Respawned in Marvel: The Ultimate Hunter System - Chapter 10

Chapter 10: The Fall of the Aristocrat and the Price of Cowardice

The heavy steel gate of the cage slammed shut, the metallic clang echoing sharply over the roaring crowd.

Inside the chain-link perimeter, the atmosphere was entirely different from the chaotic bloodbath of the Battle Royale. It was an isolated vacuum of focused, lethal intent. The blinding halogen lights beat down on the blood-stained concrete, illuminating the two fighters who stood fifteen feet apart.

Kastro looked absolutely immaculate. His white martial arts uniform didn’t have a single drop of sweat or blood on it, despite his previous matches. He stood in a relaxed, open stance, radiating an aura of supreme confidence that bordered on sheer arrogance. He looked at Veer, his eyes traveling over the torn grey hoodie and the slightly baggy jeans.

“I must admit, I am profoundly disappointed,” Kastro said, his smooth voice easily carrying across the distance. “I watched your matches, Meruem. You stumbled around like a blind drunk. You threw wild, uncoordinated swings. You won purely because your opponents were clumsy brutes who underestimated a coward. I was hoping you had been hiding some grand technique, but it seems your survival in the Battle Royale was nothing more than a statistical anomaly.”

Veer didn’t hunch his shoulders this time. He didn’t put on the terrified, wide-eyed expression of a trapped kid. He just stood up perfectly straight, his posture relaxed, his hands casually hanging by his sides.

“You know, Kastro, my therapist used to tell me that projecting your own insecurities onto others is a sign of deep emotional trauma,” Veer replied, a lazy, mocking smile touching his lips. “But then again, my therapist was also a guy named Raj who sold counterfeit watches out of his trunk, so what did he know? Still, if you want to write a thesis on my fighting style, maybe wait until you actually land a hit.”

Kastro’s eyes narrowed, a flash of genuine irritation cracking his aristocratic facade. “You have a remarkably loud mouth for a boy who is about to be drinking through a straw for the rest of his natural life. I will shatter your jaw first. Then, I will break your arms.”

“Jokes on you, the American healthcare system will finish the job and bankrupt my family long before the liquid diet gets me,” Veer deadpanned, stretching his neck side to side. “So, really, you’re just doing the hospital billing department a favor. Are we going to fight, or are we going to stand here exchanging villain monologues until someone passes out from boredom?”

Kastro didn’t reply. His face went entirely blank, his hands coming up and curling into the terrifying, rigid posture of the Tiger Bite Fist. The ambient, invisible energy in the cage seemed to instantly rush toward his fingertips.

‘BZZZZZT!’

The starting buzzer blared.

Kastro exploded forward. It wasn’t the testing, cautious approach of a martial artist feeling out an opponent. It was a kill shot. He crossed the fifteen feet in a fraction of a second, his right hand tearing through the air in a devastating, downward claw aimed directly at Veer’s face.

An hour ago, during the Battle Royale, Veer had been forced to violently twist his body out of the way, relying entirely on dodging because a clash of raw power would have shattered his bones.

But an hour ago, Veer’s Strength had been at 9. He hadn’t yet experienced the massive, evolutionary leap of his Level 20 awakening.

Now, his Strength sat at 19.

Veer didn’t dodge. He didn’t retreat. He firmly planted his feet on the concrete, anchoring himself, and threw a straightforward, brutally simple right cross directly into the path of Kastro’s incoming claw.

The collision was catastrophic.

‘BOOM!’

It sounded like a stick of dynamite detonating inside a steel drum. The sheer kinetic shockwave displaced the air around them, kicking up a fine mist of dried blood and dust from the concrete floor.

Kastro’s eyes went wide with absolute, unadulterated shock.

The devastating force of the Tiger Bite Fist, concentrated entirely in his fingertips, met Veer’s knuckles and simply stopped. It hit an immovable wall. The kinetic energy had nowhere to go but backward.

Kastro was violently repelled. He was physically lifted off his feet, skidding backward across the floor. He desperately dug his heels into the concrete to stop his momentum, leaving two dark scuff marks on the ground.

He finally halted five steps back. His chest heaved, and he slowly lowered his trembling right arm.

A thick line of dark red blood leaked from the corner of Kastro’s mouth, dripping onto the pristine white collar of his uniform. The internal shock of the impact had rattled his organs.

“How?” Kastro gasped, his voice entirely stripped of its aristocratic smoothness, replaced by raw, breathless disbelief. He stared at Veer as if the boy had suddenly grown wings. “That is impossible. An hour ago, I deflected your punch. I felt your absolute physical limit. You were a brawler, but you were weak. You cannot double your power in sixty minutes!”

