Respawned in Marvel: The Ultimate Hunter System - Chapter 7

Chapter 7: The Garden Hose Protocol and the Ant King

The moment Veer locked the deadbolt of his apartment, the oversized grey hoodie hit the floor. He didn’t bother with a warm-up; his muscles were already perfectly calibrated from the morning’s two thousand squats. He walked to the center of the cramped living room, cracked his neck, and mentally summoned the System’s Library.

He had mastered the passive containment of ‘Ten’. He had successfully learned the complete suppression of ‘Zetsu’. Now, it was time for the offensive engine. He needed ‘Ren’.

A heavy, crimson-bound book materialized in his mental landscape.

[The Principles of Nen: Ren]

The conceptual knowledge flooded his brain, hot and aggressive. If ‘Ten’ was a gentle, defensive stream wrapping around the body, ‘Ren’ was a violent, pressurized explosion. It required the user to forcefully open all their aura nodes to their maximum capacity, projecting an immense volume of aura outward to amplify physical strength and durability exponentially. It was the absolute baseline for any serious combat in the ‘Hunter x Hunter’ universe.

‘Ding!’

[Skill Registered: Ren Lv0 (0%)]

“Alright,” Veer breathed out, planting his feet firmly on the faded carpet. “Let’s turn on the pressure valve.”

He closed his eyes, anchoring his focus on the massive reserve of 12,000 AP pooling in his core. He didn’t try to gently coax it out like he did with ‘Ten’. He mentally grabbed the energy and shoved it outward with everything he had.

‘BOOM.’

The reaction was instantaneous, and it was entirely catastrophic.

Veer’s eyes snapped open, a strangled, agonizing gasp tearing from his throat. His knees instantly buckled, and he crashed onto the floorboards, curling into a tight fetal position. His hands dug into the carpet, his knuckles turning white as an unimaginable, searing pain erupted across every square inch of his skin.

It wasn’t a surface injury. It felt as if someone had taken a high-pressure firehose, connected it to a rusty, decades-old garden hose, and cranked the hydrant to the maximum. His aura nodes—the spiritual pipelines of his body—were simply too narrow, too unconditioned to handle the violent flood of his massive AP pool. The energy was literally tearing through his pathways, threatening to rupture him from the inside out.

“Turn… turn it off,” Veer hissed through gritted teeth, desperately slamming the mental brakes on the energy flow.

The crimson aura flaring around him violently sputtered and died. The oppressive pressure vanished, leaving Veer panting heavily on the floor, sweat pooling at his collarbones. His entire body felt like a massive, throbbing bruise.

He rolled onto his back, staring at the popcorn ceiling, a dark, breathless chuckle escaping his lips.

“Well. That’s a fun new way to simulate a full-body heart attack,” he rasped, waiting for his 19 Vitality to kick in and soothe the screaming nerves.

He pulled up the skill details. The math was brutally straightforward. Sustaining ‘Ren’ consumed exactly 1 AP per second. Functionally, his total reserve of 12,000 AP meant he had enough fuel to sustain the explosive power output for over three uninterrupted hours. By comparison, ‘Zetsu’ consumed absolutely nothing, allowing his aura to recover twice as fast.

The problem wasn’t the fuel; it was the engine block. His aura pipelines were simply too weak. He calculated that if he pushed past the pain, his nodes would physically rupture in exactly twelve minutes, permanently crippling his ability to use Nen.

“Okay. Twelve minutes is the absolute hard limit,” Veer muttered, slowly pushing himself up into a seated position. “I just need to grit my teeth, force it out, and endure the pain until the skill levels up to 1. Once the pathways widen, it won’t hurt as much.”

He closed his eyes, preparing to plunge back into the agonizing fire, when the sharp, obnoxious buzzing of his chunky flip phone shattered his concentration.

Veer let out a long sigh, the tension bleeding out of his shoulders. He grabbed the phone from the coffee table and flipped it open.

“If this is a telemarketer, I am legally obligated to warn you that I am currently in a state of extreme spiritual distress,” Veer answered.

“Singh, it’s me,” Flash Thompson’s voice came through the receiver, sounding uncharacteristically tight and nervous. “I got the location. It’s happening tonight.”

“Excellent,” Veer said, wiping the sweat from his forehead. “Send me the address, and I’ll see you there.”

“No, you idiot, you can’t just walk in,” Flash snapped, the anxiety bleeding into his tone. “You need a vouch. Meet me at the abandoned diner on 4th and Elm in three hours. My guy is gonna drive us in. Do not be late, and do not wear anything stupid.”

“Eugene, I only own two hoodies. ‘Stupid’ is my entire aesthetic,” Veer deadpanned. “I’ll see you in three hours.”

He snapped the phone shut.

