Chapter 83 Avengers 1 [Metropolis Battle]
Just as Arthur and Zod were casually chatting nonsense about saving the World up on the ruins' surface, a blurred silver afterimage suddenly flashed across the elevator shaft deep within the ruins.
Quicksilver Pietro ran back up from the deep underground, panting heavily, the soles of his shoes smoking faintly from intense, high-speed friction.
After wandering around down below for a long time, he found Arthur covered in dust and looking extremely displeased, shaking his head with utter helplessness.
"There is completely no hope, it's absolute hell down there. The entire underground is blocked off by solid metal walls cast in one piece, not even a drafty crack exists; even if I ran my legs off, I wouldn't be able to get in at all."
Quicksilver complained with obvious unwillingness.
After listening, Arthur didn't seem surprised, and he let out a slow sigh.
"Fine, then it looks like it's my turn to go." Arthur cracked his wrists with a popping sound.
Hearing that Arthur was going down, Quicksilver's eyes couldn't help but glance at the Kryptonian general hovering in mid-air beside them, radiating intense red heat and a murderous aura.
He swallowed a mouthful of saliva and asked somewhat apprehensively, "Since you're going down, leaving this guy up here, are you expecting me to fight him?"
Arthur rolled his eyes speechlessly and grabbed Quicksilver, who was preparing to strike a fighting stance to fight Zod to the Death.
He certainly didn't plan on letting this kid throw his life away.
"Behave yourself. Use your speed right now to rush back to Professor Charles's Mutant Academy; there are hardly anyone left over there with long-distance rapid travel capabilities. Run back, bring out all the combatants who can take hits and dish out damage, and send them to support the battlefield in Metropolis."
Arthur logically arranged this errand task, leaving no room for refusal.
Although Quicksilver was reluctant, thinking of the alien crisis descending upon Metropolis, he immediately nodded.
Without another word of nonsense, silver light erupted around his body, and he instantly vanished from the spot amid a gust of wind.
Having dismissed the thorn-in-the-side errand boy, Arthurfinally turned his head to look at Zod, who was still tense and ready to fight to the Death at any moment.
"Sorry, ha, there's an urgent matter in the mess down below that requires me to handle it personally, so I won't stay here to play with you for now." Arthur raised his hand and waved casually.
As soon as his words fell, without giving Zod any chance to stop him, Arthur directly activated the Rabbit Talisman. His figure suddenly stepped backward, and under Zod's gaze filled with shock and fury, he leaped forward and plunged headfirst into that pitch-black elevator shaft.
Falling within the narrow and bottomless vertical shaft, Arthur did not choose to rely on rubbing his limbs against the walls to perform conventional slow-descent maneuvers.
He simply allowed himself to plunge toward the depths of the darkness in a completely free-fall posture.
The light above rapidly shrank and narrowed, and behind him, Zod burst out with a roar that shattered the sound barrier, plunging headfirst into the well with a chest full of fury, chasing closely right behind him.
Arthur didn't even turn his head back; he couldn't be bothered to care about the relentlessly pursuing alien behind him.
Right in the middle of the fall, to shorten this lingering descent time, Arthur directly applied the Rabbit Talisman's speed enhancement to this drop.
The originally ordinary gravitational acceleration instantly surged to a terrifying limit under the talisman's impetus.
In barely the blink of an eye, with a muffled boom, Arthur's feet landed steadily and violently onto the solid ground at the bottom of the shaft, kicking up a thick circle of aged dust around him.
Waving away the dust and raising his eyes to look, the scene before him was indeed identical to what Quicksilverhad described earlier.
The entire underground space was tightly sealed off by a circle of heavy metal walls reflecting a dull sheen, airtight in all directions, unable to let even a single ant crawl inside.
With this level of physical defense engineering, no wonder Professor Charles couldn't find the entrance when scanning with mental power; those HYDRA remnants definitely spent a fortune to protect the secrets underground.
Arthur walked with keen interest to this lifeless metal wall completely devoid of cracks, pinching his knuckles together with both hands as his mind began to rapidly calculate.
Facing this thing, he actually had many methods, such as using the Ox directly to smash it apart with brute force, or using the Pig's laser eyes to slice it into pieces.
After thinking for a slight two seconds, Arthur ultimately chose the Dragon Talisman to complete this wall-breaking task.
He raised his right hand, keeping his palm flat as he pressed it toward the wall, but stopped when his palm was left with a tiny gap of only about one centimeter from the cold, hard metal wall surface.
The next moment, a stream of scorching ray energy, pure and filled with violently destructive attributes, burst forth without warning from his palm.
This terrifying energy ray pressed straight against the wall surface, and as Arthur's output intensity continuously climbed, the surface of the indestructible alloy wall began to turn red and soften at a speed visible to the naked eye.
That high-density alloy, sufficient to withstand the bombardment of tanks and artillery, melted faster and faster before Arthur's palm, and a pungent burnt metal smell instantly filled the narrow space.
Just as Arthur was intently digging the hole.
Carrying the massive kinetic energy from the entire fall and a full-body murderous aura, Zod crashed down heavily right behind Arthur.
When he saw that the troublesome Earthling before him was actually erupting such terrifying high-temperature rays from his hands and accelerating the melting of that thick protective wall sufficient to block a small nuclear explosion, a massive sense of panic and urgency suddenly rose in Zod's heart.
He knew very clearly in his heart that the HYDRAremnants who claimed to be Earth's top scientists were still hiding inside the core laboratory behind this thick wall at this moment.
Since no news had been transmitted from over there up until now, this meant the plan definitely had not been completely finished yet.
If this monster right before him, who could effortlessly hard-carry heat vision without injury, were allowed to recklessly drill and rush in like this, then all the trump card plans plotted by his side would definitely suffer devastating destruction.
