Marcus was having a pretty good week, all things considered.
After his Central Park community outreach event, his public approval rating had skyrocketed. The internet had collectively decided that the Duel Monster Menace was "chaotic good" and "the cryptid New York deserves." Someone had started a fan blog. There was merchandise. Bootleg merchandise, technically, but still—MERCHANDISE.
He'd spent the last few days doing his usual rounds: stopping crimes as various monsters, giving criminals motivational speeches about life choices, occasionally appearing to random civilians just to wave hello and then vanish. He'd even helped an old lady cross the street as Marshmallon, which had resulted in a viral video titled "CUTEST MONSTER EVER HELPS GRANDMA" that currently had sixteen million views.
It was nice. It was FUN. It was exactly the kind of low-key chaos Marcus had come to enjoy.
But beneath the surface, things were not going well.
Because HYDRA, as it turned out, did not know how to take a hint.
Marcus's Apartment
Tuesday Morning
Marcus was eating his breakfast—cold pizza, the meal of champions—when the news alert popped up on his phone.
BREAKING: SHIELD FACILITY IN BALTIMORE DESTROYED IN MYSTERIOUS EXPLOSION
He frowned, pulling up the article. The details were sparse—official sources claimed it was a gas leak, but witnesses reported seeing armed personnel fleeing the building before the explosion. Three confirmed dead, dozens injured.
"That's not a gas leak," Marcus muttered. "That's a cover-up."
He switched to his secure tablet—a piece of HYDRA technology he'd "liberated" during his raid on their facility—and started digging through the encrypted communications he'd been monitoring.
What he found made his blood run cold.
HYDRA wasn't backing down.
They weren't scared.
They were ACCELERATING.
The messages were fragmented—HYDRA had gotten smarter about their communications after his attack—but the picture they painted was clear. Alexander Pierce, rather than heeding Marcus's warning, had doubled down. The Baltimore facility had been a SHIELD installation that was getting too close to discovering HYDRA's infiltration. So HYDRA had destroyed it.
And that was just the beginning.
Project Insight wasn't being delayed. It was being pushed FORWARD. Pierce had called in every favor, activated every sleeper cell, mobilized every resource. The helicarriers were being finished ahead of schedule. The targeting algorithm was being finalized.
They were going to launch in THREE MONTHS.
Not eighteen months. Not six months.
THREE.
"No," Marcus breathed, scrolling through message after message. "No, no, no. This isn't—this isn't what was supposed to happen. I warned them. I WARNED them."
But he had, hadn't he? And what had Pierce done with that warning?
He'd decided to move faster. Before Marcus could stop him.
"Smart," Marcus admitted grudgingly. "Evil, but smart. If I'm a threat, the logical response is to complete your plan before I can interfere again. Get the helicarriers in the air, eliminate all targets, establish control before anyone can react."
He stood up, pacing his small apartment.
"Okay. Okay. Think. Three months. I have three months to stop Project Insight. That's... that's not a lot of time. What are my options?"
Option one: Tell the Avengers everything. Give them all the intelligence he'd gathered, let them handle it.
Problem: The Avengers were currently focused on Infinity Stones and cosmic threats, as per his own prophecy. Redirecting them to a domestic terrorist organization would split their attention and might compromise both efforts.
Option two: Tell Fury everything. Let SHIELD—the loyal parts of SHIELD—tear itself apart rooting out HYDRA.
Problem: HYDRA was too deeply embedded. A civil war within SHIELD would be bloody and chaotic, and there was no guarantee the good guys would win. In the original timeline, it had taken Captain America literally crashing helicarriers into the Potomac to stop Insight.
Option three: Accelerate his own timeline. Take out HYDRA leadership directly, one by one, until they couldn't function.
Problem: HYDRA's whole thing was that cutting off heads just made more heads. Without a comprehensive takedown, they'd just rebuild with new leadership.
Option four: Destroy the helicarriers before they could launch.
Problem: They were being built at multiple secure locations, and attacking all of them would require—
Marcus stopped pacing.
