Chapter 28: Turning You Into a Sheep Via the Network Cable
The smiley face was still hanging on the screen.
Arthur pulled up a chair and sat down, supporting his chin with his left hand while tapping the touchpad twice with his right index finger.
The command line stopped scrolling.
The Trojan program lay quietly in the process list, sending a location heartbeat packet to an encrypted IP every 0.3 seconds.
The encryption protocol was military-grade.
Three layers of encapsulation, dynamic keys, with two proxy hops in between.
But it had a fatal flaw.
It was using electricity.
Using electricity meant there were physical lines.
Where there were physical lines, there was a medium.
Where there was a medium—Arcane energy could travel.
Arthur screwed the cap onto the mineral water bottle and placed it on the edge of the desk.
He thought about the smiley face from earlier.
A colon and a closing parenthesis.
A standard social engineering phishing mentality—deliberately exposing a flaw, waiting for the prey to bite back, and then using the path of the bite to perform secondary localization.
Skye wanted to fish for him.
"Not a bad idea," Arthur admitted.
Then he placed his fingers on the network cable connector.
His index and middle fingers.
The pads of his fingers pressed against the plastic casing of the RJ45 port.
The contact area was less than two square centimeters.
That was enough.
[Arcane Wisdom] activated.
It wasn't being used to enhance memory.
This time, he was using its underlying function—Information Parsing.
Arcane energy seeped from his fingertips into the copper core of the network cable.
The speed wasn't the speed of light.
It was faster than the speed of light.
Because the propagation of Arcane energy didn't travel through physical channels; it traveled through the "existence" of the medium itself—as long as the wire was continuous, the energy could reach from one end to the other.
How many proxy hops in between? It didn't matter.
How many layers of encryption? It didn't matter.
Encryption protects data.
He wasn't traveling through the data layer.
He was traveling through the copper.
S.H.I.E.L.D. Triskelion Headquarters. Third basement level. Information Analysis Center.
Skye—or as her ID badge read at the moment, Daisy Johnson—was stuffing potato chips into her mouth with one hand, while her other hand tapped out a string of query commands on a mechanical keyboard.
"Coulson, the heartbeat packet is returning stably, the target hasn't moved."
She spoke into her headset, the corners of her mouth curling up, "What did I tell you? Power grid peak cross-localization is a hundred times more reliable than you field agents running around the streets with thermal imagers—"
"Be careful," Coulson's voice came through the earpiece, "Fury has already approved the raid plan. Team A will be in position in fifteen minutes; keep the data link clear."
"Copy that, copy that." Daisy pushed the bag of chips aside, spread her ten fingers across the keyboard, and pulled up the real-time power topology map of the Queens industrial park.
Her attention was entirely on the map on the left side of the screen.
So she didn't notice the taskbar icon in the bottom right corner of the screen change color.
The network adapter icon changed from green to blue.
A shade of blue that shouldn't exist in the Windows color palette.
Deep, pure, with a faint sense of fluidity.
The first monitor went out.
It wasn't a black screen. It was all pixels turning off simultaneously. From content to backlight, it was emptied in an instant.
But the power indicator light was still on.
Daisy's hands paused above the keyboard.
The second one.
The third one.
All seventeen monitoring terminals in the Information Analysis Center went out one by one at a rate of three per second.
From left to right, not a single one missed.
"What—"
Daisy looked down at her own host machine.
The LED light strip on the side of the case was changing color.
The RGB beads transitioned steadily from the warm orange she had set to that blue that shouldn't exist.
It wasn't software-controlled.
Her hand instinctively reached for the power button.
It was too late.
All screens lit up simultaneously.
Blue light.
Not the desktop. Not the system interface. It was runes.
Densely packed blue runes poured out from the center of every screen.
Alive.
They crawled along the pixel grid, swallowing all the original UI elements—the folders were gone, the taskbar was gone, the mouse cursor was gone.
In their place was a picture.
A sheep.
The outline was extremely exquisite, like a Renaissance copperplate engraving.
Curly hair, innocent eyes, head slightly tilted.
Below the sheep, the blue runes rearranged themselves to spell a line of English.
Script font. Exquisitely, maddeningly detailed.
"Stop tracking me, or I'll turn your director into a sheep next time. — A passing mage."
Daisy froze for two seconds.
Then she discovered something even more terrifying.
It wasn't just her screen.
The entire Information Analysis Center—all seventeen terminals were displaying the same sheep.
The large conference room at the end of the hall—the three spliced projection screens were also showing that sheep.
She stood up and rushed to the corridor's glass window to look out.
In the command hall, Fury was standing in front of the central console, looking up at the giant situational awareness screen that spanned from the ceiling to the floor.
On the screen was a three-meter-tall blue sheep.
Fury's one eye blinked once.
"Coulson." His voice broadcast across the entire floor.
"...Officer."
"Cancel the raid."
"Yes."
"And then tell me, whose system has been taken over by a damn sheep."
No one answered.
Daisy sat back down at her workstation.
The runes on the screen were fading.
The sheep was still there.
But at the end of that line of script, there was a detail she hadn't noticed before.
A small smiley face.
A colon and a closing parenthesis.
Exactly the same one she had sent earlier.
She stared at the smiley face.
Her teeth bit her lower lip.
It wasn't fear. She was certain it wasn't.
If it were fear, her hands shouldn't be wanting to type while they were trembling.
She wanted to reply with a message. She wanted to ask him how he did it. She wanted to know what encoding format those runes were. She wanted to know what the translation protocol between "magic" and "data" looked like.
But there was no input box on the screen anymore.
The other party had only given her a one-way broadcast.
He hadn't even opened the eligibility for a dialogue.
Daisy leaned back in her chair. She picked up the bag of chips and found that the chips had gone cold.
"Fine," she said to the air, "You won this round."
She threw the chips into the trash can.
Her fingers tapped the desk twice.
"But only this round."
Queens. Abandoned warehouse.
Arthur withdrew his fingers from the network cable.
His fingertips felt a little numb.
The Arcane residue in the copper core was flowing back, feeling warm.
A log popped up in the top right corner of the panel.
[Arcane Wisdom · Information Parsing Mode] usage complete. Mana consumed: 120.
One hundred and twenty mana points in exchange for a one-sided psychological battle.
Cost-effective.
He stood up, preparing to remove the hard drive from the second-hand ThinkPad and find a new base.
Although the Trojan was ruined, the physical address had already been exposed; he couldn't stay in this place any longer.
His right wrist felt hot.
Not the kind of heat from a temperature rise. It was the Arcane Mark itself burning.
Arthur looked down.
The lines of the mark were glowing. Blue.
The brightness was visibly climbing.
Three times brighter than when he had actively released it during the Blink earlier.
He wasn't the one releasing it.
It was the mark itself responding to something.
Resonance.
Some kind of energy was exploding in some direction of this city.
