"Hello, 911? Hurry, send someone to 17 Varick Street! Old Betty, she… her roses… they've pushed right through her window glass! The vines are moving like they're alive and they've wrapped up her dog! The dog keeps laughing! Laughing like something out of a nightmare! Betty says the roses are messengers from God and they're demanding a sacrifice—her dog… please, help!"
"...No, no ambulance needed! But we do need… a priest? Or an exorcist? My son, little Jack… after school yesterday, he went to play at that old, abandoned drinking fountain in the park. When he came back, he just started drawing… the whole wall! Nothing but those… those spirals! Blue ones! Densely packed blue spirals!
"He says he hears a 'mom' calling to him in the sound of the water… but his birth mother disappeared ten years ago!"
The media were like sharks catching the scent of blood.
Even though SPC and the temporary city task force were working together to control information, words like "blue-light hallucinations," "mental breakdown," and "mass hysteria" still started appearing in the corners of certain Brooklyn tabloids, and even seeped into the local-news sections of mainstream networks.
Panic, like an invisible haze, began to gather over several neighborhoods.
"Jarvis, cross-reference the locations of the abnormal incident reports with the underground water-flow model."
Tony, wearing an oil-stained work vest, was buried among the salvaged server wreckage from Stark Industries, trying to rebuild part of the AI's local database. The crater incident and the looming shadow of bankruptcy had left his beard unkempt and his eyes sunken.
"High correlation, sir."
The holographic display projected a detailed 3D map of Brooklyn. Red lines marked the water-flow network, overlapping almost perfectly with clusters of blinking blue dots.
"Preliminary assessment: the water flow is carrying residual radioactive material from the scepter and a low-frequency psychic interference field. These have already seeped into parts of the underground piping and even to the surface, causing contamination-level effects on areas with weak geological structure near groundwater nodes, as well as on the residents. The affected zone is slowly expanding," Jarvis warned.
"Contamination-level…" Tony ground his teeth. "So it's not an alien army, not a space battleship, it's goddamn… groundwater pollution and mass psychosis?!"
His anger collided with a suffocating sense of powerlessness.
Against enemies he could see, he had the Iron Man armor. But against this kind of invisible seepage and contamination? His technology felt like it was trying to grab hold of the wind.
"Reporting in, Captain," Natasha's voice came over the comm channel. She was conducting covert surveillance near the scene on Varick Street. "Abnormal mental cases have been confirmed to show correlation with the Mind Stone's energy signature. The underground river water in the bridge-hole area where the target individual is located is very likely one of the contamination sources. Also…"
She paused, pulling up several thermal images from high-altitude drones.
"The high-temperature signature we discovered in the rubble under the Brooklyn Bridge… is gone. Someone moved him ahead of us."
"Corvus Glaive is still buried underground, and Proxima Midnight may be injured as well… the only one with both the capability and the motive to move Cull Obsidian…"
Steve stood inside a temporary command post set up in a converted abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn, looking toward the gloomy sky outside the window.
"Is the 'Sorcerer'. He's gathering his strength in the dark."
Tony reacted immediately.
"Jarvis! Put priority focus on all suspicious asset movements by Hydra remnants over the past few months! Especially any secret facilities previously linked to spatial transmission or energy shielding!"
He was already thinking of where Ebony Maw's "new lair" might have come from.
(End of Chapter)
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