The wind whipping across the rooftops of Midtown Manhattan still carried the bitter, coppery scent of cordite and engine exhaust.
I stood on the precipice of a skyscraper's reinforced concrete roof. My figure was completely erased by the afternoon sun, swallowed by flawless optical camouflage. Hovering silently behind my back, the partially deployed core of the jellyfish rigging actively suppressed all biological and chanical energy fluctuations. It rendered mathematically invisible, hiding from even the most advanced military radar systems in the airspace.
I looked down at the streets below. The infantry teams were already dismantling the yellow police barricades. The massive CH-53E Super Stallion transport helicopters were slowly spinning up their rotors, and the Stryker infantry carriers were securing their hatches for departure.
I stood frozen in mid-air.
Wait, what?
I had just burned across the New York skyline from Queens at supersonic speeds. It took less than ten minutes to cross the grid. And I was still late?
I ranted frantically in my cybernetic brain, violently fighting the urge to roll my eyes.
Are you actually kidding ? Even as an all-powerful, extradinsional Rembrancer, I can still be late clocking into work? I spent three miserable days eating compressed rations in an Afghan cave just to watch Tony Stark weld his first armor. I was literally standing in the room when the spider bit Peter Parker. But when it cos to the Incredible Hulk, I break the sound barrier to get here, and the protagonist is already strapped to a gurney?!
Observer Zero, if your KPI evaluation has a docking penalty for tardiness, my bonus for this fiscal quarter is officially dead.
I extended my cyberpathic reach through the howling wind, instantly locking onto the primary biological target secured inside the lead helicopter's cargo bay.
Bruce Banner was heavily sedated, strapped to a reinforced steel gurney by five massive, high-tensile carbon-fiber restraints. Heavy biotric monitoring rings clamped his wrists and ankles, emitting a rapid, panicked beep-beep-beep into the cabin. His eyes were forced shut by the chemical suppressants. His face was a sickly, deathly shade of pale, but beneath his skin, a terrifying, neon-green luminescence pulsed violently through the bulging veins of his neck.
Six heavily ard U.S. Marines stabilized the gurney as the CH-53E prepared for liftoff. The three massive T64 turboshaft engines let out a deafening, chanical roar. The brutal downdraft from the main rotors kicked up a blinding storm of dust, trash, and dead leaves, violently rattling the tal police barricades on the street below. Dozens of civilians pressed against the periter, desperately holding up their cell phones to film the chaos, but the wall of infantryn effectively blocked their line of sight.
I hovered in the sky, watching the massive helicopter prepare to lift off, and couldn't help but sneer.
General Ross really doesn't understand the concept of subtlety, does he? He had literally called in Marine Corps heavy-lift aviation just to extract a single scientist. The CH-53E Super Stallion is the absolute largest heavy transport helicopter currently operating in the U.S. military arsenal. It boasts a maximum takeoff weight of 73,000 pounds and can sling-load a sixteen-ton armored vehicle. Never mind a sedated Bruce Banner—if they strapped him down tight enough, they could probably airlift the fully transford Hulk out of the city.
It was glaringly obvious that Ross was absolutely determined to drag Banner back to a black-site military bunker to dissect him.
Just then, a furious, desperate argunt erupted at the entrance of the abandoned building.
Dr. Betty Ross was being physically escorted out of the lobby by two female soldiers. Her white lab coat was heavily stained with wet blood. Her blonde hair was a chaotic, tangled ss plastered against her pale cheeks. Her blue eyes were heavily bloodshot, but they burned with a terrifying, stubborn rage.
General Thaddeus Ross imdiately walked over to et her. His Air Force Lieutenant General uniform was perfectly crisp and spotless. The heavy rack of dals on his chest glinted coldly in the afternoon sun. He looked at his daughter, his hardened, militaristic face softening with a rare, genuine flash of paternal relief.
"Betty. Thank God you're alright. I've already arranged a secure transport to take you back to the hotel. You need to rest..."
"Are you satisfied now?!"
Betty violently cut him off. Her voice trembled with absolute fury, the fire in her eyes practically incinerating the man standing in front of her. "You finally got exactly what you wanted, didn't you? You're going to lock him in a cage again. You're going to treat him like a lab rat for your weapons division!"
General Ross's face instantly stiffened. The brief flash of fatherly warmth vanished, replaced by the dark, unyielding granite of a military commander. He lowered his voice, speaking with a harsh, uncompromising authority, yet still attempting to justify his actions.
"He was always military property, Betty! Need I remind you that it was the United States Ard Forces that fully funded his gamma radiation research? I am simply reclaiming the results of my own military investnt! What exactly is wrong with that?"
