Chapter 6: The Gaze of a Poor Mage
A single penny can stump a hero, and this holds just as true for a mage.
Arthur squatted in a corner of the warehouse, pulling out the money in his pocket to count it for the third time.
Four twenties, and a five-dollar bill that had somehow gotten mixed in.
Eighty-five dollars.
It was five dollars more than he had previously estimated, but that didn't change anything.
In Azeroth, a mage's life was much easier. The mage towers in Dalaran provided room and board, basic magicmaterials were reimbursed by the guild, and if one was truly short on cash, they could take on a bounty mission to clear out a few Kobold nests outside Stormwind City, easily earning dozens of gold coins.
But this was the Marvel Universe.
There were no mage towers, no guilds, and no Adventurers' Associations. Instead, there was rent, utilities, food, and a modern society that relied heavily on paper currency to function.
He had even seriously considered washing dishes at a restaurant in Chinatown. At an hourly wage of eight-fifty, working a full month would bring in about fourteen hundred before taxes.
Fourteen hundred.
Just maintaining the energy consumption of his Magic Perception network every day, converted into food calories, would cost him nearly twenty dollars in groceries. And that didn't even include rent or the cost of research materials.
The honest path was a dead end. Yesterday's conclusion had been proven right all day today; it was still the same.
Arthur stuffed the money back into his pocket, closed his eyes, and expanded his perception once more.
This was his fourth day in New York. For the first three days, he had thoroughly scouted every building, every pipe, and every abnormal energy source within a three-kilometer radius. He had scanned that underground vault hidden beneath the imported food wholesale company no less than ten times.
But tonight, his perception caught a new movement.
It wasn't the wholesale company. Further away, towards the Queens docks, a large number of energy signals were gathering.
The thermal energy of vehicle engines, the chemical signatures of gunpowder, and the specific bio-electric fluctuations of human adrenaline spikes.
Someone was very nervous. Someone was moving heavy objects. Someone was carrying enough firepower to arm a platoon.
Arthur's attention extended over there.
The docks. A large cold storage facility. A rusty iron sign hung on the outer wall: Vladimir Seafood.
He spent about three minutes using his perception network to see through the place from inside out.
Six perimeter sentries. Their distribution was logical, with overlapping fields of vision and stable shift frequencies; only someone with formal military training would set up defenses this way.
Inside the cold storage, there were over thirty life forms, most of them carrying weapons. Rifles, pistols, and in a corner, there were two items whose energy signatures made him take a second look. RPGs and C4.
Had this bunch of Russians turned to smuggling to the point of being equipped with anti-armor weapons?
But what truly interested him wasn't the weapons.
It was the money.
In a cubicle deep within the cold storage, the density of paper bills was absurdly high. Money counters were running—at least three working simultaneously. The chemical residues attached to the bills—cocaine metabolites and trace molecules of methamphetamine—emitted an unpleasant grayish-green fluorescence in his perception.
Drug money. A massive amount of drug money was being counted.
While he was observing, a bulletproof Mercedes drove into the open space in front of the cold storage.
The car was very new, its chassis reinforced with steel plates, and its glass was bulletproof—these details were plain as day under Magic Perception.
The car door opened.
A bald man stepped out; he was massive, his suit jacket couldn't be buttoned, and a cigar was perched in the corner of his mouth. He carried a briefcase in each hand. The density of the paper bills inside the cases matched that of the cold storage.
The guards surrounded him, bowing and scraping. The bald man swaggered into the cold storage, and the iron door closed behind him.
Dividing the spoils.
Arthur stood up from the windowsill.
He didn't have any moral qualms about robbing the rich to help the poor. The Church of the Holy Light in Azeroth had a very practical view of wealth: every second a gold coin remained in the hands of an evil person was a crime against the good.
Of course, what those people in the Church of the Holy Light said and what they actually did were often two different things.
But that didn't stop the phrase itself from being very useful.
Arthur found a dark hoodie in the warehouse and put it on. It was his only outfit. He pulled the hood low, obscuring his eyes.
No robes, no staff, no iconic equipment.
An Asian face wearing a cheap hoodie, walking the streets of Queens, looked no different from the countless delivery guys all over the city.
This was the best disguise for now.
From the warehouse to the docks, it was a twenty-minute walk.
He didn't use teleportation, he didn't use Blink, and he didn't even use any auxiliary spells to enhance his speed. He walked. It was the most primitive, least mana-consuming, and least likely to leave an energy trail.
On the way, he passed a pizza shop that was still lit up. Heat billowed out from the gap in the door, carrying the scent of cheese and tomato sauce.
His stomach cramped.
He had only eaten one can of tuna today.
"I'll buy one on the way back later," he told himself. "A large one."
At 11:40 PM, he reached the dock area.
The sea breeze blew from the direction of the East River, carrying the smell of diesel and saltwater. Most of the dock's streetlights were broken, and the few remaining ones flickered feebly, their orange light barely reaching ten meters.
The cold storage was two hundred meters ahead.
Arthur stopped and did a final check on the distribution of personnel inside.
Thirty-four people.
The bald boss was in the innermost office area, surrounded by four personal bodyguards. The rest were scattered throughout the cold storage—some counting money, some playing cards, some smoking and chatting. The positions of the six perimeter sentries hadn't changed.
Arthur pulled his hood down a bit more.
He didn't plan on crawling through ventilation ducts, nor did he plan on finding cover.
When a mage does things, they value efficiency.
He stepped out from the shadow of the containers and onto the concrete road leading to the main entrance of the cold storage.
His footsteps were clear. The soles of his leather boots were hard, making a rhythmic sound against the concrete. He didn't bother to tread lightly.
After about thirty steps, the first sentry spotted him.
"стой! Кто идёт?"
Russian. It meant 'Halt! Who goes there?'
Searchlights flicked on. Two high-powered industrial searchlights swung over from the top of the cold storage door, their white beams slamming onto him.
Arthur didn't stop. He kept walking.
More sentries emerged—from atop containers, from behind abandoned forklifts, from gaps in the chain-link fence. The sound of guns being cocked rose one after another, the crisp metallic clicks exceptionally clear in the night wind.
Ten gun barrels were all pointed at him.
Arthur stopped fifteen meters from the cold storage gate. Not because he was afraid, but because this distance was exactly within his optimal casting range.
He looked up, letting the searchlight's glare into his hood, but the angle was such that only the lower half of his face was visible.
"Good evening, everyone."
Chinese. He was speaking Chinese.
The Russians opposite him naturally couldn't understand. The lead guard Captain, a large man with an Orthodox cross tattooed on his neck, barked in English.
"Who the hell are you? This place isn't open to the public!"
"I know," Arthur switched to English. His accent was standard East Coast, creating a sense of dissonance with his Asian face. "I'm not here to buy seafood."
"Then what are you here for?"
"A robbery."
The dock fell silent for a second.
The sea breeze blew. A few seagulls, startled by the searchlights, flapped their wings and flew away.
Then the ten fully armed Russian mobsters laughed simultaneously.
That kind of laughter was hard to describe. It wasn't the laughter of being amused, but the kind seen when a mouse walks into a cat's nest. Overbearing, with a cruel pleasure.
The Captain with the cross laughed the loudest. He said something in Russian to the person next to him, and the people around him laughed even harder.
Arthur understood. The Captain said that this Chinese guy was out of his mind.
Arthur didn't correct him. Even if he did, they wouldn't understand.