Veer looked at the center of the room, debating whether to squeeze in a few minutes of ‘Ren’ training. He shook his head. No. Grinding the skill now would leave his nodes aching and his body fatigued. He was about to walk into an underground deathmatch entirely populated by grown men who broke bones for a living. He needed to be at absolute peak condition.

He walked into his small bedroom, set an alarm, and closed his eyes. The world could wait. He needed a nap.

—

The neon sign above the abandoned diner was shattered, casting a flickering, sickly yellow glow over the cracked pavement of the parking lot.

Veer stood under the broken awning, his hands shoved deep into his oversized hoodie, the baggy material perfectly concealing the dense, superhuman musculature beneath. A battered, black Lincoln Town Car slowly rolled into the lot, its headlights cutting through the New York smog. The car idled, and the back door swung open.

Flash Thompson was sitting in the back, looking like he was regretting every life choice that had led him to this exact moment. Sitting in the driver’s seat was a massive, middle-aged Black man with salt-and-pepper hair, thick silver rings on his fingers, and a jagged scar cutting through his left eyebrow.

Veer slid into the backseat, pulling the door shut behind him.

“Singh,” Flash muttered, his leg bouncing nervously. “This is Marcus. He runs the books for the East Side.”

Marcus turned around in his seat, resting a massive, tree-trunk of an arm over the center console. He looked Veer up and down, his dark eyes analyzing the baggy clothes, the skinny face, and the entirely relaxed posture. Marcus let out a deep, rumbling scoff.

“This is the guy?” Marcus asked, looking at Flash like the teenager had just handed him a bad joke. “Flash, you told me you were bringing a fighter. This kid looks like he’s gonna ask me for help with his algebra homework. You trying to get him killed?”

“I tried to tell him,” Flash defended himself instantly, holding his hands up. “He wouldn’t listen to me.”

Marcus shifted his gaze back to Veer, his expression turning deadly serious. “Listen to me very carefully, kid. This ain’t a high school wrestling mat. There are no referees in there who care about your health, and there ain’t no tapping out when your arm gets locked. I watch at least three bodies get hauled out of that arena in garbage bags every single day. Are you absolutely sure you want to get into that cage?”

Veer didn’t flinch. He didn’t even blink. He just offered Marcus a polite, entirely pleasant smile.

“Three bodies a day?” Veer replied, his tone conversational. “Marcus, that is incredibly environmentally conscious of you. Do you compost them, or just toss them in the East River? Either way, you’re doing wonders for the local carbon footprint. I’m fully committed.”

Marcus stared at him for a long, heavy moment. The utter lack of fear, combined with the deeply unsettling morbidity of the joke, seemed to short-circuit the bookie’s brain. He looked back at Flash, who was actively burying his face in his hands.

“Your boy ain’t right in the head,” Marcus grunted, turning back to the steering wheel and shifting the car into drive. “But if he wants to bleed, he can bleed. Let’s go.”

—

The location wasn’t glamorous on the outside. It was a massive, decaying shipping warehouse near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, surrounded by rusted chain-link fences and overgrown weeds. But the moment Marcus guided them through the heavily guarded, reinforced steel doors at the back, the world violently shifted.

It was an absolute sensory overload.

The interior of the warehouse was a sprawling, multi-level coliseum of vice and violence. Massive, blindingly bright halogen lights cut through a thick haze of cigar smoke and sweat. Deafening, bass-heavy hip-hop vibrated the concrete floor.

The crowd was a chaotic, beautiful, and terrifying mix of New York’s absolute worst and wealthiest. Beautiful women in impossibly short dresses leaned against the railings, clutching champagne flutes. Heavily tattooed gang members stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Wall Street executives in tailored suits, all screaming and waving stacks of hundred-dollar bills.

In the center of it all was the pit—a massive, sunken concrete arena enclosed by a reinforced steel cage. The floor of the cage was stained with dark, overlapping patches of dried and fresh blood.

“Keep your head down and don’t stare at anyone,” Flash whispered frantically, practically clinging to Marcus’s shadow as they moved through the crowd.

Veer ignored him, his Perception absorbing every detail. He could hear the specific odds being shouted by bookies across the room. He could smell the adrenaline and the cheap cologne. It was intoxicating.

Marcus led them to a heavy metal desk tucked away in a shadowed corner. A man with a broken nose and a thick ledger sat behind it.

“Got a fresh piece of meat for the grinder,” Marcus said, gesturing to Veer.

The man with the ledger didn’t look up. “Read him the format. If he dies, we don’t pay his handlers.”

“Alright, kid, listen up,” Marcus said, turning to Veer and speaking loudly over the bass. “The main tournament only has ten slots. It’s an elimination bracket with a loser’s redemption.”

“Explain the math,” Veer requested, his eyes locked on the cage.

