The following morning, the usual hubbub of the Midtown Tech hallways cut off sharply as the main doors swung open. An incredulous, heavy silence rippled from locker to locker. Valerius Aurelian had just walked in, but he was no longer the boy from the day before. Those who had crossed paths with him the previous week remembered a teenager with an athletic, upright build, exuding the discipline of a young soldier. Today, he stepped forward like a living physical anomaly. In a single night, Valerius had crossed the two-meter mark, towering head and shoulders over nearly every student and teacher. His silhouette had broadened spectacularly, his shoulders rounding into blocks of massive muscle that recalled the terrifying geometric perfection of ancient Greek statues.
His civilian clothes, already modest, hung by a thread. The seams of his black canvas jacket threatened to burst at the slightest movement, strained to the absolute limit by a back that had become abnormally wide. His sleeves, now far too short, stopped mid-forearm, revealing thick wrists and tendons of steel. He walked with a heavy, martial stride, each impact of his boots on the linoleum seeming to carry the weight of invisible armor.
"Is this a joke...?" whispered a junior, flattening himself against his locker to let him pass. "Dude, is that Aurelian? What the hell did he do? Did he gain twenty pounds of muscle and eight inches in twelve hours?"
Whispers flew, charged with stupefaction and a hint of primal fear. A change so radical was not a growth spurt, nor even the result of the most aggressive black-market steroids. It was a metamorphosis. Valerius's face, even more angular and pale than the day before, looked as if it were carved from flint. His liquid-gold eyes stared down the hallway with sovereign detachment. There was no residue of teenage humanity left in his gaze; he moved through the high schoolers the way an alpha predator cuts through a shade of ghosts.
At the end of the hallway, near the water fountain, the group of Mutants had frozen. Jean Grey stopped mid-sentence, her green eyes widened in total shock. She instinctively projected her telepathic senses to try and understand what had just happened to Valerius, but her mind slammed once more into that same absolute, airtight, and icy wall of graphite. Nothing. Not a single thought, no growing pains, not a whisper. Yet, visually, the boy she loved had just drifted even further from humanity.
Scott Summers, for his part, felt a wave of cold sweat break down the back of his neck. His jaw clenched behind his ruby-quartz lenses. His paranoia had just received a resounding validation. A normal human, huh? he thought with a fury laced with dread. No one changed like this without the intervention of a X-Gene or a secret military project.
But the most violent reaction came from Hank McCoy. The young scientist from the Mansion, whose latent mutation sharpened his senses to a near-animal degree, flinched violently. His ears, capable of filtering the faintest frequencies, picked up an abnormal noise amidst the roar of the crowd. He closed his eyes, focusing entirely on the approaching colossus. At first, Hank thought it was interference. Then, as Valerius passed within three meters of their group without so much as granting them a glance, the auditory diagnosis came through, stark and terrifying. Beneath the giant's expanded rib cage, it was not the steady rhythm of a human heart echoing. It was a mechanical, heavy, offset rumble. A binary heartbeat.
Boom-boom... Thump-thump... Boom-boom... Thump-thump...
Two hearts. Two muscular pumps of phenomenal power operating in perfect synchronization, propelling enriched blood through a completely remodeled arterial network. The sound was so dense, so heavy, that Hank felt as though he were listening to the internal engine of a construction vehicle. Valerius continued on his way, turning the corner toward his classroom, leaving the X-Men in a state of complete paralysis.
"Hank?" Rogue asked, noticing the sudden paleness of her friend. "What's wrong? You look like you've seen a ghost."
Hank reopened his eyes, his hands trembling slightly as he readjusted his glasses. He glanced around to ensure no human was listening, then leaned toward Scott and Jean, his voice reduced to an urgent whisper.
"He's not a mutant, Scott. And he is definitively no longer human."
"What are you talking about, Hank?" Scott grew impatient, his hand moving to his glasses.
"I heard it..." Hank murmured, his eyes shining with complete scientific incomprehension. "When he walked past us. His internal physiology has been rewritten. This guy... this guy has two hearts, Scott. Two distinct hearts beating in his chest with the force of a hydraulic piston. It is anatomically impossible for our species."