Would require what, exactly?
What was his limitation here?
He could transform into ANY Yu-Gi-Oh monster. Including monsters that were, by the standards of the card game, essentially GODS. He'd been holding back, using relatively modest forms, because he didn't want to cause collateral damage or attract too much attention.
But HYDRA was about to murder millions of people.
Maybe it was time to stop holding back.
"Okay," Marcus said slowly, sitting back down. "Okay. Let's think about this differently. What's the most powerful thing I can do? What's the biggest statement I can make? What would GUARANTEE that HYDRA understands they cannot win?"
His mind started cataloging options.
Egyptian God Cards: Immensely powerful, but their true power required specific conditions that might not translate to reality. Also, using them felt like overkill for anything short of Thanos.
Exodia: Automatic win in the game, but in lore terms, it was actually a sealed demon. Unleashing it might cause more problems than it solved.
The Creator God of Light, Horakhty: Literally a supreme deity. Probably TOO powerful. Might accidentally cause religious incidents.
And then Marcus remembered something.
Something from Arc-V.
A monster that existed at the intersection of all dimensions, that could absorb the power of other monsters and become infinitely strong. A dragon that represented the culmination of the Numeron code, the power to rewrite reality itself.
Number 100: Numeron Dragon.
In the anime, Numeron Dragon had a unique ability: it could gain attack points equal to the combined attack of all Xyz monsters on the field, doubled. In lore terms, this meant it could theoretically achieve INFINITE attack power—the ability to destroy absolutely anything.
But more importantly, in the mythology of the Numbers, the Numeron cards represented the power of creation itself. The Numeron Code was what had been used to create the entire Yu-Gi-Oh universe. Number 100 was the dragon that embodied that primordial force.
If Marcus transformed into Numeron Dragon, he wouldn't just be a powerful monster.
He would be a STATEMENT.
He would be the universe itself saying "NO" to HYDRA.
"That's it," Marcus whispered, a manic grin spreading across his face. "That's the answer. I don't just threaten HYDRA. I don't just fight HYDRA. I show them something so far beyond their comprehension that they understand—truly, deeply understand—that they CANNOT win. Not now. Not ever."
He stood up again, his decision made.
It was time to remind HYDRA why you don't piss off the guy who can turn into cosmic dragons.
HYDRA Facility - Codename: PROMETHEUS
Location: Somewhere in Virginia
Tuesday, 11:47 PM
This was the big one.
Not the biggest HYDRA facility—that would be the Triskelion itself, where Project Insight's command center was located. But this was where the helicarrier components were being manufactured. Where the targeting systems were being assembled. Where the fusion cores that would power HYDRA's instruments of genocide were being built.
Take out PROMETHEUS, and Insight would be crippled.
Marcus had spent three days gathering intelligence, using Thousand-Eyes Restrict and various other surveillance-capable monsters to map the facility's layout and security systems. He knew where every guard was stationed, where every camera was pointed, where every failsafe was hidden.
He also knew that the facility was hosting a very special visitor tonight.
Alexander Pierce himself had come to inspect the final preparations. He wanted to personally verify that Insight would launch on schedule, despite the "complications" of the past month.
Perfect.
Marcus materialized in the forest about a mile from the facility's outer perimeter, still in human form. The night was clear and cold, stars glittering overhead like distant promises. He took a deep breath, centering himself.
This was going to be the biggest transformation he'd ever attempted. Numeron Dragon was a monster of cosmic significance—maintaining its form would require immense concentration and energy. He'd probably be out of commission for days afterward.
But it would be worth it.
Oh, it would be SO worth it.
"Okay," Marcus murmured to himself. "Let's do this."
He closed his eyes and reached deep inside himself, past the familiar forms of Kuriboh and Dark Magician and Blue-Eyes, past the comfortable power of Black Luster Soldier and Dark Paladin, past even the cosmic might of Cyber Eternity Dragon.
He reached for something deeper.
Something older.
Something that existed before the beginning and after the end.
He reached for the Numeron Code.
