Hunter of Marvel - Chapter 19

Chapter 19: Murder

When the sun finally dipped below the jagged peaks of the Afghan mountains, the suffocating heat of the desert vanished, replaced almost instantly by a biting, arid cold.

Veer Pratap Singh stepped out of the shadow of the Gulmira settlement and began to run.

He moved at a fast speed, keeping his internal compass locked strictly to the northeast. Beneath the vast, star-choked canopy of the night sky, the desert was a treacherous expanse of shifting dunes, loose shale, and deep, deceptive ravines. To a normal human, running at high speed across this terrain in absolute darkness would mean a shattered ankle within minutes. But Veer was no longer a normal human.

He ran at his base physical speed, his Dexterity stat allowing his legs to churn with the power of a highly tuned engine. However, the fine, powdery sand threatened to sap his momentum, his heavy combat boots sinking inches deep with every footfall.

Veer adjusted. He channeled a fraction of his aura down through his calves, pushing the energy out through the soles of his boots. He created a flat, dense disc of force beneath his feet, effectively increasing his surface area and displacing his weight. The first few miles were clumsy. He overcompensated, the aura bursting too violently and sending him stumbling. But soon flow of energy smoothed out. Soon, he was gliding over the shifting dunes, his boots barely disturbing the surface of the sand, moving like a phantom across the wasteland.

He ran for three hours.

The delay was not a failure of speed, but a consequence of the environment. The Ten Rings were not a band of undisciplined thugs; they were a highly organized, heavily armed terrorist syndicate hiding from the most advanced military apparatus on the planet. They maintained strict blackout protocols. There were no floodlights illuminating their camp, no campfires sending plumes of smoke into the sky, and no radio chatter broadcasting their coordinates. They were a black hole in the mountains.

Veer could not rely on his aura sensing to find them. His ‘En’—the spherical detection field of aura—was only at Level 1. It barely extended two meters past his skin, rendering it entirely useless for long-range reconnaissance.

Instead, he relied entirely on his physical biology.

His Perception stat sat at a massive 46. Based on the crushing, suffocating weight of the life-force he had felt radiating from Gwen Stacy, he estimated her stats were sitting somewhere near 100. That astronomical level of Perception had mutated into a localized precognition—a Spider-Sense that warned her of danger before it happened. Veer didn’t have that. His Perception was roughly half of hers. He couldn’t sense danger.

But what he could do was see the present with terrifying clarity.

His pupils dilated, drawing in the faint starlight, painting the barren mountains in sharp, monochromatic hues of silver and black. He could hear the faint, echoing trickle of loose gravel falling down a cliff face a mile away. He could smell the sharp, metallic tang of gun oil and the acrid scent of unwashed bodies cutting through the cold night air.

He slowed his pace to a silent walk, cresting a massive ridge of dark stone.

Below him, nestled perfectly into a deep, natural bowl in the mountainside, was the Ten Rings base. It was a sprawling network of camouflage netting, heavy canvas tents, and a massive, gaping cave entrance reinforced with steel and sandbags. Armed insurgents patrolled the valley floor in tight, disciplined pairs.

But Veer’s eyes didn’t track the men on the ground. He looked up.

Positioned along the steep, jagged cliffs overlooking the valley were five elevated watchposts. The terrorists stationed there held high-powered sniper rifles, sweeping the perimeter. They were the eyes of the camp. If Veer tried to slip into the valley, the have chance to see it, and a .50 caliber round would blow a hole through his ‘Ten’ shroud and his chest before he even heard the gunshot.

They had to be removed.

Veer exhaled slowly, his breath misting in the cold air. He visualized his aura nodes and clamped them completely shut.

‘Zetsu.’

His presence vanished from the world. To the naked eye, he was a statue. To a thermal scope, his body heat was trapped entirely beneath his skin, rendering him indistinguishable from the cold stone around him. He engaged his ‘Silent Gait’, dropping his center of gravity, and began to scale the cliff face.

He approached the first sniper’s nest from below. The terrorist was lying prone on a flat outcropping of rock, his eye glued to his scope, completely oblivious to the apex predator rising from the abyss.

The outcropping was ten meters above Veer’s current position. Climbing it by hand would make noise.

Veer crouched, channeling a dense, highly compressed pocket of aura directly beneath his boots. He held the pressure for a fraction of a second, letting the kinetic tension build, and then violently released it.

The aura exploded downward. Veer was launched vertically into the air, soaring silently up the ten-meter cliff face. He reached the apex of his jump and landed softly on the rock ledge, directly behind the prone sniper.

Before the terrorist could even register the displacement of air, Veer reached down. His massive hand clamped over the man’s mouth, while his other hand seized the back of his head. With a single, sharp twist, a wet ‘crack’ echoed on the ledge. The sniper’s body went entirely limp, his spinal cord severed instantly.

Veer lowered the corpse to the rock without making a sound.

It was a clean kill, but Veer frowned in the darkness. It was inefficient. Snapping a neck required leverage, positioning, and both hands. In a rapid combat scenario, it was too slow.

