Autumn was deepening, and the air carried a chill. People put on thick coats and took to the streets, strolling through the repeatedly stricken districts of Manhattan.
What truly disastrous days. Many newspapers used that very phrase as their headline. From Carnival Square to Worthington Tower in Manhattan, and then the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York kept suffering one calamity after another. Supervillains and armies of aliens—figures once found only in comic books—emerged without end, until the residents living here had begun to take it all in stride.
Nearly a month had passed since the Dark Elves' warships invaded. It had been a rare stretch of peace. The Superheroes who had once dominated the headlines gradually began to fade away, disappearing from public view, with little news of them emerging.
Iron Man had immersed himself in upgrading his armor and officially launching the Ultron Program. The Fantastic Four bounced between talk shows and television programs. Under the implementation of the Registration Act, those street-level heroes could only occasionally come out to deal with gangs or villains, scattered like irregular troops and unable to amount to much.
In truth, people were no longer so keen on following masked vigilantes. Through the live television broadcast from Brooklyn, they had seen with their own eyes how those supposedly omnipotent Superheroes had been completely unable to fight back against alien warriors—and what an absurd farce they had made of it.
To dim the halo above a hero's head, all one had to do was show people their mortal side.
Superheroes were not, as everyone imagined, all-powerful beings who could fly through the skies and vanish into the earth. They were merely ordinary people with extraordinary strength. Just as Spider-Man could never stop the bullet fired at Uncle Ben, Captain America could never truly face