Life beca noticeably quieter after the Saiyan incident.
Drex Valen had successfully scared humanity out of its self-destructive recklessness for the ti being, which honestly counted as a win.
Still, lately he had begun noticing sothing strange happening inside his body.
The feeling was familiar.
Twice before, he had experienced the exact sa sensation shortly before developing entirely new abilities.
And both tis had been... unpleasant.
It wasn't pain exactly.
More like pressure.
Like sothing deep inside him was preparing to erge.
The sensation made it impossible to relax. Sitting felt wrong. Standing felt worse. His entire body carried a constant, irritating tension.
"Drex... what's wrong?"
Tifa Lockhart noticed imdiately.
"Nothing serious."
Drex shook his head lightly.
There was no point explaining it. Tifa wouldn't be able to help him with sothing like this even if she wanted to.
She seed to realize that as well.
Instead of pushing further, she simply sat beside him and gently pulled his head into her lap.
A quiet gesture.
Warm.
Comforting.
If Drex didn't want to talk about it, then she would stay beside him anyway.
That alone was enough.
For perhaps the first ti in a very long while, Drex relaxed completely.
Resting against Tifa's lap, he slowly drifted to sleep.
And then the dream began.
His body changed the mont unconsciousness took hold.
Electromagnetic force fluctuated around him.
Gravity warped subtly.
The strong and weak nuclear forces rippled through space like invisible tides.
Inside the dream, Drex saw a monster.
A nightmare wrapped in flesh and bone.
It slaughtered an entire planet.
Cities vanished beneath its fists. Oceans boiled. Countless lifeforms died screaming beneath its rampage.
Then it noticed him.
The creature turned.
And attacked.
The battle that followed shattered the Earth itself.
Drex and the monster tore through continents, ripped apart tectonic plates, and finally smashed straight through the planet's core.
The Earth detonated into a supernova-like explosion.
Neither of them died.
Drex survived through layered defenses: electromagnetic control, gravity manipulation, energy shielding, and the overwhelming durability of his Kryptonian physiology.
The monster survived differently.
It died.
Then ca back stronger.
Drex imdiately realized sothing else was wrong.
The Dragon Force was gone.
The Phoenix Force was gone too.
Inside this dream, those powers simply didn't exist.
He could only rely on his own abilities.
After Earth's destruction destabilized the surrounding gravitational fields, both combatants were dragged helplessly through the collapsing forces around the forr planet's orbit.
The monster kept attacking anyway.
Eventually, the two escaped the gravitational collapse and crashed onto the Moon, where the battle continued.
The lunar surface exploded beneath them.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Every collision carried enough force to annihilate civilizations.
Each punch cratered the Moon deeper and deeper. Shockwaves rolled endlessly across the lunar landscape while debris launched outward like artillery shells.
The ground beneath them collapsed continuously under the pressure of their battle.
Dust storms swallowed entire regions.
The center of the Moon's surface caved inward like a gigantic funnel.
Drex's eyes erupted with crimson heat vision, lancing directly into the monster's face.
The blast detonated against blackened flesh.
Smoke rose from the creature's skin.
Then the monster grabbed Drex by the face.
Its massive hand clamped down over his head, forcing his chin upward and exposing his throat.
Its other fist tightened.
Jagged bone spikes protruded from the knuckles as it slamd a punch directly into Drex's neck.
BOOM!
Nothing happened.
With his energy absorption ability, bio-electric aura, Kryptonian body, and even the Moon's magnetic field reinforcing him, Drex had beco monstrously durable.
The attack wasn't even enough to make him flinch.
And as the battle continued, both fighters kept evolving.
The creature adapted continuously.
So did Drex.
His energy absorption ability converted kinetic force directly into permanent physical enhancent. Every strike from the monster strengthened him further, allowing him to keep pace with the creature's endless evolution.
The monster prepared another attack.
Drex countered instantly with a brutal elbow strike that launched it across the Moon like a missile.
The creature crashed into the horizon hard enough to carve out another crater before climbing back to its feet with a feral snarl.
Red energy gathered around its arm.
Then it lunged.
Its glowing fist collided with Drex's own punch.
The instant they connected, blinding white lightning exploded between them.
For a single heartbeat, everything went silent.
Then the compressed energy erupted outward into a massive sphere of destruction.
The shockwave swept across the entire Moon.
From orbit, the expanding wavefront spread across the lunar surface and continued onto the dark side of the satellite itself.
At this point, Drex stopped questioning why there was sound in space.
The fight had escalated far beyond common sense anyway.
Both combatants unleashed their full strength.
Muscles tightened.
Power surged.
The ground beneath them trembled violently as their auras distorted the environnt itself. Rocks rose into the air around them before being crushed into dust by the pressure alone.
Then the lunar surface split apart.
A massive abyss tore across the Moon with explosive speed.
Crack after crack spread outward until the entire celestial body fractured in half.
Drex ignored inertia completely.
His combat flow was flawless.
Whenever the monster threw one punch, Drex landed ten or twenty in return.
The creature's growing strength gradually stopped mattering.
Under the pressure of continuous battle, Drex finally achieved deeper mastery over the strong and weak nuclear forces.
With all four fundantal forces now under his control, his defensive capabilities climbed to horrifying levels.
Doctor Manhattan...
No.
Not yet.
Without a true unified field, he still probably couldn't beat sothing like Doctor Manhattan.
But he was getting closer.
anwhile, the interaction between the four fundantal forces made the monster's adaptation increasingly difficult.
Eventually, Drex gained the upper hand completely.
The creature could evolve counters against almost any attack, but Drex controlled the very foundations of physics itself.
Adapt to one application?
Fine.
He had thousands more.
The battle continued for an entire day and night.
By the end of it, they had practically dismantled the Solar System.
The Sun itself was pierced during one collision, its core destabilized until gravitational collapse transford it into a black hole.
Drex stood firm against the black hole's pull through sheer mastery of the four forces.
The monster couldn't.
It was dragged screaming into the singularity and torn apart at the subatomic level until nothing remained except scattered quarks.
Then the dream ended.
Drex's eyes snapped open.
"Holy shit... that was Doomsday."
Doomsday.
The realization hit him instantly.
But that only raised more questions.
Why was he dreaming about fighting Doomsday?
Did soone like him even need dreams anymore?
And what exactly was happening to his body?
This overwhelming sense of power...
It felt endless.
"Drex?"
Tifa looked startled when he suddenly woke up after several hours of sleep, breathing hard like soone erging from a nightmare.
"What happened?"
...
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