Chapter 239: Zombie Captain Marvel
The zombie Marvel universe.
Sickly yellow sunlight filtered through the clouds, falling across buildings leaning at crooked angles.
Down in the streets, zombies wandered aimlessly, scattered in disarray.
Suddenly, one of them seemed to notice something, its clouded pupils trembling slightly as it turned to look up at the pale grey mist hanging in midair.
"Hraaa—hraaa—"
The zombie raised a hand, staggering forward a few steps, trying to reach the figure hovering above.
And just as it was about to close the distance...
Hmmmm!!
A streak of crimson heat vision suddenly swept across the street!
The zombie that had just been reaching for him was instantly sliced clean in two, top to bottom, and the beam didn't so much as pause, sweeping on to catch every zombie converging on his position. Even the ones hiding behind buildings weren't spared. Matthew's X-ray vision picked out each one with perfect clarity.
Given the situation, the beam simply cut straight through the buildings along with them, vaporizing the zombies into puddles of bloody sludge in the process.
"Looks like there's not a single living person left in this city." Matthew hovered in midair, his eyes sweeping over the wreckage his heat vision had just carved through the skyline.
"So where's the zombified Scarlet Witch hiding, then?"
He hadn't crossed into this universe for a sightseeing trip. He had a purpose here.
Which meant the faster he found her, the better, before she had time to recover her strength.
His X-ray vision swept methodically across the city below, taking in every corner within a five-kilometer radius.
But... still no sign of her anywhere.
Not that it was much of a surprise.
Trying to pinpoint a single person across an area this vast was, naturally, like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Just as he pulled his gaze back, getting ready to move on to the next city to search, something caught his eye.
In the distance, atop a skyscraper leaning drunkenly amid the ruins, a figure, drenched head to toe in gore, abruptly cut into Matthew's field of view.
It was a woman.
Bald, dark-skinned, wearing the tattered remains of a Wakandan Royal Guard uniform, gripping a vibranium spear in one hand.
Half her face had already rotted down to bone, and a chunk of her lower lip was missing entirely, exposing a gumline crusted with shreds of flesh.
Her ashen, clouded eyes swiveled, locking unblinking onto Matthew hovering in midair.
...Okoye.
The captain of the Wakandan Royal Guard, the woman who'd once torn the Winter Soldier's arm off with one hand, had become a zombie too.
Their eyes met.
The zombified Okoye's mouth snapped wide open, and she let out a furious roar in Matthew's direction!
The roar tore up from deep in her throat, echoing endlessly through the empty streets.
Watching this, Matthew's brow furrowed slightly.
Without hesitation, he raised a hand and gave the empty air a light press with one finger.
The next instant, an invisible weight of gravity crashed down!
Zombified as she was, Okoye, still up on the rooftop, apparently retained her combat instincts, and sensed the danger instantly.
She grabbed the spear on reflex and raised it, trying to block—
But before it was even halfway up, the building beneath her feet was struck from directly above, as if slapped by some enormous invisible hand.
The entire building, from top to bottom, was crushed flat in an instant.
Rebar and concrete, along with Okoye's body, were pulverized into a cloud of drifting dust under that overwhelming pressure, without even enough time left for a scream.
Once it was done, Matthew was just about to move on when, from the streets that had been empty moments before, a low rumble and a chaotic chorus of shrieking suddenly rose up in the distance!
The sound came from every direction at once.
A split second later, a dark tide of zombies came pouring out of the distant streets and alleys!
They shoved and trampled over one another, like a flood of black water surging out of nowhere.
In the span of a few breaths, the distant blocks were completely filled with that black tide, all of it converging toward Matthew's position.
Only then did he understand what Okoye's roar had actually meant.
It hadn't been a show of defiance.
It had been a call, summoning the horde.
His gaze swept out across the distance.
Deep within that black tide, Matthew spotted a few faces he recognized all too well.
The zombified Hawkeye leapt up out of the surging horde, landing on an overturned truck. Zombie or not, his draw was still fluid, still practiced. The instant he spotted Matthew, three arrows were already notched on the string at once.
He drew the bow full circle, taut as a full moon!
And above the horde, a zombified Tony Stark, piloting a Mark suit, came rocketing straight at Matthew.
Except compared to his usual smooth flying, this Tony handled the suit like he'd had one too many, nearly clipping a roadside utility pole on the way in.
Facing the zombie version of Tony barreling straight at him, Matthew's expression didn't so much as flicker.
