The transformation was not just a growth spurt; it was a violent biological expansion that defied every law of conservation of mass.
The six-meter-tall Abomination stood as a pulsating mountain of raw, scarlet muscle. Every breath he took sounded like a steam engine venting pressure, and the heat radiating from his body was enough to shimmer the air around him. The earthy yellow hide had been stretched until it split, revealing a network of angry, dark red tissue underneath. Thick, golden-yellow blood—viscous and glowing with a faint chemical light—oozed from the fissures before the hyper-accelerated healing could seal them.
Two rows of bone spikes along his forearms didn't just protrude; they vibrated with a high-frequency hum, shedding the last remnants of the metal spike Leander had driven into his skull. The wound on his forehead hummed with a wet sound, closing so fast the skin didn't even leave a scar.
Leander hovered in the air, his golden aura flickering as he adjusted to the sheer scale of the monster below. The weight of this creature was now immense; even standing still, the Abomination's feet were sinking into the concrete and flagstone rubble as if it were soft mud.
The monster's head snapped up. His eyes, now twin voids of crimson fury, locked onto Leander.
Without a roar, without a warning, a razor-sharp bone spur launched from the Abomination's arm. It didn't fly in a straight line; it curved with aerodynamic precision. Simultaneously, the titan's thighs coiled like massive springs. The ground beneath him disintegrated as he pounced, his six-meter frame blotting out the sun as he reached for Leander with claws the size of scythes.
Leander didn't panic. He swept his hands upward. "Up you go."
A massive chunk of rebar-laced concrete, weighing at least twenty tons, erupted from the wreckage of the hangar. It slammed into the Abomination's chest mid-leap, acting as a makeshift catapult that sent the behemoth flying further into the sky.
The bone spur that had been aimed at Leander's throat froze inches from his face, held by an invisible tether of magnetism. Leander reached out, grabbed the base of the calcified projectile, and gave it an experimental swing.
"Good balance. Maybe I'll give it back to you," Leander muttered.
With a casual toss, he sent the spur whistling back toward its owner and shot after the tumbling giant.
Now drifting in the low-gravity arc of his leap, the Abomination turned his descent into a dive. He fired a dozen more spurs from his arms in a shotgun pattern, but as they neared him, he didn't dodge. He raised his dense, scarlet forearms and allowed his own projectiles to pepper his body. He yanked one free, his muscles knitting the hole shut before the blood could even spray.
Leander stretched both hands toward the falling giant, his fingers splaying wide. "Let's see you break this."
The flying debris behind the Abomination exploded. Every scrap of rebar snaked out of the concrete like metallic vipers, whipping around the monster's waist, chest, and neck. The rods looped head-to-tail, welding themselves together through Leander's will. With a sharp snap of his fingers, the incoming bone spurs crumbled—the calcium transmuted into brittle dust that scattered in the wind.
The Abomination seized the rebar cage around his waist and pulled. The sound was like a ship's hull tearing. Even with Leander's mental reinforcement, the steel simply couldn't withstand the raw, biological torque of a six-meter titan. The rebar snapped, and the Abomination crashed back to the desert floor, landing in a crouch that sent a shockwave through the sand.
He looked up at the untouched Leander, his pride stung worse than his flesh. He pounced again. He was tired of the long-range games; he wanted to feel the boy's bones crush under his grip.
Leander hovered, his arms wide. He didn't move. Instead, he lifted his hands gently.
Hundreds of high-grade steel rods—the remnants of the base's support structure—rose from the dust. They began to orbit Leander at blurring speeds, forming a whirling, metallic cage that served as both a shield and a thresher. The Abomination crashed into the outer edge of the orbit and was instantly flung into a violent spin.
In a heartbeat, Leander closed his hands. The rods spiraled inward, binding the giant in a cocoon of interlocking steel trusses.
"Crush," Leander commanded.
The sphere of rebar shrank. The sound of metal groaning against supernatural muscle filled the desert. The pressure was enough to flatten a tank, and finally, a shrill, agonizing scream echoed from inside the metal ball.
"AAAAARRRGH!"
Leander didn't stop. With a flick of his wrist, he drew more scrap metal from the ruins, forming them into twenty-four jagged spears that hovered in a halo around the sphere. With a wave of his left hand, they shrieking through the air, impaling the sphere from every angle.