"You alone?" The Captain stopped laughing, though his mouth was still curled. "Robbing over thirty of us?"
"Thirty-four," Arthur said. "Ten outside, twenty-four inside. Your boss is in the innermost office with four bodyguards. There's a silver Desert Eagle in the second drawer of the desk, but the safety is off."
The laughter stopped.
It didn't fade away; it was cut off all at once.
The Captain's expression change was quite interesting. First came shock, then wariness, and finally, a layer of genuine murderous intent rose in his eyes.
A stranger appearing at their stronghold's doorstep late at night not only knew the internal headcount but also knew where the boss kept his personal weapon.
A mole. An undercover. Or worse, an advance scout for some rival power.
"Kill him."
The Captain didn't use English this time. Russian. Short and forceful.
Arthur understood.
He extended his right index finger and tapped the air in front of him. It was a casual gesture, like knocking on an invisible door.
"Before you shoot," he said, "I should still give a warning."
"Fire!"
The Captain didn't give him a chance to finish.
Ten guns fired simultaneously.
The dense gunfire tore through the dock's night. Casings ejected from the ports, tumbling in the white searchlight glare and reflecting a shower of golden arcs.
That tapping gesture wasn't for show.
It was the trigger gesture for [Mana Shield], the most basic yet practical protective spell in Azeroth's arcane defense system.
Deep blue light burst from his fingertips.
In an instant, arcane energy extended from a single point into countless geometric lines, weaving into a complete spherical force field that enveloped him entirely.
Bullets slammed into the surface of the shield.
They didn't penetrate. They didn't ricochet.
The moment the bullet heads touched the blue light membrane, all their kinetic energy was completely absorbed.
They hovered three centimeters outside the light membrane, stayed for less than half a second, then lost all velocity and fell with a clatter.
A small patch of copper-colored bullet heads covered the ground.
The gunfire continued. But no one was aiming anymore.
Because they were seeing a scene completely beyond their comprehension. An Asian man in a hoodie, standing in the middle of a dense barrage, surrounded by a layer of flowing blue light, with dozens of bullets piled at his feet.
The gunfire stopped sporadically.
One, two, three.
Finally, even the gun in the Captain's hand went silent.
The dock returned to silence, save for the occasional faint metallic sound of cooling casings.
Arthur looked down at the bullet heads at his feet. Copper-colored, shiny, they covered a small patch.
"Are you done?"
No one answered.
"Then it's my turn."
Chapter 7
Arthur walked inside.
He stepped over a pile of shell casings, the copper shells clinking as he kicked them.
The guards at the entrance had emptied their magazines; the triggers clicked on empty chambers, yet not one person thought to reload.
They just watched.
They watched that person in the hoodie walk over from the pile of casings, wrapped in blue light, his pace neither fast nor slow.
Not even the hem of his hoodie was wrinkled.
Someone dropped their gun.
Someone's legs gave out, and they slid down against a shipping container.
Arthur didn't look at them.
He walked to the cold storage iron door and stood still.
The door was very thick. Special steel plate, at least half a ton. There were three rows of rivets on the door frame; small explosives were useless against it.
Arthur raised his hand.
His palm faced the door panel, and he pushed through the air.
Arcane Blast.
The entire iron door detached from the frame. As the rivets were pulled from the concrete, they made a series of muffled thuds. The door panel flipped twice in the air and crashed deep into the cold storage.
Two people who were about to rush out from behind the door were flattened onto the ground.
The sound was sickening.
Arthur stepped over the threshold.
It was brighter inside the cold storage than outside. A row of industrial incandescent lights hung overhead, making everyone's face look deathly pale. More than twenty people were scattered about, some counting U.S. dollars, others moving boxes.
Now, everything stopped.
Behind the table at the very back sat a bald man.
A very large bald head. A gold chain as thick as a finger hung around his neck, with four bodyguards by his side. On the table were several open briefcases, packed neatly with U.S. dollar bills.
It was exactly as he had scanned with Magic Perception.
The bald boss stood up. He looked at the iron door that had been smashed in, then looked at the person walking in slowly at the entrance.
"Use the RPG."
His voice was flat, but his fingers were trembling.
"Blast him."
A burly man emerged from the corner, carrying an RPG-7. The launcher aimed at the entrance.
He pulled the trigger.
The Rocket trailed fire as it flew over, lighting the entire cold storage in orange-red.
Arthur disappeared.
One second he was standing directly in front of the Rocket, the next second that spot was empty.
The Rocket passed through the air and slammed into a shipping container outside the door. Explosion. Firelight. The shockwave sent the paper money in the cold storage flying everywhere.
Then Arthur appeared in the center of the hall.
Appearing out of thin air.
Less than five meters away from the bald boss's table.
Blink.
A mage's displacement skill. It wasn't that his speed was too fast to see, but an instantaneous displacement of spatial coordinates. He hadn't passed through the distance in between at all.
More than thirty people surrounded him. Gun barrels, blades, fists—they had everything.
Not one person moved.
"Devil." Someone shouted in Russian, their voice cracking.
The bald boss didn't shout.
He did something no one expected.
He lunged at the table beside him and ripped off the tablecloth.
A row of C4 explosives was strapped under the table.
He gripped the detonator in his hand. A red button. His thumb was already pressing down on it.
"Die together."
Arthur raised his index finger and pointed it at him.
A pink light shot out from his fingertip.
"Bang."
A puff of white smoke.
It had nothing to do with an explosion. It was that comical, fluffy white smoke that only appeared in stage magic.
The smoke cleared.
The bald boss was gone.
Standing in his place was a sheep.
White and fluffy.
Around its neck hung a thick gold chain as thick as a finger.
The sheep looked down at its hooves, then looked up at its surroundings. There was nothing in those eyes, just the emptiness a sheep should have.
The detonator fell to the ground, rolled twice, and the indicator light flashed.
It went out.
"Baa."
The sheep began to gnaw on the table leg.
No one moved.
No one spoke.
More than thirty armed adult men watched a sheep wearing a gold chain gnawing on a table leg.
They collectively lost their ability to act.
Arthur didn't give them time to recover.
He stomped his right foot on the ground.
The force was about the same as crushing a cigarette butt.
Frost Nova.
A crowd control skill unlocked at Lv.5. Instant cast, no wind-up, freezing an area centered on himself.
Transparent ice spread out from under his feet in all directions. The speed was extremely fast; the naked eye could only catch a blue-white halo sweeping across the ground.
A man raising his gun, his finger still on the trigger, was frozen into an ice sculpture from feet to head. His expression was frozen at the moment of aiming.
A person running backward, his right foot raised in mid-air, was frozen in place.
The shell casings tossed into the air, not yet landed, were frozen in mid-air.
The sheep that was gnawing on the table leg, its mouth still biting the wood, was also frozen.
Crack, crack, crack.
The sound was dense and crisp.
Then it was quiet.
The temperature of the entire cold storage dropped below zero. The breath exhaled turned into white mist, and frost could form on eyelashes.
More than thirty ice sculptures. Various postures. Some fearful, some angry, some bewildered, and some running away.
And one frozen sheep wearing a gold chain.
Arthur walked to the table and picked up the briefcase full of U.S. dollars. He weighed it.
The weight was okay.
He tucked the briefcase under his arm, walked through the ice sculptures, and headed out.
He stopped for a moment when passing the ice sheep.
He looked down at those frozen, empty eyes.
He didn't say anything.