The frequency of the energy landed precisely on the sensing band of the Arcane Mark.
Not magic. Not the Vishanti system. Not an Old God.
Space.
Pure, violent, being forcibly torn—the laws of space.
Arthur looked up.
The window faced north. Through the dust-covered glass, he could see the Manhattan skyline.
The outline of Stark Tower was easy to recognize in the lights.
That huge STARK sign on top was the most expensive nightlight in all of New York.
There was a beam of light above the sign.
Azure blue.
Shooting from the top of the building into the sky.
The top of the beam had no end—it pierced through the clouds, through the atmosphere, beyond the limits of sight.
Then the sky cracked.
It wasn't a metaphor.
The night sky above Manhattan was like a windshield hit by a hammer, with cracks spreading in all directions from the top of the beam.
What leaked out of the cracks wasn't starlight. It was another sky.
Dark purple. Belonging to another galaxy.
The burning sensation of the Arcane Mark spread from his wrist to his forearm.
The panel popped up a red warning.
[Detected interdimensional space portal opening. Portal type: Space Stone level. Threat level: SS.]
SS.
The highest threat rating the panel had given since Arthurarrived in this World.
Whisperer was A. Ancient One was S.
Now it was SS.
A sound came from afar.
Not an explosion. It was a roar.
The war cries emitted simultaneously by tens of thousands of non-human vocal cords, leaking from that crack in the sky.
Chitauri.
Arthur closed the panel warning box.
He looked at the blue beam of light piercing through heaven and earth outside the window, and was silent for three seconds.
Then he pulled up his hood and zipped his hoodie up to his chin.
"The days in the newbie village were nice."
He walked toward the door.
"Pity they didn't last."
Blue light danced on his fingertips.
Not the orange-red of a Fireball, not the white-blue of a Frostbolt.
It was the deep blue of Blizzard—an area skill unlocked at Lv.20, now waiting at his fingertips for the first time.
He pushed open the iron door of the warehouse.
The night wind poured in, carrying the smell of burning from the direction of Manhattan.
Arthur lifted his foot. He walked toward that beam of light.
"Let them taste a greeting of minus forty degrees."
Chapter 29: Greetings from Negative Forty Degrees
Manhattan is burning.
When Arthur walked across the Williamsburg Bridge, the cars on the bridge were no longer moving. It wasn't a traffic jam. The owners had abandoned their cars and fled.
The three lanes were jammed with crooked sedans, pickups, and an overturned UPS delivery truck, with packages scattered everywhere. Someone had lost a shoe while running.
At the other end of the bridge was Manhattan. The skyline was still there, but the colors were wrong.
What should have been the cold gray reflected by steel and glass was now stained a dirty orange by the firelight. Three or four buildings were billowing black smoke. Further away, the blue beam of light at the top of Stark Tower still pierced the heavens, tearing a hole hundreds of meters in diameter through the clouds.
Chitauri aerial vehicles poured down from that hole. From a distance, they looked like a swarm of metallic locusts.
The panel hovered in the bottom-left corner of his vision, quietly displaying the macro-data of the battlefield.
[Current regional threat density: Extremely high]
[Detected large-scale non-Earth biological energy signals, quantity: Cannot be precisely calculated]
[Suggestion: Evade]
Arthur closed the suggestion box.
At the end of the bridge, a Police car was parked across the road as a barricade. Two patrol officers were crouching behind the car doors, firing at the sky.
Pistols. 9mm Parabellum.
The armor of the Chitauri vehicles was some unknown alloy; bullets hitting it didn't even spark. The patrol officer had emptied a magazine, his hands shaking, and was fumbling to insert a spare magazine from his waist, failing three times before finally getting it in.
A vehicle dove down, its energy cannon aimed at the Policecar.
Arthur walked past behind the patrol officers.
"Get in the car, get down."
The patrol officers looked back at him, their eyes filled with the kind of bewilderment that could no longer process new information. But their bodies were more honest than their brains; the two men shrank into the car.
The vehicle opened fire.
A blue-purple energy beam.
Arthur sidestepped. It wasn't to dodge. It was to let the beam pass while raising his right hand.
[Frostbolt].
An ice-blue bolt of light, as thick as a thumb, shot from his fingertips. It was slower than the energy beam, but its trajectory was tricky—it made a turn that defied Newtonian physics and drilled into the air intake grille on the vehicle's underside.
The vehicle's engine emitted a sharp metallic screech. Ice crystals spread inward from the intake, freezing the core components of the propulsion system.
The vehicle, having lost power, wobbled and scraped against the bridge railing before plunging headlong into the East River.
The splashing water landed on Arthur's hood. He didn't wipe it off.
He continued walking.
S.H.I.E.L.D. Triskelion Headquarters. Underground command center.
Everyone was shouting.
Tactical channels, logistics channels, civil defense channels—seven or eight communications officers were speaking simultaneously. The Manhattan map on the big screen was covered in red dots, each representing a combat zone or an area where civilians were trapped. There were so many red dots that the base map was almost invisible.
Fury stood in front of the central console, his one eye scanning every screen. His expression remained unchanged, but the muscles in his jaw were clenched tight.
Daisy was assigned to a workstation in the corner. Three screens, four keyboards, and a cup of cold coffee.
Her task wasn't command. It was data. Accessing city-wide surveillance, analyzing energy anomalies, and marking high-value targets.
Her hands flew across the keyboard. Surveillance node thirteen went offline—the signal tower had been destroyed by the shockwave of a Chitauri vehicle. She switched to the number fourteen backup node, and the image pulled up: the intersection of 7th Avenue and 42nd Street.
In the frame, three Police cars were burning. A squad of riot Police was pinned behind the steps of a bank by Chitauriinfantry. The riot shields were like plastic toys in front of the energy weapons, with each shot punching a hole through them.
Daisy bit her lip and switched the screen away. She couldn't watch.
She began to execute her real task—finding that person in the midst of this chaos.
The person who turned Fury's situational awareness screen into a pasture.
Seventeen surveillance nodes had already lost nine. The remaining eight had fragmented coverage. She wrote an automated script, using energy fluctuation characteristics as a filter—she had already modeled the Chitauri energy signature and filtered it out. The reactor radiation signature of Stark's armor, filtered out. Thor's bio-electric field, filtered out.
What remained was "unknown origin."
The script ran for forty seconds. A result popped up.
Queens—the bridge—Lower Manhattan.
A movement trajectory. The energy signature was that shade of blue that shouldn't exist.
She recognized it.
When Arthur walked into Lower Manhattan, there were no intact cars left on the streets.
Everywhere there was broken glass, concrete debris, and charred metal. The storefront of a Starbucks had been half-blown away, the green mermaid sign dangling and swaying on a broken steel bar.
The flow of people was in the opposite direction to him. Everyone was running south, running toward the bridge, running in any direction away from that blue beam of light.
