Chapter 216: The People's Matthew
Destroyed.
Project Insight, the product of untold money and years of preparation, had just been formally wiped out.
Matthew's appearance had shattered every one of HYDRA's plans, and he'd done it with an iron hand, in the span of a few short seconds.
Inside SHIELD.
The HYDRA operatives who'd watched the three helicarriers get annihilated in an instant now looked utterly ashen.
Sitwell stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, staring blankly at the mechanical debris and bodies raining down like hail, his throat dry, his Adam's apple bobbing involuntarily.
From the very beginning, none of them had actually believed Matthew could take a nuclear blast head-on with his bare body.
That had only ever been secondhand rumor. No one had actually witnessed it themselves, so who was to say it hadn't been exaggerated or outright fabricated?
And even setting that aside, even if his body really had reached that level of durability, none of them had believed that a brute whose only advantage was raw physical strength could wipe out something they'd poured this much effort into.
But now... now they finally understood the truth.
The Matthew Lawrence standing in front of them was nothing like the mindless powerhouse they'd imagined...
The power running through his body meant he had nothing to fear from any conventional method of attack, and he could single-handedly inflict destruction on a massive scale!
In other words, at this point, Matthew Lawrence had earned a new title where human society as a whole was concerned: a walking natural disaster.
If that "disaster" happened to stay well-disposed toward humanity, fine.
But if that disaster ever had a bad day...
Then the whole sky over the entire world might just change color.
The thought sent cold sweat rolling down Sitwell's face in beads.
Right now, Sitwell, and honestly every single HYDRA operative in the room, found the same thought rising up in their minds without meaning to.
They needed to find some way to counter Matthew Lawrence.
If HYDRA gave up resisting now, then humanity really would be out of hope.
So...
Come on, HYDRA! You can do it!
Please, whatever you do, don't give up on finding a way to stand against Matthew Lawrence!
In this exact moment.
HYDRA felt an invisible weight settle onto its shoulders.
After all, HYDRA's ultimate goal had never actually been to destroy the world, but to bring about a "new world" under its own control.
And to realize that dream of absolute, totalitarian rule, Matthew Lawrence was an obstacle that simply had to be removed.
As long as Matthew Lawrence existed, human society, and HYDRA along with it, would remain under threat every single day.
The upheaval inside SHIELD had drawn the full attention of social media as well.
The footage of Matthew casually tearing three helicarriers apart with a wave of his hand began spreading like wildfire across every major platform!
The video swept across the internet like a brushfire...
Within a matter of minutes, the view count blew past ten million, and the comment section erupted into chaos.
"What in the actual—?! Is that something a human being can even do?"
"Tore three carrier-class helicarriers apart with his bare hands?! At this point God showing up in person wouldn't top that!"
"Look at his face, not even a hint of effort. The whole thing looked like he was taking apart a toy!"
"Moses parting the Red Sea in the Bible was probably around this tier, honestly..."
"Not to be dramatic, but my devout grandmother watched this video and dropped to her knees right in front of the screen, insisting it was a genuine act of God!"
"If there's really a God in this world, he's wearing Matthew Lawrence's face!"
"Long live Matthew Lawrence!!"
Waves of astonishment poured in, nearly drowning out the comment section entirely.
But underneath all that awe and worship, another kind of voice began quietly taking root.
"Hey, hold on, hold on a second! You people are all busy being blown away by how powerful he is... doesn't that scare any of you?"
That comment landed like a stone dropped into a boiling pan of oil.
"The person above me is right!"
"He used that kind of power against a helicarrier today. What about tomorrow?"
"What if one day he's in a bad mood, or someone pisses him off, and he decides to use the same kind of power on a city instead?"
Another commenter chimed in in agreement. "A single person holding power on this level is a threat, full stop."
"No checks. No restraints. That means his will is the law!"
"Are we all just kneeling right now in front of something that could wipe us out whenever it feels like it?"
"Ask yourselves honestly, would you actually be willing to live in the same city as someone like that?"
Fear has always been the fastest-spreading emotion there is.
Within a matter of seconds, the wave of concern spread out from the corners of the discussion and claimed nearly half the comment section...
But the counterattack came even faster.
"Here we go again. Every single time someone does something good, there's always a crowd underneath going 'but what if he turns evil someday.' Doesn't that get exhausting?"
"Are you conspiracy theorists blind, or did some homeless guy on the street eat your conscience?"
"Do you people seriously not know what Matthew Lawrence has actually done?"
