all `sides' as it were."
"Watch out!" shouted a Hero-U sidekick on the ground.
The rift wobbled and consumed more of the island. The Noble Nymphs retreated from the fracture.
Cheetah glanced at his wrist watch. "Chrono-radiation is over 300 Ticks. 400 now. 5- Oh god."
"It's gonna blow," a sidekick down below shouted.
4X felt helpless. He used his vision on the portal but only got vague glimpses of men in costumes standing or floating in various states of panic in alternate timelines.
"This..." Cheetah said. "This is the end for earth. We... Maybe this can be reversed. Frank, we need Omnio's last known position in the galaxy. Erasing the past is our only option. Spaceoid, get us out."
A sidekick down below created a doorway in the air. 4X recognized the power. Spaceoid could open a portal to different places in the solar system.
Where they abandoning the planet? What if Omnio didn't help? The god-like being refused to interfere in matters as small as a single world.
"We're giving up?" Aqua asked, breathless.
Cheetah spoke into his communicator. "League HQ, you need to leave orbit, do you copy? Earth is lost. The tear is..."
"Wait!" 4X shouted, louder than he had even planned to. "Someone's jumped in."
His 4D vision cleared the image. Someone had flown into the rift, withstanding the temporal sheer of six intersecting dimensions.
Despite the situation, 4X' dick twitched at the sight of a young muscle god. Soot was washing off the tan skin as sweat ran down the bulging arms and strongly separated pecs, down the thick brickhouse midriff and into the tattered remains of a white uniform - used as a loincloth - or past it down deeply separated leg muscles.
This guy had the proportions of Zeal, with a bit more of a v-taper, lower body fat and much younger skin.
His face was contorted from exertion but he had steel blue eyes and pitch black hair that stuck to his head in dirty strands.
"He's... closing it," Cheetah said, incredulous.
The immensely powerful hero hovered in the middle of the rift and pulled telekinetically at the fabric of time itself.
The rift closed a tiny bit.
"Help him," Cheetah ordered and the forces on the ground aimed ray guns into the rift. "Maybe that's enough."
The rift trembled as the rays hit it and snapped shut violently. Rocks went flying as the temporal forces tore chunks out of the little island.
A body dropped to the ground. The mostly naked muscle god had exited the tear into this timeline.
He rose with a groan.
"Keep your distance," Cheetah said to the others as he approached the guy.
4X zoomed in with his vision.
"Where..." the unknown hero said. "Did it work?"
"You did it," Cheetah said. "You closed the rift and saved six timelines. I'm afraid we have no way of bringing you back to yours."
"It was doomed," said the guy, sitting up. He looked even younger now, in the light of their stable timeline. "We... we fought Chronofax with all we had. We couldn't... hold him off. This was our last hope."
"Well... uh," Cheetah said. "You're alive. And we dealt with Chronofax in our timeline with aid from Nexus Prime. So you're from an alternate past."
"I guess so," the guy said and levitated to face the A-listers. He wiped sweat off his handsome but pained face. "Your uniforms and equipment look decades ahead."
Akio ushered his bois to the plane. The crisis was over. Hero-U could deal with the time refugee.
Cheetah asked what year it had been in the refugee's timeline, introduced Hero-U which hadn't existed yet back then and finally asked, "Who are you, exactly?"
"I'm Zack. I'm 19. I was with the Brotherhood of Initiates. Is that still a thing?"
"Yes, there they are," Cheetah said.
4X waved at the muscle god as he flew backward to the Boi Wing. Maybe the beautiful colossus was going to join them soon.
They were almost out of hearing range.
"What is your hero name?" Cheetah asked.
"Oh, I hadn't picked one yet."
"Which one did you consider?"
"Zeal."
What? Xander felt his head spinning all the way back to Headquarters.
Chapter 8: Zack