“Ah, the mysteries of puberty,” Veer chuckled darkly, shaking out his right hand. The collision had stung, but his Level 2 ‘Ten’ and his 20 Vitality had absorbed the brunt of it flawlessly. “One minute your voice is cracking, the next you’re hitting with nine and a half tons of force. Drink your milk, kids. It does a body good.”

It was the truth. Their physical strength was currently dead even. Kastro’s lifetime of peak martial arts conditioning and subconscious aura focus allowed him to output force equal to a Super Soldier, matching Veer’s massive 19 Strength stat.

But raw strength was only half the equation.

“You think you have won because you can match my power?” Kastro snarled, wiping the blood from his mouth, his aristocratic pride violently wounded. “Power without technique is nothing but a blunt instrument. I will tear you apart piece by piece!”

Kastro lunged again, abandoning the single-strike strategy and unleashing the full, terrifying fury of the Tiger Bite Fist. His hands became a blur of sweeping arcs, thrusts, and vicious hooks.

It was a beautiful, lethal dance.

But to Veer, it was just too slow.

With his Agility sitting at a staggering 22, the world around Veer moved at a completely different frame rate. He wasn’t just slightly faster than Kastro; he was operating on a fundamentally different plane of existence.

Kastro threw a lightning-fast left hook aimed at Veer’s ribs.

Veer casually swayed backward, letting the claw graze the fabric of his hoodie. Before Kastro could even begin to pull his arm back for the next strike, Veer stepped into the opening.

‘Crack-Crack!’

Veer threw two lightning-fast jabs, burying his knuckles deep into Kastro’s floating ribs. The sound of fracturing bone echoed in the cage.

Kastro let out a strangled gasp, his eyes bulging as the wind was violently knocked out of his lungs. He stumbled back, desperately swinging his right claw to force Veer away.

Veer ducked cleanly under the wild swing, pivoting on his heel. He drove a devastating uppercut squarely into Kastro’s stomach.

The white-haired martial artist was lifted two feet into the air, a spray of spit and blood erupting from his lips. He crashed back down to the concrete, clutching his abdomen, his pristine uniform now ruined and stained with his own blood.

The audience in the warehouse went dead silent.

The collective roar of the crowd simply vanished, replaced by an eerie, echoing quiet. The billionaires, the mob bosses, the bookies—they were all staring at the cage in absolute, paralyzed bewilderment.

This was Kastro. The undisputed king of the Brooklyn underground. The man who had effortlessly won seven consecutive tournaments without ever taking a significant hit.

And he was currently being dismantled, utterly humiliated, by a scrawny kid in a torn thrift-store hoodie.

Suddenly, the silence shattered, replaced by a wave of pure, venomous panic.

“Get up, you white-haired freak!” a Wall Street executive screamed from the balcony, his face purple with rage, tearing at his own suit collar. “I put five grand on you to sweep this tournament! Get off the ground and break his neck!”

“Fight back, Kastro!” a gang leader roared, slamming his fists against the railing. “You’re costing me my entire crew’s payout! Kill him!”

The crowd was losing their minds. In an underground arena, money was blood, and almost every single person in the warehouse had bet heavily on the reigning champion to win. The odds on the “lucky” new kid winning the tournament were astronomically low, meaning the payout for a Meruem victory would be catastrophic for anyone holding a Kastro ticket.

Up in the VIP viewing box, completely isolated from the screaming gamblers, the tournament organizer was having a very different reaction.

He was a thick-set man in a tailored silk suit, holding an unlit cigar in his trembling fingers. A massive, greedy smile stretched across his face, revealing rows of gold-capped teeth.

“The house always wins,” the organizer whispered, his eyes practically gleaming with dollar signs as he watched Veer land another devastating combination on the champion. “Every idiot in this building bet against the kid because they thought he was just a lucky clown. If Kastro goes down, I keep it all. Every single dime. Break his legs, kid. Break him in half!”

Down in the cage, Kastro was trying desperately to survive.

He forced himself up on shaky legs, his aristocratic face bruised and swelling rapidly. He let out a primal, infuriated roar, abandoning all defensive technique and launching himself at Veer in a final, suicidal barrage of claws.

He actually managed to land a hit. His fingers raked across Veer’s shoulder, tearing through the hoodie.

But there was no blood.