He left.
...
Ten minutes later.
Siren sounds.
A black SUV stopped at the entrance of the cold storage. The car door opened, and a team of people jumped out.
Daisy Johnson walked at the front. She held an energy tracker in her hand, the needle spinning like crazy.
She kicked the iron door—the door was already off its frame. Her feet stepped inside, and cold air crept into her pant legs.
Then she stopped.
Ice sculptures everywhere.
The air was piercingly cold.
In the center of the hall, a sheep with a gold chain around its neck, maintaining the pose of gnawing on the table leg, was frozen solid.
Daisy stared at the sheep.
She stared for five seconds.
She slowly turned her head to look at her teammates, who were equally petrified behind her.
"Can someone tell me what the hell is going on?"
No one could tell her.
An Agent crouched down to touch the surface of an ice sculpture, and his finger immediately stuck to it.
"The person inside is still alive." Another Agent held up a vital signs detector. "Heart rate is three to five beats per minute. Extremely slowed down, but not stopped. It's equivalent to some kind of... hibernation."
Daisy circled the sheep. The scanner showed that the DNA sequence inside the sheep had a 99.7% match with the human DNA in the ice sculptures next to it.
This sheep was that person.
She closed her eyes for a moment.
"Coulson."
"Here," Coulson's voice came through the earpiece.
"Tell Fury I need an additional budget for two mainframes."
"...Why two?"
"One to replace the one that was burned. The other one to analyze this sheep."
The earpiece was silent for three seconds.
"I will pass it on exactly as said."
...
A few kilometers away from the pier.
Arthur walked down the street carrying the briefcase.
There was about four hundred thousand in the box. Not the target of five hundred thousand, but enough for him to live comfortably for a while. The bed needed to be changed to a bigger one. The soundproofing in the warehouse needed to be done. The food also had to be improved; eating frozen dumplings every day wasn't a sustainable thing.
In the dead of night in Queens, there was almost no one on the road. Occasionally a taxi passed by, the sound of tires rolling over puddles coming from far away.
A person rushed out from the mouth of an alley and slammed into him.
A very thin teenager. Old jacket, black-rimmed glasses, face full of panic. Sixteen or seventeen years old.
"Sorry! Sorry, sorry!" He apologized repeatedly, retreating in a panic.
Arthur hadn't paid attention at first.
But the moment the teenager slammed into him, Magic Perception automatically fed back a set of data.
Something was wrong.
The way energy flowed in this body was completely abnormal. It wasn't the innate genetic mutation of Inhumans, nor was it a mechanical energy source implanted by external technology. It was a rewrite in progress—some kind of foreign biological information was overwriting the genetic codes in the cell nuclei one by one.
The speed was very fast.
Every second, millions of cells completed reconstruction.
Arthur's attention swept over the teenager's exposed back of the neck.
There was a swollen mark there. The wound was very fresh, and the surrounding skin temperature was at least three degrees higher than normal body temperature. Two extremely fine puncture points, spaced about four millimeters apart.
Not a snake bite. Not a bee sting.
The spacing and depth of the puncture points were closer to... the chelicerae of an arthropod.
The teenager didn't notice his scrutiny and ran away in a panic.
Arthur stood in place.
He looked down at the arm that had just been bumped.
The force of the impact wasn't great. But the reaction speed was wrong. When the teenager rushed out of the alley, he was almost about to hit his briefcase, but he deflected his body in the last 0.1 seconds, only touching his forearm.
An ordinary sixteen or seventeen-year-old teenager shouldn't have this kind of proprioceptive accuracy.
Arthur withdrew his attention and continued walking forward.
The briefcase swayed in his hand.
The chelicerae of an arthropod.
Foreign genes rewriting the entire body's cells.
And a reaction speed far exceeding that of an ordinary person.
He remembered something.
But he didn't chase after him.
Tonight's harvest was already enough.
That teenager...
We'll talk another day.
Chapter 8: The Fat Sheep of Hell's Kitchen
Three million.
Arthur counted the Benjamin Franklins in the briefcase for a second time, confirming he hadn't miscounted.
In New York, that was enough for an ordinary person to lie flat for half a lifetime.
But he was not an ordinary person.
Just maintaining the daily energy consumption of the Magic Perception network, when converted into food calories, burned through twenty dollars a day.
Add in warehouse rent, research materials, and the mage tower he would eventually have to build—even the most basic spatial anchoring array required rare minerals that couldn't be measured in U.S. dollars.
Three million wouldn't last long.
Arthur closed the case and shoved it under a loose floorboard in the corner of the warehouse.
Leaning against the wall, the image of the teenager who had bumped into him half an hour ago flashed through his mind.
Old jacket, black-rimmed glasses, two needle-point puncture marks on the back of his neck, and the genetic code inside his body was being rewritten cell by cell by some kind of foreign information.
Spider.
Likely a spider.
Not something to worry about tonight.
The most pressing issue right now was money.
Three million wasn't enough.
Five million wasn't enough either.
The number he needed had to be large enough that he wouldn't have to calculate his daily food expenses every time he went out.
Since he was going to rob the rich to help the poor, and he was the poor one, he had to pick the fattest rich target.
Thanos and the Celestials were still far off.
But he had already scouted out several places on the ground in New York where he could make money.
Arthur pulled up his hood and pushed open the warehouse's iron door.
Target: Hell's Kitchen.
S.H.I.E.L.D., Trident Tower.
Two in the morning.
Daisy Johnson hadn't washed her hair in three days.
Her newly replaced workstation had six screens lit up, running the tracking program she had rewritten twice.
Facial recognition, gait analysis, thermal imaging, voiceprint comparison—she had tried them all.
All useless.
That person carried some kind of refractive interference field, and all optical capture methods failed within half a meter of him.
She had run over ten thousand comparisons in three days and hadn't gotten a single clear face.
Daisy bit on the plastic stick of her lollipop and typed the codename "Mr. Peeping Tom" into the tracking log.
Just as she was preparing to shut down and get two hours of sleep, an encrypted alert popped up in the top right corner of the screen.
[Warning: High-frequency energy peak detected at 11th Avenue, Hell's Kitchen.]
She pulled up the waveform and cross-referenced it with the intrusion incident from three days ago.
Match rate: 97.6%.
Daisy's fingers were already moving.
Bypassing three security authorizations, she remotely activated a hummingbird micro-drone.
With a wingspan of less than ten centimeters and equipped with multi-band sensors, it was launched from the top of the tower and flew toward Hell's Kitchen.
She stared at the rapidly moving green dot on the screen.
"Don't let me waste three days of staying up for nothing this time."
Hell's Kitchen.
After midnight, one-third of the streetlights on 11th Avenue were broken.
Arthur stood opposite an underground club called "Red Cossack" and deployed Magic Perception.
Brick walls and concrete turned translucent in his perception.
First floor, dance floor, gambling tables, seventy or eighty gamblers.
Not worth mentioning.
Downwards.
The Underground Room.
A man was hung by iron chains in the middle of the room, his left eye swollen shut.
Two thugs stood nearby, one holding pliers, the other smoking.
In the back, a large mahogany table.
Sitting behind the table was a burly man with a neck thicker than his head.
Ivan Vanko.
The biggest Russian arms dealer and money launderer in Hell's Kitchen.
His hands were stained with more blood than the bullets he sold.
Three money counters were running simultaneously on the table, and sequential U.S. dollar bills were neatly stacked into waterproof sealed bags, then packed into silver cash transport cases.
