The afternoon sun hit the pavement of Upper Manhattan, but for Bruce Banner, the light felt different. No one was chasing him now , but still he felt an urge to hide, the abrupt change from constantly running, feeling like a timebomb and now just like that he was free, his body and mind still couldn't connect with this new reality. People were looking , doing double takes , smiling at him , an old man who turned out to be a veteran even shook his hands and apologized for everything he had to go through because of the military and thanked him for trying to keep people safe at his own expense.
It was a very weird feeling, he was always looked at like he was a monster, a walking destructive thing, yet now he was looked at with admiration and sympathy.
"I don't know what to feel Betty, this is all so unexpected".
"People now finally know the kind and honest soul you always were. You have suffered enough Bruce, now it's time for you to live." Betty said squeezing his hand.
Arthur stood by the entrance of a quiet park near Columbia University, watching Bruce and Betty walk toward him. They weren't scurrying through shadows or wearing low-profile caps. He could still see Bruce twitching and looking over his shoulder, expecting the other shoe to drop.
"You look like you're still waiting for a siren to go off," Arthur said as they approached, offering a hand.
Bruce took it, his grip slightly clammy. "It's a bit overwhelming, to be honest. I keep waiting for a tactical team to jump out of the bushes. Five years of running is a hard habit to break." He looked at Arthur with a tired, genuine expression. "I don't think I've properly said it yet, but... thank you. For everything."
"You don't owe me, Bruce. I just helped put your side of the truth in front the world and it saw that you were a human just like them, a man wronged by his own country yet trying to protect it in his own way." Arthur said. "But we're here. Are you sure about this? You're a free man now. You could just go find a quiet cabin and live your life."
Bruce glanced at Betty, his expression softening for a second before the anxiety returned. "I can't. Not as long as he's still in there. I don't want to be a 'person of interest' or a 'biological asset.' Being free from the military is one thing. Being free from him is another. I want a life where I don't have to monitor my pulse every time I get stuck in traffic. I want to be a scientist again. I want to have a family. I want to be just... a man."
"I understand Bruce, but are you sure Sterns is the answer, because I did some digging on my end and I think you should be prepared, you might find that he is not as idealistic as you think.You have your freedom. You could just walk away. Why risk a procedure that hasn't been vetted?"
Bruce sighed running his plan across his face,"I still need to try, this just might be the answer to me having a normal life again."
Arthur nodded, respecting the conviction. "Then let's go see Sterns. But keep your guard up. Just because you're free from the military doesn't mean the world has stopped being dangerous for you."
---
Sterns saw Bruce and others enter the lab, he didn't just walk to meet them; he practically vibrated into the room, his eyes wide and roaming over Bruce as if he were a rare artifact.
"Dr. Banner! And Dr. Ross!" Sterns chirped, his voice echoing in the cluttered lab. "Incredible. Truly incredible. I've been analyzing your data for months, but seeing the source material in the flesh..." He stopped, leaning in uncomfortably close to Bruce's face. "The cellular density, the vascular response... it's a marvel you're standing here at all."
"Mr Blue," Bruce said, stepping back slightly, his tone warm. "It's a pleasure to finally meet you... I'm glad you're enthusiastic, but we're here for the suppression. You're sure the antidote is ready?"
"Ready? It's more than ready," Sterns said, gesturing to a maze of centrifuges and glowing monitors. "Though, I must admit, your 'Mr. Green' data was a bit... conservative. I took the liberty of enhancing the delivery system."
Arthur watched Sterns closely. The man was brilliant, but there was a lack of tethering to his excitement. "Dr. Sterns," Arthur interjected. "The goal here is safety. Dr. Banner needs to know if it's safe for him and all of us because if this goes sideways, we probably won't survive what comes out next."
Sterns sputtered, finally acknowledging Arthur. "Safety is a relative term in the face of evolution, Mr. Steele."
"But don't worry. These will protect you from yourself." He said to bruce as he gestured to the heavy metal restraints on the exam table. "If you have a strong reaction, you can tell me if you think it's out of control....yeah that."
Bruce climbed onto the table, the metal cold against his back. He looked at the restraints, his breathing hitching. "Just... be careful, Samuel."
"It should work based on my calculations," Sterns muttered to himself, checking a glowing vial. "This will be a somewhat novel sensation. We have begun."
The dialysis machine hummed, mixing the antidote with Bruce's blood. "The antidote will only take hold once we've achieved a full reaction," Sterns explained.
Suddenly, Bruce's body arched. A low, guttural growl vibrated from his chest—the sound of the Hulk waking up. His skin began to darken, flickering into a bruised, sickly green.
A low, subterranean roar vibrated from Bruce's throat—a sound that wasn't human. His chest expanded, the muscle mass ballooning with such force that the leather paddings on the restraints began to smoke from the friction. One of the heavy metal bolts securing the table to the floor groaned and snapped, flying across the room.
