The desert air around Leander didn't just vibrate; it seemed to warp. The unfurling of the Nirvana Golden Wings brought with it a shift in the local reality. Streaks of purplish-gold phantoms began to dance in the periphery of his vision, and the space directly surrounding his body became ethereal, shimmering like a desert mirage but with the cold, hard weight of divine metal.
Leander hovered there, his expression serene. He made a conscious choice to cease the brutal, bone-shattering metal strikes. The jagged spears and constricting rebar that had been tormenting the Abomination fell away, clattering onto the sand as inert scrap.
Covered in a thousand lacerations and missing an entire arm from the shoulder down due to Leander's transmutation beams, the Abomination was a sight of pure biological horror. But the creature wasn't done. Within seconds, his cells began a frantic, desperate overdrive. The external wounds sealed with a wet, slurping sound. Beneath the scarlet surface, flesh and blood intertwined like a nest of writhing snakes, and fragmented bone shards surged forward from his marrow to form a new foundation for a limb.
It was a miracle of evolution. At this rate, a fully functional, six-meter-long arm would have regrown in less than half an hour.
But the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.
Before Leander could even initiate his next move, the six-meter-tall blood-red colossus began to fail. Like a massive inflatable castle losing its air supply, the Abomination's frame rapidly flattened. The scarlet hue drained away, reverting to that sickly, earthy yellow. He shrank back down to four meters, his musculature sagging. The arm that had just begun its frantic regrowth suddenly withered, the half-formed bone snapping under its own weight as the limb hung limp and useless.
The Abomination collapsed into the sand, his chest heaving. His eyes were vacant, staring up at the vast, uncaring desert sky. He looked less like a monster and more like a fresh corpse waiting for the vultures. He clearly didn't understand why his "Red State" had flickered out in a mere three minutes when it should have carried him through a half-hour of slaughter.
Leander descended slowly, his boots touching the sand with a soft crunch. He looked at the broken titan and felt a strange pang of disappointment.
"Hey, Emil," Leander called out, his voice echoing in the silence. "That was it? You're a bit fast on the draw, aren't you?"
He had truly intended to test the literal edge of his Nirvana Wings—to see if the illusory feathers could slice through the most durable hide on the planet. But the biological collapse of his opponent had robbed him of the opportunity.
Despite the tactical glasses in his pocket vibrating with an insistent, rhythmic warning about satellite surveillance, Leander walked closer. He wanted a final look at the man who had been his greatest hurdle. Even the Chimera units he'd faced with Tony felt like clockwork toys compared to the raw, visceral threat of the Abomination.
As Leander reached the edge of the monster's shadow, the "motionless" Abomination suddenly erupted with the last of his stored energy.
A massive, clawed hand shot upward from the sand, moving with a speed that defied his exhausted state. It clamped firmly around Leander's neck. In that final, desperate surge, the Abomination's body swelled one last time, his eyes burning with a sickly, emerald-green light.
Emil Blonsky grinned, his fangs bared in a mask of pure malice. This was his "soldier's trap"—the feigned death, the last-ditch ambush.
"I... got you!!" Blonsky wheezed, his voice a rattle of broken glass. "I'm going to... bite you... into a pulp!!"
His massive fingers constricted, intending to pop Leander's head off like a grape and cast it into his waiting maw.
However, the Abomination didn't realize he was gripping a phantom. On the surface of Leander's skin, a three-centimeter layer of faint, golden light flickered imperceptibly. This wasn't just armor; it was a gravitational anchor, locking Leander's body to the very tectonic plate beneath them.
Blonsky's muscles bulged until they threatened to tear from the bone. He pulled. He twisted. He roared with the effort of trying to lift a hundred-pound boy, but it was like trying to lift the entire planet. He couldn't even budge Leander's chin.
Leander looked up at the giant hand, his expression bored. He reached up with his relatively tiny hands and grabbed two of the Abomination's massive fingers. He gave them a sharp tug, trying to bend them back.
He frowned. Even with his strength stat at twenty-four, he couldn't break the fingers of a six-meter-tier monster through raw muscle alone.
"Fine," Leander sighed. "Let's do this the hard way."
The Nirvana Wings, which had dimmed for a moment, suddenly flared into a blinding brilliance. The purplish-gold phantom light surged forward, trailing dreamy streams of energy that looked like liquid starlight.
