How to Save People

Tony's expression changed as he watched from in front of the television, and he instinctively put on his armor, but Zhan Liu grabbed him by the arm.

"Why aren't you staying here and enjoying the show? Where are you going?"

"Peter's going to die. I have to hurry over and save him."

Peter was a fan of Tony's. Although they had not met many times, Peter's undisguised admiration had greatly satisfied Tony's vanity.

That was why the two of them got along so well.

Now that he saw his little fan in danger, Tony's first reaction was to fly over and save him.

"Heh, didn't someone say that he absolutely wouldn't go to the battlefield?" Zhan Liu looked at Tony teasingly.

"This isn't the time to talk about that. Hurry up and go save him. You're fast, and that Hulk definitely isn't your match."

"No." Zhan Liu refused outright.

"Are you using Peter's life to pick a fight with me?" Tony was frantic and started shouting at Zhan Liu.

Zhan Liu was not angry in the slightest. Instead, he said with a chuckle, "Heh, not bad. You're starting to look like a Senior Apprentice-Brother, and you know to take care of your junior apprentice-brother. But Tony, you need to have a little faith in your junior apprentice-brother. Who says that Hulk can beat Peter?"

Tony froze.

He turned his head toward the television and saw the huge green brute pinning Peter to the ground and raining punches down on him. Peter was spewing blood everywhere and was almost covered in it from head to toe.

"This is what you call being able to beat him? Ultimate Limit Qigong is very powerful, but Peter is only at the Current Drive Realm right now, and he has just a hundred thousand volts. That's only the level of an ordinary high-voltage current. If Hulk were that easy to deal with, the military wouldn't have suffered such heavy losses."

Zhan Liu sighed and scolded him in exasperation, "Tony, Tony, I tell you things like this in class all the time, but you haven't taken a word of it to heart."

"Everyone, listen carefully. I'll say it again. The core of our martial art lies in the will. Between life and death, a person's essence, energy, and spirit become highly concentrated, and their potential erupts in an instant. A battle to the death can often allow someone's Martial Dao realm to soar and achieve a qualitative leap."

"Although Peter is being beaten, he hasn't lost consciousness. And look at the ground around him. The way it keeps cracking and sinking shows that he has been using the Ultimate Energy Conversion Art to disperse the force."

"Since he is still fully conscious, he has a chance to turn the tables against the odds."

"My expectations for him are very high. I hope he can break through the bottleneck today in one stroke and enter the Magnetic Field Rotation realm."

As Zhan Liu delivered these few words while teaching his disciples, Peter on the television suddenly let out a furious roar.

"You bastard! Are you done beating me yet?"

A powerful current surged wildly from Peter's body and shot into the sky, knocking Hulk head over heels.

Peter sprang up from the ground. His entire head and face were covered in blood, yet pale electric plasma gushed from his eyes.

"Current Drive, three hundred thousand volts!"

"Ultimate Emperor Leg!"

"Lose to me! Die, you bastard!"

Compared to a sly fellow like Tony, Peter was much easier to fool. He had not been studying Chinese for long and was still unfamiliar with it, so Strongman's Speech had been especially easy to drill into him.

With Zhan Liu deliberately misleading him, Peter took Strongman's Speech for a common Chinese sentence-final expression and learned it perfectly.

Hulk had already vented much of his anger by pummeling Peter earlier. Now, faced with Peter's sudden burst of power, he was completely unable to defend himself. Peter kicked through his crossed-arm guard and slammed his foot heavily into Hulk's face.

Hulk was sent flying like a rubber ball and crashed into the building beside them.

The building had been struck heavily several times, and most of its load-bearing pillars had already broken. It immediately began to sway precariously before toppling to one side.

There were still many office workers inside. Everything had happened too suddenly. The people on the lower floors had managed to escape, but everyone on the upper floors had been trapped.

Now that the building was collapsing, cries instantly filled the building.

"Hulk!" Hulk's fading anger surged back once again. He reached out and tore a load-bearing pillar from the side, hefting it as easily as a piece of wood before charging forward again.

"Ultimate Endless Palm!" Peter also swept forward, wrapped in lightning, and collided head-on with Hulk.

The impact between the two produced a shock wave that swept in all directions, sending the abandoned cars on the nearby road flying.

The reporters at the scene could barely withstand it either. Carrying their cameras, they retreated and edged away, yet remained professional enough to refuse to abandon this once-in-a-lifetime footage.

With that attitude toward his work, he deserved an Outstanding Employee award. Otherwise, his meager salary would not have been worth it.

Their fierce battle made the already tottering building even worse. It was almost kissing the neighboring building, and the situation looked ready to become a domino effect: this building would crush that one, then one floor after another, turning the city's prosperous cluster of office towers into a heap of ruins.

"That building is going to collapse." Tony looked at Zhan Liu beside him.

"Oh, it is." Zhan Liu nodded.

"...Aren't you going over to save them? There are at least several thousand people in that building. If you take the chain reaction afterward into account, you should be able to save tens of thousands of people if you go now."

"Then why don't you go?" Zhan Liu glanced sideways at Tony.

"I want to go save them, but I have no idea how to stop that building from collapsing. According to Jarvis's calculations, my current magnetic field power isn't enough to straighten that building, even with the armor on."

"The only thing we can do is evacuate the people from the building as quickly as possible and move them somewhere safe. But the building is about to collapse. With the time we have, I can save at most a few dozen people."

Tony's expression was gloomy. Clearly, he still respected life by nature, unlike Zhan Liu, a quasi-Magnetic Lunatic who treated human lives like weeds.

"But you can blast that building apart. Look, as long as you smash this building, all the ones behind it will be safe." Zhan Liu offered him a "good" idea.

"What a terrible idea!" Tony was speechless. "I asked you for a way to save people, not a way to kill them."

"When this building collapses and triggers a chain reaction, everyone will die. If you smash it now, the people behind it will be saved. Are you going to do it or not?"

"Look, would you kill one person to save ten thousand? What if we increased that one person to ten, a hundred, a thousand, or nine thousand? Would you still do it? Or let's put it more simply: if two people are about to die, and killing one can save the other, would you do it?"

Zhan Liu looked at Tony with malicious intent.

Questions like this, which probed human nature, had no standard answer. Zhan Liu did not expect Tony to answer.

He had brought it up purely to watch Tony squirm.

He knew Tony could not do such a thing, and neither could any of the superheroes. They always wanted the best of both worlds: to kill no one while saving everyone. If they succeeded, that was of course wonderful, but if they failed, they would only drag everyone down to die together.

It was just like dealing with Thanos. Clearly, they only needed to destroy one of the Mu Jins, but they stubbornly refused to do so.

In fact, Zhan Liu had always looked down on those so-called superheroes. He probably would have gotten along quite well with Thanos.