“First round, the ten fighters pair off. Five win, five lose,” Marcus explained, holding up his fingers. “The five losers immediately get thrown into a free-for-all. One guy survives that and moves forward. That gives us six fighters for the next round. Those six pair off. Three win, three lose. The three losers fight, one survives. That gives us a four-man semi-final. They pair off, two win. Then, the grand finale. Last man standing gets the briefcase.”

Veer’s eyes lit up. “And how much is in the briefcase?”

“Ten thousand dollars,” Marcus grinned, revealing a gold tooth. “Cash. Tax-free.”

Veer let out a low whistle. Ten thousand dollars would entirely pay off the crippling interest on his father’s loan, cover the rent for the next six months, and leave him with enough to buy Gwen a birthday gift that wouldn’t look like it came from a dollar store.

“Perfect. But you said the tournament only has ten slots,” Veer noted, looking around at the hundreds of massive, scarred men stretching and wrapping their hands in the shadows. “There are way more than ten fighters here.”

“That’s because you gotta earn your slot in the main bracket,” Marcus smirked, pointing toward a massive table piled high with hundreds of bright yellow cloth tags. “Before the tournament starts, we run the Battle Royale. Every hopeful gets a tag. You pin it to your chest. When the buzzer sounds, it’s pure chaos. You steal as many tags from the other guys as you can, and you protect your own. The ten guys holding the most tags when the clock runs out get the slots in the tournament.”

“Simple. Elegant. Extremely violent,” Veer nodded in approval. “I like it.”

“Name for the ledger?” the man behind the desk asked, finally looking up.

Veer didn’t hesitate. He had been given a system based on the greatest anime of his past life; it was only right to pay homage.

“Meruem,” Veer said, his voice completely flat. “The Ant King.”

The ledger man blinked, clearly missing the reference entirely. He shrugged and scribbled it down. “Whatever you say, bug boy. Grab a tag and get to the holding pen.”

As Veer reached for a yellow tag, a heavy hand grabbed his wrist.

He turned to see Flash Thompson looking at him, his face pale and completely devoid of his usual arrogance. The bully looked genuinely, profoundly terrified.

“Singh… Veer, listen to me,” Flash pleaded, his voice cracking slightly. “I hate you. You know I hate you. But I don’t want to watch a guy I sit next to in homeroom get beaten to death. Just look at these guys. They are going to kill you. Please, just walk away. We can leave right now.”

Veer looked at Flash’s hand gripping his wrist, and then looked up into the teenager’s panicked eyes. It was a strange, complicated moment. Flash was a terrible person, a bully who had driven the original Veer to suicide. But beneath the cruelty, he was still just a high school kid entirely unprepared for the reality of the criminal underworld.

Veer gently, effortlessly pried Flash’s fingers off his wrist.

“Eugene,” Veer smiled, a genuine, oddly comforting smile. “I appreciate the sentiment. I really do. But you’re forgetting one very important detail.”

“What?” Flash asked, bewildered.

“I’m the scariest thing in this room,” Veer replied, pinning the yellow tag to the center of his baggy grey hoodie. “Now go find a good seat on the balcony. You’re going to want to watch this.”

—

The holding pen smelled of deep heat ointment, stale sweat, and fear.

More than a hundred and fifty men were crammed into the massive, chain-link tunnel leading out into the central cage. They were mountains of muscle, covered in prison ink, gang insignias, and thick scar tissue. Some were pacing like caged tigers; others were shadowboxing, throwing violent, heavy combinations into the air.

Veer stood entirely still in the middle of the crowd. He kept his hands in his pockets, his oversized hoodie making him look like a lost child who had wandered into a maximum-security prison yard.

His heart was hammering against his ribs. It was a physiological reaction to the sheer volume of killing intent radiating in the confined space. In his past life in India, he had been in street fights—desperate brawls over stolen bricks or unpaid wages. But those were amateurs throwing wild haymakers. These men knew exactly how to shatter a kneecap and crush a windpipe.

“Alright, animals, listen up!” a voice boomed over the warehouse PA system, vibrating the metal grates under Veer’s feet. “The rules are simple! Take a tag, keep a tag! No weapons, no eye-gouging! Everything else is fair game! Top ten tag counts move to the main bracket! Open the gates!”

The massive steel doors at the end of the tunnel ground open, and the sea of violent men surged forward, spilling out into the brightly lit concrete arena.

Veer let himself be carried by the tide, stepping out onto the blood-stained floor.

He looked up. The balconies were packed with screaming billionaires and gang bosses. He spotted Flash standing near the railing, clutching it with white knuckles, looking like he was about to be sick.

‘BZZZZZT!’

The starting buzzer shattered the air, loud enough to rattle teeth.

The arena instantly exploded into absolute chaos.

