Rome

"Oh what the hell! You mean he had all that power and he was still playing second chair to gimp Batman!" I shouted as I telepathically prevented Barbatos from disengaging from our wrastle while processing all the power gained from The Merciless, "And what's your schtick, buttercup? You should have run the moment you saw me coming, bitch. You got Deus Ex'ed by fucking Hawkgirl! She's fucking B-team at best and you think you can somehow step to me? Mother fucker, didn't anyone tell you I'm Actually Invincible? I don't have that dissonance between my wiki page and my showings. I show up and everyone in my way is fucked. Just like you right now."

The All-Black empowered by devouring it's DC counterpart from the prime continuity showed why you don't wrestle a Symbiote when it burst through Barbatos' chest and made a U turn to drill back into his back before bursting out his hood via one of his glowing purple eyes.

"Oh yeah, you feel that you edgy fuck, that's liquid 10th Metal getting pumped into you via the twice over god killing sword that is currently a tentacle plowing through your insides." I mocked the being literally only two steps from omnipotence, "It's not obscene, it's just part of a creature. This is what you get, you punk, when you come at me with an actual honest to god comic book style weakness. You're a joke!"

I kept roasting Barbatos until a giant pale hand stretched across all of existence seeking to snuff us out.

"Finally." I sighed as the All-Black instantly consumed Barbatos and then formed a fuck-you-giant-hand greatsword.

A portal to my left opened up and the Energy shot through it, joining another third of my divine being to me while the Machine portalled in behind me, opening its world sized chest cavity and taking us into its core.

Mega-zord me took up our sword, complete for the first time since we split up to focus on the three key aspects of power fully: Biology, Technology, and Energy. We pumped our power into the All-Black which dragged light into itself as we flew straight into the oncoming hand, constantly growing larger. When the All-Black became large enough to face the hand we skipped straight to the true charge slash like the cheat character we are.

We flipped over the handle of the All-Black and twisted to bring it around in a single full powered attack. The All-Black hit the hand between the first and second finger, splitting the wedge and following the bone down to the wrist carving off three fingers and two thirds of the giant palm.

I shunted the power of Perpetua's scream into the Void and took her hand with it for later assimilation.

Then I stood there bluffing like I wasn't burnt out after that attack. I'd only need a little while for my various pools of infinite energy to fill me back up, but a few moments being ass out is not ideal when dealing with a being one step from omnipotence.

So I rode all in on my brass sack and won big.

Perpetua withdrew to lick her wounds and I split back into three beings who each did that old school tilt the head back acknowledgement to each other then went our separate ways. I flew back down to the assembled heroes who'd completely decimated the Dark Knights after the deaths of Barbatos and the Merciless.

"Alright, roll call." I shouted, "Superboy! Zatanna! Kid Flash! Rocket! Robin! Miss Martian! Aqualad! Artemis! Danny!"

As I said each name an Nth Metal warframe unbonded and returned to me, leaving me with a bunch of kids puking their guts out from the sudden depowering.

"Okay cool. MM, lets get the fuck out of here." I declared and waited for Martian Manhunter to respond.

And waited.

"Anytime MM. Whenever it's good with you, dude…" I called out with my hands on my hips.

"Fucking hell…" I muttered as I used my super vision to find what was left of Manhunter.

With a snap of my fingers the crispy shapeshifter came back to life screaming as his flesh uncooked. Thank God the kids all puked already cause the sight was disturbing. Young Justice Martians are way uglier than Justice League Martians for sure. Even Invincible Martians look more fuckable.

"I died." J'onn shuddered as he felt up his unburnt form.

"So did the kids like thirty minutes ago. Get over it." I tapped the green dude on the shoulder and waved open a portal back home, "Alrighty all Earth 16 residents through the portal. Keep away from the event horizon. Just because I can fix you doesn't mean I want to. And like Yahweh says, don't test me."

"Wait!" Superman flew to stand in front of the portal, "If there is anyway you can use your resurrection powers to help out the people who've lost their lives in this crisis, I beg you to do it."

The Man of Steel dropped the Nth Metal hammer and shield and bowed on his hands and knees.

So I snapped my fingers.

