He didn't arrive with a bang.
No flash of thunder across the sky, no warning ripple in the fabric of space. No firestorm to mark his entrance.
Instead, the world shifted—subtly—as if gravity took a breath. The clouds paused in their slow drift, and every digital clock in a three-thousand-mile radius skipped a beat at the same instant. Light shivered. Streetlamps flickered in cities that hadn't seen power outages in years.
And deep beneath the bones of Earth-Prime Nexus, where old truths slept in molten silence, something ancient stirred—and watched.
The man stood alone in the middle of an empty street in Jersey, where time itself had yet to realize it had been breached. He wore red—sleek, angular, the lightning bolt across his chest dulled with ash and old fire. Faint traces of energy bled off him in erratic pulses, distorting the air like heat mirages. He didn't speak. Didn't move. The wind swept broken glass around his boots while the buildings—abandoned and breathing mold—offered no shelter, only silence.
This was Wally West.
Or what remained of him.
He didn't belong to this Earth. Not this version. Not this patchwork universe stitched together by secret wars, celestial whims, and corporate compromise. Earth-Prime Nexus—home to everything, yet loyal to no one. A reality where Avengers shared skies with Mutants, Inhumans squabbled with AI regimes, and cosmic threats passed through like hurricanes no one could predict or prepare for. Order here was temporary. Power was negotiated. Morality bent like steel under pressure.
He had dropped into the center of it without asking.
From the moment his boots touched cracked pavement, Wally knew something was wrong. Not in the immediate sense—no gunfire echoing through alleyways, no smoke rising from the horizon—but in the weight of the place. The air here remembered too much. It didn't hum with anticipation like the cities he once knew; it brooded. The silence wasn't peaceful. It was patient. The kind that watched to see who you'd become.
He walked a street lined with empty storefronts and tilted lamp posts, his gaze tracing the aged scars carved deep into the city's concrete—battle damage, maybe. Or political failure. But something beneath it all whispered louder than the surface grime. It wasn't decay. It was resignation.
This wasn't just any version of Earth.
This was Earth-Prime Nexus.
A patchwork world unlike the others he'd known. A convergence point where all timelines had spilled into one another and stitched themselves into a single tapestry, too complex and too twisted to ever be unraveled again. Here, every hero existed. Every villain. Every ideology, every contradiction. This wasn't a universe with diverging paths.
This was the place where all of them crashed into each other.
And somehow, society still functioned.
But only barely.
He made a quick run around the globe, read some classified documents, listened to some important meetings and found out several things.
The governments still had names. Flags still flew. Presidents still shook hands and signed bills beneath marble domes and golden eagles. But Wally could see it immediately—the power behind those titles was performative. What remained of national leadership wasn't ruling anything anymore. It was managing—scheduling meetings, mediating PR scandals, making statements nobody listened to.
The ones in charge weren't presidents or monarchs.
They were employees.
The world had turned its governments into something resembling overburdened departments in a corporate machine too big to fail and too chaotic to steer. Politicians weren't decision-makers—they were HR reps. Regional managers. Tasked with filing damage control memos while celestial beings debated in the upper atmosphere and ancient gods wrote treaties in languages physics hadn't caught up with yet.
In some nations, Wally learned, the illusion of governance had been discarded altogether. Cold, efficient AI systems now sat in high offices—neural networks optimized for fairness, logic, and productivity. No ego. No greed. No ideology. Just code. Emotionless, calculating... and terrifyingly popular. People had surrendered control, not out of fear, but out of exhaustion. Decades—centuries—of corruption, coups, and catastrophes had worn them down to the point that even automation felt like hope.
In a world where sorcerers rewrote causality on a Tuesday and alien invaders strolled through Times Square like tourists, it was hard to argue that human leadership still had a role to play.
And so it didn't.
The true power had moved on.
Above the clumsy scaffolding of national flags and constitutional debates loomed entities and organizations whose existence Wally could feel without even looking. Institutions that had outgrown secrecy, no longer hidden behind acronyms or invisible jets. They weren't hidden anymore. They didn't need to be.
