Countdown to Crisis

These were New York's underground bowels, now a breeding ground for alien viruses.

The pale beam of a tactical flashlight swayed across the pipe walls. The once-smooth concrete interior was now covered in eerie purple moss. It pulsed faintly as though alive, secreting a thick fluid that gave off a pungent smell.

"Watch out for that moss," Old Dog said, his voice slightly distorted beneath his mask. "That shit grew from feeding on dead Chitauri. Some poor bastard slipped last week and put his hand on it. By the next day, his whole palm had rotted clean through."

Zhao Fan nodded and stayed close behind Old Dog. In this confined space, he had no special perception abilities. He could only rely on the map Benjamin had sent ahead and Old Dog's seemingly uncanny experience.

The pipes were difficult to navigate. Collapsed rebar blocked some sections, forcing them to crawl like lizards. Muddy water soaked through their knee pads, cold enough to chill them to the bone.

"How much farther?" Zhao Fan checked the time inside his goggles. Five minutes had already passed.

"Almost there." Old Dog stopped at a three-way junction, panting as he consulted the crumpled plans in his hand. "According to that fat guy's map, the drainage system under the First National Bank of Manhattan is just ahead. The vault that got smashed open is right above us."

Suddenly, Benjamin's breathing quickened over the earpiece. "Fan... Bro Fan! We have a situation! That she-devil from the technical team, Dr. Evelyn-her car arrived early! She's heading into the temporary command center!"

"She noticed something wrong with the surveillance?" Zhao Fan's heart sank.

"Not yet! But she's a workaholic. If she gets the urge to check the server logs..." Ben sounded close to tears. "Should we pull out?"

Zhao Fan stopped and looked up into the pitch-black depths of the pipe ahead. At its far end, something seemed to be calling to him silently. It was a chance to change his fate. It was dollars. It was dignity.

"We keep going." Zhao Fan's voice was as cold and hard as iron. "We get it before she finds out."

Three minutes later, they reached the area beneath the "vault."

This had once been a sturdy bank basement. Now it looked like a cracker smashed by a mischievous child.

A section of metal spine as enormous as a skyscraper-the tail wreckage of a Chitauri Leviathan-had pierced straight through the ground above and plunged into the center of the vault, completely destroying its once-tight security system.

Through the enormous crack overhead, Zhao Fan and Old Dog struggled up into a space filled with dust and rubble.

Even beneath these ruins, the sight before them was enough to inspire awe.

Dollars lay everywhere.

The violent impact had burst open most of the vault's safe-deposit boxes. Most of the gold bars and jewels had already been moved away. Only moldy dollars remained scattered across the ground, strewn like trash among broken stones and rotting alien flesh. Under the flashlight beam, the place shimmered with a strange, dazzling glow in which death and wealth intertwined.

Old Dog's gaze swept around. His breathing instantly grew heavy, and his hand unconsciously reached toward a stack of dollars half exposed in the purple sludge by his feet.

"Don't touch." Zhao Fan caught Old Dog by the shoulder with a sharp, low warning. "They're covered in radioactive dust and alien bodily fluids. Do you want the money or your life?"

Old Dog shuddered as though waking from a nightmare. He slapped himself hard, clarity returning to his eyes. "Fuck... This place is seriously cursed."

"That's not what we're looking for." Zhao Fan forced his gaze away from the abandoned valuables. He knew very well that these possessions, contaminated by all kinds of alien substances, could not simply be taken away. They needed specialized equipment to clean them, but there was no time now.

What they needed was that energy source.

"Ben, location!" Zhao Fan asked quietly.

"According to... according to the thermal image we intercepted, it should be in the southeast corner of the vault, where the load-bearing pillar collapsed." Benjamin rattled off the data. "There's a steadily weakening heat signature there."

Zhao Fan and Old Dog hurried toward the southeast corner.

This was the most severely collapsed area, with enormous concrete slabs piled atop one another. Without X-ray vision or superpowers, Zhao Fan could only search bit by bit like a real scavenger, using his eyes and the crowbar in his hand.

"There!" Old Dog suddenly called in a hushed voice.

Zhao Fan followed his pointing finger and saw it.

A Chitauri soldier's corpse was pinned beneath a broken load-bearing wall. Its hideous head had been crushed flat, but the arm clutching its weapon still protruded. The energy rifle, shaped like some kind of musical instrument crossed with a spear, was mostly trapped beneath the rubble, with only half its body and its core exposed.

Even in the dusty darkness, the core still gave off a faint, ominous blue glow.

"Found it..." Zhao Fan felt his heart hammering wildly against his chest.

This was his ticket to a new world.

"I'll get it." Old Dog pulled the containment bag he had specially prepared from his backpack and was about to step forward.

"Wait!" Zhao Fan stopped him, his eyes fixed on the load-bearing wall pinning the corpse. "That slab is a point of mechanical equilibrium. Move the gun, and the secondary collapse structure above will come crashing down and turn you into pulp."

Old Dog froze. "Then what do we do? We didn't bring a jack!"

Zhao Fan narrowed his eyes, his mind racing.

If he had no tools, he would make them.

He looked diagonally upward. A broken length of rebar held a huge section of ventilation duct precariously suspended just above and to one side of the load-bearing wall.

If he could make that wreckage fall and strike the raised end of the wall... it would serve as a natural lever.

"Old Dog, step back." Zhao Fan took a large nut from the tool pouch at his waist.

He drew a deep breath. The world changed in his eyes, and he could see the trajectories of force. A pale blue parabola visible only to him extended from his fingertips, passed through the tangled rebar, and locked precisely onto the rusted hook suspending the wreckage.