Kastro’s eyes widened in horror as his fingers scraped against the dense, invisible shroud of Veer’s ‘Ten’. It was like trying to claw through a sheet of solid titanium. Without the momentum of his perfect technique—which Veer had systematically broken—Kastro simply didn’t have the force to pierce the aura defense.

“You’re a very skilled martial artist, Kastro,” Veer said calmly, stepping smoothly inside the champion’s guard. “But without an aura of your own to defend your organs, you’re just a glass cannon. And I hit very, very hard.”

Veer didn’t drag it out. He wasn’t a sadist; he was just efficient.

He planted his feet, twisted his hips, and drove a single, perfectly executed right hook directly into the side of Kastro’s jaw.

‘CRACK.’

The champion’s eyes instantly rolled to the back of his head. His body went entirely rigid for a fraction of a second before the strings were cut. Kastro collapsed face-first onto the blood-stained concrete, sliding a few inches before coming to a complete, motionless halt.

The digital clock on the side of the cage read exactly 4 minutes and 12 seconds.

The referee, a grizzled man who had seen hundreds of brutal knockouts, stood frozen for a long moment before rushing over to the unmoving champion. He dropped to his knees, checking Kastro’s pulse, and then began the count.

“One! … Two! … Three! …”

The crowd wasn’t counting with him. They were screaming curses, throwing empty beer bottles and crumpled betting slips at the chain-link fence. They had been robbed.

“Eight! … Nine! … Ten!”

The referee stood up, grabbing Veer’s wrist and hoisting the teenager’s hand into the air.

“Winner by knockout! Meruem!” the announcer’s voice boomed over the PA system, sounding slightly terrified of the crowd’s reaction.

In that moment, as Veer stood under the harsh lights, entirely uninjured and completely calm, the collective realization hit the audience like a physical blow.

Their mouths hung open. The cursing slowly died down.

They finally understood. The stumbling. The desperate flailing. The “lucky” backhands that somehow perfectly broke legs and knocked out kickboxers. It was all a lie. The kid had never been in danger. He hadn’t been fighting for his life; he had been putting on a theatrical performance, deliberately playing with his opponents just to manipulate the betting odds.

He was an absolute monster.

‘Ding!’

[Opponent Defeated: Kastro (Pre-Nen Awakening)]
[Danger Assessment: High]
[Reward: +800 EXP]

Veer lowered his arm as the referee let go, his dark eyes instantly locking onto the blue system interface that popped up in his vision. Eight hundred EXP for a single opponent. It was a massive haul, reflecting just how lethal Kastro truly was compared to the rest of the underground brawlers.

‘Ding!’
[Level Up!]
‘Ding!’
[Level Up!]
‘Ding!’
[Level Up!]

The familiar, rushing waterfall of cool, transcendent energy washed over him, instantly clearing the minor fatigue in his muscles.

[Hunter: Reached Level 23!]
[Free Stats Available: 15]

Veer didn’t even hesitate. He had the speed, he had the intelligence, and his vitality was a bottomless well. He wanted raw, devastating stopping power. He wanted to hit a level of strength that defied physical reality.

“System. Dump all fifteen points into Strength,” Veer commanded mentally as he walked back toward his corner of the cage.

‘Ding!’

[Stat Points Distributed.]

His muscles didn’t bulge or expand, but he felt an incredible, localized densification in his muscle fibers and bones. It felt like his entire skeleton had been replaced with indestructible tungsten.

He pulled up his panel and checked the math.

His Strength was now 34.

At 500 kilograms per point, his baseline physical strength was exactly 17,000 kilograms.

“Seventeen tons,” Veer whispered, stopping in the middle of the cage, a look of profound awe crossing his face.

His encyclopedic knowledge of the ‘Hunter x Hunter’ universe immediately provided the context. When Killua Zoldyck, a trained assassin from birth, returned to his family estate after the Hunter Exam, he opened three doors of the Testing Gate. That required 16 tons of physical force.

Veer, after exactly one month in this universe, was physically stronger than the prodigy heir of the Zoldyck family. And that was just his baseline, without even activating ‘Ren’ to amplify his power with aura.

“I am going to need to be very, very careful when I open doors from now on,” Veer chuckled darkly, shaking his head. “If I pull too hard, I’m going to rip the handle off and take the entire wall with it.”

He stepped out of the cage, ignoring the furious glares of the bankrupt gamblers above, and walked back into the tunnel to wait for the grand finale.

—

The final match was, to put it mildly, an absolute tragedy of scheduling.

