"With great power cos great responsibility..."
Gwen went ho and flopped onto her bed.
She had not expected Drex Valen to be so gentle in person. And, honestly, he was really handso.
Of course, Gwen was not the kind of hopeless face-obsessed girl Morgan was. After that brief thought, she began turning over the things Drex had said.
"With great power cos great responsibility..."
For a high school girl like Gwen, that idea felt a little too heavy. She was not Jessica, after all. She had not watched her whole world fall apart.
The reason Gwen had beco a superhero was simpler than that. She wanted to show her dad that she had grown up, help him where she could, and prove that she was capable. Beyond that, she had never really thought much about it.
Outside Gwen's window, Drex hovered in the air and watched the girl wrestle with the whole burden of heroism.
That line really was the standard motto of every superhero.
If you have the power to do sothing, and you choose not to, then the consequences of your inaction are on you.
Drex, naturally, did not carry that kind of ntal weight. He was already a mature adult.
Gwen was different. The pressure on her was still enormous, heavy enough that she was starting to think about giving up the whole superhero thing.
Too young, Drex thought.
And then he vanished.
Once Gwen had more experience, she would probably understand.
anwhile, Johnny Storm had been enjoying his recent streak of attention. He was very satisfied with how good he looked.
Then he heard screams from a nearby street.
"Monster!"
"Help!"
Johnny did not hesitate. He imdiately transford into the Human Torch and flew toward the sound.
What he found made his stomach drop.
The creature had a human-like face and wore an ancient crown. A red cape hung from its back, and its body was built like a slab of living muscle. Its skin was blue, and fin-like ridges protruded from behind it. It looked like so kind of sea-dwelling organism, except it stood upright like a man, with arms and legs shaped like a human's.
It was over three ters tall.
Right in front of Johnny, it was grinning as it stuffed a man into its mouth.
Boom!
A fireball exploded across its face.
Johnny yanked the man free, but the upper half of the poor bastard was already gone.
"Fuck!"
Johnny cursed, then nearly retched at the sight of the mutilated corpse. That was when the monster turned its attention to him and slamd a fist into his body, sending him flying.
"How strange," the creature said with a click of its tongue. "A land-dweller who burns."
"You speak English?" Johnny blurted out.
"It is only the language of land-dwellers. I learned it easily enough."
The monster grinned, all teeth and malice.
"Fine," Johnny said, trying to keep him talking. "But what do you an by land-dwellers?"
"Land-dwellers are land-dwellers. What else would it an?"
The creature lunged.
Its speed was so fast that Johnny barely had ti to react. He only had ordinary human reflexes. His fire powers did the real work in a fight like this.
Crash!
The two of them smashed straight through a house, and Johnny was knocked right back into his normal human form.
Damn it. What the hell is this thing? It is strong as hell.
When he saw the burns on the monster's skin healing at once, dead flesh sloughing away and new tissue already replacing it, cold sweat broke out across Johnny's back. He quickly transford into the Human Torch again.
"Let's see how you like being cooked!"
Johnny unleashed a torrent of fla.
The monster did not even turn around. It simply grabbed a heavy object nearby and hurled it back at him.
Thud!
Johnny was blasted away again. He slamd into a wall, grunted in pain, and collapsed to the ground, struggling to move.
It hurt. It hurt like hell.
"If I eat you, I should beco stronger."
The monster walked up to Johnny and reached down.
A transparent force field suddenly blocked its arm.
"Johnny!"
The Invisible Woman, Susan Storm, arrived.
First she wrapped Johnny in a protective force field, then used an invisible pressure wave to launch a sonic attack from range.
The monster flinched in obvious pain, but it was incredibly fast and agile. It slipped out of the way before the full force could land.
Then a hand suddenly wrapped around its right leg and began winding upward, coiling around it several tis.
Reed Richards.
Mr. Fantastic had tried to restrain the monster, but the creature was stronger than he had expected. With a violent tear, it ripped straight through Reed's stretched body.
"You land-dwellers really are stranger and stranger," the monster said, still clutching Reed in its hand.
Susan stared at the scene in disbelief, then slamd the creature with another force field and knocked it backward.
"Johnny, can you still fight?" she called urgently.
"Yeah!"
Johnny clenched his teeth.
Since becoming the Human Torch, he had never taken a beating this bad.
He pushed his fla output to maximum. Susan used her force fields to keep the fire from spreading through the area. The monster was swallowed in flas, but it quickly smashed through the wall behind it and fled outside.
"It's outside now. We can't let it eat anyone else!" Johnny shouted, panicking, and raced after it.
That only earned him a vicious counterpunch.
His face warped under the impact, and the monster seed to decide he was the biggest threat. Before Johnny could fly away, it snapped out a hand like lightning, caught him by the leg, and slamd him into the ground again and again.
"Johnny!"
Susan's eyes shrank.
She tightened both hands, and the monster suddenly felt an invisible force detonating inside its body.
"Ugh!"
Its legs gave out and it collapsed to its knees, vomiting chunks of viscera and green blood all over Johnny.
At this point nobody cared about being clean.
Reed hurried forward and pulled Johnny out of the way.
"Die!"
Susan manipulated the invisible force field around the monster and hurled it hard into a wall. The masonry exploded outward, and then she slamd it again and again.
But halfway through the barrage, Susan felt sothing was wrong.
The next second, the monster broke through the restraints of her invisible force field and charged her.
At the critical mont, Reed stretched out a hand and yanked Susan away just in ti, making the monster's attack miss completely.
"This thing is too fast, too strong, and its defense is no joke," Reed said rapidly. "Johnny just told it can heal itself too. We cannot beat it on our own. Our only option is to hold it here."
Most importantly, the monster was intelligent, and its combat instincts were frighteningly sharp. It was far more experienced than the four of them.
When it faced Johnny's flas, it chose to smash through the wall and escape. Then it imdiately followed with a surprise counterattack. They had not even had ti to react.
For this thing, battle and slaughter were probably pure instinct.
"We need to hold out until the other superheroes arrive," Reed said grimly, "or until the Dark Knight, Drex Valen, gets here."
The Fantastic Three did not have what it took to finish this monster off. It was a sha. If Ben had not insisted on staying in human form, his strength would have been enough for a straight-up brawl against this thing.
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