And the Numeron Code answered.
HYDRA Facility - PROMETHEUS
Outer Perimeter
11:52 PM
Private Jenkins was bored.
Guard duty was always boring, but guard duty at a top-secret facility in the middle of nowhere was ESPECIALLY boring. Nothing ever happened. The most exciting thing he'd seen in three months was a deer that had wandered too close to the fence and gotten startled by the motion sensors.
He was thinking about what he'd have for breakfast tomorrow when the sky changed.
It didn't do anything dramatic, not at first. The stars just... shifted. Like they were rearranging themselves into a new pattern. Jenkins blinked, rubbed his eyes, looked again.
The stars were definitely moving.
"Uh," he said into his radio. "Control, this is Perimeter Three. I'm seeing something weird in the sky. Can you confirm?"
Static.
"Control? Do you copy?"
More static, then a burst of something that might have been screaming.
Jenkins looked up again.
The stars had formed a pattern. A spiral, centered directly above the facility, rotating slowly like a galaxy in miniature. At its center was a point of absolute darkness—not just absence of light, but absence of EVERYTHING. A hole in reality.
And from that hole, something was emerging.
It started as light—pure, blinding, golden light that streamed from the darkness like water from a broken dam. The light twisted and coiled, taking shape, becoming something vast and serpentine and utterly impossible.
A dragon.
But not like any dragon Jenkins had ever seen—not like the ones in the reports about the monster sightings in New York. This dragon was made of light itself, of starfire and cosmic energy, its body stretching across the sky like a constellation given life. Its scales were galaxies. Its eyes were supernovae. Its very presence bent reality around it, making the air shimmer and warp.
And it was LOOKING at him.
Jenkins did the only sensible thing a human being could do when confronted with the physical manifestation of cosmic infinity.
He fainted.
Inside the Facility
Control Room
Alexander Pierce was in the middle of a briefing when every alarm in the building went off simultaneously.
"What the hell is happening?" he demanded, striding toward the main display.
The technician at the console was pale, her hands shaking as she pulled up the external camera feeds. "Sir, there's something—we don't—I don't know how to—"
The screen flickered to life.
For a long moment, nobody moved.
The camera showed the sky above the facility. Or rather, it showed what the sky had BECOME—a swirling vortex of light and darkness, centered on a dragon that seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. The dragon's body coiled through dimensions that the camera couldn't properly capture, creating visual artifacts and glitches wherever it moved.
And its face—massive, ancient, impossibly beautiful—was looking directly at the camera.
"Is that..." someone whispered. "Is that the thing from New York?"
"No," Pierce said, his voice barely above a whisper. "That's something else. Something worse."
The dragon opened its mouth, and when it spoke, every speaker in the facility broadcast its voice simultaneously:
"HYDRA."
The word resonated through the walls, the floor, the very air. It wasn't just sound—it was MEANING, concept made manifest.
"YOU WERE WARNED."
The lights in the control room flickered, then stabilized. Every screen now showed the same image: the dragon's face, filling the frame, its eyes burning with light that hurt to look at.
"YOU WERE GIVEN A CHANCE TO TURN BACK. TO ABANDON YOUR PLANS. TO FADE INTO OBSCURITY AND HARM NO ONE ELSE."
Pierce's hands were trembling. He clenched them into fists, forcing himself to maintain composure. "It's just a trick. Some kind of holographic—"
"THIS IS NOT A TRICK."
The building shook.
"I AM NUMERON DRAGON. I AM THE POWER THAT UNDERLIES ALL REALITY. I AM THE BEGINNING AND THE END. I AM INFINITY GIVEN FORM."
Outside, the dragon's body shifted, and suddenly it wasn't just in the sky—it was EVERYWHERE. Coiling around the facility like a serpent around its prey. Its scales scraped against the reinforced walls, and where they touched, the metal simply... dissolved. Not melted. Not destroyed. UNMADE. Returned to the nothing it had come from.
