"What... what the hell is that thing?"
Several hundred meters away, General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross white-knuckled the cabin door handle of his military helicopter, binoculars pressed so hard against his face they'd probably leave a mark. Through the lenses, he could see the burning figure hovering in mid-air with perfect clarity.
That was not a human being.
It didn't need fuel. It didn't need a reactor. It was just... on fire. The whole thing. Like someone had sculpted a man out of volcanic rock and then set him loose over Harlem like the world's most terrifying birthday candle.
"General!" His adjutant's voice cracked with barely contained panic. "Thermal imaging shows the target's core temperature is still climbing! If this thing cuts loose at full power, we're looking at several city blocks turned into a convection oven!"
"Whether it's a mutant or some new toy Stark cooked up in his garage..." Ross's jaw was clenched so tight a vein throbbed at his temple. His face had gone the particular shade of gray that meant someone's career was about to end. "It has completely blown my capture operation."
The center of the battlefield.
The Abomination had also frozen mid-rampage, thrown off by this unexpected development.
Emil Blonsky was riding the highest high of his life. The super-soldier serum cocktail pumping through his veins had turned him into something beyond human — beyond anything human. He'd been ripping apart armored vehicles with his bare hands for the past ten minutes, and every kill only fed the intoxicating certainty that he was untouchable. Invincible. A god wrapped in bone armor.
But this walking matchstick had just vaporized a multi-ton taxi like it was made of tissue paper?
"ROOOOAAAR—!!"
The Abomination let out a roar that shook windows three blocks away, a blast of foul breath spraying out like a biological weapon. His cloudy yellow eyes locked onto Jake with predatory focus, and something that might have been a grin twisted across his monstrous face.
"You a friend of the Hulk?" The Abomination's voice sounded like two slabs of concrete grinding together. "Or just some circus act that wandered onto the wrong stage?"
He took a thundering step forward, cracking the pavement.
"Doesn't matter. Since you wanna play hero, I'll turn you into paste and scrape what's left off my knuckles."
Standing in the path of that wall of murderous intent, Jake felt... calm.
Weirdly, impossibly calm.
It was the Omnitrix — or more specifically, it was Heatblast. The Pyronites were a species born in stellar fire, forged in temperatures that would liquify steel. Confidence wasn't a personality trait for them. It was a biological constant, baked into their DNA like the need to breathe.
And right now, that alien confidence was bleeding into Jake's mind like warmth spreading from a campfire, smoothing over the panic and replacing it with something that felt dangerously close to excitement.
Jake tilted his burning head, raised one rocky hand, and curled his finger in a slow, deliberate come here gesture. A shower of sparks cascaded from his fingertips like tiny falling stars.
"Big guy, your breath is worse than your feet. If you wanna fight, maybe hit a dentist first."
"YOU'RE DEAD!!"
The Abomination erupted.
If there was one thing Emil Blonsky couldn't stand — the one button you absolutely should not push — it was mocking his appearance. The last shred of tactical thinking evaporated from his brain, replaced by pure, white-hot rage.
BOOM!
The ground detonated beneath his feet.
The Abomination's legs — each thigh thicker than a tree trunk and packed with enough muscle fiber to embarrass a hydraulic press — fired like pistons. His entire body launched forward like a cruise missile made of bone and fury, covering the distance between them in a heartbeat. Abandoned cars in his path didn't even slow him down — they just exploded outward like bowling pins hit by a wrecking ball.
The speed was insane. Way too fast. A normal human eye wouldn't have even registered the blur.
Oh crap, he's FAST—
Jake's alien instincts screamed a warning, and his core temperature spiked in response. Heatblast's combat programming was good — reactive, sharp, loaded with millennia of evolutionary fight-or-flight coding — but what was charging at him right now was one of the absolute heavy hitters of the early MCU.
If he'd been in his human body, he'd already be a red smear on the asphalt.
But he wasn't human right now.
UP!
Jake didn't even need to think the command consciously. Two jets of concentrated fire erupted from the soles of his feet like rocket thrusters, the heat so intense the pavement beneath him flash-melted into bubbling tar.
WHOOOOSH—!
Just like Iron Man hitting the afterburners, Jake's body rocketed skyward at the last possible instant, tracing a blazing arc of fire across the Harlem skyline before punching straight up into the clouds.
The Abomination's haymaker — a punch that would have literally liquefied a human torso — slammed into empty ground.
BOOM!!