"I'd like to ask, who exactly rolled out the low-interest student loan program? Who paid out of pocket for free treatment for disabled people? Who kept the alien invasion out of the city in the first place?"
"And Hell's Kitchen, the neighborhood with the highest crime rate in the whole city, how exactly did it turn into the peaceful, thriving place it is now?"
"If he actually wanted to destroy the world, you think he'd have waited this long? He'd have done it already!"
"Some of you have just got something dark rotting inside you and assume the whole world's as dark as you are."
"The man's done all this good and you can't even see it, but you'll dig up some baseless 'what if' scenario and turn it into a whole essay... don't you people find yourselves disgusting?"
"And honestly, if Matthew ever did decide to destroy the world someday, it'd only be because the world screwed him over first."
"Eat with the bowl in your hands, curse your mother the second you set it down. That's exactly what you people are doing."
The two sides went at each other in the comments, the whole thing turning into an all-out war.
Some internet sleuths laid out, item by item, every charitable project Matthew had been involved in over the years, with a level of detail that could've passed for a statistical report.
Others dug up historical case studies of one supervillain after another, arguing that absolute power inevitably leads to absolute corruption.
Words became weapons, likes and dislikes rising and falling in waves, the intensity of the fighting rivaling what felt like a third world war...
Back and forth it went, the topic's popularity climbing higher and higher with every exchange.
No one could say how much time passed, but the argument still hadn't produced a winner.
The debate online was still raging.
And on the other side of the world, an entirely different kind of battle, one without a single shot fired, had already begun.
The dust from SHIELD had barely settled before a press conference request landed directly on Ada and Eleanor's desks, demanding an exclusive interview with Matthew.
After all, reporters were like sharks by nature. The moment they caught even a whiff of blood in the water, they came swarming in.
Inside the office.
Listening to Ada explain the press request, Matthew rubbed his temples, a headache visibly setting in.
"Figures. Compared to how effortlessly Tony handles reporters, I'm going to have a much harder time with this..."
"Guess I really do need to sit down with Tony and pick up some pointers on how to deal with these people."
Beside him, hearing what Matthew had said, Ada's mouth curled into a faint, teasing smile. "I've got even less experience than Tony Stark does, but I might still be able to give you a tip or two on handling them."
"Oh?" Matthew turned his head to look at Ada.
He hadn't expected Ada to have any experience dealing with reporters at all.
He was fairly sure she disliked dealing with the press just as much as he did.
Seeing that Matthew was genuinely asking for her input, Ada laughed. "Simple."
"Just treat the whole crowd like a field of radishes and cabbage. Tomatoes work too. I personally prefer tomatoes."
"..."
"That advice was exactly as useless as saying nothing at all."
Matthew drew a slow breath and rose to his feet. "If those reporters want to schedule me, then let's schedule it."
"Just make it my choice of location and time."
"Okay~" Ada gave a playful thumbs-up.
"So, boss, where do you want to hold it?"
"The SHIELD ruins." Matthew said it flatly. "I think that spot suits this particular press conference better."
"As for the time..."
"Seven o'clock this evening."
Seven o'clock arrived quickly.
Eager to get a taste of this fresh story before anyone else, none of the news outlets dared cut it close, and every one of them arrived at the SHIELD ruins well ahead of schedule.
By that point, the wreckage was crowded with excavators and trucks specifically brought in to haul off the metal debris.
For the press conference itself, staff had cleared a designated area within the wreckage.
The reporters, weighed down with their cameras and long-range lenses, fell into complete silence at the sight of agents constantly moving through the ruins around them.
The tension in the air was thick enough that nobody dared even breathe too loudly, terrified of drawing SHIELD's special brand of attention.
Some amount of time later.
A row of black sedans rolled slowly into the ruins.
Then the doors opened.
Matthew stepped out first.
Followed by Nick Fury, Tony Stark, and Steve and the others.
The instant the reporters saw the real thing standing in front of them, their camera flashes went off in a frenzy, as if something had short-circuited.
Having gotten a bit of coaching from Tony beforehand, Matthew kept a polite smile fixed on his face despite the storm of flashing lights, showing none of the cold, brutal edge he'd had earlier while tearing the helicarriers apart with his bare hands.
Beside him, Tony Stark stood with his arms crossed, the symbiote armor retracted back to his neckline, his expression thoroughly resigned.
Behind them, seated in a wheelchair, Nick Fury was still dressed in his usual black trench coat, though the bandages wrapped around him were impossible to miss.
