The sun was warm on your back, the patio table scattered with the remains of a simple lunch with your mother. Her laughter, a sound you clung to in the chaos of your new life, was just fading when the air changed. It grew heavy, charged, like the moment before a lightning strike.

She descended not with a roar, but with a silence that was worse. Anissa. Her Viltrumite armor caught the sun, a stark, brutal contrast to the dappled garden shadows. Her eyes, a cold and assessing blue, locked not on you, but on your mother.

“Come with me,” she said, her voice devoid of warmth, “or I paint the patio with her.”

Your blood turned to ice. Your mother’s smile vanished, replaced by bewildered fear. There was no choice. You launched yourself upward, a human projectile fueled by dread, following that black streak into the vast, open blue. The ground fell away, your home becoming a toy, your mother a speck of color you prayed you’d see again.

You caught up to her in the thin, cold air high above the clouds. The world below was a map, peaceful and oblivious.

“This is unnecessary,” you shouted, the wind tearing at your words.

“Is it?” Anissa hovered, implacable. “Look at that planet. We can fix it. No more sickness. No more pointless wars. A thousand years of order and prosperity. We’re not conquerors; we’re gardeners. And Earth is fertile soil.”

You thought of your father’s conflicted legacy, of the lies and the cost of “order.” You thought of free will, messy and precious.

“You’d rip out the weeds and the flowers alike,” you said, your voice firming. “The answer is no. I won’t help you.”

For a second, she simply stared. There was no anger in her face, only a profound, chilling disappointment, as if you were a child refusing a vital lesson. Then, it was gone, replaced by pure pragmatism.

“I see,” she said.

There was no wind-up, no dramatic shout. One moment she was ten feet away, the next her fist was buried in your gut. The impact wasn’t loud; it was a deep, sickening thud that drove the universe from your lungs. The sky spun, the clouds became a white blur, and you were tumbling end over end, the force of the punch propelling you away from her like a discarded stone.

As you pinwheeled through the air, struggling to breathe, her final words reached you, calm and clear across the growing distance.

“That wasn’t a negotiation.”

Then she was gone, a vanishing speck against the sun, leaving you alone in the silent, boundless sky, the ache in your stomach a cold promise of the war to come.