Arthur walked against the flow of people.
He wasn't in a hurry. Mages don't need to be in a hurry. What a mage needs is to choose the right battlefield position.
The experience bar on the panel was slowly increasing. That vehicle just now contributed a little. Not much. Single low-level mobs, low experience points.
What he needed was a group of mobs.
Dense, organized groups of mobs standing together waiting to be harvested by AOE.
Just like pulling a wave of mobs in World of Warcraft and then washing the ground with Blizzard.
Two hundred meters ahead. An intersection.
An MTA bus was tilted in the middle of the road, its doors deformed and unable to open, its windows all shattered. There were at least a dozen people left in the bus; some were crying, some were smashing the windows.
Around the bus, eight Chitauri infantry were closing the encirclement.
Their movements had a mechanized coordination—two blocking the ends, four approaching from the sides, two raising their energy guns at the windows.
A standard hunting formation. More than enough to deal with civilians.
Arthur stopped.
One hundred and fifty meters from the bus. Eight targets, distributed within a radius of about twenty meters. The density was just right.
He had no weapon. Nor did he need one.
The panel popped up the skill selection interface. He didn't look. He didn't need to. He had been playing this combo in the game for three years.
He grabbed the void with his right hand.
Two hundred points of mana were instantly drained.
This was 9.5% of his current total. Not a small amount. Blizzard was a sustained area-of-effect skill, and mana consumption was always the main cost.
But the effect—
Worth it.
The sky changed.
Directly above the intersection, a cloud formation not belonging to Earth's meteorology condensed within two seconds. The color wasn't normal gray-white. It was deep blue. It carried visible ice crystal refraction.
The temperature plummeted.
It wasn't the kind of "cooling down." It was the physical extraction of heat. The water vapor in the air didn't have time to condense into fog before skipping the liquid state and turning directly into ice crystals, glittering in the light of the street lamps.
The Chitauri soldiers' biological sensors triggered an alarm. They looked up.
It was too late.
Icicles smashed down from that blue cloud.
It wasn't the kind of smashing like rain. They were pure magical icicles, each as thick as an arm, with tips harder than steel, pouring down vertically at a frequency of twelve per second. The coverage area was precisely controlled within a circular region with a radius of twenty-five meters, centered on the bus.
The bus itself was not in the attack range. A mage's Blizzard never hits friendly units.
The first icicle pierced a Chitauri soldier's energy shield.
The energy shield was force-field based and had high resistance to kinetic strikes. But Blizzard didn't just deal physical damage. The icicles were wrapped in a layer of arcane energy; the force field couldn't read magic—it collapsed instantly.
The shield shattered.
The icicle pierced the alien metal armor behind the shield.
Then the second. The third. The twelfth.
Five seconds.
Eight ice sculptures stood at the intersection. Their poses were varied. Some still maintained the posture of raising their guns. Some had just turned their heads, the expressions on their faces frozen in a moment of astonishment.
The ground was covered with a layer of frost three centimeters thick. Ice flowers had formed on the bus windows. The passengers inside huddled in their seats, teeth chattering, but alive.
The panel scrolled.
[Killed Chitauri infantry x 8, EXP + 1,600]
[Blizzard · First combat use, skill proficiency + 5%]
Arthur withdrew his hand. The blue cloud dissipated.
The white mist of water vapor left behind by the extreme cold remained in the air, making the entire intersection look like it had been stuffed into a freezer.
He stepped over the nearest ice sculpture. His boot soles crunched softly on the frosted surface.
The experience points had gone up a bit. But it was still quite a ways from Lv.23. The yield from eight infantry was too low. He needed elite mobs. Or a BOSS.
In the distant sky, a shadow several hundred meters long streaked across the clouds. A Leviathan.
Arthur looked up at it for a moment.
Too far. Wait until it gets closer.
He turned into a side street, preparing to advance north along Fifth Avenue—that was the area with the highest density of Chitauri landings, which meant the most experience points.
Less than fifty meters later.
His wrist burned.
Arcane Mark.
But this time the reaction was different from any previous one. Before, the warning for Chitauri energy was a stable, continuous scorching heat. This one now—
It was in waves.
Like a pulse.
And it wasn't heat. It was cold.
The kind of cold that seeps out from the bones. It had nothing to do with Blizzard. Blizzard was a spell he cast himself and wouldn't trigger the mark.
This cold came from the outside.
Arthur stopped.
The panel popped up a new warning. Red. Not the orange of the Chitauri from before.
[Detected unknown dimensional energy infiltration]
[Energy type:... Parsing... Old God-type · Low-tier Herald]
[Source direction: Underfoot. Underground utility network. Depth approx. 15 meters.]
[Approaching.]
Underfoot.
Arthur looked down at the asphalt road beneath his feet.
Something was seeping out from the cracks in the road.
Not water. Not blood.
It was a translucent, viscous, dark liquid like mucus, silently emerging from the cracks and winding into an irregular pattern.
That pattern was expanding.
The air had a new smell. It wasn't the metallic, burnt smell of the Chitauri ships. It was an older, deeper, rotting scent. Like silt from the bottom of the deep sea trench being overturned.
The chaos of the Battle of New York. The space portal tearing the dimensional barrier. Energy tides affected every corner of the city.
Some things had woken up during the chaos.
Some things—had been waiting underground for a long time.
The Arcane Mark on Arthur's wrist turned from blue to white.
Highest level warning.
The last time it was white was when the Ancient Oneopened the Time Stone.
He slowly raised his head, no longer looking at the ground.
At the end of the side street. Thirty meters away. Two street lamps were broken. The third one was still on, but the light was crooked, and the shadow it cast was wrong—
A person was standing in that shadow.
No.
Not a person.
Humanoid silhouette, but the proportions were distorted. Limbs too long. Neck too thin. The head was tilted fifteen degrees, like a crooked screw.
It had no face.
Where the face should have been was a mass of wriggling dark flesh membrane, covered in eyeless pupils. Every eyeball was rotating in a different direction.
It spoke.
The voice didn't come from a mouth—it had no mouth. The voice came from all directions simultaneously, layering at least seven or eight different human voices, men, women, young, and old mixed together, saying the same sentence.
"Em... ber... of... A... ze... roth..."
It knew what he was.
Arthur's expression didn't change.
The panel popped up the target information.
[Whisperer · Servant of Shadwock]
[Level:?? (Exceeds current scanning precision)]
[Type: Old God-type · Low-tier Herald]
[Special Ability: Mental Corruption / Dimensional Erosion / Unfixed Physical Form]
The level displayed a question mark. This meant the opponent was at least ten levels higher than him, or its energy system was completely outside the calibration range of the panel.
The last one to make the panel show a question mark was the Ancient One.
Arthur pulled his hood down a bit lower.
"You picked a lousy time to go out," he said.
His fingers began to gather mana.
