Infiltrating Stark Tower!

A month later.

Fu Qinghai sat in a cubicle by the floor-to-ceiling windows, staring with a pained expression at the busy New York streets outside.

Stark Industries' shitty intern recruitment!

He looked up at the gleaming, iron-gray building in the distance. He was still a full three blocks away from Stark Tower!

In his previous life, Fu Qinghai had heard of this sort of thing. Some subsidiaries and smaller companies under large conglomerates weren't famous enough to attract sufficient applicants, so they recruited under the parent company's name. But the actual party signing the employment contract would be some obscure little company. Some large state-owned enterprises and private companies loved this trick.

He just never would've thought that even the mighty Stark Industries would pull something like this!

And the company where Fu Qinghai was interning now, Beckhart Visual Effects, wasn't even a subsidiary of Stark Industries. At most, it was a close business partner and supplier in which they held some shares in each other.

And they could still recruit under Stark Industries' name?

Fu Qinghai thought back to how unusually smooth the interview had been. He'd assumed his fake credentials were flawless and his story airtight.

Turns out they didn't care whether he was real or not.

Society was simple. People were complicated.

So the joke had been on him all along!

He looked at the computer screen in front of him and the piles of documents. These tasks were simple, tedious, and repetitive. Did this really need "Dr. Stanford" Fu to handle? A graduate of Galiton University could do it.

Fu Qinghai was in an incredibly complicated mood.

He was now one step further from becoming CEO of Stark Industries.

The one small consolation was that the internship paid decently. It was enough for Fu Qinghai to scrape by in New York without having to line up with the homeless for the federal government's unemployment relief meals.

His instant coffee had gone cold. Bored out of his mind at his desk, Fu Qinghai stared at the entrance to Stark Tower in the distance, as if gazing at a goddess he could see but never reach.

The midday sun was just as scorching as it had been on the day of his interview, and glints of light danced across the glass curtain wall.

Suddenly, Fu Qinghai thought he saw a blurry shadow flicker across the glass curtain wall.

"Hm?" Fu Qinghai focused on the distant building, but it was too far away to make out.

"Am I seeing things?" The reflected sunlight was too bright. Fu Qinghai couldn't tell what he'd seen.

"Probably just my eyes. Hmm... I've been in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for over two months now, and I still haven't found anyone else who might be a Reincarnator. That voice in my head hasn't appeared again, either." Fu Qinghai mused over how long it would take a phony like him to work his way into Stark Industries.

He hadn't stolen any of Stark Industries' advanced technology, and those legendary Assimilation Points still seemed nowhere in sight.

"Tsk..." After a moment, Fu Qinghai smacked his lips, stood up, and went to get himself another hot coffee.

Suddenly, a deafening BOOM rang out. Fu Qinghai hurriedly turned to look outside.

A gaping hole had been blown into the middle floors of Stark Tower in the distance, and thick black smoke poured out.

The blast had been so loud that Fu Qinghai, three blocks away from Stark Tower, felt the floor shake.

The office erupted into commotion. His coworkers all stood up and looked out the windows.

"What happened?"

"Terrorist attack?"

"Look, that's Stark Industries! It's smoking!" one coworker pointed out.

"God, don't tell me those aliens are back," one employee prayed. He might have been a survivor of the Chitauri invasion during the Battle of New York.

"Quiet! Quiet! Get back to your desks!" A short, stocky supervisor had also been startled. He emerged from his office and tried to restore order.

But the employees ignored his shouts and crowded around the floor-to-ceiling windows to watch Stark Tower in the distance.

The Battle of New York from a year ago was still fresh in everyone's minds. Even now, many parts of New York remained in ruins and hadn't been fully rebuilt.

Fu Qinghai stared at the chaos in the distance. Traffic was jammed, people were fleeing in terror, and police in black New York Police Department uniforms were rushing over. The distant wail of fire alarms had already begun.

I have to get over there. A voice in his heart seemed to urge him on.

"I have to go check it out!" Fu Qinghai made up his mind. He didn't know what was happening, but he had a feeling this incident was no small matter. He'd experienced Stark Tower's security during his interview; it was exceptionally strict. Whoever could cause an explosion on the building's middle floors was no ordinary person.

Driven by that inexplicable yearning in his heart, Fu Qinghai pushed past his coworkers, ran down the stairs, and headed out onto the street.

People on the street were fleeing in panic, away from Stark Tower. Nobody wanted to stick around to watch. In disaster-prone New York City, that was the most basic safety instinct.

