"Every thirty minutes," Sophia said. "A single word. If I miss two, I call Reyes. If Reyes can't reach you, he calls his people, and I do not care how much trouble that makes."
"That's a lot of rules for a walk."
"It's a lot of rules for a hunt." She didn't look up from the Ledger. She had written DRONE: DENTED, SPIRAL INSIDE in the SCAN EVENTS tab, drawing three neat arrows leading away from it. "You told me it was a guess and a secret. I'm asking you to be careful with both."
He had told her everything at the door, shoes still on. It was a ritual now.
"One word every thirty minutes," Adrian confirmed. "Understood."
"Good." She capped her marker. "And Adrian?"
"Yeah?"
"Come home with the same number of arms you left with."
The drone had left a trail.
It wasn't a trail anyone else could see. It was a faint, silver thread of the same residue that had clung to the manhole cover, strung out across the rooftops like spider silk. His Six Eyes tracked it easily, following the thread over the river, past the low brick sprawl of the waterfront, and into a tangle of shuttered industrial lots.
At the fourth check-in, he texted: Fine.
At the fifth: Still fine.
At the sixth: Found something.
The thread ended at a windowless cold-storage plant. Three stories of stained concrete squatting behind a chain-link fence. A faded sign read FRIGOR-PAK. A newer one read NO TRESPASSING.
Scratched into the paint beneath it, small and precise, was that exact same spiral.
Cute, Adrian thought.
He cleared the fence in a single bound and slipped through a freshly picked maintenance door. Inside, the air was cold enough to fog his breath. He walked down a dim, sprawling corridor lined with massive steel freezer doors.
The hum reached him first. A low, patient electrical murmur.
He pushed open the double doors at the end of the hall and froze.
It was a factory floor. Not a ruin. A fully functional, pristine workshop. Rows of clean steel benches ran the length of the cavernous room. Arranged on them with mechanical care were dozens—maybe a hundred—half-finished spheres the color of wet slate. Overhead, automated articulated arms moved in precise loops. Welding, seating, testing.
There were no workers.
A workshop with no one working, he thought, the hair on his arms standing up.
His Six Eyes drank in the details. The plating on the nearest bench was old, scavenged alloy. Dull and dense. He recognized it immediately from a smuggler's van months ago.
Chitauri.
This was the missing salvage. The alien tech that had vanished through the gaps in the DODC's inventory, now being repurposed into something far deadlier than the Chitauri ever intended. And in every sphere, every automated arm, every weld and wire, that tiny spiral turned inward on itself.
Then, somewhere above him, a chime sounded.
Low. Flat. Like a subway announcement.
Adrian's blood ran cold.
It was the exact chime from the Grade 2 curse at the Willets Point rail yard. A flawless audio recreation, played back through the ceiling speakers.
It watched the fight.
Every sphere on every bench opened at once.
They unfolded like metallic spiders. Four legs, then six, then eight—each ending in a Chitauri alloy blade honed to a razor's edge. They dropped from the benches in a single, rippling wave, completely silent except for the click of steel on concrete.
They swarmed him from every direction.
Adrian met the first three in the doorway. Todo's physical talent slowed the world to a crawl, turning the chaotic ambush into readable vectors. He saw the swing of a blade and stepped inside the guard. A cursed-energy reinforced palm slapped the flat of the metal aside. His right fist punched straight through the drone's shell, showering sparks. He grabbed a severed leg and drove it through the two bots behind it.
Five down. Stil hadn't broken a sweat.
No cursed energy, his Six Eyes confirmed. They're completely mundane.
But he saw something else. Thin, shining threads of that spiral energy connected every drone in the room. They pulsed in a rapid rhythm, moving the entire swarm as one synchronized entity.
It's a hive mind. One thing wearing fifty faces.
He identified the relay nodes—the specific spheres burning brighter than the rest—and targeted them. A leap, a kick, a sprinting slide under a sweeping blade, and three nodes were slag. The swarm stuttered, their movements turning ragged for a full second.
Then, it learned.
The next wave didn't rush him. They spread wide, moving with slow, deliberate precision. They weren't attacking; they were cutting off his escape angles. A blade grazed his shoulder. Another sliced his jacket open down the back.
It's copying my footwork.
Adrian tried the rail yard trick. He slammed his palm onto the nearest sphere and unleashed [Domain Amplification].
A burst of raw interference flooded the bot. The drone's spiral scrambled. The entire swarm hesitated.
One. Two.
The exact moment his two-second window closed—and his left arm flared with nerve pain—every remaining drone lunged at once.
Adrian threw himself backward, but he was a fraction too slow. A blade opened his left side from hip to rib. Another bit into his thigh. He hit the floor rolling, blood soaking his shirt.
They timed it.