He closed his eyes for a microsecond, interfacing with the massive, mental database of the System. He searched for a specific physiological manipulation technique, something sharp, something lethal. He found it.

‘System, unlock the Claw.’

The knowledge downloaded directly into his cerebral cortex. It was a terrifying technique popularized by the Zoldyck family of assassins, specifically Killua. It required the user to manipulate the muscles, joints, and keratin in their hands, forcing them to mutate into razor-sharp, hardened talons.

A notification chimed silently in his mind.

[Skill Unlocked: Claw Level 1]

Veer held his right hand up in the moonlight. He concentrated on the anatomical structure of his fingers. He felt a sharp, agonizing pressure in his fingertips. The joints popped and locked into a rigid, curved structure. His fingernails elongated, hardening instantly into thick, dark points that reflected the starlight like polished steel.

At Level 1, they weren’t capable of slicing through reinforced steel plating, but they were as sharp and durable as high-carbon combat knives. It was exactly what he needed.

Veer slipped off the ledge, falling back into the shadows of the cliff, and moved toward the second watchpost.

The execution was flawless. He ascended the rock face, dropping in behind the second sniper. This time, Veer didn’t bother with leverage. He simply swept his mutated hand across the man’s throat. The hardened claws parted flesh, muscle, and the carotid artery with zero resistance. The sniper choked on his own blood, dying in seconds.

Veer moved like a ghost of vengeance across the perimeter. The third, fourth, and fifth snipers died in exactly the same manner, their throats opened in the dark, their bodies left bleeding out on the cold stone.

The high ground belonged to him.

Veer looked down at the sprawling camp on the valley floor. With his enhanced stats, he could have dropped into the center of the camp, activated ‘Ren’, and slaughtered every man by the tents within five minutes. But he immediately vetoed the idea. If the camp went into an uproar, the commanders hiding deep inside the cave system would panic. Their first protocol would be to secure, or execute, their high-value hostages.

Tony Stark was the linchpin of the universe. If he died, humanity died.

Veer bypassed the camp entirely. Remaining in the absolute suppression of ‘Zetsu’, he utilized his ‘Silent Gait’ to slip down the rocky incline. He bypassed two patrolling guards, stepping through their blind spots with the precision of a metronome, and melted into the yawning black mouth of the cave.

The interior of the mountain was a sprawling, subterranean labyrinth. The walls were strung with cheap electrical wiring and harsh, flickering incandescent bulbs. The air smelled of diesel exhaust and damp earth.

Veer moved deeper.

He encountered the first internal patrol rounding a corner—two men carrying Kalashnikovs, laughing quietly about something.

They never finished the joke.

Veer moved at a speed their brains literally could not process. He closed the distance in a blur. His right hand, still locked in the rigid, razor-sharp ‘Claw’ formation, ripped the throat entirely out of the first guard. As the man fell, Veer’s left hand shot forward, grabbing the second guard by the face and violently twisting his head to the side, snapping his neck before his finger could even brush the trigger of his rifle.

He lowered both bodies to the dirt floor, stepping over them without breaking his stride. His hands were coated in thick, warm blood, but his expression remained entirely impassive. He was a machine, functioning on pure, lethal arithmetic.

He navigated the twisting tunnels, following the faint, echoing sounds of the complex.

He turned down a narrow corridor and stopped. His Perception stat picked up a series of sounds coming from behind a heavy, rusted iron door at the end of the hall. It wasn’t the sound of machinery or weapons manufacturing.

It was the sound of weeping. And worse, the sound of cruel, guttural laughter.

Veer approached the door. The smell leaking through the cracks was abhorrent—a mix of sweat, blood, and the unmistakable, sickening stench of decaying flesh.

He placed his hand flat against the iron, feeling the vibrations from inside. He pushed the heavy door open, stepping into the room.

The scene before him was hell on earth.

It was a massive cavern carved into the rock, serving as a holding pen. Chained to the walls, shivering on filthy mattresses, were over two dozen women. They were from Gulmira and the surrounding villages. They were battered, starved, and broken, their eyes hollow with unimaginable trauma.

But the true horror lay in the center of the room.

Several women lay dead on the stone floor, their bodies cold and pale. And yet, the violation had not stopped. Five terrorists were in the room, their weapons discarded on a nearby table, actively engaged in the absolute peak of human depravity. They were raping the corpses of the women they had murdered, laughing and jeering at each other in the dim, flickering light.

Veer stood in the doorway.

The cold, calculating pragmatism of his adult mind shattered. The strategic imperative of avoiding noise evaporated. A terrifying, absolute rage—cold, black, and unyielding—flooded his veins.

He didn’t just drop ‘Zetsu’. He unleashed it.

His aura exploded into the room like a physical shockwave. The heavy iron door behind him slammed shut with a concussive ‘boom’. The five terrorists froze, ripping themselves away from the corpses, their eyes wide with sudden, primal terror as they looked toward the doorway.