Steve stood silently behind Fury, pushing his wheelchair.
From the way the two of them kept exchanging glances, it wasn't hard to tell that, sometime during all of this, Steve and Fury had had some kind of conversation about whether SHIELD should even continue to exist.
Amid the flashing lights, Matthew and the others made their way to the center of the open ground.
Looking at the microphone within arm's reach, he slowly picked it up, his eyes sweeping across the crowd.
As his gaze moved, the reporters' necks all instinctively shrank down a little.
Although Matthew had always come across as gentle and mild-mannered in public, after seeing the footage of him tearing a helicarrier apart with his bare hands, everyone present had developed a healthy fear of this god walking among mortals.
His gaze swept over the whole crowd once.
Matthew smiled slightly, speaking as if trying to lighten the mood. "Weren't you all supposed to be interviewing me? What, do you want me to ask myself the questions?"
The line actually did seem to break the tension, and the crowd, silent until then, suddenly stirred to life.
A flood of questions came pouring in all at once, enough to leave anyone listening thoroughly overwhelmed.
Behind Matthew, Tony took in the scene, pulled a face, and murmured a joke to him under his breath. "This is louder than twenty thousand ducks."
"...Tell me about it." Matthew tilted his head, shrugging, resigned.
In the middle of the chaos, a male reporter in gold-rimmed glasses forced his way to the front of the crowd, thrusting his microphone straight at Matthew, his voice loud enough to cut through everyone else's.
"Mr. Lawrence! Mr. Lawrence!"
"I'm a reporter with the Daily Bugle!"
"I have a question I'd like to ask you!"
The Daily Bugle...
Matthew looked over at the man in gold-rimmed glasses.
Someone from Peter Parker's old stomping grounds, huh.
Since there was a bit of a connection there, Matthew gave him a nod, then raised a hand to quiet the crowd.
Following his gesture, the scene fell quiet almost immediately.
"You seem to be the most eager one here, so go ahead. You get the first question."
Matthew looked at the reporter.
Flattered and slightly stunned, the reporter finally worked up the nerve to speak. "Mr. Lawrence. This might come across as a bit forward, but I have to ask. Given how freely you used your abilities over the city earlier, weren't you worried at all about civilian casualties?"
"A power discharge on that scale, even a single piece of debris landing in a residential area could have been catastrophic!"
"While you were putting on that... that display, did you give any thought at all to the safety of ordinary citizens?"
The moment the question left his mouth, the crowd went dead silent for half a second.
Every eye in the place locked onto Matthew, cameras zooming in as close as they could get, not willing to miss even the faintest shift in his expression.
Matthew didn't rush to answer.
Instead, he looked at the reporter thoughtfully for a moment.
His gaze was remarkably calm.
There was no anger in it, no offense taken, no hint of nerves at having every camera trained on him.
That calm alone was enough to make the reporter swallow hard, involuntarily.
"Actually, you brought up two separate questions just now." Matthew spoke slowly, his voice neither loud nor soft, yet carrying clearly to every ear in the crowd.
"First, about civilian casualties."
"Second, about whether I gave any thought to the safety of the public."
He raised a finger and pointed toward the wreckage still smoking in the distance.
"Before you asked that question, did you do any research into what's actually sitting in those ruins right now?"
The reporter froze for a second, and before he could say anything, Matthew answered for him.
"This is SHIELD."
"Or more precisely, a SHIELD that had been infiltrated by another terrorist organization. HYDRA."
"In the past few hours, three fully armed helicarriers rose up from this very site."
"Each one of those carriers was equipped with thousands of precision targeting weapon systems, capable of eliminating more than two thousand targets per minute with total accuracy."
His eyes swept across every reporter present, his voice still perfectly calm.
"That program was called Project Insight."
"Its targets weren't terrorists. They weren't the military installations of some hostile nation. They were every single one of you standing here."
"They might have been your neighbors. They might have been your own families, and every ordinary civilian HYDRA had flagged as a 'potential threat.'"
The moment he said it, a low murmur of unrest broke out through the crowd.
In his wheelchair, Fury, looking a little embarrassed, raised a hand to cover his face.
It clearly didn't feel good, having your own dirty laundry aired out in public like this.
Elsewhere, at the podium, Matthew kept going. "Of course, you might not fully grasp what Project Insight actually meant in practice."
"To put it plainly, if those three carriers had completed their ascent and reached their designated orbits, more than twenty million people worldwide would have been wiped off the map within the next seventy-two hours."
