Bendo sat on the roof of his apartment building, the stars above cold and sharp. Jason-Mark sat beside him, still in partial armor, legs dangling over the edge. The city hummed beneath them, unaware of the truths being unraveled in the shadows.

"You said you believed me too easily," Jason muttered, finally breaking the silence.

Bendo smirked, his eyes still on the sky. "Yeah. Because I know what X is capable of. I’ve lived it."

Jason turned to him. “You never told me anything.”

“You never needed to know. Until now.”

Bendo leaned back on his hands, exhaled, and let the memories come.

Years ago, before Jason ever touched alien tech or heard the name X, Bendo was just another high school kid in a normal neighborhood. Good grades. Solid jumper. Quiet charm. But something always hovered over his family — a tension he never quite understood. Locked rooms, hushed phone calls, sudden relocations.

He remembered the day it all cracked.

It was evening when the men came. Unmarked vans. Black uniforms. Silent entry. They didn’t knock. His father had barely enough time to shove a hidden drive into Bendo’s jacket pocket before the door burst open. His mother screamed. His father fought. Bendo was grabbed by cold metal hands.

X had found them.

They were former scientists — both of them. Years ago, they’d walked away from X’s experiments, taken classified knowledge, and vanished. They thought they’d covered their tracks. They hadn’t.

Bendo was dragged into the facility blindfolded. Cold floors. Echoing metal. Fear.

“I was twelve,” he told Jason quietly. “I didn’t know what the hell was going on. Just that they weren’t going to let me go.”

The room he was taken to was dark, humming. They were going to use him as leverage. Hurt him to get his parents back in line. But there was a malfunction. Or fate. Or something stranger.

He escaped his restraints in a moment of panic, stumbling down sterile corridors. He turned a corner too sharply, slipped through a cracked door, and found himself between two tall machines — both glowing with unstable energy.

“DNA Alteration Pods. One for gravity manipulation. The other for magnetic resonance,” Bendo said. “Guess I got both.”

The overload was instant. Energy surged through his body. He screamed. The room exploded in light.

When he woke, the floor was scorched around him. The walls were warped like soft metal. His hands... trembled with weight.

“Next day, they sent robots after me,” he said, looking down at his hands. “I didn’t even know how I survived. But something in me... knew how to fight.”

The bots were fast, brutal, and merciless. He remembered how the floor cracked under his feet as gravity folded inward. How metal twisted like paper when his hands reached out. The whole neighborhood saw the sky flicker with unnatural light.

He stood between the machines and his parents.

That was the first time he had ever killed.

After that, they had no choice. His parents used what little clearance they had left to vanish. New names. New country. Gone.

He stayed behind. To fight. To resist.

“And Amy?” Jason asked quietly.

“She’s got powers too. Different story. But yeah, we’re not exactly normal.”

Jason sat in silence, digesting it all. A clone built to wear alien armor, and a cousin mutated by genetic accident. Both caught in the crosshairs of the same monster.

Bendo stood and stretched.

“So yeah. When you showed up saying X came for you? I didn’t need convincing.”

Jason looked up at him. “Do you regret it? The powers?”

Bendo smiled bitterly. “Sometimes. But regret never saved anyone.”

He held out his hand. Metal screws in the rooftop satellite dish nearby gently rose and hovered around his palm like planets around a sun.

“We’re not alone in this,” Bendo said. “And X has no idea what we’re gonna do next.”

Jason nodded slowly. The armor on his shoulder hummed faintly, as if agreeing.

The war had already begun.