Evening, Port of Mexico.
Eddie arrived as promised, with Venom hidden within his body. The two of them looked at the huge containers piled up layer after layer. Several cargo ships were scattered throughout the port, while flashlight beams wandered along the edges. Eddie looked around and saw that there were only two or three workers on duty.
"Thompson? Where are you? I can feel you. Come on out. There's no point in hiding."
"You're worthy of being the one who defeated Riot." The blond man slowly emerged from the shadows between the cargo containers. "Chaos is warning me like crazy, saying that you're dangerous—more dangerous than Riot."
Thompson wasn't lying. Chaos, the symbiote he had been saved with, was indeed sending warnings through his mind, making his brain buzz like thunder.
This only made Thompson more curious about the unremarkable man in front of him. During the past week, the military had subjected Chaos and Thompson to unimaginably harsh training, including experiments that involved combining certain genes with animal DNA.
No matter how strong Eddie was, he couldn't possibly be stronger than a technological creation developed by an entire nation.
Thompson was very confident in his own strength. He smiled mockingly, the flesh on his face shaking crazily.
"Wang Defa! Is this guy really your kind?!" The monster in front of him didn't look like an ordinary symbiote at all, and Venom had never seen such a special kind before. Eddie didn't dare underestimate his enemy. According to Venom, he was the weakest of the four symbiotes, and even Chaos was somewhat stronger than him.
Thompson's body was covered in a large amount of blue mucus. What made him different was the pair of bat-like wings extending from his back. His eyes retained the long, narrow shape characteristic of symbiotes, but black pupils were visible within them. Chaos had been implanted with the DNA of numerous Earth creatures, which had made him even stronger.
Eddie and Thompson were fifty meters apart, but anyone with a discerning eye could immediately tell that Venom was an entire size smaller than Chaos. Once Chaos spread his wings, his figure appeared particularly imposing.
"Does this mean you're weaker than Riot?" Venom hadn't expected his kind to become so powerful in just half a year, far stronger than the big silver guy at the rocket base six months ago.
Eddie didn't bother questioning his buddy. Venom had never been reliable anyway.
Chaos let out a harsh roar, the sound as strange as a crow's cry, and leaped high into the air before charging toward Venom.
Ping!
Venom raised his arm to block the attack and felt a strange force coming through his thick limb. He was slightly startled, but then saw Chaos's arm transform into a giant crab-like claw that clamped onto his arm and smashed him violently into the container.
A large hole appeared in the huge container. Venom crawled out through it somewhat dazedly. His long, slender tongue passed over his sharp teeth.
"You underestimated him!"
"Can you beat me? If not, let me do it!" Eddie shouted.
"No. It's easy!" Venom snarled, but a long, thick tentacle slammed directly into him, appearing in his vision in an instant. Venom's head took a heavy blow, and countless sticky tentacles spread out, their tiny suction cups clinging to his head and pulling him backward.
Chaos was far more powerful than Venom could have imagined.
"Switch!"
"I knew it." Eddie had never had much hope for Venom from the beginning of the fight. Control of his body suddenly changed, and his chaotic left hand transformed into a tuna-like blade. Eddie twisted his body upward, avoiding the strike that nearly pierced him, and grabbed Chaos by the head.
Rip!
Chaos wailed as a piece of the symbiote covering his head was torn away, revealing Thompson's blond hair. But Eddie clearly heard another scream.
"Kill him!" Thompson roared angrily.
Eddie looked at the strands of blond hair floating on the ground, the corners of his mouth twitching as he understood what had happened.
"I'm sorry, but getting stronger always comes with a price." Eddie apologized sincerely, but unfortunately, Thompson didn't seem to appreciate the sentiment. Chaos's arms suddenly stretched out, and the enormous mantis-like blades crossed and swept toward Eddie, their sharp edges reflecting a silvery glow beneath the moonlight.
Eddie was shocked and jumped high into the air. He had no doubt that those blades could easily chop his body in half.
Chaos seized the opportunity and suddenly flapped his wings violently. His wings weren't merely decorative. Thompson propelled Eddie away in midair, while his claws, lined with sharp barbs, tightly clamped onto Eddie's shoulders. His wing membranes swelled wildly in the wind, slicing across the man's face like knives.
The two monsters flew toward the sky. Someone aboard one of the freighters seemed to have heard the noise. Flashlight beams swept toward the sky, but nothing was found.
