"Fifty million?!"
Coulson's perpetually unflappable, good-natured face instantly twisted as though he had swallowed an entire unpeeled lemon.
"Doctor Yang, this shabby little two-story building of yours, land included, would fetch two million dollars at most in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen!"
"Bullshit! Do you even know what intangible assets are?" Yang Ming adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses and pointed at the heap of scrap metal at the bottom of the crater, nearly spraying spit in Coulson's face.
"See that twisted steel plate? That was a custom hyperbaric chamber Stark Industries gave me! Tony Stark tightened the screws himself! How much do you think that prestige alone is worth?"
Jessica played along with perfect timing, shouting from beside him:
"Exactly! And my ergonomic office chair! It was handcrafted by an old artisan who served the Swedish royal family, with cushions stuffed full of premium goose down from the Caucasus Mountains! Without that chair, I can't possibly use my ten tons of strength to protect the clinic!"
Coulson's mouth twitched violently as he looked at Jessica.
"Miss Jones, unless our search team's assessment was wrong, you bought that chair for fifteen dollars at the secondhand flea market in the next neighborhood last week. It even had a cigarette burn in it."
"What do you know? That was battle-damaged vintage style!" Jessica planted her hands on her hips, utterly shameless and supremely confident.
Yang Ming gave Coulson no chance to catch his breath and kept up the barrage.
"And that's just the equipment! The cold storage in my basement held thousand-year-old snow lotus extract I harvested from the Himalayas, along with rare poison dart frog toxins I found deep in the Amazon rainforest! Those were lifesaving medicines for treating difficult conditions! Now that lousy hammer has smashed them all to bits!"
The more he spoke,