Chapter 30: Battlefield Dead End
Manhattan was burning. Arthur had already walked three blocks through the burning Manhattan.
The intersection he had cleared with Blizzard was already four hundred meters behind him. The ice sculptures had not yet melted. New York's November night wind helped; the bodies of the Chitauri soldiers were locked in amber-like, deep blue ice crystals by the extreme cold of minus forty degrees. The light from the streetlamps shone upon them, refracting a sort of absurd beauty.
In the top right corner of the interface, his mana was slowly recovering. From a cap of 2,100, one cast of Blizzard had dropped it to 1,900. The recovery rate was 3 points per second. It wasn't fast, but it was enough.
Two blocks ahead, a Chitauri chariot skimmed the side of a building, strafing. An energy beam sliced through the seventh floor of an office building, and the glass curtain wall collapsed like a waterfall.
A sonic boom came from overhead.
A red and gold streak shot past thirty degrees above Arthur's right, moving at over Mach two. Iron Man. The thrusters of his armor trailed orange exhaust, with three Chitauri chariots in pursuit. Tony was performing serpentine maneuvers in the air, firing three shots backward from his repulsors, hitting one, while the other two remained locked on.
He didn't notice Arthur on the ground.
Arthur didn't intend to attract his attention, either. Mages didn't steal the jobs of air combatants.
He continued walking toward the portal. The blue beam of light from Stark Tower was directly to the north, visible to the naked eye. That beam of light was the source of all the problems—shut it down, and the Chitauri reinforcements would be cut off.
14th Street.
Arthur stepped over the chassis of an overturned yellow taxi and skirted around a collapsed lamppost.
He stepped on something soft.
It wasn't a corpse. It was the ground.
The asphalt road surface sank a centimeter under his feet. It was like stepping on a waterlogged sponge.
Arthur stopped.
He didn't stop voluntarily. The Arcane Mark on his wrist suddenly burned hot.
The warning frequency was wrong.
Chitauri energy was cold, metallic, with rhythmic pulses. The mark's warning for the Chitauri was a continuous low-frequency vibration, like a phone on vibrate mode.
This one, however—it was a burning. A sharp, foul-smelling, chaotic burning.
Arthur recognized this frequency.
The last time he felt it was in the sewers of Queens.
The sounds around him were changing.
The screeching of the Chitauri chariot engines began to elongate and distort, like a cassette tape being held down by a finger. The explosions in the distance became sticky, as if the sound waves were passing through a layer of jelly.
Then, all sound vanished.
It wasn't silence. It was deafness.
The asphalt five meters in front of Arthur began to bubble. The black tar was like boiling porridge, with fist-sized bubbles rising to the surface, and what flowed out when they burst wasn't air.
It was eyeballs.
Amber-colored eyeballs without irises squeezed out of the asphalt, one after another, covering the entire street. Every single eyeball was rotating, and every one of them was aimed at Arthur.
The exterior walls of the buildings on both sides of the street began to melt. Brick and concrete turned into deep red walls of flesh, with blood vessels bulging and pulsing irregularly on the surface. The lampposts softened, bending into the shape of tentacles, and the bulbs at the top turned into skinless mouths, opening and closing silently.
A Flesh Illusion.
The interface emitted a harsh alert sound.
[Warning]
[Elder Gods-type mental erosion detected]
[Type: Abyss Whisper · Mental Corruption]
[Source: Shadwock residual will · Low-tier believer]
[Effect: Sanity erosion (-5/sec), perception distortion, fear amplification]
[Current Sanity: 98/100]
[Consequence of zero Sanity: Consciousness disintegration, soul devoured]
The debuff list scrolled down rapidly. Line after line. Red warnings filled the right side of the interface.
Arthur didn't look at the debuff list. He was looking at the road ahead.
In the center of the mire of flesh, something was rising.
Emerging from the ground paved with eyeballs was a blurry silhouette. It had no fixed shape. One half-second it was humanoid, the next it was insectoid, and the next it was some kind of geometric shape—a constantly rotating icosahedron with a mouth on every face.
Whisperer.
It was different from the batch in the sewers. That batch were just beginners, not even capable of performing the ritual properly.
This one showed signs of materialization. Shadwock's divine power had been infused deeper into it, so deep that its physical form had started to dissolve into faith. Half-human, half-god. To be precise, ninety-five percent human, five percent god.
But five percent was disgusting enough.
The Whisperer spoke.
It wasn't a sound coming from a mouth. It came from all directions simultaneously. The eyeballs on the ground, the walls of flesh, the scent of blood in the air—every "organ" existing within the illusion vibrated at the same time, piecing together a voice that overlapped hundreds of frequencies.
"Delicious... soul..."
"Primordial magic... untouched by any Lord of Dimensions... pure..."
"You... have a scent familiar to the Master... the scent of the sewers..."
Sanity: 78/100.
It dropped twenty points instantly.
Every syllable was eroding his sanity. It wasn't mind control, not a hallucination interference. It was something more fundamental—conceptual contamination. The Whisperer's voice was attempting to rewrite Arthur's basic perception of "reality." It made his brain start to doubt: perhaps this mire of flesh was the real one, and the New York from just moments ago was the hallucination.
The Whisperer's body had fully emerged from the ground. A churning mass of tumors and tentacles, about three meters tall. It was covered in mouths, each saying different sentences, layered together to form a white noise that made his internal organs spasm.
Tentacles reached out from all directions. It wasn't a physical attack. They passed through the Mana Shield—because mental contamination wasn't on the physical plane; the shield blocked kinetic energy and energy, but it couldn't block concepts.
Seven tentacles. At the tip of each one, an eye had split open, reflecting Arthur's face in its pupil.
Sanity: 72/100.
It was still dropping.
If he didn't deal with it, his Sanity would hit zero in thirty seconds.
Arthur looked at this self-satisfied lump of meat in front of him, the expression on his face never changing from beginning to end.
He wasn't putting on a brave face.
He truly didn't feel there was anything to be afraid of.
C'Thun. Y'Shaarj. N'Zoth. Yogg-Saron.
The Elder Gods of Azeroth. Each one was a Planet-level source of mental contamination. Heroes of the Alliance and Horde would charge in wearing blue and green gear, tanks holding aggro, healers spamming heals, and DPS waiting for the right moment to unleash their firepower.
This one in front of him?
It couldn't even compare to one of N'Zoth's tentacles.
"I've seen plenty of Elder Gods in Azeroth."
Arthur spoke. His voice was as flat as someone reciting grocery prices at a supermarket.
"What are you supposed to be?"
He flipped his left palm.
Instant cast. No channeling. No wind-up.
[Cleanse (Basic)]
A streak of pure white arcane light shot from his palm, not an offensive projectile—but an expanding wave of purification. The light wave expanded outward with Arthur as the center, extremely fast, sweeping over his entire body.
On the interface.
The red debuff list.
