"Thanos's army? The Black Order?"
Tony was yanked back to reality by those names. A cold shiver ran through him, smothering the loss and searing pain in his chest.
"JARVIS! Bring every satellite we've got to maximum alert! Highest-level monitoring across the whole network! Scan all of New York and the surrounding area! Look for high-energy reactions, abnormal spatial fluctuations! Track the last trajectory of the scepter! Find them for me!"
"Sir, the scepter is in the Brooklyn sector. Its signal terminated in the last 0.3 seconds and vanished deep within the B-Zone underground tunnel system. Simultaneously, multiple highly suspicious anomalous energy sources were detected, widely distributed, matching… the signature profiles of Thanos's elite legion units."
For a moment, JARVIS's voice carried an urgency it had never held before.
The wormhole had closed. The remaining forces of the alien invasion army had been almost entirely wiped out by that single stomp.
But a new, even trickier shadow instantly loomed over all of them: Thanos's most elite, most cunning, most terrifying strike force—the five generals of the Black Order—had already slipped quietly onto Earth. The Mind Scepter, symbol of devastating power and enough to unleash a blood-soaked storm, was now lost somewhere beneath the city's ruins.
Everyone's gaze once again, uncontrollably, drifted to the doorway of Fragrant Pot Hotpot.
That man who started it all.
A savior? Or a calamity?
Would he go after them? Go deal with those terrifying enemies who could threaten the safety of the entire planet?
Saitama reached out a single finger and pressed against the glass door, its surface covered in a spiderweb of cracks.
Creak—
The door didn't move an inch. It was locked from the inside.
He pressed his face up against the grimy glass, squinting hard to see through. Inside, the shop was pitch-dark and utterly still. Aside from trash and overturned furniture, there was nothing.
"Sigh…"
A clear, unmistakable sigh of disappointment slipped from his lips. His shoulders slumped all at once, and his back—turned away from the battlefield—exuded the pure, heavy aura of "nothing is going right today."
"So it really… is closed, huh…" he muttered. His voice wasn't loud, but it pierced straight through the dead silence of the battleground.
He turned around, putting his back to the massive, soul-crushing crater, his back to the heroes with their complicated expressions, his back to the unseen enemies lurking somewhere in the city's shadows.
His bald head, catching the last bit of sunset, reflected a faint, guiltlessly innocent glimmer.
He raised a hand and scratched his smooth scalp, frowning so hard his brows knotted together.
"The discount eggs are all gone too… So now…" he murmured to himself, his tone carrying the seriousness of someone facing a cosmic-level crisis, "what am I gonna eat for dinner?"
Above the huge crater of ruins, only the wind remained, stirring up dust with a low, mournful howl.
The final streak of sunlight slipped completely beneath New York's skyline. The enormous hemispherical crater, like a gaping, savage wound, began to be devoured by deepening darkness. The former core of the Manhattan battlefield, aside from a few scattered fires in the distance and faint wailing sirens from the city's main districts, sank into a stagnant, deathly stillness—a silence after overwhelming shock and terror, where all things had run out of words.
"Sir, the emergency repair protocol is now thirty-five percent complete. The nanobot cluster is reconstructing the breastplate and forearm armor. The arc core remains stable within safe thresholds, but restoring the offline weapons systems and propulsion units will require additional time. I recommend you immediately relocate to a secure area to rest and recover."
JARVIS's voice sounded inside Tony's helmet, the metallic calm doing its best to steady a master whose emotions were on the brink of collapse.
(End of Chapter)
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