Leander took a single step back, and as he did, he didn't just pull away—he brought the Abomination's entire forearm down with him. The monster stared, stunned, looking at his arm as if he couldn't quite feel the sensation of it being severed.
Leander didn't hesitate any longer. The golden light on his body intensified until he looked like a miniature sun dropped into the desert. The wings behind him began to vibrate at a frequency that hummed in the bones of anyone within a mile.
Following the limits of his thought, Leander moved.
He became a golden blur, spinning around the Abomination in a dizzying, dreamy dance. To a spectator, it would have looked like a sphere of golden ribbons wrapping around a statue. But each ribbon was a wing-blade, vibrating with enough frequency to split atoms.
Against this massive physique, a single cut was difficult. But Leander wasn't making one cut. He was unleashing dozens of wing-blades every second, carving through the "unbreakable" hide, the hyper-dense muscle, and the reinforced bone with the clinical precision of a diamond-tipped saw.
The Abomination stood motionless. Whether he was too stunned to move or had simply accepted his fate, he didn't even attempt to strike back. He just stood there as the golden light finished its work.
Leander came to a halt back in his original position. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his tactical glasses, and slid them onto his face.
"Mr. Hayes," Jarvis's voice was urgent, the HUD flashing a violent, pulsing red. "The military satellite has completed its recalibration. It is beginning a high-resolution sweep of the sector. Mr. Stark has blocked my attempt to override their system—he insists you learn to manage your own operational security. If you do not wish to be the lead story on every news network, I suggest you hide in the cloud layer immediately."
"I hear you, Jarvis. Just give me twenty seconds to finish the chores."
Leander sat down on a piece of rubble in front of the Abomination and gave the monster's shin a playful kick.
The effect was instantaneous. The Abomination's body, which had appeared intact, suddenly began to leak streaks of golden light from within. The internal structural integrity of the giant had been completely dismantled.
The next moment, the massive physique shattered. It didn't bleed; it simply divided into dozens of perfectly sliced segments that fell to the ground in a heap.
As Leander prepared to metallize the remains, the biological recoil of death caused the pieces to shrink. The massive segments withered, losing their "enhanced" volume until they were just a pile of human-sized remains.
It was Emil Blonsky. Or at least, the pieces of him.
Leander didn't want S.H.I.E.L.D. or the military finding so much as a strand of DNA to experiment on. His eyes flared with a dazzling, molten gold radiance. He sustained the beam for three full seconds, the heat and transmutation energy turning the organic remains into a small pile of inert, gray metal blocks.
Leander opened his clenched fist toward the pile. The blocks crumbled into a fine, metallic residue that the desert wind immediately began to catch.
The dust of the Javier base finally began to settle. The small metal beads on the ground stopped rolling.
By the time the satellite lens achieved focus on the crater, Leander Hayes was gone, leaving nothing behind but a flattened landscape of ruins and a faint, golden shimmer in the air.
In the secure "War Room" at S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ, Nick Fury stood perfectly still. On the wall-sized monitors, the live satellite feed finally cleared.
The council members, still connected via their shadowed links, were silent. They were looking at a wasteland. The Javier base, a multi-billion dollar investment in the future of warfare, was a total loss. Surface buildings were gone; the underground levels were a compressed sandwich of concrete and steel. It looked as if the site had been subjected to a saturation bombing by a carrier strike group, followed by a targeted bunker-buster.
"Our recovery teams will be on-site in thirteen minutes," Fury said, his voice devoid of emotion. "We will find out what happened to the asset."
"We expect a full report, Nick," a council member said, the connection light flickering. "The loss of the base is... acceptable, if the threat has been neutralized. But if that monster is loose in the desert, this becomes a global crisis."
"And immediately initiate Phase One of the secondary experiment," another voice added. "We clearly need a countermeasure that doesn't rely on 'volunteers' like Blonsky."
The screens went black as the council members disconnected.
Fury turned and walked out of the room, his coat billowing behind him. He wasn't thinking about Blonsky. He was thinking about the New Mexico incident and the growing list of "gifted" individuals who could flatten a military base on a whim.
He pressed a button on his secure earpiece. "This is Director Fury. Authorize the immediate commencement of the Tesseract research project. Cosmic Cube Phase One is now active. We're out of time to play catch-up."
Outside, the sun was setting over the Atlantic, but for Nick Fury, the world was only getting darker.