Arthur roughly scanned the scale of the pile of cash.
Much more than the batch from the cold storage yesterday.
At least eight figures.
You're the one.
He circled to the back alley of the club, not having walked three steps.
"Hey! Stop!"
Three men swayed out from the shadows.
Slavic faces, flushed red from drinking, holding sharpened machetes in their hands.
Military grade.
The tallest one in the middle, with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, scanned Arthur up and down.
"Halloween is still a month away, what are you pretending to be in that ragged hoodie?"
The bald guy next to him laughed: "If I didn't know better, I'd think it was a delivery guy who took a wrong turn."
The one with the cigarette patted Arthur's shoulder with the back of his blade.
"Empty your pockets, turn around, and get lost. The boss is busy today and in a good mood, I don't feel like dirtying my blade."
Arthur lowered his head, looking at the machete on his shoulder.
He twisted his right wrist.
A short staff slid out of his sleeve and into his palm.
This was the novice staff gifted by the system panel when he transmigrated; the wooden staff body was embedded with a dim blue crystal core, and the panel attribute was a pathetic +5 spell power.
But it wasn't the attributes that Arthur valued.
This thing was hard enough and heavy enough.
Holding it was no different from holding a short steel rod.
The one with the cigarette hadn't finished speaking.
The staff whipped across his jaw.
The sound of bone shattering was crisp and clean.
His jawbone was directly dislocated, half his face crooked in a direction it shouldn't be.
He fell backward, the back of his head hitting the wall, knocking him out instantly.
The second thug had only raised his machete halfway.
Arthur stepped forward half a step.
The staff whipped upward, striking his wrist squarely.
The machete flew out of his hand, smashing into a trash pile five meters away.
Immediately after, the staff body swept across his knee, the thug dropped by half, and before he could scream, the head of the staff jabbed into his temple, and he went limp.
The bald guy reacted the fastest and turned to run.
He ran two steps.
The staff flew from behind, hitting him square in the back of the head.
The bald guy flopped to the ground, face-planting into a mouthful of gravel.
Arthur walked over, picked up the staff, and wiped it on his pant leg.
Three seconds. Three people.
No spells activated, no skills used.
"Mages don't necessarily have to cast fireballs when they fight."
He tucked the staff back behind his waist and walked to the end of the back alley.
An explosion-proof iron door blocked the way there.
Gray coating, three circles of rivets, and from the door gap, you could tell it was at least ten centimeters of composite steel plate.
Conventional demolition tools couldn't handle it.
Arthur raised his hand.
Five fingers spread, palm forward.
The few remaining lit light tubes around him exploded simultaneously, glass shards falling all over the ground.
Heat in the air was sucked away in a large area, and the temperature plummeted.
Arcane energy condensed into a ball in his palm.
The blue light cast hard-edged shadows in the dark alley.
"Arcane Blast."
The ball of light was pushed out.
The explosion-proof door held for less than half a second.
The centerline deformed, snapped, and the entire steel plate flew off the door frame.
The dull thuds of rivets being ripped from the concrete merged into one, and the door panel flipped twice in the air before smashing deep into the Underground Room.
The two people just about to rush out from behind the door were flattened on the ground.
The sound was horrible.
Arthur stepped over the threshold.
The Underground Room was brighter than outside.
A row of industrial incandescent lights hung, illuminating every face until they were deathly pale.
More than thirty heavily armed Russians were scattered everywhere; those counting U.S. dollars, those moving cases, all stopped.
Dozens of guns pointed at him almost simultaneously.
AK-47s, micro-submachine guns, two Glocks with silencers.
The sound of safeties being clicked off crowded together, click-clack, click-clack.
Infrared laser sights cut through the smoke and dust, densely landing on him.
Arthur stood in the blasted doorway and counted.
Thirty-two red dots.
He reached out and straightened his collar, which had been skewed by the Impact.
"The biggest arms dealer in Hell's Kitchen, and this is all the firepower you have? Not even a single heavy machine gun?"
In the deepest part, Ivan Vanko stood up from behind the mahogany table.
A little over two meters tall.
His gold chain was thicker than the one on the sheep's neck in the cold storage.
Veins popped on his forehead, and he spat out a long string of Russian profanities.
Then he added in English.
"Kill him."
Chapter 9: The Value of Mana Shield
Ivan's voice bounced back and forth between the concrete walls.
"Kill him!"
More than thirty guns opened fire simultaneously.
The gunshots layered into a single roar in the enclosed space, numbing the eardrums. The sound of shell casings jumping from the ejection ports and hitting the cement floor was completely drowned out. The smell of sulfur instantly filled the entire Underground Room.
Arthur stood at the doorway, unmoving.
The Mana Shield lit up.
A blue curtain of light grew from beneath his feet, enveloping his entire body in less than a blink of an eye.
The bullets struck.
Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding—
The sound was so dense that no intervals could be heard. The moment hundreds of 7.62mm rounds hit the light screen, their kinetic energy dropped to zero. The copper jackets deformed under high heat and slid down the curved surface, falling one after another at his feet, forming a thin layer.
It was the exact same script as the pier cold storage three days ago.
The difference was that these people had heavier firepower and more ammunition.
And, this time, Arthur didn't even bother to check his mana bar.
The gunfire thinned out. The sound of empty magazines clicking rose one after another.
It went quiet.
"Switch to armor-piercing rounds!" Ivan leaned most of his body out from behind the table, his voice cracking. "He's a Mutant! Hit him with armor-piercing rounds!"
Someone's hands trembled as they rummaged through an ammunition box.
Arthur moved.
He didn't retreat.
He stomped his right foot onto the ground.
Frost Nova.
A blue-white Impact of extreme cold burst from under his feet, spreading across the floor in all directions.
This wasn't the first time he'd used this skill. But the situation this time was different.
The Underground Room was a fully enclosed space. The ceiling was three meters high, the walls were enclosed on four sides, and ventilation relied entirely on pipes. The extreme cold energy released by Frost Nova had no space to dissipate—it was all trapped inside.
The temperature plummeted below zero in a second.
The water vapor in the air condensed on a large scale. Frost flowers crawled over the casings of the industrial incandescent lamps, refracting the light into fragments and leaving the Underground Room in a patchwork of light and shadow. The fire pipes on the ceiling cracked from the freeze, and the water flowing out turned into ice shards before even hitting the floor.
Frost hung on the walls. Frost hung on the table. Frost hung on the gun barrels.
The dozen or so people in the front row had their feet nailed to the ground. Their boots and pant legs were frozen into the ice; they tugged hard a few times, but they didn't budge an inch.
Someone tried to fire. The trigger was pulled halfway when their finger froze. The temperature of the iron trigger had dropped to below minus forty degrees; bare skin stuck to the metal, and pulling it away tore off a layer of skin.
This was different from the cold storage incident.
That time was about freezing people.
This time was about freezing the entire field.
The entire Underground Room had turned into an ice cave.
The first to surrender was the youngest thug. He looked less than twenty. He threw his gun away, raised his hands over his head, and shouted a string of Russian; the general meaning was that he was quitting.
The second. The third.
More guns thudded onto the ground, the sound of metal hitting ice crisp and clear.
"Usele..." Ivan stood up from behind the table and cursed half a word before being choked by his own breath.
It was so cold in the Underground Room that the white mist he exhaled turned directly into fine ice shards, stinging his face.
