Respawned in Marvel: The Ultimate Hunter System - Chapter 20

Chapter 20 — The Anatomy of a Defeat

Seven days. That was the extent of the ceasefire.

For a week, New York City had held its breath, limping through the aftermath of the Mid-Town High massacre. The news cycled endlessly between political outrage and SHIELD press conferences that said absolutely nothing. In Astoria, I spent exactly one hundred and sixty-eight hours meditating, cycling my aura, and refusing to turn on the television.

Gwen had taken my warnings as a challenge. Every morning and evening, she texted me a single confirmation that her ‘Ten’ shroud was active. She was weaponizing her trauma, treating the ambient anxiety of the city as the resistance needed to stretch her aura nodes.

I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom, doing a mental calculation of my remaining aura capacity against my base AP regeneration, when my cheap flip phone rattled against the hardwood.

I didn’t need to look at the screen. My Perception, sitting comfortably at 44, registered the elevated, erratic frequency of the cellular signal before I even touched the plastic.

“I explicitly mentioned that weekends are for resting your nodes, Gwen,” I said, putting the phone to my ear.

“Turn on the news,” she breathed. Her voice wasn’t just shaking; it sounded brittle, like glass right before it shatters. “Channel four. Now.”

I stood up, walked into the living room, and hit the power button on the television.

The screen flickered to a live feed from a news helicopter hovering over Midtown Manhattan. Plumes of thick, noxious green smoke were billowing out of the shattered glass doors of the OsCorp Tower. The sprawling plaza was littered with the motionless bodies of heavily armed security contractors and NYPD officers.

“He’s there,” Gwen whispered through the phone. “Dr. Connors. He bypassed the perimeter. He flooded the lobby with some kind of paralyzing aerosol.”

“I see it,” I replied, analyzing the tactical layout. The bodies weren’t torn apart; they were stiff, frozen in place. A non-lethal entry. Connors was preserving his energy for the main event. “Lock your doors, Gwen. Do not leave your house.”

“I can’t,” she said, the terror in her voice suddenly hardening into a terrifying resolve. “My dad just deployed with the ESU strike team. And Peter… Peter’s been tracking him all week. I know he’s heading straight for that tower.”

“That is their job. It is not yours.”

“I’m not sitting in my room waiting for a phone call anymore, Veer,” she snapped. The sound of a heavy zipper being pulled closed echoed through the receiver. “I put together a suit. It’s just reinforced motorcycle gear and a ski mask, but it’s enough. With my ‘Ten’ active, I can take a hit. I can help them.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, feeling an incoming headache. “Gwen, a Level 1 ‘Ten’ shroud makes you a durable civilian, not a combatant. You do not have the kinetic output to damage a Level 40 anomaly. If you go to OsCorp, you will simply become leverage for the Lizard to use against Peter.”

“I’m going,” she said, her voice dropping to a stubborn, tearful whisper. “I just… I wanted to tell you. In case you wanted to come. In case you actually cared.”

The line clicked dead.

I stared at the phone. I had made my philosophy incredibly clear. I was a bystander who punched hard when provoked, not a cape-wearing crusader.

But my vastly upgraded Intelligence stat was already running the cold, unforgiving arithmetic. Connors couldn’t brew his mutagen in the sewers. He needed the pristine, industrial-scale bio-reactors located in OsCorp’s upper labs. He needed the atmospheric dispersal vents on the roof. If he succeeded, he wouldn’t just turn a few security guards into lizards. He would blanket the entire island of Manhattan in an aerosolized evolutionary reset.

And if Manhattan turned into a reptilian swamp, the local economy would collapse, the Hunter Association would undoubtedly quarantine the island, and I would lose my security deposit.

I let out a slow, heavy sigh that carried the weight of a man clocking in for a double shift at a construction site he despised.

“I hate this city,” I muttered.

I grabbed my oversized grey hoodie, pulled it over my head, and opened the window. I pushed a fraction of aura into my legs and dropped three stories to the alleyway below. My boots cracked the pavement, and I broke into a dead sprint toward the subway lines, my Agility of 42 turning the Astoria streets into a blurred, rushing wind.