He could not care about any tactical considerations; he directly hurled himself at Arthur, who was melting the wall, his fists striking Arthur's back and neck like a storm with a force sufficient to shatter a small hill.
While launching heavy punches, taking advantage of the gap while Arthur had his back to him, he also continuously sprayed heat vision at maximum power from his eyes, attempting to melt through this man's body with sustained high temperatures.
The bottom layer of the underground shaft instantly turned into a Shura field for Zod to vent his violence, with muffled impact sounds and red light darting everywhere.
However, amidst this storm-like combined fatal move, Arthur's figure did not even sway once.
He stood so steadily in front of the melting metal wall, maintaining the posture of radiating energy from his palm, with completely no intention of turning around to pay attention to Zod.
Zod's heavy fists, which should have been World-destroying, slammed onto Arthur's thin casual shirt completely devoid of armor, and the sound produced was like hitting an indestructible cosmic firm rock.
That proud Kryptonian heat vision was even more like taking a warm bath, leaving only a tiny trace of smoke on Arthur's clothes.
To Arthur, who possessed the absolute trump card of immortality, Zod's desperate and crazy attacks didn't even count as mosquito bites on a summer night.
After all, if ordinary mosquitoes encountered such an indestructible skin, they would probably snap their mouthparts directly.
A few seconds later, accompanied by the final viscous melting sound, that lead-steel composite wall of unknown thickness ahead was forcibly melted by the Dragon Talisman's energy into a smooth large hole big enough for a person to easily walk inside.
Dark red molten iron was dripping down along the edges of the hole.
Only then did Arthur turn his head back nonchalantly, looking at Zod beside him who was panting heavily from overexertion and staring fixedly at his unscathed body.
"Save your energy, don't waste your effort here, anyway you can't break my defense." Arthur very calmly stated this despair-inducing fact to the other party.
Zod stopped the futile attacks in his hands. As a seasoned Commander, he wasn't a fool who couldn't see the situation clearly; he had long since desolately seen through this point, only that earlier he had been unwilling to accept it.
Now that reality was laid out before his eyes, he simply chose to give up the intention of continuing to fight to the Death with Arthur in such a narrow space.
Just at the moment when the two fell into this brief stalemate, the internal communicator embedded inside Zod's helmet suddenly rang.
The subordinates standing by high above the Metropolisbattlefield sent an urgent combat report at an extremely fast pace through the cross-interstellar frequency band, reporting that the Kryptonian vanguard, which was preparing to execute the clearance plan, had just encountered a stubborn attack from an unknown special faction.
Zod's slightly calmed state of mind grew irritable once more, and he asked sharply into the communicator: "Who did this? Is it that traitor Karl El?"
The subordinate on the other end of the communication quickly gave a negative reply: "Preliminary judgment indicates it is not him. These attackers look more like local armed resistance forces on Earth, with a variety of methods."
Hearing this, Zod turned off the communication, raised his head, and looked at Arthur standing in front of the karst cave with a cold and arrogant gaze that fancied itself seeing through the truth.
A murderous sneer curled up at the corners of his mouth.
"No wonder you have been acting so fearless from the very beginning. It turns out it is because your teammates went to delay my troops at this time."
As if trying to reclaim his lost Commander's dignity, Zod's words were full of a condescending contempt.
"But do you think that just by relying on these fragile, worthless trash on Earth, you can harm our noble Kryptonian warriors? Unless your so-called teammates can all be as abnormally strong as you, otherwise, going to intercept my army, the fate awaiting them will be nothing but a dead end."
After delivering his harsh words, Zod did not even look at Arthur's expression—which looked as if he were looking at a fool—and directly turned his back, issuing a ruthless massacre order to the theater Commander connected to Metropolis.
"Pass down my order: anyone who dares to intercept us is to be killed on the spot, without leaving a single one alive. Immediately have Ur take the other two deputies to clear up the remaining mess. Squash all these annoying bugs for me at the fastest speed. Once the cleanup is complete, immediately activate the World Engine, and clear all these ungrateful Earthlings out of this Universe."
Listening to this pretentious declaration of destruction rattling off like machine-gun fire behind him, Arthur could not even muster the mood to make a sarcastic remark.
With a face full of disgust, he cast a sideways glance at Zod's tall back, then lifted his leg to step over the uncooled dark red molten iron beneath his feet, walking without looking back toward the next door inside the melted-open opening.
The life or Death of these aliens, and how that group of Avengers above were struggling bitterly in battle, what the hell did it have to do with him?
Following the transmission of the signal, the perspective shifted to the central battlefield of Metropolis thousands of kilometers away, which had long since descended into chaos.
On the belly of the sky-blocking Kryptonian mothership in the sky, as the Commander's order was issued, patches of huge delivery hatchways opened up.
Zod's subordinate army poured out like a rainstorm leaving its nest. Nearly a hundred ordinary Kryptonian soldiers wearing heavy, pitch-black full-coverage armor, without the support of any deceleration parachutes, directly air-dropped like swarms of meteors from an altitude of ten thousand meters straight into the bustling area in the center of the city.
Those streets originally wrapped in reinforced concrete successively emitted terrifying, teeth-aching explosion sounds the moment these soldiers impacted the ground with their pure physical bodies.
Although these falling guys belonged merely to the bottom-tier ordinary soldiers in Zod's army, this did not mean they were weak.
Because the genetic technology implemented by Krypton over these thousands of years was essentially cultivating every generation of citizens like an assembly line under a unified high standard.
This also meant that the baseline physical strength of all born combatants throughout Krypton was at an equally monstrous level from beginning to end.