Jean placed a hand over her mouth, her gaze turning toward the empty hallway where Valerius's colossal silhouette had just vanished. This revelation obsessed her for the rest of the day, turning the hours of class into a blurred, endless drag.
The final bell rang like a deliverance for most students, but for Jean, it was the start of a silent hunt. Taking advantage of the flood of teenagers rushing toward the exit, she tailed Valerius's massive figure. He wasn't heading toward the buses, but toward the old, condemned stairwell that led to the disused glass roofs of Midtown Tech. A place where no one ever came.
When she pushed open the heavy metal door, the cool afternoon wind whipped her face. Valerius was there, standing before the void, his hands resting on the wrought-iron railing. From behind, his build was almost frightening. His shoulders, abnormally broad, drew a line of absolute straightness beneath his jacket, which was stretched to the tearing point. As she stepped closer, Jean felt that incredible sensation of peace wash over her again: within three meters of him, the city's mental cacophony instantly died out. Her mind found a white calm, a sanctuary. But this time, telepathic peace was no longer enough to soothe her heart. She herself had to guard the secret of her mutant nature, but the urgency of the situation shattered her barriers.
"Val..." she murmured, her voice trembling slightly.
The giant did not startle. He slowly turned his head, revealing his marble profile and liquid-gold eyes. At this distance, Jean had to look way up to lock her gaze with his. Eight inches taller in a single night. It was absurd. It was terrifying.
"You shouldn't be here, Jean," he replied. His voice had changed too; it was lower, deeper, resonating with a dull vibration that almost made the young girl's chest vibrate in response.
"Look at yourself, Valerius!" she burst out, taking another step forward, braving the distance he always maintained. "Look at what you've become in twelve hours! Hank heard you this morning... he says your chest echoes weirdly, like your anatomy doesn't make sense anymore. What is happening to you? Are you the result of a secret government project? Some kind of anomaly? Tell me the truth, please. I can't take this wall between us anymore."
Valerius detached his hands from the railing and turned fully toward her. Facing her, he looked like an ancient deity sculpted for war, massive and implacable. To him, Jean was just an ordinary high school girl, a fragile human he was duty-bound to protect from his own reality. He knew nothing of the X-Gene or the X-Mansion; he saw in her only the candor of mortal youth.
"I am no one's project, Jean," he answered in a calm, almost solemn tone. "What you see... is the awakening of a lineage. A biological and historical responsibility that has activated within me. My body is changing to adapt to the weight of what I must accomplish. That is all you need to know."
"That's all?" Jean felt tears welling up in her eyes, a mixture of frustration and a dull ache. She stepped even closer, placing a trembling hand on his arm. Her fingers met muscle as hard as rock, a physical density that had nothing civilian left about it. "You lock yourself in silence. You push everyone away, you push me away... Why do you try so hard to be distant from others? From me?"
Valerius placed his golden gaze on Jean's hand gripping his arm. He felt the warmth of her fingers, a deeply human sensation, but his second heart beat a heavy, steady rhythm in his chest, reminding him of his nascent post-human nature.
"I distance myself because the very nature of my existence forbids me from binding myself to you, or to anyone here," he replied softly, yet with icy firmness. "The biology awakening in my veins condemns me to absolute solitude, Jean. I will never know the rest of time. When the decades pass, when your hair turns white and your friends fade away one by one, I will still be here, unchanged, condemned to walk through the centuries without gaining a single wrinkle. Binding yourself to me means anchoring yourself to a specter that will watch you grow old and die."
Jean caught her breath, her heart broken by this revelation of his nascent immortality. She wanted to speak, but Valerius cut her off, his voice tinged with an even deeper bitterness.
"And that is not the heaviest part, Jean. My lineage ends with me. This body is being rewritten for absolute war. I am sterile. I will never see my own children born, I will never be able to offer a family, a normal life, or a future to a woman. My existence is carved in steel, blood, and duty. To love you, or to let you love me, would be to waste your mortal life on a man who is nothing more than a weapon."
"And what if I don't care about any of that?" Jean blurted out, tears finally spilling down her cheeks. She planted her green eyes into his, abandoning all pride. "Do you think I don't see how you look at me? I don't care about your future or your body, Val. I'm in love with you. With who you are. With that boy I met at the beginning of the year."