—

The OsCorp lobby was a cathedral of glass, steel, and absolute silence.

By the time I bypassed the outer police barricades, the green paralyzing gas had settled into a thin mist along the marble floor. I tied my grey handkerchief around my face and stepped over the frozen bodies of the security guards.

Connors had taken the executive elevators. I didn’t bother waiting for a car. I pried the heavy steel doors of the service elevator shaft apart with my bare hands, the metal groaning and warping under my base twenty-two tons of force.

I looked up into the darkness of the shaft. One hundred and four stories.

I pushed aura into my hands and feet, utilizing a minor application of ‘Ren’ to stick to the sheer concrete walls, and began to ascend like a launched mortar shell. The wind roared in my ears as I cleared ten floors every few seconds, my physical stats operating at peak efficiency.

But even as fast as I was, the tragedy at the top of the world was unfolding on its own terrible schedule.

When I finally ripped open the doors on the 104th floor and stepped out onto the sprawling, wind-whipped terrace, the air was thick with the smell of ozone and raw blood.

In the center of the roof, connected to the building’s primary venting system, was a massive, humming centrifuge machine glowing with angry, fluorescent green light.

Standing in front of it was Dr. Curt Connors.

He was easily ten feet tall now. His dark green scales were thicker, resembling obsidian armor. He had used his own concentrated, mutated DNA to synthesize a pure batch of the Lizard Serum, loading a massive glass cylinder into the core of the dispersal machine.

Lying on the grated steel floor, twenty feet away, was Spider-Man.

The red-and-blue suit was shredded. Peter’s mask was torn half off, exposing a bruised, bleeding jaw. He was gasping for air, struggling to push himself up. He had fought brilliantly, using his webbing and agility, but the brutal, undeniable gap in raw stats had caught up to him. Level 32 against Level 40. The boy was broken.

“It’s over, Peter,” the Lizard hissed, his voice echoing over the howling wind. His hand hovered over the heavy activation lever. “The algorithm is complete.”

“Step away from the console!”

The voice barked through the wind—sharp, authoritative, and completely out of place.

I turned my head. Emerging from the roof access stairwell, his service weapon drawn and aimed squarely at the monster’s head, was Police Chief George Stacy.

“Dad, no!”

A second, smaller silhouette stumbled out of the stairwell directly behind him.

It was Gwen. She wore a black leather jacket, dark jeans, and a crude ski mask pulled up over her hair. Even from fifty feet away, I could see the faint, shimmering white mist of her ‘Ten’ shroud clinging to her body. She had actually bypassed the cops and stepped directly into the nightmare.

The Lizard turned his massive head. A horrific, chilling smile stretched across his elongated snout.

“The authorities,” the Lizard rumbled. “The men who send young boys to bleed for them. You represent the very fragility I am trying to eradicate, George.”

Chief Stacy didn’t hesitate. He pulled the trigger. Three deafening gunshots echoed across the terrace. The hollow-point bullets struck the Lizard directly in the chest, flattened against the obsidian scales, and fell to the floor like discarded coins.

Before Stacy could fire a fourth shot, the Lizard moved.

It was a burst of speed that defied his massive bulk. The creature crossed the thirty feet between the console and the stairwell in a fraction of a second.

“Captain!” Spider-Man screamed, trying to launch himself forward, but his legs gave out.

I stepped out from the shadows of the elevator shaft, dropping my ‘Ten’ and instantly flaring my aura into a violent, explosive ‘Ren’. The concrete beneath my boots spider-webbed. I lunged forward, pushing my Agility to its absolute breaking point.

But the geometry of the terrace was a cold, unforgiving equation, and I was on the wrong side of the math.

The Lizard didn’t strike Chief Stacy. He reached down with his massive left hand and pinned the struggling police officer to the steel wall of the access housing. With his right hand, the Lizard produced a small, compressed auto-injector from the remains of his lab coat. It glowed with the same volatile green liquid.

“Let me heal you, George,” the monster whispered.

He drove the syringe directly into the side of Chief Stacy’s neck and depressed the plunger.

