Hunter of Marvel - Chapter 18

Chapter 18: Aisha

The dry, relentless wind of the Kunar Province whipped through the narrow, unpaved streets of Gulmira, carrying with it a thick layer of yellow dust and the unmistakable, suffocating stench of despair.

Veer Pratap Singh walked through the settlement, his boots crunching softly against the hardened earth. His canvas duffel bag hung loosely from his shoulder. To anyone watching, he was just a lone traveler, perhaps a lost student or a misplaced refugee. He kept his posture deliberately slouched, his head down, but beneath the facade, his heightened Perception was pulling in a staggering amount of sensory data.

He could hear the quiet, terrified whispers bleeding through the walls of the mud-brick houses. He could hear the rapid, anxious heartbeats of the locals as they spotted him and quickly averted their eyes, rushing to pull their children indoors. The village was practically suffocating under a blanket of absolute, paralyzing fear.

His first order of business was securing a physical base of operations.

He navigated the winding dirt roads until he found a small, dilapidated structure that served as a local inn and trading post. The owner, an older man with deep, weathered lines carved into his face and eyes clouded by perpetual exhaustion, stood behind a wooden counter.

Veer approached, dropping a crumpled fifty-dollar American bill onto the rough wood. It was an astronomical sum in this isolated valley.

“I need a room,” Veer said, his voice flat, speaking in Pashto—a linguistic download courtesy of his meticulously prepared study over the last month, aided by his massive Intelligence stat. “For a few days. No questions. No interruptions.”

The old man stared at the green paper, his hand trembling slightly as he reached out and snatched it, making it vanish into his robes. He didn’t say a word. He simply reached under the counter, pulled out a heavy, rusted iron key, and slid it across to Veer, gesturing vaguely to a set of stairs in the back.

Veer took the key and headed up to the room. It was little more than a wooden cot with a thin, dusty mattress and a small window overlooking the main thoroughfare.

He dropped his bag onto the cot and stood by the window, looking out over the village.

He could have easily bypassed this entire transaction. He had ‘Hide and Seek’. He could have walked into a deserted alleyway, placed a marker, and lived perfectly comfortably inside his sterile, climate-controlled pocket dimension. But his tactical mind had immediately recognized the fatal flaw in Knov’s Hatsu: sensory deprivation.

When he was inside the pocket dimension, he was completely cut off from the outside world. He couldn’t hear gunfire, he couldn’t sense approaching life-forces, and he couldn’t gather intelligence. If the Ten Rings raided the village while he was locked in his Nen dimension, he wouldn’t know until he stepped back out, potentially right into the crossfire. Even if spending the money pained his pragmatic sensibilities, maintaining a physical presence in the village was a logistical necessity.

He needed information.

Veer left the room and stepped back out into the sweltering afternoon heat. His ‘Ten’ shroud hummed just beneath his skin, perfectly regulating his core temperature, rendering the brutal Afghan sun completely irrelevant.

He began to walk the village, observing the devastating reality of the Ten Rings’ occupation.

The situation in Gulmira was far worse than the brief news clippings and movie scenes had conveyed. This wasn’t just a town living in fear; it was a town being systematically bled dry. The signs of recent raids were everywhere. Doors were splintered and hanging off their hinges. Deep, heavy tire tracks from military transports scarred the dirt roads.

His Perception picked up the subtle, horrific demographics of the settlement. There was a glaring, unnatural absence of young, able-bodied men. The few men he did see were either elderly, crippled, or possessed the hollow, broken stares of those whose spirits had been entirely crushed. The women moved like ghosts, wrapped tightly in their garments, practically pressing themselves against the walls to avoid being seen.

Veer stopped at a small, ramshackle market stall where a woman was trying to sell a few bruised, pathetic-looking vegetables.

“Excuse me,” Veer said, keeping his tone calm and non-threatening.

The woman violently flinched, pulling her shawl tighter around her face, refusing to look at him.

“I am looking for a man,” Veer continued, ignoring her panic. He didn’t dare mention Tony Stark. A billionaire American weapons manufacturer missing in the region was a beacon for death. “A doctor. His name is Ho Yinsen. Can you tell me where his clinic is, or where his family lives?”