Solely in terms of physical functions, these newly landed grunts and the previously overbearing General Zod on the ground had no difference in their initial attributes.
The only difference between them was merely acquired tactical and technical training, as well as the depth of mastery over photosynthetic energy and ability development within Earth's environment.
It was because Zod had developed all potentials such as flight and heat vision to the extreme with a general's will that he possessed that kind of oppressive presence.
But even for these undeveloped grunts, their sheer strength and defense were enough to crush ninety-nine percent of the supercriminals in this Universe.
At this desperate moment of descent, accompanied by the roar of distant rotor blades, the first batch of Avengersordered to come support finally arrived in the skies above the outer perimeter of the battlefield.
Above the clouds, Tony Stark, wearing a brand-new, dazzling Mark II Armor coated suit, was hovering in mid-air using the deep blue exhaust flames sprayed from his palms and soles.
The condescending view allowed him to immediately lock onto those alien visitors who had smashed countless deep craters into the road.
"Dr. Yinsen, stop looking at the scenery! Hurry up and use the skyscraper's supercomputing system to help me scan what kind of data state this group of black-armored ugly monsters smashing the streets below is in." Tony issued operating commands rapidly inside his mask.
Inside the secure cabin at the rear of the mothership, Dr. Yinsen was watching the real-time footage transmitted by the big screen while interfacing permissions with the extremely smart Jarvis super artificial intelligence loaded inside Tony's mecha.
With the exquisite auxiliary cooperation of these two top-notch minds and codes, the data fed back by radar, sonar, and radiation scanning was listed on Tony's helmet reticle screen in just a few seconds.
When seeing that row of overpowered red-bar data on the screen representing muscle fiber density, bone compression resistance, and skin cell molecular level.
Tony's expression, which had been fairly relaxed, suddenly turned very ugly, and he could not help but click his tongue fiercely.
"Are you kidding me? Do these aliens now have this completely unreasonable, bulletproof abnormal strength just by randomly airdropping a grunt?"
Tony muttered a complaint in the channel.
"This time, that old black man, the S.H.I.E.L.D. Director, has really given us an extremely difficult suicide question."
Although the data looked frightening, Tony's consistent pride did not allow him to just stare blankly like this.
He raised his armored arm, aiming at an ordinary black-armored soldier in the ruins below who was preparing to demolish a building.
Accompanied by two sharp charging sounds, two highly concentrated recoil energy repulsor palms flew out of his hands, hitting the soldier's chest accurately and unmistakably.
A fierce light exploded on the soldier, kicking up a cloud of dust.
But when the smoke cleared, half of Tony's heart turned cold.
That kind of high-temperature energy weapon capable of melting a large hole in the shell of a main battle tank hit this ordinary alien soldier's armor and exposed chin, yet it did not even leave a trace of scorch marks, and the opponent did not even take half a step back.
This sneak attack without any combat results instead immediately made the soldier below aware of this annoying iron flying insect in the sky.
Without even lifting his head, the soldier backhandedly raised the heavy plasma carbine in his hand, instantly aiming the muzzle at Tony high in the air, and pulled the trigger without hesitation.
A series of fatal blue high-temperature plasma beams instantly intertwined into a net, pouring toward the location where Tony was.
Tony was startled by this exaggerated counterattack firepower. The engine of the Mark II Armor instantly burst out with maximum thrust, carrying him clumsily to complete a set of highly irregular Cobra maneuvers in the air, immediately attempting to escape the coverage range of this deathly fire net.
"Mr. Stark! Watch out for the right rear! Another extremely fast-moving life form is rapidly cutting and flying toward you." Dr. Yinsen's anxious reminder exploded in the earphones.
Tony's heart shook, and he had no time to turn back and confirm. Relying on the instinct he had honed from these days of air combat maneuvering, he forcibly cut off the auxiliary thruster of his left sole.
The armor instantly lost balance in the air, relying on inertia to make an extreme rolling change of direction to the left that nearly broke the frame.
The very next microsecond after he forcibly shifted his flight trajectory.
An extremely fast black humanoid afterimage, accompanied by a piercing, wind-breaking screech, cut horizontally and pierced precisely through his predetermined original position from the previous second, the aftermath of the airflow even tossing the Mark II Armorto sway a few times.
Tony stabilized his posture and looked closely. The guy who had almost cut him in half was currently hovering in the distant clouds.
That was Tor-An, one of the four high-level deputy Commanders under Zod.
Although this guy belonged to the weakest bottom-tier existence in the quartet in terms of overall quality such as strength, the extremely proficient flight control skills he displayed high in the air at this moment, as well as his terrifying beyond-visual-range air combat maneuvering ability, were still a fatal mountain to Tony, who only wore conventional mecha.
Chapter 84 [Battle of Metropolis] 2
High above the battlefield, Tony Stark barely had time to digest the strong wind that had just grazed past him.
Inside the mask of the Mark II Armor, all the warning red lights flashed frantically almost simultaneously, and Jarvis's usually calm electronic voice sounded somewhat hurried at the moment, continuously reporting the high-speed approach of a high-risk lifeform.
Tony felt that things were looking very bad.
Judging by the dynamic trajectory captured by the radar on his helmet's retina, that was not a changing-direction capability that any conventional aircraft could possibly achieve.
That was a mortal Kryptonian in the high altitude, completely disregarding inertia and air resistance, executing three-dimensional tactical maneuvers in a way that defied the laws of physics.
"Mr. Stark, he's coming, nine o'clock direction!" Dr. Yinsen's voice had just exploded in the communication channel when a black afterimage forcefully ripped through the clouds to Tony's left.
Tor-An had no buffer whatsoever, nor any preparatory actions for gathering power, instantly closing in right before the eyes of the Mark Armor.