Fu Qinghai, moving against the crowd, stood out like a sore thumb. Police officers were directing people along the roadside, and the explosion had caused several cars to rear-end one another.

"Hey, kid, you can't—" A police officer holding the cordon stopped Fu Qinghai and began to speak.

BOOM!!! Another deafening explosion rang out.

This time, the blast struck near the top floors of Stark Tower. Smoke billowed out, and countless shards of glass and chunks of concrete pattered down like rain. People on the street ducked and scrambled for cover.

The instant the explosion went off, Fu Qinghai and the police officer beside him instinctively crouched for cover. Fu Qinghai took the opportunity to spring up and sprint toward Stark Tower even faster.

As he ran, Fu Qinghai could hear his heart pounding.

It was his reason warning him: This is dangerous! Extremely dangerous!

But the gambler's streak in his bones overwhelmed his reason. He'd spent a whole month muddling along in the Marvel Cinematic Universe without achieving a thing. In his previous life, he'd been a corporate wage slave at a private company. Was he really going to spend half his life being a useless wage slave even after entering a Reincarnation World?

"Besides, according to that message, shouldn't I have three lives?"

Fu Qinghai reached the tower's entrance. Injured, bloodied people were crying as they rushed out. He slipped inside and saw that the once-bustling lobby was in ruins: collapsed pillars, unconscious people strewn across the floor, and security guards tending to the wounded who were bleeding heavily.

This isn't the time to save people. Besides, I don't know first aid. Nobody paid Fu Qinghai any attention. He stepped over the rubble and ran toward the elevators.

The explosions had spread close to the top floors. There wasn't time to take the stairs. Fu Qinghai pulled an access card from the chest of a half-body lying on the floor in a blue security uniform. He didn't dare look at the mangled lower half, and he held his breath to avoid the nauseating stench of blood. Recalling where the elevators were from his interview, he swiped the card and opened the elevator doors.

Ding! The elevator was still working.

Fu Qinghai pressed the button for the highest floor. When he pressed the button for the forty-fifth floor, it finally lit up.

"Phew... Looks like this guard's clearance only goes up to the forty-fifth floor." Fu Qinghai drew a deep breath. The elevator doors closed, and it began to rise slowly.

As the elevator slowly rose, Fu Qinghai forced himself to calm down and think about what he might face next.

"Someone's broken into Stark Tower. They're using force, but what do they want?"

According to the original movie plot, this was Thor's time. There was no indication of what the other Avengers were doing.

So the intruders probably weren't characters from the story. They were Reincarnators like me! Fu Qinghai's heart tightened. Any Reincarnator brazen enough to attack the Avengers' New York headquarters was definitely no weakling like him, who had only just entered the Reincarnation World.

And judging by the situation, they'd most likely chosen the opposite side from him.

Another explosion sounded from the floors above. The elevator lurched, and the lights flickered.

Fu Qinghai hurriedly grabbed the handrail to steady himself.

He suddenly remembered the blurry shadow that had flashed by in the distance when he'd first seen the building. Could it have been related to this?

Ding! The elevator doors opened.

Fu Qinghai cautiously peeked out. There was damaged furniture, bullet holes in the walls, and two bodies—fewer than on the first floor. But there were splashes of blood radiating across the walls. Apart from the signs of a battle, the entire forty-fifth floor was empty.

Compared with the chaos on the streets outside, an eerie silence hung over the place.

Now that he was here, Fu Qinghai was no longer in a hurry. He'd rushed up to the higher floors on impulse, but now he could take a moment to observe and think. He approached a headless body in a suit, slumped over a sofa. The cut at the neck was clean and smooth, and half-congealed blood streamed down the back of the sofa like a waterfall. The head lay behind it. The body's relaxed posture suggested the man hadn't realized danger was coming before he died. A Stark Industries badge was pinned to his chest, stained red with blood.

Another body lay at the entrance to the stairwell. It was a white man with a thick beard, wearing a shirt, jeans, and a GEN2 Bulletproof Vest in desert camouflage. His hand still gripped an AR-15 assault rifle covered in aftermarket attachments and custom paint. Fu Qinghai's instincts told him that this wasn't how Stark Industries security dressed.

And the roughly ten-centimeter-wide hole, charred black, right through the bearded man's chest suggested something else, too.

Was this a penetrating wound caused by Iron Man's palm repulsor? Fu Qinghai wondered. If so, the bearded man might also have been a Reincarnator.

