Metal sang and the island shook.
The Hulk was pure, blunt force — unstoppable when he hit with his whole body. Magneto was elegant cruelty: billions of flecks of metal, each the size of a fingernail, threading through flesh to tear organs and brain apart from the inside. Both were monsters. Both had one fatal blind spot.
Ryuuto watched from the rooftop—wind tangling his hair, sandwich long gone—hand locked in Susan's palm and Katie Dee's glove in his other. Up close the battlefield smelled of gasoline, torn steel and ozone. He loved the mess, he didn't love the stakes.
Magneto's plan was surgical. He sprayed metal micro-shards into the Hulk's path, hungry for any aperture that would let them crawl in. If the fragments reached the Hulk's interior, he could finish what brute force started: quietly, perfectly, irreversibly. The logic was lethal and cold.
The Hulk answered with a howl that rattled window glass. Steve Rogers hadn't hesitated. He stripped his shield from his back and launched it like a prayer, the disk singing through air toward Magneto.
Magneto laughed—sharp, amused. "Captain, remember: I control metal. Your precious shield is nothing more than my toy." He plucked the shield from the air and slotted it into a slab of concrete as if hanging art. Steve's face went tight; suddenly the man who'd been the symbol of hope looked very mortal.
A shard skittered into the Hulk's nostril. The giant sneezed and sprayed metal across the air, but he was already furious. He scooped up a block of concrete as a shield and began to swing like a living wrecking ball. Magneto's defensive walls buckled under single blows. The pair traded blows the way tectonic plates trade earthquakes.
Cars from the broken span began to float—Magneto's toys—and he launched them in a hail against the Hulk. Gasoline exploded; a dozen vehicles detonated in a single, volcanic bloom of smoke and fire. Magneto thought he'd won that exchange. He didn't see the Hulk slip under the shells, rip open the slab below and spring up from the sewers with the speed of a charge.
The impact sent Magneto flying. He vomited blood—and then retaliated by slinging burning car debris, a molten rain meant to stick to and sear the Hulk's skin. For a moment the green colossus screamed like any animal caught in flame. The heat blistered flesh; the Hulk tore the metal off, great hands ripping burning iron away. Magneto's control kept the hot shrapnel glued to him, but the Hulk's raw healing and momentum were monsters' answer to cunning.
Then the Hulk did the thing no amount of temperature or blade could avoid: he ran to the sea and leapt. For a breath, everyone wondered if he'd gone—only to watch the green mountain land back on the island, roaring and more furious than before.
From the rooftop, Ryuuto's mouth curled. "Classic," he muttered. "Two apex predators. Both right. Both wrong. Environment decides the winner." He turned half to Susan. "If a battlefield has no metal, Magneto is tied. If there's metal everywhere—Magneto wins. It's not about who's stronger in the abstract. Context is the scalpel."
Susan pouted. "Don't call me stupid."
"You're dumb but happy," Ryuuto said with mock solemnity. "So, what now? You gonna ask me what I'm planning next, or do you want me to guess?"
"You always guess food," Susan huffed, but her eyes were sharp. "You promised to destroy the injection."
Ryuuto's grin went cold-line. "No. Not just the injection." He scanned the island—the lab, the shipping bays, the racks of experimental vials—then looked up at Magneto and the Hulk as they tore the world into pieces.
"I'll destroy Devil Island."
As if answering a cue, Magneto screamed that first declaration into the wind: "Those who would erase us must die!" The Hulk answered with a sound that was the sound of iron bending. The battlefield had become a crucible. Ryuuto felt the hum in his bones—danger, yes, and opportunity.
He closed his fist. The plan was simple in its ugliness: hit the injection source so hard the government couldn't spin it into a "safe program." Let Magneto draw fire and make himself the headline; strike the lab in the confusion and burn the production lines to ash. If the press showed pictures of the institute wrecked and vials melted—if the program's physical manifest no longer existed—then the Department's cure would be a corpse.
Problem: Devil Island was falling apart around them. The Hulk's footsteps made the ground shudder; Magneto could turn every scrap into an arrow. It wasn't a raid. It was a war zone.
Ryuuto tightened his jaw. "Okay," he told Susan and Katie Dee. "We go now. Quiet, surgical, fast. We get in, we destroy, we get out. No heroics. No speeches. We do what they say we'll do—survive."
Behind him, the island's sky flamed and the sea answered. Somewhere below, the machines that made the injections hummed like a sleeping monster. Time to wake it—and gut it.
Hook: The island is collapsing into a fight between gods—and Ryuuto is about to cut the heart out of the machine that would erase his kind.