Even though this Tony looked almost identical to the one from his own world, Matthew didn't spare him so much as a second glance, simply closing his fist toward that direction through the empty air.
Before he'd even closed the distance, zombie Tony, suit and all, was crushed flat in an instant.
The armor offered him no protection whatsoever.
Metal and flesh were kneaded together by an utterly irresistible force, bursting outward into a crimson mist of blood.
At the same moment, zombie Hawkeye's arrows arrived.
The three arrows tore through the air, their speed still shockingly fast.
But against an attack this feeble, Matthew didn't even bother to look.
Before the arrows could even get close, his molecular manipulation ability rewrote their molecular structure, and they crumbled into three thin streams of sand, scattered without a trace on the wind.
The horde kept surging toward Matthew's position.
Seeming to realize they couldn't reach him at their current height, countless zombies began clambering onto one another, stacking layer upon layer.
Before long, a tower built out of piled, rotting corpses rose up right in the middle of the city.
Decaying arms jutted out from the "tower" in every direction, reaching out like branches spreading from a tree.
Matthew's gaze lowered, watching the mountain of corpses climbing higher and higher beneath him.
A single thought.
A torrent of gravity, centered on him, roared outward!
His gravity field, after all, could cover an area equal to a full tenth of the continental United States.
Under that massive, sweeping barrage, the mountain of corpses was flattened in an instant!
A visible wave of force rippled outward at incredible speed, pressing everything it touched, living or dead, equally flat into the ground.
The corpse-mountain, which had stood a hundred meters tall moments before, had now been flattened into a thin layer.
The sound of bones shattering came so densely packed together it was almost impossible to make out individual cracks.
The dust that kicked up never even had the chance to clear the ground before that same gravity slammed it back down.
A few seconds later, the dust cleared.
The entire district had been wiped completely clean.
Or rather, a full tenth of the continental United States had been forcibly flattened into open plain by that single burst of force.
Seen from above, it looked like America had been stamped by some enormous seal, leaving behind a massive, perfectly round mark.
Watching New York and the surrounding districts, now completely erased below him, a flicker of satisfaction crossed Matthew's eyes.
Since he couldn't pinpoint exactly where the zombified Scarlet Witch was hiding, he might as well just carpet-bomb the whole map.
If he flattened every city on the entire planet, she'd naturally run out of places to hide.
And if she tried to hide underground, he'd just compress the ground itself too, until there was nowhere left for her to run.
With that thought, Matthew let out a cold laugh and shot off without a moment's pause toward the next area his carpet-bombing hadn't reached yet.
The gravity field followed him like a shadow, spreading outward with him at its center.
Everywhere he passed, whether city streets or rubble-strewn hordes of zombies, all of it was crushed flat by that invisible, colossal force.
Seen from high above, it looked exactly like some enormous, invisible steamroller advancing steadily across the continent.
Wherever Matthew flew, the ground behind him turned into smooth, flat earth.
But a display this blatant quickly drew the attention of a few powerful beings on this Earth, ones who, even zombified, had held onto their combat instincts.
From within the rubble ground flat by the gravity field, a golden figure suddenly shot up from below.
The figure tore through the grey-green clouds, trailing a dazzling streak of gold light, closing in fast on Matthew's position.
The shockwave of her flight sent debris flying in every direction along her path, tearing a visible rift through the air itself.
Whoosh.
Hearing the commotion behind him, Matthew tilted his head slightly to look.
A blonde woman came into view.
She wore a red-and-blue combat suit, her entire body wrapped in a layer of blazing gold energy.
But in stark contrast to that dazzling energy, the flesh beneath it had already rotted and turned foul.
The face that had once carried such striking, heroic energy now held nothing but madness and savagery.
"Captain Marvel?" Matthew murmured under his breath. "So she's turned into a zombie too."
By rights, with Captain Marvel's physical toughness, an ordinary zombie shouldn't have been able to break through her defenses at all.
Even if the Scarlet Witch herself had come at her personally, with Captain Marvel's speed, she should have easily been able to outrun her.
And yet here she was, a zombie all the same. Which left Matthew genuinely puzzled.
Just as he was still turning the question over, the Captain Marvel behind him suddenly accelerated!
Her whole body became a streak of gold light, barreling straight at him!
Her hair was entirely wrapped in streaming energy, her eyes blazing like twin stars. Clearly, she'd entered Binary form.
Seeing this, Matthew's gaze sharpened, and the gravity field he'd spread out flat instantly contracted, slamming down onto Captain Marvel with tremendous force!
