Respawned in Marvel: The Ultimate Hunter System - Chapter 15

Chapter 15 — The Cold Arithmetic of Violence

Financial stability, it turned out, was entirely a matter of sensory input.

When you possess an Intelligence stat that allows for flawless real-time probability calculation, and a Perception stat sitting at a staggering 21, the concept of “luck” simply ceases to exist.

The solution to my immediate eviction threat had not been another grueling battle royale. Instead, it had been a quiet, dimly lit underground casino operating out of the back room of a laundromat in Hell’s Kitchen. I had walked in wearing my usual oversized grey hoodie, placed two twenty-dollar bills on a high-stakes blackjack table, and closed my eyes.

With Perception 21, I could hear the faint, microscopic scrape of the dealer’s thumb sliding across the textured surface of a face card. I could hear the elevated heartbeats of the men trying to bluff. I could even see the faint, residual body heat left on the chips. It wasn’t gambling. It was data entry.

Four hours later, I had walked out with fourteen thousand dollars stuffed into a duffel bag, leaving behind a very confused pit boss and a table of furious mobsters. I paid the landlord six months of rent in advance, filled Chloe’s refrigerator with expensive groceries to make up for my prior lack of contribution, and finally allowed myself to breathe.

With the crushing weight of New York living expenses temporarily lifted, I had dedicated the entirety of the last week to the singular, obsessive pursuit of Nen mastery.

I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom in Astoria. The morning sunlight filtered through the blinds, casting horizontal stripes over my skin. My eyes were closed, my breathing slow and rhythmic.

‘System,’ I thought.

The familiar, translucent blue HUD materialized in the darkness behind my eyelids.

—

Hunter: Lv25 (37/351)
Affinity: Enhancement

…

HP: 270/270 [Recovers 0.2% per minute]
AP: 26000/26000 [Recovers 0.1% per minute]
Fatigue: 0%
Storage: 7%
…

STR: 44
AGI: 22
VIT: 20
INT: 18
PER: 21

…

Skill: Ten Lv3(8%), Zetsu Lv2(16%), Ren Lv2(0%), Gyo Lv2(12%)
Hatsu: Vampire

…

[Quest]
[Library]

—

I exhaled slowly, opening my eyes. The progress was deeply satisfying. The sheer, terrifying agony of pushing my aura nodes past their natural limits had finally paid off.

My ‘Ren’—the explosive, outward projection of aura that served as the engine for all high-level combat—had finally reached Level 2. The first time I had attempted to activate it weeks ago, the massive pool of my AP trying to force its way through narrow aura nodes had nearly ruptured my body from the inside out. Now, after days of agonizing, deliberate stretching, my nodes were wide enough to handle the current. I could sustain a full-powered ‘Ren’ for exactly two hours before any physical pain or node damage occurred.

But ‘Ren’ was just raw power. The true evolution of my training had been discovering the efficiency of advanced applications.

I focused my mind, drawing a fraction of the aura shrouding my body and directing it upward. I felt a warm, electric pressure pool behind my retinas.

‘Gyo.’

The world shifted. The colors of my bedroom became hyper-saturated. Dust motes floating in the sunbeams glowed with a faint, iridescent light. ‘Gyo’ was the advanced application of ‘Ren’, concentrating a massive amount of aura into a single body part—usually the eyes.

Training ‘Gyo’ was a revelation in efficiency. Because the advanced skills were simply complex combinations of the basic principles, practicing them yielded double the experience. Maintaining ‘Gyo’ simultaneously leveled up my ‘Ren’. Practicing ‘Ken’—which was the exhausting, full-body defensive armor created by combining ‘Ten’ and ‘Ren’—leveled up both of its base components.

My ‘Ten’ had naturally reached Level 3 through this compounding method. The invisible shroud of aura protecting my body was now so dense that a standard 9mm handgun bullet would flatten against my skin like a raindrop hitting safety glass. And once I fully unlocked ‘Ken’, the defensive multiplier would be exponentially higher. A high-caliber sniper rifle wouldn’t be able to break my skin.

There was, however, a significant drawback to walking around with ‘Gyo’ active in a city as old as New York.

I looked out my third-story window down at the Astoria street below. A woman was walking her dog. A delivery truck was idling at the corner. And sitting on the roof of the delivery truck, entirely translucent and glowing with a sickly, pale blue light, was a man in a 1920s suit, weeping silently into his hands.

Ghosts.