The Mutant Congress, run from the living island of Krakoa, operated like a fully independent empire—with its own borders, its own economy, its own damn resurrection protocol. The Hellfire Network blurred the line between legitimate business and supernatural aristocracy, its members managing trade routes, contracts, and underground magic markets like nobles from some shadow-ruled Renaissance. And there were older ones, stranger still—like the Celestial Archive, whose librarians documented cosmic events in living ink, or the Eidolon Pact, where representatives of Hell, Limbo, and other realms met to negotiate spiritual jurisdiction over dying souls.
Even Wakanda had changed. Once a secretive nation cloaked in isolationism, it had evolved into something else—something denser. No longer a country in the traditional sense, it now operated more like a planetary firewall. An anchor node in Earth's metaphysical architecture. Wally could feel its pulse even now, radiating across the subquantum fabric like the heartbeat of a sleeping god.
And these organizations—these forces—were the real powers of Earth-Prime Nexus.
They shaped economies. They settled wars. They decided which futures would be allowed to happen and which would be crushed before they began. Some were benevolent. Some weren't. But unlike the capes he remembered from back home, they weren't naive. They didn't pretend that standing beside a flag made you right.
Here, even the most righteous hero knew the truth.
If you supported a government that oppressed the people it claimed to protect, you weren't neutral.
You were complicit.
Wally didn't flinch at that realization.
He didn't even pause.
He understood it instantly—not from logic, but from instinct.
There was no moral debate. No deep philosophical struggle. Not anymore.
This world had seen too much to pretend that obedience was virtue. The lines were too blurred, the stakes too high, and the consequences too immediate.
And maybe, in another life, he would've taken a side. Picked a color. Signed a code of conduct.
But here?
He wasn't going to kneel to corrupt men in suits or emotionless machines in citadels.
He wasn't going to swear loyalty to any council, covenant, or kingdom.
Not unless he wanted to.
Because in Earth-Prime Nexus, everything was tangled. Power, morality, identity—all scrambled into something unrecognizable. And in that chaos, Wally found something pure:
Choice.
He can do whatever he wanted without a brooding bat telling him what he can or can't do.
---
He stood, bones cracking like thunder in a hollow drum.
Now, he need to do some choices, he looked into himself. Several questions came but no absolute answer formed in his mind.
Then, he started brainstorming about what made him, Wally West, special... The Speed Force.
Wally knew his connection to the Speed Force had always made him more than human. But now... now he saw the full shape of the truth he had danced around for too long.
He wasn't tapping into the Speed Force.
He was it.
Its beginning. Its end. Its present, past, and future woven into a single impossibility wearing red.
The realization didn't elevate him. It grounded him.
And for the first time in his existence, he felt a terrifying kind of liberty. Not freedom from duty. But freedom from expectation.
No more League. No more Justice. No more cosmic treadmill forcing him to run toward problems he didn't choose. He wasn't bound to save anyone anymore.
He would choose who mattered.
He would choose when to care.
And if he didn't?
Then no one could make him.
That thought seeded something deeper, more dangerous than rebellion.
It sparked ambition.
He turned his eyes skyward. Somewhere far beyond the clouds, he could already feel the presence of entities watching, curious—some cosmic, some divine. But they weren't the goal.
They were milestones.
He wasn't going to wander this universe blindly. He'd carve through it with purpose. He wasn't here to play along. He wasn't a guest. He was an apex force in a system that thought itself superior—and he intended to evolve beyond even that.
Inside his mind, calculations unfolded at speeds no supercomputer could imitate. He dissected the raw structures of power, rewriting every metaphysical law he had once accepted as truth. The concept of a singular power source became inadequate. He began drafting new Forces. Not found—created. Built from observation, logic, necessity.
If Speed was his domain, then what of Power—the raw, brute expression of physical might? Punches that shattered physics. Blows that ignored scale.
What of the Mind? Intelligence unshackled from time. The ability to learn faster than information could be hidden. To solve problems in quantum moments. To reshape perception, language, even consciousness itself.
And at the core of it all: Soul.
The unseen weight. The supernatural stat no one measured, but all relied on. Magic, chi, chakra, spirit.
The Speed Force had given him a lot of things.
But a lot of things wasn't enough anymore.
He wanted all of 'em.
