Kal'thal stood behind Betty Ross - Doctor Banner's original love interest. She was with her father, General Thaddeus Ross - the reason behind the existence of the Hulk. They stood near Grayburn College's campus in Brooklyn.
A lucky find after Kal searched for their names in his vague memories.
General Ross had funded and urged on the project that resulted in the gamma radiation explosion that created the green monster and everything that came after.
In his stealthed form, Kal leaned down and whispered, "Tell me where to find Samuel Sterns."
Betty visibly tensed but didn't cry out, just as Kal had suspected of the daughter of a military man.
"Tell me, and I'll help Banner by reducing the amount of casualties his actions will shore up the moment Blonsky finds him," Kal whispered enticingly.
"They are inside. His laboratory is on the second floor of the Biology Department. Room 2.109," Betty immediately answered, biting her lips as she did.
"Good luck," Kal wished and shot off in the direction of the building.
Finding the correct room proved to be much easier than he originally believed because Blonsky's transformation into the Abomination had just been successful - if you believed looking like that to be a success. And Banner had been able to escape just minutes before he had arrived. He wasn't sure if that was canon or not because he vaguely remembered Ross dragging a weakened Banner into a helicopter that would later crash before the Hulk emerged to protect Betty from harm.
But Kal let him pass for now. Both Banner earlier and Abomination for now. Instead, he entered the lab and found Sterns lying beneath a table in his smashed laboratory.
The villain's origin story was happening before Kal's very eyes.
A broken vial of Banner's gamma radiated blood was lying on the table and the green ichor slowly dripped into an open wound on Sterns' head.
"Sorry, mate. I don't want to see Fury enlist you to fight me once he learns of your existence," Kal mockingly apologized and took out a dagger that came with his sentinel equipment.
Without the need of any extra skill, the elf decapitated the man and washed out the Hulk blood from the wound just for good measure. Thinking about Marvel logic, he eventually decided against leaving the head behind entirely and flexed his mana to deal with it by creating a construct.
[Skill used: Immolation Trap]
[Survival profile partially integrated]
The elf placed Sterns' head on his mana construct together with the remaining blood of the Hulk and walked off.
A fire breaking out in the lab didn't surprise anybody after seeing the Abomination break out of the building, so Kal made his way to Harlem unhurriedly.
There, his stealthed form eventually found Banner and Blonsky duke it out in their monster alter egos.
Cars were used as boxing gloves. Buses served as nothing more than clubs as the two raging muscle mountains destroyed building after building.
"Even Patchwerk fought with more grace," Kal whispered to himself as he cast another Lifebloom on a wounded civilian.
When he watched Abomination aim a piece of concrete at a car with children stuck inside, Kal jumped from the roof he was standing on and barreled toward the villain with two swords drawn. Swords he learned he could equip if he thought about it hard enough.
It was weird, though. These swords he wielded would be given to him at a time his Night Elf self had not yet lived through. It was his Blood Elf self who learned he would be given the twin swords Quel'Thal. Forged in his honor after Kal'thal Ravencrest fought off an invasion of an entire troll tribe that wasn't part of the Horde in Ashenvale all alone during the events following the Cataclysm.
While not as powerful as the legendary 'sister blade' Quel'Delar, his swords were modeled after the powerful relic of the Queldorei, the high elves. His swords were shorter and much more slim, but they still resembled the single edge blade of old remarkably.
[Skills used: Double Jump, Blade Dance]
[Havoc profile partially integrated]
As Kal's blade repeatedly cut through Abomination's ankles, calves, and thighs, the elf's eyes started hurting and itching, and he had to squint to make sure he still saw through the pain.
[All available profiles for the sentinel class unlocked. Special boon triggered]
[Fel blood incompatibility detected due to Holy Light coursing through the user's body. Havoc skills now deal physical, shadow, and nature damage as opposed to chaos damage]
[Sentinel class changed to special legacy class unique to the user:
The Abomination screamed in pain, dropped the huge rock in his hands, and turned around to give Kal a slap to the head.
[Skill used: Blur]
Kal dodged every single attack in a manner that left the Abomination both baffled and enraged. Every single dodged attack was followed by another deep cut in the monster's body. But the cuts were visibly healing in front of Kal's very eyes.
Eyes that brimmed with power.
"Could it be?" Kal whispered to himself and forced his mana to move into his eyes.
[Skill used: Moon's Warth: Eye Beam]
A silver beam with blue and green streaks running through it extended for several feet in front of him and burned a hole in Abomination's thigh. Kal intended to aim it at Abomination's head with a swivel of his own head, but suddenly, the elf had to dodge.
"I'm on your side, you green oaf!" Kal shouted indignantly at Hulk, who had just tried to smash the elf into paste instead of their mutual enemy.
"Me smash! Pointy ears go!" Hulk shouted back and started pummeling Abomination, who was wailing in pain, one hand covering the smoldering hole on its leg, the other blocking the Hulk's blows to its head.
