The sight of Tony being launched backward by the Bounce Pad device sent the entire team into fits of laughter. Even through his armor, his indignant expression was clearly visible as he picked himself up from where he'd landed several feet away.
"I really shouldn't have expected anything less from you," Tony grumbled, though his tone carried more amusement than genuine annoyance. As someone who'd just experienced the device firsthand, he had to admit the tactical applications were impressive. While the repulsion field might not be particularly useful for someone in a flying suit, it could be invaluable for infantry combat—providing instant battlefield repositioning or emergency escape routes.
"I didn't realize you had any expectations of me to begin with," Marcus replied with casual indifference. "That's oddly touching."
With his Warframe now complete, Marcus's attention was already shifting to the next phase of his power enhancement project. The dimensional artifacts he'd collected from the battlefield were calling to him, their residual energies waiting to be properly utilized.
"If there's nothing else urgent, I'm heading back to work," Marcus continued, tossing both the Tesla Nervos sphere and the Bounce Pad device to Tony. "Consider those your new toys. I'm sure you'll find interesting ways to reverse-engineer them."
Tony's eyebrows rose as he caught the spherical devices, immediately understanding the implications. Marcus wasn't just giving him examples to study—he was providing prototypes for mass production. With enough analysis, Tony could potentially create entire arsenals of similar devices, each one customized for specific tactical situations.
"Fire explosions, ice barriers, sonic disruptors..." Tony muttered to himself as he examined the devices, his engineer's mind already racing through the possibilities. "If I can crack the fundamental principles behind the matter restructuring..."
While Tony hurried off to the battleship's improvised research lab, the rest of the team began dispersing to their various activities. The ship was back under control, and they could finally continue their journey to Clint's farm for what was supposed to be a relaxing vacation.
Back in his private workspace, Marcus spread out his collection of dimensional artifacts and frowned at what he was seeing. The fragments glowed with various forms of otherworldly energy, but none of them carried the kind of cosmic significance he'd been hoping for.
"These are disappointingly mundane," he observed with a sigh.
The dimensional demons who had been forced to abandon these artifacts during the battle had been among the weaker members of their respective pantheons. The truly powerful entities—the ones whose relics might have contained transformative energies—had managed to retreat without leaving anything behind.
Still, dimensional energy was dimensional energy, regardless of its source. Marcus reached for his belt and withdrew several blank empowerment cores, crystalline devices designed to store and focus specific types of power.
"Even if these can't trigger a full Warframe evolution," he reasoned, "they should still provide useful enhancements."
He began the careful process of extracting dimensional energy from each artifact, watching as streams of differently colored power flowed from the fragments into the waiting empowerment cores. Each core took on the distinctive hue of its contained energy—crimson from the Blood Dimension, azure from the Frost Realm, violet from the Shadow Plane, and dozens of others.
When the extraction was complete, Marcus found himself surrounded by floating empowerment cores, each one pulsing with its own unique rhythm of contained power.
"Not bad," he admitted, selecting a particularly bright yellow core that seemed to vibrate with unusual energy. "Let's see what the Disaster Dimension has to offer."
The moment Marcus integrated the empowerment into his energy matrix, he felt the power settle into his consciousness like a poisonous whisper. This wasn't raw destructive force or elemental manipulation—this was something far more subtle and potentially more dangerous.
"Disaster energy," Marcus mused, flexing his fingers as he felt the power respond to his will. "Interesting. It's not about direct harm, it's about probability manipulation."
To test his new capability, Marcus opened a portal to observe a random location elsewhere in the world. The blue-edged rift showed him a concrete warehouse somewhere that appeared to be operating as some kind of black market organ harvesting facility. A bald man in blood-stained clothes was casually playing with a knife while standing over a severely beaten victim suspended from chains.
"Perfect test subject," Marcus decided, focusing his attention on the torturer.
He channeled a small amount of disaster energy through the portal, watching as yellow light settled over the bald man like invisible fog. The effect was immediate and dramatic.
The knife that had been spinning smoothly through the man's fingers suddenly caught awkwardly, the blade slicing deep into his hand and sending blood spattering across the floor. Cursing loudly, the man moved toward a first aid kit mounted on the wall—and immediately slammed his shin into the corner of a metal table with enough force to make him howl in pain.
The injury caused him to stumble backward, his feet sliding on his own blood, and he crashed into a rack of torture implements that had been mounted on the wall. Dozens of knives, hooks, and other sharp instruments rained down around him as he fell, each one seeming to find its way toward his body with impossible precision.
"Holy shit," Marcus muttered, watching in fascination as the man desperately twisted to avoid the falling blades. "This is way more dramatic than I expected."
The torturer managed to avoid the worst of the falling weapons, though several knives left deep cuts across his arms and legs. But just as he started to catch his breath, the massive chandelier hanging from the ceiling chose that exact moment to break free from its mounting. The heavy copper fixture crashed down directly onto his head while a falling ladder added insult to injury by striking him from the side.
The combined impact was instantly fatal, turning the man's skull into something resembling a broken watermelon.
The victim who had been chained to the wall stared at the scene in absolute shock, unable to process what he'd just witnessed. After several moments of stunned silence, he began whispering prayers of gratitude, clearly convinced that divine intervention had just saved his life.
Using his toes to retrieve one of the fallen knives, the man began carefully cutting through his restraints, his movements filled with the desperate hope of someone who had just been given an impossible second chance.
Marcus closed the portal and leaned back in his chair, genuinely impressed by what he'd just observed. The disaster empowerment was unlike any power he'd previously encountered—it didn't directly harm targets so much as it manipulated probability to ensure that everything that could go wrong would go wrong at the worst possible moment.
"That's genuinely terrifying," he admitted with grudging respect. "If this had come from a more powerful dimensional entity, it could probably cause accidents on a planetary scale."
The implications were staggering. Instead of having to personally confront enemies, he could simply mark them with disaster energy and wait for the universe itself to eliminate them through increasingly unlikely coincidences. It was subtle, untraceable, and absolutely ruthless in its efficiency.
Marcus carefully removed the disaster empowerment from his energy matrix and held the yellow core up to the light, watching its inner energy swirl like liquid sunshine.
"This could be very useful for dealing with problems that require a delicate touch," he mused. "Sometimes the best solution is the one that looks like an accident."
Meanwhile, in the warehouse where Marcus had conducted his test, the freed police officer was cautiously making his way through the building's corridors. Detective Martinez had been investigating reports of missing persons when he'd stumbled onto this organ harvesting operation, only to be captured and tortured for information about police activities.
Now, armed with a pistol taken from his dead captor and carrying several knives as backup weapons, Martinez was determined to escape and bring backup to rescue the other victims he'd seen during his captivity.