They saw a massive figure cloaked in shadows, a localized pressure front radiating from his body that made the oxygen in the room feel as heavy as water.

One of the men lunged for a rifle on the table.

He didn’t make it.

Veer crossed the room in a single, terrifying bound. His hand, hardened into the ‘Claw’, drove straight through the man’s chest, shattering his sternum and pulverizing his heart. Veer ripped his hand out in a spray of arterial blood and spun on his heel.

The slaughter was instantaneous. It was an execution carried out by an apex predator.

He kicked the knee of the second terrorist, snapping the leg entirely backward. As the man screamed and fell, Veer crushed his skull beneath his combat boot like a ripe melon. The third and fourth men tried to run toward the door. Veer grabbed them both by the back of their necks and slammed their heads together with the force of a hydraulic press. The sickening crunch of shattering bone echoed off the stone walls as they dropped, dead before they hit the ground.

The final terrorist backed away, his hands raised, babbling incoherently in terror, slipping on the blood pooling on the floor.

Veer walked toward him, his dark eyes entirely devoid of mercy. He didn’t use the claw. He simply reached out, grabbed the man by the throat, and squeezed. The cartilage collapsed instantly. Veer held him in the air, watching the life drain from his eyes, before casually tossing the corpse into the corner of the room.

The cavern fell dead silent, save for the ragged, terrified weeping of the chained women along the walls.

Veer stood in the center of the carnage, his chest heaving slightly, his hands and forearms soaked in dark, viscous blood. He forced his breathing to slow, reeling his aura back in, locking it down tight.

He turned his head, looking at the women. They were staring at him in absolute horror, shrinking back against the rock, expecting this new monster to turn his wrath upon them.

Veer didn’t approach them. He knelt on the blood-slicked stone floor.

He channeled his aura, pushing it into the ground. The brilliant, blue geometric script of ‘Hide and Seek’ flared to life, casting an ethereal glow over the nightmare room. He triggered the portal. The one-by-one meter square of absolute blackness opened, leading directly into his pristine, secure Level 1 dimensional room.

Veer looked at the women. He spoke in perfect, flawless Pashto.

“I am going to unchain you,” Veer said, his voice calm, steady, and entirely safe. “This door leads to a room. There is food inside. There is clean water. There is light, and there are blankets. No one can hurt you there. No one can touch you. Step inside, and you will live.”

He walked along the wall, his massive strength snapping the iron chains holding them to the rock.

The women hesitated. They looked at the terrifying, blood-soaked teenager, and then at the impossible, pitch-black void floating in the center of the room. It defied all logic. It looked like a doorway to the abyss.

But they looked around at the corpses of their friends, at the mangled bodies of their captors, and they made the choice. The abyss was better than this hell.

One by one, the women stood. They limped toward the portal, clutching their torn clothes, and crawled through the black square. They vanished from the cave, stepping into the absolute safety of the Nen dimension.

Veer waited until the very last woman, a girl who looked no older than Aisha, stepped through the void.

He closed the portal. The blue light faded, leaving him alone with the dead.

He stood up, wiping the excess blood from his hands onto the clothes of a dead terrorist. He took a steadying breath, resetting his tactical mind. He had saved them, but his primary objective was still unfulfilled. Tony Stark was not in this room.

Veer slipped back into ‘Zetsu’, erasing his presence once more, and pushed the heavy iron door open, stepping back out into the labyrinth.

He moved faster now, his senses hyper-tuned, sweeping every tunnel, every cavern, and every crossroad. He killed three more patrolling guards, dispatching them silently and efficiently, leaving their bodies hidden in the dark recesses of the cave.

Ten minutes later, he heard it.

It was a faint, rhythmic sound. The steady, heavy ‘clank’ of a hammer striking dense metal. Accompanied by the low, mechanical hum of a portable generator.

Veer slowed his pace, creeping down a wide, heavily reinforced corridor. The tunnel dead-ended at a massive, heavy steel door, secured by heavy deadbolts and a sliding observation grate. Two elite guards stood outside, fully armored, holding heavy machine guns.

They were not standard grunts. They were stationed to protect the prize.

Veer didn’t hesitate. He utilized ‘Silent Gait’, closing the distance in a heartbeat. He drove his stiffened fingers through the visor of the first guard, piercing his brain, while simultaneously driving a devastating kick into the chest of the second guard, caving his ribcage into his heart.

He caught their weapons before they hit the ground, lowering their bodies silently to the dirt.

Veer stepped up to the massive steel door. He leaned forward, pressing his eye to the small, barred observation grate.

Inside the cavernous room, illuminated by harsh halogen work lights, the air was thick with smoke and the smell of soldering iron. Tables were strewn with blueprints, wires, and dismantled missile casings.

Standing near an anvil, looking exhausted but intensely focused, was an older man with glasses. Ho Yinsen.

And sitting at a workbench, hammering a piece of crude, heavy iron, was a man with a glowing, circular arc reactor embedded directly into the center of his chest.

Veer found the room where Tony and Ho Yinsen were held prisoner.