Even a monster born from another dinsion was still flesh and blood at its core.
The first bullet tore into it and burst the thing open in a spray of blood.
Barnes kept advancing, the heavy machine gun braced in one hand as if recoil had no aning at all. The reinforced chanical arm Drex had enhanced with Black Hole Dinsion energy didn't buckle, didn't shake, didn't give way the way a normal limb would have.
No Spider-Man-style catch. No lucky deflection. Just relentless pressure.
By the ti Barnes had shredded the first creature apart, Drex had already claid its soul.
"Impressive," Drex murmured.
"One soul is worth more than fifty ordinary sinners."
He clicked his tongue in satisfaction.
And that was only the beginning.
The innocent people the monster had killed were taken as well, their souls swept into the Black Hole Dinsion. Drex had already locked Heaven, Hell, and even Death itself out of the soul-collection process with the Soul Stone. From now on, every soul had only one place to go.
His dinsion.
And the Black Hole Dinsion was hungry for all of it.
Johnny Blaze's arrival dragged S.H.I.E.L.D. into the disaster zone too, and he filled them in on what was happening.
This was the spearhead of a dinsional invasion.
With the gods having abandoned Earth, the monsters that had long been kept out were finally forcing their way in.
Barnes thought the worst of it was over.
It wasn't.
A second monster appeared.
Then a third.
Barnes was caught off guard and sent flying.
Fortunately, he was a Ghost Rider now. If not for that immortality, he would have been done for right there. A mont of carelessness would have been fatal.
The National Guard and the Army had already been deployed. The situation had escalated too far for S.H.I.E.L.D. to handle alone, so Fury had called the military in.
The ground trembled.
Inside nearby buildings, dishes and glassware rattled violently against counters and shelves, clinking and knocking in a sharp, panicked chorus.
The shaking lasted about five seconds before it finally faded.
"A quake?"
"Sir, take a look at this. We need to expand the containnt periter imdiately."
One of the officers wheeled out a computer monitor.
On it was a data simulation model, mapping the football stadium against the sky above it. A young blond analyst pointed at the screen with his mouse.
"This is the epicenter, this is the stadium, and this is the radius of the tremors. Our periter is sitting directly beneath the vertical shockwave path. I ran a comparison using blast-pressure principles, and at this altitude..."
A diagonal line appeared on the model, starting from the zone above the current periter. Its edge was marked at a 49-degree angle.
The line extended far beyond the area they had already cordoned off.
"In other words," the analyst said, "the periter has to be expanded."
The model made it obvious.
They had not prepared nearly enough.
Rumble.
The quakes beca more frequent, shortening to once every ten or so minutes.
In truth, they did not even need to force an evacuation. New Yorkers were not stupid. When danger kept showing up in one place, most people knew better than to stand there and wait for it to reach them. Plenty of smart ones had already started driving away from the city center, so even heading straight out of New York altogether.
The rest followed out of fear, panic, and the natural human instinct to move when everyone else is moving.
It had started in the morning, gradually building into a mass departure.
Traffic was starting to choke the outer roads, but at least inside the newly expanded periter there were fewer civilians left to clear out. It saved a great deal of evacuation work.
On the roof of a thirty-story building near the football stadium, a military squad had taken position.
Two snipers.
One spotter.
Several other soldiers ard with rocket launchers and automatic weapons.
Roughly twenty n in total.
"The number of monsters is increasing!"
"We need more manpower!"
Through the stadium, they could see the swarm of creatures inside, as well as the flaming skull fighting them. Every soldier on the roof was tense.
Damn it all, nobody had signed up for monster hunting. This was supposed to be real life, not a popcorn movie.
Rumble.
Another minor tremor hit.
The soldiers tensed, but by now the quakes were happening so often that they were no longer panicking like they had at the start.
Then ca the roar.
"ROOOOOAR!"
The vibration followed imdiately after.
This ti the sound was clearer.
Drex could even faintly see the World Wall.
It was a shifting barrier of multicolored matter, impossibly thick, dense beyond anything words could properly describe. One fiery red fragnt stood out inside it, already pressing against the edge of the boundary.
Every ti Barnes killed one of the monsters, violent shockwaves exploded from within. And every ti that happened, the horrifying roar ca again.
Each cry felt close enough to be in their faces, packed with sothing deeper than rage. There was bitterness in it. Triumph. Grief. Joy. A ss of emotions tangled together in one monstrous voice.
Boom.
A brutal impact burst in the sky, detonating in empty space.
Both visible and invisible shockwaves spread outward from that point.
Rumble.
This one hit harder than anything before it.
People on the ground staggered. Many lost their balance entirely.
Glass curtain walls on several buildings shattered under the force of the blast.
Car alarms went off across the streets below, a rising tallic chorus of panic.
"Command Center, Command Center, we're taking impact! Aircraft control is lost, repeat, aircraft control is lost!"
Several helicopters circling overhead were struck by the shockwave and began spinning wildly through the air.
The pilots fought the controls with everything they had, but inertia was winning.
No one paid them much attention.
The sky above New York had turned red.
An eerie mirror-like crack appeared in the air, widening by tiny incrents, as if reality itself had split and was now trying to keep the fracture from tearing open completely.
Then it failed.
In the blink of an eye, it was like a dam wall giving way under floodwater.
A torrent of molten, lava-like substance burst out of the unknown space beyond.
The sky looked like it had caught fire.
Temperatures across the city surged violently upward.
The lava-like material vaporized the buildings directly beneath it, along with everything else in its path. Then, just as suddenly, the temperature dropped slightly, though the air remained brutally hot and visibly warped by the heat.
Wherever it spread, even steel lted into liquid tal within a few breaths.
Much of the fire remained suspended in the sky, gathering together in a writhing mass.
A savage roar thundered out, shaking the air.
The sound battered the ears of the troops on the ground and the civilians still trapped nearby. In several places, fires broke out spontaneously.
Then a massive arm, burning with orange-red fla, punched out of the inferno.
A tail followed.
The fire mass abruptly shredded and vanished, revealing what had been hiding inside.
A monstrous body erged.
It had bat-like wings made of fla and magma, four legs, two arms, and a head shaped like a horned beast. One hand held a long burning whip. The other ended in a set of vicious claws. A tail long enough to dwarf its body lashed behind it.
The thing had to be twenty or thirty ters tall, and even its tail was hard to judge at a glance.
The mont the surrounding flas dispersed, the creature began falling in free drop.
Boom.
It crashed onto the roof of a twenty-story residential building in the center of New York City.
Every scope on the ground, every targeting system in the air, imdiately locked onto that point.
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