"Twenty million people. That's not a statistic. Those are real, living people."
"That's the office worker standing in line ahead of you at the coffee shop this morning. That's the old woman at the corner store downstairs who always gives you a little extra change. That's your kid's homeroom teacher."
"So now, I'd like you to tell me..."
"Before you asked me whether a falling piece of debris might hit a civilian, did you stop to consider the twenty million civilians who nearly got wiped off the map entirely?"
The reporter in the gold-rimmed glasses opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
Matthew didn't press the point any further.
He shifted his gaze away from the man and toward the rest of the microphones and cameras, as if the sharp question a moment ago had just been a minor, forgettable footnote.
"I know you all have plenty more questions."
"Since I'm in a decent mood today, feel free to get them all out at once."
The words had barely left his mouth.
Another reporter jumped in immediately, firing off the second question at a rapid clip. "Mr. Lawrence! You mentioned that SHIELD had been infiltrated by HYDRA... do you have any evidence to support that claim?"
"SHIELD is an internationally recognized security organization, after all. Isn't an accusation like that a little extreme?"
Matthew turned his head, looking over at Nick Fury beside him.
"...I think this one would be better answered by him."
With that, Fury turned his wheelchair with both hands, rolling slightly forward.
His one good eye swept across every camera in the crowd, his expression as unreadable as ever.
"I'm Nick Fury, Director of SHIELD."
"In my capacity as Director, I am now formally confirming to the public..."
"Over the past forty-eight hours, we successfully exposed and dismantled a HYDRA cell that had been embedded inside SHIELD for decades."
"Former senior SHIELD official Alexander Pierce has been confirmed as a senior member of HYDRA."
"The program he oversaw, Project Insight, was presented publicly as a preventive security measure. In reality, it was a mass elimination operation targeting every civilian HYDRA judged to be a potential threat to its rule."
"We have a complete chain of evidence, including Pierce's communications with HYDRA, the actual target list for Project Insight, and a large volume of internal documentation."
"This material will be released to the public in stages over the coming days."
Fury's words landed like a bomb going off among the reporters.
If Matthew's account a moment ago had left the crowd only half-convinced, then hearing it confirmed directly from the mouth of SHIELD's own Director left no room left for doubt.
Even so, the reporters' sharp instincts weren't about to let up.
A third question followed immediately, still aimed at Matthew.
"Mr. Lawrence, even accepting that everything you and Director Fury have said is true, the level of power you just demonstrated is still beyond anything anyone could have imagined."
"Based on the footage, it doesn't even look like you were using your full strength when you destroyed those three helicarriers."
"That... um... that near-godlike level of power, do you consider it, in and of itself, a potential threat to society?"
The moment the question landed, the entire crowd went still.
Every other reporter turned to look at the one who'd asked it, and every single one of them was thinking the exact same thing: bro, you've got some nerve.
Faced with a question that sharp, that pointed, Matthew smiled instead.
The smile came and went in an instant.
He looked at the reporter. "What's your name?"
"...Lloyd." Lloyd gave his name, uneasy.
Hearing it, Matthew nodded. "Lloyd, do you know what the single biggest difference is between humans and animals?"
Caught off guard by the sudden question, the reporter froze for a second, then shook his head without thinking.
"Humans ask why."
"When animals face the unknown, all they can do is fear it, run from it, respond to it with the most primitive instincts available to them."
"But people are different..."
"People think. People judge."
He lifted his chin slightly, his gaze passing over the crowd and settling on the wreckage in the distance, glowing gold in the setting sun.
"I've lived in New York for a long time now. Everything I've done for this city, every bit of it, has left a mark somewhere."
"So go ahead. Look it up. Ask around. Dig through every old news story you've tossed into some forgotten corner."
"And if, after all of that, you still think I'm a potential threat that needs to be watched..."
"Then come ask me that question again."
"And when you do, I'll give it a real answer."
The words settled, and the crowd fell into a brief silence.
The camera flashes kept going, but the reporters' questions had dried up entirely.
Thinking back over everything Matthew had actually done, the crowd fell into another round of quiet.
After that question, Matthew didn't linger any longer, handing the rest of the press conference over to Nick Fury and Tony.
As far as he was concerned, the questions that were actually his to answer had already been asked.
What came next was someone else's mess to clean up.
After all...
Fury still had one more thing to announce publicly.
SHIELD was being dissolved.
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