The instant the gravity field swallowed her mid-flight, her whole body lurched sharply downward.
In that instant, it felt exactly like slamming headfirst into some impossibly dense, invisible swamp, so dense that even the gold light radiating off her body was forcibly warped by that unseen pressure.
At the same time, her flight path was violently bent off course, and she plummeted headfirst, slamming hard into the ground.
BOOM!
The impact plowed a deep trench through the flattened earth.
Captain Marvel tumbled across the ground in an undignified sprawl, rolling more than a dozen times before finally skidding to a stop half a minute later.
But before she could even get up, the ground beneath her was suddenly torn open by an unseen force!
Then Matthew swung a fist through the empty air!
Captain Marvel was instantly shoved down into the split earth, which sealed shut again just as fast.
Crack!
Compressed layers of high-density rock collided against each other, sandwiching Captain Marvel between them underground, the pressure building steadily tighter as Matthew's hand closed.
Like some continent-sized hydraulic press, trying to crush whatever sat at its center into nothing.
A steady creaking, grinding sound filled the air without pause, but Matthew's expression stayed grim.
He knew perfectly well that an attack at this level, against an enemy of her caliber, would do little more than cause some temporary discomfort. Killing her outright was a long way off.
As if to confirm exactly that:
Just as the earth kept converging and compressing toward the center, a thunderous roar suddenly erupted from below.
Before Matthew could make his next move, Captain Marvel came bursting straight out!
She smashed clean through the rock in the most brute-force way possible, crackling with shattered gold sparks, and lunged at Matthew again!
Her huge, reeking mouth stretched wide open, going straight for Matthew's neck.
Seeing this, Matthew sidestepped, dodging out of the way.
Captain Marvel's bite closed on empty air, her whole body jerking to a sudden halt midflight.
As if genuinely startled she hadn't managed to bite clean through his neck, she let out a furious snarl from deep in her throat.
Just as she was turning to lunge again, a streak of crimson heat vision tore through the air and slammed dead-center into her back, driving her body straight back down into the ground!
Gold light and heat vision crossed and exploded outward!
The rock layers along the impact zone were instantly vaporized by the sheer heat of the two energies colliding.
At the same moment, Matthew flipped his hand over.
A throwing knife forged from Uru metal materialized in his palm.
The knife was no bigger than an adult's palm, its blade etched with runes.
Along the edge, arcs of electricity churned and crackled, as if the blade had just been pulled straight out of the heart of a thunderstorm.
The knife was one Matthew had commissioned through Thor, sent to Nidavellir to have Dwarf King Eitri forge it. Its craftsmanship was intricate, sharing its origins with Stormbreaker, and it carried lightning stored inside it.
He gave his knife-wielding wrist a light flick.
The knife left his hand, blurring into an afterimage.
The instant it left his hand, the gravity field stacked onto it in a flash!
In a single instant!
The knife was accelerated by the gravity field to a terrifying speed, and shot straight down after Captain Marvel, chasing her through the crack in the earth she'd just smashed open.
The blade cut a line of light through the air, driving straight for her forehead!
Uru metal itself wasn't quite as hard as Adamantium, but the runes carved into it, along with the other magic bound to it, pushed the knife's lethality up several levels beyond what its raw material alone could account for.
A booming crash echoed up from deep underground!
Captain Marvel, recovering, immediately tore free of the heat vision's impact and shot back upward.
But that exact move put her on a direct collision course with the incoming knife!
The instant the two collided, the entire ground shuddered.
Then a teeth-grating screech rose up from somewhere deep underground.
Half a minute later.
Seeing no more movement below, Matthew frowned slightly and activated his X-ray vision.
His gaze cut straight through the soil, down into the depths below.
Before long, a figure, still moving within the rock, came into view.
The palm-sized knife was already buried halfway into Captain Marvel's skull, its hilt clenched in a death grip in her own hand.
"That combat instinct... really is something." Matthew, still hovering in midair, let out the remark, half in genuine admiration.
As fast as the knife had been, Captain Marvel's raw power spoke for itself. Running on pure combat instinct alone, she could still steamroll most other superheroes.
That was part of the reason his one strike hadn't finished her off.
Feeling the knife still trying to bore deeper into her brain, Captain Marvel let out a shriek and wrenched it free with brute force!
She spared a quick glance at the brain matter smeared across the blade, a flicker of fury crossing her zombified face, then hurled the knife straight back like she was tossing a sandbag.
A sharp whoosh split the air!
The knife came screaming back toward Matthew, driving straight for the spot between his eyes!
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