"YOU THOUGHT YOUR FACILITY WAS SECRET. YOU THOUGHT YOUR PLANS WERE HIDDEN. YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD OUTRUN CONSEQUENCE."
A section of the outer wall disappeared, revealing the dragon's eye—a burning orb of golden light that somehow conveyed disappointment and anger and terrible, infinite patience.
"YOU WERE WRONG."
Pierce's composure finally cracked. He stumbled backward, nearly tripping over his own feet, his carefully maintained facade crumbling in the face of something that his mind simply could not process.
"What do you want?!" he screamed. "What do you WANT from us?!"
The dragon was silent for a moment.
"WANT?" it repeated, almost contemplatively. "I WANT MANY THINGS. WORLD PEACE. BETTER PIZZA DELIVERY OPTIONS. A SECOND SEASON OF FIREFLY."
Despite the terror of the situation, someone in the control room let out a slightly hysterical laugh.
"BUT FROM YOU SPECIFICALLY? I WANT YOU TO UNDERSTAND SOMETHING, ALEXANDER PIERCE. I WANT YOU TO TRULY, DEEPLY COMPREHEND THE NATURE OF YOUR SITUATION."
The dragon's body shifted again, and suddenly Pierce was no longer in the control room. He was... somewhere else. A void of absolute darkness, lit only by the dragon's presence. He was alone—completely, utterly alone—with a being that could unmake him with a thought.
"IN YOUR ARROGANCE, YOU BELIEVED THAT ACCELERATING YOUR TIMELINE WOULD SAVE YOU. YOU BELIEVED THAT MOVING FASTER THAN I COULD RESPOND WOULD LEAD TO VICTORY."
Pierce opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out. His voice had been taken—not painfully, not violently, just... removed, like it had never existed.
"YOU WERE OPERATING UNDER A FALSE ASSUMPTION. YOU BELIEVED THAT MY PREVIOUS INTERVENTION—THE ATTACK ON YOUR FACILITY, THE WARNINGS—REPRESENTED THE LIMITS OF MY POWER. THAT IF YOU PUSHED HARD ENOUGH, YOU COULD OVERCOME ME."
The dragon's face came closer, filling Pierce's entire field of vision.
"ALLOW ME TO CORRECT THAT ASSUMPTION."
And then Pierce saw.
He saw the dragon's true nature—not the physical form it was manifesting, but the CONCEPT it embodied. He saw infinity. He saw the space between dimensions. He saw the power that had created the universe and could unmake it just as easily.
He saw, for the briefest moment, what it would mean if this being actually tried.
It was not a comforting vision.
"I COULD END YOU," the dragon said, its voice now soft, almost gentle. "NOT JUST YOU—ALL OF HYDRA. EVERY CELL, EVERY SLEEPER, EVERY HIDDEN BASE AND SECRET BUNKER. I COULD REACH INTO THE FABRIC OF REALITY AND SIMPLY... REMOVE YOU. MAKE IT SO THAT HYDRA NEVER EXISTED. SO THAT NO ONE WOULD EVER REMEMBER THE NAME."
Pierce was crying. He wasn't sure when he'd started. The tears just flowed, his body's only possible response to the overwhelming terror.
"BUT I WON'T. DO YOU KNOW WHY?"
Pierce shook his head, a tiny motion in the vast emptiness.
"BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE EASY. AND YOU DON'T DESERVE EASY. YOU DESERVE TO WATCH EVERYTHING YOU'VE BUILT CRUMBLE. YOU DESERVE TO SEE YOUR PLANS FAIL, YOUR ALLIES ABANDON YOU, YOUR LEGACY BECOME NOTHING MORE THAN A CAUTIONARY TALE. YOU DESERVE TO LIVE LONG ENOUGH TO UNDERSTAND EXACTLY HOW BADLY YOU LOST."
The void began to fade, reality reasserting itself. Pierce found himself back in the control room, collapsed on the floor, surrounded by equally traumatized HYDRA personnel.