He opened his mouth but didn't make another sound.
Arthur walked inward across the ice. His footsteps were exceptionally clear on the frozen ground. He walked past the frozen thugs, past the people kneeling on the ground who had thrown away their guns, and past the shivering ammunition boxes.
Step by step, unhurried.
Ivan took a step back. Then another. His back hit the wall.
"What... what do you want?"
"To take the money."
After Arthur spoke, he glanced at the pile of neatly bundled U.S. dollars on the table.
"Is this all?"
Ivan didn't reply. His hands were moving.
Not the kind of movement for surrendering with raised hands. He was reaching into his jacket.
Arthur saw it.
But he didn't move to stop him.
Because he wanted to see what other trump cards this man had.
The bald guy at the cold storage could only scream and shout at the end; besides a detonator, he had no surprising moves.
But Ivan was different.
From the moment he entered the Underground Room until now, fear was fear, but his eyes were constantly darting around. Even with his subordinates completely incapacitated, he was still looking for a way out; this kind of person was often the most difficult and dangerous to deal with.
Ivan pulled something out from his jacket.
A palm-sized red device. It had a plastic shell, and the protective cover had already been flipped open, revealing the button inside.
A detonator.
But that wasn't what concerned Arthur.
His Magic Perception had scanned the internal structure of the device the moment Ivan reached for it—a wireless frequency transmitter, signal encryption with double verification, and an additional set of bio-electric sensors.
A heartbeat sensor.
This thing was strapped to his body. Pressed against his lower back, it had been working all along, constantly collecting his heart rate signals.
It wasn't a temporary measure pulled out because he was desperate. This thing had been activated from the moment he walked into this Underground Room tonight.
A daily insurance policy.
In Ivan's line of work, he was prepared to go up in smoke with his stronghold at any time.
"See this?" Ivan flipped the protective cover further open, exposing the button, his voice carrying a strange calmness. The fear was still there, but it was suppressed by something else.
He used his free hand to rip away the waterproof tarp piled on the table.
Underneath the cloth wasn't money.
Grayish-white brick-shaped solids, bundled block by block with gray tape, stacked even more neatly than the U.S. dollars outside.
C4.
Military plastic explosives. Wires extended from each block, converging into a bundle that connected to the red detonator.
Arthur did a rough count.
With this amount, blowing up the entire building would be no problem. The windows of the neighboring two blocks wouldn't survive either.
"I've been on this street for seventeen years." Ivan's Russian accent grew heavier, and his English was stumbling, but every word was clear. "I've seen Mutants. I've seen drug dealers. I've seen the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Not one of them has been able to drag me out from behind this table."
His thumb rested on the button.
"This device is linked to my heartbeat. I press it, it blows. I let go, it blows. My heart stops—"
He grinned, revealing a mouthful of teeth yellowed by smoke.
"—it also blows."
Footsteps.
In the corner of the Underground Room, a few subordinates who hadn't been frozen began to crawl toward the exit. No one cared if the boss lived or died; they just wanted to get out of the blast radius.
Ivan didn't look at them. He only stared at Arthur.
"You turn around and walk out, and you take half this money. I won't pursue it. From now on, we're even."
He paused.
"Or you kill me. Then everyone on this street, including yourself, will join me in a coffin."
The Underground Room fell silent.
A faint cracking sound came from the ice. The control effect of Frost Nova was decaying, and cracks began to appear in the ice covering the frozen thugs.
Arthur looked at the red device in Ivan's hand.
Heartbeat-linked detonation.
Killing him would trigger the blast. Controlling him—if Polymorph took effect, such a massive change in biological signs would highly likely trigger the sensor alarm, and it would blow just the same.
Freeze him? Vital signs would slow down extremely, with the heart rate dropping to three to five times per minute. What was the sensor's threshold setting?
This required time to judge.
But Ivan wouldn't give him time.
Deep within the ventilation pipes, that Hummingbird Drone with a wingspan of less than ten centimeters had been working all along. The micro-camera transmitted every frame of footage through an encrypted channel to a location three thousand kilometers away.
S.H.I.E.L.D. Headquarters.
Daisy Johnson leaned her hands on the table. The footage on the six screens had undergone multiple rounds of enhancement processing, and she had witnessed the entire battle from start to finish.
On the right side of the screen was the supercomputer's real-time analysis report. Data was rolling.
[Target energy field output constant. No decay curve.]
[Physical projectile kinetic energy absorption rate: 100%. Recoil coefficient: 0. Thermal dissipation: 0.]
[Energy conversion path—unable to model.]
[System Prompt: Does not conform to known energy conservation frameworks.]
She read the last line three times.
Does not conform to energy conservation frameworks.
She had worked in the S.H.I.E.L.D. data analysis department for six years and had handled triple-digit files on powered individuals. Whether they were Mutants or enhanced humans, no matter how ridiculous the ability, running it through the supercomputer would always yield a decay curve.
They would always get tired. There was always an upper limit.
This one didn't have one.
The energy graph provided by the supercomputer was a flat line. Horizontal. It had been run three times with the same result.
Her gaze shifted to the real-time footage.
In the Underground Room, the floor was covered in ice sculptures and shell casings. A person in a hoodie stood before a mahogany table, across from a burly man clutching a C4 detonator.
The image froze at this moment.
Neither side moved.
Daisy picked up the encrypted communicator on the table and pressed the channel button.
"Coulson."
"Listening."
"Tell Fury to watch the live stream."
Chapter 10: Hacker Skye's Mania
S.H.I.E.L.D., Trident Tower.
Daisy Johnson's coffee cup stopped at her lips; she forgot to drink.
She refreshed the thermal imaging analysis data three times before confirming she hadn't misread it. After a quick conversion of the C4's yield, she realized it was enough to wipe an entire block off the map of New York and punch a few ventilation holes in the surrounding buildings.
The detonator was linked to a heartbeat.
Suicide bombers in the Middle East used similar setups, but she had never seen anyone pair this system with military-grade C4. This was a city-wide threat on the level of a dirty bomb.
"Large yield explosives detected in the target area!" Daisyspoke, her ten fingers already racing across the keyboard. "Requesting forced intervention."
The standard jargon of the command center came through the communicator: "Agent Johnson, your override quota—"
"I know."
She didn't wait for the sentence to finish, burning through her three remaining override quotas for the quarter in one go.
Intrusion path: Civil broadcasting system in the 11th Avenue sector of Hells Kitchen.
The security level of this system was about as sturdy as paper; it took Daisy eleven seconds to gain full control. Eight of those seconds were spent waiting on network latency.
The Hummingbird Drone was a pure reconnaissance model with no external speakers, so she had to route through the civil broadcast.
She had to warn that man.
No matter who he was or why he was there, he at least deserved a chance to run.
---
Underground Room.
Ivan huddled in a corner, his two-meter frame curled into a ball, clutching the detonator with his thumb pressed against the button.
"Either get lost, or die," he licked his lips. "It's a very simple choice."
Arthur didn't look at him.
There were still survivors in the corners.
Two were playing dead behind an overturned shelf, one was curled up under a pipe, and another was inching toward the exit on his knees, moving slowly and thinking he was being stealthy.
Arthur raised his hand.
Four ice spikes flew from his fingertips. There was no sound, no light effect—just four transparent, slender spikes following four different arcs.
Four people, eight knees, but he only pinned four. One for each person, randomly left or right.