“NO!” Gwen shrieked, tearing her ski mask off. Her voice shattered into a hysterical scream. She lunged forward, her fists glowing with her rudimentary ‘Ten’, but the Lizard casually backhanded her. The blow would have shattered every bone in a normal human’s body. Her aura shroud absorbed the lethal force, but the kinetic impact still sent her flying backward, skidding ten feet across the grated floor.

Chief Stacy dropped his gun. His hands flew to his neck. His eyes rolled back into his head.

The transformation wasn’t cinematic. It was a violent, agonizing biological rebellion. The sound of his bones breaking and resetting echoed over the wind. His spine arched backward at a grotesque angle. His uniform began to tear at the seams as massive, dark green scales erupted through his skin. His jaw unhinged with a sickening crunch of cartilage, tearing his own face apart to make room for rows of razor-sharp teeth.

Gwen pushed herself up on her elbows, completely paralyzed. Her mind simply refused to process the visual data. The father who had kissed her forehead that morning was currently screaming, his voice morphing into a terrifying, guttural hiss.

“Look at him,” Dr. Connors laughed, releasing his grip. The newly formed lizard monster dropped to the floor, thrashing wildly as the last of his mammalian brain died. “He is perfect.”

“You son of a bitch!” Peter roared.

The sheer trauma shattered whatever physical limits were holding Peter down. He launched himself across the terrace, bypassing the thrashing mutation of Chief Stacy entirely, and slammed feet-first into Dr. Connors’ chest.

The impact sent the giant Lizard staggering backward, away from the access door and directly toward the humming dispersal machine.

I finally closed the distance. My eyes were locked entirely on the glowing green console. I materialized next to the centrifuge, pulling back my right arm to deliver a twenty-two-ton, ‘Ren’-amplified strike that would shatter the machine’s core.

But as he was falling backward, the Lizard reached out with his massive tail, blindly smashing it against the control console.

He didn’t hit the off switch. He shattered the glass casing protecting the emergency override.

‘BEEP.’

I threw the punch. My fist connected with the thick steel casing, obliterating it instantly. Metal shrapnel exploded outward, and the glass cylinder shattered into a million pieces, raining green liquid onto the floor.

But it was too late. The system had already primed.

‘WHOOSH.’

A concussive shockwave of pressurized air erupted from the massive exhaust pipes lining the edge of the OsCorp roof. It wasn’t the island-wide dispersal Connors had wanted, but it was enough.

A rolling cloud of dense green aerosol cascaded over the edge of the building, plummeting toward the busy streets of Midtown Manhattan like a toxic waterfall.

I stood amidst the ruined metal, the green liquid sizzling against my ‘Ten’ shroud. I looked down over the ledge. The cloud hit the pavement and expanded outward, blanketing exactly two city blocks in an impenetrable green fog.

Down below, the traffic stopped. Car horns began to blare.

And then, the screaming started. It was a cacophony of absolute, widespread agony. Hundreds of pedestrians and commuters caught in the immediate radius were experiencing the exact same biological rewrite that had just destroyed Chief Stacy.

I pulled my head back from the ledge. I had been too slow. The villain had won.

“I did it,” the Lizard hissed, pushing Peter off him and standing up, staring at the green fog rolling below.

Peter Parker snapped. There was no witty quip. There was only raw, unadulterated rage. Spider-Man lowered his shoulder and tackled Dr. Connors with every ounce of force his body could generate.

The impact lifted both of them completely off the grated floor. They smashed through the thick, reinforced glass barrier at the edge of the terrace.

“PETER!” Gwen screamed, scrambling toward the ledge.

They plummeted off the side of the 104-story building. About forty stories down, Peter fired a desperate web-line toward the side of the building. The line caught, pulling the boy violently away from the monster.

Dr. Connors continued to fall.

He hit the asphalt of the OsCorp plaza with the kinetic force of a meteor. The impact cratered the street, throwing abandoned cars into the air.

