The G-Class Annihilation Fighter hovered above Maple Street, an obsidian predator in a blue, suburban sky. Its presence was a violation of reality, a nightmare monster in the dream of normalcy.
Inside the Smith house, panic gripped everyone except three people.
"He's gonna blow up the house! My Civil War coin collection is in there!" Jerry shrieked, hiding behind the couch.
"This is amazing!" Summer exclaimed, recording with her phone. "My social media live stream is gonna blow up!"
Rick, Kaelen, and Padmé were already in motion, their minds working in perfect combat synchronicity.
"He wants to play," Kaelen said, his cybernetic eye analyzing the fighter's weapon system. "If he wanted to kill us, we'd already be dead. He's testing us."
As if to confirm his words, a thin energy beam, not green, but an unsettling purple, shot from the fighter. It didn't aim at the house. It hit Mr. Henderson's prize-winning garden gnome. The gnome didn't explode. It simply melted into a vibrating, gelatinous puddle.
"Matter disintegrator with entropic component," Rick analyzed with a whistle of appreciation. "The bastard's been busy. I need to get to my ship! Can't fight that from here!"
"Get the family out!" Kaelen ordered. "Padmé, Beth! Get them to the basement. It's the most reinforced part of the house."
Beth didn't need telling twice. She grabbed Jerry and Morty, while Padmé, blaster in hand, ushered a protesting Summer towards safety. "But my angle is perfect from here!"
The moment they were safe, the fighter opened fire for real. A hail of lasers slammed into the backyard. Kaelen activated his personal shield, a hexagon of light that appeared on his forearm and deflected the shots.
"Cover me!" he yelled to Rick.
Kaelen raised his portal gun. A laser beam headed directly towards him. He opened a half-meter portal right in front of it. The beam went in and didn't come out anywhere. A second later, thousands of kilometers away, a geyser of boiling water erupted in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Using this tactic, Kaelen began to "absorb" the shots, opening and closing portals at dizzying speed, a cosmic sleight of hand to protect the house.
"My turn, asshole!" Rick yelled, and he darted from the back door towards the garage.
The fighter focused on him, unleashing a volley. Kaelen, anticipating the move, opened a larger portal. Rick's entire volley was diverted through it and exited another portal right above the fighter, which had to maneuver sharply to avoid its own shots.
Rick reached the garage. "HA! Eat some dysfunctional teamwork!"
But Commander Rick in the cockpit wasn't stupid. He was learning. "Portal anomaly detected," a computerized voice said in his cockpit. "Deploying countermeasure."
From the underside of the fighter, a device shot down and slammed into the lawn in the middle of the street. It didn't explode. It emitted a low hum and a visible wave of distortion, like heat shimmer on asphalt.
Kaelen tried to open another portal. The gun sputtered, and the portal opened and closed violently, unstable and dangerous.
"Shit!" Kaelen yelled. "It's a Reality Anchor! It's locked down portal travel within a 200-meter radius!"
They were trapped.
"Plan B!" Rick roared from the garage. "The one about improvising like a lunatic!"
The fighter, knowing its main threat was neutralized, began charging its primary weapon. A massive glow accumulated in its central cannon, enough to vaporize the entire block.
"We can't stop that shot," Padmé said, having returned to Kaelen's side.
"Not head-on," Kaelen replied, his mind working at incredible speed. "Rick, the energy it's accumulating! The core signature is massive! It's right under the cockpit!"
"I read your mind, wonder boy!" Rick responded over the comm. There was a sound of heavy machinery activating in the garage. "Padmé, I need a distraction! Shoot its optical sensors!"
Padmé didn't hesitate. She peered from her cover and began firing with sniper-like precision at the fighter's red "eye." The shots ricocheted, but forced the ship to adjust its aim, buying them precious seconds.
At that moment, the garage door burst open. From it came not Rick's ship. It was something that looked like a giant torpedo with a diamond drill bit on the end, mounted on a repulsor platform.
"Presenting the World Scrubber 9000!" Rick yelled. "Normally I use it to dig up Kaledonite crystals from the core of dead planets, but today it'll just bore into some scrap!"
With Kaelen shouting trajectory corrections based on real-time energy readings, Rick aimed the device not at the sky, but at the ground.
"Fire in the hole!" he screamed.
The World Scrubber launched itself into Rick's lawn, disappearing underground with a deafening rumble. It traveled beneath the garden, under the sidewalk, under the street, a mole of destruction guided by science.
Just as the fighter's main cannon was about to fire, the World Scrubber emerged from the asphalt directly beneath it. The diamond drill bit, spinning at thousands of revolutions per minute, tore through the ship's underside and plunged directly into its overloaded energy core.
The result was spectacular. The main weapon fired harmlessly into the sky, a beam of energy lost in the clouds. Then, the ship convulsed. It began to flicker, phasing in and out of reality, before imploding in on itself with a dull "POP" and collapsing to the ground in a smoking, twisted heap of scrap in the middle of the street.
Silence fell, broken only by car alarms and the distant shouts of neighbors.
Kaelen, Padmé, and Rick stood up, covered in dust and bits of lawn. They looked at the destruction. The garden was ruined. The street was a crater. The remnants of a state-of-the-art interdimensional ship smoked in front of the house.
Rick looked at the scrap, his eyes gleaming. "Hmm. I can use some of those parts."
Kaelen looked at Padmé, then at the house where the rest of the family timidly peeked from the basement. Local police sirens began to wail in the distance.
Their safe haven. Their hiding spot. It had just been announced to the world in the loudest way possible. War had come to Earth. And their brief period of peace had ended, definitively and spectacularly.