Relying on the air combat maneuvering instincts accumulated from various actual battles before, coupled with the assistance of the mecha's high-sensitivity positioning, Tony gritted his teeth and forcibly activated all front micro-thrusters, lifting his arms while suspended in mid-air to cross them in front of his chest, attempting to build a layer of temporary defense.
At the very moment the armor's arms closed, Tor-An's fist smashed heavily forward accompanied by a sharp sonic boom.
That was a dull, deafening roar that made one's scalp tingle.
The special alloy layer on the chest of the Mark II Armor, which was said to be able to withstand light anti-armor missiles, lasted less than a tenth of a second in front of this seemingly ordinary punch before immediately caving heavily inward.
Tony only felt a turbulent churning inside his chest, and a mouthful of fresh blood almost sprayed onto the inner screen of his mask.
The violent impact kinetic energy completely destroyed the flight balance of the armor, and the thrusters' exhaust flames instantly went out.
Tony himself fell like an out-of-control meteor, spinning as he plummeted straight down from high altitude toward the street below that had already turned into ruins.
"Warning, chest armor damage rate thirty-five percent, flight stabilization system offline, main engine restarting..." Jarvis's warning sound continuously echoed.
Seeing that the fragmented steel and concrete on the ground were getting closer and closer, just as Tony was preparing to close his eyes to greet this hardcore emergency landing.
At the end of the skyline on the other side, a massive green shadow the size of a small mountain crashed down.
This body full of exaggerated muscles not only completely ignored the common sense of gravitational acceleration, but the moment it touched the ground, its legs smashed deeply into the thick cement road surface.
The gravel and dust all over the ground splashed frantically around like detonated explosives, and amidst the flying dust and smoke across the sky, Hulkstraightened his body and emitted a deafening roar toward the pile of Kryptonian miscellaneous soldier legions ahead.
Immediately after, Hulk's arms, which were thicker than thighs, forcefully pushed against the ground, and his entire body leaped high like a cannonball.
He extremely precisely extended those wide palms, grabbed Tony who was in a state of free fall, and then landed steadily on the ground like a boulder.
Tony shook his head dizzyly inside the mecha, looked at the green monster in front of him that previously only knew how to roar in a cage, took a deep breath, and was about to turn on the external loudspeaker to say even the most perfunctory expression of gratitude.
As a result, before these words of thanks could form in his throat, Hulk's face, full of rage, didn't even spare a glance at the tin man in his palm, and with a fierce wave of his wide arm, he directly threw Tony far away into a relatively safe pile of waste soil nearby like throwing away an inconsequential piece of garbage.
After shaking off the burden, Hulk's thick legs kicked fiercely against the ground, and his entire massive body, carrying violent airflow, charged straight toward the group of Kryptonian troops holding plasma carbines ahead.
At this moment in Hulk's brain, there was no obstruction from the will of Bruce Banner, that frail scientist of the past.
His furious nature, which was purely born for destruction, had previously been subdued forcefully by Arthur with that unreasonable violence, and even insulted by being shrunk into the form of a mouse.
This experience left a very stubborn and indelible psychological shadow deep inside Hulk's heart.
At this moment, this pent-up frustration was suffocating him with nowhere to vent.
Encountering this group of alien miscellaneous soldiers who seemed to have a death wish, Hulk completely treated them as punching bags to vent his stress.
He charged into the military formation, simply as if entering an uninhabited realm.
Facing the plasma energy rays shot by those ordinary Kryptonian soldiers, Hulk did not dodge or avoid them at all.
The high-temperature rays hit the old green skin, and aside from leaving a few shallow white Marks, they couldn't even manage to hinder the pace of his charge.
Hulk opened his arms, brutally grabbed two Kryptoniansoldiers who failed to dodge in time, and like dealing with two broken ragdolls, grabbed their ankles and smashed them directly into each other as meteor hammers.
Then, with one punch each, he hammered those alien soldiers directly flying into the piles of abandoned cars around them.
But this situation where the Earth faction unilaterally vented its violence did not last long.
Accompanied by a heavy, thunder-like sound of breaking the air coming from mid-air, another huge figure like an iron tower directly descended from the sky, bombarding right in front of Hulk like a meteorite crater.
That was Nam-Ek, another high-ranking lieutenant with a lofty status in Zod's army.
Completely different from Tor-An's style of relying on extreme speed for interweaving and strangulation, what was contained within Nam-Ek's massive and heavy body was the most pure and unstoppable primitive brute force belonging to a Kryptonian.
As soon as he landed, the ruins and debris under his feet instantly turned into fine powder.
Nam-Ek didn't give Hulk any time to figure out the situation at all; his thick arm swung violently, and his fist, carrying white airflow that tore through the air, smashed solidly onto Hulk's head, which was several times larger than an ordinary person's.
A collision sound even duller than thunder resounded through the block.
Hulk, who was still hammering miscellaneous soldiers like punching bags, had his mountain-like body instantly fly off the ground under this tremendously powerful strike.
After bouncing and crashing several times on the ground covered with sharp gravel, he barely used the ten thick fingers of both hands to tightly grip the ground, plowing out two deep ravines, and finally stabilized his continuously retreating figure.
Hulk shook his head, which was briefly buzzing from the heavy blow, and an unusual, long-absent obvious pain unexpectedly came from his normally indestructible skin and flesh.
At the exact moment this pain was transmitted to his nerve endings, in Hulk's not-so-complex brain, the humiliating image of that black-haired Earth man pressing him to the ground and frantically torturing him like a toy subconsciously resurfaced.
That PTSD deeply rooted in the depths of his psyche surged up instantly.
The shadows of the past mixed with the pain before his eyes, directly transforming into a purer, more unreasonable fury inside this fierce beast's brain.