The whole thing.
Cleared.
It didn't remove them one by one. It zeroed out all negative statuses simultaneously. Sanity erosion—gone. Perception distortion—gone. Fear amplification—gone.
Sanity: 100/100. Full.
The essence of Cleanse wasn't "dispelling magic." It was "resetting status." It wiped away everything on the target that didn't belong to the original template. Whether it was an Elder God's curse or a flea bite—in the logic of Cleanse, they were all "abnormal statuses." Treated equally, cleared with one click.
Your meticulously designed mental contamination chain, within the judgment framework of the interface, was no different in essence from a 3-second slow debuff.
The Whisperer screamed.
It wasn't an angry scream. It was one of pain.
Mental erosion was a two-way link. It poured contamination into Arthur's consciousness, and the channel was open. When Cleanse severed the channel, the backlash slammed back along the break.
You take a water hose to pump dirty water into someone else's house, and they weld the hose shut. The pressure has nowhere to go, so it blows up on your end.
The eyeballs on the Whisperer's body closed and opened simultaneously, and its tentacles twitched and thrashed. Cracks appeared in the Flesh Illusion—the eyeballs underfoot began to shatter, revealing the true color of the asphalt road. The walls of flesh on the buildings peeled away, revealing gray concrete.
The illusion was collapsing. But the Whisperer was still there.
It was trying to re-coalesce. Tentacles stretched out again, and those skinless mouths began to move once more.
"You—you can't—without dimensional power—mortals can't—"
"You talk too much."
Arthur raised his right hand, palm facing down.
[Frost Nova]
With him as the center, within a radius of fifteen meters, a circle of ice-blue frost exploded from the ground. The temperature plummeted from nine degrees to minus sixty degrees in 0.3 seconds.
The Whisperer's tentacles froze solid the moment they touched the leading edge of the frost wave. Seven tentacles, seven ice pillars. The eyeballs at the tips were frozen in the ice, their pupils still holding the shape of terrified dilation.
Its lower body was completely frozen onto the road. A layer of white frost formed on the surface of the tumors. Its mouths were still moving, but the sound had turned into an indistinct tremor.
It couldn't run.
Arthur took a step forward. The remnants of the Flesh Illusion shattered into powder under his feet, revealing the clean asphalt road.
On the left side of the interface, the skill icons switched. The blue light of the Frost school extinguished, and the orange-red of the Fire school lit up.
He brought his hands together. Between his palms, a ball of flame condensed.
It wasn't a fist-sized Fireball like Fireball. It was compressed flame—the core temperature exceeded sixteen hundred degrees, and the shell was constrained by an arcane force field into a perfect sphere. The spell power calculation bar on the interface flashed with dense strings of multiplier numbers.
A final wail squeezed out of the Whisperer's mouth.
Arthur looked at it. The orange-red firelight was reflected in his pupils.
"Next."
His voice was slightly distorted by the scorching airflow of the flames.
"It's Fire Mage time."
On the interface, the multiplier for spell power was still climbing.
Chapter 31: Spoils in the Ashes
The Whisperer struggled within the ice.
It was not a struggle in the physical sense. Its body was frozen solid; the surface of its tentacles and tumors was covered in half an inch of black ice, and even its eyeballs had frozen into cloudy glass beads.
What struggled was the Old God blood within it.
Arthur's Arcane Wisdom immediately captured the anomaly—the heat signal in the Whisperer's core region was rising sharply. The ice layer, at minus sixty degrees, was being heated from within. It was not a normal body temperature. It was an uncontrolled energy-release reaction.
It was going to explode.
The panel popped up the analysis results.
[High concentration of Old God blood detected in target. Critical temperature expected in 3.2 seconds. Blast radius: approximately 45 meters. Side effect: Regional psychic contamination (lasts 72 hours).]
Forty-five meters.
Enough to cover this entire street. Coupled with seventy-two hours of psychic contamination, passersby would have nightmares for a week, and those with fragile minds would be sent straight to a mental hospital.
The Whisperer's shattered mouths simultaneously twisted into a distorted smile. It had given up on escaping and chosen mutual destruction. A classic move by Old God cultists—if you can't beat them, make it messy.
"Three seconds?"
Arthur took a step forward.
Not backward. Toward the Whisperer.
Arcane Wisdom operated at full power, and the spell intensity calculation bar on the left side of the panel expanded into a dense, transparent display board. Core temperature curve, critical threshold, the precise heat required for blood evaporation—all data was parsed within 0.5 seconds.
Conclusion: Burn it dry before the Old God blood reaches the critical point of explosion.
Not to burn the Whisperer to death. It was to ignite the "bomb" inside it prematurely, using externally applied high heat to evaporate the blood within the sealed ice shell—before the explosion.
Time window: 2.7 seconds.
Channeling began.
Arthur pushed his hands forward, and the compressed Fireball between his palms expanded rapidly under the propulsion of mana. A progress bar ran across the panel.
[Fireball]—Channeling—1.5 seconds.
A one-and-a-half-second channel. On the battlefield, this was a deadly window of vulnerability. Any melee class could stab a mage three times during this period.
But the Whisperer was not a melee fighter. It was frozen in place. Its tentacles were icicles, its tumors were ice blocks. The only thing still active was the mass of blood inside it that was heating up.
Channeling complete.
The Fireball left his hands.
Not a parabola. A straight line. The compressed Fireball, constrained by the mana field, crossed the seven-meter distance at near-sonic speed, accurately hitting the center of the Whisperer's core tumor.
The ice layer exploded. The Fire flames drilled in.
The 1,600-degree high temperature created a sealed micro-furnace inside the ice shell. The Old God blood was evaporated the moment before it boiled—not an explosion, but vaporization. No spreading, no splashing. Before the ice shell melted through, the blood had already turned into superheated steam, escaping in wisps along the cracks.
Panel prompt: [Old God blood deactivated. Self-destruct aborted.]
The bomb was defused.
The Whisperer let out the most shrill scream of its life. The Old God blood was its lifeblood and also the umbilical cord connecting it to Shadwock. The moment the blood evaporated, the signal channel between it and the higher-dimensional existence was completely severed.
It was equivalent to kicking it out of the god's embrace and throwing it back to the mortal World.
It was no longer the "Whisperer." It was just a lump of charred meat.
But dying things are often the most dangerous.
The remaining tumors squirmed on the pavement beneath its feet, and its skinless mouths moved frantically. It wasn't cursing. It was chanting. A miniature dimensional rift tore open behind the Whisperer, about the size of a basketball. On the other side of the rift was a dark purple void, emitting a rotten, sweet, fishy smell.
It wanted to run.
Tearing open a dimensional rift to escape—this was the escape method of Marvel dark magic cultists. The rift only needed to be maintained for two seconds, enough for its residual consciousness to squeeze in. Then it would slowly recover in the void and make a comeback.
