Martyr used to be one of the most powerful superhumans alive, using dozens of powers in conjunction to save lives and smite metahumans who abused their powers to oppress people. Superhumanly tough, immensely quick, able to withstand huge amounts of damage and able to dish out plenty of his own, either through his own super strength or through his telekinetic abilities.
Now he’s kind of hard to look at.
He was supposed to have died. The Lone Star of Texas - never stable to begin with - was driven into a bout of insanity by the death of his parents, and used his powers in unexpected ways to grant himself access to a nuclear silo near Minot, North Dakota. Wanting to die, he launched the nuclear weapon with a straight up-and-down trajectory so that its blast would kill him. Martyr intercepted it at its apogee, but his attempt to disarm it caused it to detonate. With him at the absolute heart of the explosion.
Against all logic, against sanity, he’s still alive, a mutilated, burned corpse that drifts through the air with ropes of intestine dripping out of the bottom of the ruined torso. His head lolls on a broken neck, a single eye shining from a skull covered in impenetrable char. His left arm is gone at the elbow and the right is essentially fused carbon being kept together by the remnants of his suit; it wouldn’t matter, as he doesn’t seem to be able to move either one. He won’t communicate, even by blinking, and telepaths aren’t able to get through the wall of psychic defense that he’s erected around his mind.
They made one attempt to mercy kill him, when three of the most powerful metahumans on Earth jumped him and tried to smash his skull, end his suffering. He didn’t kill any of them, but the Angel of Harlem was bedridden for six months and the other two were dropped into medicinal comas to aid their recovery. A concerted attempt to break through his psychic defenses by the Cleveland Hive Mind resulted in him dropping his silence to deliver a single message: Let me do my job.
He shows up now when he’s needed, when a metahuman goes on a rampage and can’t be stopped, or when a natural disaster strikes that he can help with. He doesn’t seem to react to external stimuli anymore, whether it’s a photon beam attack or praise screamed from a grateful crowd. It’s been speculated that he’s locked himself inside of his own mind, steering his body like a pilot would an airplane, disassociated from the tremendous amount of pain that occupying his body would cause. Nobody knows. Nobody’s sad when he shows up and saves the day. But nobody likes to look at him, either.
(Inspiration: The Ten Who Were Taken from the Black Company series - particularly the Hanged Man and the Limper - and from Rick Veitch’s Bratpack, for spoilery reasons.)
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