Thirty thousand feet overhead, two blue beams more than ten meters in diameter thundered down.
The moisture in the air evaporated completely in a hundredth of a second. Temperatures in the tens of thousands of degrees instantly vaporized the clouds in their path. The acrid smell of ozone mixed with the scorched stench of baked earth flooded Lynn's nostrils.
The wind cut like blades, slicing through the ruined walls.
Lynn sat upright on the leather sofa, his back perfectly straight. The brilliant light overhead washed his profile deathly pale, but he did not even blink. He even had the leisure to lift a hand and brush the ashes from his cuff.
This woman is even crankier when she wakes up than I imagined, Lynn silently grumbled.
As the "vessel" at the center of this storm, he understood his current role all too well. Moving recklessly now would only interfere with a Skyfather-level powerhouse's attacks. All he needed to do was sit quietly here, a piece of "jade" that had to be protected at all costs, and Wanda's destructive urges would automatically sweep every obstacle out of his way.
In midair, Wanda's thin pajamas snapped in the violent currents.
She slowly raised her head.
Her once-clear eyes had now completely lost their whites, filled entirely with scarlet particles as thick as tangible blood.
"Who gave you permission..."
Wanda's voice was quiet, yet it eerily drowned out the sonic booms of the main cannons, striking everyone's eardrums with perfect clarity.
"To attack him?!"
With that final, piercing scream, Wanda thrust both hands upward, her fingers abruptly spreading as though she were playing a piano.
Boom!
There was no chant, no gathering of power. Violent chaos magic erupted from her slender body like a tsunami surging skyward.
In that instant, the entire night sky over the outskirts of Brooklyn turned a suffocating blood-red.
The blue beams of destruction slammed into the scarlet tsunami. There was no earth-shattering explosion, nor any shock wave from the energies canceling each other out.
It was an utterly bizarre kind of "devouring."
The railgun energy, enough to erase half a city block in an instant, met the chaos particles like snowflakes falling into strong acid. Without so much as a bubble, its underlying physical rules were rewritten, and it was annihilated on the spot into red specks of light drifting across the sky.
"How... is that possible?"
Ten meters away, Gwen Stacy, kneeling on one knee in the rubble, jerked her head up.
Beneath her mask, her bloodshot eyes went wide. Even though she had crossed universes, even though she possessed an extraordinarily keen Spider-Sense, she still felt her mind shudder.
That was not a contest of strength. It was a higher dimension crushing a lower one!
But the obsession in Gwen Stacy's eyes did not fade. Instead, it burned even more wildly. She stared fixedly at the composed man on the sofa, her nails digging deep into the soft flesh of her palms.
He's being controlled by a monster like this... He must be suffering. I have to take him back! Ghost-Spider's logic had become a completely closed loop. She now saw Lynn entirely as a tragic princess imprisoned by a demon king.
Meanwhile, hundreds of kilometers away in Washington, D.C., on the top floor of the Triskelion.
A deathly oppressive atmosphere filled the Director's Office.
On the enormous tactical screen, the bars representing the two Helicarriers' firepower output had already reached an overloaded state of 120%. Yet not only had the vital signs at the target coordinates failed to disappear, they had instead erupted with a terrifying energy pressure that crashed every detector.
"Warning! Energy backflow detected in Helicarrier Two's main cannon!"
"Warning! Unknown distortion detected in Helicarrier Three's gravitational field!"
The shrill synthesized electronic voice echoed wildly through the room.
Veins bulged on the back of Steve Rogers's hand as he gripped the Vibranium Shield. The Super Soldier Serum he was so proud of seemed like a ridiculous toy before that reality-rending scarlet storm on the screen.
"What kind of power is this...?" Sam Wilson swallowed. The Mechanical Wings on his back let out an uncontrolled grinding of gears.
Slumped in his leather swivel chair, Alexander Pierce had completely lost his earlier arrogance of mutual destruction.