Two seconds.
Arthur looked at the rift.
"Did I say you could leave?"
His right hand reached forward. Not channeling. Instant cast.
[Fire Impact].
A fan-shaped Fire shockwave swept out from his palm. The heat wasn't high, and the damage was limited. But the core function of this skill was not damage output.
It was interruption.
The Fire shockwave accurately hit the Whisperer's remaining body as it was casting, forcibly interrupting the tearing process of the dimensional rift. The rift, like a flattened bubble, shrank back with a "pop."
Casting interrupted.
The Whisperer's rift was half-open before being snuffed out. This thing had a name in World of Warcraft—Counterspell school lockout. The interrupted spell school would enter silence.
It couldn't tear open a second one anytime soon.
Arthur did not give it a second chance.
In the bottom left corner of the panel, an icon was flashing with a red warning.
[Pyroblast]—Current level: Unlocked (requires Lv.30). Forced over-level cast: Available. Cost: Overdraft 60% of current mana, enter 3-minute mana exhaustion state after casting.
Over-level cast.
Using a low-level mana cap to forcibly drive a high-level spell framework. It was like using an electric scooter battery to start a tank engine. It could start. But the battery would be ruined.
Arthur glanced at his mana.
2,100 / 2,100.
60% overdraft. The remaining 1,260 points of mana would go straight to zero, and there would be no mana regeneration for the next three minutes.
Three minutes. On the battlefield of the Battle of New York, three minutes was enough to die eight hundred times.
He did not hesitate.
Hands clasped. Separated. Between his palms, the air began to liquefy.
Not a heatwave. The temperature of a heatwave wasn't enough to liquefy air. This was the temperature at the edge of plasma—the molecular structure was shattered, and matter jumped back and forth between gaseous and plasma states.
A Sun.
A miniature version. About forty centimeters in diameter. The core temperature exceeded the panel's measurement range. The shell was not Fire, but pure thermal energy forcibly compressed by an Arcane force field. It consumed 60% of his mana in exchange for an ultimate Fire-type skill that didn't belong to this level.
[Pyroblast—Over-level cast—Mana cost 1,260—Release!]
The Whisperer's remaining eyeballs reflected the shape of that light orb at the last moment.
It wanted to scream.
It was too late.
Pyroblast landed.
No explosion sound. The temperature was too high. The gas molecules in the air were ionized the instant the Fireball touched the target, making it impossible to form a normal shockwave. So there was no "boom."
Only light.
White light.
Pure, retina-searing White light expanded outward from the Impact point, swallowing the Whisperer, the pavement beneath the Whisperer's feet, and the soil and pipes two meters beneath the pavement.
Everything within a two-meter radius jumped directly from solid to plasma state.
Skipping liquid and gas.
The Whisperer left no corpse. No ashes. Even the ashes were burned into ionized particles, invisible to the naked eye.
It was erased in the physical sense.
The White light faded.
Arthur stood at the edge of a vitrified crater four meters in diameter and half a meter deep. The soil and asphalt at the bottom of the pit had been burned into black glass by the high heat, the surface smooth as a mirror, still emitting a dark red afterglow of heat.
The panel flooded with messages.
[Kill: Whisperer (Shadwock Cultist · Abyssal Level)]
[Experience + 12,800]
[Experience + Cross-dimensional Kill Bonus (× 2.5) = 32,000]
[Level Up: Lv.22 → Lv.23]
[Level Up: Lv.23 → Lv.24]
[Level Up: Lv.24 → Lv.25]
[Level Up: Lv.25 → Lv.26]
[Level Up: Lv.26 → Lv.27]
[Level Up: Lv.27 → Lv.28]
Six levels. Six levels in one go. From 22 to 28.
The panel popped up new skill unlock notifications. The names flashed by: [Flamestrike] [Mana Shield] [——], and he skipped the rest by tapping repeatedly. Not the time to look at them now.
Mana: 0 / 2,800.
The cap increased due to leveling up. But the pool was empty. Three minutes of mana exhaustion.
He squatted down.
In the center of the vitrified pit, there was something that hadn't been burned away.
Fist-sized. Pitch black. Dark purple veins slowly flowing on the surface.
The moment his finger touched it, his temple throbbed violently. He immediately stored it in the system inventory.
Panel identification: [Old God Energy Fragment (Low Tier)—Can be used as an advancement material for special skills. Please keep it safe.]
The moment he stood up, the last remnants of the flesh illusion shattered like bubbles.
The eyeballs, tentacles, and meat walls in his vision all disappeared.
New York was back.
The gray of concrete. The dim yellow of streetlights. In the distance, the energy beams of Chitauri aircraft streaked across the sky, leaving trails. The air smelled of burning, dust, and the pungent odor of some alien metal burning.
The war was still going on.
Arthur exhaled. The side effect of mana exhaustion was not pain, but collapse—like staying up for forty-eight hours at an internet cafe and then standing up suddenly; that was the feeling. His legs were shaking, his fingertips were numb.
Three minutes. He needed to find a safe corner to hide for three minutes.
He had just turned around.
Twenty meters away, a red-haired woman holding a child of about four or five years old stumbled out from behind an overturned taxi.
She was covered in blood. There was a laceration on her left arm extending from her shoulder to her elbow. Her hair was matted into strands by blood, sticking to her pale cheeks. The child in her arms was wailing.
"Please! Save us!" Her voice was hoarse, with a crying tone, "There are those monsters behind—please—"
She ran toward Arthur. Her steps were staggering but her direction was precise. Her right knee seemed injured, wobbling with every step, but her speed was not slow.
Arthur looked at her.
Mana: 0.
No shield, no Blink, no defensive means whatsoever.
The panel floated quietly in the bottom left corner of his vision. Health bar, mana bar, skill icons, all quiet.
But in the top right corner of the panel, a line of small text popped up.
[Biological Scan—Target heart rate: 62 beats/min. Inconsistent with the physiological indicators of "panic escape." Note: Target body fat percentage is 12%, muscle density is abnormally high, and bipedal landing pattern matches the gait characteristics of a combat trainee.]
Heart rate sixty-two.
A woman holding a child, covered in blood, screaming for help at the top of her lungs. Heart rate sixty-two.
When he fought against a Rogue in the arena, his heart rate would be over 120.
He glanced at the "laceration" again. The color of the blood was too bright, the flow direction was wrong. From top to bottom, but there were no signs of clotting at the edges.
Special effects makeup.
Arthur's gaze shifted from the woman's face and swept behind her.
The third-floor window on the right. The top floor of the parking lot on the left. The fire escape platform at a forty-five-degree angle behind her.
Three sniper positions.
He memorized these three angles. Then he put his hands in his pockets and looked at the woman again.
The panel popped up a line of text.
Cold White text.
[Identity Match: Natasha Romanoff. Codename: Black Widow. Affiliation: S.H.I.E.L.D.. Current Status: On mission.]