The first time I had activated ‘Gyo’ in the apartment, I had nearly thrown a punch at a translucent Victorian woman standing in my kitchen. It turned out that when you tune your eyes to see the absolute spectrum of spiritual energy, you see the spirits themselves. New York was practically crawling with them. It was haunting, deeply unsettling, and completely ignored by the living. After the third day of seeing spectral mobsters and colonial-era farmers wandering around Queens, I had simply forced myself to adjust to it, the same way one adjusts to a strange smell in a new car.

But ‘Gyo’ offered a far more practical advantage than supernatural tourism. It allowed me to see the raw power levels of the living.

I had tested it out two days ago in AP Calculus. I had casually activated ‘Gyo’ and looked over at Peter Parker’s desk. Floating above the exhausted, bruised teenager’s head had been a crisp, glowing number: Level 32.

It had been a sobering reality check. I was Level 25. Peter, despite his lack of formal combat training, was a biological anomaly. The spider venom had pushed his baseline stats to absurd heights. He was currently a heavier hitter than I was.

“Everything is a matter of scale,” I muttered to the empty room, deactivating ‘Gyo’. The ghost on the truck vanished, and the world returned to its mundane, duller colors. I grabbed my backpack from the floor, throwing it over my shoulder. It was Tuesday. The rent was paid. My nodes were stable.

For the first time since waking up in this bizarre composite universe, I actually felt like I was in control.

I should have known better.

—

Lunchtime at Mid-Town High was usually a loud, chaotic affair, confined mostly to the cafeteria or the sprawling outdoor courtyard. The June sun was bright, the air warm and thick with the scent of cut grass and cafeteria pizza.

I was sitting on a concrete bench near the edge of the courtyard, eating a sandwich I had actually packed myself, enjoying the strange, domestic peace. Across the lawn, I could see Peter Parker sitting alone under a tree, looking pale and exhausted, staring blankly at a textbook. Flash Thompson was a few yards away, throwing a football with a subdued, robotic energy, his usual arrogance entirely stripped away since his uncle’s death.

It was a perfectly normal, terribly fragile American high school afternoon.

And then, the southern wall of the gymnasium simply exploded.

The sound was deafening, a concussive boom of shattering brick and screaming steel that sent a shockwave across the courtyard. A cloud of thick, grey mortar dust plumed into the blue sky.

The chatter of five hundred teenagers instantly died, replaced by a second of suffocating silence.

Then, the screaming began.

Through the settling dust, a massive, horrifying silhouette emerged. It was nine feet tall, covered in dark, impenetrable green scales, wearing the shredded, filthy remains of a white lab coat. Dr. Curt Connors—the Lizard—stepped out into the bright sunlight, letting out a roar that rattled the windows of the main building.

But he wasn’t alone.

Crawling out of the rubble behind him were four other creatures. They were slightly smaller, perhaps seven feet tall, but equally terrifying. They had elongated snouts, razor-sharp claws, and the same cold, yellow, slit-pupil eyes. They moved with a terrifying, jerky speed, their heavy tails whipping against the brickwork.

The Lizard Army.

“Secure the perimeter,” the massive Lizard commanded, his voice a grotesque, booming hiss that echoed across the lawn. “No one leaves. The serum must be administered to the next generation.”

The four smaller lizards didn’t hesitate. They lunged into the crowd of screaming, scattering teenagers like wolves into a flock of sheep.

The panic was absolute. Students trampled each other, scrambling toward the chain-link fences. I watched in cold, detached horror as one of the smaller lizards leaped thirty feet through the air, landing on the hood of a teacher’s sedan. Its claws tore through the metal effortlessly as it swiped at a fleeing security guard, sending the man crashing into the pavement in a spray of blood.

‘They are killing them,’ my mind calculated, the laborer’s pragmatism instantly overridden by the sheer, brutal reality of the slaughter. ‘This isn’t a comic book brawl. This is a massacre.’

Across the courtyard, I saw Peter Parker bolt. He didn’t run toward the gates with the rest of the crowd; he sprinted toward the blind spot behind the bleachers, his hands already tearing at the buttons of his flannel shirt to reveal the red-and-blue fabric beneath.

I stood up from the bench, dropping my sandwich onto the concrete. I didn’t panic. My heart rate remained a steady, rhythmic sixty beats per minute.

I pushed aura into my eyes. ‘Gyo.’

The world shifted into high-definition. I looked at the massive Lizard standing near the gymnasium, coordinating the attack. A glowing red number materialized over his scaled head: Level 40.

I shifted my gaze to the four smaller creatures tearing through the fleeing students. Level 20. Level 20. Level 20. Level 20.

Peter burst from behind the bleachers a second later, fully masked, firing a webline to the roof of the school and swinging directly into the chaos. He intercepted one of the Level 20 lizards just as it raised its claws to strike a group of freshmen. Spider-Man slammed both boots into the creature’s chest, sending it crashing through the glass doors of the library.