He took a half-step forward, his voice dropping into an aggressive hiss. "I am not doing this for my own personal glory! I am doing this to protect this country! I am trying to stop a walking weapon of mass destruction from running loose and slaughtering innocent civilians! Specifically you! Betty, you almost died in that crossfire!"
"Died in the crossfire?!" Betty stared at him like he had just uttered the most insane paradox in human history. She violently wrenched her arm out of the female soldier's grip. She stepped directly into her father's personal space, her eyes filled with absolute, freezing disappointnt.
"If you hadn't cornered him at every single turn... if you hadn't hunted him across the entire planet with tanks and assault rifles... he never would have transford in the first place! This is your fault, Dad! You are the one who turned him into a monster! You turned him into a fugitive!"
She didn't wait for a response. She turned her back on the General and marched furiously toward the waiting helicopter.
Just as she passed him, she stopped. She didn't look back, but her voice was low, lethal, and aid directly at his heart.
"I will never forgive you for what you did to him today. Never."
General Ross completely froze. He stood on the asphalt, his jaw locked so tight the muscles bulged. His knuckles turned stark white as he clenched his fists. He watched his daughter's resolute silhouette disappear into the cabin of the helicopter.
He didn't say another word to her. He simply let out a heavy, furious grunt, turned to his tactical adjutant, and barked an order.
"Notify the Apache escorts! Full defensive periter! If anything goes wrong in that airspace, I want it neutralized imdiately!"
"Yes, General!"
The heavy hydraulic ramp of the Super Stallion slowly sealed shut. The massive rotors pitched aggressively, and the heavy fuselage lifted off the asphalt, turning its nose toward the classified military bunker on the outskirts of New York. On the ground, the Stryker armored vehicles fired up their diesel engines, rolling out in a heavy convoy to follow the helicopter's flight path.
The heavy police barricades were pulled aside, and the three-block lockdown was finally lifted.
I hovered in the sky, watching the heavy military convoy disappear into the distance, and let out a quiet sigh.
A father and daughter permanently alienated. Two desperate lovers torn apart by military bureaucracy. General Ross had dedicated his entire life to capturing the Hulk, but he lacked the fundantal emotional intelligence to realize that the harder he squeezed his fist, the more collateral damage he inflicted on the people he actually loved. From a narrative perspective, this entire extraction was destined to be a catastrophic tragedy.
I assud the show was over. Banner was in custody, and I had missed the big fight. There was no point in loitering in Midtown. I might as well fly back to Queens; if I hurried, I could probably make it to my desk before the final bell rang.
But just as I prepared to trigger my spatial jump, my cyberpathic radar suddenly spiked. A violently unstable, highly radioactive biological signature flared to life deep inside the abandoned building's underground laboratory.
I stopped. I raised an eyebrow, my tactical interest instantly rekindled.
Oh? A post-credits scene?
My consciousness instantly bypassed the physical concrete, plunging through the building's electrical grid to access the underground security feeds. The entire laboratory rendered perfectly in my vision, as if I were standing in the room.
The lab was an absolute disaster zone. Shattered glass beakers and ruined centrifuges littered the floor. Puddles of synthesized green serum dripped off the stainless-steel examination tables, emitting a faint, highly toxic gamma radiation signature.
Standing in the dead center of the wreckage was Emil Blonsky.
The Royal Marine commando's tactical gear was torn to shreds. His muscles were grotesquely knotted and swollen, pushing against his skin. His eyes were completely dilated, burning with a terrifying, paranoid madness. He had just witnessed the absolute, god-like kinetic fury of the Hulk firsthand. That raw, apocalyptic display of violence had completely shattered the elite soldier's psyche, driving him into a state of obsessive, suicidal power-hunger.
Pinned against a tal examination table a few feet away was Dr. Samuel Sterns —the eccentric cellular biologist Banner had been communicating with under the alias "Mr. Blue."
Sterns was currently being crushed against the steel by two terrified soldiers. The scientist's glasses were askew, and his face was pale with terror. Yet, beneath the fear, his eyes glinted with the twisted, unethical fervor of a man desperate to see his life's work realized.
"What are you doing?! Get your hands off !" Sterns thrashed against the soldiers, his voice cracking with panic. "The synthesized serum hasn't cleared baseline human trials! I cannot mathematically predict the physiological fallout of a direct injection!"
"I do not care about the fallout!" Blonsky roared. He shoved the soldiers aside, grabbed Sterns by the collar of his lab coat, and violently hoisted him off the floor with a single hand. The madness in his eyes was absolute. "I want that power! I want what he has! Inject ! Now!"
In the jungles of Brazil, the Hulk had casually shattered nearly every bone in Blonsky's body with a single, dismissive kick. That profound, humiliating helplessness had festered inside the soldier's mind like a rotting infection. He wanted the power to crush the Hulk to death with his bare hands—even if the biological cost was his own humanity.
