Chapter 189: The Birth of The First Children of Mars

[Mars, Underground Palace, Several Hours Later]

The chamber was deep beneath the palace, carved into the solid volcanic rock of the Martian crust and lit by the steady, cool luminescence of Genesis-infused runes set into the walls. The air down here was still and clean and carried none of the warmth of the terraformed surface above.

It was a place built for serious work, and the two figures standing in the centre of it had the quality of serious things.

Ethan stood with his arms crossed, looking at them.

The male was tall, broad through the shoulders, with black hair cut short and eyes the precise deep blue of a clear sky at altitude.

The female stood at his side with the same dark hair falling straight to her shoulders and eyes that were black all the way through, sharp and still and carrying something in them that suggested the intelligence he had built into their genetics was already running at full capacity.

Both wore fitted black suits, clean-lined and functional, and on the chest of each one, rendered in clean silver, was the Aeon symbol: the stylised A that had started as his company logo, become a symbol that half the world associated with Ethan Carter’s name, and would now serve as the founding mark of an entirely new civilisation on an entirely new world.

They looked back at him with the attentive stillness of people waiting for something important.

’I genuinely cannot tell if I am looking at a triumph of applied science or the setup for a story that ends with someone saying I told you he’d do this eventually.’

He kept that thought to himself.

He had run the Genesis Chamber for several hours, working from the Kryptonian Codex with the precision the work required.

Every capability recorded in Krypton’s genetic library had been built into both of them, the full spectrum of what a Kryptonian body could become under a yellow sun, the cellular solar absorption, the physical enhancement cascade, the sensory range, the flight, the heat vision, the invulnerability threshold.

He had not given them a baseline nor a ceiling. They were built to lead, and the genetics reflected that intention in every measurable way.

The loyalty architecture he had woven into their foundational psychology was thorough and, in hindsight, possibly more thorough than necessary.

He had already named them before they finished the growth cycle.

Adam and Eve. The first son and daughter of Mars, which made them, technically, the first Kryptonians born anywhere in this multiverse.

’Should they be called Martians, technically? They were born on Mars. They will live on Mars. But they are biologically one hundred percent Kryptonian, so...’

He shrugged internally. The taxonomy question was interesting for approximately four seconds and then stopped being interesting.

Kryptonians. That was what they were. That was what they would call themselves. The planet of origin was a detail.

Adam and Eve dropped to one knee simultaneously and looked up at him with expressions that carried a quality Ethan found simultaneously touching and faintly alarming.

"Thank you for giving us life, Supreme Being," Adam said.

Ethan uncrossed his arms.

"Woah." He held up one hand. "Let’s not go full demiurge on me right out of the gate. I am not a certain bone king sitting on a throne issuing commandments from the Tomb of Nazarick."

He looked between them. "Just call me Ethan. Supreme Being is a bit much for a Tuesday."

Eve’s expression did not waver. "You are our creator," she said, and her voice was steady. "You have the potential to become the most powerful being in the entire omniverse. It is only natural to address you accordingly."

Adam inclined his head. "We would not dare address our master as anything less than what he is."

Ethan’s eye twitched. ’I may have gone slightly overboard on the loyalty.’

He studied them both for a moment, then let out a breath. "Alright. New plan. How about we settle on Lord Ethan. Consider it my first official command."

Their eyes lit up with something that could only be described as genuine delight, which was not a response he had anticipated from a first command and which he was going to spend some time thinking about later. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

"We understand, My Lord," they said, in near-perfect unison.

Ethan looked at the ceiling briefly. ’Definitely went overboard on the loyalty. The next batch is getting a significantly more relaxed disposition. These two are going to make every simple conversation feel like a royal audience.’

He pulled his attention back to the practical matters and gave them their initial orders. They were to begin the creation of one hundred more Kryptonians using the Genesis Chamber, selecting from the full range of the Codex to produce individuals suited to different roles: scientists, builders, strategists, protectors, cultivators, engineers, etc.

He wanted a functioning society in its first generation, not a military unit. He made that distinction clear.

The loyalty architecture for the next batch would be dialled back considerably. Enough to ensure genuine commitment to his family’s protection and the planet’s security, not so much that every interaction felt like a scene from a court drama.

He also gave them the secondary directive: a communication and surveillance network for Mars, built on Kryptonian crystal technology.

Kryptonian communications operated on principles that made most of Earth’s infrastructure look charmingly primitive.

The crystal lattice network used naturally resonant mineral formations as both transmission medium and processing architecture, growing the network organically as more crystal nodes were added rather than requiring manufactured hardware for every expansion.

Signal fidelity across the network was effectively lossless because the crystals did not transmit data so much as they shared state, each node in the lattice holding a real-time reflection of the whole, which meant that communication between any two points on the planet was not a transmission across distance but an instantaneous synchronisation between nodes.

