Gwen Stacy's fingertips were cold, carrying the chill of the night wind.
Through the torn fabric of his shirt, she pressed her fingertips hard against the crescent-shaped bite mark on Lynn's collarbone. Her breathing beneath her mask was rapid and heavy, like a lone wolf guarding its food that had finally found its long-lost prey.
Lynn leaned against the back of the couch without struggling. His Top-tier Spider-Sense was screaming wildly in his mind, every nerve transmitting signals of mortal danger.
It was not because of the obsessive Ghost-Spider before him, but because of the scarlet figure in midair who had already turned all the way around.
Wanda had seen it.
She had seen it perfectly clearly: a white bug that had crawled out of some unknown sewer was draped over her man. That filthy hand even dared to touch Lynn's skin!
Her extreme territorial instinct erupted completely at that moment.
The scarlet particles in Wanda's eyes instantly grew so dense they seemed about to drip blood. Unable to withstand those terrifying emotional fluctuations, the space around her began to develop visible, glasslike cracks.
"Where... are you touching?"
Wanda's voice was very soft. There was no hysterical roar, yet it carried an absolute pressure that stood above every rule in the Multiverse.
Gwen Stacy went rigid. The fear brought on by her Spider-Sense made her instinctively want to retreat, but she bit through her lip and forcibly withstood that pressure. Not only did she refuse to retreat, she gripped Lynn's collar even tighter, raised her head, and met Wanda's gaze without fear.
"I'm touching the bond he left behind when he saved me." Gwen Stacy let out a cold laugh, her tone carrying a sick provocation. "An old woman like you who wants to control him doesn't understand what he really wants at all."
The corner of Lynn's eye twitched furiously.
This girl really isn't afraid to die. Getting right in a Skyfather-level powerhouse's face and provoking her is even crazier than calling Madara Uchiha a useless piece of trash to his face.
He was just about to speak up and smooth things over, cooling down this romantic battlefield that could explode at any moment.
But Wanda had already moved.
The witch's chest heaved violently once. She did not hurl Chaos Magic straight at the couch, because Lynn was there, and subconsciously, she feared accidentally hurting her one and only "precious jade."
The towering jealousy bottled up in her chest, enough to destroy heaven and earth, desperately needed an outlet.
So Wanda slowly raised her head. Her scarlet gaze pierced thirty thousand feet of night sky and locked firmly onto the two Helicarriers in the clouds, still struggling desperately to gain altitude.
"A pile of eyesores."
Wanda's red lips parted slightly. She slammed her hands together, interlocking all ten fingers tightly.
Boom!
The sky above Brooklyn changed completely.
The scarlet tentacles that had merely been coiled around the Helicarriers' lower armor began multiplying and swelling wildly the instant Wanda brought her hands together. Hundreds of columns of chaos energy, each more than twenty meters in diameter, wrapped tightly around and engulfed the two steel behemoths hundreds of meters long, like giant pythons reaching out of the depths of hell.
Crack-bang!
The deafening sound of metal bursting thundered straight down to the ground from thirty thousand feet above.
This was no ordinary destruction. It was the forcible rewriting of the laws of physics themselves. Beneath the strangling force of Chaos Magic, the half-meter-thick Special Alloy hulls were as fragile as thin paper.
The two Helicarriers, representing the pinnacle of human technology, were forcibly compressed inward and twisted in midair.
Their massive main shafts snapped.
The fighter jets on their decks were crushed like toys.
The four Plasma Engines, powerful enough to propel tens of thousands of tons, had their reactors snuffed out by scarlet particles flooding backward into them the instant they erupted with blinding flames. Even the explosions' shock waves were completely swallowed before they could spread.
Just three seconds.
Under everyone's stunned gaze, Wanda twisted the two colossal vessels in the sky into two enormous, irregular tangles of scrap metal with her bare hands!
"My God..."
On the top floor of the Triskelion in Washington, D.C.
The assault rifle in Sam Wilson's hands dropped straight to the floor. His mouth hung open as he watched the scene on the tactical screen, like a deity destroying the world, and felt his legs go weak.
Steve Rogers's shield hand was also trembling slightly. The Super Soldier Serum he took such pride in was not even a joke in the face of an attack from such an overwhelmingly higher level.
"It's over... it's all over..."
Alexander Pierce collapsed beside the leather swivel chair. Clutching his bleeding shoulder, he stared blankly at the screen full of static.
Three Helicarriers, the ultimate trump card Hydra had spent decades in hiding amassing, had all been crushed like soda cans in less than ten minutes by one person-no, by one monster.