Bruce's eyes flew open. They weren't brown anymore; they were vast, glowing pools of radioactive rage. His face began to distort, the jaw widening, teeth sharpening. It was a tug-of-war for a single soul. One moment, Bruce's human features were visible, pleading and agonized; the next, the heavy, slab-like brow of the Hulk forced its way forward.
"Wait, there's more!" Sterns shouted, leaning over the monitors in a trance of scientific ecstasy. "The gamma pulse is coming from the amygdala! I think the cells are absorbing the energy!"
The table shook as a massive, green-tinted hand—nearly twice the size of a human's—clenched into a fist, crushing the metal railing it was bolted to. The Hulk was almost through the skin, his roar now shaking the glass beakers on the shelves.
"Do it!" Bruce's voice tore through the monster's growl, a final, desperate command. "Do it... now!"
Sterns slammed the secondary lever. A concentrated surge of the primer and antidote hissed into the line.
For a heartbeat, the lab was silent. A blinding white light seemed to emanate from Bruce's very pores, and then, with a sound like a dying fire, the green retreated. The massive muscles deflated, the skin paled, and Bruce slumped onto the table. He was shivering, his clothes shredded, but he was human.
"This... oh my god," Sterns breathed, looking at the data. "That was the most extraordinary thing I have seen in my entire life."
Betty ran up to Bruce hugging him and checking his body for any sign of injuries, he was breathing heavily and was exhausted from the strain on his body.
Bruce sat up slowly, wiping a trail of blood from his nose. He looked at his hands, watching them tremble. "Did it... is he gone?"
"Maybe we neutralized the cells, or maybe we just suppressed the event," Sterns said, already distracted by the glowing vials of synthesized blood nearby. "Hard to know... none of our test subjects ever survived."
Bruce froze, his exhaustion replaced by a cold, sharp clarity. "Test subjects? What test subjects?"
Sterns led them to the back, revealing the cages. Arthur watched the horror dawn on Bruce's face as he saw the warped, distorted creatures—the price of Sterns's curiosity.
It's breathtaking, isn't it?" Sterns whispered, his reflection distorted in the glass of the canisters. "I took the liberty of... expanding on your samples, Bruce."
Bruce stepped forward, his face paling as he realized the sheer volume of material. "Samuel... how much did you make?"
"Enough to change everything!" Sterns swept his arms wide, gesturing to the banks of data flickering on nearby monitors. "Your blood is a miracle of adaptive resilience. I've spent months isolating the gamma-irradiated sequences. Dr. Ross's primer was the key—it allowed the cells to absorb the energy temporarily rather than being destroyed by it. But I went further."
He tapped on a button , bringing up a complex, rotating double-helix structure that was jagged and pulsing with green light.
"I managed to synthesize a more stable variants," Sterns continued, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial hum. "I've been testing it on subjects. I wanted to see how the cellular walls held up under concentrated pressure. Of course, without the primer, the results were... inconsistent. But the potential! We're talking about the end of cellular decay. Permanent limb regeneration. A total overhaul of the human immune system."
As Bruce and Sterns began their heated argument over the ethics of the research, Arthur moved with practiced, surgical precision. While Betty was distracted by the mutated primates in the cages, Arthur leaned against the primary server console.
With a slight flick of his sleeve, he palmed a specialized USB drive—an encrypted bridge—and slotted it into the rear port of Sterns's terminal.
"Astra, you're in. Mirror every byte of data. Research, donor history, synthesized sequences. Delete everything once we are gone leave nothing behind."
"Access granted, Arthur. Ghost-imaging complete. I am now monitoring his local network in real-time. I've also flagged a specific vial—batch 4-B—as the most concentrated variant."
Arthur shifted his weight, his coat shielding his movements. He reached out to a nearby cooling rack and plucked a small, sealed vial of the concentrated gamma-marrow. In a blur of motion, the vial vanished into his System Inventory.
He stepped away from the console just as Bruce turned back, his voice dropping to a low, "They're a death sentence.Destroy it. All of it. The data, the cultures, the synthesized marrow. If the military finds this—the world becomes a factory for more monsters and biological weapons."
"Destroy it?" Sterns looked at the vials as if they were his own children."This is evolution! These samples... they are the greatest biological discovery of the century. Bruce, this is a Nobel Prize!"
"It's a nightmare," Bruce said flatly. "Burn it, Samuel. Or the repercussions will be catastrophic."
Betty firmly stated, " Dr Sterns.. please do as he says, we have tried so hard to keep this data and knowledge from falling in the wrong hands. All of that will be for nothing if this is allowed to exist."
Sterns was unable to comprehend the gravity of their request."You don't understand Dr. Ross this can change the world... we will be considered pioneers for this research, it will advance the medical and energy fields by leaps and bounds, beyond what anyone has come close to. I can't just destroy this..it is very crucial data." he said bursting with excitement and obsessive energy.
Bruce began shaking his head in disappointment. "I can't be a part of this, I have just gained my freedom, destroy it Doctor for all of our sake."
Betty pulled Bruce toward the exit. Arthur stayed behind, stepping into Sterns's line of sight.