The impact cratered the street. A shockwave rippled outward, blowing out every remaining window in a two-block radius and sending a geyser of pulverized concrete fifty feet into the air.
"He ran?"
The Abomination jerked his head up, yellow eyes blazing with fury, and saw a streak of fire carving lazy circles through the sky above him like the world's cockiest comet.
Jake hovered in mid-air, riding the thermals his own body was generating, and took a second to just... look.
The ruined streets of Harlem spread out below him. Smoke, rubble, overturned cars, the distant wail of sirens — and right in the middle of it all, one very angry bone monster glaring up at him like he'd personally insulted its mother.
I'm flying. I'm actually flying.
The adrenaline hit was indescribable. Every nerve ending — or whatever the Pyronite equivalent was — sang with electric joy.
Okay. Enough sightseeing.
"My turn."
Jake thrust both hands downward, palms open, and the flame patterns etched into his rocky skin blazed white-hot.
Two pillars of fire — thick, concentrated, and devastating — erupted from his palms like high-pressure plasma cutters and screamed down from the sky, slamming into the Abomination's broad back with pinpoint accuracy.
SSSSSZZZZZ—!!
This was real heat. Not campfire heat. Not industrial furnace heat. This was the surface-of-the-sun, melt-through-anything, alien heat.
The Abomination's skin — tough enough to shrug off bullets, resilient enough to tank small-caliber artillery shells — sizzled like a steak thrown on a grill cranked to infinity. The acrid stench of burning flesh filled the air, and thick plumes of black smoke rose from his back.
"AAAARGH! HOT! You disgusting little insect!"
The Abomination howled, thrashing and rolling across the rubble in a frantic attempt to smother the flames crawling across his back. But this wasn't ordinary fire — it was Pyronite fire, alien plasma that could burn underwater, in a vacuum, in anything. Rolling around on some dirty concrete wasn't going to cut it.
Don't let up. Press the advantage.
Jake cupped his hands together in front of his chest, and the air around him began to distort and shimmer as heat gathered between his palms at an alarming rate. A fireball swelled into existence — two meters across, then three, blazing so bright it cast sharp shadows across the rooftops below.
"Eat this!"
Jake swung his arms and launched it.
The massive fireball screamed downward trailing a comet-tail of flame, and slammed into the Abomination just as he staggered to his feet.
BOOOOM—!!!
The explosion bloomed across the streets of Harlem like a miniature mushroom cloud. A wall of superheated air blasted outward in every direction, bending lampposts, flipping debris, and turning the air itself into something that shimmered and warped for a hundred meters in every direction.
Jake held his position in the air, watching the smoke churn below.
Did that do it?
The smoke cleared.
And the Abomination was still standing.
Barely. He looked awful — scorched black across most of his body, skin cracked and ulcerated in patches, wisps of smoke curling off him like a burnt marshmallow that had somehow survived the campfire. But his chest was still heaving, his yellow eyes still burning with rage, and his regeneration was already working — the worst of the burns slowly knitting themselves closed even as Jake watched.
The pain hadn't broken him. It had just made him angrier.
"I WILL TEAR YOU APART!!"
The Abomination grabbed the mangled wreckage of a city bus from the rubble beside him and hurled it skyward like a javelin, straight at Jake.
"Getting real tired of you throwing vehicles at people."
Jake banked hard to the right, and the bus sailed past close enough for him to feel the displaced air. It tumbled end over end before crashing into a rooftop somewhere behind him.
He hovered there, frowning — or doing the Pyronite equivalent of frowning, which involved the flames on his face flickering in an annoyed pattern.
The problem was becoming clear. Heatblast's firepower was spectacular — flashy, devastating, and extremely satisfying to use. But against the Abomination? A gamma-mutated tank with maxed-out durability and regeneration that bordered on unfair? It was like trying to kill a cockroach with a flamethrower. Sure, you'd hurt it. But it would just keep coming back angrier.
Unless he broke bones, this fight would never end.
[System Notification: Target displays extreme physical durability. Elemental damage output significantly reduced in effectiveness.]
[Suggested Tactic: Physical suppression.]
A slow grin spread across Jake's flaming face.
Way ahead of you.
"Alright, big guy," Jake muttered, already diving. "You want a brawl? Let's brawl."
He plummeted like a burning comet, closing the distance in seconds. When he was thirty feet from the ground and the Abomination was already cocking his fist back for a killing blow aimed at the incoming fireball—
Jake's right hand slapped the Omnitrix emblem on his chest.
ZZT—BANG!
