Marvel Hunter - Chapter 2
Chapter 2: The Silence of the Valley
The landing was silent, but the impact vibrated through Veer’s shins. He hit the rocky shelf overlooking the valley and immediately collapsed his posture, sinking into a crouch that merged his silhouette with the jagged geography of the cliffside.
Below him lay the Ten Rings encampment.
It was a sprawling scar on the face of the desert. Floodlights powered by humming diesel generators cut harsh, yellow cones through the darkness. Tents were arranged in a semi-disciplined grid, surrounding a central clearing filled with crates stamped with the Stark Industries logo. Huge missile launchers sat there, dormant beasts of war, looking out of place against the primitive backdrop of the Afghan mountains.
And there, at the back of the valley, was the heavy steel door embedded into the rock face. The cave.
Veer took a breath, but he didn’t let it out. Instead, he pulled it inward, visualizing the pores of his skin, the shoko, acting as valves.
“Zetsu,” he whispered in his mind.
If Ren was the explosion of a volcano, Zetsu was the vacuum of space.
He commanded his aura to stop flowing. He seized the energy radiating from his body—the life force that naturally leaked from every living being—and shut the gates. The aura retracted, snapping back inside him, locking tightly within his skin.
The sensation was immediate and jarring.
A moment ago, wrapped in Ten, he had felt protected. He had felt like he was wearing a suit of warm, invisible armor. Now, that armor was gone. The desert air felt suddenly colder, biting against his skin. He felt naked. Vulnerable.
If a sniper were to spot him now and take a shot, a high-caliber bullet would pierce his skin. His Ten wasn’t there to dampen the impact. His superhuman durability was still there—he was denser than a normal human—but he was no longer bulletproof in the mystical sense.
But the trade-off was worth it.
With his aura contained, his presence vanished from the world. To the senses of the universe, Paramveer Singh had ceased to exist. He was just another rock, another shadow. Unless someone looked directly at him with a flashlight, they would not sense him. Even if they looked, their eyes might slide over him, their brains registering him as part of the background.
And then came the secondary effect.
Because he wasn’t expending energy to project aura, all his internal resources were redirected to his senses.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
Veer’s eyes widened. He could hear them.
He could hear the heartbeat of the guard standing sixty feet below him. He could hear the scratch of a match being struck against a boot. He could hear the shifting of sand as a scorpion skittered across a rock ten yards to his left.
The world became a tapestry of sound and smell. The scent of unwashed bodies, cheap tobacco, gun oil, and cooking spices wafted up to him, distinct and separate layers of information.
He scanned the perimeter.
Patrols. Everywhere. Men with AK-47s were walking in pairs, their paths overlapping. There were heavy machine gun nests on the ridges. A sniper tower was erected near the entrance.
Veer analyzed the scene with a cold, mathematical detachment that felt alien to him.
Option A: Charge. With his strength—now hovering around 9 tons without Ren—he could jump down there and start throwing trucks. He could rip the steel door off its hinges.
Result: Failure.
He wasn’t Luke Cage. He wasn’t the Hulk. He was strong, but a chaotic hail of gunfire from two hundred rifles would eventually find a soft spot. A lucky RPG to the face would end his journey before it began.
More importantly, there was the hostage.
Tony Stark was inside that cave.
Terrorists were creatures of spite. If Raza, the leader of the Ten Rings, realized he was under attack by a superior force, he wouldn’t fight fair. He would put a gun to Tony Stark’s head and pull the trigger just to deny the rescuer their prize.
Veer thought grimly. “If they can’t have him, no one can.”
He had to be a ghost. He had to clear the board before the pieces even knew the game had started.
“I wish I had Meleoron’s template,” Veer thought, a pang of longing hitting him.
In Hunter x Hunter, Meleoron was a Chimera Ant with the ability Perfect Plan. As long as he held his breath, he was truly invisible. Not just unseen, but unperceived. You could touch him and not realize you were touching anything.