Wally stood in the middle of an empty street, cracked pavement under his boots, the city around him stretching like an unfinished sketch. No sirens. No capes. Just wind and silence. His fingers sparked with residual speed force energy, but his mind—his mind was doing laps.
He stretched his shoulders, exhaled, then broke into a grin.
"Hohoho, now this is interesting…"
His voice echoed, soft, playful. Like a kid left alone in a candy store the size of a planet.
"I can do whatever. However. Whenever I want. Honestly? Maybe I always could. But back then, there were always chains. Commands. Calls from Bruce. Pep talks from Clark. Missions. Schedules. Deadlines. So many shoulds hanging around my neck."
He paced in a slow circle, toe nudging a loose stone, eyes scanning the fractured skyline.
"But now? Heh. This is nuts."
He stopped and looked up—no stars yet, just a smoggy orange haze hiding the edges of the sky. A twisted canvas of a world that didn't even pretend to play fair.
"This world is kinda perfect, in a 'so broken it wrapped back around to functional' kind of way. Or not. Depends. Lol."
He chuckled at himself. Literally said "lol."
"I mean, speaking of perfect… I kinda miss the League. I even miss Bruce's twenty-four-seven brooding. Maybe, just maybe, the guy could've toned down the nagging now and then. 'Wally, protocol. Wally, secure the perimeter. Wally, stop eating during briefings.'" He mimicked Bruce's gravel voice and grinned. "Good times."
He rubbed the back of his neck, and for a half-second, the smile dropped.
"I'll miss them. All of 'em. Really."
Then the switch flipped. Mind moved on.
"Anyway! Meh. I'll go back eventually. Maybe. Probably. Okay, I don't even know if I can. It's not like this place is parallel, or divergent, or even… what's the word? Uh… em, em, em…"
He snapped his fingers rapidly, each snap displacing a puff of air.
"Nope. Gone. Brain fumbled. Vocabulary's not exactly my strong suit. YET."
He jabbed a thumb toward his temple and winked at no one.
"But after I get the Mind Force? Oh baby, I'll be the walking Oxford. Words per second? Infinite."
He crouched, dragging a fingertip across the ground like he was sketching theoretical diagrams in the dirt.
"These Forces… Speed, sure, that one's already baked in. But Power? Mind? Soul? I can think of a dozen metaphysical connection points, maybe even cross-dimensional keystones, but the real question is—how the hell do I house these things?
Like... Speed Force, I get. Kind of. It's in me, through me, is me? Who knows anymore."
He waved a hand like brushing aside the mystery. Didn't matter now.
"But how do I put the rest in the same vessel without popping like a cosmic soda can?"
A few sparks danced across his shoulders, reacting to his thoughts.
"Wait—what if I don't even need to contain them? What if I'm supposed to become them? Like... not storage. Embodiment. Huh..."
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, blinked five times in a blink, then snapped back into ramble-mode.
"Also, side note—why does nobody talk about Defense Force? Like, yeah, yeah, speedster, light bones, all that jazz, but if I could make myself untouchable? Not like fast-dodge untouchable. I mean like nope-you-don't-get-to-hurt-me untouchable? That's cracked. That's broken. That's…"
He paused, made a face.
"...really, really far from where I am now. Kinda counter to the whole flash-zoom-boom aesthetic. But still. Conceptually? Delicious."
He flicked his fingers, ticking off ideas.
"Life Force? Nah, too broad. But Healing Force? Yes. Close. Regeneration, restoration, fixing other people, too. Not as flashy, but way more useful long-term. Could even stitch myself back together after punching a dimension in the face."
He laughed, shaking his head.
"God, I love thinking fast. It's like arguing with a hundred versions of yourself at once, but you're all equally annoying and equally brilliant."
Then he stopped.
Straightened.
Focused.
"So... yeah."
His voice dropped, softer now. Calmer.
"Let's meet some people. Start figuring out how to build the rest."
He grinned again—slower this time. A little crooked. A little hungry.
"Time to start running toward everything I don't understand yet."
And then he was gone.
No lightning trail.
No boom.
Just silence stretching in every direction, waiting for the consequences to catch up.
"Okay maybe an outfit change, this red costume get boring really fast! ? HAHHAHA!"