The moment the name left Veer’s lips, the woman gasped. Pure, unadulterated terror flooded her eyes. She practically threw a dirty tarp over her vegetables, grabbed her basket, and scrambled away down the street without uttering a single syllable.

Veer frowned, his dark eyes tracking her retreat.

He spent the next two hours attempting to extract the same piece of intelligence from half a dozen different villagers. An old man fixing a cart. A young boy carrying a bucket of water. A merchant sweeping his stoop.

The reaction was identical every single time.

Absolute, total refusal. They didn’t just claim ignorance; they reacted as if Veer had spoken a lethal curse. Doors were slammed in his face. People turned their backs and walked away. The psychological conditioning inflicted upon Gulmira was terrifyingly effective. The Ten Rings didn’t just come to take their food and their resources; they came to take their humanity. They executed the men who dared to fight back, and they dragged the beautiful women away to their camps in the mountains as sex slaves. Everyone knew that anyone taken by the terrorists never returned.

Yinsen had clearly been taken, and the village was too terrified of retaliation to even whisper his name.

The sun began to dip below the jagged peaks of the mountains, casting long, bloody shadows across the valley. The temperature, which Veer’s aura ignored, began to plummet rapidly. The streets emptied entirely as the villagers locked themselves in their homes, hiding from the night.

Veer stood in the center of the dusty thoroughfare, his jaw set in a hard, calculating line.

Interrogation was a failure. The fear was too deeply rooted. He would have to expand his search radius tomorrow, sweeping the mountains with his enhanced physical speed and ‘Silent Gait’. It would be a massive drain on his AP, and searching a mountain range blindly was a logistical nightmare, but he was running out of time.

He turned, preparing to head back to his rented room at the inn.

“Wait.”

The voice was barely more than a dry, raspy whisper, accompanied by a faint tug on the fabric of his baggy cargo pants.

Veer stopped instantly.

He turned his head, looking down.

Standing in the gloom between two mud-brick walls was a little girl. She couldn’t have been more than twelve years old.

She was a devastating picture of collateral damage. Her traditional clothing was torn and coated in layers of grime. She was severely malnourished, her collarbones jutting sharply against her skin, her wrists looking brittle enough to snap between two fingers. But it was her eyes that caught Veer’s attention. They were dark, massive, and entirely devoid of the innocence a child should possess. They were the eyes of a cornered, starving animal.

“Follow,” the girl whispered, her voice cracking. She didn’t wait for his response, immediately turning and slipping deeper into the dark, narrow alleyway.

Veer didn’t hesitate. He expanded his sensory radius, ensuring there were no ambushes waiting in the dark, no elevated heartbeats hiding behind the walls, and stepped into the alley after her.

He followed the girl through a maze of winding, claustrophobic passages between the houses. She moved with the silent, desperate familiarity of someone who had spent their life avoiding predators. Eventually, she stopped in front of a small, heavily damaged house on the edge of the settlement. The wooden door had been violently kicked in, the splintered remains hanging off a single, bent hinge.

The girl slipped inside. Veer followed.

The interior of the house was completely empty. It had been thoroughly, ruthlessly ransacked. Smashed pottery littered the dirt floor. The few pieces of wooden furniture had been hacked to pieces, likely out of sheer malice. There was no food, no blankets, no life.

The girl stood in the center of the ruined room, wrapping her thin, dirt-streaked arms around herself to ward off the encroaching chill of the evening.

“My name is Aisha,” she said, her voice slightly louder now that they were hidden, though it still carried a tremor of exhaustion.

Veer stood near the broken doorway, his massive frame blocking the exit. “You know about Ho Yinsen.”

Aisha nodded slowly. She pointed a trembling finger at the wall separating her ruined house from the one next door. “He lived there. He was my neighbor. He was a good man. A good doctor. When I got sick last winter, he gave my mother medicine. He didn’t ask for money because he knew we had none.”

She swallowed hard, her dark eyes dropping to the dirt floor.

