"Reed, say it louder! Your data really wasn't wrong?!"
The electricity Doom had absorbed from the blacked-out city center was pouring back out through his body, arcs of light lashing across half the block and lighting the street like daylight. The bitterness inside him only made him seem more imposing.
Reed's face was burning with shame. Doom had reason to resent him—he'd sunk a conglomerate worth tens of billions, and a few pointed questions were the least he deserved.
The Thing, though, didn't care for Doom's tone. If Doom were really as straightforward as he claimed, the four of them offering an apology wouldn't have been unreasonable. But more than half of Doom's energy was clearly fixated on his personal grudge with Reed and on Susan's emotional betrayal.
As far as the Thing was concerned, Doom was two-faced. A hypocrite.
He picked up a car from the curb—already fried into scrap by the earlier plasma discharge, no longer anything resembling a vehicle—crushed it between his massive arms into a rough iron ball, and hurled it at Doom with a whoosh.
"Reed, we have to stop him before he wrecks anything else!"
The Thing knew his old friend well enough to know Reed needed something in front of him to focus on, or he'd spiral.
Mister Fantastic took two deep breaths and finally found some fight in him. In his view, his personal grudge with Doom shouldn't be dragging innocent bystanders into it.
"Get out of here, move!" He waved the gawking New Yorkers off—some of them still snapping photos, apparently with no survival instinct at all—while stretching his arm out toward a fire hydrant at the curb. With Doom wreathed in that much voltage, a cold-water soak might help settle him down.
His arm extended ten meters. He tugged twice. The hydrant didn't budge. He called Ben over, fast.
The Thing got the idea, but he'd barely taken two steps before one of Doom's arcs caught up with him.
His rocky body shrugged off most of the current, and he pushed on through the electricity, stumbling toward the hydrant. Their intent was obvious. Doom didn't think twice before firing off two more bolts—but this time, as if by some uncanny impulse, the current didn't release from his hands. It stretched and extended through the air until it formed two cracking electric whips.
The Thing, already slow-moving, caught one around each leg. The paralytic effect of the current hit fast. His whole body went numb; his legs turned to rubber.
He fought it hard, and the arcs began discharging erratically in every direction. A curly-haired Black woman took a hit to the calf and went down screaming on the sidewalk.
The other three went pale. Reed—immune to the current—ran over to try to untangle the whips. Invisible Woman and Human Torch split off to treat the injured and evacuate civilians.
The Thing shook loose from the whips fast enough. The evacuation, however, was going far too slowly.
A lot of people refused to abandon their property, and when Invisible Woman tried to reason with them, they snapped back that it was the Fantastic Four who'd brought this disaster down on their heads.
Strictly speaking, they weren't entirely wrong.
Human Torch, increasingly short-tempered these days, had zero patience for crowd work. He flew straight back into the fight and went at Doom.
Scorching flame poured down on Doom, but Doom was slippery—he kept ducking behind civilians and buildings, letting them take the heat. Fireballs scattered across the pavement, scorching the asphalt black until the street looked like it had been freshly tarred.
"Kid, you're too impulsive!" Doom looked down at Human Torch with open condescension. He made a feint at a white teenager fleeing nearby, and Torch dove to intercept—but Doom had read the move long before it happened. Electricity crackled in his hands, and with no training at all, he lashed out with two more whips.
In a flash, two silver-white lashes shot from his wrists. One coiled around Torch's left foot. The other wrapped around his throat. Doom's power surged through them. He was going to choke the boy to death.
Susan saw her brother in mortal danger and stopped worrying about the civilians entirely. She swore under her breath, pulled her hands apart, and inverted her force field—a translucent, milky dome appeared from nothing, locking Doom in place and severing the power feed to the whips. Torch broke free.
"Susan—you too? You're against me now?" Doom's eyes were visible through the slits of his iron mask, and they were full of affection, full of feeling. Susan said nothing. The silence chilled him to the bone. His metal-looking arm slammed against the force field.
The force field bought the Fantastic Four a solid ten-plus seconds. They regrouped and threw themselves back at him.
As the fight dragged on, the four of them started to find a rhythm. Most of the civilians had cleared out, so they could finally let loose.
But Doom still held the upper hand. Those two electric whips were cracking against all four of them with vicious precision.
Daisy arrived on the scene but didn't engage right away. She perched on top of one of the Hammer Drones and watched.
It felt absurd to her. Was Ivan Vanko's ghost really this tenacious? Seven days dead, and he could still coach Doom on whip technique from beyond the grave?
The Fantastic Four were losing ground, but not catastrophically. They could hold out for a while yet.
The two sides looked like mortal enemies, but Reed and Doom's relationship was far more tangled than that.
A lot of people knew about Reed and Susan's son—Franklin Richards, the Omega-level mutant who could manipulate time and causality and birth universes. But very few people knew Reed also had a daughter.
Fewer still knew her name: Valeria Richards.
Valeria. Not an American name. It was from Eastern Europe, from Latveria—Doom's homeland. It had been the name of his first love, back when he still lived there.
Wild, isn't it? Reed named his daughter after his rival's first love. What exactly was he trying to say with that?
To Daisy, Mister Fantastic was clearly channeling his inner Yang Xiao: I stole your woman, so here, take my daughter as compensation—we're all family now, right? Turn the enemy into a friend by making him an in-law…
Whatever was really going on between them, the connection ran deep. Which was why Daisy was content to stay on the sidelines and watch.
She hung back while the fight escalated into something genuinely intense.
The Thing's signature verbal tic was quoting his Aunt Petunia—what Aunt Petunia said, what Aunt Petunia didn't allow.
Doom, behind his metal mask, was losing patience. Who the hell cares about your Aunt Petunia? He gathered a massive charge in his hand and sent it hammering into the Thing like a cascade of silver dragons.
After two of his attacks were blocked by Reed's body and Susan's force field, Doom seemed to recall some distant memory. He briefly found himself on the back foot—then his offense suddenly erupted into something far more violent.
Wisps of black vapor coiled around him. His dark green robes stirred without wind.
The silver electricity, once brilliant, now looked as though it had been dipped in ink. Its penetrating power was unchanged, but it had taken on something else—a corrosive edge, a killing edge.
Daisy froze for a split second. Different in character, but the resemblance was unmistakable. It carried the same quality as Storm's attacks.
That black vapor was magic.
Doom had leveled up mid-fight.