Countdown above the mana bar: 2 minutes 47 seconds.
New York was being invaded by aliens. The Old God cultist had just been burned to glass by him. S.H.I.E.L.D. chose this moment to close the net.
Fury.
You really know how to pick your timing.
Chapter 32: The Arrogance of S.H.I.E.L.D.
The aftereffects of mana depletion were weakness, a sense of powerlessness seeping from the marrow of one's bones.
Arthur's hands were in his pockets, his fingertips unconsciously rubbing the fabric. He watched the woman, covered in blood and clutching a child, run toward him with calm eyes.
"Monsters... behind... they're coming!" Natasha Romanoff's acting was masterful; every tremor in her voice precisely struck the softest part of the human heart. The "child" in her arms, a highly realistic mechanical doll, also wailed louder.
Arthur didn't even look at the overturned taxi behind her.
There was no ripple in his heart.
He just felt it was a bit noisy.
He cooperatively frowned, glanced behind Natasha as if confirming the location of the "monsters," then nodded at her, mouthing, "This way, quickly."
He turned and led her into a narrower, darker alley nearby.
The alley was deep, flanked by the high walls of warehouses with no windows; the only exit was at the other end.
A dead end.
An imperceptible arc just lifted the corners of Natasha's mouth before she quickly smoothed it away.
The target had taken the bait.
It went even smoother than expected. He seemed genuinely exhausted from the previous battle, having lost even the most basic sense of vigilance.
S.H.I.E.L.D. Triskelion Headquarters.
"Target has entered the designated trap zone 'A-3'." A tactical analyst reported, their voice tight with excitement.
On the big screen, a red dot was leading the green dot representing Natasha, steadily walking into a highlighted alley model. At the end of the alley, the blue mark representing Hawkeye flickered from a high vantage point.
"Very good." Nick Fury stood before the command console, hands behind his back, his single eye reflecting the red dot on the screen, his tone devoid of warmth. "The aliens must be fought, and this variable must also be controlled immediately. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s intelligence network cannot tolerate blind spots."
"Officer!" Daisy stood up abruptly in the corner. She looked at the red dot on the screen, which had almost no energy fluctuations, and her heart constricted. "His data model doesn't conform to standard laws of physics at all! We shouldn't provoke him at a time like this! The Battle of New York is the primary objective!"
She had seen that Blizzard with her own eyes, that absolute zero that defied the second law of thermodynamics. To her, this calm red dot before her was more dangerous than the entire Chitauri army wreaking havoc outside the screen.
Fury did not turn back, coldly interrupting her, "That is why he must be controlled. Agent Daisy, sit down. Do your job."
Daisy's lips moved, but she eventually sat back down powerlessly. She clenched her fists, forced to watch the countdown to a capture operation she had a premonition would be disastrous.
Eight hundred meters away. The rooftop of a thirty-story office building.
Clint Barton knelt behind the parapet, his figure sinking into the night. He held the bow in his left hand and pulled the string with his right; the limbs of the specialized compound bow were already drawn into a full moon.
The arrow was not a standard tip.
It was a specialized arrow flickering with blue electric arcs. The tip was a foldable titanium alloy claw hook with an integrated high-intensity electromagnetic generator. Once it hit, it would deploy a superconducting electromagnetic net covering a five-meter radius within 0.1 seconds.
It was a heavy weapon S.H.I.E.L.D. used specifically to deal with high-speed or strangely-powered targets; even an out-of-control Hulk could be briefly restrained by it.
In his scope, the crosshairs locked onto the alley entrance.
He was waiting.
Waiting for Natasha to lead the target to the trash can with graffiti at the deepest part of the alley. That was the end of Zone A-3, the center of the dragnet.
Arthur's pace was languid, even a bit sluggish, truly looking like someone exhausted.
He followed Natasha into the depths of the alley, surrounded by heavy shadows and the sour stench emanating from the trash cans. He didn't even adopt the most basic defensive posture, his back completely exposed to the "person seeking help" behind him.
Natasha's heartbeat remained steady, but her breathing rhythm quickened by a few hundredths of a second.
Now!
Three meters from the trash can. The optimal pre-planned trap point.
The fear and helplessness on Natasha's face vanished instantly, replaced by the coldness and precision of a top assassin. She threw the fake doll in her arms to the side, her body sinking and rotating with astonishing flexibility!
Two cylindrical "Widow's Bites" slid into her palms from the tactical straps on her outer thighs. She pushed off with her feet, lunging low to the ground with the murderous aura of a predator, closing in on Arthur's nape!
The tips of the Widow's Bites ejected electrodes, targeting the carotid artery and nerve plexus! Thirty thousand volts of high-voltage electricity, enough to paralyze a bull instantly!
Meanwhile, eight hundred meters away.
The moment Natasha moved, Clint released the bowstring.
"Hum—"
There was no sound of breaking air.
The arrow was faster than the speed of sound, designed with a streamlined shape to minimize air resistance. It flew silently and accurately toward Arthur's only escape route—the alley entrance!
Pincer attack.
Close quarters meant instant high-voltage paralysis.
The escape route was a supersonic electromagnetic net.
A kill-zone tailor-made for him by S.H.I.E.L.D.
The electrodes of the Widow's Bites were only one centimeter away from Arthur's skin. Natasha could even see the fine hairs on his neck.
Hit!
The moment the electrodes touched his skin, Natasha felt a surge of joy.
Success!
However, the anticipated muscle spasms and the smell of charred human flesh did not appear.
The feeling was wrong.
It wasn't the toughness of piercing a human body.
It was like... popping a water balloon.
"Pop."
A soft sound.
Natasha's pupils contracted sharply.
The Arthur in front of her, the man in the hoodie with his back to her, had his entire body ripple like a water surface after a stone was thrown into it, and then—it turned into a puddle of clear, dripping water, shattering all over the ground.
[Mirror Image].
An illusion composed purely of arcane energy and water elements.
From start to finish, the person who walked into the alley was just a decoy.
The electromagnetic net arrow at the alley entrance hit the empty ground with a "clang," instantly deploying a sizzling blue net that trapped a few startled rats.
Hawkeye's arrow had missed.
Natasha remained in her lunging posture, staring stiffly at the puddle of water evaporating on the ground.
In her earpiece, Clint's voice came through, filled with confusion and urgency: "Nat? Target lost! He's not in the alley! Repeat, target..."
Clint's voice cut off abruptly.
Replacing it was Natasha's own voice, which she heard through their encrypted communication channel, completely distorted by extreme shock, exploding in Clint's earpiece:
"Clint, behind you!"
A deep blue figure, who knows when, had already stood ghost-like on the edge of the rooftop of the building eight hundred meters away, quietly watching Hawkeye, who was half-kneeling on the ground.
Just like watching a poorly performed pantomime that had just finished.
