Blonsky's reputation among the troops carried them through every checkpoint—until the final one stopped them cold.
The chamber ahead was a cell forged entirely from steel, its walls exceptionally thick. No door, no window—only a ceiling panel that could be mechanically extracted by specialized equipment, currently sealed tight. General Ross had no intention of sending Banner food or water; in his view, keeping the man weakened made him easier to manage.
Twelve soldiers stood guard. No one was to approach without direct orders from either Ross or the Secretary of Defense.
Blonsky was stopped as expected.
"Halt, Captain. You can't go in." The soldier was respectful—but didn't budge an inch.
"I'm acting on the General's orders—" Blonsky tried to spin it out, but these were Ross's personal guard, elite men. Their eyes were full of suspicion.
His acting wasn't good enough, either. He exhaled.
"Sorry about this."
"What was that, Captain?" The soldier leaned forward—and in the next instant watched Blonsky's elbow come around in a vicious arc toward his face.
No warning. Far faster than any unenhanced soldier could track. The man crumpled without getting a single word out.
"Freeze, Captain!"
"Hands up!"
The remaining eleven closed in immediately. Three raised their weapons. Seven formed two overlapping rings to converge on Blonsky together—his combat reputation made every one of them cautious. The last broke away and sprinted for the alarm.
"Stop right there!" Blonsky charged—shoulders down like a bull, plowing straight through the men in his path. He lunged forward and tackled the soldier reaching for the alarm panel, and with the man staring up at him in raw terror, drove a fist down hard.
The soldier coughed blood and went still.
With that, the rest understood his intentions. Two of them flicked their safeties off.
Exactly as he'd always said about himself: decades of combat experience, a body at absolute peak condition. When he fought at this level, he sometimes frightened himself.
Blonsky waded into them. He used their own bodies for cover, staying tight, denying clean shots. Twenty seconds. Five soldiers down—concussions, fractures—but no kills. His control held.
Ten seconds more. The last four went down.
Then he reached the cell and his fists were useless. The ceiling mechanism required specialized equipment he didn't have with him.
That was why he'd gone out of his way to bring Betty.
"Wake him up. Tell him to come out and fight me." He pressed the gun barrel to Betty's temple.
His heart was hammering. He'd seen the Hulk's strength firsthand—that complete, bulldozing force. He'd been telling himself it was just raw power, that the Hulk was slow, that he himself was the agile type.
But after watching Daisy tonight, the self-talk had stopped working. Some part of his mind—quiet but insistent—was whispering that he had neither strength nor speed.
His conscious mind refused to accept it. He was still here. Still standing. He could still land a hit.
Betty stared at the way his lips were trembling, the barely audible repetition—I'm the strongest, no one can beat me—and privately thought her father had extraordinary taste in hiring lunatics. But the lunatic had a gun to her head, so arguing wasn't an option.
He wanted her to call out. Fine.
Betty Ross knocked twice on the cell wall—hard enough to hurt her own knuckles—and since she had no idea whether the deeply sedated Banner could actually hear her, she simply screamed.
What followed proved that Professor Charles Xavier's research into the human mind was at least twenty years ahead of the rest of the world.
His theory was exactly right: when an emotion is suppressed past its limit, it doesn't fade—it rebounds.
For ordinary people, the emotional reservoir is shallow enough that even genuine anger stays manageable. Daisy had roughed up that bald guy, and the worst he'd walked away with was a vague feeling of I'm going to eat an extra bowl of rice tonight.
The Hulk was different. Completely different.
His rage had no ceiling. Once it hit bottom and rebounded, it came back like a volcano.
The initial spark had been tiny, easily swallowed by the ocean of sedative in his system.
But the rage didn't give up. It fought like a soldier who refused to break—struggling, clawing back territory one inch at a time. Every fraction the sedative lost, the anger claimed. It started slowly, painfully—and then the pace accelerated.
And then, through the haze, he heard Betty's voice.
Whatever rational thoughts remained were swept away. Bruce Banner became the Hulk again.
The sedative load evaporated—driven out like steam, squeezed through every pore by the sheer pressure of his fury. What emerged was a Hulk more savage and more enraged than before.
BOOM.
A single impact punched through the steel cell. He hit it again, and again—hammering until one entire wall caved inward—then jumped out.
"ROOAARR!" The Hulk saw Betty with the gun at her head. The rage was overwhelming now; whatever remained of Bruce Banner's rational mind had been mostly displaced.
His fury was beyond control—and yet, in some deep layer of instinct, the Hulk still didn't want to hurt Betty. He chose to leave.
"Stop right there, you big idiot. I'm ordering you to stop!" Blonsky shoved Betty aside, raised his pistol, and emptied the magazine into the Hulk's back.
When the gun ran dry, he tossed it. A spinning kick came around toward the Hulk's skull.
The Hulk's reply was a single punch. No wind-up, no war cry. Casual—the way you'd bat away a fly.
WHAM.
A dull, meaty impact. The man who had been raving about being the greatest fighter in the world left the ground and hit the far wall.
He didn't get up.
"Oh my God." Betty clapped a hand over her mouth. He'd been making all that noise, she'd thought maybe he actually had a chance.
Blonsky meant nothing to her—just a stranger. She watched the Hulk roar out through the underground facility and ran after him.
She didn't see Blonsky slowly come back to consciousness in the corner, beaten into a pulp.
Daisy's performance tonight had already half-shattered his invincibility complex. And unlike the film version, tonight he'd been wearing high-grade Kevlar tactical armor.
He was still beaten. Still badly beaten. But not quite as destroyed as he would have been otherwise—the film's full-body skeletal collapse was just slightly avoided.
He forced himself upright. Even with the super-soldier serum accelerating his recovery, he could feel the damage everywhere: most of the bones in his upper body had fractured, multiple organs bruised at varying degrees. Every breath was a struggle.