Clutching his bleeding shoulder, he stared fixedly at the screen, his entire body shaking like a leaf.
On-screen, the scarlet tsunami of energy did not stop after devouring the main cannon beams. Like living abyssal pythons, it raced up along the beams' trajectories against gravity, latching directly onto the two Helicarriers thirty thousand feet overhead.
"No... cut the connection! Make the Helicarriers gain altitude!" Pierce roared hoarsely at Rumlow like a drowning man.
"Sir... engine thrust is already at maximum, but..." Rumlow hammered frantically at the keyboard, sweat blurring his eyes. His voice held undisguised despair. "They... can't move!"
The screen switched to an external surveillance view.
The steel behemoths weighed tens of thousands of tons. Their four enormous rear plasma engines were still spewing blinding exhaust as they tried to climb.
But it was useless.
Countless scarlet tendrils of magic had already coiled tightly around the Helicarriers' thick belly armor. The rules of gravity were forcibly rewritten in that instant. Like flies pinned inside amber, the two Helicarriers hung in midair, their metal structures cracking explosively under the strain.
Crack, crack, crack-
Under the crushing pressure of chaos magic, horrifying dents began to visibly appear in the half-meter-thick special-alloy hulls.
The ultimate weapons Pierce was so proud of had become two cans the witch could crush flat at any moment.
"Just what kind of monster did you provoke, Pierce?" Nick Fury's one remaining eye narrowed to a slit. The palm of his gun hand was drenched in cold sweat.
He knew Lynn was dangerous, but he had never expected the card Lynn held to be capable of outright disregarding the pinnacle of human technology.
On the outskirts of Brooklyn.
The wind gradually subsided, but the oppressive weight in the air increased exponentially.
Wanda held her loosely curled hands before her chest, her scarlet eyes regarding the sky coldly. An extremely cruel smile curved her lips.
How could merely immobilizing these two heaps of scrap metal possibly quell her rage?
Someone had tried to destroy her one and only bond right before her eyes. Merely letting that thought pass through her mind sent Wanda's reason hurtling toward the abyss.
"Since you like opening fire so much..." Wanda's voice was as soft as a whisper in a lover's ear, but the words she uttered carried bone-chilling killing intent. "Then become fireworks."
She abruptly twisted all ten fingers inward.
At that very instant, with everyone's attention drawn to the Helicarriers about to be crushed in the sky.
Gwen Stacy, who had been lurking in the shadows of the rubble all along, moved.
Like a soundless streak of white lightning, she used her Spider-Sense to skirt the perimeter guarded by chaos magic and landed directly on the back of the sofa behind Lynn.
Lynn raised his brows slightly. His Spider-Sense had long since detected Gwen Stacy's movements, but he did not resist. He simply leaned back against the sofa and lowered his voice. "Gwen Stacy, coming over here now-do you really want to die?"
"Shut up, liar."
Gwen Stacy's voice carried ragged breaths and a sickly fervor. She seized Lynn's shirt collar and yanked hard.
Riiip.
Buttons flew, exposing Lynn's left collarbone to the air.
Gwen Stacy's gaze fixed on that patch of skin. There was a deep, crescent-shaped bite mark there, its color already somewhat darkened.
It was the mark she had left in the simulation when she bit Lynn's shoulder before falling from the Clock Tower, so that he would remember her forever!
"So you really did... keep all your memories." Gwen Stacy's fingers gently stroked the bite mark. Beneath her mask, her tears instantly burst free, yet her tone held a spine-chilling obsession. "You lied to everyone. You've been using this old woman as a shield, haven't you?"
The corner of Lynn's eye twitched. He was just about to talk this Ghost-Spider, whose imagination had run far too wild, into calming down.
In midair.
Wanda, who had been about to crush the Helicarriers completely, abruptly froze.
She slowly turned her head. Her scarlet gaze pierced the void and locked onto the white figure on the sofa, who was practically pressed against Lynn.
The surrounding temperature instantly dropped to absolute zero.
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