Dr. Sterns stared into the commando's violently dilated pupils. He knew with absolute certainty that if he refused the order, Blonsky was going to snap his neck like a twig.
Slowly, the terror in Sterns's eyes began to recede, replaced by a chilling, pathological excitent. He had spent years obsessively synthesizing Bruce Banner's irradiated blood. He had desperately wanted to run a live human trial, but he had never found a viable subject, nor did he possess the sociopathic courage to cross the ethical line.
But now? An elite, physically enhanced super-soldier was actively demanding to be his guinea pig. It was a scientific miracle.
"Fine... fine! I'll do it!" Sterns gasped, nodding frantically.
Blonsky dropped him. Sterns scrambled over to the shattered lab bench. His hands trembled as he loaded a heavy pneumatic syringe with a massive dose of synthesized green gamma blood, hastily mixing it with a secondary vial of brownish fluid.
"This is my heavily synthesized variant of the serum," Sterns warned, his voice shaking with adrenaline. "If I mix this with the heavily irradiated blood samples... the physiological mutation will be catastrophic. I am warning you, you could turn into an abomination".
Blonsky didn't even flinch. He violently ripped the collar of his tactical shirt open, exposing his heavily scarred chest.
"Shut up and do it!" he snarled.
A manic, terrifying light flashed in Dr. Sterns's eyes. He didn't hesitate. He slamd the heavy needle directly into the primary artery of Blonsky's neck and depressed the plunger, flooding the soldier's bloodstream with raw, synthesized gamma radiation.
What happened next was so violent it actually made raise an eyebrow.
The absolute second the serum hit his heart, Blonsky let out a deafening, agonizing scream.
His biology completely destabilized. His skeletal structure mutated at a terrifying, visible speed. Sickening, wet cracks echoed through the lab as his bones violently shattered and imdiately fused into massive, dense new shapes. His skin rapidly necrotized, turning a horrific, calcified shade of greyish-green. Massive, jagged bone spurs violently erupted from his spinal column, tearing through his flesh and tactical gear like razor blades.
His muscle mass expanded exponentially, mutating into horrific, dense tumors of raw kinetic power. In less than ten seconds, the six-foot commando had been biologically annihilated, replaced by a towering, eleven-foot-tall, heavily armored monstrosity.
The Abomination.
The Hulk's first true cinematic nesis had just been forged in blood and radiation.
"Haha! It worked! It's perfect! You are a masterpiece of genetic evolution!" Dr. Sterns scread in absolute ecstasy, throwing his arms wide as he stared up at the towering monster. One lens of his glasses was completely shattered, and his lab coat was soaked in blood, but he was completely lost in scientific rapture.
The Abomination didn't thank him.
The monster turned, opened its massive, jagged jaws, and unleashed a deafening, concussive roar.
"GET OUT!!"
The raw kinetic shockwave of the roar violently swept the lab. The remaining glass beakers detonated into shrapnel. The heavy centrifuge monitors short-circuited and exploded.
The sheer concussive force hit Dr. Sterns like a freight train. The frail scientist was launched backward like a discarded ragdoll, slamming brutally into the sharp steel edge of a heavy lab bench.
He hit the floor with a sickening thud. Blood imdiately began pouring from a deep, jagged gash on his forehead.
Directly above him, a single, highly irradiated drop of synthesized Hulk blood hung precariously from the edge of the shattered table. As Sterns groaned in agony, the drop lost its adhesion, falling through the air and landing perfectly inside the open, bleeding wound on his forehead.
The Abomination ignored the bleeding scientist entirely. The monster flexed its massive, bone-plated claws, intoxicated by the apocalyptic surge of gamma power flooding its veins. It dropped into a heavy crouch, the concrete cracking beneath its imnse weight, and launched itself violently upward.
BOOM!!
The reinforced concrete ceiling of the laboratory shattered like dry drywall. The Abomination blasted straight through the floorboards of the lobby, disappearing into the New York sunset as it began frantically chasing the flight path of General Ross's helicopter.
Back in the ruined underground lab, Dr. Samuel Sterns lay bleeding on the linoleum tiles.
The single drop of gamma blood didn't just infect his wound. It acted like a sentient parasite, instantly aggressively burrowing into his bloodstream.
Beneath his scalp, his primary cranial veins violently bulged, glowing with a sickly, neon-green luminescence. Sickening, wet cracking sounds echoed from his skull as his cerebral cortex rapidly expanded and physically restructured itself. His previously normal forehead began to aggressively bulge outward, mutating into a grotesque, massive cranium.
"What... what is this..."
Sterns staggered to his knees, desperately clutching his violently expanding skull. His eyes were initially wide with absolute terror.
