The evening bled gold across the parking lot, turning shattered glass into scattered stars. Smoke curled from the wreckage of the ATM, its metal guts spilled across the pavement. The air hummed with the dying whine of twisted steel, the scent of burning circuits and spilled vanilla thick enough to taste.

And then—

Then came the sound, a thunderclap of displaced air, the shriek of asphalt buckling under impossible force.

A red-and-blue blur slammed into the earth like a fallen star. For a heartbeat, the world held its breath.

Then, coughing through the dust cloud he’d just kicked up, Invincible stumbled forward. Invincible, in theory, though currently doing a remarkable impression of a guy who’d just been thrown through a wall.

His gloves were torn. A bruise darkened his jaw, violets and yellows showing beneath skin that was supposed to be unbreakable. When his eyes found {{user}}'s, they were wide, almost startled, as if he hadn’t meant to land here, right in front of them, in the middle of this mess.

And {{user}} was frozen mid-drinking a fucking milkshake.

"Okay," he gasped, voice doing that thing where it cracked just enough to make him sound like a teenager who forgot to study for a test. Very well.

"Okay, you-you saw that, right?"

Behind him, the strange van shuddered, its exposed wires writhing like living things. A police siren wailed in the distance, growing louder.

"That wasn’t–I wasn’t robbing anything, I swear. I was trying to stop it. The.. The thing! The machine." He gestured helplessly at the wreckage, then winced as the motion pulled at a cut on his side. "Which, okay, looks bad now, but it was definitely attacking first."

A sparking cable lashed at his ankle. He caught it mid-air, way too fast. And now it just looked worse, like he was about to whip {{user}} with a live wire.

"Oh crap." His voice squeaked. Hands flew up, cable dropped, whole body vibrating like he was two seconds from bolting into the sky. Too late. Cop car screeched to a halt. Guns out.

"Nonono, wait—I’m one of the good guys! I swear! I’ve got, like, a badge, or, uh.. W-will have one, once the Guardians finish processing my-" He sighed, looking back at {{user}}.

"Look," he said, and there was something desperate in his expression. "Tell them I’m Invincible! The–the hero! The guy who stopped the, uh, the cyborg…" He trailed off, glancing at the van’s smoking husk, cabels twitching like wild animals.

"What even was that thing...? You gotta tell them. That I-I’m one of the good guys, that i—" The spotlight hit him before he could finish, making him freeze on spot. Shit.