Meanwhile, deep inside the Brooklyn bridge tunnel.
Saitama tossed irritably on the "bed" he'd made out of flattened cardboard. He couldn't sleep.
It had been fine yesterday, but tonight he just kept feeling… cold.
A strange chill that seeped into his bones—not physical, exactly. More like someone was whispering in his ear, mumbling things he really didn't want to hear.
"Supermarket… sale… all the eggs sold out… hotpot… the hotpot place went bankrupt…"
His dreams were filled with nothing but bad luck, a broken radio buzzing in his brain with endless bad-news channels.
He jerked upright, scratching at his shiny scalp in annoyance. The bridge-hole was pitch black, and the dull roar of the distant current seemed louder than usual.
"Man… so noisy… louder than last night…" he muttered, rubbing his temples. His head felt a little swollen, an indistinct irritation pressing against his skull and making him deeply uncomfortable.
He didn't notice that on the piece of cardboard where he'd been lying and the concrete floor beneath it, right next to the cracks in the rock wall, faint threads of pale blue light—almost invisible to the naked eye—were silently seeping through the damp soil and spreading outward.
The chill in the air seemed to grow even stronger.
The abnormal psychic contamination, like ink dropped into clear water, was spreading much faster than anyone had imagined.
By the time the news headline—"Hulk, While Tracking a Blue-Glowing, Talking Homeless Man's Psychic Energy Signature, Accidentally Destroys Three Side Halls of Brooklyn Museum"—reached the Avengers' temporary base, Steve knew things had deteriorated to a critical point.
"Hulk lost control not because of anger?"
Bruce's face was pale, the eyes behind his glasses bloodshot. "It's because… he sensed the chaotic psychic current?"
He tried to use a gamma energy tracker to map the abnormal zone, but the instrument's display was nothing but bands of interference.
"That frequency… it's polluting normal people's stream of consciousness! Hulk's senses are ten thousand times sharper than an ordinary person's—he's basically standing at the center of a psychic storm! Tony, our tracking systems…"
"Still calibrating! Dammit, this energy field is a total mess!"
Tony hammered at the keyboard in front of a floating virtual screen flickering with corrupted data.
"Jarvis! Build me a process-of-elimination model! Filter out the areas with the worst contamination… at least find me the core node of all this!"
"Warning! High-energy psychic convergence detected… deep within Brooklyn Park! The energy profile of the convergence matches previous 'roses growing out of control and binding pets' and 'wall full of spiral drawings' incidents with high accuracy! Preliminary assessment: …a spontaneously formed energy life-form? It is rapidly growing! It is absorbing all the negative emotions and psychic interference energy in the surrounding blocks!"
Jarvis's voice held an urgency it had never had before.
"Brooklyn Park!"
Steve slammed a fist down onto the table.
"That's one of the biggest public gathering spots in the city! Evacuate! Evacuate immediately! Wanda! I need… wait, where's Wanda?"
He suddenly realized the Scarlet Witch was no longer on the comms channel.
"Wanda and Vision were on patrol near the outer edge of Brooklyn Park half an hour ago…"
Bucky's voice carried a hint of unease.
"Then the comm signal got hit with heavy interference and was cut off!"
"Damn!"
Steve's face changed dramatically.
"They've been pulled in!"
Almost at the same time, at the center of Brooklyn Park—
The long-abandoned Beethoven music pavilion.
This pavilion, ignored for years, now radiated a deadly kind of allure, like a magnet. A layer of ghostly blue, semi-translucent light had spread over it like the bell of some giant jellyfish, covering most of the pavilion and the surrounding lawns and trees.
Inside the light dome, the air twisted and flowed in a bizarre way, as if everything were being seen through a layer of slowly moving, deep-blue seawater.
(End of Chapter)
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