If he had that, he could walk right through the front gate, tap Raza on the shoulder, and walk Tony out without firing a shot.
“Work with what you have, Veer,” he chided himself. “You have power of Zeno Zoldyck. Act like it.”
He looked at his hands.
He needed a weapon. The combat knife strapped to his thigh felt clumsy, a tool for a soldier, not an assassin. Zeno Zoldyck didn’t use knives. He used his body.
“Skill check: Claw.”
He focused on his fingers. He triggered the skill.
Claw Lv1.
It wasn’t a dramatic transformation. He didn’t sprout foot-long razor blades like Wolverine. Instead, he felt the muscles in his hands tighten, condensing. The tendons shifted, becoming rigid like steel cables. His fingernails didn’t grow longer, but they darkened, turning as hard as diamond. His fingers hooked slightly, taking on a predatory curvature.
It looked… underwhelming. It looked like he was just flexing his hand really hard.
“Level 1,” Veer sighed. “It’s just a hardened grip right now.”
But combined with his grip strength? It would have to be enough.
He shifted his gaze to the nearest sentry. The man was standing on a jagged outcrop about forty feet down the path, smoking a cigarette, looking away from the camp, out into the dark desert.
Veer stood up.
He didn’t walk, he used Silent Gait.
This was a foundational assassin technique. It wasn’t just about tiptoeing. It was about rhythm. The human brain is wired to notice patterns—the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of footsteps. Silent Gait broke that rhythm. It smoothed out the motion, making the assassin move like a fluid rather than a solid.
Veer stepped off the ledge.
He moved down the rocky slope with terrifying speed, yet he displaced no pebbles. His boots made contact with the stone, but the sound was swallowed by his technique. He flowed over the uneven terrain like water sliding down glass.
He reached the sentry in three seconds.
The man didn’t turn. He took a drag of his cigarette, the ember glowing bright orange. He exhaled a cloud of smoke, completely unaware that death was standing twelve inches behind him.
Veer raised his hands. His fingers, hardened by Claw, hovered near the man’s neck.
For a fraction of a second, Veer hesitated.
This wasn’t a video game. This wasn’t a target dummy. This was a human being. A man with a name, maybe a family, certainly a history. Veer had never taken a life. The modern moral compass instilled in him—the belief in law, in due process, in the sanctity of life—flared up.
Do it, a voice whispered in his head. It wasn’t the System. It sounded like his own thought, but colder. Sharper.
Veer clamped his hands onto the man’s head. One hand on the chin, the other on the back of the skull.
He didn’t jerk. He twisted.
CRACK.
The sound was sickeningly loud in the quiet night, like a dry branch being stepped on.
The guard didn’t scream. He didn’t struggle. His body simply went limp, the signal from the brain severed instantly. The cigarette fell from his fingers, sparking as it hit the ground.
Veer caught the body before it could slump, lowering it gently to the rocky floor.
He stood there, staring at the twisted angle of the man’s neck. The eyes were still open, staring blankly at the moon.
Veer waited.
He waited for the bile to rise in his throat. He waited for the shaking hands, the panic, the overwhelming guilt that fiction always promised would accompany the first kill. He waited for the horror of what he had just done to crush him.
It didn’t come.
Instead, he felt… nothing.
It was a hollow, sterile sensation. It felt like he had just finished a task. Like taking out the trash or filing a tax return. It was simply a job that had been completed efficiently.
A shiver ran down his spine, but not from fear. It was a shiver of realization.
“The template,” Veer thought, looking at his hands. “It’s not just the body. It’s the mind.”
Merging with Zeno Zoldyck wasn’t just getting his muscles. It was getting his psychology. Zeno was a man who had killed thousands. To Zeno, murder wasn’t a sin; it was a transaction. It was a trade.
Veer was losing his humanity, percentage point by percentage point.
“Hey! You!”
The shout broke his trance.