"SO HERE IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN," the dragon's voice continued, now coming from outside again. "YOU WILL SHUT DOWN PROJECT INSIGHT. YOU WILL DISMANTLE THIS FACILITY. YOU WILL SURRENDER YOURSELVES TO NICK FURY—THE REAL FURY, NOT YOUR COMPROMISED COUNCIL—AND YOU WILL CONFESS EVERYTHING. EVERY CRIME. EVERY CONSPIRACY. EVERY NAME."
Pierce's voice returned. "And if we don't?"
He regretted asking immediately.
"IF YOU DON'T?" The dragon's eye appeared at the hole in the wall again, somehow conveying amusement. "THEN I WILL SHOW YOU WHAT 'INFINITY ATTACK POINTS' ACTUALLY MEANS IN PRACTICE. WOULD YOU LIKE A DEMONSTRATION?"
The dragon's body glowed brighter, and a sphere of pure golden energy began forming in front of its mouth—the same kind of sphere that, in the anime, had been capable of destroying dimensions.
"NO!" Pierce screamed. "No, we'll—we'll do what you say! We'll shut it down! We'll surrender! Just—just STOP!"
The energy sphere dissipated.
"EXCELLENT. I'M SO GLAD WE COULD COME TO AN UNDERSTANDING."
The dragon began to withdraw, its massive body uncoiling from around the facility and ascending back into the sky. The vortex of stars and darkness slowly closed, reality knitting itself back together.
"OH, AND ONE MORE THING," the dragon added, its voice now coming from somewhere far above. "I'LL BE WATCHING. ALWAYS. EVERYWHERE. IF YOU TRY TO REBUILD, IF YOU TRY TO RESTART YOUR PLANS, IF YOU DO ANYTHING—ANYTHING AT ALL—TO HARM INNOCENT PEOPLE..."
A pause, weighted with terrible promise.
"I WON'T BE SO MERCIFUL NEXT TIME."
And then it was gone.
The sky returned to normal. The stars settled back into their proper positions. The hole in the facility's wall remained, but everything else was as it had been—except for the profound, soul-deep terror that now gripped every HYDRA operative who had witnessed the event.
In the control room, Alexander Pierce lay on the floor, staring at nothing.
For the first time in his life, he understood what it meant to be truly, completely powerless.
He didn't like it.
Forest Outside the Facility
12:23 AM
Marcus transformed back into his human form and immediately collapsed.
"Oh god," he groaned, his entire body feeling like it had been turned inside out and back again. "Oh god oh god oh god."
Maintaining Numeron Dragon had been... intense. Beyond intense. He'd felt EVERYTHING while he was in that form—every atom in the facility, every heartbeat of every HYDRA operative, the very fabric of reality bending around his presence. It had been overwhelming and exhilarating and terrifying all at once.
And the speech. The SPEECH.
"Did I really threaten to show them what infinity attack points means?" Marcus mumbled into the dirt. "Did I actually say 'better pizza delivery options'? Was that... was that too much?"
He replayed the conversation in his mind.
"Yeah, that was definitely too much. I basically did an anime villain monologue. I showed a guy the concept of infinity and made him cry. That's... that's a lot."
But it had worked.
Oh, it had WORKED.
He'd watched through the dragon's eyes as Pierce crumbled, as the entire facility descended into panic, as HYDRA's carefully maintained composure shattered in the face of something beyond their comprehension. They were going to shut down Insight. They were going to surrender. They were DONE.
At least, this version of them was.
"There'll be other cells," Marcus reminded himself, slowly pushing himself up to his hands and knees. "Other operations. HYDRA doesn't die easy. But the main threat—Insight—that's neutralized. The helicarriers won't fly. Millions of people won't die."
He managed to sit up, leaning against a tree for support.
"I just saved millions of lives by turning into a cosmic dragon and threatening a Nazi with infinity."
He started laughing.
He laughed until tears streamed down his face, until his exhausted body ached with the effort, until he was gasping for breath and still couldn't stop.
"This is my life now," he wheezed. "This is actually my life. I'm a guy who stops genocides by becoming Yu-Gi-Oh monsters. I'm the world's most ridiculous superhero. I'm—"
He paused, a new thought occurring to him.