“Hey, Godzilla!” Peter yelled, his voice strained even through the mask. “I thought we agreed to keep our disagreements out of the school district!”

“Peter,” the massive Lizard hissed, turning his yellow eyes toward the vigilante. “You cannot stop evolution.”

Three of the smaller lizards immediately abandoned their pursuit of the students and swarmed Spider-Man. Peter was incredibly fast, dodging a swipe from the left, webbing the eyes of the one on the right, but he was grounded. Without the skyscrapers of Manhattan to swing from, his mobility was severely restricted. A heavy, scaled tail caught him in the ribs, sending him skidding across the grass.

He was Level 32, but he was fighting four Level 20s and a Level 40 simultaneously. The math was terminal. He was going to die on this lawn, and then the rest of the school would follow.

I let out a slow, heavy sigh.

“I am definitely not getting my deposit back on this life,” I muttered.

I reached into the pocket of my hoodie and pulled out a simple, cheap grey handkerchief. I folded it into a triangle and tied it tightly around the lower half of my face, covering my nose and mouth. It was a pathetic, low-budget disguise, but I was not about to ruin my credit score by getting sued by the city for collateral damage, nor was I going to let SHIELD track me down through a high school yearbook.

I closed my eyes. ‘Ten.’

The white mist of my aura erupted from my nodes, enveloping my body in a dense, invisible armor.

Then, I pushed deeper. ‘Ren.’

A violent, explosive pressure radiated outward from my core. The air around me actually warped, shimmering like heat off an asphalt road in July. The sheer density of the aura cracked the concrete beneath my sneakers. My base physical strength was forty-four points. Twenty-two tons. But with ‘Ren’ active, projecting my life force to amplify my physical limits, that number skyrocketed.

I opened my eyes.

Spider-Man was struggling to his feet, two of the smaller lizards circling him, while Dr. Connors began to stalk forward, raising a massive, clawed hand to deliver a crushing blow to the boy’s head.

I bent my knees, and pushed off.

The concrete bench behind me shattered into powder from the kinetic recoil of my launch. I crossed the seventy yards of the courtyard in a fraction of a second, a grey blur moving faster than the human eye could track.

Dr. Lizard’s claws descended toward Peter.

I didn’t try to pull Peter away. I simply stepped between them, planted my feet, and threw a straight right cross directly into the center of the giant Lizard’s chest.

‘BOOM.’

The shockwave was deafening, a physical ring of compressed air expanding outward from the point of impact, flattening the grass for thirty feet in every direction.

Dr. Lizard’s eyes widened in profound, reptilian shock. The massive, forty-ton monster was lifted entirely off his feet. He flew backward through the air like a discarded toy, crashing violently through the brick exterior of the cafeteria, disappearing into the darkness of the building in an avalanche of rubble.

Silence fell over the immediate area, broken only by the sound of falling bricks.

Spider-Man, still on his knees, stared at me. The large, white mirrored lenses of his mask were wide with absolute, unadulterated shock. He looked at my cheap hoodie, the grey handkerchief tied around my face, and then at the massive hole I had just punched through the school wall.

“What… who the hell are you?” Peter stammered, his voice cracking.

“I am the substitute teacher for physics,” I said deadpan, my voice muffled slightly by the cloth. I didn’t look at him. I kept my eyes fixed on the hole in the wall. I could already hear the rubble shifting. “Listen to me very carefully, Spider. The large one is mine. The four smaller ones are yours.”

“Whoa, wait, I can help—”

“You cannot,” I interrupted coldly. “Their cellular regeneration is too fast for blunt force trauma. If you punch them, they will heal. If I punch them, they will explode, and I do not want to clean biological waste off my shoes. You have webbing. Tie them up. Restrict their movement. Do not let them near the students. Do you understand?”

Spider-Man blinked, clearly overwhelmed by my clinical breakdown of the violence. But the hero in him overrode the confusion. He gave a sharp nod. “Yeah. Yeah, wrap ’em up. Got it, ninja guy.”

Spider-Man flipped backward, firing two web-lines into the faces of the approaching smaller lizards, perfectly executing the tactical division of labor.

A deafening roar echoed from the cafeteria.

Dr. Lizard exploded back out of the rubble, his green scales dusted with white plaster. A massive indentation in the center of his chest—where my fist had landed—was already popping back into place, the broken ribs knitting together with sickening, wet snaps.

He locked his yellow eyes on me, his jaw unhinging in pure fury.

“What are you?!” the Lizard bellowed.

“Underpaid,” I replied.

