New York City, Manhattan
The afternoon sun hung lazy and golden over Fifth Avenue, warming the shop windows and filling the air with the rich, roasted aroma of overpriced coffee. Just another Tuesday in Manhattan — tourists snapping photos, businessmen power-walking with their AirPods in, and the occasional celebrity ducking into a boutique like they weren't begging to be recognized.
Jake Rivers snapped his eyes open.
Before he could even process the Starbucks logo staring back at him through the glass, a violent wave of heart palpitations ripped through his chest so hard he nearly crushed the iced Americano in his hand.
What the hell—
BOOM!!
The explosion hit like a physical wall. A deafening roar — the kind that didn't just hurt your ears but rattled your teeth and vibrated in your ribcage — shattered the afternoon silence of New York City in an instant.
Then came the tremors.
The massive floor-to-ceiling window in front of Jake spiderwebbed with cracks before blowing inward with a spectacular crash, showering the café in a rain of razor-sharp glass. Shards poured down like a glittering waterfall of pain, slicing through what had been a perfectly peaceful afternoon just three seconds ago.
"OH MY GOD!"
"What the hell is that thing?!"
"RUN! EVERYBODY RUN!"
Screams, crying, and the ugly screech of car brakes erupted all at once. The New Yorkers who'd been elegantly sipping their afternoon lattes transformed into a stampede of panicked animals, shoving and clawing their way toward the exits like their lives depended on it.
Which, to be fair, they absolutely did.
Ignoring the small cuts stinging across his cheeks from the glass, Jake bolted out of the café on pure instinct and followed the terrified gazes of the crowd upward.
Billowing columns of black smoke rose into the sky from the direction of Harlem, maybe a dozen blocks away. Even from this distance, he could hear the sounds — deep, thunderous impacts that shook the ground beneath his sneakers.
And between the clouds of dust and debris, two massive figures were tearing each other apart.
One was a sickly green, every muscle swollen to cartoonish proportions, veins thick as garden hoses pulsing across arms that could bench-press a building. That was the Hulk.
The other was somehow even worse to look at. Covered head to toe in yellowish bone armor with grotesque spinal ridges jutting from its back like the world's ugliest dinosaur — a walking nightmare straight out of the deepest pit of hell.
The Abomination.
Jake's brain short-circuited.
The Battle of Harlem. The Incredible Hulk timeline.
I'm in the MCU.
His mind felt like someone had shoved a firecracker behind his eyes and lit the fuse. Transmigration was one thing — he'd read enough webnovels to at least wrap his head around the concept. But transmigrating into Marvel? And not into some quiet corner of the universe where he could live peacefully as a civilian, oh no. He'd landed smack in the middle of a throwdown between the Hulk and the freaking Abomination.
This wasn't just a bad start. This was hell-mode difficulty with no tutorial.
Run. I need to run RIGHT NOW.
Zero hesitation. Jake spun on his heel and threw himself into the river of fleeing pedestrians. He was just a regular guy — no super-soldier serum, no iron suit, no radioactive spider bite. In a fight between monsters like those two, even a stray chunk of concrete could turn him into a smear on the pavement.
But he'd barely made it two steps when a sudden, searing pain erupted from his left wrist.
"Gah—!"
It felt like someone had taken a branding iron fresh from the coals and pressed it against his skin. Jake hissed through clenched teeth and instinctively yanked his left hand up to look.
What he saw stopped him dead in his tracks. The primal urge to flee evaporated completely, replaced by something that made his blood run cold and hot at the same time.
On his left wrist, where there had definitely been nothing before, sat a watch.
But calling it a "watch" was like calling the Space Shuttle a "plane." It was a deep blackish-green, made of some material that was neither metal nor stone — something that screamed not from this planet in every way imaginable. The wide face was dominated by an hourglass shape, and two fluorescent green lines ran through its center, forming a geometric pattern that glowed faintly with alien energy.
Jake's heart slammed against his ribs.