"I'm going to need to update my resume."
The laughter started again.
SHIELD Headquarters
The Next Morning
Nick Fury stared at the reports on his desk.
Then he stared at the video footage.
Then he stared at the reports again.
"Hill," he said finally, his voice carefully controlled. "Am I reading this correctly? HYDRA—the secret Nazi organization hidden inside my agency—just SURRENDERED? En masse?"
"That's what the reports indicate, sir."
"And they surrendered because..."
"Because of the dragon, sir."
Fury looked at the video footage again. The image quality was terrible—apparently cosmic dragons played havoc with digital recording equipment—but it clearly showed something massive and glowing coiling around the PROMETHEUS facility like it was a toy.
"That's not the same dragon as before. The mechanical one."
"No, sir. This appears to be a different form. Initial analysis suggests it matches a card called—"
"Let me guess. It's from the card game."
"Number 100: Numeron Dragon, sir. According to the game's lore, it's a being that embodies the power of creation itself. Theoretically infinite attack power."
Fury was quiet for a long moment.
"Infinite," he repeated.
"That's what the file says, sir."
"Hill, I've dealt with a lot of strange things in my career. Aliens. Super soldiers. Norse gods. But a creature with infinite power that comes from a TRADING CARD GAME is a new one even for me."
"If it helps, sir, it appears to be on our side. The dragon's demands were very specific—shut down Insight, dismantle the operation, surrender to loyal SHIELD personnel. It didn't ask for anything else."
"It didn't need to." Fury leaned back in his chair, his eye fixed on the frozen image of the dragon's face. "It just demonstrated that it could destroy us all if it wanted to. That's leverage enough for any demand."
"What are your orders, sir?"
Fury thought about it.
The Duel Monster Menace—as the media was still calling it—had done something incredible. In one night, it had accomplished what would have taken SHIELD months or years: the complete dismantling of HYDRA's primary operation. The helicarriers would never fly. The targeting algorithm would never fire. Millions of lives had been saved.
And Fury hadn't had to lift a finger.
That should have made him happy. Instead, it made him worried.
Because if the creature could do THIS to HYDRA, what could it do to anyone else? What if it decided, one day, that SHIELD was a threat? That the Avengers were a problem? That Nick Fury himself was someone who needed to be taught a lesson?
"For now," Fury said slowly, "we process the surrendering HYDRA agents. Get every piece of intelligence we can. Root out every cell, every sleeper, every hidden operation."
"And the dragon?"
"The dragon..." Fury shook his head. "The dragon, we leave alone. We don't provoke it, we don't antagonize it, we don't give it any reason to decide we're the next problem that needs solving."
"So we just... let it do whatever it wants?"
"Do you have a better suggestion? Because I'm open to ideas on how to fight something with 'infinite power.'"
Hill was silent.
"That's what I thought." Fury stood up, gathering the reports. "Set up a meeting with the Avengers. They need to know what happened. And Hill?"
"Sir?"
"If anyone asks, this conversation never happened. As far as the official record is concerned, HYDRA collapsed due to internal conflicts and aggressive SHIELD investigation. The dragon was never here."
"Understood, sir."
Fury left his office, the reports clutched in his hand.
Somewhere out there, the Duel Monster Menace was probably eating pizza and laughing at the chaos it had caused. Fury had never met the creature in person, but he was starting to develop a very clear picture of its personality.
It was, he decided, exactly the kind of chaotic wild card that could either save the world or destroy it, depending on its mood.
He really, REALLY hoped it stayed in a good mood.
Avengers Tower
That Afternoon
"So let me get this straight," Tony said, for approximately the fifth time. "The card game dragon—a DIFFERENT card game dragon from the one that visited us—just single-handedly dismantled HYDRA. The secret Nazi organization that's been hiding inside SHIELD for decades. It just... solved that problem. In one night."
