The quarry was no longer a quarry; it was a pressure cooker of raw Gamma energy. David Banner's mud-titan form was swelling, his limbs vibrating so violently that they began to blur. He had wanted the Hulk's power, but he hadn't realized that the Hulk's strength wasn't just a battery—it was a sun. And David's body was a paper cup trying to hold a supernova.
"No! It's too much! Stop it! Bruce, make it stop!" David's voice was no longer arrogant. It was the terrified scream of a man who had reached for God and caught a lightning bolt instead. His stone skin was cracking, leaking blinding green light from every fissure. He was becoming a living bomb, and he knew it.
Up on the hill, Huang Wen casually flicked a piece of fruit skin away. He saw the panicked look in Bruce's eyes and knew the boy had reached his limit. "I guess it's time to close the curtains," Huang Wen muttered. He stood up, his presence suddenly expanding, pressing down on the battlefield like a physical weight.
With a single step, he bypassed the physical distance, appearing directly between the Hulk and the exploding David Banner. He placed a hand on the Hulk's massive shoulder. "You did well, Bruce. Take a break. Let the big guy sleep."
A soft, muffled 'puff' echoed from deep underground—the sound of Huang Wen's internal force neutralizing the chaotic energy spill. The trembling earth suddenly went still. The Hulk let out a long, weary sigh, his massive frame shrinking back down until a very naked, very exhausted Bruce Banner lay on the cracked dirt. The 'Hulk' wasn't just tired; he was spent.
"Move out! Now!" General Ross's voice crackled through the comms of every tactical unit within five miles. "I want Banner secured and the target neutralized! Use everything we've got!"
But before the first Humvee could even roar to life, the ground groaned. A thin, crystalline stream of water hissed out of the cracks in the earth, swirling upward to form a translucent, liquid giant. It was David Banner. He had survived the meltdown by transforming into groundwater at the last possible second, but he was a wreck. His watery form was turbulent, full of debris and silt, his aura flickering like a dying lightbulb.
"Wait! Hold positions!" Ross shouted, his eyes glued to the satellite feed. He saw Huang Wen standing over Bruce, looking completely bored. He wanted to see what the 'Master' would do when faced with a water elemental.
Huang Wen looked at the shivering water giant and sighed. With a lazy wave of his hand, the scattered sunflower seed shells and half-eaten apples from his 'picnic' flew into the air. They didn't just fall; they zipped toward David, embedding themselves deep within his liquid chest.
"You're attacking me with... trash?" David's watery face twisted into a grotesque, liquid sneer. "Is this the best the 'Great Master' can do? I am the ocean now! I can absorb your life force just as easily as I took Bruce's! You're nothing but a snack!"
"You really love that word, don't you? 'Absorb'." Huang Wen smiled, and it wasn't a friendly one. He raised his left hand, his palm glowing with a faint, dual-colored light—one side a searing orange, the other a frost-bitten blue.
Ice Flame Palm.
He didn't strike the giant. He just flicked a thread of pure, condensed Frost True Qi into the air. The moment it touched David's watery surface, the reaction was instantaneous. A lattice of ice raced across David's body, freezing the liquid giant solid in less than three seconds.
"You think... ice... can stop me?" David's voice echoed hollowly from inside the frozen statue. "I'll just... absorb the cold... make myself harder..." Suddenly, his voice turned to a panicked squeak. "Wait... why can't I shift? Why can't I change back?!"
"Because I own that power now," Huang Wen said, his voice cold enough to match the ice. "The Ice Flame Palm gives me absolute dominion over the energy I manifest. You didn't just 'absorb' ice, David. You invited a landlord into your house, and I've just changed the locks."
Huang Wen turned his back on the frozen freak, looking down at Bruce, who was shivering in the dirt. "Bruce, he's your father. Technically, he's still in there. How do you want to play this? I can leave him as a garden ornament for the next thousand years, or I can finish it."
Bruce looked at the ice giant, his eyes full of a complicated, heartbreaking sadness. He saw the madness in his father's eyes, even through the frost. "He... he wanted to free me, in his own twisted way. I don't want to see him like this anymore. Compared to him, the Hulk is just a misunderstood kid. If you can't save him, Master... just let him go."
Huang Wen nodded. "Fair enough. Let's get out of here. Things are about to get a little loud."
"Goodbye, Father," Bruce whispered, his voice cracking.
Huang Wen grabbed Bruce's arm and the two of them vanished in a shimmer of light.
Inside the frozen giant, David Banner felt a sudden, rhythmic pulsing. It was coming from the sunflower seeds. The 'trash' Huang Wen had thrown earlier wasn't just debris; it was a delivery system. Huang Wen had infused each shell with a micro-burst of the Baozi Grenade skill, held in stasis by the ice.
The moment Huang Wen was gone, he released the mental trigger.
BOOM.
The suburbs of New York were rocked by a blast so clean and so powerful that it looked like a tactical nuke on the sensors, minus the radiation. A massive, perfect sphere of white light expanded from the quarry, vaporizing the ice, the water, and everything David Banner had become. When the dust settled, there was nothing left but a smoking crater fifty meters wide.
In the command center, the silence was absolute. The technicians were staring at their screens, their faces illuminated by the green glow of the data feeds.
"Report!" Ross roared, though his voice lacked its usual bite. He looked like a man who had just seen a ghost.
"Sir... the explosion... it was equivalent to a Tomahawk missile with a conventional warhead," the analyst stammered, his hands shaking as he typed. "The thermal signature peaked and vanished in milliseconds. There's no fallout. No residue. It was... it was pure kinetic and internal energy."
"You're telling me that kid just generated a cruise missile strike with a handful of sunflower seeds?" Ross whispered. He sat back in his chair, the weight of the situation finally hitting him. He had spent his whole life chasing a green monster, only to find a 'god' hiding in a Chinatown gym.
"We need that power," Ross breathed, his eyes narrowing. "Whatever it takes. Mobilize the heavy divisions. If we can't negotiate with him, we break him."
While the military was losing its mind, a different kind of conversation was happening in a high-rise office in Manhattan. Jack's father, a man with deep ties to the city's power structure, was staring at a private feed of the explosion. His phone buzzed. It was a secure line from the Department of Defense.
"What is he?" the voice on the other end asked—a voice Jack's father knew belonged to a very high-ranking official. "The explosion in the suburbs. Was it a bomb?"
"No," Jack's father replied, his voice grim. "It was a man. My son's teacher."
"Can he be controlled?"
"I asked Jack that same thing," the father said, looking out at the skyline. "His answer was simple: you don't control a hurricane; you just try to stay out of its path. He can go anywhere. He can destroy anything. And right now, he's training my son."
The official on the other end went silent. "If the military moves on him, will he retaliate?"
"If you anger him? He'll turn the Triskelion into a crater before you can finish the order. But Jack thinks there's a better way. He thinks we should show 'goodwill'. He wants to be the bridge."
Jack's father leaned back, a calculating look in his eyes. "Tell the General to stand down for now. If this power is going to be harnessed, it shouldn't be in the hands of the army—it should be in the hands of a family that knows how to show respect. Jack is our ticket. We support him, we support the school, and eventually... we inherit the strength."
"Go for it, Jack," the father whispered after hanging up. "Make yourself indispensable to that man. The family is behind you."