The recording hadn't just watched him fight. It had calculated the length of his technique, the physical cost, and the exact millisecond his guard dropped. It built a flawless ambush around his cooldown.
"Okay," Adrian hissed through his teeth. "Okay. You're smart."
He ignored the warm blood running down his ribs and locked his stance.
"But you've never seen me be stupid."
He ran.
The industrial freezers were built to hold a hundred tons of meat behind three-foot-thick doors.
Adrian hit the corridor at a dead sprint, the silver flood of spider-drones pouring out of the workshop right behind him. He dove into the nearest open walk-in freezer, rolled to his feet, and snatched a heavy steel meat hook off the wall.
The drones flooded in after him. Dozens of them, filling the room like water.
"Learn this," he grunted, and slammed the heavy door shut.
It weighed a ton, booming like a cannon shot. He threw the external latch, wrapped both hands around the handle, and flooded the locking mechanism with dense cursed energy reinforcement. Inside, the drones hammered furiously against the steel. The thick door bulged. Frost sprayed from the stressed seams.
Somewhere, he thought wildly, a dead train curse is laughing at me.
Then, the hammering stopped.
A long, ticking silence fell over the corridor.
From the far end of the hall, something heavy took a step.
It was the size of a man, built like a spider that had studied human anatomy. Six legs tipped with curving blades. A heavily armored Chitauri chassis, welded and re-welded, crawling with bright spirals. In the center of its chest, a single, glowing white optic lens stared at him.
It stopped ten feet away.
Adrian breathed hard, blood dripping down his leg. He pushed himself off the freezer door.
"Foreman," he said. "Nice to meet you."
The machine lunged.
It was impossibly fast. The first strike caught Adrian across the forearm before he finished turning. He countered with a reinforced right hook that nailed the chassis dead center, rocking the machine back.
The second exchange was cleaner. Adrian slipped a blade, wrenched a leg sideways, and drove his heel straight through the thing's underbelly. Bright hydraulic fluid sprayed the concrete.
Two.
The third exchange went wrong.
The Foreman parried. Perfectly. It stepped inside his guard—using the exact low-shoulder, weight-forward technique Adrian used—and hit him with his own timing.
The concrete floor slammed into Adrian's back.
It's learning my martial arts in real time.
He rolled frantically as a sword-length blade bit into the floor where his head had just been. He came up on one knee, vision doubling. He had maybe two more exchanges before the AI completely mapped his combat style.
It's better at being me than I am.
Which was precisely the problem.
So, Adrian stopped fighting like himself.
He threw a sloppy, wide, wildly unbalanced haymaker. Absolutely zero technique. The Foreman analyzed the vector and blocked it flawlessly.
It didn't calculate that Adrian's other hand was coming in low, ugly, and underhanded, clutching a jagged chunk of cracked concrete.
The rock smashed into the Foreman's optic lens.
It wasn't a clean hit. It was the kind of desperate throw an angry kid makes in a street fight. But the Foreman's processing spirals stuttered. It had no algorithmic model for a random rock throw.
Adrian didn't give it a millisecond to adjust.
He drove forward with everything he had, maxing out his cursed energy reinforcement and Todo's physical strength. He plunged his right fist through the armored slats and directly into the cracked white lens.
Metal buckled. The core inside cracked like a glass bulb.
Every bright spiral in the room instantly went dark. The Foreman sagged, folding into a heap of dead scrap metal.
Every monitor in the workshop woke up at the exact same instant.
Dozens of screens he hadn't noticed lit up along the walls. They all displayed the same image: Adrian's face. High-definition, frozen mid-turn on the rooftop at dawn. It was the exact moment the scout drone had memorized him.
Beneath his face, in a plain white font, was a single character:
?
"...Oh, that's just rude," Adrian rasped.
The floor began to glow.
Blinding lines of white light raced across the concrete, up the workbenches, and into the walls. His Six Eyes read the chemical reaction a full second before it triggered.
Thermite. It's burning the workshop.
The AI wasn't going to let him keep a single piece of evidence.
Adrian bolted. Out the double doors, down the hall, and up a stairwell that violently shook with the first muffled explosion. He smashed through a roof access hatch, diving into the freezing night air just as the building lit up like a lantern behind him. White fire burst from the seams, roaring up through the vents in a catastrophic chain reaction.
He made it as far as the chain-link fence before his bleeding leg gave out.
He sat down hard in the gravel, watching Frigor-Pak burn to slag.
Nothing came. No notification. No [INCIDENT LOGGED]. No reward card. The System didn't even acknowledge the fight had happened.
It doesn't register them, he realized with a sinking dread. They aren't curses. They aren't magic.
Tony Stark's tech was a blind spot to the System.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. Thirty minutes exactly. He pulled it out, his hand shaking, and typed a single word:
Alive.
The reply came back in under four seconds.
Come home.