Chapter 7: Dawn of Destruction
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On the rooftop of a building, a blond boy sat quietly, munching on a bag of Lay's chips with a bottle of Coca-Cola beside him.
He was wearing a red-and-blue metallic suit of armor, accented with golden details that highlighted its sleek design.
Naruto calmly looked over what remained of New York City from such a great height.
Endless chaos.
Overturned cars, zombies wandering aimlessly through the streets, buildings engulfed in flames, and every now and then, people or infected creatures falling from the sky. Sometimes... both.
After using his webs for the first time, he had decided to try out the Iron Spider suit. Spider-Man's powers had struck him as surprisingly interesting.
So, he first removed the Mark armor before taking the Iron Spider suit from Peter and claiming it for himself.
He began by swinging between buildings with the webs, and thanks to the recordings Aetheria showed him, he gradually came to understand how they worked.
He even figured out the wall-crawling ability, eventually mastering it as well.
At first, he had no idea how to do it, but with the explanations and demonstrations he received, he eventually understood the nature of the ability and learned how to use it properly.
Thanks to that, he managed to reach one of the tallest buildings in the city, where he casually sat down to enjoy his chips and soda without crushing either of them, completely unaware that the suit itself was helping keep them intact.
Another thing he decided to experiment with was Mjolnir, once the initial surprise over his new spider-like abilities had faded.
At first, he could only make the hammer spin, with no way of controlling where it would go. Only after watching recordings of Thor wielding it did he begin to understand how it was meant to be used.
Within minutes, he had partially mastered aerial movement using Mjolnir, though he still didn't fully grasp everything the legendary weapon was capable of.
Another of the hammer's abilities that caught his attention was its power to return to its owner's hand after being thrown.
If Thor could do it... then so could he.
After several attempts and a bit of practice, he finally succeeded, though at first he could only summon the hammer back from a short distance.
There was also something else that had piqued his curiosity.
The zombies.
Thanks to the information provided by Aetheria, Naruto came to understand a little more about what those strange creatures were.
When he asked for more details, Aetheria explained everything again, this time with far greater depth and clarification.
She also told him about the origin of the zombie virus in this reality and how it had turned the world into the disaster now spread out before him.
According to her, the virus had originated here, in New York itself, when a group of scientists attempted to create an extremely powerful drug for the government.
That may have been their goal, but instead, they accidentally created this virus, which escaped from the laboratory and infected the entire city within hours.
If the virus wasn't contained, it would take only a matter of days to spread across the entire planet. But judging by the reports constantly appearing, stopping it was probably already impossible.
Thanks to the bracelet holding the blue gem, broadcasts from news stations across the world could be projected before him.
And it seemed that many of the major cities in the United States—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and countless others—were already being consumed by the outbreak.
Washington, D.C., appeared to be holding out the longest, and after Aetheria dug a little deeper, she discovered that the President was likely preparing something drastic to prevent the world from descending even further into hell.
Central and South America had not yet been completely overrun, but several locations had already begun to fall.
Air travel was the reason.
The virus was spreading across the globe within hours.
Naruto silently watched it all, processing everything he had experienced since arriving in this strange world.
He had arrived...
Tried to eat...
Been forced to fight zombies...
Then faced a famous hero named Tony Stark.
Not long afterward, he had fought Tony's protégé, Peter Parker—better known as Spider-Man—and acquired his powers.
As for the subject that interested him more than anything else...
There were the Infinity Stones.
He couldn't understand why he possessed them, even if they weren't currently on his person. He mentally reviewed everything stored in his inventory, but it contained only the items he had recently obtained.
The strangest of them all was the filing cabinet that had fallen through the TVA portal.
Remembering it, Naruto became curious.
With a single thought, the sand-colored cabinet appeared before him.
He stared at it for a moment before walking over.
He opened the top drawer.
Inside were countless stones of different colors, many of them sharing the same hue.
[Name: Mind Stone]
[Bearer: (No Bearer)]
[Universe: Marvel / Earth-763]
[Type: Cosmic Artifact / Mental and Cognitive Dominion]
[Rank: S+]
[A brilliant yellow crystal that contains the primordial essence of consciousness. Within its core beats an ancient, silent, omnipresent intelligence, as though the universe itself thinks through it. The Mind Stone does not merely control thoughts—it defines perception, identity, and will.]
[Abilities: (Dominion over the Concept of Mind)]
The notification appeared the moment he looked at one of the yellow stones, which he picked up out of curiosity.
The instant he held it, glowing veins of energy began spreading up Naruto's arm, passing even through the Iron Spider suit as they sought to reach his mind.
Grabbing his head tightly, he saw a familiar notification appear—the same one he had encountered before.
[Item Identified: "Infinity Stone - Mind Stone"]
[Would you like to establish a bond with this item?]
[Yes] - [No]
Just as he had done with the previous artifacts, he accepted immediately.
A familiar radiance emerged, much like the Space Stone's. It began as a faint glow before intensifying until it became blinding, while Naruto felt his mind finally settle into perfect calm.
Carefully, he placed the gem into the black bracelet around his right wrist.
As soon as he did, thin yellow veins of energy pulsed through his arm for a brief moment before fading away completely.
This time...
Without pain.
He repeated the process with the remaining stones, each one shining with its own distinct color. This time, however, he proceeded more carefully, following Aetheria's advice.
Once that was done, he picked up a green gem, and another screen appeared before him.
Time Stone.
Just like the previous one, he bonded with it without much difficulty.
Naruto let out a quiet sigh as he adjusted to the new energy.
