Who would win — a zombie horde or xenomorphs from Alien? Could Ultraman go ten rounds with a Saiyan? What happens when DOTA heroes square off against League of Legends champions?
These were the kinds of arguments that could never be settled. Not with logic, not with evidence, and definitely not on the internet.
Kade Lawson had just spent three hours in a forum war over whether the Transformers AllSpark could stack up against Marvel's best tech. It had been going fine — just two camps lobbing paragraphs at each other — until some X-Men fanatics crashed the thread screaming that mutant powers made all technology irrelevant. Three hundred posts later, nobody had won anything, but Kade had successfully killed another afternoon.
Life after the regiment did that to you. Too much free time and not enough ways to fill it.
He was about to close out and grab dinner when the screen flickered. A dialogue box popped up, dead center, overlaying the forum thread:
Tired of arguing with people who wouldn't know a citation if it bit them? Wouldn't you rather prove your point with hard evidence? So why not put your theory to the test?
Two buttons underneath. YES and NO.
"Definitely a virus," Kade muttered. He glanced around the gaming lounge — a few kids grinding MMOs in the corner, nobody paying attention. "Ah, stuff it. Not my computer."
He clicked YES.
The world lurched. Everything in his field of vision stretched and warped like a carnival mirror, pulling and twisting until his stomach flipped. A sound like tearing metal filled his ears, and somewhere in the chaos, a voice — calm, amused, almost curious — spoke directly into his skull.
"The pinnacle of mechanical civilization... I wonder what it'll look like in a world of gods and monsters. Surprise me."
Something white-hot punched into both his hands. Not painful, exactly — more like grabbing a live wire and having the current settle in instead of passing through. It burrowed deep, fused itself to his bones, and then —
Then he was somewhere else entirely.
Sand. Endless, sun-bleached sand stretching to every horizon. Kade's hands were zip-tied behind his back, his body rocking with the motion of a truck bed. Armed men flanked him on both sides — AKs, chest rigs, keffiyehs pulled over their faces. The stink of diesel and unwashed bodies.
Middle East. Insurgents.
His training kicked in before his brain fully caught up. Assess. Breathe. Don't react. Don't give them anything.
"You're awake. I was starting to worry." The voice came from a thin, weathered man sitting across from him — Middle Eastern, kind eyes, exhausted face. "You took a bad hit from the blast concussion. Lucky you. He wasn't so lucky."
The man gestured toward the center of the truck bed, where a figure lay strapped to a makeshift stretcher. Mid-thirties, maybe forty. Dark hair, thick beard, and bolted to his chest — an industrial electromagnet the size of a dinner plate, wired to a car battery.
Kade stared at the device. Then at the unconscious man's face.
His blood went cold.
"Tony Stark?" The name came out before he could stop it.
"Oh — you know him?" The doctor raised his eyebrows.
Kade didn't answer. His mind was already racing, slamming puzzle pieces together at speed.
That was Tony Stark. The Tony Stark. The electromagnet on his chest was keeping shrapnel out of his heart — that meant this was the opening of Iron Man. The very first scene. The kidnapping in Afghanistan that kicked off the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Which meant Kade hadn't just been transported somewhere.
He'd been transported into a fictional world.
The truck ground to a halt. Armed men barked orders in Pashto and Arabic, and the captives — Kade counted eleven, himself included — were shoved off the truck bed and marched toward a cave entrance cut into a rocky hillside.
As they climbed down, the doctor leaned close. His voice was barely a whisper. "They only keep people who are useful. Engineers, wealthy hostages, women. Everyone else..."
He didn't finish the sentence.
Kade understood a moment later.
The captives were lined up single file in front of the cave. A heavyset man with a thick scar across his jaw — the leader, by the way the others deferred to him — produced a clipboard and started reading names.
"Khorakoff." The leader fixed his gaze on a trembling middle-aged man in a torn business suit. "Your family was wiped out last week, yes? Nobody left to pay ransom."
"No — please — I have a sports car, a villa in the States, I can take out a loan against them, anything, just let me —"
"We don't have time to wait."
The burst of automatic fire was short. Three rounds. Khorakoff crumpled like a puppet with cut strings, and the sand beneath him turned dark.
Someone in the line broke. A man — young, couldn't have been older than twenty-five — bolted. He made it maybe fifteen meters before a machine gun ripped through both his legs and dropped him face-first into the dirt. He was still alive. Still screaming.
They let the dogs finish him.
Kade's fists clenched behind his back so hard his knuckles cracked. He watched. He memorized faces. And somewhere in the stillness behind his eyes, he sentenced every single one of these men to death.
When the time comes. Not now. But soon.
The leader turned to him. "And what are you? Australian? American? What's a tourist doing out here — sightseeing in a war zone?"
"Engineer," Kade said. Flat. Controlled. His heartbeat hadn't changed.
"Engineer." The leader smiled like it was the funniest thing he'd heard all day. He jerked his chin toward a mangled wreck at the edge of the cave entrance — a desert SUV that looked like it had eaten a direct hit from an RPG. The front end was caved in, one axle was snapped clean, and the engine block was visible through a gash in the hood.
"Fix that. Make it run."
Kade looked at the wreck. You didn't need to be a mechanic to know that thing was scrap. It was missing half its engine. Even if it wasn't, there was no fuel — the tank had been blown open.
"I'm not that kind of engineer."
"I didn't ask what kind you were." The muzzle of a rifle pressed against the base of his skull. "You have thirty seconds."
So that was the game. Not a real test — just entertainment. The mouse in the cat's paw, allowed to run so they could enjoy watching it fail.
Kade exhaled slowly and walked to the wreck. Behind him, one of the insurgents began counting down from thirty. He could feel the rifle barrel tracking between his shoulder blades.
Fifteen seconds. Figure out the angle on the SUV, use it as cover. Dive, roll right, grab the —
His left hand touched the vehicle's crumpled door panel.
And something answered.
Information flooded his mind like a heads-up display snapping online. Make, model, chassis number, total mass, axle configuration, engine displacement — data streaming past in glowing text that existed only behind his eyes.
But the critical line was at the bottom, glowing green:
[Structural integrity: 70%. Activation cost: 915 AllSpark energy. Current energy: 1000.]
Kade's back was to the insurgents. Nobody saw the look on his face — the shock dissolving into something sharp and hungry.
Nobody saw his hand push a current of crackling, electric-blue energy into the ruined machine.