Blonsky wasn't stupid. He was, in fact, quite sharp.
He'd realized that the world he'd just stepped into looked very different from the one his four decades of experience had mapped. A woman he'd never heard of could fight and fly. So how many others were out there, hidden? What if some heavyweight came out of nowhere and put him down in ten seconds?
He wanted to talk to Daisy. Get a read on the landscape, figure out where he stood.
Daisy didn't give him the chance. The man was radiating heat like a furnace—she could smell the char on him even at altitude, the scorched sweat baked into his skin carrying a distinctly unpleasant edge.
The Hulk was closing fast. She blinked past Blonsky and kept moving.
"ROAAAR!"
The Hulk landed, swept his gaze around, and found Blonsky.
The two of them were fundamentally incompatible—the kind of mutual antipathy that didn't need a reason. And now the Hulk could feel it: somewhere in this creature's blood was something taken from him. Like a toy stolen from a child. He felt the insult of it viscerally.
Fury flooded through him. The Hulk fixed his attention on Blonsky. He'd finish this first, then get back to Daisy.
Blonsky wanted the same thing. He'd given up everything—his dignity, every trace of his former life, every last piece of his humanity—for this: a level playing field. The chance to prove it.
The Hulk hit the ground and charged, delivering a haymaker that carried the weight of dozens of repetitions—he'd made that same run-up-and-swing motion dozens of times chasing Daisy, and by now it was second nature, every bit of him moving in brutal, fluid rhythm.
Blonsky had over twenty years of combat training. But he'd never practiced this—the run, the coil, the full-body commitment of a swing at this scale. Whatever technical skill he'd built over a career became irrelevant when the physics changed.
Inexperienced with the power, mid-transformation, no muscle memory for the new body—three disadvantages stacking up. And the Hulk, in this version of events, was angrier than he might have been otherwise.
The opening exchange was decisive: Blonsky's punch landed square on the Hulk's chest and accomplished nothing. The Hulk's punch landed square on Blonsky's skull and nearly ended it there.
The Hulk paused, cocked his head, and said something that amounted to: You're weak.
The future Hulk—the one who'd trade quips with Thor—was years away from existing. The version in front of them was rawer, younger in every sense, more animal than person. He didn't talk. He barely wanted to.
He got his bearings, started to turn, and headed back toward Daisy.
"You—" Blonsky hauled himself upright. His skull was still spinning. The arrogance that had carried him this far retreated, and in its place something else roared up—the fury running through that stolen blood, finally awake. Rage at the enemy. Rage at himself.
Tactics dissolved. Two decades of technique dissolved. He let all of it go.
He wanted a real fight. The oldest kind.
He snatched a residential lawnmower from the roadside and brought it down on the back of the Hulk's head with a crack that shook the street. Before the Hulk could respond, Blonsky threw a flurry of raw punches and drove him straight through the wall of a commercial office building.
That landed.
The Hulk—genuinely startled—felt the blood inside this creature begin to respond, some reciprocal fury igniting in answer. He forgot about Daisy entirely. All he wanted now was to end this.
Neither of them had any interest in defense. They just swung. Over and over. Taking every hit. Seeing who ran out first.
The office building lasted less than half a minute. The load-bearing walls gave out under the shockwaves, and the whole structure began to lean and topple.
The night, which should have been quiet, became a continuous roar of collapsing masonry and crumpling steel. Culpeper, Virginia—this particular small town—was being systematically unmade. Buildings fell. Cars became scrap. A growing number of civilians lay bleeding in the streets, waiting for help that was still miles away.
As the scale of destruction escalated, attention converged. Several major broadcast networks had choppers in the air running live coverage.
Regrouped in the shadows—Fury, Natasha, Daisy—they watched the press arrive.
"Shouldn't we do something?" Coulson's heart was considerably softer than the other three; faced with the carnage below, he couldn't bring himself to just stand there and watch.
Natasha was Black Widow. Nick Fury was Nick Fury. Daisy was still catching her breath from sprinting across half the eastern seaboard. None of them acknowledged him.
If only Captain America were here, Coulson thought, not for the first time.
The press didn't stay long. Partly because the scene was actively terrifying—Natasha could dodge flying debris in a Quinjet; the network pilots could not. One chopper took a piece of wreckage through its tail rotor and came down spinning. The others immediately gained altitude.
Partly because the Department of Defense had come down hard on the major networks. The message from the military was unambiguous: Keep filming and we'll declare martial law at your front door.
Invading Iraq or Afghanistan had proved difficult. Cracking down on their own people, though—that they were very good at.
Once the press was gone, military units did begin moving in—evacuating surviving civilians. Results were limited. The moment the east side was clear, the two of them jumped to the north. By the time the north was cleared, they'd moved south again.
Complete chaos.
"How did something like this even get created?" Daisy asked, watching the Hulk from a distance while the anti-Hulk bioweapon sat on standby. "Isn't monitoring this kind of thing literally what S.H.I.E.L.D. exists for?"
She'd always been curious. S.H.I.E.L.D. had enormous responsibilities and comparatively modest official authority. The whole original mandate was preventing accidents—stopping humanity from destroying itself.
If oversight had functioned the way it was supposed to, the Hulk project never would have happened.
Fury exhaled slowly. With only his inner circle around, he let himself be uncharacteristically candid:
"S.H.I.E.L.D. has stations around the world. You tell me, Agent Johnson—which country do we watch? All of them? We don't have the personnel."
"The government wants our agents' real identities disclosed. The military wants to inspect our classified weapons. Neither side trusts us. So they run their own biological weapons programs and don't tell us—and that's just the accepted arrangement."
It was visible, even through the mask of authority he always wore: Nick Fury was holding a crumbling institution together through sheer will. He probably knew S.H.I.E.L.D.'s internal rot better than anyone. The resource-skimming, the off-the-books global network of private assets—all of it preparation for the day the institution finally collapsed entirely.