Dark Web Storm

The emergency lights in the subway tunnel cast cold white halos overhead. Lin Xiu slid twenty meters along the metal inner wall of the ventilation duct, while the thermal radiation coating on his Nano Armor adjusted its temperature in increments of 0.1 seconds.

A faint tremor ran through the metal wall, like an electric current lightly dancing across skin. A chill crept down his spine.

He drew a deep breath, his nostrils filling with the mingled scent of rust and damp air.

With his back against the damp brick wall, he listened as the Iron Shadow Squad's footsteps gradually faded deeper into the tunnel. His Adam's apple bobbed—alerts from the Oracle System pulsed along his neural synapses, while real-time data from a dark web forum floated across his retina. The "mysterious warrior" video had surpassed a million views, and comments saying "like Iron Man, but smoother" flooded the screen until his temples tightened.

The ringing in his ears would not stop, as though countless voices were whispering beside him. Every comment was a thorn driven deep into his consciousness.

"I've been exposed." He murmured, lightly tapping the armor around his wrist with his fingers, producing a faint metallic knock.

The Nanite Swarm immediately burrowed through his skin and into his blood vessels, projecting a more detailed analysis interface into his pupils. In the reflection of the video's final frame, Melvin's high-definition camera had captured two-thirds of the pale brown mole beneath Lin Xiu's left eye.

A faint prickling sensation came from his fingertips, tactile feedback from the Nanite Swarm moving beneath his skin.

Although the Oracle System had already hacked into the forum and attempted to delete it, the anonymous servers were distributed across twenty-seven nodes worldwide. The deletion speed could never keep up with its spread.

A faint scrape of metal suddenly came from the ventilation duct, sharp and grating, like fingernails dragged across a metal plate.

Lin Xiu snapped his head up, only to see a grimy gray rat poke its head out from a crack in the duct. Its whiskers twitched twice before it withdrew.

A trace of dust hung in the air, mixed with the rank smell of rat fur.

He loosened his tense shoulders and back, only then realizing that cold sweat had soaked the back of his neck. Since crossing into the Marvel universe, this was the first time he had felt the urgency of prey biting back.

In a loft somewhere in Brooklyn, Melvin Carson's mechanical keyboard clattered loudly.

Every keystroke sounded like a bullet striking steel plate, crisp and rapid.

He stared at the combat footage on his screen. He had enlarged it frame by frame, and in the reflection on Lin Xiu's visor as he turned, the outline of half a face was gradually becoming clear in the image restoration software.

"A mole beneath the left eye, facial bone structure close to East Asian..." He licked his cracked lips and clicked on the chat window. A new message from the anonymous buyer popped up: "Another fifty thousand. I want an analysis of his tactical patterns."

The computer fan suddenly let out a piercing buzz, like the wail of an old machine on the verge of collapse.

Melvin tugged at his wrinkled hoodie. The loose strands of hair stuck to the cold sweat on the back of his neck pricked at him, and the clammy feeling made him scratch at it.

He pulled up the timeline of the combat footage and marked three of Lin Xiu's crucial movements in red. The first time he used the Nanite Swarm to interfere with thermal imaging, it took 0.8 seconds; the second time, he used the lighting system to create intense flashes, controlling the light-dark alternation precisely at 0.3 seconds; the third time, he broke through beside the Iron Shadow captain, his movement path just barely avoiding every firearm's line of sight.

"That reaction speed isn't something a human can calculate." Melvin's fingers froze over the keyboard, his throat tightening.

But the figure "one hundred and fifty thousand dollars" in the chat window was like a red-hot iron spike, driving his heartbeat faster.

He typed quickly: "Target's tactical preferences: excels at exploiting environmental energy sources—lighting electricity, pipe structures. There is always a subtle 0.5-second pause before action—presumed to be activating some form of real-time computational system. Possible hiding areas..."

Meanwhile, beneath an abandoned factory on the outskirts of New York, Controller J-09's quantum processor flashed with blinding blue light.

