The silver arrow flowed around Lynn's fingertips, trembling like a living thing as it pointed northeast.
Silver light flickered over his dark fingertips like flowing mercury.
Following its direction, he slipped into an abandoned subway station in Brooklyn. The moment he stepped inside, damp, clammy air brushed the back of his neck like icy tentacles, making every hair on his body stand on end.
Thirty meters underground, the air carried the stench of decay, filling his nostrils with the smell of age and abandonment.
The Oracle System said residual quantum wake traces from a Tesseract Fragment remained here, but what unsettled him more was that Asgardian divine script continued to flicker across his retina like a silent warning. Its flashing glow was especially glaring in the darkness.
"Temperature: 12.3°C. Humidity: 89%." The system's prompt was kept extremely low, as though afraid to disturb the underground silence. "The ventilation ducts have rusted breaches. Avoid the third pillar on the left." Supporting himself against a mildew-spotted wall, Lynn edged downward. His hand brushed the surface, and its rough texture felt like the ravines carved by time.
The soles of his combat boots slipped on the water-filmed rails. The clink of metal echoed in scattered fragments through the tunnel, reverberating through the empty passage like countless eyes watching him.
He immediately held his breath—Nanobots within this body surged along his veins toward his fingertips, forming a translucent shielding membrane in his palm.
The membrane flickered with faint blue light, its barely visible glow mysterious and eerie in the darkness.
That was when the blue light entered his field of vision.
At the end of the tunnel, a thumbnail-sized fragment hovered above a concrete pedestal like a crushed star. Its blue glow was especially dazzling in the darkness, as if proclaiming its extraordinary nature.
Lynn's pupils constricted sharply, his throat tightening—he had seen similar light in the laboratory. The day the Quantum Collider exploded in blue radiance, the Nanocore had fused into his flesh and blood just like this.
That mysterious laboratory had been the turning point of his fate. Countless secrets and dangers had begun there. "Low-grade fragment. Energy stability: 78%." The system's voice carried a trace of mechanical excitement. "Recommendation: use Type III extraction protocol. Estimated time: 17 seconds."
He crouched down as Nanobots crawled from his sleeves, weaving into web-like energy claws around his fingertips.
The energy claws shimmered faintly, trembling gently as if alive.
But the instant they touched the fragment, metal scraped in the depths of the tunnel—as though some heavy machine were crushing over the rails. The clack-clack rhythm grew clearer, each sound hammering against Lynn's heart.
Cold sweat instantly beaded on the back of Lynn's neck. The nano-claws withdrew beneath his skin with a swish, and he slid along the tunnel wall into a recess.
The stone wall of the recess was cold and rough against his back, sending a chill through him.
"Thermal scanner activated." The system's warning came before the footsteps. "Seven biological signals detected. Energy signatures match Chitauri Ground Forces." Lynn held his breath as six figures wrapped in dark purple armor emerged around the bend, their armor gleaming with an eerie light in the dimness.
The one at the front stood half a head taller, with a totem of crossed bone blades engraved on her shoulder armor—Carl Weiss, the elite Chitauri commander Lynn had seen in S.H.I.E.L.D. files.
"The energy disturbance is here." Carl's throat modulator emitted a hoarse electronic voice, her claw-like fingertips pointing toward Lynn's hiding place.
The voice seemed to rise from hell itself. Lynn's heartbeat abruptly accelerated, and he could hear his blood roaring against his eardrums.
His left hand quietly pressed against his waist as Nanobots crawled along the lines of his skin into the armor interface—the activation sequence for Tactical Form flashed wildly within the Oracle System, but revealing himself now was no different from courting death.
"Adjusting temperature to 12.5°C." The system's voice suddenly became urgent. "Releasing interference swarm to simulate water droplet frequency. Three, two, one—"
A drip-drip sound echoed through the tunnel, perfectly overlapping with an actual seepage point twenty meters away.
The sound of dripping water was especially distinct in the silent tunnel, like a countdown to fate.
The red beam of a Chitauri soldier's scanner swept over Lynn's position, paused before the recess, then slowly moved away.
The red light flickered in the darkness like a demon's eye.
Carl's antennae suddenly shot upright. She turned and hissed several phrases in an alien language, and the soldiers immediately spread out in a fan formation.
Lynn watched the nearest soldier approach to within three steps of him. The thermal detector on its gun barrel lit up with a piercing red glow.
The red light was like a sharp blade, stabbing into Lynn's eyes.
His nails dug deeply into his palm, the sharp pain making him even more alert.
Nanobots churned beneath his skin, slipping out through cracks in the ventilation ducts—his contingency, hidden at the top of the tunnel.
When the Chitauri soldiers' communicators suddenly erupted in a shrill screech, a cold glint flashed through Lynn's eyes.
He controlled the Nanobots to coil around the communication lines and detonated them precisely at the system-marked "overload threshold"—the blast wave sent two soldiers flying, while metal fragments grazed past Carl's shoulder armor and struck sparks from the wall.
The sparks flickered in the darkness like sparks of hope.
"Now!" Lynn barked, bursting from the recess.
His heart was filled with determination to protect the fragment. It might be the key to saving humanity, or perhaps the key to unraveling the mystery of his origins.
His right hand drew a silver arc through the air. Nanobots wrapped around the fragment and retracted into his palm, while the armor core abruptly heated up—blue ripples spread from his chest across his entire body, and the markings of Tactical Assault Form lit beneath his skin like flowing lightning.
"Human!" Carl's roar made the tunnel hum. Her weapon spat a purple beam, blasting a charred crater where Lynn had stood moments before.
The purple beam shone brilliantly in the darkness, accompanied by a pungent smell.
Using the explosive power of his new form, Lynn leaped onto a crossbeam at the top of the tunnel. Nanobots reassembled in his palm, and the cold gleam of the Electromagnetic Pulse Crossbow reminded him of the particle guns in the laboratory. "Target locked: command terminal." The system's prompt was drowned out by gunfire. The instant he pulled the trigger, the bolt pierced precisely through the weak point beneath Carl's arm guard.
In the firelight of the terminal's explosion, the Chitauri soldiers' weapons failed one after another.
Lynn landed where the fragment had originally hovered and watched the last soldier collapse into the darkness.
Just as he was about to relax, the Oracle System's alarm suddenly pierced his eardrums: "Higher-density energy fluctuations detected!
Source..."
"An aerial carrier," Lynn finished for the system.
He stared at the still-heated fragment in his palm and could feel the Nanocore cheering—but clearer still was the vibration coming from overhead, as though some colossal thing were tearing through the clouds.
The vibration grew stronger and stronger, like the prelude to the end of the world.
In the daylight leaking through the tunnel vent, he saw his shadow stretched impossibly long.
Along the edges of that shadow's outline, a faint golden light was seeping out—the exact same color as the Asgardian divine script from before.
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