Giganta's shadow washed the street in a moving eclipse as she wound back and threw a right cross the size of a billboard.
Marcus didn't flinch. He raised an open palm and caught it.
The impact rang his bones like a tuning fork and shoved twin trenches through the asphalt beneath his boots, rubber burning, gravel spitting. For half a breath, everything held, fist against hand, city against force, and then the momentum bled out into him and vanished, grounded like lightning through a rod.
Giganta's eyes went wide. "What?"
"Hi," Marcus said, modulating the word into a calm he didn't feel. "Police line's that way. Let's not."
Before the surprise could harden into anger, he was already there—up through her guard in a blur, hammering short, surgical shots into the soft plates under her sternum, then two ribs over, then the solar plexus. Each blow landed with a muted thunk, precision over spectacle, power under control. Her breath hiccuped; the grin cracked. She stumbled back three booming steps, heel punching a crater into a bus lane.
—COLLATERAL RISK: HIGH—
—RECALC TRAJECTORIES—
"On it," he murmured, rolling his shoulders as his visor overlaid a lattice of red arcs and green safe lanes over the block. If he drove her the wrong way, she'd fall into the subway grate, take out two parked cruisers and a transformer. Right way? Empty construction lot; damage contained.
She swung wide, wild with size and sudden frustration. He got a forearm under it, redirected the sweep past him with a twist that looked effortless, felt like wrestling a crane. The punch hit a lamppost instead; the lamppost folded like wet pasta.
"Helmet," Marcus said. "Map neuromotor targets at current scale."
The HUD obeyed, painting her limbs with faint constellations clusters at the elbow crease and biceps groove (median and musculocutaneous), along the forearm (ulnar, radial), the notch just above the knee (common peroneal), and the deep line down the thigh (femoral). Human anatomy, scaled hideously large, was still human anatomy.
He moved.
Three crisp shots up her right bicep; one-two to the ulnar groove; a heel kick to the peroneal cluster as she tried to plant. Each contact was clean and almost gentle compared to what he could do, precision, not punishment. The effect wasn't gentle at all. Her arm lit with pins-and-needles deadness; her right knee buckled like a cut marionette string.
She dropped to one knee hard enough to spiderweb the street. Her arms hung, momentarily useless, fingers twitching.
"Stay down," he said, voice even. He let himself rise a meter, staying between her and the police line, making himself the obvious target and the shortest path away from everything fragile.
She screamed instead, giant lungs driving a sonic bellow that rattled windows, a peel of sound that punched at his chest. The suit dampened the worst of it. Civilians behind the barricade clapped their hands to their ears; a cop lost his hat to the shockwave.
"Copy," Marcus said to no one, and cut her off mid-howl with a clean, ascending uppercut. He kept the angle high and tight to send the force up rather than back, knuckles sliding along the hinge of her jaw with just enough tilt to spin the brainstem. Her pupils rolled white. The light went out.
For a heartbeat, she hung there, huge and slack, then the air around her shivered. Color ran out of her skin like water down glass; the world seemed to inhale, and she began to shrink, fast. Massive limbs retracting, features tightening, bone and muscle compressing with a rubbery, unnerving grace note that always felt a little like magic.
Marcus stepped in and caught her before she was too small to break on concrete, scooping her under the shoulders like an unconscious swimmer. She settled into normal human scale in his arms, six feet and change, heavy but not that heavy. He floated her down and set her gently on her side, checking for a clear airway by force of habit.
The nearest officers approached with hands open, adrenaline still sparking in the whites of their eyes. One held out a pair of matte black cuffs that hummed the way honest tech hums. Metadampeners, good ones.
"On her wrists," Marcus said, stepping back to let the sergeant kneel. "And ankles, if you've got a second pair."
Clicks. A low tone. The cuffs synced and went quiet.
"Who are you?" the sergeant asked, awe leaking around the edges of professional voice. Behind him, civilians peered over the barricade, recording, whispering. A kid in a Mets cap mouthed whoa. Someone else said no damage and said it twice like they couldn't believe it.
Marcus angled his helmet, the gold sigil on his chest catching a bar of streetlight. He let the pause breathe just long enough for the name to stick. "Vanguard."
He didn't wait for the follow-ups.
His HUD flicked. The Metallo tile went orange. Superman took a chest-full of radiation and staggered; Metallo's panel slammed shut again, lining up a piston punch that would turn a dump truck into shrapnel. Police radio screamed a block-long evacuation and then got swallowed by static.
"Metallo," Marcus said. The word tasted like a decision.
He rose smooth and vertical, slow enough not to bowl the barricade with backwash, fast enough that a gust still ruffled the sergeant's hair. The crowd noise swelled into a chant that hadn't decided whether it wanted to be a question or a cheer. He let himself hover at twenty feet for the heartbeat it took to look back at what he hadn't broken: no collapsed facades, no rolled cruisers, no street craters bigger than a manhole cover. Five minutes work. Less.
"Appreciate the assist!" the sergeant yelled, cupping his hands. "Vanguard, right?"
Marcus gave a two-fingered salute. Then he flew off like the wind and was gone.
The sonic crack was shaped and tight, rolling up the canyon of glass without shattering a thing.
On the ground, the city started talking.
"Did you see—"
"He caught the car."
"He barely touched her and she just—"
"No cracks, no— look at the street!"
"Who is he?"
"Vanguard."
"Vanguard.Vanguard."
Lana Lang arrived at a run, mic already live, cameraman hustling behind her with a shoulder rig and a van idling crooked at the curb. She reached the sergeant just in time to catch the tail of the name, turned on a heel, and looked up at the dwindling black speck arrowing east.
"He's heading toward Metallo," she said into the camera, breath even despite the sprint. "You saw it here first. A new player just took down Giganta in under five minutes with minimal collateral damage, and he's not done. If he's flying the way it looks, his next stop is Superman's fight. Joey, van. Now."
They piled in. Tires squealed. The city rearranged itself for the chase.
Above it all, Marcus cut through the night toward the sick green glow pulsing at the heart of Metropolis, the name the crowd had tried on for him still ringing in his ears like a promise.