Men roared, throwing themselves at each other with reckless, brutal abandon. Fists flew, blood sprayed, and the sickening sound of knuckles connecting with bone echoed in the massive space. It was a meat grinder.

A massive, bald man with a swastika tattooed on his neck spotted Veer instantly. Seeing the scrawny kid in the hoodie, the man grinned, seeing an easy target. He charged forward, throwing a massive, looping right hook aimed directly at the side of Veer’s head.

The moment the man moved, a switch flipped in Veer’s brain.

The anxiety, the racing heartbeat, the overwhelming noise of the crowd—it all vanished, replaced by an absolute, chilling stillness.

His Perception and Agility engaged simultaneously.

To the crowd above, the bald man was moving fast, a terrifying display of brute force. But to Veer, the man might as well have been submerged in thick, invisible molasses.

Veer watched the fist approaching in agonizingly slow motion. He could see the micro-expressions on the man’s face, the flare of his nostrils, the exact trajectory of the swing.

‘Martial arts,’ Veer thought clearly as the fist crept toward his face, ‘are entirely useless if you are fundamentally outclassed in speed.’

Veer didn’t bother taking a fighting stance. He just lazily tilted his head an inch to the left.

The massive fist sailed past his ear, missing him entirely. The bald man, overextended and confused by the sudden lack of impact, stumbled forward.

Veer casually reached out his right hand, snatched the yellow tag off the man’s chest, and gently swept his left foot behind the man’s heel.

The bald man went crashing face-first into the concrete floor, entirely completely oblivious to how he had gotten there.

Veer looked at the yellow tag in his hand. ‘One.’

“Well, this is just embarrassing,” Veer muttered, sighing deeply.

He moved through the chaotic battlefield like a ghost dancing through a hurricane. He didn’t run; he just walked, his body fluid and perfectly balanced.

Two men rushed him from the side, intent on crushing him between them. Veer simply dropped into a crouch, letting them violently collide with each other, before reaching up and casually plucking the tags from both of their chests as they collapsed.

‘Two. Three.’

He was too fast. His Agility was beyond human capacity. He was dodging spinning kicks, slipping under jabs, and weaving through grapples with zero effort. Every time a fighter overcommitted, Veer simply took their tag and gave them a light, one-percent push that sent them tumbling into the chaos.

Within a minute, he had thirty yellow tags clutched in his left hand.

But as he ducked under a wild elbow strike, his high Intelligence stat pinged a warning.

‘I’m looking too invincible,’ Veer realized, glancing up at the VIP balconies. The rich gamblers weren’t cheering for him; they were staring in utter confusion. The bookies looked suspicious.

If a scrawny kid in a hoodie flawlessly dismantled thirty grown men without taking a single hit or throwing a single real punch, it wouldn’t look like an underdog victory. It would look like a rigged fight. It would look like magic. If he ruined the betting odds by being suspiciously untouchable, the organizers would simply disqualify him, or worse, refuse to pay him.

He needed to sell the narrative. He needed to look like a desperate kid surviving by the skin of his teeth.

“Time to take a dive,” Veer murmured.

He intentionally slowed his reaction time. He spotted a massive, bearded biker swinging a vicious, textbook left hook his way. Veer could have easily dodged it, but instead, he mentally pulled the thick, invisible shroud of his Level 2 ‘Ten’ tightly around his jaw and leaned slightly into the blow.

‘CRACK!’

The punch landed square on Veer’s cheekbone. To the crowd, it looked devastating—a blow that should have shattered his orbital bone and knocked him unconscious.

To Veer, his ‘Ten’ absorbed the kinetic energy so flawlessly that it felt like he had been hit in the face with a slightly firm pillow.

Veer threw himself backward, performing a spectacular, theatrical stumble, flailing his arms for dramatic effect. The crowd above suddenly roared, the bloodlust reignited.

The biker grinned, stepping forward to finish the job and take Veer’s tags.

As the man lunged, Veer let out a convincing groan of pain, pretending to trip. As he “fell,” he reached out, his hand snapping forward with lightning speed, snatching the biker’s tag, and driving his knee firmly—but not lethally—into the man’s solar plexus.

The biker folded like a cheap lawn chair, gasping for air.

Veer scrambled back to his feet, panting heavily, rubbing his cheek to simulate pain, and looking wildly around the arena like a terrified animal.

Up on the balcony, Flash Thompson was gripping the railing so hard his hands were shaking. His jaw was entirely slack. He had just watched the kid he used to shove into lockers take a punch from a 250-pound brawler, survive it, and put the man on the floor in seconds.

Veer glanced up, caught Flash’s eye, and offered the bully a quick, completely out-of-character, terrifyingly bright wink.

The Battle Royale was just the warm-up. The Ant King had arrived.