"So, General Ross, I wonder if the government has made any new plans?"
After hearing what Shin said, General Ross's face darkened slightly. "The government will try its best to support you..."
"The damn government rats have pretty much all bailed by now!" A furious voice cut in before Ross could continue. Shin turned his head, surprised to see Captain America and Wolverine together. Standing beside them was a bald black man with an eye patch.
The speaker was Wolverine, wearing his usual rebellious look. He spat out the cigar in his mouth and growled, "Those bastards already left Earth! I bet they're running things remotely now."
Shin nodded, expression rigid. In Marvel comics, it wasn't unusual for the U.S. government to have spacefaring technology. Considering S.H.I.E.L.D. had spacecrafts, it was only natural for the government to have access to alien technology.
But leaving without a word? That was ridiculous. Even Shin, a world traveler who had seen plenty, felt secondhand embarrassment. It was pure drama!
While Shin was still assessing the situation, the U.S. government had already evacuated. Truly, it lived up to the name Land of the Free.
He looked back at Ross and saw that although the general looked grim, he didn't deny anything. Clearly, they were telling the truth.
As for how Wolverine knew this kind of classified information... just look at the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. standing beside him.
By contrast, although Ross in the original comics chased the Hulk endlessly and caused massive destruction in his pursuit of creating a Hulk army, he wasn't exactly a good person.
Still, he had more guts and grit than most bureaucrats.
"Then that means, General Ross, you're the highest-ranking officer now?" Shin asked bluntly.
Ross replied in a low voice, "Yes. Right now, in all of America, I probably hold the highest position."
"Then I have to congratulate you, General Ross. That's quite the rapid promotion," Shin said with a smile.
"Okay, cut it out," Captain America interjected quickly, stepping between them. "Kevin, how did you get here just now? You appeared out of nowhere."
"Just a little trick. Not worth mentioning. What really matters right now isn't that, Captain," Shin replied, shifting the topic.
In fact, quite a few people were curious about Shin's sudden appearance. As humanity's last hope, this lab was one of the most advanced and heavily guarded facilities on Earth. Even someone like Kingpin could get his hands on space-locking technology, there was no way this place didn't have some.
However, Scarlet Witch's ability wasn't teleportation in the strictest sense it was probability manipulation. It was like someone having both the chance to go to work and the chance to call in sick. Wanda altered the odds of a group of people appearing here. It wasn't space travel at all, so anti-space devices were useless.
[T/N: In the Marvel Database, the Scarlet Witch is a Hexcraft user. As a result of her powers, Wanda Maximoff has been stated as a probability manipulator of the highest order.]
As for high-level phenomena like probability and causality, current Earth technology has no effective countermeasures.
"Ah, that's not the real issue," Captain America said, looking troubled. "Ever since I woke up, this world just makes less and less sense to me. Back in the day, I was only fighting Nazis. Now I've got to deal with monsters that eat planets."
He sighed. "God help us. I just hope we're not appetizers to that thing."
Despite his words, Captain America's eyes held no defeat. Though he had no solutions for Galactus, his courage and composure brought a sense of calm to the room.
Seeing this, Shin figured this was heading toward another all-out superhero battle. Otherwise, what was the point of gathering everyone here?
Shin knew how these stories went. All the heroes would gather and prepare for the worst...
And then, suddenly, Galactus would get blown up by a quantum bomb. Everyone would cheer, go home, and reunite with their families. But realistically? That wasn't going to happen.
In Shin's opinion, the bomb might do something, maybe damage Galactus's ship or weaken him, but in the end, it would still fall to the heroes to fight. Either they would defeat a weakened Galactus through grit and teamwork, or they'd all be obliterated.
Keeping that in mind, Shin wasn't about to voice any naive optimism. "No. If we're talking scale, we're just bacteria on his ship. If we wanted to qualify as seasoning, we'd need to be hundreds of times bigger."
"The most important thing now is understanding our opponent. How much has the Silver Surfer revealed?"
"Very little," said the bald man from S.H.I.E.L.D.—Nick Fury. "None of Earth's tools or truth serums work on him. Honestly, if it weren't for the Hulk, even with Dr. Reed separating him from the board, we couldn't have caught the Silver Surfer at all."
Shin stroked his chin. "Let's find the mutants. Have Professor X use his psychic powers to see if he can pull the information directly from his mind."
Due to Shin's intervention, Wolverine had been traveling with Captain America and hadn't returned to Xavier's School. The two had even gone after William Stryker together, forcing the colonel to abandon several of his bases.
But because of Captain America's presence and because Stryker was a filthy man whose actions couldn't be easily exposed, the military couldn't do anything to them. In the end, the incident was swept under the rug.
In fact, thanks to their actions and the fact that the Great Illusionist was no longer in Stryker's control, the entire plot of X2: X-Men United had been derailed.
As a result, Wolverine's connection to the X-Men only extended to a couple of past battles and collaborations. While there was some camaraderie, the strained human-mutant relations made it hard for him to simply return to the team. Otherwise, he would've given them a heads-up already.
"Mutants? But the trust between us is quite low," Nick Fury said calmly.
"Low trust? Don't flatter yourself," Shin sneered. "The mutants don't trust you. Not the other way around."
"After all, you bastards have been screwing them over for a long time."
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