He irritably and fiercely beat his wide chest, emitting a deafening roar several times louder than before.
In the extreme state completely driven by anger, his already exaggerated green body swelled slightly in a circle once again to the naked eye, and the density of his muscle fibers became even more terrifying.
Hulk exerted force with his hind feet, shattering the surface of his footing, and roared as he charged toward Nam-Eklike an out-of-control heavy armored train. The two monsters, both relying on brute force and physical bodies to run amok, collided instantly, beginning a close-quarters hand-to-hand combat with no reservations and punches landing squarely on flesh.
At this time, at the other end of the edge of this chaotic battlefield, Natasha Romanoff was directing several waves of scattered surviving civilians to evacuate along hidden routes toward a safe area.
And on the defense line dozens of meters ahead of her, Steve Rogers, Captain America, was shouldering the heavy pressure of covering the team and drawing the concentrated fire of all the Kryptonian miscellaneous soldiers.
Even with physical fitness and recovery capabilities far exceeding human limits, compared to the physique of this Kryptonian legion that completely crushed Earth's carbon-based creatures on the genetic line, Captain America's physical strength still seemed somewhat lacking.
He clenched his teeth tightly, pressing his shield firmly in front of him.
Ahead, several Kryptonian miscellaneous soldiers coldly held their rifles, continuously pulling the triggers.
The plasma carbines fired in bursts, and a series of high-density energy bullets smashed fiercely onto the surface of the shield one after another.
The continuous impact force brought by the bullet explosions, like an invisible sledgehammer, smashed Captain America back step by step amid the littered ruins.
His feet, wearing an old-fashioned jacket and tactical pants, had forcefully dragged out two obvious long Marks on the ground.
Steve quickly poked his line of sight out from the edge of the shield, observing the group of aliens opposite him who suppressed him solely relying on firearms.
He suddenly turned his head and shouted loudly toward the direction behind him: "Natasha! Tell me, what would happen if we used the weapon in their hands to hit themselves?"
Natasha had just turned around to help a frightened passerby point out a safe escape route through the alley. Hearing this sentence thrown out by Steve on the front line, she did not show any surprise; instead, a trace of a hunter's calmness emerged on her lightly made-up face.
"This suggestion is very good, we can indeed give it a try." Natasha turned her head and answered decisively.
As soon as her words fell, this supple and lethal top Agentrushed straight like an arrow leaving the string toward a lone Kryptonian soldier who had just flanked from the side.
That soldier wearing black heavy armor was preparing to clear the perimeter, and the shimmer on the side of his mask captured Natasha rapidly approaching.
He didn't think for a moment that the human female before him could pose any threat to him, directly turning his huge and heavy muzzle to aim at her.
Just a second before he was about to pull the trigger, Natasha did not slow down at all, her body suddenly pressing down with the momentum of her sprint.
She beautifully completed an extremely low-to-the-ground long-distance slide, sliding directly from the dead angle where the energy rays might cover into the soldier's defense zone.
Her legs wrapped in the black tight suit were like flexible steel whips, delivering a fierce upward whip kick that accurately and flawlessly struck the soldier's gun.
Taken off guard for a moment, the soldier had his fatal carbine kicked flying into mid-air by the tremendous force.
Following the momentum of the slide, Natasha braced her hands on the ground and leaped up fiercely.
Her deft boots stepped directly onto the soldier's heavy chest armor—which he had no time to react to—as a springboard, leveraging the force to pounce upward again, and steadily grabbing the falling heavy plasma gun in mid-air.
Mid-air, Natasha immediately rolled to adjust the muzzle, and utilizing the gap of gravitational descent, the cold barrel pressed straight toward the soldier's undefended head.
Without even blinking an eye, she pulled the trigger without hesitation.
A series of dazzling blue energy bullets instantly bombarded outward.
Without a doubt, although Kryptonians could forcefully withstand most of Earth's conventional firearms relying purely on physical muscle density.
But this plasma carbine was inherently the pinnacle of Kryptonian technological crystallization.
That kind of destructive power could produce fatal penetration even when facing defenses of the same tier.
The high-concentration plasma energy quickly burned and destroyed the connecting armor at the vulnerable parts of the soldier, and then struck the physical torso of his body without any hindrance.
Amid a brief yet violent energy explosion, the once arrogant Kryptonian soldier was instantly shot dead on the spot by his own weapon, collapsing to the ground.
Captain America, who had been hiding behind the shield observing, was overjoyed to see this tactic achieve perfect success.
Without any hesitation, he directly used the communication channel to send a reminder to his comrades fighting bitterly in various combat zones across Metropolis.
"Everyone! Their defense lines are not unbreakable. Seize their equipment, their weapons can still kill them!"
This reminder spread through the communication channel like a stimulant.
However, Tony, far away thousands of meters above in the sky, couldn't laugh at this moment.
Having finally restarted the damaged engine of the MarkArmor, he was struggling to maintain his high-altitude posture, barely dodging Tor-An's rabbit-like, hard-to-capture high-speed cut-in strike once again.
Hearing Captain America's hopeful shout in the communicator, Tony couldn't help but complain speechlessly inside his mask:
"That is truly a touching piece of good news. But before that, shield-wielding old popsicle, can you first tell me what on Earth I should do to shake off this crazy rabbit-like guy behind me? This damned alien's speed is simply ridiculously fast!"
Meanwhile, at the center of the bunker in the abandoned plaza, the close-quarters hand-to-hand combat between the berserk Hulk and Nam-Ek had reached a white-hot stage.
The crude and primitive collision of power caused every punch to trigger visible shockwaves in the air.
Right at the critical moment when Hulk swung his right fist to meet Nam-Ek's offensive head-on, another figure suddenly descended from the sky.