"That's what the reports say," Steve confirmed, his expression a complicated mix of relief and concern. "The footage is... it's hard to describe. The dragon was massive. Reality-warping. According to witnesses, it showed Pierce something—some kind of vision—that left him completely broken."
"What kind of vision?"
"Unclear. Pierce hasn't been coherent enough to explain. The psychologists say he might never fully recover."
Tony processed that information.
"So the card game entity can not only transform into reality-warping dragons, it can also psychologically destroy people by showing them... what? The nature of infinity?"
"Apparently."
"Cool. That's cool. That's a totally normal thing for our new 'ally' to be able to do." Tony started pacing. "JARVIS, what's the latest on the dragon? Any sightings since the HYDRA incident?"
"None, sir. The entity appears to have gone dormant. No monster sightings anywhere in the country for the past eighteen hours."
"Dormant or recovering," Bruce suggested. "A transformation that powerful probably requires some kind of cooldown period. Even by superhuman standards, what that dragon did was extraordinary."
"So right now, somewhere out there, there's a person—or whatever—who can turn into an infinite-power cosmic dragon, and they're just... resting? Taking a nap? Eating a sandwich?"
"Presumably, sir."
Tony stopped pacing and stared out the window at the New York skyline.
"You know what the worst part is?" he said quietly. "I'm not even mad. HYDRA was a genuine threat. Project Insight would have killed millions. And the dragon stopped it without any civilian casualties, without any collateral damage, without any of the messy consequences that would have come from us trying to handle it."
"But?" Natasha prompted.
"But it also just demonstrated that it can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and there's nothing any of us can do about it. That kind of power, in the hands of something we don't understand..." He shook his head. "I don't like it."
"The entity warned us about Thanos," Steve pointed out. "It gave us information that could help save the universe. And now it's eliminated a domestic threat that we didn't even know existed. Those aren't the actions of something hostile."
"They're also not the actions of something predictable. Chaos isn't automatically good just because it happens to work out in our favor a few times."
"Maybe not," Steve admitted. "But right now, it's the best ally we've got. I say we accept the help and try to learn more about who—or what—we're actually dealing with."
Tony was quiet for a moment.
"Fine," he said finally. "But I'm putting together contingency plans. Just in case. And if anyone gets a chance to actually TALK to this thing—to understand its motivations, its goals, its weaknesses—I want to know about it."
"Agreed," Natasha said. "In the meantime, we should focus on what we can control. HYDRA's surrender is creating chaos within SHIELD. Fury's going to need help sorting the loyal agents from the compromised ones."
"And the Infinity Stones," Bruce added. "The dragon's prophecy about Thanos is still our primary long-term concern. We need to keep researching."
"Alright." Steve stood up, assuming his natural role as leader. "Tony, you work on contingencies and analysis. Natasha, coordinate with Fury on the HYDRA situation. Bruce, continue the Infinity Stone research. Clint, Thor—"
"Thor's still off-world," Clint reminded him.
"Right. Clint, you're on general intelligence gathering. Keep your ears open for anything related to our mysterious friend."
"The dragon?"
"The dragon, the warrior, the puffball, whatever form it takes next. We need to understand this entity. It's too powerful and too unpredictable to ignore."
The team dispersed, each heading to their assigned tasks.
None of them noticed the tiny Winged Kuriboh hovering outside the window, having recovered just enough energy for some light surveillance.
Marcus, safe within his cute fluffy form, listened to their discussion with interest.
"Contingency plans," he murmured in his squeaky Kuriboh voice. "Fair enough. I'd want contingency plans too, if I were them."
He made a mental note to be extra chaotic in his next few appearances. Not malicious—never malicious—but definitely unpredictable. If they thought they could figure him out, they'd get complacent. And complacent wasn't safe.
Also, it was more fun to keep them guessing.
He floated away from the tower, heading back to his apartment to continue his recovery. The Numeron Dragon transformation had taken more out of him than he'd expected—it would probably be another day or two before he was back to full strength.
But it had been worth it.
HYDRA was done. Project Insight was dead. Millions of people would live who would have otherwise died.