At those words, a veil of infinite sadness passed through Valerius's golden eyes. Jean noticed it immediately and gripped the fabric of his jacket tighter.
"That's what I'm talking about..." she whispered, her voice broken. "That look, Val. Why do you have that look that's so dark, so devoid of any joy of life? At the beginning of the year, you knew how to smile. You liked to laugh with me, you were joyful, almost lighthearted despite your solitude. Today, it feels like you're mourning the entire world on your shoulders. What put out that light inside you?"
Valerius let a long silence stretch out, the Queens wind fluttering their hair. He thought back to the raw data that had poured into his mind at 100%. He thought back to the cataclysmic threats the System had shown him.
"The boy from the beginning of the year was a blissfully ignorant fool, Jean," he finally replied, his voice nothing more than a dull rumble imbued with a terrible maturity. "He believed the sky was empty and that humanity was safe. But I have opened my eyes. Beyond the atmosphere of this planet, there are bellicose alien civilizations, ruthless Xenos just waiting for a sign of weakness to enslave or exterminer us. And worse still... there are dimensions of pure madness, an ocean of psychic horrors called the Warp, ready to consume everything."
He took a step toward her, his towering stature completely blocking out the glow of the setting sun, plunging Jean into his shadow.
"But do you know what took away my smile, Jean? It is the worst of truths. In the future from which I draw my knowledge, humanity had a protector. A being of divine light, an Emperor capable of guiding the species and preserving it from shipwreck. But here... He does not exist. The Throne is empty. There is no Emperor to save us from the monsters. There is no beacon in the night. Humanity is utterly, desperately alone in the face of extinction."
He gently placed his massive hand over Jean's, softly breaking her grip on his arm. His hand almost completely enveloped hers, a grasp of steel wrapped in a strange restraint.
"If I do not build an Empire, if I do not become the cruel and implacable rampart this Earth needs, no one will. Joy is a luxury I can no longer afford. Do not waste your heart on a sentinel condemned to eternal war."
He took a step back, breaking physical contact. Without another word, Valerius turned on his heel, his tall stature silhouetted against the New York sky. He crossed through the stairwell door, while his mind already displayed 6% assimilation of the Space Marine model, leaving him to descend the steps to face his destiny, deaf to the young girl's sobs.
Utterly distraught, Jean eventually followed in his footsteps. As she descended the emergency stairs, her steps were uncertain, almost faltering. The tears she had held back in front of Valerius now flowed freely down her cheeks, blurring her vision. Her hands still trembled from contact with that muscle of steel, so cold, so distant. In her head, the white silence that surrounded her near him had shattered, replaced by the brutal and painful return of the telepathic hum of the last students leaving the high school.
Scott Summers and Hank McCoy were waiting for her below, concealed in the shadow of the side alley leading to the parking lot. The moment he saw Jean emerge, her face flushed and her shoulders shaking with sobs, Scott took a sharp step forward, his hands instantly clenching into angry fists.
"Jean!" he exclaimed, his voice loaded with a protective worry that bordered on fury. "What did he do to you? Did he touch you? By the Professor, if that monster laid his hands on you..."
"No! No, Scott, stop..." Jean gasped, pressing her palms against her eyes to try and calm her shaking. She leaned against the high school's red brick wall, short of breath. "He didn't touch me. He didn't hurt me. Not physically."
Hank approached more calmly, though the expression behind his glasses was of absolute gravity. He placed a reassuring hand on the young girl's shoulder.
"Breathe, Jean. Come, let's get in the car before anyone notices us."
Once settled in the back of Hank's station wagon, sheltered from view, a heavy silence took over as the vehicle drove away from the school. Scott stared at Jean through his ruby-quartz lenses, devoured by anxiety, while Hank waited patiently for her to gather her wits.
"His mind..." Jean began, her voice cracked by a residual sob. "I still couldn't get inside it, Scott. It's like trying to read through a mountain of lead. But he spoke to me. He answered my questions. And what he told me... is terrifying."