A long, anguished cry tore through the air—but it ended in a savage, wet laugh.
An eerie, sickly green light flared from the gaps in the metal. The Abomination's body began to swell even further, the unstable serum reacting to the external pressure. With a violent expansion of his chest, he burst the steel cocoon apart, sending a rain of jagged metal shards flying in every direction.
He landed on the ground, yanked a three-foot spear out of his own abdomen, and tossed it aside like a toothpick. The deep grooves the rebar had carved into his shoulders vanished in seconds.
He realized he couldn't win a battle of attrition against a flyer who controlled the world's metal. He scooped up a five-hundred-pound boulder and hurled it at Leander with the force of a railgun.
Leander didn't even move. A single rebar blade flashed, slicing the boulder into four harmless chunks that fell to the sand.
Leander raised his hands again, drawing thousands of metal filings from the ground. They coalesced into twenty heavy lances, all aimed at the monster below.
The Abomination didn't wait. He turned and ran.
Emil Blonsky was a soldier first. He knew his biological clock was ticking. This "Red State" was a frantic, high-output surge that would likely kill him or leave him a withered husk in thirty minutes. He needed to escape the open desert and find a population center—somewhere the boy couldn't just drop buildings on him.
He sprinted toward the horizon, each leap covering hundreds of meters. He was a scarlet blur against the yellow sand, moving faster than any land vehicle.
Leander smiled, the metal lances following him as he streaked after the giant. "You're not going anywhere."
He hadn't gone far before Jarvis's voice chimed in his ear. "Mr. Hayes, priority alert. A US military satellite is shifting its geostationary orbit. It will have a direct visual on your current location in ninety seconds. Mr. Stark suggests you 'finish the paperwork' immediately."
Leander's brow furrowed. He couldn't afford to let the government see his face, and he definitely couldn't let them capture a live, mutated Blonsky.
He dove. The twenty lances beside him broke the sound barrier in a series of cracks, slamming into the Abomination's back one after another. They didn't kill him, but they acted as anchors, the rods coiling around the giant's legs and pulling him to a grinding halt in a plume of sand.
Leander landed ten meters away. He tried a new tactic, snaking thin wires of metal toward the monster's face, attempting to enter the nose and mouth to attack the internal organs. Simultaneously, he reached out with his mind, grabbing onto the calcium in Blonsky's skeletal structure, trying to snap his femurs from the inside.
The Abomination howled as his bones cracked, but the regeneration was insane. The bone knitted faster than Leander could break it. Realizing the danger, Blonsky used his massive hands to clamp his nose and ears shut, his facial muscles tightening into an impenetrable mask of flesh.
He thrashed wildly, his punches and kicks creating massive craters even while bound in steel.
Leander realized that standard physical trauma wasn't enough. He reached into his pocket and tucked away his tactical glasses. He closed his eyes for a second, then snapped them open.
His eyes weren't blue anymore. They were blazing with a brilliant, molten gold light.
Two thin, concentrated rays of golden energy shot from his pupils, striking the Abomination's chest.
The monster raised his arms to block the light, but where the beams touched his palms, a gray, metallic sheen began to creep over his scarlet skin. It wasn't a burn; it was transmutation.
"What... is... this?!" Blonsky roared.
His body sensed the intrusion. His muscles buckled and surged, literally ejecting the transmuted, metalized flesh in a bloody slab. It was a gruesome sight—the monster peeling off his own hands to stop the spread. But even as the bloody stumps remained, they began to regrow.
Metalize, reject, repeat.
Leander's Delusion-Breaking Golden Eyes could turn inert matter to metal in an instant, but living, regenerating flesh was a different story. It was a battle of magical transmutation versus biological evolution. It would take five full minutes of sustained focus to turn the titan into a statue, and Blonsky wasn't going to stand still.
Facing the six-meter mountain of rage, Leander felt his own limits being pushed. He closed his eyes, drawing on every scrap of energy he had saved from his New Year's training.
Suddenly, a pair of illusory, golden wings unfurled from his back, shimmering with a divine light. He wasn't just a metal manipulator anymore. He was the judge.
"Emil Blonsky," Leander's voice boomed, sounding like the vibration of a great bell. "Your service is over."