Venom was completely black, making him nearly invisible beneath the dark night sky, while black mucus also flowed across Chaos's surface.
How can that be? Eddie was shocked. "Can your symbiote change colors? Like a chameleon?"
Venom didn't know what Chaos was capable of and hurriedly reminded Eddie, "Be careful with his claws!"
Severe pain struck!
Eddie's mind went numb instantly. A large hole had been pierced through his chest, and his enormous body was thrown high into the air before falling freely toward the sea.
In an instant, everything returned to silence.
Thompson landed on the ground and looked at the calm sea. "Let him get away?"
Chaos was silent, but Thompson could clearly sense a trace of sadness from his companion.
An imperceptible flicker passed through Thompson's heart, and he knew what Chaos was mourning.
A symbiote, a life-form more advanced than humans, had fallen on a planet that seemed so weak to them. Of the four companions that had come to Earth, only Venom remained intact.
No species liked fighting among its own kind. Chaos had endured half a year of torment, constantly having unknown medicines injected into his body, along with electric shocks, fire, sound waves, flooding...
Those scientists had even forced Chaos to try extracting power from corpses. Symbiotes could only coexist with living hosts, and forcing one to merge with a corpse was a profound humiliation to them.
After half a year of torture, Chaos's consciousness finally recovered, and he was resurrected! But life was still worse than death. He had been completely trained into a human weapon—a human weapon that was afraid of the white figures moving behind the glass but had nowhere to escape.
Until he met Thompson, an optimistic man who had suffered inhuman torture just as he had. In order to make their human experiments more precise, the researchers repeatedly used Thompson's body to combine with Chaos, a total of sixty-three times. Sixty-two of those attempts failed. Chaos was stripped away sixty-two times, and Thompson was pulled back from the brink of death sixty-two times. Each combination made both sides weaker.
In order to keep the information they had previously collected usable, they injected a special nutrient into Thompson's body to keep him strong. The price was the life of the person receiving the injection.
The military didn't care. These "heroes" and "monsters" that people respected and feared were merely weapons in their eyes, no different from guns, knives, or gloves. Repair them when they were damaged, replace them when they couldn't be repaired, and squeeze every last bit of usefulness from them.
Thompson returned to his human form, and Eddie had escaped. It was time for him to leave. This battle had been too ridiculous. The man regretted acting so hastily. He would definitely be placed under strict surveillance when he returned this time.
Suddenly, a large number of heavily armed soldiers appeared from all directions. Infrared sights focused on Thompson's body, with a large portion aimed directly at his head. They had somehow slipped into the Port of Mexico without him noticing.
Who had given them the information? Thompson wondered.
No, that wasn't right!
They had implanted a positioning system into Chaos's body to track Thompson's movements.
"Eugene Thompson! Kneel on the ground immediately with your hands on your head! I repeat, Eugene Thompson! Kneel on the ground immediately with your hands on your head!"
The leading military commander held a loudspeaker and raised his right hand high. The moment he swung his arm downward, a hail of bullets was unleashed, enough to turn Thompson, who had no time to react, into a sieve.
Thompson obediently fell to his knees and shook his head like a defeated dog.
How ridiculous!
He had obviously been the victor in the battle just now. Venom had been beaten by him and fled like a lost dog, not even daring to escape along the ground...
Boom!
Thompson suddenly looked toward the sea. It was as if a huge bell had rung inside his mind.
He was indeed a monster who had survived Riot's assault. His danger sense was much better than Chaos's.
Thompson was pushed to the ground by the soldiers behind him. Beneath their khaki camouflage helmets were expressionless faces. Even when facing one of their own, they could obey orders without changing expression.
Thompson realized that he hadn't won.
He had lost.
The loss was absurd, but he had indeed lost.
A pair of black boots appeared in front of the blond man. The commander lowered his head and asked softly,
"Purpose."
"I'm hungry. Let's find some people to eat." Thompson showed a row of shiny teeth, an innocent look on his face.
The commander said nothing. The pair of blue eyes beneath the military cap seemed to conceal deep spring water, a bottomless well. They were calm and composed. Thompson couldn't tell what this man was thinking.
In fact, he didn't even know the other man's identity. No one could be certain. Thompson had never heard of him during his time in the army. He seemed to have appeared out of thin air.
"I hope you can bear the consequences of the lies you told when you go back."
"Lightning is fearless!"