The screams were cut off as soon as they began. Frost spread outward from the penetration points, crawling up thighs along muscle fibers, over waists and abdomens, and finally stopping at the neck. It was just enough to let them breathe, but they couldn't move an inch.
The Underground Room went silent.
Truly silent.
Just then.
"Zzt, crackle."
A dust-covered speaker on the ceiling suddenly crackled with static.
Then came a woman's voice. Young, urgent, and tinged with an uncontrolled sense of nervousness:
"Whoever you are! Evacuate immediately! Repeat, evacuate immediately! Those are military-grade plastic explosives; your shield won't withstand that power! Evacuate!"
Ivan's expression froze.
He recognized this method of channel hijacking. In his seventeen years hanging around Brighton Beach, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had visited three times and the CIA once. In all of New York, the organizations capable of taking over a civil broadcast in seconds could be counted on one hand. None of them would use a broadcast to shout; they preferred kicking down doors.
There was only one option left.
S.H.I.E.L.D.
Fucking S.H.I.E.L.D. was here.
Arthur, however, had no reaction.
His attention drifted past Ivan's bald head to the vent grate in the corner of the ceiling. Behind the grate, deep in the duct, something was hovering.
A micro-drone. Its wingspan was less than ten centimeters.
The lens was pointed right at him.
---
In the monitoring room of the Trident Tower, miles away.
Daisy overlaid the thermal imaging and night vision modes, cranking the resolution to the maximum.
On the screen, the man raised a finger toward the vent.
Daisy's stomach churned.
It was just like last time. One finger, and then her mainframe burned into scrap metal.
This time, she didn't hesitate.
Before the light could shoot from his fingertip, Daisydoubled over and yanked the physical power cord from the main workstation.
The same second the plug left the socket, the Hummingbird's feed exploded into static.
Five out of six screens went dark. As the mainframe lost power, the hard drive let out a dull click and its RPM dropped to zero.
The sixth screen, the one connected to the backup power supply, remained lit.
Half a line of runes surfaced on the screen. Blue and cold, the geometric lines drifted slowly across the black background for less than two seconds.
Host not found.
The runes dissipated.
The screen returned to normal.
Daisy stood there clutching the power cord, her heart rate over one hundred and twenty. Last time she paid the tuition of one mainframe; this time she saved five screens and three solid-state drives.
Progress.
But that line of text lingered on her retina for a few seconds before fading. 'Host not found.' What did that mean?
No time to think. The Hummingbird was gone, and the real-time feed of the Underground Room was cut. She didn't know what happened next.
Daisy threw down the power cord, pulled open a drawer, and grabbed her car keys and leather jacket.
The Agent on duty at the door stopped her: "AgentJohnson, you don't have authorization to leave."
"Move."
She didn't stop.
---
Underground Room.
A handful of fragments drifted down from the vent. The broadcast speaker never made another sound.
Ivan watched the pile of fragments fall to the floor.
The strongest intelligence agency in all of New York had been crushed by a flick of his finger.
The last string in his mind, which had been taut for too long, didn't snap—it burned out.
"Then we die together."
His voice was low. Dry.
His thumb pressed down hard on the detonation button.
A faint click came from the mechanical structure.
The fuse indicator light switched from blinking to a steady glow. Red.
A sharp beep rang out, rising in pitch, sustained, filling the entire Underground Room.
Ivan closed his eyes.
One second.
Two seconds.
Three seconds.
The beeping was still ringing.
But it was just ringing.
Five seconds.
Ivan opened one eye.
He was still alive. The Underground Room was still there. The ceiling hadn't collapsed. The pile of C4 on the table sat there obediently, motionless.
The detonation signal had been sent. He confirmed it. The indicator light was on. The beeper was screaming. The signal had been sent.
The explosives didn't explode.
Why didn't they explode?
He looked down at the detonator. The red indicator light was on; everything was normal. He looked back at the C4 on the table, at the wires connecting the explosives to the detonator.
A layer of frost had formed on the surface of the wires.
A thin layer. It started from the wire interfaces and spread all the way to the detonator insertion points on every block of C4. The frost patterns were intricate, almost transparent, and impossible to notice without looking closely.
He didn't know when this frost had appeared.
Maybe when Arthur walked to the table. Maybe earlier. Perhaps from the moment he pulled out the detonator, the outcome had already been decided.
Arthur finally looked at Ivan.
"Finished pressing?"
Ivan opened his mouth. No sound came out.
The detonator slipped from his hand, hitting the ice and bouncing twice.
Arthur glanced at the neatly stacked US dollars on the table.
He picked up the nearest cash carrier case and weighed it.
He turned and walked out.
Passing the four people pinned by ice spikes, he didn't give them a single glance.
---
Trident Tower, underground garage.
Daisy pulled open the door of a black Dodge, inserted the key, and the engine roared.
Three remote tracking attempts.
The first time, the mainframe burned. The second time, the Hummingbird exploded. The third time, she only saved half her life by pulling the power cord early.
She bit through the plastic stick of the lollipop in her mouth and spat the fragment onto the passenger seat.
Reversing. Leaving the garage.
The Dodge sped onto the surface, merging into the late-night traffic of Manhattan.
She cranked the steering wheel, heading toward Hells Kitchen.
"Fine."
"I can't beat you remotely."
The speedometer needle crossed eighty and kept climbing.
"Then let's talk in person."
Chapter 11: Concept-Level Hard Control
Arthur raised his hand.
He pressed his index and middle fingers together, and his fingertips lit up.
Pink.
A ridiculously tender pink. This color appearing in an Underground Room filled with bullet casings and C4 explosives was so jarring it made one's brain tie itself in knots.
The light shot out.
No sound, no tail flame.
A speck of light smaller than a lighter's flame drifted unhurriedly across the distance of over two meters.
It landed on Ivan's chest.
White smoke.
Thick white smoke billowed from his chest, swallowing the entire man in a third of a second. The smoke carried a sweet scent. Marshmallows. The kind sold for five dollars a stick at the entrance of an amusement park.
The smoke dissipated.
Ivan was gone.
Two hundred and twenty pounds of muscle, that face twisted by fear and rage, half a gold chain, and a detonator.
All gone.
Standing in his place was a sheep.
White, with wool so fluffy it looked round, short legs, and a height reaching up to the knees. Its light brown eyes had horizontal pupils, large and round, and were perfectly clear inside.
A herbivore.
Ivan's half-broken gold chain hung around the sheep's neck; it was too long, wrapped around more than twice, with the pendant dragging on the ground.
The detonator was held in its mouth. The buzzer was still ringing.
"Baa?"
It was a milky, babyish sound, with the end curling upward.
The detonator fell from its mouth, bouncing once on the concrete floor. The buzzer's tone shifted slightly and continued to wail.
The sheep looked down at the hard, noisy thing by its feet, took a step back, and bumped its rear into a table leg.
"Baa."
The second cry. Even softer. The kind of sound only a lamb just separated from its mother would make. Confused, aggrieved, recognizing no one.
Everyone still conscious in the Underground Room was watching.
Those gang members whose limbs were frozen by frost, leaving only their eyes able to move, were darting their gazes rapidly. They saw with their own eyes their boss—Ivan, who had killed six people at Brighton Beach and sent a rival's fingers to his wife as a Christmas gift—turn into a bleating sheep.
Two of them rolled their eyes and fainted while standing. Their frozen bodies kept them upright, looking like mannequins in a shop window from a distance.
The buzzer was still wailing.