Veer snapped his head up. Down the path, about twenty meters away, a group of five terrorists had just rounded the bend. They were staring right at him. They saw the body on the ground. They saw the intruder in black.
One of them reached for the radio on his shoulder. Another raised his rifle, opening his mouth to scream an alarm that would wake the entire valley.
Time slows down.
Adrenaline flooded Veer’s system, but the Zeno template processed it not as panic, but as fuel.
If they made a sound, the mission was compromised. If they fired a shot, Tony Stark was in danger.
They had to die. Immediately.
Veer didn’t think. He moved.
Silent Gait: Overdrive.
He pushed off the ground with enough force to crack the stone beneath his boots, but the technique suppressed the sound of the launch. He was a blur. A shadow elongating in the moonlight.
Twenty meters vanished in a heartbeat.
The first terrorist, the one with the radio, didn’t even have time to depress the talk button.
Veer was suddenly there, standing in the middle of the group.
He lashed out.
He didn’t have a sword. He didn’t need one. With Claw active and nine tons of kinetic force behind his arms, his open hands were bludgeons of devastating power.
He swung his right arm in a horizontal arc. The back of his hand struck the radio man’s head.
It wasn’t a clean cut. It was a brutal impact. The sheer velocity and hardness of his hand acted like a sledgehammer. The man’s head didn’t just turn; it was torn from his shoulders, sent spinning into the darkness in a spray of crimson mist.
One.
Veer spun, using the momentum. His left hand, fingers hooked into a claw, swiped across the throat of the man raising the rifle. The hardened fingers tore through the trachea and the arteries like they were wet tissue paper.
Two.
The remaining three were frozen, their brains unable to process the violence that had just exploded in their midst.
Veer dropped low, sweeping the leg of the third man, shattering the tibia instantly. As the man fell, Veer rose with an uppercut that caved in his chest cavity.
Three.
The fourth man finally screamed, but it was cut short as Veer grabbed his face and slammed the back of his head on the ground.
Four.
The fifth man turned to run. Veer didn’t chase. He simply picked up a stone from the ground—a jagged piece of granite the size of a baseball—and threw it.
He didn’t throw it like a baseball pitcher. He threw it with the mechanics of an assassin using a projectile.
The stone whistled through the air. It struck the fleeing man in the back of the head with the force of a sniper round. The skull collapsed. The man dropped mid-stride.
Five.
Veer stood in the center of the carnage. His chest wasn’t heaving. He wasn’t out of breath.
[System Notification]
[5 Targets Eliminated.]
[Synchronization Increased: +0.5%]
Veer stared at the floating blue text.
“It increases on kill?”
He felt it. A subtle shift deep in his gut. A warmth spreading through his limbs. The connection to the Zeno template tightened. His aura and power increased, but his skill didn’t change.
It wasn’t just training. It was sacrifice. The System was rewarding him for acting out the role of the character. Zeno was an assassin. Assassins killed. Therefore, killing made him more like Zeno.
He looked down at the camp below.
There were over two hundred men down there. Most were asleep in their tents. Some were playing cards.
They weren’t people anymore. They were obstacle in completing his Quest.
“No,” Veer whispered, shaking his head violently. “Don’t think like that. They are terrorists. They kill innocents. That’s why they die. Not for XP.”
He had to hold onto that distinction. He had to keep the moral high ground, even as he waded into the swamp.
He adjusted his scarf. He checked his surroundings. No one else had seen. The camp was still buzzing with the low hum of generators, unaware that the reaper was at the door.
Veer descended into the camp proper.
He moved like a phantom. He stuck to the shadows cast by the tents and the crates of weapons.
He found the first barracks tent. He slipped inside.
The air smelled of stale sweat and unwashed feet. Twelve men were sleeping on cots. Snoring. Vulnerable.
Veer moved to the first cot.
Silent Gait.
He placed a hand over the man’s mouth and drove his other hand, fingers rigid and hardened, into the man’s heart. A single, sharp thrust. The ribcage offered no resistance. The heart ruptured.
