After spending a while carving through Chitauri forces with heat vision, Drex Valen was starting to get bored.
anwhile, underground, the Monster Association was overwhelming the superheroes.
This wasn't the future New York where thousands of superheroes could appear with a single rallying cry. At this point in history, Earth's superhuman population was still relatively small.
And honestly, most of them weren't even as effective as War Machines.
Drex's existence alone had drastically elevated humanity's military power.
Earth was no longer helpless against alien invasions.
At minimum, humanity could probably go toe-to-toe with half the civilizations in the galaxy now.
And that was without counting superheroes.
Fortunately, the Monster Association's advantage in sheer numbers didn't last long.
Humanity answered with overwhelming force.
Endless waves of War Machines, Iron Mongers, and Decepticons flooded into the underground city, crashing headfirst into the monsters in brutal close-quarters combat.
Conventional military forces followed with heavy weapons support. Regular soldiers might not have been able to kill stronger monsters outright, but they could still provide suppression fire and battlefield assistance.
At the sa ti, more War Machines moved into aerial support around Drex.
He decided the Battle of New York had gone on long enough.
Ti to replace the villains.
With that thought, he flew straight toward Stark Tower.
"Drex Valen is heading for Stark Tower! He's probably targeting the portal device!"
"Cover him!"
"Director Fury, we've got a problem! The mont Director Valen left his position, a massive firing gap opened in the defense line!"
Nick Fury clenched his jaw and ordered the Helicarrier forward.
Unfortunately, the ship simply lacked the firepower to properly deal with Leviathans.
The Helicarrier had never been designed to fight colossal airborne war beasts.
Its original combat doctrines focused on aircraft and ground targets. Eight-kiloter-range close-in defense cannons and missile systems were more than enough for those threats.
But Leviathans were different.
Their armor was too thick.
The Helicarrier's weapons struggled to penetrate them at all.
As if sensing Drex's absence, the Chitauri imdiately escalated.
Three Leviathans surged forward simultaneously.
Pressure crashed down across the battlefield.
Unlike the movie versions that mostly ramd things like oversized armored whales, these Leviathans were ard with devastating energy weapons and heavy plasma cannons.
The mont Drex entered Stark Tower, he found Thor and Loki wrestling each other across the room.
The second both brothers noticed him, they froze.
Thor and Loki simultaneously looked like they wanted to explain that this really was a life-and-death fight and not... whatever this looked like.
Instead, Drex glanced at them once, said absolutely nothing, and walked away.
Honestly?
That reaction sohow felt worse.
"Wait, it's not what you think!" Thor shouted desperately after him.
Drex didn't even turn around.
He approached the portal device and looked at the imitation Tesseract powering it.
Then he reached out with one hand.
The energy barrier surrounding the device, which originally required Loki's scepter to bypass, shattered instantly under brute force.
Drex crushed the fake Tesseract in his hand.
The effect was imdiate.
The enormous wormhole over New York collapsed in on itself.
One unfortunate Leviathan that had been halfway through the portal lost most of its body to spatial severance, leaving only its head crashing down into the city below.
At the sa ti, every remaining Chitauri suddenly went limp.
Like drones disconnected from a server.
Thousands of alien soldiers and aircraft rained from the sky.
"Is it over?" Fury let out a long breath.
But only briefly.
Because another disaster was still unfolding beneath New York.
Personally, Drex felt the Monster Association was already dood.
So of the monsters were powerful, sure.
But the number of absurdly overpowered individuals he'd personally created was becoming ridiculous.
Take Blonsky, for example.
After continuously evolving through kinetic energy absorption, he had already torn apart multiple Dragon-level monsters, including Gouketsu himself.
His ability was practically designed to counter lee fighters.
The harder soone hit him, the stronger he beca.
Of course, he'd get demolished by Holess Emperor's ranged energy bombardnt.
And Rover was another terrible matchup for him.
Unfortunately for Rover, the giant monster dog had run into the Green Hulk.
Drex had invested heavily into preserving Hulk's limitless growth potential. Eventually, he decided to permanently connect Hulk to the rage aspect of the Phoenix Force itself.
Whenever necessary, Hulk could enter a state of endless escalation.
Infinite anger.
Infinite power.
Elsewhere underground, Holess Emperor stared in disbelief at Red Hulk Ross.
Several energy spheres exploded directly against the massive crimson figure without leaving a scratch.
"That's impossible! The power granted to by God shouldn't be ineffective!"
"God?" General Ross bit down on his oversized cigar. "I don't care what kind of god gave you power. You betrayed humanity. That ans you die."
Tony Stark had been the one to discover Holess Emperor was originally human.
The revelation genuinely shocked them.
A human siding with monsters against his own species?
That was harder to accept than the monsters themselves.
anwhile, Tony was dealing with another headache entirely.
"What the hell is this thing?"
Tony's voice crackled through comms as he blasted apart another swarm of Black Sperm clones.
Every ti he destroyed one, more appeared.
And each individual clone wasn't weak either.
Black Sperm, anwhile, was having the ti of his life ssing with Tony.
So these were S-Class heroes?
Not that impressive.
Once the other heroes exhausted themselves fighting Orochi and the rest, Black Sperm planned to swoop in dramatically, "save" the Monster Association, and naturally beco the new boss.
Unfortunately for him, Tony suddenly switched tactics.
A burst of freezing gas exploded outward from his armor systems.
Several Black Sperm clones froze solid before they could react.
And this ti...
They didn't multiply.
Tony grinned.
"Found your weakness."
His symbiote armor carried specialized equipnt for almost every combat scenario imaginable. It wasn't as absurd as Drex's Dark Knight armor, which could freeze the atmosphere itself, but against monsters?
More than enough.
Above the battlefield, Drex silently looked down over the ruins of New York.
Smoke curled upward from shattered streets and collapsed buildings.
Then the ground started shaking harder.
Chunks of debris bounced across the broken streets.
The tremors intensified rapidly, like the entire city had beco a tiny boat caught in a violent storm.
Then—
BOOM!
A massive pillar of fire erupted from the depths beneath New York.
The heat distorted the atmosphere instantly.
The sky turned crimson, glowing like sunset had swallowed the entire city whole.
BOOM! BOOM!
The ground trembled even harder now, as though sothing enormous beneath the earth kept slamming against the surface.
Then another eruption burst upward.
And another.
And another.
The ruins of New York transford into a landscape of fire.
Gigantic pillars of fla shot skyward throughout the city like burning trees clawing toward heaven.
Then the flas began falling back down.
The sky itself started raining fire.
"What the hell is happening down there?"
"This fight's getting completely out of control..."
Everyone aboard the Helicarrier stared in shock at the dozens of volcanic fire columns erupting from beneath New York.
If they'd been trapped inside that inferno...
There would've been no escape.
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