The green flash that erupted this time was blinding — brighter and more violent than the first transformation, a nova of emerald energy that made the Abomination actually flinch and shield his eyes.
And Jake's body didn't shrink.
It grew.
The sleek, streamlined magma form of Heatblast dissolved in an instant, the flames guttering out and being replaced by something entirely different. Red muscle — dense, fibrous, hard as stone — swelled outward, piling on mass at a rate that shouldn't have been physically possible. Bones cracked and reformed with sounds like gunshots. His frame surged upward, blowing past seven feet, past eight, past nine, past ten — finally stopping somewhere north of eleven feet tall.
And then, with a wet, visceral ripping sound that made the nearby S.H.I.E.L.D. agents wince through their screens, two additional arms tore their way out from beneath his ribcage. Each one was as thick as a normal man's torso, corded with muscle and ending in fists the size of car engines.
Four eyes snapped open. Golden. Predatory. Hungry.
The Abomination, mid-lunge with a fist already swinging, suddenly found himself staring at something that was very much not a fragile little flame creature anymore.
Four massive hands shot forward like hydraulic clamps.
WHAM!
The impact was like two freight trains meeting head-on.
Jake's upper pair of hands caught the Abomination's incoming fists — caught them, fingers wrapping around those bone-armored knuckles and holding them in place with raw, grinding force. The shockwave from the collision cratered the ground beneath Jake's feet in a perfect circle. His legs plowed two deep furrows through the asphalt as he skidded backward, tearing up the road like a plow through soft earth.
He slid back fifteen feet before he stopped.
But he stopped.
Holy crap, this guy hits hard. Jake's four arms trembled with the effort of holding the Abomination's strength at bay. This was a monster that could go toe-to-toe with the Hulk — the raw physical force behind those fists was legitimately terrifying.
But he'd caught them. He'd held.
"Wha—what?"
The Abomination's yellow eyes went wide. His full-power charge — the same punch that had caved in the front of an M1 Abrams tank earlier that day — had been stopped cold.
And the thing that stopped it had four arms.
"Surprised, ugly?"
Jake's voice had changed completely. Gone was the crackling, campfire rumble of Heatblast. This voice was deep, heavy, and resonant — the kind of bass that you felt in your chest cavity before you heard it with your ears. Like distant thunder given a personality.
A savage grin split across his broad, crimson face.
"Tetramand. Four Arms." He flexed all four hands for emphasis, the muscles in his shoulders bunching like tectonic plates shifting. "See, the thing about having four hands—"
The Abomination's eyes barely had time to widen before Jake's lower pair of arms — the two that had been free this entire time, coiled and loaded like springs — unloaded directly into the Abomination's completely unguarded midsection.
"—is that you always have two to spare."
CRACK!
The punch connected with the force of a wrecking ball swung by God.
The Abomination's massive body folded in half like a lawn chair, his spine curving into a shape it was absolutely not designed for. A spray of green acidic fluid erupted from his mouth. His feet left the ground entirely — all however-many tons of bone-armored nightmare muscle — and he flew.
Backward.
Through a parked SUV, through a fire hydrant that exploded into a geyser, and straight through the front wall of an abandoned apartment building, disappearing into the structure with a catastrophic CRASH that brought half the facade crumbling down on top of him.
Jake stood in the center of the ruined street, all four fists clenched, chest heaving. The red Tetramand body thrummed with raw power — dense, brutal, and beautifully simple compared to Heatblast's elemental complexity.
He rolled all four shoulders and cracked his neck.
"Yeah. That felt about right."
S.H.I.E.L.D. Stealth Jet.
Dead silence.
Every agent on the command deck had forgotten how to breathe. The satellite feed was still playing on the main screen, but nobody needed the replay — the image was burned into their retinas.
They had just watched an elemental fire creature — something that could melt steel at a distance — transform into a twelve-foot red giant with four arms in under a second. And then that giant had punched the Abomination through a building.
This wasn't mutation. This wasn't technology. This wasn't anything in their database.
Nick Fury stood perfectly still, his single eye fixed on the screen with an intensity that could have cut glass. The gears behind that eye were turning at a speed that would have made a supercomputer jealous — calculating threat levels, asset potential, recruitment angles, and contingency plans all at the same time.
"This isn't a simple mutation," Fury said quietly.
He let the silence hang for exactly one beat.
"This is a perfect piece of biological weapon art."
He pressed his communicator.
"Natasha. Stand down on the attack run." His voice was calm, measured, and absolutely certain. "I want him alive."
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