Putting his hood back on, Kal disappeared with the use of Vanish.
Saving a few more civilians, the newly minted Moon Sentinel eventually found himself with nothing to do. So he turned back to the fight of the muscular duo and got his two short swords that he could wield like daggers out again.
[Skills used: Premeditation, Shadow Blades, Gloomblade, Cold Blood, Eviscerate, Smoke Bomb, Shadow Dance, Ambush x2, Eviscerate, Ambush, Gloomblade, Rupture]
A flurry of stabs from a blade he couldn't see, followed by smoke filling the street that disguised how Abomination was suddenly made to scream like a pig getting slaughtered followed. That was all General Ross was able to make out from where he had a camera pointed at the fight of the two rage filled giants.
Once the smoke cleared, Hulk looked around in confusion until his eyes settled on Abomination drowning in its own blood on the ground. Blood was seeping out of every pore in its head. A giant chunk of flesh was missing from the villain's neck. Stab wounds littered every section of the monster's protruding spinal cord.
Kal had used Shadowstep to appear somewhere else before the smoke cleared. He was panting heavily as for the first time in this world, he had exerted a considerable amount of his own energy pool.
Sure, he used mana instead of actual energy, the resource rogues used in the original game universe, in the end. But between healing hundreds of civilians and doing a combo that would have emptied the energy pool of a regular rogue twice over in an instant, Kal was drained.
Reflecting on what he could have done better, the elf watched on as the Abomination actually managed to live through the mutilation he had just inflicted on it.
"What an enviable constitution... well, if you disregard that hideous physique..."
Kal sat down on a broken piece of building and watched on incredulously as the Hulk fled the scene through the sewers, eventually getting out of New York unbothered. And, General Ross still managed to take Blonsky back into custody.
"I should have trained more under Nathressa instead of trying to get into her pants. Maybe if I had grasped the intricacies of Shadowstrike over a regular Ambush, Blonsky might have died... Tyrande would never let me live this down if she knew."
Eventually after he got over his momentary exhaustion, he walked past Betty Ross without being seen and whispered, "I did all I could. Getting him back is your job now."
"I've seen people walk off after having their legs broken, how did you do that?" She asked in a quiet voice so none of the army men surrounding her would find out she was talking to someone.
"Stick with science. Leave magic to those with the mind for it," Kal quipped and disappeared from Harlem through repeated use of Shadowstep down in the subway line.
Back in his penthouse suite, Romanoff was waiting for him.
"Let me guess. You want to know why?" Kal sighed as he took off the dusty hoodie and his sweaty shirt under it.
"Why what?" Romanoff asked with a pleasant smile on her face.
"Indeed. What could I mean if you're tracking my phone? Why was I inside Sterns' lab and he suddenly has no head? Why did I help Hulk? Why did I try to kill Blonsky? And why could I allow myself to fail?"
"I thought interrogating dumb people was easy," the agent joked as she eyed Kal's sculpted body.
"Take a picture, it'll last longer," Kal scoffed and sat on a chair he had dragged over so he wouldn't sweat up the expensive upholstery of the couch.
"Am I getting any answers?" Black Widow asked as she sat up with a neutral expression.
"I'm not answering anything regarding Doctor Banner, but I bet you all I have that Fury has him on his potential Avengers-roster already. Sterns was a threat waiting to happen, so I took care of it. Blonsky is a threat, but I miscalculated. In the end though, he is no concern for me anyway."
"Speaking of Director Fury, he intends to know more about… your insights."
"Hydra or the future? Nevermind, I'm not answering either. Deal with your own problems," Kal shot back.
"You could save the lives of many," Romanoff argued back.
"Oh yeah? I could just head to all the hospitals in town and rip every human out of death's claw and save hundreds. Fly to a different city and rinse and repeat until nobody in my wake will have died of unnatural causes. Should I have nightmares because I didn't?"
"That's not wh-"
"Imagine I continue doing that for months, years even. I can grant the gift of life to people with broken organs, eliminate the need for transplants. Save kids from dying. Surely I should dedicate decades doing nothing else. And then experienced surgeons lose chances to teach their valuable knowledge to new surgeons. Slowly, doctors will stop needing to innovate because all they do is dress scrapes and prescribe antacids as they wait for me to heal their most injured patients. And then I'm suddenly gone and people die in droves. People the doctors of today would have been able to heal. And suddenly, the world starts to hate me."
Romanoff looked at Kal with complicated eyes as he eventually stood up.
"I heal those in my way. I help those I owe favors to. I am not the guardian angel of mankind. For the same reasons, I owe you no explanation for my potential future knowledge. For the same reasons, I am not fixing all of your problems for you before they become problems. You people need to get stronger on your own or your future will be looking quite bleak."
As he walked to the bathroom for a shower, he left the redhead with a last remark, "I hope my home in Malibu won't have any more surveillance tech."