Dark Undercurrents of the Swarm

The tunnel was thick with the stench of blood, as though the heat of the battle still lingered in the air.

A ghostly blue glow suddenly spread across Lin Xiu's wristguard, like a faint lamp in the darkness.

The Balder Armor's tactical grid flickered across his retina. Four orange-red heat signatures were approaching at 3.2 meters per second—the Iron Shadow Squad.

Their footsteps were light, but in the narrow tunnel, he could still hear the faint scrape of metal boot soles against the ground.

His Adam's apple bobbed as his fingertips lightly tapped his chestplate.

The Nanite Swarm immediately emerged from the standing water on the floor, crawling up his boots and calves like tiny silver snakes before condensing into a translucent sheet of metal three meters in front of him.

It was a temporary barricade built from metal ions in the ground. Its surface glimmered faintly with a cold sheen and could reflect 70% of electromagnetic scanning signals.

The metal within reach felt cold and hard, yet carried a fluid softness, as though liquid metal were breathing.

"Oracle, shut down all external communication modules," he said softly. The armor's built-in silencer filtered his voice into intermittent electrical static, like the whisper of some mechanical creature.

From the corner of his eye, he caught the hem of a dark gray trench coat retreating farther into the shadows at the tunnel entrance—Mia Chen was edging toward the exit.

Every movement she made was exceptionally careful, her toes nearly gliding along the ground as if afraid of alerting anyone.

This former S.H.I.E.L.D. analyst clearly did not want to get involved, but Lin Xiu knew that as long as her binoculars had not been put away, she was still recording everything.

Through the reflection on the lenses, he could even see her adjusting the focus.

A click came from the direction of the ventilation shaft. Melvin had turned off his camera.

That guy only ever sold information that could make him money. With the situation so chaotic, he was probably planning to wait for the dust to settle before editing the footage.

Lin Xiu licked his dry lips. The Tesseract fragment in his palm suddenly grew hot—it was J-09's signal.

The Chitauri's central AI had always been cold-blooded.

The information that the assault team had been wiped out twenty minutes earlier had barely reached the mothership before J-09's logic chain skipped "loss assessment" and entered its "threat escalation" protocol.

Its mechanical mind did not hesitate. It only calculated with precision.

A red alert exploded within its core processor: capable of reflecting Phase Gun energy, devouring biological chips, and even using a Nanite Swarm to construct tactical cover—this human named Lin Xiu was absolutely no ordinary Earth warrior.

"Activate the Rift Hunter retrieval protocol." J-09's mechanical voice rang through the mothership's command center. On the holographic display, seven heavily armored units standing two and a half meters tall squeezed out of the portal.

Their joints were covered in spikes, while the anti-nanite pulse generators on their chests crackled with electricity—these high-frequency oscillation waves could cause the Nanite Swarm to lose coordination within 0.3 seconds.

The faint smell of scorched metal drifted through the air.

Lin Xiu suddenly frowned.

He smelled ozone in the air, three times stronger than before.

The scent stung his nostrils, like the ionized air before a thunderstorm.

"Silent mode." He gritted his teeth and forced out the three words. The fluorescent glow on the armor's surface instantly dimmed, and even his breathing shifted to a low-consumption rate of four breaths per minute.

His heartbeat slowed with the rhythm as well, until almost no sound could be heard.

The Oracle System's notification exploded in his mind: "Unknown energy fluctuations detected. Frequency: 217 megahertz. Suspected anti-nanite weapon."

A sharp crunch of leather boots grinding over metal fragments came from the tunnel entrance.

The Iron Shadow Squad's leader raised a spectral scanner, its blue light sweeping over the wreckage. "The thermal residue is concentrated over here." Behind him, a female agent had already pulled the pin from an EMP grenade. The safety pin landed on the ground with a ding.

Lin Xiu's pupils narrowed to slits.

He could hear the fuse hissing. It would explode in 0.8 seconds, with a blast radius of five meters.

The Nanite Swarm rearranged itself before him, honeycomb patterns spreading across the metallic sheet—an electromagnetic shielding layer designed to counter EMPs.

The instant the blue light exploded, he could even see the air ionized into purple ripples. Yet the nanite barrier merely trembled before reflecting most of the energy into the cables overhead.

"Fuck!" the Iron Shadow Squad's demolitions expert cursed.

He stared at the garbled readings on his scanner and was about to pull out another grenade when a blinding white flash burst above him—Lin Xiu had remotely activated the high-voltage cables of the abandoned rail line.

Sparks from the short circuit erupted with crackling pops, instantly turning the tunnel into a field of snow blindness.

Mia Chen took the chance to shift two steps deeper into the wreckage.

Her binoculars still hung around her neck, but she did not dare raise them now—that electromagnetic barrier had clearly been dynamically constructed from nanobots.

S.H.I.E.L.D.'s nanotechnology was still at the theoretical stage. This man's technological system was at least twenty years ahead.

She took out her phone to snap a picture, but the moment her finger touched the power button, a chill spread down the back of her neck.

It was the instinctive feeling of being targeted by a gun barrel.

Mia slowly turned her head. What she saw was not an Iron Shadow Squad tactical rifle, but the pulse cannon muzzle of a Chitauri Rift Hunter.

Water dripped from its metal joints. She could not tell whether it was tunnel moisture or blood from the earlier battle.

The massive thing had made no footsteps at all. It had simply pressed itself against her back like a shadow.

Her breathing rate instantly soared from twelve breaths per minute to twenty-eight, her chest heaving violently.

Lin Xiu's temples throbbed.

The Oracle System was analyzing the vital signs of every living creature nearby. Mia's heartbeat graph had suddenly risen as sharply as a cliff—she had encountered a threat.

He lowered his eyes to his wristguard. The energy flow through the Tesseract fragment had accelerated by 15%.

Tactical Form: Third Stage. He silently invoked it. The patterns across his armor began to reorganize as the Nanite Swarm surged from his fingertips, forming a humming high-frequency vibration sword in midair.

The Rift Hunter's pulse cannon finished charging, and a blue sphere of light gathered at its muzzle.

Mia could see her own reflection in the cannon barrel, twisted like a scrap of rag.

She wanted to run, but her calves were trembling—this thing was far stronger than the assault team from earlier.

The next second, a streak of silver light tore through the darkness.

The high-frequency vibration sword precisely pierced the Rift Hunter's energy core. The Nanite Swarm burrowed in through the wound and instantly devoured its power circuits.

Amid the blue light of the explosion, a notification appeared on Lin Xiu's armor: "Tactical Form: Third Stage unlocked—swarm can construct high-frequency melee weapons." Sweat clung to his brow, but his gaze was colder than the blade.

The Iron Shadow Squad's searchlights suddenly swung toward him.

Lin Xiu turned and saw four agents emerging from the smoke with guns raised. Mia was crouched behind the wreckage, pale-faced but still clutching her phone.

The sound of metal grating being stepped on came from the ventilation shaft—Melvin had probably turned his camera back on.

Most troublesome of all were the ionospheric fluctuations at the end of the tunnel. J-09 clearly would not send only one Rift Hunter.

"Oracle, swarm-splitting plan," he said softly. The Nanite Swarm in his palm began dividing into two streams.

One stream crawled back along his arm into the armor, while the other quietly slipped into the drainage pipe beside Mia's feet.

The tunnel alarms were still blaring, but Lin Xiu knew the real trouble had only just begun.