The newcomer wore lighter, streamlined armor full of aerodynamic aesthetic, with light, ruthless, and silent movements—none other than the Zod legion's last high-ranking lieutenant—the top assassin specializing in close-quarters combat and precise assassination, Fiora-Ul.
She landed silently at Hulk's side and back position.
As soon as she landed without any pause, the special short-blade dagger emitting a cold light in her hand turned over at her wrist, stabbing fiercely at an tricky angle into the muscle group of Hulk's back.
That sharp blade, which was enough to easily cut through the steel plate of a heavy armored vehicle, did indeed pierce in.
However, when the blade edge had just pierced the surface skin and penetrated halfway, the resistance became unimaginably immense.
Hulk's body, fully activated by fury with the density of muscle fibers surging by a perverted magnitude, directly transformed into a sturdy vise made of flesh and blood, tightly jamming the dagger's advancing path.
Failing to achieve full success with a single strike, Fiora displayed an assassin's ruthlessness.
She did not choose to pull out the blade and retreat, but instead utilized the core strength of her waist and abdomen, gripped the hilt tightly with both hands, and dragged downward violently with extreme ferocity, barely slicing open a long skin wound on Hulk's spine, and a series of pale green blood immediately oozed out along the wound.
This stinging pain like an insect bite once again attracted Hulk's attention.
Hulk, who was originally fighting to the death with Nam-Ek, suddenly turned around, his pillar-thick arms whipping up a violent wind, and that wide, heavy green palm whistled directly to sweep toward the annoying bug-like fellow behind him.
Fiora's neural reflexes were extremely sharp. Seeing that this slap's momentum completely exceeded the scope of conventional blocking, she decisively released the hilt and, utilizing the momentum of leaning backward, rolled to escape the slap's coverage area.
At this moment, the dagger was still lonely embedded in Hulk's back.
Hulk's massive brows tightly knitted into a knot, and with some disgust, he reached back and roughly pulled out this alien weapon deeply embedded in his muscles.
The moment the dagger left his body, at that rather horrifying-looking incision, the muscles immediately wriggled and sutured rapidly, and the wound completely healed as before in the blink of an eye, leaving not even a trace of a scar.
Hulk casually tossed the dagger—which could cut iron like mud to humans—into the pile of ruins like throwing away garbage, and he even moved his shoulders in deep puzzlement, muttering an incoherent whisper.
"What kind of thing stung me?"
With that, he completely ignored Fiora, who had retreated into the shadows to look for her next opportunity, and let out another roar. His huge green body collided violently once more with Nam-Ek, who had just caught his breath, continuing that seemingly tireless feast of fist-to-flesh mutual bashing.
Chapter 85 [Metropolis Battle] 3
At the other end of the battlefield, Faora-Ul's figure landed lightly on top of a battered, abandoned carriage.
She had just tried to sneak attack that big green guy Hulk, and the special dagger in her hand was already half-stuck in, only to find that the opponent's muscles clamped the blade tightly like steel.
When she cut open that slit and withdrew, an even more astonishing scene appeared — the bone-deep wound on Earth's monster's back completely healed without leaving even a trace of a scar within one or two seconds after pulling out the weapon.
Faora raised her eyebrows slightly, a hint of surprise adding to the sternness on her face.
As a top melee combat expert of Kryptonian, she knew very well what this level of self-healing ability represented.
Since this green monster could not be killed for a moment, and was already entangled by her colleague Nam-Ek, it was completely meaningless for her to continue staying here doing useless work.
As an assassin, finding a more vulnerable breakthrough on the battlefield was the most efficient way to clean up.
She quickly shifted her gaze, and those Hawkeye eyes, capturing prey, quickly locked onto a small position dozens of meters away.
There, an Earth woman with dazzling red hair was on a killing spree using a plasma carbine snatched from the hands of a Kryptonian soldier.
That woman codenamed Black Widow had a supple figure, wearing a pure black tight combat suit. When rolling and moving across the battlefield, the clothes ruthlessly outlined her graceful and tight muscle curves.
But her shooting technique was ruthless and decisive; every time she pulled the trigger, the high-concentration blue energy beam could precisely eliminate a Kryptonianfoot soldier.
"Start clearing from you." Faora snorted coldly.
She smoothly drew the spare short dagger tucked into the straps by her leg.
This dagger was slightly shorter than the previous one, but the blade gleamed with a dangerous faint blue gloss.
With a sudden burst of force from her toes on the roof of the car, the thick iron plate of the roof was directly stepped into a deep dent by her.
With the help of this reaction force, Faora's entire body turned into an elusive afterimage, galloping towards the direction where Natasha was located almost against the ground.
Although Natasha did not have an extraordinary physique defying conventional logic, her top Agent intuition, cultivated over years on the edge of life and death, instantly issued a fatal warning.
Her spine suddenly tightened, and her hands holding the heavy firearm subconsciously wanted to turn the muzzle.
But the opponent's speed was simply too fast.
When Natasha's gaze just turned over and focused on that dark shadow, Faora's expressionless face had already approached to a position of less than two meters.
The tip of the cold dagger pointed directly at Natasha's throat.
The dodging angle had been sealed off, and the heavy carbine simply had no time to be raised and aimed.
Even the Black Widow, who was accustomed to life and death, suddenly contracted her pupils at this moment, and could only watch helplessly as that life-taking sharpness stabbed over.
But at the very split second when the tip of the dagger was only a few centimeters away from Natasha's skin, a thing defying physical common sense happened.
Faora suddenly felt a huge and weird pulling force coming from her wrist.
That completely unreasonable pulling force was not aimed at her person, but directly acted on the dagger she was holding.