"Alright, everyone's alive and everything is rebuilt like this was all just a bad dream everyone had together." I said while the man stood up, "Now lets get out of here, and ahh… keep the weapons. Don't get all Superhero Spurg on me and get rid of them so an enemy can pick them up or you don't have them when you need them next time. Be better than that."

When we got to the other side Robin grabbed ahold of my forearm bold as brass and looked up at me with a face full of terror and hope.

"M…my-my parents?" he managed to croak out.

The teens that nagged me into the situation that landed me with assimilation material only one step below the fuck mothering Presence looked at me together, as if their combined peer pressure could sway me… again.

"I'm sure there's some kind of balance or something… you know… philosophical that says I shouldn't, but fuck that. Nobody tells Mark what he can and can't do."

So I snapped again, causing the thirteen year old in the mask to begin weeping in joy causing him to miss the surprised look on my face.

"Hmmm….." I mused over the problem as I looked into the past to see what the fuck is stopping me from rezzing his dad.

"Ahhh…" I sounded as the mystery revealed itself to me.

I put a hand on Dick Grayson's shoulder and got his attention.

"Listen…" I started, "about your father…"

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I am genuinely inspired to end this one here on that Rome reference. It's one of my favorite endings of all time. As such alls yall need to comment to get me to keep going.

I am pretty much certain that people will demand the finish between Mark and Darkseid, but I'll put this final thoughts section here anyways.

Writing this story has been weird, likely because of the two years I'd spent writing Ultimate Krogan and its spinoffs. Grunt was about Charm and Accepting the Present where as Mark was about Ambition and Sacrificing to Build a Better Future. They were essentially two opposites despite the whole Super Alien Endangered Species theme they shared.

It really made me work harder because Mark was far less based on myself than Grunt was. There was also a lot less nostalgia pushing me through this one. I'm a lot more bitter about Superhero Comics and adaptations than I am about Gears of War and Guild Wars 2. The last truly excellent comic adaptation ended in 2006. The MCU was always hit and miss with me and before you clutch your Infinity War pearls remember that Thor 2 was a movie so tone deaf I don't even think the writers and director ever watched the first one.

Hopefully the Invincible TV show continues being better than the comic was. Fingers crossed lads. Season One was such a vast improvement that I actually have hope.

Anyways, when I thought about this one I knew that I wanted to explore the big questions posed in comics and Angstrom Levy and his powers were the perfect way to do it. I could go through the various brands and try to find out what the Superhero genre actually stands for, what it means.

So I had Mark do the whole standard Isekai hero's journey in reverse.

Crazy.

It put a hell of a lot of people off of the story that's for sure.

Basically, the standard is for the insert to start out all hopeful, bright eyed, and bushy tailed and then get kicked around until they are some cynical killing machine. The Fanfiction Standard is for the Insert to start out a cowardly whiny bitch and then coast on those laurels from their likely via some munchkinery if we are lucky or on the wings of some kind of wish fic bullshit. Maybe sometimes they become an actual hero worth reading like Null in Less than Zero. GG Kenichi618.

Mark flips this and starts out the cynical killing machine and then over time peels it back to that core of the superhero genre. Normally Superhero stories are stories of Order, and the thing that really really fucking bothers people is that Order is never actually achieved. When the violence is all over, the hero hasn't actually fixed what's wrong. That Dissonance is what Mark was acting on at the start of the story. The world was wrong, so Mark used violence to bring things back into Order, except he actually did enough violence to genuinely achieve this, setting him apart from standard superhero fare.

As the story progresses, Mark transitions from a need to bring Order to a need for Integration. Via the Omniverse of comics Mark can have his cake and eat it too, he can stabilize his own universe and explore the instability of others and seek out the value to be found there. He can be the Dictator at home, the Dashing Rogue in the MCU, and the Reforming Superhero in DC.

And that last one was a son of a bitch to write.

Some people might think it was due to the Power scaling with just how wonky things got right out the box in DC, but I don't have a problem writing OP Please Nerf protagonists. It was actually due to Mark needing to Integrate with a genre I'd grown cold to. Thank God I found the Implicitly Pretentious Youtube Channel. That guy single handedly got me through the brain fog I was experiencing with the DC content.

I worked hard to say everything I wanted to say about Superheroism in this, to be as thorough as I could without getting completely bogged down in disinteresting bullshit no one has time for.

So thanks for reading, and an especially big thanks for the comments.