Half a month later, in a stretch of wasteland on the outskirts of Louisiana.
Carol hovered three meters above the ground, eyes closed. She extended both hands, palms facing each other. Between them, a fist-sized sphere of highly condensed golden energy slowly rotated.
It was no longer a violent mass of blazing light, but a nearly perfect sphere. Across its surface flowed patterns like molten gold, while within, nebula-like structures flickered in cycles of birth and extinction. This tiny "planet," under her control, was as quiet and composed as a piece of art.
Monica sat on a large rock not far away, chin propped in her hands, watching with rapt fascination. Maria leaned against a pickup truck, her eyes filled with relief—and a worry she couldn't quite hide.
Carol slowly spread her hands apart. The energy sphere began orbiting her body along a stable elliptical path.
One circle. Two circles…
On the third, her brow twitched slightly. A fleeting memory surfaced—of flying back at the Air Force Academy. Her emotions wavered, just a little.
That tiny fluctuation instantly shattered the perfect balance.
The energy sphere's orbit destabilized. It shook violently, the golden patterns on its surface turning chaotic. In the next instant, like a derailed comet trailing a long tail of flame, it screamed toward a distant hill.
"Damn it!" Carol cursed under her breath and snapped her eyes open, instinctively moving to chase it.
But it was already too late.
The energy sphere was about to slam into the hillside, triggering an explosion on par with a heavy aerial bomb—when Levi, who had been standing off to the side like none of this concerned him, finally moved.
He didn't even look at the runaway energy sphere.
He lazily raised his right hand in its direction, brought his index and middle fingers together, and lightly swiped through the air.
It was as if he were using an eraser to wipe away a pencil mark on paper.
In front of him, space itself distorted—barely visible to the naked eye, like heat haze rising off asphalt on a summer afternoon. The distortion lasted only an instant, like an invisible mouth opening… then closing.
The energy sphere—powerful enough to level a hill—vanished.
No explosion.
No sound.
No light.
It was simply… gone.
A few seconds later, far beyond the atmosphere tens of thousands of meters above, a thin beam of golden light flashed briefly, shooting off into the depths of space without alerting anyone.
Carol stared, dumbfounded, her mouth hanging open. She knew Levi was strong—but this effortless disregard for the very laws of energy was still far beyond her imagination.
"I told you," Levi said calmly, slipping his hand back into his pocket, his tone as casual as if he were critiquing a dish, "your problem isn't how much power you have."
"It's that you don't understand what you're actually using."
He walked over to Carol and glanced up at the sky, where faint traces remained of clouds pierced by energy.
"You think what you gained was the power of a lightspeed engine?" Levi asked.
"Wasn't it?" Carol replied uncertainly.
Seeing her confusion, Levi decided to give her a crash course in his own brand of cosmic physics.
"The core of that engine—you later learned it was called the Tesseract, right? That thing isn't an energy source. It's the manifestation of a concept. It's the source code of the universe's space dimension, compressed into a small cube. It is the embodiment of spatial law."
He paused, giving her a moment to digest that.
"My path is to understand and rewrite the rules. Like just now—I didn't block your energy with greater force. I simply rewrote a tiny patch of spatial rules along its trajectory, opened a back door to outer space, and let it fly out on its own."
"And your path," Levi continued, "is to push pure energy to its absolute limit. Your body right now is a perfect energy converter—a walking star. You don't need to understand complex rules. You just need to become power itself."
Carol nodded, half-understanding.
"Then what should I do?"
"Keep training," Levi replied bluntly.
"Train control until it's as instinctive as breathing or blinking. When you can play cards with Monica while making a hundred energy butterflies fly around you—and every single one flaps its wings at a different frequency—then you can call yourself barely qualified."
Carol's mouth twitched. That requirement was downright inhumane.
"Until you've completely made this power part of your body," Levi warned at last, "don't even think about going after the Kree. Otherwise, you won't even know how you died."
With that, he stopped paying attention to her and turned toward the pickup truck.
---
The following days marked a new phase in Carol's training.
She stopped chasing sheer power output and scale, instead grinding away at the borderline-insane level of fine control Levi demanded.
She tried running while maintaining a stable light sphere at her fingertip. She tried chatting with Maria while using energy to heat Monica's milk to exactly 37.5 degrees Celsius.
The process was full of failure and frustration. She nearly set the house on fire more than once, and on one memorable occasion, she melted Maria's favorite coffee machine—earning herself an entire day of icy glares.
Levi, meanwhile, fully embraced the role of hands-off supervisor.
Most of the time, he locked himself in his room, glued to the humming computer like a textbook internet addict.
Only when Carol hit a bottleneck—or when her energy threatened to spiral out of control—would he appear like a ghost, offer a couple of cold, precise pointers or casually defuse a looming disaster, then drift away again, deeply hiding his contributions.