Chapter 33: The Pinnacle of Elegance
Barton had worked at S.H.I.E.L.D. for seventeen years.
In those seventeen years, he had experienced assassinations, counter-assassinations, double-Agentoperations, biohazards, and today's alien invasion.
His brain had been trained into a precision reaction machine—the moment any threat appeared within his perception range, his body would react before his consciousness could.
So he didn't look back.
He didn't go to confirm what that "behind you" from Natasha actually meant.
His right hand had completed the motion before the bowstring even left his fingers: his left foot pushed off the ground, he spun one hundred and eighty degrees, his right hand drew a high-explosive arrow from the quiver, nocked it, drew to full, and released.
The entire sequence took 0.7 seconds.
The arrow's speed upon leaving the string was 93 meters per second.
At a sniping distance of 800 meters, this was nothing, but at a close range of three meters—it was essentially a bullet.
The arrow head flew straight toward that deep blue figure.
Arthur stood at the edge of the rooftop, his hood swaying slightly in the night wind.
He watched the arrow fly toward him.
He didn't dodge.
The countdown for his mana had reached zero three seconds ago.
The three-minute depletion period was over.
The moment his mana pool began to recharge, the first thing he did wasn't to Blink, nor was it to attack.
It was to cast a shield on himself.
A mage's basic discipline.
[Mana Shield] deployed.
A layer of arcane film, barely visible to the naked eye, covered him thirty centimeters from his body, with light blue runes flowing across its surface.
The high-explosive arrow head struck the shield.
The fuse triggered.
Explosion.
Firelight, Impact, shattered metal shrapnel.
At a distance of half a meter, this kind of explosion was enough to tear apart the hood of a car.
The shield absorbed all the energy.
It didn't even ripple.
On the panel, the number for the shield's durability jumped.
It dropped by two percent from full value.
Two percent.
Barton watched the smoke from the explosion dissipate.
Behind the smoke, the young man stood in place, his posture hadn't even changed from one hand in his pocket to both.
Barton heard his own heartbeat.
Then, the young man pulled his hand out of his pocket.
"It's my turn."
The voice wasn't loud, half-scattered by the wind, but every word drilled clearly into Barton's ears.
His body reacted before his consciousness again—he rolled backward, creating distance, while his right hand reached for the electromagnetic net arrow in his quiver.
He didn't find it.
His feet slipped.
A [Frostbolt] struck the concrete ground at the edge of the rooftop.
It wasn't aimed at him, but at the spot where he was about to land.
A sheet of ice at negative forty degrees spread out within 0.2 seconds, covering a one-meter radius around where he had kneeled.
Barton's left knee and left palm touched the ice surface simultaneously.
Friction became zero.
He slid forward uncontrollably, his compound bow nearly slipping from his hand.
Just as he tried to use the spikes on his right shoe to catch the ice, a metallic clanging sound came from the other side of the rooftop.
A red-haired figure vaulted over the rooftop railing.
Natasha took less than forty seconds to climb from the ground to the thirtieth-floor rooftop.
S.H.I.E.L.D.'s specialized magnetic grappling hook helped, but this speed itself was not something a normal human could achieve.
The moment she landed, she had already raised two Glock 19s in both hands.
The muzzles were aimed steadily at the back of Arthur's head.
"Don't move."
Her voice returned to its normal frequency, cold, professional, without any of the weak impurities from the alleyway.
The Widow's Bite was tricked by a puddle of water, but her pistols wouldn't be.
Nine-millimeter Parabellum rounds, capable of punching six holes in him every second.
Arthur didn't turn around.
He heard the sound of the chambers being loaded behind him, and sensed the precise orientation of the two muzzles.
Then he sighed.
There was no tension in that sigh, only a hint of... helpless exhaustion.
He raised his right hand.
White light shimmered at his fingertips.
Not the orange-red of Fire, not the deep blue of Frost.
It was pure, attribute-less arcane white light.
[Transformation Magic].
The white light shot out from Arthur's fingertips, splitting into two beams.
One hit the Glock in Natasha's right hand.
One hit the Glock in her left hand.
Bang.
Not a gunshot, but a dull thud of air being instantly compressed.
A cloud of white smoke exploded from where Natasha's hands were, carrying an indescribable scent of poultry.
The smoke dissipated.
Natasha Romanoff, codenamed Black Widow, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s top Agent—was holding a speckled hen in each hand.
The two chickens were startled, their wings flapping frantically in her palms, feathers flying everywhere, clucking and screaming.
Natasha's fingers were still in the position of pulling the trigger.
Her index fingers were curled, precisely resting on the chickens' necks.
Her mind went blank for 0.3 seconds.
In the Red Room's training manual, there wasn't a single chapter that taught you what to do after your weapons turned into poultry.
A third beam of white light.
Barton was lying on the ice trying to crawl up, his compound bow his last weapon.
The white light hit the bow limb.
The smoke dissipated.
He was clutching a stalk of celery in his hand.
Emerald green, fresh, with water droplets still hanging on the leaves.
It looked like it had just been taken from the supermarket vegetable section.
Barton looked down at the celery.
S.H.I.E.L.D. Triskelion Headquarters, Command Center.
The tactical footage on the big screen was clear—two top Agents, one holding chickens, one holding celery, standing on a patch of ice.
The entire Command Center was so quiet one could hear the humming of the air conditioning vents.
Thirty-seven analysts, tactical officers, and communications personnel all maintained the same expression.
Fury's single eye stared at the screen, the muscles at the corner of his mouth twitching.
In the corner, Daisy's lips were pressed into a tight line, her shoulders trembling slightly.
She was holding back laughter.
Holding it back until her face was red.
She had only one thought in her mind: I told you so.
On the rooftop.
Arthur turned around to face Natasha, who was holding the chickens.
His gaze went past her, looking at an inconspicuous camera at the edge of the rooftop, disguised as an exhaust pipe.
He spoke into the camera, his voice not loud, but enunciated clearly to ensure the audio equipment could capture every syllable.
"Fury."
He paused.
"I am not your enemy, but I am also not something you can control. If you send people again, it won't be weapons I transform next time."
He shifted his gaze away from the camera.
His mana had recovered to 700 points.
Not much, but enough.
The blue light of Blink began to gather at his feet.
Then he heard a sound.
It wasn't the sound of Chitauri engines.
It was the sound of metal breaking and thrusters cutting out, mixed together, coming from directly above.
He looked up.
A red and gold afterimage, trailing thick black smoke, broke away from the chaotic battle over Manhattan, crashing toward the rooftop in a free-fall parabola.
The armor's left arm had already fallen off, and the Arc Reactor on its chest was flickering.
Iron Man.
Two Chitauri skiffs followed behind, their energy cannons still pouring firepower onto the falling armor.
Its landing point was precisely aimed at the spot two meters from Arthur's feet.
Time to Impact: four seconds.