It detected a sudden surge in entropy across the dark web's information flow. Of the three hundred and seventy-two discussions about the "mysterious warrior," fourteen had precisely mentioned "golden eyes"—a characteristic of the Balder Armor's Oracle Form and a sign of energy overflowing from the carrier.

"Raise prey recovery priority to Class A." J-09's mechanical voice echoed through the empty command chamber. On the holographic projection, a three-dimensional map of New York City was covered in red alerts.

It mobilized the Chitauri Satellite Network and locked onto an anomalous energy point above a forest on the outskirts. Its metal tendrils plunged sharply into the control panel. "Activate Hunter drones. Coordinates 40°42′N, 74°00′W. Execute area-wide coverage scan."

In a Brooklyn apartment, Mia Chen removed her noise-canceling headphones, her knuckles clenched white.

Two windows were open on the laptop before her. One looped the combat footage, while the other displayed an old S.H.I.E.L.D. database file on the Quantum Crossing Project. The phrase "Nanocore fusion probability: 0.03%," circled in red ink, matched the movement pattern of Lin Xiu's Nano Armor Nanite Swarm almost perfectly.

"Not an alien, not a mutant..." she murmured, her fingertip tracing the footage of Lin Xiu tapping his armor.

It was a typical habit of a mechanical engineering graduate student: the index finger knuckle touched the metal surface first, then pressure was applied with the fingertip. Her ex-boyfriend used to do the same thing when calibrating precision instruments in the lab.

Mia suddenly rose to her feet, the hem of her trench coat brushing over the miniature tracker on the coffee table.

It was now blinking red in sync with Lin Xiu's movement pattern, its frequency completely matching the energy fluctuations of the "quantum carrier" in her memories.

She took a modified Glock 17 from a drawer. Its magazine was loaded with Vibranium particles.

"If he really is..." Mia adjusted her collar in the mirror, sharp light flashing in the eyes of her reflection. "I need to confirm whether he knows what S.H.I.E.L.D. sealed away back then."

Lin Xiu followed the maintenance passage beside the subway tracks toward the exit when the Oracle System suddenly emitted a beep.

He stopped. A glaring orange-red warning appeared on the energy monitoring interface across his retina: "High-level Chitauri energy fluctuations detected on the outskirts. Intensity rating: B+. Estimated carrier: mothership-class vehicle." "J-09 is finally getting desperate." He tore off a strip of Nanite Swarm that had fallen from his armor and examined it in his palm.

The swarm immediately gathered into a miniature radar and began scanning for electronic signals within five meters.

When the radar swept over the metal wall around the bend in the ventilation duct, a flashing red dot suddenly appeared—it was an electronic note, fixed into a crack in the wall with fragments of the Nanite Swarm.

Lin Xiu narrowed his eyes.

The writing on the note was in a mechanical font, but a tiny S.H.I.E.L.D. eagle emblem was drawn in the signature field at the end.

The message was brief: "I know who you are, and I know you're not the enemy. If you still want to live, come to East River Pier at ten tonight."

His thumb lightly brushed the edge of the note.

The Nanite Swarm fragments retained the faintest trace of lavender, the scent of Mia Chen's usual perfume. Three days ago at a café, he had helped the woman who bumped into him pick up her scattered documents. The cap of her fountain pen had been engraved with the initials "M.C."

"A trap or an opportunity?" Lin Xiu looked up toward the ventilation opening at the top of the tunnel. Moonlight seeped through gaps in the iron grating, casting mottled shadows at his feet.

The Oracle System had already begun calculating the risks of keeping the appointment: a 23% chance of an ambush by the Iron Shadow Squad, a 17% chance of being tracked by J-09, and the probability that Mia was trustworthy... The system suddenly lagged for 0.01 seconds before giving a result of 78%.

He folded the note into a small square and slipped it into a hidden compartment inside his armor.

The Nanite Swarm immediately wrapped around the paper and began analyzing the ink composition—it was an exact match for the fountain pen ink Mia had used three days earlier.

Lin Xiu glanced down at the tactical watch on his wrist. The hands pointed to 9:05.

"East River Pier." He spoke softly to the air as his armored visor slowly closed. Golden eyes lit up in the darkness. "I hope you really know something."