Whoosh!

Zhao Fan flicked his wrist, and the nut shot out like a bullet.

Clang!

A crisp metallic impact echoed through the deathly silent vault.

The hook, already strained beyond its limit, snapped at the sound. Hundreds of kilograms of ventilation duct wreckage crashed down, striking one end of the load-bearing wall with perfect accuracy.

Rumble-

Dust billowed everywhere.

The tremendous impact levered the load-bearing wall sharply upward for a moment. The section of energy rifle trapped beneath it also shook loose and slid down the slope, landing just half a meter from Zhao Fan's feet.

"Beautiful!" Old Dog could not help exclaiming under his breath.

Zhao Fan did not waste a second. He pulled on thick industrial radiation-protection gloves, stepped forward, and bent to grab the damaged energy rifle.

The instant his fingers touched the cold, faintly glowing energy core-

Zap!

An invisible current instantly pierced the thick insulating gloves and stabbed straight into Zhao Fan's fingertips.

Zhao Fan's body abruptly stiffened, his pupils contracting sharply. This was no ordinary electric shock. It was a kind of... shuddering sensation, as though some high-frequency signal had pierced his soul.

Time seemed to stop at that moment.

That cold mechanical voice thundered through his mind again for the first time in a long while:

[Warning! Contact with a source of energy fluctuations (B+ rank)...]

[Host detected performing a high-risk recovery operation...]

[Implicit system protocol triggered...]

[Analyzing target energy signature: Chitauri Cold Fusion Energy...]

[Analysis complete.]

[Congratulations, host. New ability activated: Weak Energy Perception (Level 1).]

[Ability description: Your retinas and nervous system have synchronized frequencies. You can now "see" the energy flows hidden beneath the surface of matter.]

Boom!

Zhao Fan's eyes flew open, and he gasped for breath as though he had just surfaced from deep water.

The world had changed.

The vault, previously pitch-black and visible only by flashlight, now appeared bizarre and kaleidoscopic to his eyes.

He saw it.

He saw a mass of violent blue light spinning wildly inside the damaged rifle's core at his feet, like an imprisoned miniature star.

He saw faint red electrical sparks lingering in the discarded electronic components around him.

He could even see... countless interwoven streams of signals spreading down like a net from hundreds of meters overhead.

"Fan? What's wrong? Get it in the bag!" Old Dog's anxious voice pulled him back to reality.

Zhao Fan shook his head. The dizziness quickly faded, replaced by an unprecedented sense of clarity and control.

"I'm fine."

Zhao Fan shoved the hot potato into the collection bag Old Dog held open.

"Seal it! Quick!"

The instant the lead-lined bag was sealed, Benjamin's warning came over the earpiece:

"Run!!! Stark Industries' drones have deployed! They're... they're heading underground! That doctor manually overrode the security protocols!"

"Damn it!" Old Dog went deathly pale. He grabbed the lead-lined bag and started to run back.

"Wait!"

Zhao Fan suddenly caught hold of Old Dog.

In his new vision, their previously safe escape route-the crack through which they had entered-was now filled with a faint red haze. It marked the activation of an infrared sensor array.

If they had charged straight over just now, they would already have been riddled with bullets.

"What is it? If we don't run now, we won't make it!" Old Dog stamped his foot anxiously.

"That exit is blocked." Zhao Fan pointed at the crack, though Old Dog saw nothing there. "That's Stark's invisible sensor net."

"Then... then what do we do?"

Zhao Fan looked around. His gaze pierced the layers of rubble, searching for a way out among the chaotic lines.

Suddenly, his gaze settled on an inconspicuous ventilation shaft in a corner of the vault.

To an ordinary person, it was welded shut with several enormous iron plates-a complete dead end.

But in Zhao Fan's eyes, faint whitish light representing airflow seeped through the gaps between those plates. More importantly, there was no red energy signature indicating an alarm system.

It was a genuine blind spot.

"Over there!" Zhao Fan pointed toward the corner. "That ventilation shaft!"

"Are you crazy? It's welded shut!" Old Dog roared.

"Trust me!" Zhao Fan grabbed Old Dog and dragged him toward the corner. "That should be a backup exhaust vent the bank designed to guard against poison gas attacks. It has a mechanical lock, not an electronic one!"

The two stumbled up to the ventilation shaft. The distinctive buzzing of drones was already coming from overhead, and several red laser beams began sweeping through the rubble.

Zhao Fan ignored the welds. His gaze passed through the surface, revealing the rusted mechanical lever assembly behind the iron plates.

"Give me the crowbar!"

Zhao Fan snatched the crowbar from Old Dog. Instead of prying at the iron plates, he drove it hard into an inconspicuous hole in the adjacent wall.

That was the lever fulcrum he had "seen," connected to the mechanical lock.

"Open!"

Veins bulged on Zhao Fan's skin as he heaved downward.

Creak-bang!

The seemingly welded-shut iron plate actually sprang open a crack, revealing a pitch-black passage behind it.

"My God..." Old Dog stared, dumbfounded. "How did you know there was a mechanism here?"

"Stop talking and get in!"

Zhao Fan shoved Old Dog into the passage and scrambled in right behind him, reaching back to pull the iron plate shut.

The instant the plate closed, several laser beams swept across the place where they had just stood, scorching the floor black.

The passage was narrow and cramped, but it led down to the main sewage pipe below.

The two slid all the way down the chute, finally landing heavily in a heap of soft, rotten sludge.