"Nick Fury?"
After so long without seeing him, Nick Fury looked almost exactly the same as before. If anything, the exhaustion in his eyes had grown heavier, and his mental state did not look especially good.
Fenris slowly climbed out of bed. Looking at Fury's bloodshot eyes, he smiled and teased, "Hasn't Director Fury been busy matching wits with HYDRA lately? How do you have time to call an ordinary person like me?"
"…"
At the mention of HYDRA, Fury's heart trembled. As the investigation deepened, the extent of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s infiltration had long since reached a shocking degree.
Even though he had deliberately promoted several HYDRA members, including Agent Sitwell and Brock Rumlow, in an attempt to infiltrate HYDRA in reverse and turn those people to his own use, completely cutting their tendrils out of the helicarrier project was still so difficult that it gave Fury no end of headaches.
"Don't bring it up. You might as well never have told me about HYDRA in the first place. Maybe then I'd still have a little free time."
Fury rubbed his brow, looking utterly drained. "S.H.I.E.L.D. is facing trouble from within and without. New York keeps producing one or two mad scientists from time to time, and if not for that pajama-wearing spider baby, I really wouldn't be able to keep up anymore."
"And then there are the mutants. Because of Magneto's global broadcast, they've still been stirring up the situation in secret lately. Now mutants all over the world are beginning to flock toward Xavier's School and the Brotherhood's base in the Pacific. Some of them have even started treating your transformed form as a spirit of nature…"
"The only good news is that, for now, the impact is still within a controllable range. They haven't managed to stir up any major trouble."
"Then there's that mad genius in Washington, the suspected discovery of a decades-old super fighter jet in the Arctic, and less than two hours after I finally lay down to sleep, Stark sent an alert saying New Mexico, where Coulson is stationed, had several energy reactions in a row that far exceeded an ordinary nuclear blast…"
As Fury spoke, he could not stop rolling his eyes. "Fenris, how about I hand the director's seat over to you?"
"If I actually agreed, you'd probably be unwilling again."
Looking at Fury's worry-ridden face, Fenris could not help laughing.
This was nothing. Fury still had plenty of headaches waiting for him in the future.
However, considering their previous collaborations had gone rather smoothly, and that S.H.I.E.L.D.'s intelligence had played a key role during the Sentinel incident, Fenris thought for a moment and casually opened the video file Stark had sent over. "Don't worry. I'll take a look for you."
"Thank you."
Seeing that Fenris was willing to help, Fury nodded and yawned. It was obvious that the king of spies had truly been run ragged lately.
The video was projected outward, and the first thing that came into view was the faint, blurry outline of something shaped like a hammer.
"This little thing that looks like a hammer fell from the sky and smashed out a crater several dozen meters wide. But because it was nighttime, and because of atmospheric interference, the satellite footage isn't very clear."
The projected image shifted, and Stark's large face poked out from within it. He explained, "There's another spot too. A high-energy reaction descended from the sky, but it only appeared for less than two seconds before vanishing."
"According to my estimate of that energy level, if that energy had lasted for several dozen more seconds, it could even have shattered the Earth's crust with ease."
Stark opened an image of a storm eye glowing with rainbow light. Fenris recognized it immediately.
Wasn't that the Bifrost?
"And this."
Tony's expression turned serious, and the projection before Fenris changed again. "After that energy disappeared, this area was quickly covered by a powerful magnetic field, completely blocking my observation. But the energy level inside kept climbing."
"According to my most, most conservative estimate, that energy was enough to rival a star like the sun."
Remembering the string of numbers JARVIS had given him, Tony could not help feeling his scalp go numb.
If power of that level erupted, there was simply nothing on Earth that could withstand it. Not even Fenris.
However, looking at the energy data Tony provided, Fenris merely curled his lip. "Too low."
"Too low?"
Tony and Fury widened their eyes in unison. "That's still low?"
"Wait, Fenris, do you know what that was?"
Tony suddenly realized something. "That's not something from Earth, is it?"
"It's a person," Fenris nodded and explained.
"A person?!"
The moment his words fell, both men stared wide-eyed and instinctively refuted him. "How could one person contain that kind of stellar-level energy?"
"An alien. Or you can call him a god."
Fenris spread his hands. "There's nothing strange about it. Never mind anything else. Some powerful enhanced individuals or mutants may not have power much weaker than that inside them."
Clang.
The armor part Tony had been fiddling with suddenly fell to the floor with a crisp sound.
The two of them looked at each other through the projection. Fury's hand unconsciously flipped through the so-called top-secret files before him, and he suddenly felt a burst of emptiness in his heart.
Before power like that, his struggle with HYDRA seemed as childish as playing house. It had no meaning at all.
After a long silence, Fury was the first to come back to himself and asked, "This person—no, this god. Will he act against us?"
"He won't."
Only after hearing that firm answer did the two men relax slightly.
"He won't, but that doesn't mean enemies from other parts of the universe won't attack us."
The existence of aliens was not earth-shattering news that either of them found impossible to accept. In the vast universe, the idea that human civilization was the only one that existed would be far more unbelievable. Both of them had already prepared themselves psychologically for that.
After pondering for a moment, Fury was the first to say, "We need to prepare against that."
"You're right."
Tony answered at once.
Although he had agreed to join Fury's big-boy organization, he did not agree with many of Fury's ideas—except the need to unite against all kinds of shared threats that might appear in the future.
At that moment, Tony thought of his armor, while Fury thought of the blue cube in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s warehouse that had been passed down from Captain America's era and possessed an almost infinite source of energy.
The two of them pursed their lips at the same time, each making some kind of decision in his heart.
"But there's no need for you to be too nervous. I'll share some information I know with you later."
Seeing the tension in both men's nerves, Fenris spoke up.
After all, the existence of Asgard, the Bifrost, and gods was not exactly some earth-shattering secret.
"Then thank you, Fenris." Fury's expression finally eased a little.
Powerful enemies were not frightening. The truly frightening thing was the unknown hidden in the dark.
"Oh, right. Fenris, take a look at this too."
Tony suddenly smacked his forehead, as if he had just remembered something, and opened a video only a few seconds long, presenting it before Fenris.
"This was captured by a near-Earth satellite."
Tony rubbed his chin. "A massive object traveling at over Mach ten set off from New Mexico, crossed the continent in an extremely short time, looped around the terminator line, and finally returned to North America."
As he spoke, Tony's gaze swept over Fenris with great interest, his eyes full of teasing. "Fenris, whoever this person is, he's really hard to guess."
(End of Chapter)
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