“Those bastards came,” Aisha continued, the venom in her young voice startling in its intensity. “The men with the guns and the rings on their flags. They came in the middle of the night. They kicked the doors in.” She paused, her breathing hitching slightly, but she forced herself to keep speaking. She was beyond tears. The grief had been burned out of her by necessity. “They killed Dr. Yinsen’s family. Shot them right in the street. Then they dragged him away. They said they needed his hands.”

Veer’s expression remained perfectly stoic, but his mind was rapidly filing the data. The timeline matched perfectly. The Ten Rings had captured Tony Stark, realized he was critically wounded by his own shrapnel, and had raided the local village to kidnap a surgeon capable of keeping their billion-dollar prize alive. Yinsen’s tragic backstory was playing out in real-time.

“And your family?” Veer asked, his voice low, devoid of pity but carrying a quiet respect for her resilience.

Aisha’s jaw tightened. “My father tried to stop them from coming into our house. They shot him in the chest. Then they grabbed my mother by her hair.” Her voice finally cracked, a single, agonizing sound of a child breaking under the weight of the world. “She was beautiful. They laughed. They threw her in the back of their truck and drove away. That was a month ago.”

Veer looked at the twelve-year-old girl standing in the ruins of her life.

He was a veteran police officer. In his past life in New Delhi, he had seen the absolute worst of human depravity. He had seen what powerful, armed men did to the weak and the vulnerable when they thought no one was watching. He had sworn an oath in his past life to protect people, an oath he had abandoned when he realized this new, cosmic universe required absolute, ruthless self-preservation.

But looking at Aisha, a tiny, buried fragment of the cop he used to be flared to life. He crushed it down instantly. Emotion was a liability. He was here for Tony Stark, for the timeline, for his own survival.

But the logic aligned. The Ten Rings had Tony Stark. The Ten Rings had Aisha’s mother. They were in the same place.

“Where did they take them?” Veer asked, his tone shifting into a sharp, commanding edge.

Aisha looked up at him, her eyes searching his impassive face. She didn’t know who this strange, massive guy was, or why he was asking about a dead man walking, but she was desperate.

“I don’t know the exact place,” Aisha whispered, pointing a thin arm toward the northern wall of the house. “But they always drive out that way. Toward the mountains. I heard from villagers… it was in the caves, about ten kilometers northeast of the village.”

Veer’s eyes narrowed slightly, processing the coordinates. Ten kilometers northeast. The cave system. It was a massive piece of tactical intelligence. It narrowed his search grid from hundreds of square miles down to a specific, manageable radius.

“Thank you, Aisha,” Veer said, nodding his head once.

He turned to leave.

“Wait,” Aisha said, taking a step toward him.

Veer paused, looking back over his shoulder.

“Are you…” Aisha hesitated, her small hands balling into fists. “Are you going up there? To the caves?”

“I am going to find Ho Yinsen,” Veer replied simply.

Aisha stared at him, a desperate, impossible hope warring with the cynical reality she had been forced to adopt. “If… if you find my mother. Her name is Fatima. She has a silver bracelet with a blue stone. If she is still alive… will you bring her back?”

Veer looked at the girl. The probability of her mother being alive and unharmed after a month in a terrorist camp was practically zero. The Ten Rings were not merciful captors. He knew this.

But Veer Pratap Singh looked into the eyes of the starving child and made a cold, absolute decision.

“If she is there, and she is alive, I will bring her back,” Veer said. His voice carried a dense, terrifying weight, completely lacking the hesitation of a normal teenager.

Aisha clearly didn’t believe him. The men with the guns were invincible monsters who ruled the valley with iron and fire. One unarmed boy couldn’t possibly fight an army. But she nodded anyway, accepting the lie because it was the only thing she had left.

“They have big guns,” Aisha warned him, her voice grave. “Machine guns. Rockets. They kill people without blinking. They are demons. Be careful.”

“I am aware,” Veer said, his aura humming faintly beneath his skin. “I am not easily killed.”

Silence fell over the ruined room. The intelligence exchange was complete. Veer was ready to step out into the night and begin the hunt.