"He's giving you a choice, Dr Sterns," Arthur said quietly. "Walk away from the ego and your greed, this is bigger than that.
Sterns didn't look up. "This data... it's the key to perfect systemic adaptation. You can't ask me to bury the greatest biological breakthrough in human history."
Arthur moved. He didn't walk; he drifted into Sterns's periphery, a shadow that refused to be ignored. When he spoke, his voice was a cold, jagged rasp that seemed to vibrate in the scientist's very marrow.
"You aren't a pioneer, Samuel. You're a man standing in a room full of glass, throwing stones at things you don't understand."
Sterns finally turned, his eyes wide behind his glasses, but the retort died in his throat. Arthur was standing inches away, not touching him, yet Sterns felt the air in the room vanish. Arthur's gaze was a vast, void of any emotions.
"You've built a monument to your own ego out of another man's blood," Arthur said, his voice dropping to a pitch so low it was barely audible over the hum of the lab. "And you think your 'genius' makes you exempt from the fallout. It doesn't."
Sterns tried to step back, but he hit the edge of a cold steel table. "I have tenure. I have the backing of—"
"You have nothing," Arthur interrupted. The words were quiet, but they carried the weight of a closing grave. "If a single drop of this leaves this lab—if one person dies because you wanted your name in a journal—there won't be a hole deep enough for you to hide in. Your life, your work, and your name will be erased until there is nothing left but the silence of what you used to be."
Arthur leaned in, his shadow looming over the glowing green canisters, his eyes reflecting nothing.
"Don't look for a way out. There isn't one. The moment your actions have any sort of a fallout incident you will be judged."
Arthur straightened his cuffs, the terrifying pressure in the room dissipating as he transitioned back into the mask of the professional strategist.
"Choose your next move very carefully, Doctor. While you still have the luxury of a breath."
Sterns stood frozen, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He watched Arthur walk out, the door sealing with a final, metallic thud. For a long minute, the scientist couldn't move.
Astra had quietly started deleting the research the moment Arthur left the room.
---
Let's see if this changes anything, I don't think I can stop the birth of Abomination... but Sterns...how he acts next will decide if he should be left alive or not. A cold glint passed through Arthur's eyes as he walked out of the building.
Bruce and Betty were standing a few yards away. Bruce leaned against a soot-stained brick wall, staring at his hands as if seeing them for the first time. The adrenaline of the procedure was fading, replaced by a hollow, fragile peace.
Before the moment could settle, the air was ripped apart by the rhythmic, chest-thumping beat of heavy rotors. A black Pave Hawk helicopter roared over the rooftops, its searchlight cutting through the twilight and banking sharply toward the street. Dust and debris swirled in a violent vortex as the bird touched down directly in front of them, the landing skids sparking against the asphalt.
The side door slid open. General Thaddeus Ross stepped out, followed by a squad of MP escorts. He didn't come with his usual tactical bravado stopping to five feet from Bruce, his eyes scanning the scientist with a mixture of old habits and new, bitter restraint.
"Banner," Ross grunted. The name tasted like ash in his mouth.
"General," Bruce replied, his voice steady. He didn't shrink.
Betty stepped forward, her arms crossed. "Why are you here, Dad? You lost. The tribunal is over. Leave us alone."
Ross looked at his daughter, then at Arthur. "I'm not here to arrest anyone. Believe it or not, I'm here on orders from the Commander-in-Chief. President Ellis is in the city for a charity event tonight. He's at his private residence on the Upper East Side, and he wants to meet the man who stared down the Pentagon—and the doctor who survived the project. He wants this settled tonight, off the record. Consider it a finality to your 'free man' status."
Arthur adjusted his coat. "The President is a busy man, General. It would be rude to keep him waiting."
"Get in," Ross grunted.
As they climbed into the vibrating cabin, Arthur caught a glimpse of Emil Blonsky sitting in the shadows of the rear seats. The soldier didn't look at them; he was staring at the lab building they had just left. His skin was a sickly, translucent gray, and his pulse was visible in the frantic, jagged throb of his neck.
Arthur immediately took out his phone and started typing, 'Astra start re-routing all the Aegis Assets towards Harlem immediately and order all the units already present here to start the evacuation process right now. Harlem is about to become a battlefield for giants.' he ordered gravely as he saw that Blonsky didn't get on the helicopter with them still staring towards the lab.
"Done, all units re-routed and evacuation will begin in a few minutes..." Astra confirmed in his earpiece.
"It will work... right? We can contain the damage with this now..!!" Astra asked in a hopeful tone.
"I hope it does...I bloody hope it does !" Arthur muttered to himself.
---
A/N
Well that escalated quickly...We are on a cusp of the Clash of Titans. I am not going to keep you guys waiting, gonna drop 3 more chapters and conclude the Hulk Arc today itself as soon as I am done writing them. Be on a lookout for more.
And enjoy the ride coz it will be wild and unexpected. Well not the battle itself can't change much of that but...you will see.