Adam decided not to linger any longer.
He turned to leave—
But to his shock, the airtight door behind him had already sealed shut.
He didn't dare run.
Sudden movement might attract attention.
So he moved quickly but cautiously, pulling out the stolen access card once more.
Just as he raised it to the reader—
Swish!
A thin red cord whipped out of nowhere and coiled tightly around his wrists, yanking him to a halt.
The audience watching the livestream felt their hearts seize as if gripped by an unseen hand.
> "Oh no…"
"He's caught!"
"Can Adam escape?"
The answer was obvious—
He could not.
Adam thrashed desperately, but the rope was unnaturally sticky and disturbingly rigid, as if bones were hidden within its fibers.
"Damn it!" he hissed, glancing back—
But he saw nothing.
No body, no source.
Only the rope.
And then—
The mountain of flesh stirred.
It opened its eye.
A single, ten-meter-wide eye dominated its grotesque body, its iris a sickly pink, split into four vast black pupils.
---
S.H.I.E.L.D.
The moment the agents saw it, a chill swept through them.
Even hardened veterans flinched.
But Nick Fury leaned closer, his brow furrowed.
Shock gave way to suspicion.
"…Wait a second," he muttered. "Doesn't this thing look… familiar?"
Natasha Romanoff turned sharply.
"Familiar? You've never seen this thing before."
"No. Not like this," Fury growled. His one eye locked onto the grotesque pupils. "But I've seen its pattern."
A realization hit him like lightning.
"The Germ. This is just an enlarged version of the antimemetic germ!"
The room fell silent.
The Antimemetics Division had once bred microbial organisms to hold dangerous memories of SCP-3125—outsourcing thought to something other than the human brain.
And now, here it was.
Magnified. Mutated. Alive.
---
But recognition didn't help Adam.
He was still trapped.
And to the horror of the audience—
The monster spoke.
Not in words exactly.
But in a maddening psychic buzz that drilled into every skull watching.
Do you have it?
Adam froze. His throat worked before he croaked, "What?"
No doctor. No machine.
Before he could react, another cord lashed out.
It plucked the access card neatly from his fingers and retracted, holding it up before the creature's enormous eye.
The livestream exploded.
> "It's… intelligent?!"
"It knows what a security pass is?!"
"This thing isn't just a beast—it's thinking."
And then—
The buzzing voice called out a single word.
"Wheeler."
---
Adam went rigid.
The audience gaped in shock.
Could this creature… still recognize people?
Adam stammered nervously, "Uh… yeah, it's… it's kind of a coincidence actually—"
But before he could finish—
The cord snapped taut.
Adam's arms were wrenched above his head.
"Wait—no!"
His body was hauled upward, dangling helplessly.
And then—
A pupil dilated.
A flash of pink consumed his vision.
"Hell no!" Adam screamed as he was yanked down, plunging directly into the vast black eye of the flesh mountain.
The Marvel audience held their breath.
One second.
Two seconds.
Three—
The gruesome death they expected never came.
Instead—
The psychic voice rumbled again, clear this time:
[I am Hughes…]
---
Silence.
Absolute, crushing silence.
The Marvel Universe audience stared at the screen in disbelief.
Their minds reeled, struggling to process what they had just heard.
And then—chaos.
> "WHAT?!"
"No way! That THING is Dr. Hughes?!"
"Oh my god… what happened to him?!"
"If Hughes ended up like this… does that mean the plan already failed?"
---
S.H.I.E.L.D.
Nick Fury's chest heaved as his heart pounded violently.
He couldn't tear his eye from the screen.
"…Dr. Hughes? Turned into… this?"
He had guessed it was some kind of antimemetic embryo.
But never—never—had he imagined that the embryo was Hughes himself.
---
The creature's buzzing voice continued:
[My human body is dead. But my consciousness remains within the embryo. The embryo survived intact. And so… I live on, in this form.]
The audience fell into stunned silence.
Then, slowly, horror gave way to awe.
This was no mindless monster.
It was Dr. Hughes—reborn into nightmare flesh.
And yet—still fighting.
---
[I labored in this embryo form for more than a year.]
[I developed tools, peripherals, and instruments suited to these hands. I built furniture. I bred small life forms to assist me. I even designed exercise routines. I sleep in nutrient mud.]
Even the hardened Overseers watching the feed couldn't hide their astonishment.
The Marvel audience was floored.
> "He… he kept going?"
"In that body? For a year?"
"Unbelievable…"
This was the will of a man who refused to die.
An ordinary person would have given up instantly.
But Hughes—
Hughes endured.
Driven by his duty to Wheeler, to the Division, to humanity itself.
He had clung to survival in the very heart of living hell.
---
[By the end of the first month, I proved to myself that the countermeme we needed existed—something beyond the reach of human comprehension.]
---
To Be Continued…
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