But Aisha didn’t move. She stood there, her body swaying slightly, her thin arms still wrapped around her waist. She looked down at the dirt, her pride warring with her biological reality.

“Do you…” she started, her voice dropping so low Veer almost couldn’t hear it, even with his Perception. “Do you have any food? Any bread? I haven’t eaten in three days. I drank from the well, but my stomach hurts.”

Veer stopped.

He looked at the starving child. He could have reached into his pocket and handed her the rest of his American cash. But money was useless in a village where the terrorists had stolen all the food. You couldn’t eat paper.

Veer let out a long, quiet sigh.

He had meticulously kept his abilities hidden. In a world of cell phones, SHIELD satellites, and paranoia, exposing his Nen was a massive tactical risk. But he was in a ruined mud hut in Afghanistan, standing in front of a child who was quite literally starving to death.

Veer stepped back into the center of the room. He knelt on the dirt floor, right in front of Aisha.

“Do not tell anyone what you are about to see,” Veer said, his voice dropping into a low, commanding register that demanded absolute obedience.

Aisha’s eyes widened in confusion, but she nodded slowly, taking a step back.

Veer placed his right palm flat against the hard-packed dirt. He channeled 100 units of aura.

‘Hide and Seek.’

A brilliant, ethereal blue light exploded from beneath his hand. Intricate, geometric Nen script carved itself into the dust, glowing with a soft, localized heat that illuminated the dark room. Aisha gasped, stumbling backward, her hands flying to her mouth in absolute shock.

Veer lifted his hand, and the blue script vanished. He focused his intent on the anchor, and the air folded inward.

A one-by-one meter square of absolute, light-absorbing blackness materialized, hovering just above the floor.

Aisha stared at the tear in reality, her body trembling, entirely unable to process what she was witnessing. “Magic…” she breathed, terrified and mesmerized.

Veer didn’t correct her. He reached his arm shoulder-deep into the pitch-black portal, bridging the gap into his secure, Level 1 dimensional room. He mentally located the stockpile he had arranged before leaving Queens.

His hand closed around a heavy, sealed plastic package. He pulled it out of the void.

It was Ready-to-Eat food, packed with three thousand calories of dense, preserved nutrition. He reached in again and pulled out two large, sealed plastic bottles of purified water. Finally, he reached in a third time and retrieved a thick, heavy wool blanket.

He pulled his arm back and willed the portal closed. The black square snapped shut, vanishing as if it had never existed, leaving the room plunged back into the gloom of the evening.

Veer stood up. He held the supplies out to the stunned girl.

“The brown packet has enough food inside to keep you alive for three days,” Veer instructed, his voice strictly practical. “There is a chemical heater inside. Add a small amount of water to it, and it will warm the food. Do not eat it all at once, or your stomach will reject it. Drink the water slowly. Wrap yourself in the blanket and stay out of sight.”

Aisha didn’t move for a long moment. She stared at the packages in his hands, then up at his face, her mind completely shattered by the impossible display.

Slowly, tentatively, she reached out. Her small, trembling hands closed around the MRE and the water bottles. The moment she felt the solid weight of the food, the reality of her starvation overrode her fear of the supernatural. She clutched the supplies to her chest as if they were made of solid gold, tears finally spilling over her dark eyelashes, cutting clean tracks through the dirt on her cheeks.

“Thank you,” she sobbed, burying her face in the thick wool blanket. “Thank you.”

Veer didn’t offer a comforting smile. He didn’t pat her on the head. He was a weapon, wound tight and pointed at the mountains.

“Lock the door,” Veer said simply.

He turned and walked out of the ruined house, stepping back into the freezing, dusty alleyway.

The intelligence was secure. Ten kilometers northeast. The cave systems hidden high in the rocks, out of sight of the aerial drones.

Veer Pratap Singh adjusted the strap of his bag. His dark eyes locked onto the jagged, imposing silhouettes of the mountains looming in the distance under the moonlight. The suppression of his aura receded slightly, allowing a terrifying, dense pressure to bleed into the air around him.

He had the location, and he was ready to search for the terrorists.