But that sound was no longer important.
The detonation signal raced forward along the wires, but halfway there, the thin layer of frost coating the wires completely drained the current. A physical-level interception. From the moment Ivan pulled out the detonator, Arthur had already put a safety lock on the wires.
But what truly rendered the bomb useless was the Polymorph spell itself.
Arthur looked at the sheep that was currently gnawing on the table leg with its front teeth.
Transformation Magic never just changes the appearance. The appearance is merely the result. It changes the definition of existence itself. Human, Ivan, adult male, gang leader—this entire chain of identity was erased and replaced with three other words: Non-threatening creature. The moment the old identity vanished, all causal relationships attached to it became null and void. The relationship of control between Ivan and the detonator conceptually no longer existed. A sheep cannot operate a detonator; this required no judgment, no interception.
Double insurance. Frost was the physical layer, and the sheep was the rule layer. Two locks, two dimensions.
Arthur did not gamble on luck when he did things.
He walked up to the sheep and crouched down.
The sheep looked up. The dim, yellow light of the Underground Room was reflected in its light brown pupils, showing nothing. Ivan was not hidden inside. During the duration of the Transformation Magic, the original consciousness was completely suppressed.
The sheep tilted its head and brought its nose close to sniff the back of his hand.
Whether this person crouching down had any grass on him was the only thing it currently cared about.
Arthur picked up the detonator by his feet.
His two fingers closed together.
Crack.
The plastic casing split open. The circuit board, capacitors, and relays were ground into powder, rustling down through the gaps in his fingers to form a small pile on the floor.
The buzzing stopped.
The Underground Room fell completely silent. Even the sound of ice cracking vanished. Even the sound of teeth chattering stopped. They didn't even have the strength left to shiver.
A patch of the ice became wet.
It was the contribution of more than one person.
Warm liquid seeped from frozen pant legs, cooling instantly upon touching the ice shell. Before it could even flow to the ankles, it froze into yellow icicles hanging crookedly from the hems. A pungent smell of urine filled the air.
Among this group were retired soldiers who had been at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and mercenaries who had taken heads in Chechnya. Their crotches were more honest than their mouths.
Arthur reached out and patted the sheep's head.
His fingers sank in. Fluffy, soft, and the skin beneath was warm. The texture was exceptionally good.
He patted it a few more times.
The sheep didn't dodge; it tilted its neck to rub against his palm. The gold chain clinked.
"Much better looking than your original face."
Arthur withdrew his hand and stood up.
The sheep had no reaction to this comment. It discovered the table leg and began to gnaw on it. A few wood chips fell off. It gnawed very earnestly.
Arthur turned around.
On the mahogany tabletop, stacks of cash were neatly arranged, bound by rubber bands and sorted by denomination. Hundreds were the most numerous, piled across nearly half the table. A rough glance suggested at least four to five hundred thousand.
This was the protection money from Hells Kitchen for this month. Scraped together, bill by bill, from every dry cleaner, every small restaurant, and every old man pushing a hot dog cart.
Arthur raised his hand.
With his palm up and fingers slightly spread, he made a beckoning motion toward the pile of cash.
It was very casual.
Something went wrong with the air above the bills. Light distorted slightly as it passed through that area, very faintly.
The paper began to vibrate.
The rubber bands tightened.
The first stack of hundred-dollar bills floated up from the table. One inch, two inches, then it accelerated, flying steadily toward Arthur's open palm.
The second stack followed. Then the third.
All the cash on the tabletop moved simultaneously, stack after stack taking flight, lining up to fly into his hand.
Even the scattered loose change wasn't spared. Single twenties and fifties somersaulted in the airflow, scrambling to stick to him.
Arthur pulled over an empty cash transit box from the corner of the table and caught this rain of bills with its open mouth.
The last bill fell inside. The lid closed. Click.
He weighed it. It was full.
The sheep was still gnawing on the table leg.
Arthur walked out with the cash box under his arm, not even glancing at those ice sculptures as he passed them.
He reached the door and paused for a step.
In his Magic Perception network, a signal was approaching at high speed.
Direction: Manhattan, 11th Avenue.
The speed was very fast. Over eighty miles per hour and still accelerating.
One person in the car. Energy fluctuations were weak, a normal human. But that driving rhythm was familiar. Urgent, with the reckless drive of a gambler.
Three days ago, he had burned one of their servers. Today, he had blown up one of their drones.
This person still hadn't given up.
Arthur switched the cash box to his other hand.
"Since you're already here..."
He stepped out into the night.
Chapter 12: An Unexpected Surprise
Arthur's fingers sank into the warm wool.
The sheep nuzzled his palm. The gold chain clinked as it hit a hoof.
The entire Underground Room was eerily quiet. The ice cracked occasionally, and the incandescent light welded to the ceiling buzzed; other than that, there was nothing.
Then, the air changed.
It wasn't the temperature or the humidity.
It was space itself.
Magic Perception was the first to sound the alarm. Arthur's attention was yanked toward the center of the Underground Room, next to that table, where the light was bending.
The light from the incandescent bulb passed through that area and came out skewed by more than ten degrees.
It wasn't an illusion. It was spatial distortion on a physical level.
A black dot the size of a fist appeared out of thin air, constantly collapsing inward. Its edges were writhing.
Sulfur. Rotting meat. Ozone.
Three scents seeped out simultaneously, exceptionally pungent in the cold air.
Arthur let go and stood up straight.
It's here.
In Azeroth, releasing a spell that massively tampers with the laws of reality leaves cracks in the dimensional walls. Polymorph, a concept-level spell that forcibly rewrites the definition of a biological existence, leaves a much larger crack when released in a Universe that has never been in contact with Arcane energy than it does in Azeroth.
Cracks attract things.
It's the same principle as the scent of blood attracting sharks.
A tearing sound.
The black dot was torn open. The irregular, writhing crack widened to half a meter, and something squeezed out from within.
It had no physical form.
A mass of flowing blackness, barely maintaining the silhouette of a four-legged hound. It stood on all fours, the black mist on its body constantly dissipating and being sucked back in.
It had no eyes, but Arthur could clearly feel where its attention was focused.
A system panel popped up with information.
[Target Identification: Lesser Dimensional Hound. Level: Lv.15 (Elite). Attributes: Shadow/Void.]
[Warning: Target is immune to physical attacks. Possesses Mana Siphon ability; can absorb magical energy upon contact.]
That last line of red text made Arthur look twice.
Mana Siphon. It can absorb magic.
Dimensional Hound. Scavengers of the Universe. Attracted by energy fluctuations, they live by devouring energy and souls.
It had no interest in the ice sculptures around it. Frozen souls were cold and hard, with little to offer.
It set its sights on two main courses.
One was the sheep whose soul and body were severely misaligned, emitting a strong aura of mutation.
The other was the person next to the sheep, whose mana was so dense it felt scalding.
The hound chose the soft target.
With a kick of its hind legs, the black shadow turned into an afterimage, silently pouncing toward the bewildered sheep at his feet.
Arthur's reaction was faster than his thought.
"My sheep."
A single thought. Frost Nova.
A cold current surged outward with him as the center, cleanly bypassing the sheep.
The Dimensional Hound froze in mid-air for a moment. A thin layer of frost condensed on the surface of the black mist, and its speed plummeted.
But only for an instant.
Within a few breaths, the frost layer shattered. The black mist surged again.
It changed its mind. It was no longer attacking the sheep.
