"Damn it! These things just keep coming!"
Clint Barton's arrows fluttered through the chaos like butterflies weaving through flowers, each shaft landing with surgical precision on a mutant's knee or joint. Every hit crippled, not killed, stripping them of mobility with non-lethal shots.
But there were too many.
And in this narrow tunnel, his biggest advantage—range—was being squeezed to nothing.
"The scepter's energy radiation is right up ahead! It's what's drawing them in!"
Steve Rogers rammed his shield into a mutant whose whole body was dripping viscous black slime as it tried to wrap its arms around his waist. His free hand snapped up, grabbing the man by the collar and hurling him sideways. The mutant slammed into the concrete wall with a heavy thud.
"Move! We punch through! Bucky, left flank!"
"Copy!"
Bucky Barnes' metal arm swung like a piledriver, smashing an onrushing "ice-man" off his feet. In the same motion, the stock of his assault rifle cracked against another mutant's temple, dropping him in a heap.
"No good, Cap! The way ahead's blocked!"
He pointed toward the junction further down the track.
At the point where several tunnels met, a huge mass of collapsed concrete and mangled rail segments, all frozen over with blue ice crystals, sprawled across the tracks like a man-made glacier. The only opening left was a cramped gap barely wide enough for a single person to squeeze through with difficulty.
Worse, more eyes were appearing in that gap—eyes shining with an ominous blue light, one pair after another.
"We go around!" Steve decided instantly. "Right-hand branch! Clint, high ground and overwatch!"
They pivoted at once and sprinted toward a side tunnel on the right that looked slightly wider. Natasha fell back to cover the rear, two compact shock grenades spinning between her fingers, ready to be tossed into the densest cluster of pursuers to buy them time.
Clint, meanwhile, spotted a broken section of stairway, vaulted toward it, and scrambled up in a few nimble bounds. He dropped flat on a protruding platform, bow ready, eyes sweeping over the melee below and the yawning darkness ahead.
The moment they rushed into the mouth of the side tunnel, the darkness exploded with sound.
Roars, closer and more numerous than before.
The shriek of ice fracturing.
This path was just as infested. Mutants were entrenched everywhere—and they seemed to have been stirred up in advance by some unseen signal. Even more twisted shapes spilled out from deeper within the tunnel, dropped down from overhead ventilation ducts, and dragged themselves out of murky, stagnant pools on the floor.
"We walked right into it..."
Steve's heart sank. He swung his shield in a brutal arc, battering a path open ahead of them.
It felt like wading through foul, freezing quicksand. Every step forward came at a heavy price.
About two hundred meters away from the core battlefield, the air grew colder, damper. At the far end of an abandoned branch platform, swallowed by the dark—
Proxima Midnight drew back the tip of her spear, its edge still shimmering with a ghostly aurora. A cold smile curved the corner of her lips.
"See, Deathblade? Trash will always have its uses."
Her voice was a low murmur, but her gaze seemed to pierce the darkness itself, as if she could clearly see the mutants surging like moths to a flame toward Steve's team, driven mad by the scepter's radiation.
"The louder they thrash around, the faster 'Silence' comes crawling to us."
General Deathblade stood before the fallen rock like a carved statue, Extinction held level in front of him. The blade's tip trembled with a faint vibration, in eerie harmony with the deep, blue-tinged "heartbeat" pulsing from beneath the pile of boulders.
He ignored Proxima Midnight's mockery.
All of his focus was buried in the cold rubble before him—a barrier of stone and ice hiding a treasure of absolute power.
Each time he sent Extinction's energy probing into the structure, trying to tease apart, strip away, and analyze those stubborn nodes saturated with the scepter's power, it triggered an even more violent backlash from below.
Blue ice crystals and condensed psychic shockwaves surged up in response, slamming into his senses again and again.
The mental impact gnawed at his perception and strength like invisible fangs, biting deeper with every attempt.
(End of Chapter)
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