Before she could increase her grip to hold it tightly, that sharp Kryptonian spare dagger directly and forcibly detached from her palm, spinning and flying into mid-air.
This sudden turn of events caused Faora's attack action to directly miss; she vigilantly steadied her figure and raised her head along the direction the dagger flew away.
On a broken wall piled up by ruins, I do not know when a thin old man was standing.
He was wearing a dark long trench coat, and on his head wore a specially shaped dark red special metal helmet.
This old man didn't move even half a step, but just very casually crooked his leather-gloved finger at mid-air, and the dagger that was just about to take Natasha's life flew obediently into his hands like an obedient dog, playing with it.
Not far behind Magneto, several high-order Mutants had also spread out their combat formation.
Today's disaster, which originally belonged to Metropolis, due to Arthur's unreasonable cross-dimensional smashing behavior earlier, coupled with Professor Charles's secret maneuvering, caused this surprise force of Mutants to also step into this battlefield full of wasteland.
Magneto pinched that alien dagger with one hand, his face under the shadow of the helmet pulling out a slightly arrogant and mocking smile:
"So, you guys from the Universe, the so-called advanced race, also use metal?"
As soon as his voice fell, there was no major movement seen in his hands, just five fingers suddenly contracting inward.
That special alloy dagger, which could even pierce Hulk's muscles, was directly and forcibly kneaded into a lump of iron whose prototype could not be seen by an invisible magnetic force amidst a teeth-aching sound of metal twisting.
Then, Magneto pushed his palm outward.
That heavy iron lump instantly flew back and smashed toward Faora on the ground like a shell fired by an electromagnetic gun, carrying a harsh wind-breaking sound.
Because the distance was too close, and the speed of the impact was no less than that of a heavy sniper rifle, even if Faora's neural reaction was fast, she only had time to tilt her head slightly.
The iron lump heavily brushed past the side of her armor's face, the huge impact kinetic energy directly knocking her head to one side, and her body was also driven by this force to slide back a small half-step.
However, the Kryptonian's body was indeed ridiculously hard.
This blow, comparable to a cannonball, did not leave even a patch of broken skin on Faora's face, but instead completely angered this proud female adjutant.
"Little tricks." Faora straightened her body with a cold face.
At that instant just now, she had already judged that the helmeted old man opposite had a strange ability to remotely control all metal products.
Continuing to use any metal weapon in front of this old man would only become a disarmed toy.
So she simply gave up the plan of reaching for other small gadgets around her waist, and directly clenched her fists.
With a muffled sound of "bang", the heavy concrete fragment under her feet was directly crushed to pieces by her, and utilizing this violent ground-pushing power, Faora's entire body, carrying the sound barrier of tearing the air, rushed straight towards Magneto high up in the ruins like a missile out of a chamber.
Without weapons, relying solely on that Kryptonian brute-force skeleton that could even hurt Hulk, as long as she got close, one punch could smash that seemingly frail Earthold man into meat paste.
The distance was closed in an instant.
Ten meters, five meters, two meters.
Faora had already thrown a heavy punch with an afterimage, that fist wrapped in black armor heading straight for Magneto's face.
Just one microsecond before the fist was about to touch that dark red helmet, space suddenly underwent an unheralded distortion.
Accompanied by a slight air explosion sound of "bang", a thick purple smoke burst without warning at Magneto's location.
The air instantly filled with a pungent sulfur smell.
Faora's powerful punch directly missed, the violent fist wind blew away the purple smoke, but there wasn't even a ghost shadow left in front of the fist.
On another open space more than a hundred meters away, the same purple smoke flashed out with a sound of "bang".
Nightcrawler, whose whole body had blue skin and dragged a long sharp tail behind him, was holding tightly onto Magneto's shoulders with both hands, bringing him to a safe position.
Nightcrawler's own combat power was indeed not up to par, and could not withstand a punch from these Kryptonian monsters, but as long as he had this rogue-like short-distance no-cast-time teleportation ability, used to take his own big output teammates to play guerrilla warfare everywhere, it was enough to disgust any melee class to the point of wanting to vomit.
This sense of disparity of hitting the air made Faora's movements inevitably stagnate for two or three seconds, and she suddenly turned her head to find the prey's location.
But these short two or three seconds were enough for the old man who controlled the global magnetic field to pronounce the direction of the battle.
Magneto stood a hundred meters away, the slightly regretful sneer on his face not yet dissipated.
He slowly raised his hands and grabbed hard in mid-air.
Within a radius of several hundred meters, all the metal substances scattered on this ruined battlefield all came alive.
Those car skins peeled off from scrapped vehicles, thick steel bars exposed underground, smashed streetlight poles, and even the plasma carbine parts dropped on the ground by those Kryptonian foot soldiers, all rose into the air under an invisible and irresistible magnetic tearing force.
"Don't struggle, little girl." Magneto pressed his palm sharply forward.
A large amount of flying metal waste filling the sky, like a school of sharks smelling blood, bombarded towards Faora overwhelmingly.
The first batch of steel bars heavily smashed into her body, making a deafening collision sound.
Faora tried to stride and rush towards Magneto again, but before she could take half a step, several pieces of twisted car body iron had already stuck tightly to her legs.
She wanted to shake them off, but found that under Magneto's superpower control, these metals seemed to have a terrible centripetal gravity, and could not be easily brushed away by brute force.
More metals flew in endlessly from all directions.
Broken iron pipes wound around her arms, and thick car doors stuck to her back.
Faora roared and exerted strength crazily, trying to break free from this restraint, but no matter how many steel bars she snapped, twice the weight of metal components would immediately adhere.
Finally, as the carriages of two overturned heavy dump trucks in the distance were directly disassembled by magnetism and flew over, the last bit of gap was completely sealed.
