BOOM!
The explosion was a deafening, gut-punching roar that shattered the heavy silence of the Hudson River docks. A derelict warehouse, once a skeletal frame of rusted steel and rotted wood, was instantly leveled. A plume of thick, acrid smoke—smelling of ozone and scorched metal—billowed into the night sky, illuminated by the flickering orange glow of the debris.
Predictably, the surrounding neighborhood erupted into chaos. Panicked shouts echoed from nearby apartments, and the frantic trill of phone calls to 911 flooded the dispatch center. In less than five minutes, the NYPD—already stretched thin by a week of unprecedented gang violence—swarmed the scene. Lights flashed red and blue against the oily surface of the river, but when the officers searched the smoking pile of rubble, they found nothing. No body, no suspect, not even a trace of an explosive device.
Meanwhile, the culprit was blocks away, walking into a 24-hour coffee shop with his hands shoved deep into his pockets. Rosen looked like any other tired New Yorker, though his heart was still thumping a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He ordered a black coffee and a sourdough roll, his fingers slightly trembling as he took the change.
The explosion hadn't been an act of terrorism. It had been a catastrophic failure of engineering.
Since the night of the Fisk Tower heist, Rosen's life had settled into a rhythmic, dangerous routine. By night, he was the "Ghost of Hell's Kitchen," hitting gang-run warehouses and money-laundering fronts to fill his System balance. By day, he was an amateur scientist, hunting down industrial materials and testing the mechanical blueprints etched into his brain.
New York was currently a powder keg because of him. Wilson Fisk had gone scorched-earth, his enforcers tearing the city apart to find the man who had emptied his vault. Because Rosen left no fingerprints and no DNA, Kingpin had pivoted to the only lead he had: the gold. He'd put a bounty on anyone trying to move large quantities of bullion or jewelry.
But Rosen wasn't that stupid. He hadn't sold a single ounce of Fisk's gold. Instead, he'd focused on hitting other gangs—the Irish Mob, the Russian syndicates, the street-level cartels—to scrape together the remaining cash he needed for the Staff of Antonidas.
The result was a city-wide gang war. Every syndicate assumed their rivals were the ones behind the thefts. The Mayor, the Police Commissioner, and the FBI had even held a "sit-down" with the city's underworld bosses to figure out what was happening. When the word got out about a "Master Thief" specifically targeting criminal enterprises, the authorities had no choice but to issue a massive reward for information.
Rosen didn't care. He was a ghost. Between Gale Step and Blink, he was invisible to every camera in Manhattan. Whenever he finished a job, he'd use a Level 2 Flame Storm to incinerate the evidence. The magical fire was so hot it turned steel to slag and bone to ash, leaving nothing for the feds to find.
His real problem wasn't the police. It was the physics of the Marvel Universe.
The Cyberpunk Problem
Over the past few days, Rosen had built a dozen different devices. Using his Engineering Upgrade, he'd constructed everything from high-frequency scanners to a crude set of power armor.
The armor was... well, it wasn't pretty. Because he was using scavenged parts and Goblin-style blueprints, the suit looked like something out of a cyberpunk nightmare—all exposed wiring, hissed steam, and jagged plates of bolted-on steel. It was essentially the magical cousin of the Mark 1 suit Tony Stark would eventually build in a cave. It worked, and it gave him enough strength to flip a car, but it had one fatal flaw:
It was a power hog.
He'd tried running the suit on improved lead-acid batteries and even high-end lithium-ion cells, but the thing would die after ten minutes of heavy use. If he wanted to fly—or even just sustain a fight—he needed a real energy core.
He didn't have the blueprints for an Arc Reactor. Even Stark hadn't perfected that yet. So, Rosen had turned to the only other option in his head: the Orichalcum Energy Core.
In the Warcraft world, this was the pinnacle of magi-tech. It was the heart that powered the Arcane Golems of Silvermoon City and the floating lanterns of Dalaran. It was a battery for pure mana. Since Rosen now had several spell skills, he could act as a living charger for the core.
But the experiment at the docks had proven one thing: modern Earth materials couldn't handle the strain.
In his world, the core was made of Thorium, a magically reactive metal. On Earth, Thorium was just a radioactive element used in nuclear reactors—it didn't have the "arcane" properties he needed. He'd tried substituting it with Bismuth, a metal known for its unique conductivity. It had cost him $5,000 a kilogram on the industrial market.
It had held for about thirty seconds. Then, the mana saturation had reached critical mass, the Bismuth had crystallized and shattered, and the resulting explosion had leveled the warehouse. If Rosen hadn't used Divine Shield and Blink in the same heartbeat, he'd be a red smear on the Hudson.
The Search for a Solution
Rosen stared into his coffee, the dark liquid reflecting the fluorescent lights of the shop. He needed better materials. He listed his options in his head:
System Melting: He could buy high-end gear from the System shop and melt it down to extract "Orichalcum." But the cost was astronomical, and if he messed up the forge, he'd be out millions with nothing to show for it.
Vibranium: The legendary "miracle metal." It was supposed to absorb energy and vibration. Would it conduct magic? It was a gamble, but it was the best candidate on the planet.
The Vanko Method: He could go to Russia and track down Anton and Ivan Vanko. They were working on a crude version of the Arc Reactor. But the Vankos were unstable, bitter, and likely to try and kill him the moment he showed off his tech.
Kamar-Taj: He could walk up to the Sanctum Sanctorum and ask the Ancient One for some magical metal.
"Yeah, right," Rosen muttered, tearing off a piece of the roll. "Walk into the den of the world's most powerful sorceress as a dimension-hopping thief. That'll go great."
He knew the Ancient One probably knew he was here, but as long as he wasn't trying to tear a hole in reality, she likely had bigger fish to fry. If he showed up on her doorstep, though, he'd be inviting a level of scrutiny he wasn't ready for.
"Vibranium it is," he decided. It was rare, expensive, and mostly hidden in Wakanda, but there were traces of it on the black market—if you knew where to look and had the stomach to take it from the people who owned it.
"Rosen?"
The voice was clear, sharp, and entirely too close.
Rosen froze. He slowly turned his head, his hand instinctively twitching toward the Orb of Fire hidden in his jacket.
Standing by the booth was a young woman with a mess of dark hair and a look of genuine surprise on her face. She was wearing a worn leather jacket and looked like she hadn't slept in a week—a look Rosen was becoming very familiar with.
"You are... Jessica?" Rosen said, his brain finally clicking.
It was Jessica Campbell. His high school classmate. A girl who had been quiet, smart, and—if his 'prophet' memories served him—was destined to become Jessica Jones after a tragic accident that hadn't happened yet. Or maybe it had. In this universe, the timeline was always a little fuzzy.
He relaxed his grip on the Orb, but his eyes remained sharp. In a city where he was the most wanted man in the underworld, seeing a familiar face wasn't a comfort. It was a complication.