Chapter Text
Tanya Degurechaff was finally free from a world of Being X: no more frantic whispers, no more terrors of world-wide conflicts. Even though the entity had tried to claim her soul after the War ended, she had won their wager through sheer stubbornness and cold logic, securing transit to a reality where Being X influence was nonexistent. Now, in this new world, the only "gods" were people in capes who flew for their own reasons, governed by the physical laws of a world she intended to master as a civilian.
Tanya had built a life of calculated normalcy. She had found a partner in Nolan, a man whose efficiency and cold pragmatism matched her own military soul. They were a house of secrets, yet they found a strange harmony in their shared detachment from the rest of humanity. She could reach for the mana now without that cursed Elinium box burning a hole in her chest. No more prayers, no more annoying whispers from Being X just clean, lethal energy at her fingertips. She could command magic with a thought, but she chose to command a household and a career instead, hiding her lethal potential behind the veneer of a disciplined professional.
She is not just settled for the quiet life of a housewife, Tanya had ascended the ranks of a local consulting firm. She worked as a high level corporate legal consultant and she was a person that optimizing company infrastructures with the same ruthless efficiency she once used to reorganize battalions. By day, she managed contracts and navigated the treacherous waters of corporate bureaucracy, by evening and night, she maintained the perfect image of a suburban mother, ensuring her "assets", Mark and… Mary (she is still mad at Nolan for naming the girl with this name) were raised with the discipline required to survive in a world of superhumans.
Everything was proceeding according to her long-term plan until Mark's tenth birthday.
Tanya found him in the driveway, standing over a still burning puddle that had recently been a heavy-duty trash bag. The scent of metallic and undeniably magical clung to the air. It was a scent she hadn't encountered since the collapse of the Empire, a ghost of a past life she had buried under spreadsheets and suburban decorum.
She stood on the porch, her not so small frame casting a long, intimidating shadow that seemed to stretch across the concrete.
"Mark," she said, her voice carrying the authoritative tone of a career officer addressing a fresh recruit. "Explain the situation. Report."
"Mom, I… I think something happened," Mark muttered, looking up with a face pale and streaked with soot.
Tanya stepped down, her eyes narrowing into cold slits as she scanned the perimeter for any sign of Viltrumite power being used. There was no crater from a heavy landing, no heat marks in case of moving Mark moving too fast and no structural displacement. The thermal signature was too precise, the mana residue too familiar.
"Are you sure?" she asked, her piercing blue eyes locking onto his. "Are you absolutely certain this wasn't just your father's DNA finally manifesting?"
Mark swallowed hard, he knew this tone all too well.
"I'm pretty sure, Mom. I didn't hit it, and I didn't use my eyes like Dad said I might. I just… I got annoyed that the bag was so heavy and it also hit me in the knee so I kinda started thinking how I would burn it the most effective way, then I felt this spark inside my chest. Next second, I accidentally burnt the garbage bag to a crisp. It didn't feel like 'strength.' It felt like... clicking a switch."
Tanya stared at the burnt pile. The boy just had performed a crude, instinctive conversion of mana into thermal energy. The "peace" she had negotiated with reality had just been compromised by her own lineage. To be fair, she expected it and accepted it as an unavoidable risk. Still it was somewhat annoying.
"I see," Tanya noted, her mind already pivoting to a new training doctrine. "The growth projections for this household just hit a massive structural error. Go wash the soot off your face, Mark. Your childhood is officially over-budget. I have calls to make."
At the age of twelve the sound barrier was a wall Mark hit every Tuesday afternoon, Mark's life was a frantic and chaotic due constant trainings by both of his parents. And right now he was in a middle of another exercise in aerodynamic.
His Viltrumite genes remained stubbornly dormant which was fueling Nolan's growing frustration, after all, Mark couldn't lift a car or fly an inch on his own. To compensate and to save her son from Nolan's increasingly "rigorous" (aka lethal) training sessions Tanya had been forced to induct Mark into the arcane arts earlier than planned.
Mark wasn't flying because he was a Viltrumite but he was flying because he was maintaining a constant, high-output Flight Formula in his head. Which ends up being a much tougher task than he imagined.
"You're lagging, Mark. You should be able to break the sound barrier by now. Why are you sweating?" Nolan hovered in the clouds, arms crossed, watching Mark struggle to keep pace.
Mark didn't answer. Couldn't. He was too busy calculating the mana-to-thrust ratio required to keep his body airborne. Below them, on the porch, Tanya watched through binoculars.
"He is optimizing his trajectory, Nolan!" Tanya's voice would boom across the comms, defending her 'investment.' "Efficiency is more important than raw speed. Discipline the mind, and the body follows!"
But when Mark turned fourteen, the household dynamic fractured.
Eight year old Mary didn't just "awaken" her power; she ignited it. Unlike Mark, who had to laboriously study formulas to keep up with his mother's demands, Mary performed high-level conversion instinctively. She was a natural-born Mage-Prodigy, a mirror image of her mother.
Tanya's focus shifted instantly. Mark was a "stop-gap" who used magic to mimic a Viltrumite; Mary was a Strategic Asset who could surpass Tanya herself.
"Mark," Tanya said coldly one evening, barely looking up from the complex runes she was drawing for Mary. "Your Father will handle your 'physical therapy' from now on. You have reached a plateau in your magical theory that suggests your mana-veins are secondary to your DNA. Mary, however, has a resonance frequency that requires my full attention. Dismissed."