The military commander glanced indifferently at the man kneeling on the ground, his eyes revealing nothing.
"Take him away!"
The commander waved his hand, and the soldiers immediately raised their weapons and pointed them at Thompson's head. At the same time, someone behind him put on headphones filled with noise designed to suppress the Chaos within Thompson's body.
"Fortunately, I got away early. Bat, you're such a good person." Eddie patted his chest after escaping the disaster. If Morbius hadn't warned him that someone was surrounding him, he wouldn't have had time to escape.
"How about we go home and buy a bed?"
The big bat suddenly appeared at the top of the tower, his dark cloak hiding his figure in the shadows.
"It seems their relationship isn't as harmonious as we imagined."
Eddie was a little confused about what the military was planning. He wasn't sure whether someone had been behind Thompson's appointment that night, but judging from the current situation, this powerful blond man was a knife, a sharp sword, and a gun that could be discarded at any time.
Morbius was a smart man who saw things more clearly than Eddie.
Thompson had definitely been deceived into coming to find Eddie. It seemed that no one had been pulling the strings this time and that it had nothing to do with them. Perhaps they had deliberately allowed Thompson and Eddie to fight before finally reaping the benefits.
Such suspicions were not unfounded. If this had been a sudden attack, how could they have brought such a large number of soldiers and such sophisticated weapons and equipment to the battle site without being detected? Not even the symbiote's excellent senses had noticed the army's arrival.
The military had been secretly researching ways to fight symbiotes, and now they had actually trained a team specifically designed to deal with them!
Morbius didn't know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. He couldn't tell whether other symbiotes would come to Earth in the future, but as far as he knew, the one that had kidnapped Eddie's ex-girlfriend was a brand-new symbiote from another world. Perhaps the military was right to prepare in advance. Planning ahead could always prevent many problems.
At the same time, he secretly lamented how terrifying these people were. In only half a year, they had actually managed to train such an effective team.
At least according to his perception, the strength of these soldiers was greater than that of ordinary special forces, with each of them reaching roughly the level of a Navy SEAL.
Morbius could hardly imagine what they would be like if they discovered his existence—wearing crosses and carrying silver bullets, with silver daggers at their waists and everyone chewing garlic. Or perhaps they would trap him with special shackles and wait until sunrise to burn him to death!
Huh~~
The cold man couldn't help shuddering, and the desire for blood in his heart inexplicably weakened. It seemed that he could no longer rely on stealing blood packs in the future. He would have to be careful even when buying and selling them.
Moreover, Eddie's residence was no longer safe. The military definitely had information about Eddie, but why hadn't they arrested him?
Maybe they weren't certain they could capture him. Maybe they didn't want to cause too many casualties. Or maybe they didn't want to capture him at all and were keeping him as a chess piece—a piece capable of influencing the balance of power.
Cold wind.
Annie was sitting beside a campfire, shivering from the cold. She could only rub her hands together to keep warm.
Contempt had completely separated from her host and was now residing in the electronic body she had created. She sat silently on the ground, unable to figure out what she was thinking.
Contempt saw the scene of Thompson and Eddie fighting through satellite surveillance. Although there were no cameras at the Port of Mexico, she knew exactly what everyone was doing, especially the military's movements, including their secret experiments on symbiotes.
She paid little attention to these experiments. They were merely low-level symbiotes. No matter how much research was conducted on them, they could not escape their place in the hierarchy. Lord Knull's power would put an end to all such schemes. This was the power of the symbiote god!
Contempt found it somewhat strange. Aside from some of the military's top-secret information, she had no way to decipher everything. It wasn't that she couldn't; attempting to do so would likely alert the military. It wasn't worth the risk. For now, it was better to continue developing herself.
But she was unable to monitor Eddie's whereabouts. She always felt that an inexplicable magnetic field was interfering with her and blocking all her attempts to locate Eddie through the network.
Of course she couldn't find him.
Vision was a perfect body that Ultron had painstakingly created. It also possessed the information flow of two artificial intelligences, Ultron and JARVIS, merged into one, combined with Renzo's soul from his previous life. Three enormous sources of information had been fused into an extremely powerful soul.
Renzo's soul was now strong enough to do almost anything. He could move through electronic devices at will and could even reach the level of Cyborg, although he was still not as powerful as the Mother Box.
But with the blessing of the Soul Stone, Renzo believed that he would not be inferior to the Mother Box.
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