Project Insight had vanished into nothing.
"Fury..." Pierce wheezed like a broken bellows. He raised his head and looked at the one-eyed director walking toward him, his lips twisting into a bleak smile. "You won. But you also opened Pandora's Box. That agent named Lynn... he'll take that witch and drag the whole world into hell."
Fury did not answer. His one remaining eye regarded Pierce coldly as he raised his handgun without hesitation and aimed it between Pierce's eyebrows.
"Take your time preaching Hydra's ideals in hell."
Bang!
The gunshot echoed through the ruined office. A bloody hole appeared between Pierce's eyebrows, and his body fell heavily amid the wreckage, his eyes still fixed wide on the screen, unable to close even in death.
With Pierce's death, the Triskelion, the symbol of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s highest authority, also let out an overloaded groan under the lingering impact of Helicarrier One's earlier crash.
Wide sections of the load-bearing walls began to crack, and chunks of concrete rained down from the ceiling.
"The building's coming down! Fall back!" Steve roared, raising his shield over his head.
S.H.I.E.L.D., the behemoth that controlled order on the hidden side of Earth, met its final dissolution that night, along with Hydra's ambitions.
On the outskirts of Brooklyn, New York.
Steel wreckage filled the sky, falling from above like a meteor shower and hurtling toward the ground with piercing whistles.
But a hundred meters above the Safe House, these pieces of scrap weighing several tons struck a translucent scarlet barrier and were instantly vaporized into ash by violent magical energy.
Not even a speck of dust fell into the ruined house.
Wanda slowly descended from midair.
She wore no shoes. Her pale bare feet stepped onto a floor covered in broken glass and scorched earth, but the sharp fragments were automatically pulverized by magic a second before touching her skin.
Step by step, she walked toward the couch.
The pressure in the air grew heavier and heavier, making even breathing extremely difficult.
Gwen Stacy abruptly released Lynn's collar and landed steadily three meters from the couch with a backflip. With a flick of her wrists, two strands of specially made webbing shot out and stuck to the remaining walls on either side.
She lowered her body into a highly aggressive defensive stance. Beneath her mask, her Spider-Sense had already raised the danger level to its maximum, but the obsession in her eyes did not yield in the slightest.
"You think destroying a few heaps of scrap metal will scare me off?" Gwen Stacy stared coldly at the approaching witch, her voice full of hostility.
Wanda stopped.
She did not even look directly at Gwen Stacy, instead turning her gaze to Lynn on the couch.
As she looked at Lynn's open collar and that glaring bite mark, the scarlet in Wanda's eyes churned violently again. She extended her slender fingers and gave a slight beckoning curl.
An irresistible force instantly wrapped around Gwen Stacy's neck and hauled her into the air.
"Urgh-" Gwen Stacy clawed desperately with both hands at the invisible shackle around her neck, her legs struggling painfully in midair.
"I don't care which gutter you crawled out of, bug." Wanda tilted her head slightly, looking at Gwen Stacy as she hovered on the verge of suffocation, her voice cold as ice. "And I don't care about those ridiculous fantasies in your head."
She abruptly tightened her fingers.
"Keep your filthy hands away from my man. Anyone who touches him, I'll grind into pulp, little by little."
Gwen Stacy's face flushed red from lack of oxygen, but she still stared fiercely at Wanda, forcing broken words of mockery from her throat. "Your... man? Up on the Clock Tower... when he cut the webbing... and died in my place... he never mentioned... a crazy woman like you!"
Those words struck Wanda's most sensitive nerve with perfect precision.
Died in her place?
Lynn had died once in another time and space for this white bug?!
A boom went off in Wanda's mind, and the thread of her reason snapped instantly. The Chaos Magic around her surged wildly out of control, transforming into countless sharp scarlet blades aimed straight at Gwen Stacy in midair.
At that critical instant.
Lynn, who had remained seated on the couch, watching coldly from the sidelines, finally moved.
He did not use his newly acquired flexible physique to withstand the magic, nor did he shout a reprimand. He simply rose slowly, casually dusted off his shirt, and then strode straight into that field of scarlet blades filled with deadly killing intent.
"Wanda."
Lynn's voice was calm and even, without a trace of panic, as though he were calling to a wife who had just awakened from a nightmare.
Ignoring the magical blades that nearly brushed his skin, he walked up to Wanda. Under her trembling gaze, he reached out and gently gripped the witch's wrist, the one poised to strangle Gwen Stacy.
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