And just like that for the next three years, Mark felt like a failure in two worlds. He was a mage who wasn't "good enough" for his mother and he still wasn't Viltrumite for his father. He spent his teens desperately maintaining magic shields just to survive Nolan's "sparring" sessions, praying for the day his blood would finally kick in.
Then came his seventeenth birthday.
The driveway was unnaturally quiet. Mark was standing here and staring at the empty patch of concrete where a bag of household waste had been a second ago. There had been no blue mana-shimmer, no humming calculation in the back of his brain, and no geometric circles burned into the floor. Just nothing… magical.
Inside the house, the sound of the front door closing signaled Nolan's return from "patrol." Mark hurried inside, his face pale, finding his father in the kitchen.
Nolan looked up, noticing the soot on Mark's shirt and the way his son's hands were shaking.
"Mark? What happened? Did your mother have you running mana-exhaustion drills again?"
"No, Dad," Mark breathed out, his voice cracking. "I think... I think it finally happened."
Nolan froze. The coffee mug hit the counter with a sharp clack. When he looked at Mark, the look in his eyes wasn't fatherly—it was predatory. Long-awaited and terrifyingly sharp.
"Are you sure?" Nolan asked. "Are you absolutely certain? You didn't just accidentally trigger a kinetic-launch spell? You didn't use any of your mother's tricks or a hidden computation orb? This was just... you?"
"Pretty sure," Mark muttered looking down at his hands. "I was taking out the trash and I just got annoyed because it wasn't actually my turn. I didn't use a formula. I didn't even visualize a circuit like Mom taught me. I just... I felt this spark inside my chest, and I threw it. Next second, it was gone. I think it hit the upper atmosphere, Dad. I heard the sonic boom."
Nolan let out a breath he seemed to have been holding for seventeen years.
"Oh, that's great, Son, just great! Don't tell your mother yet. She'll just want to run a cost-benefit analysis on your flight path" Nolan said with, triumphant smile touching his lips. "We're going to the flight deck. Let's see what you're actually worth"
The heavy scent of espresso and bleach, scents of Tanya's "calculated normalcy" filled the kitchen. Mary sat at the table, her small fingers clutching a crayon, moving with a deliberate, forced clumsiness.
Inside her mind, the screaming never stopped.
She knew those eyes. Every time Tanya looked at her, Mary felt the ghost of a bayonet in her chest and the cold mud of the Rhine in her lungs. To the world, Tanya was a high-level corporate "fixer" in a pencil skirt. To Mary, she was the Argent Devil, the monster who had spat in the face of God and walked away smiling.
Being X had a sick sense of humor. He had taken Mary's soul and stuffed it into the one place she could call hell that she had no way of escaping: the Devil's own lineage. For eight years, Mary played the part. She was the "quiet" one. Mary watched Mark endure their father's grueling flights and their mother's "efficiency drills," but she stayed in the shadows.
She made sure her grades were average. She made sure her "magic" stayed buried under layers of suburban boredom. She lived in a house of secrets, terrified that if Tanya saw even a flicker of the old Mary Sioux, she would "optimize" her out of existence.
Then came the morning of her eighth birthday.
The newspaper on the table showed a picture of a local hero—some man in a cape saving a bus. It was the kind of self-righteous display that usually made Mary's soul sing with holy fervor. But across the table, Tanya let out a sharp, derisive "Hmph."
"Look at the waste of kinetic energy," Tanya murmured, her blue eyes scanning the photo like a tactical map. "Sub-optimal. He could have redirected the momentum with half the effort if he'd bothered to calculate the friction. Pathetic."
The crayon in Mary's hand snapped with a clean, sharp crack that felt too loud in the quiet kitchen. The familiar, hot itch of prayer and hatred was back, clawing at her throat.
The old, fanatical fire the one that had fueled her across battlefields to kill the person in front of her, just returned. How dare she? How dare she look down on someone trying to do good?
Mary's hand tightened around remains of the crayon. She didn't pray. She didn't ask for a miracle. She just hated.
The air in the kitchen turned sharp, vibrating with the high-pitched hum of a logic circuit. No miracle came. Just the sound of atoms tearing apart. The wooden table beneath her hands didn't catch fire. Instead, the atoms began to vibrate. The wood grain groaned, turning to a fine, grey powder where her palms touched the surface. It was a high-level Molecular Disintegration Formula, performed without a single word or a computation orb.
The silence that followed was deafening.
Tanya set her cup down. The porcelain clinked against the saucer, a sound as final as a gavel. She didn't look shocked nor scared, but instead looked... satisfied?
"Remarkable," Tanya whispered. Her voice had lost the soft, 'suburban mother' lilt. It was the razor-edged tone of a Brigadier General.
Mary froze, her face filled with terror, when she looked up, she saw Tanya leaning forward, her blue eyes glowing with a predatory light.
"The mana-density was hidden under a layer of emotional turbulence," Tanya noted like reading just a quarterly earnings report. Tanya reached out, her hand cold as ice as she patted Mary's cheek.""I was worried I'd have to spend another decade teaching Mark how to fly straight. To trigger a disintegration spell of that magnitude at your age...
Tanya stood up, her shadow stretching across the ruined table and a small, dangerous smile touched her lips.
"Forget the dolls, Mary. Tomorrow at 0500, we begin Theoretical Ballistics and Mana-Compression. Your 'childhood' is a sunk cost. It's time to turn you into something useful."
Mary looked into the eyes of her mother and felt a new kind of hell. She hadn't just been reborn. She had been drafted.