The Kryptonian assassin, whose actions were originally as fast as lightning, was forcibly wrapped into a huge all-metal solid sphere with a diameter of more than five meters under this continuous heavy pressure stack, heavily smashing to the ground, no longer able to move a single fraction.
Magneto lowered his hands, listening to the muffled struggling sound coming from inside the big iron ball, and snorted disdainfully.
"The so-called Kryptonian high-level combat power turns out to only have this much ability after all."
Meanwhile, in that suburban wasteland ruin originally blasted out by dropped explosives.
In the air-raid shelter space deep underground, the situation underwent some rather comical changes.
General Zod, who had previously gone head-to-head with Arthur in the outer deep well, after a series of heat vision sufficient to melt steel proved completely ineffective, completely lost patience with the unbeatably unbudging Earth freak in front of him.
Originally, wading into this muddy water made no sense at all.
Clearly, he had brought an entire Universe fleet that could walk sideways across interstellar space, why did he have to run down into this broken pit to death-struggle with this madman who only cared about backing up his girlfriend?
As for the HYDRA organization that originally came to the door and swore they could help themselves disintegrate and rule this Planet from the inside, it now looked completely like a joke.
What was the use of sincerity?
The trouble caused by that bunch of trash couldn't control the field at all, it was better to use his own force to blow Earth upside down to make it more convenient.
Zod figured this point out, and was even too lazy to drop a harsh word. Bending his legs, his entire body like a take-off Rocket, with a "bang" sound, directly smashed through the thick rock layer overhead and the roof of the air-raid shelter, escaping underground along the channel he smashed out, flying to the higher surface to resume his most adept large-scale invasion plan.
He ran cleanly and neatly, leaving behind only Arthur, who was originally supposed to be responsible for containing or solving, standing alone right in the center of the underground Base.
This was a wide-open underground core area.
At this time in the venue, hundreds of HYDRA researchers wearing white sterile suits were running back and forth in front of various consoles.
On the control console in the very center of the venue, a huge semi-finished mechanical monster lay horizontally — that was the ultimate weapon they pinned high hopes on, the Sentinel.
Along with the huge collapse sound of Zod breaking through the soil overhead, all the noise at this second suddenly seemed to have been pressed with a pause button.
The blueprints and instruments in the hands of the researchers subconsciously paused, turning their heads one after another, carrying expressions of confusion and panic, looking at the young Asian man who walked down leisurely along the breach.
The whole place was dead silent, and the atmosphere solidified to the extreme for a time.
That group of ordinary HYDRA researchers looked at each other, their minds full of question marks.
"Who is this person?"
"Where is that allied alien armored boss who was fighting Earth-shatteringly outside just now?"
"Why has it been replaced by an Earth youth wearing casual clothes coming down?"
But a temporary high-level Commander commanding and scheduling on the periphery, the moment he saw that face, his body hair stood on end, and cold sweat on his forehead came out like a waterfall.
Because Arthur's furious smashing performance on the ground earlier targeting Mutant Quicksilver was too eye-catching, his image data had long been recorded by S.H.I.E.L.D., and also synchronously leaked to HYDRA's intelligence system.
But what was the evaluation given by the intelligence department at that time?
This kid had extraordinary mobility and hyper-speed beyond conventional logic, and also mastered some kind of high-dimensional means that seemed to make people's injuries recover and come back to life.
Although it was tricky, it wasn't enough to make people desperate.
But who could have thought, how was this a mobile blood pack?
He could stand directly here, meaning that Zod, who claimed to be the Kryptonian Commander, actually suffered a setback and ran away in a head-to-head clash.
Their trump card Sentinel hidden in the deepest part of the underground hasn't even finished loading its system, what can they use to deal with this monster now?
All the HYDRA members on the scene, after realizing that the people above were completely wiped out, and the fact that this jinx had already come right under their eyelids, completely panicked.
Some people even started quietly reaching for the self-defense pistol at their waist, although they also knew it was futile.
But just when everyone thought a bloody massacre was about to inevitably stage in this underground core.
Arthur's reaction completely shocked everyone.
This person stood beside that huge and cold-breathing unfinished Sentinel, slightly raising his head, looking up and down at this huge robot with great interest for several glances.
The kind of confidence in his eyes that only a cheater possessed, supported by the phantom of the Zodiac Talismans lingering in his mind, appeared extremely stable.
After reading this pile of scrap iron, Arthur neither destroyed it because of the so-called saving the common people of a hero, nor paid attention to these enemy foot soldiers facing a formidable enemy around.
He turned his head, swept his gaze around the hall, and walked straight to a master control computer nearby.
Under the ghost-seeing gazes of a group of researchers, Arthur very naturally pulled the scared operator away from his pulley office chair.
Then he sat down comfortably with a thump, leaned his entire body very relaxed against the soft back of the chair, even crossed one leg, and reached out to push an unfinished donut on the table to the side.
"Don't be nervous." Arthur raised his chin towards the temporary Commander covered in cold sweat, his tone as casual as dropping by an old friend's house to stay overnight,
"You guys keep busy with your things, don't mind me."
Seeing that group of people still frozen in place due to excessive fright, Arthur even changed to a more comfortable posture, and added a piece of nonsense that made people's blood pressure soar:
"I won't delay your business. If you guys have any heavy work needing help moving things or something... depending on my mood, I can also lend a hand."
This calm and composed operation, even with a bit of outrageous banter, made all the HYDRA masses present even more dumbfounded.
This feeling was like at a bank robbery scene, suddenly a person walked in, moved a chair and sat down, and by the way asked the robbers if they needed him to help pass a sack.
This badass who beat away the Kryptonian Commander, what on Earth did he want to do?