But as the mutation accelerated, the terror vanished, completely overwritten by an expression of extre, sociopathic euphoria.
He could literally feel his brain undergoing an impossible, accelerated evolution. His cognitive processing speed, his eidetic mory, and his baseline logic algorithms were multiplying exponentially by the second. His consciousness felt like it was expanding into the stratosphere, brushing against the fundantal, underlying mathematical logic of the universe itself.
"Hahaha... so this is what it feels like! This is the cognitive architecture of a god!" Sterns began laughing hysterically. His facial muscles twitched in an unnatural, disturbing rhythm, perfectly matching his grotesquely swollen cranium.
I hovered in the sky above the destroyed building, watching the birth of the genius supervillain through the security feed. I let out a heavy, tired sigh.
Are you actually kidding ?
I thought Bruce Banner got captured way too easily. As it turns out, the tiline was just saving the actual boss fights for . I missed the Hulk smashing the lobby, but I managed to secure front-row VIP tickets to the simultaneous origin stories of the Abomination and the Leader.
Observer Zero, your KPI algorithms are absolutely sadistic.
Originally, my tactical directive was strictly passive observation. But watching Dr. Sterns's skull rapidly mutate into a hyper-intelligent biological weapon, my fingertips began to twitch.
Samuel Sterns—the Leader—was an absolute nightmare for the MCU. His catastrophic intellect, his mastery of gamma radiation, and his eventual foray into mass psychological manipulation would eventually cause just as much collateral damage as the Abomination's physical rampages. He was a walking extinction-level event.
Honestly? It was tactically superior to just thin the herd right now.
I made my decision.
I engaged the spatial displacent drive. My body vanished from the sky, instantly rematerializing directly inside the ruined underground laboratory.
I dropped the optical camouflage. The massive, translucent jellyfish core of my rigging flared violently to life in the dim light. The heavy annihilation cannons mounted on my shoulders imdiately powered up, emitting a lethal, high-pitched chanical whine.
Three concentrated beams of azure, annihilation-class plasma violently lanced across the laboratory, striking the mutating Dr. Sterns dead center in his chest.
There was no cinematic explosion. There was no dramatic villain monologue. There wasn't even a scream.
The mont the annihilation plasma made contact, Samuel Sterns, his hyper-evolved cerebral cortex, and every single drop of gamma blood in his system were instantaneously vaporized at a sub-atomic level.
He was completely erased from the tiline.
The only evidence that a human being had ever been standing there were three perfectly smooth, glass-like scorch marks lted directly into the reinforced steel floor plating.
I instantly re-engaged the optical camouflage, fading back into the ether. I looked at the empty, smoking laboratory and nodded in absolute satisfaction.
Perfect execution.
Strike with overwhelming force. Do not monologue. Vaporize the target, and vanish without a trace. Not only did I successfully assassinate a major future Avengers-level threat before his origin story even finished, but I completely preserved my operational secrecy. It was the absolute gold standard of the "low-key" survival strategy.
Just as I prepared to teleport back to Queens, my radar violently spiked.
Two massive, apocalyptic biological energy signatures violently collided in the airspace over Harlem.
The digital impact was followed a millisecond later by the physical shockwave. A deafening, thunderous explosion echoed across the Manhattan skyline. The frantic screams of thousands of civilians and the heavy roar of Apache chain-guns flooded the acoustic spectrum.
I didn't need a tactical briefing to know what was happening.
The Abomination had successfully intercepted General Ross's extraction convoy. Bruce Banner had undoubtedly triggered his transformation, and the most devastating heavyweight brawl of Phase One had just begun in the streets of Harlem.
I floated up through the shattered ceiling of the lab, rising high above the Manhattan skyline.
I looked north toward Harlem. Massive columns of thick, oily black smoke were already rising into the atmosphere, and the violent flashes of explosive ordnance were painting the evening sky a bruised, bloody red.
I hesitated.
Do I go?
If I didn't go, I was going to miss one of the most iconic, brutal cinematic showdowns in Marvel history: Hulk versus the Abomination. Skipping that fight felt like a massive waste of a front-row ticket to the universe.
But if I went, I was flying directly into an active, chaotic warzone. Harlem was currently a at grinder of collapsing skyscrapers, stray Hellfire missiles, and flying cars. S.H.I.E.L.D. satellites were definitely watching the grid, the U.S. military was actively engaged, and Tony Stark was likely already monitoring the chaos. If I got caught in the crossfire and was forced to use my Siren capabilities to survive, my identity was completely compromised.
I floated in the freezing wind, agonizing over the tactical risk assessnt for exactly two seconds.
My hyper-advanced supercomputer logic and my overwhelming cosmic power quickly ca to a unified, highly irresponsible conclusion.
Whatever. I'm already here!
User Comments
0 comments from readers