One moment Indra stood on the ridge above Uzumaki Island, Manda coiled below like a sleeping mountain. The next, his awareness slammed into a heavy, swollen body—green, hot, coated in sweat‑slick hide.
Bullets slammed into that chest and didn't stop.
A metallic roar tore through the air. Concrete shattered. Glass rained down in glittering arcs. The building across the street folded like wet paper, its upper floors collapsing into the street.
Indra's new body staggered under the impact but didn't go down. The bullets cratered the skin, flared white at the edges, then… flattened. The surface dimpled, then healed almost instantly.
"Keep firing!" a voice shouted in English.
"Target's still moving!"
Dozens of black‑suited figures in matching uniforms advanced, rifles and missile launchers digging into their shoulders. The air reeked of gunpowder, scorched metal, and something sour—chemical burn, maybe.
Above them, a banner flapped in the smoke: a shield, a star, the silhouettes of a person in a red, white, and blue motif, half‑obliterated by shrapnel.
"Don't fight. Don't fight. Let me out!" a voice screamed inside the skull.
It wasn't language. It was a burning sensation, pressure behind the eyes, a scream‑shaped thought shoving against Indra's control.
"Huh," Indra muttered—inside, not out. The voice had no face, no body, just noise and fear.
Around him, the air was a storm of bullets and smoke. The concrete walls were chewed through. The asphalt cracked under the weight of something heavy moving through it.
Indra tried to look through the eyes of this body, but it wasn't his eyes. This was a mind trapped in total darkness, a soft, trembling human scraped raw against the inside of his own skull.
He pushed past it.
Control slid over the green monolith like a second skin. The body exhaled, shoulders rolling forward, muscles tensing, then relaxing—just enough to stop roaring, but not enough to stop moving.
Without a word spoken to the others, Indra turned the Hulk away from the firing line.
Feet slammed through the last half‑standing wall. The concrete surrendered with a groan. The ground trembled as the green mass stepped out into a quieter side‑street—fewer gunmen, fewer missiles, just the wet clatter of debris settling.
Here, the air smelled less like gunpowder and more like wet concrete and gasoline. A distant siren wailed, then cut off.
Indra looked down at the hands—huge, knuckled, green.
"Hulk," he said silently, in the language of his old life. "Or something like him."
Memories surfaced, sharp and unbidden.
Before the coffin, before Uzushiogakure, before the war—he'd walked through his own consciousness, body sealed, muscles cooled, chakra lulled into dormancy. His astral form drifted through the void, tracing the edges of his own soul.
There, in that space, he had found green smoke.
Not air. Not mist. A dense, pulsing fog, humming with strange energy. It had felt like lightning trapped in color, hot and deep.
For hours—maybe more—he had sat in that smoke, his astral body soaking it in, letting the energy seep into the substance of his being. He hadn't known what it was, only that it felt compatible, like a second layer of chakra.
Now, in this body, the connection clicked into place.
"Gamma rays," he thought. "From some strange world. That green mass… that was the same energy, bleeding into my asleep form. And now, when something dragged me here, it found the vessel already saturated with it."
Inside the skull, the weak voice screamed again, panicked, directionless.
"Let me out! You don't belong here! This is my body!"
Indra ignored it.
He flexed the Hulk's fingers, feeling the weight of the mass, the rush of power in the bloodstream, the way muscles coiled like springs. The green skin rippled, catching the faint light from a broken streetlamp.
He turned his head toward the sound of engines, the distant roar of a chopper, the hammer‑like rhythm of boots.
"marvel world," he thought and walked towards the jungle, various helicopter followed him.