The tunnel was thick with the stench of blood, as though the lingering heat of the recent battle still remained.
A dim 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 within the narrow tunnel, the faint rasp of metal boot soles scraping against the ground was still audible.
His Adam's apple bobbed as his fingertips lightly tapped his chest armor.
The Nanite Swarm immediately emerged from the pooled water on the ground, slithering up his boots and calves like tiny silver snakes before forming into a translucent sheet of metal three meters in front of him.
It was a temporary barricade constructed from metal ions in the ground. Its surface glimmered faintly with cold light and could reflect 70% of electromagnetic scanning signals.
The metal within reach felt cold and hard, yet carried a trace of fluid softness, like liquid metal breathing.
"Oracle, shut down all external communications modules," he said quietly. 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 saw the hem of a dark gray trench coat retreat further into the shadows at the tunnel entrance—Mia Chen was edging toward the exit.
Every movement she made was exceedingly cautious, her toes practically sliding along the ground as though afraid of alerting anyone.
This former S.H.I.E.L.D. analyst clearly did not want to get caught in the crossfire, but Lin Xiu knew that as long as she had not put her binoculars 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 ventilation shaft. Melvin had turned off his camera.
That guy had always sold only information that could fetch a price. 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 heated up—it was J-09's signal.
The Chitauri's primary AI had always been cold-blooded.
The information that the assault team had been wiped out had only just reached the mothership twenty minutes earlier, yet J-09's logic chain skipped "loss assessment" and proceeded directly to the "threat escalation" protocol.
Its mechanical mind knew no hesitation, only precise calculations.
A red alert erupted within its core processor: capable of deflecting Phase Gun energy, devouring biological chips, and even using the Nanite Swarm to construct tactical cover—this human named Lin Xiu was definitely no ordinary Earth warrior.
"Initiate the Rift Hunter retrieval protocol." J-09's mechanical voice rang through the mothership's command deck. In 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 in their chests crackled with electricity—these high-frequency Shockwaves could make the Nanite Swarm lose coordination within 0.3 seconds.
A 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 irritated his nostrils, like the charged atmosphere before a thunderstorm.
"Silent mode." He gritted out the three words. The glow on the armor's surface instantly dimmed, and even his breathing shifted to an energy-saving 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 alert exploded in his mind: "Unknown energy fluctuation detected. Frequency: 217 megahertz. Suspected anti-nanite weapon."
A crisp crunch of leather boots grinding over metal fragments came from the tunnel entrance.
The leader of the Iron Shadow Squad raised a spectral scanner, its blue light sweeping over the wreckage. "The heat residue is concentrated over here." Behind him, a female agent had already pulled the pin from an EMP grenade. The safety pin struck the ground with a ding.
Lin Xiu's pupils narrowed into 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 in front of him, honeycomb patterns emerging across the metal sheet—an electromagnetic shielding layer designed to counter EMPs.
The moment blue light erupted, he could even see the air ionize into purple ripples. Yet the nanite barrier merely swayed before bouncing 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 exploded in rapid crackles, instantly plunging the tunnel into a blinding white haze.
Mia Chen took the opportunity 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 pulled out her phone to take a picture, but the instant her finger touched the power button, a chill rose along the back of her neck.
It was the instinct of having a gun barrel aimed at her.
Mia slowly turned her head. What she saw was not an Iron Shadow Squad tactical rifle, but the pulse cannon 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 not made a sound as it walked. It had simply pressed itself against her back like a shadow.
Her breathing instantly surged 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 suddenly rose as sharply as a cliff—she had encountered a threat.
He lowered his gaze to his wristguard. The energy flow of the Tesseract fragment had accelerated by 15%.
Tactical Form: Third Stage. He silently invoked it. The patterns across the armor's surface began to reorganize, and the Nanite Swarm surged from his fingertips, condensing in midair into a humming high-frequency vibrating sword.
The Rift Hunter's pulse cannon finished charging, a sphere of blue light gathering in its muzzle.
Mia could see her own reflection in the cannon's barrel, distorted like a scrap of torn cloth.
She wanted to run, but her calves were trembling—this thing was far stronger than the assault team from before.
The next second, a streak of silver light tore through the darkness.
The high-frequency vibrating sword precisely pierced the Rift Hunter's energy core. The Nanite Swarm burrowed through the wound and instantly devoured its power circuits.
Amid the blue light of the explosion, a notification popped up on Lin Xiu's armor: "Tactical Form: Third Stage unlocked—Swarm can construct high-frequency melee weapons." Sweat hung at his temples, but his gaze was colder than the blade.
The Iron Shadow Squad's searchlights suddenly swept over him.
Lin Xiu turned and saw four agents emerging from the smoke with guns raised. Mia huddled 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 far end of the tunnel. J-09 clearly would not send just one Rift Hunter.
"Oracle, swarm-splitting protocol," he said quietly. The Nanite Swarm in his palm began dividing into two streams.
One stream crawled back up his arm and into the armor, while the other silently 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.
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