The system was also self-repairing, because crystal lattice damage triggered automatic regrowth from adjacent healthy nodes, and it was entirely invisible to any scan or surveillance method that did not already know what it was looking for.

He had studied enough of the Kryptonian technical library to understand how to set the foundational nodes. Adam and Eve had that same knowledge built in. Between them, the network would be operational within days.

’And in the meantime, I will monitor this place the old-fashioned way. By which I mean using mystic arts and Runes surveillance that covers an entire planet.’

He left them to begin their work and moved deeper into the underground complex, to the second chamber he had prepared.

The Hyperbolic Time Chamber took two hours to build, which was shorter than the one on Earth had taken, but the first one had been a learning experience and this one benefited from everything that had taught him.

The structure was the same: an isolated dimensional space anchored to the physical location but existing in a fold of reality where time moved at a different rate from the world outside. He calibrated it to the same parameters as the Earth chamber, with one difference in the dilation setting he intended to use for himself.

One year inside is one minute outside.

He stood in the entrance for a moment before going in, holding the Monarch Core in both hands and looking at it.

The Core of the Monarch of Transfiguration: Yogumunt. It glowed with a deep, shifting light that moved through the spectrum slowly, never settling, like the surface of something alive.

The power set it carried was portal creation, dimensional travel, spatial separation, and illusion creation at Monarch scale, which meant at a scale that rewrote the rules of a battlefield rather than simply operating within them.

He was not planning to absorb it the way his girls had absorbed theirs. The method he had developed was more careful than that, and the reason was straightforward: he was not going to waste a Monarch Core on a process he could achieve through his own power if he was patient enough and precise enough about how he approached it.

He understood, from watching Anna, Susan, and Diana go through their assimilations, that the Core merged with the soul and the body simultaneously during the process, rewriting both to accommodate the Monarch’s power frequency.

He had also developed, during that same period, a method of partial engagement and extraction, a way of beginning the merger and then removing the Core intact while retaining whatever adaptation his body had achieved during the contact.

The theory was that if he repeated that process enough times, his Adaptive Evolution would do what it always did: read the stress being placed on his systems, identify what adaptation was needed to handle it, and build that adaptation permanently into his biology.

The Core would be the teacher. His own power would be the student. And eventually the student would no longer need the teacher.

He genuinely did not know if it would work. He had a strong suspicion that it would, because his Adaptive Evolution had surprised him before in the range of what it considered a learnable trait. But he had also been wrong about things before, occasionally, when he was being overconfident, which was a personal failing he was aware of and managed imperfectly.

’Only one way to find out.’

He stepped into the chamber. The door sealed behind him with the soft, deep resonance of dimensional architecture clicking into place.

"Alright," he said to the empty space, turning the Core over once in his hands, feeling its weight. "Today is the last day as a human."

He paused. "Or whatever I currently qualify as. Let’s not get philosophical about it."

He looked at the Core, and the grin that crossed his face, "Let’s get to work."

He sat cross-legged on the chamber floor, placed the Core in his lap, and began.

...

[Earth, Nick Fury’s Residence, Night time]

The apartment was quiet, it was not actually quiet but the sounds were familiar enough to pass for it: the distant traffic, the building settling, the refrigerator cycling on and off with its low mechanical hum.

Nick Fury came through the door looking like a man who had been solving other people’s problems since before most of those people were born and was operating on the last reserves of his patience for the day.

He dropped his coat over the chair near the door, moved to the kitchen with the directness of someone who knew exactly what they wanted and where it was, and pulled a beer from the refrigerator.

He took one long sip.

"Boo."

The beer went everywhere.

Fury spun, the can already down, the gun already in his hand and aimed at nothing, because there was nothing there to aim at. The room looked exactly as it had. There was no movement and no visible presence.

His hand stayed steady. His eye swept the room.

Then a hand settled onto his shoulder from behind, where there had been nobody one second ago, and the same voice said, close and easy, "Let’s not involve more people in this, alright?"

Fury turned slowly.

Anna Marie Carter stood behind him with her arms loose at her sides and a smile on her face that was doing several things simultaneously. It was friendly and amused.

She looked unhurried and entirely comfortable in a room she had entered through no door he had seen open.

Her green eyes were steady and warm and currently reading him like a document she had already reviewed once and was checking for updates.

Fury lowered the gun by approximately two degrees. Not all the way. Just enough to indicate that he had assessed the situation and was choosing conversation over escalation, for now.

"What the hell are you doing in my house, Mrs.Carter?"

His voice was controlled and his pulse was not, but that was information he had no intention of broadcasting.

Anna’s smile did not shift. "The real question, Director," she said, tilting her head slightly, "is not what the hell I’m doing here."

Her voice was light but the lightness was a surface and they both knew it. Her eyes moved across him once and her expression did something subtle that sharpened the room by several degrees.

Her gaze settled on his face and stayed there. "Where is the real Nick Fury?"