The other finalist was a massive, scarred Russian brawler who had survived the loser’s redemption bracket through sheer, brutal perseverance. He had watched the semi-final on the monitors in the locker room. He had watched the scrawny kid dismantle Kastro—the man who haunted the nightmares of every fighter in the building—in under five minutes.

When the announcer called for the final match, the Russian walked down the tunnel very slowly.

He stepped into the cage. The door locked behind him.

Veer stood in his corner, his hands resting easily in his hoodie pockets. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t put up his fists. He just looked at the massive man, his dark, perceptive eyes entirely calm.

The Russian looked at Veer. Then, he looked down at the massive pool of Kastro’s blood still staining the center of the concrete floor.

The Russian visibly swallowed hard. He looked up at the referee, raised his hand, and firmly tapped his own chest three times.

“I forfeit,” the Russian said, his thick accent echoing in the quiet cage. “Keep the money. I am going home to my wife.”

The crowd didn’t even boo. They were too depressed about their lost bets to care about a forfeit.

Veer raised an eyebrow as the Russian immediately turned around, waited for the gate to open, and practically sprinted back down the tunnel.

“Well. That was incredibly anti-climactic,” Veer sighed.

He waited for the System notification to ping. He waited for the massive EXP drop for winning the grand finale of an underground tournament.

Nothing happened.

“System?” Veer asked mentally. “Where’s my EXP?”

There was no response. The blue screen remained blank.

Veer let out a long, slow breath, realizing the brutal fairness of his cheat code. The System wasn’t a game that rewarded him for completing a ‘Quest Line’ or standing in a winner’s circle. It only rewarded Danger, Experience, and Effort.

Standing in a cage while a man politely excused himself required zero effort and posed zero danger. Therefore, zero EXP.

“Right. The System doesn’t reward me for farming cowards,” Veer concluded, nodding in understanding. “Fair enough. At least the prize money isn’t tied to my spiritual progression.”

—

Ten minutes later, Veer was standing in a small, heavily guarded office located above the warehouse floor.

The organizer, the thick-set man in the tailored silk suit, was sitting behind a massive oak desk, grinning from ear to ear. He slid a sleek, metallic silver briefcase across the polished wood.

“Kid, I gotta tell you, you are the best thing to ever happen to my profit margins,” the organizer laughed, leaning back in his leather chair. “When Kastro went down, the betting pool defaulted completely to the house. I made more money in five minutes than I did in the last six months combined.”

Veer placed his hand flat on the briefcase. “I’m thrilled I could facilitate your aggressive wealth accumulation. Does the briefcase actually lock, or is this just a cinematic prop so I feel important?”

The organizer laughed harder, reaching into his suit jacket. He pulled out a thick envelope tied with a rubber band and tossed it onto the desk next to the briefcase.

“You’re a funny kid. I like you,” the organizer smiled, pointing a fat finger at the envelope. “The briefcase has the ten grand. That envelope? That’s two thousand dollars extra. Consider it a performance bonus from me to you. You ever need to fight again, you skip the qualifiers. You come straight to me, and I put you on the main card.”

Veer didn’t smile, but he didn’t refuse the money either. In his previous life, two thousand dollars was a sum he would have literally broken his back for. To have it casually tossed at him as a tip was a jarring reminder of how vastly his reality had shifted.

He picked up the envelope, shoving it deep into his jeans pocket, and firmly grabbed the handle of the briefcase.

“I appreciate the bonus,” Veer said smoothly, his tone polite but entirely devoid of warmth. “But I think I’m going to retire from the underground circuit. The ambiance here is great, really—love the smell of blood and cheap cigars—but I have to focus on my AP Calculus homework. It’s very demanding.”

The organizer looked at him, confused for a second, before letting out another booming laugh, thinking it was just another one of Veer’s dark jokes.

“You do you, Meruem. The door is always open.”

Veer gave a single, dismissive nod. He turned around, walking past the two massive armed guards flanking the office door, and made his way out of the warehouse.

He stepped out into the cool, polluted night air of Brooklyn, the heavy silver briefcase pulling slightly at his arm. Flash and Marcus had already left, deciding not to linger after the chaotic riot of the crowd.

Veer walked alone toward the subway station, his mind racing.

He had the money to save his parents from ruin. He had the strength of a Zoldyck assassin. He had a demonic purple bat that could store infinite aura, and he was firmly planted in a universe where the Avengers and the Hunter Association seemingly coexisted.

“Okay, Marvel universe,” Veer whispered to the New York skyline, a dark, incredibly dangerous smile breaking across his face. “I have my starting capital. Let’s see what you throw at me next.”