Without wasting any time, he continued the same process with the remaining Infinity Stones—Reality, Power, and Soul.
But the moment he placed the final gem into the bracelet...
The Soul Stone...
Something unexpected happened.
At that instant, veins of energy in all six colors erupted simultaneously, spreading across his entire arm.
The bracelet seemed incapable of withstanding the overwhelming power released by gathering all six together.
Naruto collapsed onto the rooftop, clutching his wrist tightly, his teeth clenched in pain.
After several seconds, the infinite energy of the Stones gradually calmed, adapting itself to its new bearer.
The bracelet vibrated as it adjusted to both itself and the young blond, while thin wisps of smoke escaped from its surface.
Several more minutes passed before Naruto finally managed to stand, breathing heavily as the bracelet finished molding itself around his wrist.
He slowly flexed his hand, getting used to the new sensation.
Then he stored the filing cabinet away, seeing no further use for it at the moment, and turned his attention back toward the city.
He watched black smoke slowly rise into the sky while infected and uninfected alike ran through the streets—the latter desperately hunted by the former.
A question settled into his mind.
What now?
He didn't know where to go.
He didn't know this world.
Then his gaze fell upon the Space Stone.
If that gem had brought him here... perhaps it could take him somewhere else as well. But before he could do anything... he felt something.
He lifted his head toward the blue sky, partially hidden behind gray clouds.
Far in the distance, something was approaching the city at incredible speed.
Even with his enhanced vision, he couldn't identify what it was. Only a black tip, trailing a long plume of smoke behind it.
[Naruto, I recommend switching to the Mark armor.]
The sudden warning made Naruto raise an eyebrow, though he ultimately shrugged.
He quickly deactivated the Iron Spider suit, revealing the Asgardian armor beneath before storing it away and attaching the triangular Arc Reactor.
He tapped it twice.
Immediately, countless nanobots deployed at incredible speed, once again covering the Asgardian armor.
Even the Infinity Stones disappeared beneath the swarm of nanobots.
The moment the suit fully assembled, he felt the system assisting every movement of his body.
The thrusters ignited, gently lifting him into the air.
Naruto made a small movement midair, startled by the sudden sensation of weightlessness.
It took him several seconds to adapt before flying began to feel almost natural.
He rose a little higher, enough to clearly see the object racing toward the city.
It was a light gray cylinder...With a black nose cone.
Before he could fully process what it was, the armor abruptly turned on its own and accelerated away at maximum speed.
The object continued its unstoppable course.
Moments later...
It struck the heart of Manhattan.
For a fraction of a second...
Everything stopped.
The air itself grew tense.
And then...
The world split apart.
A blinding light swallowed everything.
It wasn't an ordinary explosion.
It was an instant sunrise.
Violent...
Impossible.
A sphere of fire was born in absolute silence.
Then, in the next heartbeat, it roared with the fury of a god.
Everything within the immediate blast radius simply ceased to exist.
Buildings.
Vehicles.
Infected.
Survivors.
Reduced to nothing in the blink of an eye.
The asphalt itself erupted into burning dust.
The air became fire.
Even from an enormous distance, Naruto barely had time to react despite having already flown far from the impact site.
The armor's sensors exploded with warning messages before shutting down entirely from overload.
He turned toward the epicenter just as the shockwave took shape—
An invisible wall of pressure.
Dense.
Brutal.
Advancing faster than any storm.
It struck him head-on, crushing the air around him and ripping him from the sky as though he weighed nothing.
The armor desperately tried to compensate, to stabilize him...
But it was useless.
He was hurled backward at an absurd speed.
The world became a blur of fire, dust, and twisted steel.
He spun uncontrollably, battered by debris traveling nearly as fast as he was.
A chunk of concrete the size of a car slammed into his side, partially deforming the armor.
Internal alarms flashed crimson.
Inside the suit, the Uzumaki's body endured horrifying G-forces.
His bones groaned.
His skin flushed red.
The air was violently forced from his lungs.
And then...
Came the end.
His flight ended against what remained of a massive supermarket nearly twenty kilometers from ground zero.
The impact was brutal.
Devastating.
The armor absorbed part of the force...
But not all of it.
The metal buckled inward, collapsing at several critical points.
The already weakened building could no longer endure the strain.
It partially collapsed on top of him beneath an avalanche of steel and concrete.
Far away...
The fire continued to advance.
The mushroom cloud, rising nearly fourteen kilometers into the sky, continued to grow across the horizon like a living mountain, dragging dust, ash, and death behind it.
Most of Manhattan was no longer a city.
It was a burning corpse.
A shattered landscape consumed by unnatural silence beneath a poisoned sky.
And it wasn't an isolated incident.
Similar scenes were unfolding across different parts of the United States—a desperate measure by the government to eliminate not only ordinary infected, but also the "supers" hiding within those cities.
Beneath the rubble, Naruto's armor emitted only faint, intermittent flickers.
Systems failing.
Power levels plummeting.
Until...
Everything finally shut down.
The suit's blue lights died all at once.
Even the Arc Reactor went dark, plunging the interior into complete darkness.
Naruto remained unconscious, his eyes closed.
A thin trail of blood ran down his face, slowly evaporating from the lingering heat.
Within that darkness, the only sources of light were the narrow cracks between the rubble...
And the six glowing Infinity Stones exposed on his wrist.
As for the young blond...
It didn't seem as though he would be waking up anytime soon.
All the while, the wounds inflicted by the nuclear blast began healing at a remarkable speed, and Naruto's breathing gradually steadied within only a few minutes.
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