He was busy.
Busy laying the foundation for his future business empire.
Using Shapeshift Mimicry, he fabricated over a dozen new identities scattered across the globe in just half a month.
In Frankfurt, he was Hans Schmidt, a fifty-something German investment consultant—rigid, meticulous, gold-rimmed glasses, always in a perfectly pressed suit. This identity handled offshore companies and European bank accounts.
In Tokyo, he was Takahashi Kenichi, a scruffy tech nerd in his early twenties, hair perpetually messy, wearing anime T-shirts and obsessing over emerging internet technologies. This identity tracked and analyzed Asian tech trends.
In London, he was Arthur Pendragon, a retired banker—elegant, gentlemanly, unfailingly punctual for afternoon tea at three. This persona leveraged its old-school credibility to conduct large-scale capital operations that required deep trust.
Like a master puppeteer, Levi sat in an unremarkable house in Louisiana, manipulating these global "avatars" through a single thin internet connection, weaving an enormous invisible web of capital.
The hundred-thousand-plus dollars he'd "borrowed" from Butcher's casino were broken up, transferred, exchanged, and laundered through dozens of accounts—like a stream flowing into the sea—until every trace was clean. From there, the money re-emerged from offshore tax havens under the guise of angel investments, precisely injected into companies Levi knew would soar in the future.
Yahoo. Google.
These names—still obscure, still struggling for their next funding round—quietly gained their earliest and most mysterious shareholder.
Levi wasn't greedy. He took small stakes in each company, usually under one percent. He didn't want control—he wanted entry tickets, long-term seats at the table of future technological dividends.
Money, to him now, was just a number. A tool.
His real goal was to plant his hooks early in the world's top technological fields. He needed a massive secular empire—one that could provide information, technology, resources, and cover. When future crises arrived, the Avengers would handle the fighting in the spotlight, while he ensured the rear lines were solid—making sure human civilization's ship wouldn't sink just because gods decided to throw punches.
---
That afternoon, Levi had just opened a new anonymous account at a Swiss bank under the identity Hans Schmidt, preparing to move funds for the next phase.
He stretched, stood up from the computer, and headed for the kitchen to grab a drink.
In the living room, Carol sat cross-legged on the carpet. Dozens of golden energy butterflies of varying sizes fluttered around her and Monica, while Maria watched with a smile as they played.
Everything looked peaceful. Perfect.
A rare smile tugged at the corner of Levi's mouth.
Then—
It froze.
He abruptly turned his head, staring toward the forest to the northwest.
He heard nothing. Saw nothing.
But his perception—reinforced by spatial laws—clearly caught a faint ripple that didn't belong to this world.
It felt like someone pressing a finger from behind a smooth sheet of paper, creating a tiny bulge.
Something was entering this space through abnormal means.
Not teleportation. More like… optical and spatial camouflage being disengaged.
"What is it?" Carol asked immediately, sensing the change. She waved her hand, and the energy butterflies vanished into the air.
Maria stood up, tense.
"We have guests," Levi said calmly, his eyes sharpening.
"Uninvited ones."
As his words fell, the air at the edge of the northwestern forest rippled like water. A strangely shaped, dark-green ship—about a dozen meters long—silently emerged from invisibility, hovering a few meters above the ground.
The hatch slid open. A tall, thin man wearing a jacket and jeans stepped out. He looked utterly ordinary—like a random middle-aged American.
But he wasn't.
Because Levi could see the completely different life signature surging beneath that human skin.
The man showed no hostility. He simply stood beneath the ship, gazing at the house from afar, his eyes filled with complex emotions.
The moment Carol saw the ship, her body tensed. Golden energy flickered uncontrollably over her skin. She recognized it—the Skrull ship.
"Relax," Levi said, pressing a hand to her shoulder. A wave of calm willpower flowed into her, instantly soothing her unstable energy.
"He's not here to fight."
Levi's gaze passed over the man to the ship behind him. Inside, he sensed dozens more Skrull life signatures—weaker, but similar. Men. Women. Even children.
This wasn't a military unit.
It was a group of refugees.
As the standoff held, an utterly unexpected sound shattered the tension.
Ding-dong.
The doorbell.
Maria and Carol both froze.
Levi raised an eyebrow, a hint of amusement crossing his face, and turned toward the front door.
Outside stood another man, dressed in ordinary clothes.
Nick Fury.
He'd come alone, empty-handed, wearing that trademark smile that never revealed what he was really thinking.
One in the open.
One in the shadows.
One arriving silently from the sky.
One ringing the doorbell from the ground.
Clearly not the same faction—yet they had arrived at the same place, at the same time.
Things had just gotten interesting.
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