For a moment, there was nothing. Then, deep within the crater, bones snapped violently back into place. A scaled hand reached out, grabbing the rim of a shattered sewer grate. With terrifying resilience, the Lizard dragged his mangled body into the darkness of the subterranean tunnels.

He survived.

I stood on the ledge, the cold wind whipping the grey fabric of my hoodie. Down below, the green fog was dissipating, revealing the nightmare. Dozens of slightly smaller lizard-men were stumbling out of the fog, operating purely on newly installed reptilian instincts. They began to attack the un-mutated civilians trapped in their cars. The sound of shattering glass drifted up to the roof.

Suddenly, the ‘thwump-thwump-thwump’ of heavy military rotors cut through the chaos.

Three massive, matte-black SHIELD transport helicopters descended rapidly. The side doors slid open, revealing tactical agents armed with specialized riot rifles.

“Disperse the antidote payload,” an amplified voice echoed. “Shoot on sight. Non-lethal darts only.”

A hail of silver darts rained down. When a dart struck a lizard-man, the creature would collapse, thrashing as the hastily synthesized SHIELD cure aggressively reversed the mutation. But the cure wasn’t perfect, and there simply weren’t enough darts.

I watched a mutated businessman tear the door off a taxi cab, dragging the screaming driver out into the street. A dart struck the mutant a second later, but the damage was already done. The driver lay motionless.

Thousands of people were trapped in that radius. The collateral damage was staggering.

I turned away from the ledge.

Behind me, the roof was eerily quiet. The mutated form of Chief Stacy had fled down the stairwell the moment the klaxon sounded, his instincts driving him to seek the damp safety of the lower levels.

Gwen was still on her knees.

She was staring at the bloodstained spot on the grating where her father had dropped his service weapon. Her ski mask lay forgotten. Her ‘Ten’ shroud was flickering violently, destabilizing as her emotional state fractured completely.

I walked slowly toward her. My footsteps echoed loudly on the steel.

She slowly turned her head. Her blue eyes were empty, hollowed out by a trauma no equation could solve. And then, the emptiness sharpened into a raw, venomous hatred.

“This is on you,” she whispered, her voice trembling. She pointed a shaking finger directly at my chest.

I stopped walking.

“You were just sitting there,” Gwen sobbed, the tears spilling hot and fast. She pushed herself up to her feet, stumbling slightly. “You had the power. You could have stopped him days ago! You could have hunted him down! But you just sat in your apartment pretending you were above it all!”

She stepped forward, shoving her hands against my chest. My body didn’t move an inch, but I let her hit me.

“My dad is a monster!” she screamed, her voice tearing at her throat, raining weak blows against my ‘Ten’ shroud. “And all those people down there are dying! If you had just come earlier, if you had just cared about someone other than yourself, this wouldn’t have happened!”

I stood perfectly still, absorbing the blows, absorbing the sheer, crushing weight of her misplaced grief.

She wasn’t entirely wrong. If I had actively hunted Connors for the last week, I might have found him. I had the capability. I had simply lacked the will.

But I also knew the dangerous, poisonous logic of the path she was demanding I walk.

“I told you, Gwen,” I said, my voice incredibly quiet, devoid of anger or defensiveness. It was just a cold, hollow statement of fact. “I am not a hero.”

She stopped hitting me. She just stood there, her hands resting against my chest, weeping uncontrollably.

I looked down at her. I didn’t feel the urge to comfort her. I didn’t feel the urge to apologize. I just felt a profound, exhausting confirmation of the philosophy that had kept me alive.

When you put on a mask, you do not just accept the responsibility of the people you save. You accept the guilt of every single person you fail. It is a burden that destroys the soul, eroding a person until there is nothing left but trauma and an endless, unwinnable war.

Peter Parker would carry the guilt of this night for the rest of his life. I refused to carry it for a single second.

I stepped backward, slipping out of her grasp.

“Remember your breathing,” I told her quietly. “If you let your shroud destabilize now, the cold will kill you before the shock does.”

I didn’t wait for her to respond. I turned my back on the weeping girl, walked to the edge of the OsCorp roof, and stepped off into the howling wind, vanishing into the darkness of the city below.