"What did he say about his physical changes?" Hank asked, leaning forward, his gaze shining with scientific curiosity mixed with apprehension. "Twelve hours, Jean. An eight-inch growth spurt and that kind of muscular hypertrophy in twelve hours is biologically impossible without an energy source or an artificial genetic rewriting."
Jean raised tear-filled eyes toward Hank, her gaze haunted.
"He's not a mutant, Hank. He swore it to me, and I felt it in his voice... there wasn't an ounce of a lie. He speaks of a lineage. His body is being entirely rewritten for war. He told me he's becoming immortal... that he will never age. He knows he will see us all die, one by one, wither and rot in the grave while he remains unchanged. That's why he isolates himself. That's why he refuses to let anyone close."
Scott let out a nervous laugh, tinged with incredulity.
"Immortal? He's seventeen and he thinks he's a god because he had a growth spurt? Jean, this guy is either completely insane, or he's been lobotomized by a military experiment. Project Weapon X, or something else..."
"No, Scott, you don't understand!" Jean cut in, her voice rising a notch, vibrating with sincere terror. "He doesn't think he's a god! It's the exact opposite. He told me his lineage ends with him. His body is modified in such a way that he is sterile. He knows he will never have children, never have a family, never have a normal life. He doesn't see it as a gift, he sees it as a condemnation. He described himself as a weapon. A sentinel."
Hank McCoy sat back slowly, absorbing every word. His puzzle pieces were beginning to assemble in an appalling manner.
"Biological immortality... induced sterility... an expanded rib cage to accommodate additional organs..." Hank murmured, his eyes fixed on the void. "Jean, what you're describing resembles no mutant gene cataloged by Professor Xavier. Mutants mutate to evolve, to adapt to life. What Valerius Aurelian is undergoing is heavy, almost surgical military engineering. This confirms what I heard this morning."
"The two hearts..." Scott breathed, finally beginning to gauge the gravity of the situation.
"Yes," Hank nodded. "Developing a functioning second heart overnight to sustain a post-human musculature is cutting-edge bio-engineering. If what he says is true, his metabolism is designed to survive traumas that would kill any of us. But who could have done this? And for what purpose?"
Jean wiped away a final tear, her green eyes fixing on Scott. She recalled the end of the conversation, the part that had chilled her to the bone, far more than Valerius's immortality.
"There's worse," she said, the shudder returning to haunt her limbs. "He didn't become dark because of his physical pain. He knows things, Scott. Things about the universe. He spoke of distant alien civilizations, of monsters hidden in the stars waiting for our slightest weakness to wipe us out. And he spoke of another dimension... the Warp. A sort of psychic hell, an ocean of pure madness."
Scott frowned, his paranoia taking over again.
"Aliens? A psychic hell? Jean, that's paranoid delusion. This guy is having end-of-the-world hallucinations."
"They weren't delusions, Scott!" Jean snapped back, clenching her fists. "I saw his eyes. I saw that marble face. He was mourning the world. He told me that in the history of his lineage, humanity had a protector, a beacon in the night that he called the Emperor. A being capable of repelling those horrors. But he looked at our sky, and he understood the worst of truths..."
She stopped, her throat tightening. Hank and Scott held their breath, hanging on her words.
"He told me that here, the Emperor does not exist. That the Throne is empty. That we are desperately, tragically alone in the dark in the face of extinction. And that if he does not build an implacable and cruel Empire to straighten out this Earth, no one will."
A dead silence settled in the car. Even Scott found nothing to say in response. Madness had its limits, but the absolute conviction with which Valerius had delivered this message, according to Jean's account, had nothing of a psychiatric delusion. It was the cold declaration of a sovereign already planning his conquest.
"An Empire..." Hank repeated softly, readjusting his glasses with a trembling hand. "He doesn't want to be a hero. He doesn't want to hide. He wants to unify this planet by force to prepare it for a cosmic war."
"It's a threat," Scott decided, his voice turning hard again, though his gaze betrayed deep worry. "Whether he's crazy, modified, or an alien, this guy wants to overthrow the world. The Professor must be informed tonight. If this Valerius starts moving, if he has the means for his ambitions with his superhuman strength, he's going to trigger a civil war. And we'll be in the middle of it."
