The uniform was bold.
It wasn't military standard. It wasn't meant to be.
Max stood in front of the mirror, clean-shaven now, his thick black hair slicked back like a matinee idol. His features were sharp, almost too perfect, the jawline that used to be bruised and bloodied in alley brawls now framed by light. He no longer hid behind a mask. The old blue cowl with white eyes was gone—retired like a childhood ghost.
Now, he stood tall. Unmasked. Unafraid.
He wore a red leotard that stretched down to the wrists and ankles, the fabric shimmering faintly with bullet-resistant threading. A bold blue "M" emblazoned his chest, wide and symmetrical like a call to arms. His yellow trunks sat high on his waist, the style intentionally lifted from the pages of Action Comics and the early Captain America strips—the kind of costume that screamed symbol, not soldier.
The yellow boots were thick and laced, built for impact—but polished to a golden shine. The cape, long and regal, matched the same brilliant yellow. It snapped behind him like a war banner.
He was no longer just Max Malone.
He was Marvelo-Man.
And he looked like he had stepped off the page of every boy's favorite wartime comic—only he was real. Flesh and blood. Stronger than myth.
---
In March of 1938, they deployed him to the Eastern front—not Europe, not yet—but a secret stop before the storm: China.
The Japanese Imperial Army was cutting a swath through Nanking. The atrocities were whispered, not printed. Women dragged into alleys. Children bayoneted in the streets. Bodies dumped in rivers like waste.
The Army denied him. The press ignored him.
But Marvelo-Man went anyway.
He didn't descend from the sky. He marched in. Alone.
---
He tore through the gates of a detention block on the city's west end. The guards opened fire. Their bullets clattered to the floor like pebbles.
Max didn't shout. Didn't grandstand.
He gripped the first soldier by the rifle barrel and crushed it like it was tin. The man's eyes widened before Max sent him flying through a wall with a single backhand.
Another tried to bayonet him. Max grabbed the blade mid-swing and bent it in half before knocking the man unconscious with a flick to the skull.
The cell blocks reeked of blood and urine. He ripped the doors off one by one, freeing the caged civilians—most too dazed or wounded to understand what they were seeing.
But a little girl reached up and touched the blue "M" on his chest.
"Monster?" she asked in a whisper.
Max knelt, shook his head gently. "No, sweetheart. Just a man."
She smiled.
---
By dawn, three full blocks were silent.
The Japanese soldiers left behind were either unconscious, dead from their own munitions ricocheting off him, or scattered into the wilderness in terror. Max dragged a truck full of survivors to safety, his cape torn and soaked, his hands red.
He didn't sleep that night.
He sat on a rooftop outside the burning outskirts, watching smoke rise over a city that could never be whole again.
But he had stopped some of it.
And for now, that had to be enough.
Europe would come next. Normandy. Ardennes. Death and blood on a scale unimaginable.
But Marvelo-Man was no longer a ghost in a mask.
He was visible. He was real.
And he had work to do.