The monster charged. The ground shook beneath his massive weight. He closed the distance in an instant, swinging a right hook that carried enough kinetic force to derail a locomotive.

I didn’t dodge. I wanted to test the math.

I raised my left forearm, feeding ‘Ren’ into the limb.

The Lizard’s massive fist slammed into my arm. The impact cratered the earth beneath my feet, burying me up to my ankles in the dirt. But my arm didn’t snap. It didn’t even bend. The Level 3 ‘Ten’, amplified by the explosive aura of ‘Ren’, absorbed the forty tons of force like a concrete pillar taking a hit from a baseball bat.

Dr. Lizard’s eyes widened in sheer disbelief. “Impossible. You are human. Humans break!”

“Your hypothesis is flawed, Doctor,” I said.

I dropped my center of gravity, pivoting on my buried feet, and drove a devastating uppercut into the creature’s jaw. The sound was like a cannon firing. The Lizard’s head snapped back with enough force to shatter his cervical vertebrae. He was launched upward, hovering in the air for a fraction of a second.

I didn’t let him land. I leaped after him, grabbing the thick, scaled base of his tail. I spun mid-air, utilizing every ounce of my boosted strength, and hurled the nine-foot monster directly downward into the concrete plaza.

The plaza shattered, a spiderweb of cracks spreading fifty feet outward.

I landed lightly on the edge of the crater. Dr. Lizard lay in the center, his jaw hanging at a grotesque angle, his chest heaving. But even as I watched, the jaw snapped back into place. The scales re-aligned. The sheer speed of his regeneration was staggering. It was a war of attrition, and while my AP pool was massive, I was burning through it rapidly by maintaining ‘Ren’.

The Lizard pushed himself up to his hands and knees, glaring at me with a mixture of hatred and newfound caution. He had realized, with cold reptilian logic, that he was fighting something that broke the biological rules he worshipped.

A loud ‘thwip-thwip’ sound drew my attention to the right.

Spider-Man was executing his end of the bargain perfectly. He was an acrobat of pure instinct. He had already completely cocooned three of the Level 20 lizards in thick, impenetrable layers of white webbing. They were thrashing wildly on the grass, unable to break the tensile strength of the synthetic silk. He was currently riding the back of the fourth, webbing its jaws shut while dodging its frantic tail swipes.

Dr. Lizard saw it too. His army was incapacitated. His primary target had been intercepted by an anomaly he couldn’t physically crush.

The tactical advantage was entirely lost.

“This is not over,” the Lizard hissed at me, his voice vibrating with venom. “Evolution cannot be stopped by a single anomaly.”

He didn’t attack again. Instead, he turned and sprinted toward the edge of the school property, where a massive, heavy iron storm drain grate covered a primary access point to the city’s sewer system. He tore the iron grate out of the concrete as if it were made of cardboard, diving headfirst into the dark, rushing water below.

I dashed across the courtyard, skidding to a halt at the edge of the open, gaping hole. The smell of rot and stagnant water drifted up from the darkness. I could hear the heavy splashing of the monster retreating deeper into the subterranean maze.

Spider-Man landed next to me, breathing heavily, having just finished webbing the fourth and final minion to a flagpole.

“He’s getting away!” Peter panted, leaning over the edge of the hole. “We have to go after him!”

I stood perfectly still, looking down into the black abyss. I deactivated my ‘Ren’, letting the explosive aura settle back into the quiet, invisible shroud of ‘Ten’. The sudden drop in power made my muscles ache slightly, a reminder of the physical toll.

The sewers were tight, restricted, and flooded with water. The Lizard was a semi-aquatic apex predator. I was a terrestrial brawler who relied on footwork and solid ground to generate kinetic force. Down there, his mobility would double, and mine would be cut in half.

“No,” I said, my voice flat, adjusting the handkerchief over my nose.

“What do you mean, no?” Spider-Man protested, throwing his arms up. “He’s a giant lizard! He’s going to regroup!”

“He is a giant, highly regenerative reptile entering a flooded, pitch-black subterranean labyrinth where he holds absolute spatial superiority,” I corrected him, turning away from the hole. “I punch things, Spider. I am not fighting Godzilla in his own bathroom. That is a tactical suicide.”

Spider-Man stared at me, the white lenses of his mask narrowing slightly. “You’re a really weird superhero, you know that?”

“I am not a superhero,” I replied, walking past him toward the shattered gymnasium wall to retrieve my backpack. “I am just a guy who hates property damage. Call animal control for your presents.”

I didn’t wait for him to respond. I slipped into the settling dust of the ruined school, blending perfectly into the terrified crowd.