Jean did not answer. She looked out the car window, staring at the dark clouds gathering over New York, as the collision between their two worlds became inevitable.
Those same clouds finally broke over Queens as night fell, spreading a mantle of frost and soot over the grid-like avenues. Far from the hustle and bustle of the Mansion where the X-Men were already nervously debating his nature, Valerius was locked inside his sanctuary. The darkness of the single room was broken only by the orange indicator lights of several secondhand generators he had installed along the wall. That evening, the destitution of the studio had given way to a quasi-industrial organization. Around the bio-synthesis machine, thick canvas bags and sealed drums were methodically stacked. Valerius had injected his last dollars and his orphan savings into purchasing raw materials: high-protein algae strains, purified cellulose, and industrial lipid binders.
Everything was ready. The vats were sterilized, the circuits calibrated according to the technical litanies of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Production of the first Imperial Nutrient Bars could technically begin. But before feeding his future people, the forge of his own body demanded a new tribute of pain.
Sitting directly on the floor, shirtless in the biting cold, Valerius closed his eyes. In his mind, the System interface began to flicker, accelerating its internal countdown as the residual genetic data anchored into his cells.
[ BEHAVIORAL MODEL SYSTEM: IMPERIUM ]
'Cadian Soldier' : 100% [SYNCHRONISATION TERMINÉE]
'Space Marine' : 10%
-> Unlocked Capacity: Summoning of a MK II Space Marine Armor, a Bolt Pistol & Chainsword
-> Status: Space Marine profile currently assimilating.
A fraction of a second after the message displayed, Valerius's body froze, locked by tetanic paralysis. The Black Carapace. The nineteenth and ultimate implant that definitively separated a human from a true Space Marine. Although the System was only in its infancy, it had just forced the introduction of this matrix beneath his skin.
The agony was of a radically different nature than that of the second heart. This time, it was not an internal tearing, but an invasion. Beneath the layers of his epidermis, a black texture, resembling a flexible alloy of carbon plastic and neuro-conductive circuits, began to grow. Valerius felt this membrane spread like wildfire, crawling across his chest, enveloping his back, his thighs, his shoulders, and his arms.
Crack. Crack.
The organo-metallic mesh drove deep into his flesh, fusing directly with his central nervous system. Thousands of microscopic filaments grafted themselves one by one onto his spinal cord. Valerius arched his back, his eyes rolling back, the veins in his neck ready to burst. His hands gripped the concrete floor, leaving bloody finger marks as his grasp tightened under the effect of the electrical surges ravaging his nerves.
After an hour of torment, the membrane stabilized and began to harden beneath his skin, forming a subcutaneous armor nearly impenetrable to light impacts. But the process demanded its physical conclusion. With a dull sound of tearing flesh, the neural connection ports burst through the surface of his skin. At strategic points on his body—along his spine, on his pectorals, his deltoids, and his thighs—the flesh opened cleanly to reveal circular connection plugs, ringed with a grayish, sterile alloy. These direct technological sockets, now solidly anchored in his anatomy, awaited the day they would plug into the sensors of a power armor to become one with the machine.
Valerius let his head fall back, panting, his dual hearts beating a frantic rhythm to purify his blood, sustained by his new implants. He stood up slowly and approached the broken mirror in the washroom. His two-meter-five silhouette had become massive, almost square at the torso. Passing his hand over his chest, he no longer felt the suppleness of human skin, but a fierce rigidity, a hidden carapace protecting his vital organs. The gray stigmas of his neural ports marked his body like the seals of an irreversible pact. He was no longer just an enhanced human. He was a living interface.
Ignoring the dried blood surrounding his new neural ports, Valerius returned to the main room. His golden eyes settled on the nutrient synthesizer. He stepped up to the makeshift control panel and pressed the main switch. The generators hummed, delivering raw power into the fermentation vats. Inside, the grinders began to process the cellulose and synthetic proteins with a heavy, steady roar. A few minutes later, a metallic click echoed, and the first Imperial Nutrient Bar fell onto the stainless-steel receiving tray.
It was gray, compact, heavy. Devoid of artifice, but loaded with the energy required to subjugate and feed the souls of the New York slums.