And all it had cost was one really dramatic speech and a guy's sanity.
"Worth it," Marcus decided. "Definitely worth it."
Marcus's Apartment
Two Days Later
Marcus woke up feeling almost normal.
His body still ached in strange places—apparently reality-warping transformations left phantom pains that took time to fade—but his energy was back. He could feel the potential of his powers humming beneath his skin, ready to be called upon.
And he was STARVING.
"Pizza," he groaned, stumbling out of bed. "Need pizza. Need approximately seventeen pizzas."
His phone had approximately four hundred notifications, which he ignored in favor of ordering food. Once that essential task was accomplished, he finally checked his messages.
The news was... a lot.
HYDRA's surrender was the story of the year. Every network was covering it, every newspaper had it on the front page. "SECRET NAZI ORGANIZATION INSIDE GOVERNMENT" was the kind of headline that got people's attention. Politicians were demanding investigations. Former SHIELD agents were being arrested left and right. The Triskelion was surrounded by military forces.
And, of course, everyone was talking about the dragon.
The official story was that HYDRA had collapsed due to internal conflicts and a surprise SHIELD investigation. But the leaked footage—blurry, distorted, but unmistakable—told a different story. A story of a cosmic dragon that had descended from the sky and delivered judgment.
The internet had gone absolutely insane.
#NumeronDragon was trending worldwide. There were memes. There were fan theories. There was a growing faction of people who genuinely believed that the Duel Monster Menace was some kind of divine entity sent to protect humanity.
There was also a concerning amount of fan art.
"Why," Marcus muttered, scrolling through his phone. "Why is there romantic fan art. I'm a DRAGON. I'm MULTIPLE dragons. This is not—this shouldn't be—"
He decided to stop scrolling.
His pizza arrived—he'd ordered from four different places to avoid suspicion about his inhuman appetite—and he spent the next hour eating and processing everything that had happened.
HYDRA was done. That was the big victory, the thing that actually mattered. Millions of lives saved, a secret Nazi conspiracy exposed, the world a slightly better place than it had been a week ago.
But Marcus wasn't naive enough to think that was the end of it.
HYDRA had cells everywhere—not just in SHIELD, but in governments and corporations around the world. The main operation was destroyed, but the ideology lived on. There would be remnants, survivors, people who'd rebuild from the ashes.
And there were other threats. Ultron was still a possibility if Tony got too paranoid about cosmic dangers. The Sokovia Accords might still happen, dividing the Avengers when they needed to be united. Thanos was still out there, collecting Infinity Stones, preparing his grand plan.
"One problem at a time," Marcus reminded himself. "I'm not responsible for fixing EVERYTHING. I'm just... nudging things in better directions."
He finished his pizza and stood up, stretching.
"Okay. What's next? More street-level stuff? Take a vacation? Go mess with some villains I haven't encountered yet?"
He thought about his options.
Doctor Doom was always fun to consider, but Latveria was pretty far away and Marcus wasn't sure how his powers would interact with Doom's magic. Probably fine, but "probably" wasn't great when dealing with one of the smartest villains on the planet.
Spider-Man was presumably active somewhere, but Marcus still wasn't sure which Spider-Man or what timeline of Spider-Man stories applied here. Needed more reconnaissance.
The X-Men might exist, but mutants in general were a complicated topic in the MCU and Marcus wasn't sure if he wanted to get involved with that whole mess.
Actually, wait.
What about Loki?
Marcus sat up straighter, his mind racing.
Loki was currently in an Asgardian prison, right? After the Battle of New York? He was just... sitting there. Waiting for the next phase of his story. Waiting for Thor: The Dark World to happen, for Malekith to attack, for everything to go sideways.
What if Marcus visited him?
Not to free him—Loki was still a dangerous war criminal who'd tried to conquer Earth. But to TALK to him? To mess with the God of Mischief?
That sounded HILARIOUS.
"Oh, this is a terrible idea," Marcus said gleefully. "This is a WONDERFUL terrible idea."
He started planning.
To Be Continued...