Washington, D.C., the top floor of the Triskelion.
The thick smell of gun smoke mingled with the aroma of fine cigars, filling the wreckage-strewn Director's Office.
"Councilman Pierce, I bet you're regretting not taking out a hefty accident insurance policy beforehand."
A cold gleam shone in Nick Fury's one remaining eye. The Glock in his hand was pressed hard against Alexander Pierce's jaw, the cold of its barrel passing through his skin straight into his nerves.
Facing the gun pressed against his vital spot, Pierce merely stiffened slightly. Instead of the expected terrified pleas for mercy, a chilling, vicious grin slowly spread across his wrinkled face.
Like a madman who had lost every chip yet still hoped to overturn the table, he let out a low, hoarse chuckle. "Fury... you always like showing up at the last second. But have you forgotten? The man standing here is Hydra's supreme leader."
"It's over, Pierce." Steve Rogers strode forward, blood from Hydra agents still dripping from the edge of his Vibranium Shield. "The main cannon on Helicarrier One has already been stopped. Give the order now. Have the other two Helicarriers land and shut down Project Insight's underlying protocols."
"Over?" A flash of utterly sick fanaticism crossed Pierce's eyes.
He slowly raised both hands in a textbook gesture of surrender. At the sight, Steve's taut muscles relaxed a fraction.
But it was only a feint meant to fool everyone.
An old fox who had hidden within S.H.I.E.L.D. for decades, Pierce knew all too well how to exploit body language to create an information gap. The instant his hands rose above his head, his jaw muscles tensed sharply, and his back teeth clamped down hard.
Click.
An extremely faint snap sounded deep inside his mouth. It came from a miniature biological trigger hidden in the pulp of his tooth, directly connected to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s deepest core mainframe-a back door known only to him.
Fury's instincts as an agent screamed a warning. Ignoring Pierce's raised hands entirely, he pulled the trigger without hesitation.
Bang!
Flame spat from the muzzle. The bullet did not pierce Pierce's skull, but punched precisely through his right shoulder.
Pierce grunted, blood instantly staining his expensive bespoke suit. Clutching his bleeding shoulder, he collapsed into the leather swivel chair, yet burst into unrestrained laughter despite the pain.
Too late. It was all too late.
Without warning, a piercing synthesized voice echoed wildly throughout the office, drowning out every alarm:
"Supreme biological command confirmed. Project Insight final protocol initiated. Helicarriers Two and Three, main cannons charging to full capacity. Target locked: coordinates outside Brooklyn, New York. Execute indiscriminate saturation bombardment."
Natasha's expression changed abruptly, her red hair sweeping an arc through the air. She lunged at the console, her hands blurring across the keyboard as she tried to forcibly cut off the command.
Seconds later, she slammed a fist against the metal panel and turned back, teeth clenched. "Access is completely locked down! Even physically cutting the connection won't work! These two Helicarriers' fire-control systems have fully detached from the mainframe and entered an irreversible, self-destructive firing sequence!"
"Are you insane?!" Sam Wilson held his gun ready, staring at Pierce in disbelief. "If both Helicarriers fire their main cannons at once, that neighborhood will be wiped clean off the map! Tens of thousands of civilians will die with it!"
"So what?" Pierce leaned against the backrest, blood dripping between his fingers, yet his eyes shone with a frightening brightness.
He stared venomously at Steve, his voice filled with the madness of taking everyone down with him. "Fury, Steve, you have no idea what true despair is! That low-level agent named Lynn isn't some victim. He's that witch's one and only 'jade'!"
Pierce panted heavily, as though reciting some vicious curse. "Once that piece of jade is crushed completely, that monster with the power to rewrite reality will lose all reason! She'll become a nuclear bomb that destroys the world! If I can't live, then the entire Earth can go to its grave with Hydra's lofty ideals!"
Fury's lone eye contracted sharply, cold sweat instantly soaking his black trench coat. This madman had personally hit the accelerator on the very thing he feared most.
The view shifted hundreds of kilometers away.
The safe house outside Brooklyn, New York.
The smell of burning in the air was chokingly strong. Fierce winds swept up the ashes of the heat-charred lawn and hurled them against the ruined walls.
High above, the clouds Wanda's Chaos Magic had forcibly torn apart were once again churning like boiling ink. Two mountain-sized steel shadows barged into the night sky with sonic booms that pierced the eardrums.
Helicarriers Two and Three.