It charged straight at Arthur.
It opened its mouth to bite. A row of teeth formed from pure shadow closed in, hitting the Mana Shield right in the center.
*Crack.*
It wasn't the teeth that broke.
A ripple, unlike any before, appeared on the outer layer of Arthur's Mana Shield. Where the blue light screen touched the black mist, it visibly thinned by a layer.
The mana bar moved.
It dropped.
Not much, but it dropped.
Mana Siphon. This thing was absorbing his shield.
Half of the Dimensional Hound's teeth were shattered, but it didn't care. The broken parts were immediately filled by new black mist. It bit onto the shield and wouldn't let go, the black mist on its body churning faster as it greedily sucked in the Arcane energy.
The mana bar was dropping at a rate of one percent per second.
Not fast, but it couldn't be ignored. The more this thing absorbed, the more physical its body became, and the harder it would be to kill.
Arthur made a judgment.
The consumption of conventional spells couldn't beat its absorption speed. If he dragged it out, he wouldn't die, but he would be stuck in an ugly and time-consuming war of attrition.
The only solution: a one-shot kill before it could absorb more energy.
In the most violent way possible, burn it completely clean before its absorption speed could catch up.
Arthur flicked his right hand. The novice staff slid out of his sleeve.
He raised the head of the staff.
The air turned red.
Within two seconds, the temperature in the entire Underground Room skyrocketed from below zero to a suffocating heat. Large areas of the ice on the ground cracked, and white mist steamed up. The frost on the surface of the ice sculptures began to melt, trickling down their stiff faces.
All the wandering fire elements in the vicinity were forcibly conscripted. They were stripped from the gaps in the air, compressed, and gathered frantically at the tip of the staff.
A point of light appeared.
The size of a needle tip.
It expanded to the size of a fist.
That wasn't fire. No flickering flames could be seen. There was only an incandescent white sphere of light that was nearly solid. The internal energy was compressed to the extreme, and the sphere's thermal radiation warped the air within three meters.
The Dimensional Hound, still biting the shield, finally sensed danger.
It let go. The black mist contracted frantically as it retreated toward the shrinking spatial crack behind it.
"Fireball."
The incandescent white sphere of light left the tip of the staff.
Its flight path was terrifyingly quiet. No sound of breaking the air, no trail of flames. A streak of pure white light cut through the dim Underground Room, so fast that it caught up to the Dimensional Hound before its black mist had even half-retracted.
The two collided.
There was no explosion.
The white light swallowed the blackness.
Absolute high temperature.
Under the fire elements, the shadow was stripped away layer by layer, evaporated, and annihilated. The hound didn't even make a sound; its mouth had ceased to exist before it could even be burned away.
The light dissipated.
There was nothing left in its place.
Only a circular scorch mark two meters in diameter remained on the ground. The concrete had been burned by the high temperature into a black vitreous texture, so smooth it could reflect a person's image.
The spatial crack also shrank rapidly after losing its energy source and closed with a pop.
System calculation.
[Slayed Lesser Dimensional Hound (Lv.15 Elite).]
[Dimensional creature over-level kill bonus x2.5.]
[Experience points gained: 2200 points.]
The experience bar surged wildly. Filled, cleared, filled, cleared, filled.
[Level up! Lv.6!]
[Level up! Lv.7!]
[Level up! Lv.8!]
Three golden lights flowed through his body. The mana pool expanded by three more rings. The bit of mana previously absorbed by the hound was insignificant compared to the replenishment from leveling up.
[Lv.8 Unlocked Skill: Arcane Missiles (Active). Multi-stage tracking strike; once locked on, it cannot be dodged.]
Another good card.
Arthur put away his staff and looked down at the vitreous ground. In the very center lay a fingernail-sized object.
It was pitch black, with a faint light at the edges. It was cold to the touch, and some kind of energy flowed slowly within.
[Item Obtained: Dimensional Crystal (Rare). Spatial attribute material, can be used for inscription enhancement or spell research.]
Arthur pocketed the crystal.
The Underground Room became quiet again. The ice sculptures were still ice sculptures. The sheep with the big gold chain was still standing there.
Then he heard a sound.
Far away. Very far. But Magic Perception compressed the distance.
The roar of engines at full throttle. The sound of tires rolling over wet pavement. More than one car. Three. Black. No license plates. In the lead car sat a person whose heart rate was soaring.
It was her. The one who had a computer mainframe burned and a drone blown up by him within three days.
This time, she had come in person.
Arthur leaned down and patted the sheep on the head.
"Time to go. Someone's coming to clean up after you."
The sheep didn't react. It was trying to reach the gold chain around its neck with its mouth; its snout was too short, and it was struggling with its head tilted.
Arthur picked up the cash carrier box and used Blink.
With a flash of blue light, he was already at the stairs.
A few steps up, he crossed the empty first-floor hall of the club and slipped into the alley through the back door.
The sea breeze blew into his hood. Far away on 11th Avenue, three sets of headlights were rapidly approaching.
Arthur turned and disappeared into the layered shadows of the containers in the Dock Area.
...
When Daisy Johnson's Dodge screeched to a halt, the wheels almost smoked.
She was the first to jump out of the car, clutching her sidearm and an energy tracker. The tracker's needle was going crazy, spinning around the dial.
The Quick Response Team members jumping out of the three SUVs behind her followed her as she rushed toward the club's back door.
The entrance to the Underground Room was pitch black, with cold air surging out and visible white mist.
Daisy turned on her weapon light and was the first to head down the stairs.
On her first step onto the ice, she almost did the splits.
The flashlight beam swept across.
More than thirty ice sculptures.
She wasn't surprised. She had seen this kind of scene before.
What made her stop was something else.
The temperature was wrong.
The last cold storage was a uniform, extremely cold environment. This Underground Room was different. Some areas were cold enough to frost over, while others were so hot the concrete floor was steaming.
Ice and fire had existed simultaneously.
She walked further in.
A sheep. A big gold chain. It was biting a piece of broken wood from a table leg.
Everything was within expectations.
What was not within expectations was the circular area to the left of the center of the hall.
Nearly two meters in diameter. The concrete floor had been burned into a pure black vitreous texture. Smooth, reflective. When the weapon light hit it, the beam bounced back.
Daisy crouched down. She didn't touch it. She had learned her lesson; last time she touched a frozen keyboard, she almost lost a layer of skin.
She brought the energy tracker close.
The reading jumped.
It didn't just increase; it shifted into a completely different mode.
The signals tracked before—the freezing, the flames, that impenetrable shield—all shared the same underlying energy signature. A blue marker. That person's own energy.
In the signals remaining on this vitreous floor, a second color appeared.
Blackish-purple.
Two types of energy had collided at this spot. Blue won. The blackish-purple had been completely annihilated.
Daisy had seen many types of energy markers in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s database. Mutants', alien technology, radiation residue from Infinity Stones.
This blackish-purple.
It didn't match anything.
This meant that in this Underground Room tonight, besides the person in the hoodie, something else had appeared.
Not a person. Not any known creature on Earth.
It had been here. And then it was killed.
Daisy stood up and pressed her communicator.
"Coulson."
"Go ahead."
"Tell Fury things are more complicated than we thought."
She stared at the pitch-black vitreous mirror at her feet.
"Something else was in this Underground Room tonight."
There was a four-second silence on the other end of the communicator.
"What kind of thing?"
Daisy didn't answer.
Because she didn't know either.