The man jerked once, his eyes flying open in silent terror, and then glazed over.
Veer moved to the next.
It became a rhythm. Step. Strike. Step. Strike.
He was efficient. Brutally so. He didn’t waste movement. He didn’t gloat. He didn’t pause to reconsider.
As he moved from tent to tent, the voice in his head grew louder. It was an old man’s voice, dry and raspy, filled with a lifetime of cynical wisdom.
“Don’t hesitate, boy. Hesitation creates noise. Noise creates problems.”
“Good. The carotid artery is a valid target, but the cervical vertebrae is faster. No blood spray.”
“This is just a job. Emotional attachment to the target is unprofessional. You are cleaning a stain, nothing more.”
Veer felt like he was floating. His body was moving on autopilot, guided by the instincts bleeding over from the template.
He cleared the eastern sector. Then the weapon depot guards. Then the vehicle pool.
He moved through the camp like a plague.
He encountered a patrol near the latrines. Two men. Before they could turn, Veer was upon them. He grabbed their heads, smashing them together with a sickening thud. They dropped without a sound.
He didn’t use his gun. Gunshots were loud. His hands were silent.
Time seemed to warp. He lost track of minutes. The only metric that mattered was the count.
One hundred. One hundred and fifty. Two hundred.
He was drenched in blood, but almost none of it was his. His black tactical gear was soaked, heavy with the iron scent of death. He felt like a demon crawling out of hell.
Finally, he stood at the entrance of the cave.
Behind him, the camp was silent. Not the silence of sleep, but the heavy, final silence of the grave. The generators hummed on, indifferent to the fact that they were now powering lights for corpses.
Veer checked his watch.
Thirty minutes.
It had taken him thirty minutes to depopulate the entire exterior base.
He leaned against the cold steel of the cave door and exhaled a long, shaky breath. He wiped a smear of blood from his eye.
“System,” he croaked.
The blue screen materialized.
—
[Template: Zeno Zoldyck] [Synchronization: 48.4%]
[Stats]
Aura: Lv33 (Significant Increase)
Power: 38 (Physical Strength Equivalent: ~19 Tons)
Affinity: Emitter
[Skills Updated]
Silent Gait: Lv2 (16%)
Zetsu: Lv2 (2%)
Claw: Lv2 (16%)
—
Veer stared at the numbers. The jump was massive. Nearly a 25% increase in synchronization in half an hour.
His aura capacity had doubled. He could feel the energy swirling inside him now, a dense, heavy liquid that demanded to be released. His Zetsu felt tighter, more hermetic. His Silent Gait felt more natural, as if gravity had less hold on him.
He flexed his hand. The Claw skill had leveled up. The skin on his hands felt tougher, the bone density even higher.
“Nineteen tons of lifting strength,” he muttered. “And that’s without Ren.”
If he activated Ren now, with his increased aura capacity… he shuddered to think of the number. Maybe 40 tons? 50?
He felt invincible. He felt like he could punch a hole through the mountain.
“Stop it,” he told himself, slapping his own cheek. The sound was sharp, grounding him.
“Don’t get cocky.”
He looked back at the carnage he had wrought. It was impressive, yes. Horrifyingly so. But he forced himself to gain perspective.
In the grand scheme of the Marvel Universe, this was nothing.
Hawkeye could have done this. If Clint Barton had been here with his bow and a quiver of trick arrows, the result would have been the same. Black Widow could have done this with a garrote wire and a pistol. The Punisher would have done it faster, albeit louder.
He had killed mooks. Nameless henchmen with outdated weaponry.
He wasn’t a god yet. He was just a very efficient exterminator.
“The real threat is inside,” Veer reminded himself, looking at the steel door. “And the real prize.”
Raza was inside. The high-ranking Ten Rings members were inside. And somewhere deep in the dark, Tony Stark was waiting.
Veer straightened his back. He dismissed the System window.