The two war behemoths, representing humanity's most advanced killing technology, hovered thirty thousand feet above, one on either side. Blue energy matrices gathered frantically across their menacing underside armor, their light twice as blinding as Helicarrier One's had been.
Their target coordinates remained firmly locked on the tottering safe house.
Lynn sat on the soft leather sofa, the top-tier Spider-Sense in his mind stabbing at his nerves like ten thousand steel needles at once, frantically sounding a lethal warning.
He raised his head and looked past the roof that had been ripped clean off, at the two main cannons in the sky capable of vaporizing everything, and quietly clenched his back teeth.
That old bastard Pierce is still pulling this take-everyone-down-with-him crap before he dies?
Lynn ranted furiously inwardly. Rather than sitting here watching nuclear bombs fall from the sky and two yandere heroines fight over him, he desperately missed the days before his transmigration, when he watched anime in front of a screen. Even going out for a bowl of Ichiraku Ramen, or eating a meal at BBQ Q beneath the sunset at the training grounds, would have been far better than being targeted by orbital cannons thirty thousand feet overhead.
But he understood his current situation all too well. Right now, he absolutely could not show even the slightest trace of panic.
Because in this battlefield of romantic rivalry, he was the "vessel" who had to keep the whole situation steady.
Ten meters from the sofa, Gwen Stacy stood amid shattered glass, panting heavily.
Her Ghost-Spider suit, woven in pure white and bright pink, still bore black scorch marks from resisting the heat earlier. Beneath her mask, her bloodshot eyes stared fixedly at the two Helicarriers overhead, her pupils shrinking to pinpoints with extreme fear and obsession.
"These things again... more things trying to take him away from me!"
Gwen's nails dug deep into her palms, blood dripping between her fingers onto the ruined floor. Like a Rogue Ninja stubborn to the extreme, she had only one thought left in her mind: protecting her bond.
She paid no attention to whether she had already exhausted her strength, or how terrifying the firepower of those two Helicarriers was. Her legs drove hard against the ground, launching her high into the air like a female leopard guarding her food.
Both wrists vibrated frantically, sending dozens of specially made webs shooting through the air and weaving rapidly across the remnants of the ceiling above Lynn. She tried to force a protective net into place over him with her own body and webs.
Even if she was only a mantis trying to stop a chariot, she would die before Lynn did.
Yet faster and more violent than her was the scarlet figure hovering in midair.
Wanda Maximoff.
The Skyfather-level chaos witch looked down upon it all from above.
The pajamas that had originally given her a relaxed, homey air snapped in the violent energy turbulence. The whites of her eyes had vanished completely, filled with scarlet particles so dense they seemed ready to drip blood.
Just moments ago, she had crushed a Helicarrier with one hand. Yet these Hydra insects actually dared to threaten her one and only man, right before her eyes, again and again with this scrap metal.
And beside her was a white spider who had no idea what was good for her, actually trying to seize the right to protect Lynn on her territory.
Absolute possessiveness.
An utterly pure desire for destruction.
These two emotions exploded in Wanda's chest, turning into tangible killing intent that sent the temperature of the surrounding space plummeting to freezing.
"Get lost."
Wanda cast a cold glance at Gwen, who was weaving her web, and flicked a fingertip.
Without warning, a scarlet energy whip lashed Gwen's web. The specially made strands, capable of withstanding several tons of tension, were like fragile cotton thread before Chaos Magic, snapping and dissipating in an instant.
The recoil forced Gwen into three tumbles in midair before she landed on one knee, glaring at Wanda as a beastlike growl rose from her throat.
But Wanda did not spare her another glance.
The witch slowly raised her head, her scarlet gaze piercing thirty thousand feet to lock firmly onto the two Helicarriers charging frantically within the clouds.
"You... truly deserve to die."
Wanda's voice was quiet, yet carried a terrifying pressure that stood above every rule of the Multiverse.
As her words fell, the surrounding space began to warp violently, visibly to the naked eye. Gravity ceased to function entirely, and dozens of tons of building debris, soil, and even broken oak trees around the safe house all floated uncontrollably into the air.
The two Helicarriers overhead had finished their final charge. Two blue beams of destruction, each over ten meters in diameter, thundered down with the power to flatten everything.
At that critical instant.
Wanda thrust both hands upward, her ten fingers spreading sharply as though playing a world-ending symphony.
In that instant, the night sky over all of New York changed color completely.
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