After searching the man thoroughly and finding nothing useful, Fu Qinghai struggled to pry his fingers from the grip. He familiarized himself with the trigger and safety, then copied the way he'd seen others play CQB, crouching with the rifle raised as he crept up the stairwell through the large hole blasted in the wall.

Forty-sixth floor, forty-seventh floor, forty-eighth floor.

Along the way, Fu Qinghai tried every electronic device he could find.

"Please enter your password."

"Facial recognition in progress."

"Insufficient clearance. Access denied."

The devices gave him more or less the same answers.

"Fuck!" Fu Qinghai couldn't help swearing.

This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get into the top floors of Stark Tower, yet it had brought him no gains at all. Fu Qinghai was, at best, an office worker with broad interests. He wasn't a genius hacker, and cracking Stark Industries' firewall would probably take more than an ordinary genius hacker, anyway.

As Fu Qinghai searched around, explosions and tremors periodically shook the top floor. The battle was clearly at a stalemate.

"If they're holding their own against Iron Man, a few Reincarnators who look like mercenaries probably aren't enough..." Now that he was here, one floor below the top of Stark Tower, Fu Qinghai hesitated again.

He'd made it into Stark Tower, but he hadn't gotten anything out of it.

His disappointment was one reason. More importantly, he still remembered the main storyline he'd chosen a month ago: "A. Avengers faction storyline"!

If... and he meant if... Iron Man really was killed on the top floor, that would definitely affect the entire Avengers faction's storyline—even though this was Thor's part of the timeline, Iron Man was one of the MCU's three core Avengers.

The Reincarnator group that dared challenge Iron Man clearly hadn't come unprepared...

Fu Qinghai thought again about the words he'd heard in his head: "Reincarnation lives x3"...

"Let's do it!" Fu Qinghai steeled himself.

No matter how carefully you've planned, no matter how powerful you are, and no matter how much of a weakling I am... today, I, Fu Qinghai, am going to help out!

That was what he told himself, but he still moved toward the spiral staircase at a nearly turtle-like pace.

Fu Qinghai did his best to keep quiet, inching forward as he held his breath and listened.

The fighting upstairs seemed to have stopped. Faint voices drifted down.

"So, Mr. Stark, even if you don't care about your own life, you should at least think about the lives of your woman and your friends. Now, hand over the Tesseract isotope." The speaker sounded like a young man.

A weak voice replied, "I don't know what you're talking about... What the hell is this Tesseract? There's nothing here you want."

"That was an heirloom your father left you. How could you not know?" The young man sounded furious. "Look at this face—Virginia Pepper Potts, your poor little secretary. In the next second, this face will be blown to bits by a .44 Magnum round!"

What a classic villain speech.

"You should go after Nick Fury instead of me. Ha... Just get it over with. I didn't think I'd survive the Battle of New York only to... only to die at the hands of a mutant asshole."

"A mutant? I'm no filthy mutant, Mr. Stark. You know nothing about the will of the Earth, and nothing about the mighty Power of Orochi!" The young man's voice was full of arrogance.

The will of the Earth? The Power of Orochi? Hearing that, Fu Qinghai began to think...

Could it be... The King of Fighters?

Tsk... Fu Qinghai drew in a sharp breath. He'd been wondering what kind of Reincarnator could go toe-to-toe with Iron Man. But if his opponent was a fully reincarnated vessel of Orochi from The King of Fighters, then given the power scale of that world, the Mark 42 armor Iron Man was wearing now wouldn't stand a chance. At the very least, Tony Stark would need to be wearing the Mark 46 Bleeding Edge armor to have a chance of fighting him.

On the other hand, the fact that he could go toe-to-toe with Iron Man suggested that his opponent wasn't the fully manifested will of Orochi, but merely a temporary vessel for it. Fu Qinghai continued analyzing the situation.

"Merely" a temporary vessel? Listen to how cocky he sounds.

"Murakami, stop wasting time. The other Avengers are on their way. Just kill him and take the Assimilation Points," said a gruff voice.

Fu Qinghai had made it to the top floor. He was sitting beside a glass door, listening to the voices from behind the wall.

"No. The other Avengers won't get here so quickly. We've finally cornered Iron Man. We can take our time playing with Mr. Stark..." The young man sneered. Clearly, the huge number of Assimilation Points he'd get for killing Iron Man wasn't enough for him. He had even greater ambitions and greed.

No, I have to do something, or Iron Man will die here today. Hearing that, Fu Qinghai decided to cautiously peek out and see what was happening.

He slowly leaned his head out from behind the door.

What he saw on the other side of the door.

One look was enough to make Fu Qinghai's blood run cold.