He was a massive nerd. Had been his whole life. Comic books, anime, cartoons, video games — he'd consumed it all with the dedication of a scholar studying ancient texts. And that meant he recognized this thing immediately.
He knew it even better than he knew the MCU.
The Omnitrix.
The freaking Omnitrix.
The most powerful personal weapon in the entire Omniverse. A device containing the DNA of over a million intelligent species from across the cosmos, capable of transforming its wearer into any one of them. It wasn't just a watch — it was a one-man army condensed into a wrist-mounted gadget that looked like it was designed by an alien with a very specific sense of style.
"This is my cheat code?" Jake whispered, his voice cracking.
His hands were shaking. Fear, excitement, and the kind of adrenaline rush that made your vision sharpen into crystal clarity — all of it crashed together inside his chest like a chemical reaction about to go critical.
And then a voice spoke in his mind.
Cold. Emotionless. Mechanical. Like a computer booting up for the first time.
[DING! Omniverse-level gene bank — Omnitrix — activated.]
[DNA sequence binding complete. User: Jake Rivers.]
[Initial DNA library unlocked: Heatblast, Four Arms, XLR8, Grey Matter, Diamondhead, and 10 additional heroes.]
[Newbie Mission issued: First Appearance.]
[Mission Description: You've landed in a world of superheroes. Settling for ordinary was never an option. Survive the upcoming battle and make S.H.I.E.L.D. feel the full impact of alien technology.]
[Mission Reward: One-time trial unlock — "Ultimate Evolution" function.]
Jake's breath caught.
Ultimate Evolution.
That was an Ultimatrix feature — the ability to simulate millions of years of evolution on an alien species, pushing them into their absolute peak combat form. It was like taking something already overpowered and cranking the dial to eleven.
And they were dangling it as a first quest reward?
WHOOOOSH—!!
Reality didn't give Jake another second to geek out.
A piercing shriek of displaced air cut through the chaos — the sound of something massive moving way too fast. Jake's head snapped toward the source, and his stomach dropped straight through the asphalt.
The Abomination — that bone-armored nightmare — had apparently decided the fight with the Hulk wasn't destructive enough. In one savage motion, it had ripped a yellow taxi off the street like it weighed nothing and hurled it like a fastball, launching several tons of American steel straight at the crowd.
Straight at Jake's section of the crowd.
The taxi whistled through the air, spinning end over end, a screaming missile of crumpled metal and shattered glass.
And directly in its path — maybe fifteen feet ahead of Jake — a young mother was on her knees on the sidewalk, her arms wrapped tight around her little daughter, shielding the girl's head against her chest. She wasn't running. She couldn't run. Her legs had given out, locked rigid with terror, and all she could do was hold her child and squeeze her eyes shut.
The taxi's shadow fell over them like a death sentence.
Everyone else was running. Nobody was stopping. Nobody could stop — survival instinct had taken the wheel, and heroism wasn't exactly a standard feature on the human operating system.
Jake stood there, watching the massive shadow grow darker over the mother and daughter.
The math was simple and brutal. If he kept running, with the distance he'd already covered, he'd probably survive. The trajectory would miss him by a comfortable margin.
But they would die. The mother. The little girl. Crushed under several tons of twisted metal, and there wouldn't even be enough left to identify.
Damn it.
Jake clenched his jaw so hard his teeth creaked.
I never signed up to be a superhero. I never asked for any of this.
But the confusion in his eyes burned away like paper in a furnace, replaced by something harder. Something fiercer. A reckless, almost manic determination that came from somewhere deeper than logic.
The universe gave me this watch. If I run now — if I let them die when I have the power to stop it — then what was even the point?
He raised his left hand.
His right index and middle fingers came together, pressing the activation button on the side of the Omnitrix with a practiced motion that felt weirdly natural, like muscle memory from a life he'd never lived.
Zzt—!
The hourglass symbol in the center of the dial popped up with a satisfying mechanical click, revealing the glowing green holographic core beneath. Silhouettes of alien forms cycled past — towering, hulking, sleek, bizarre — each one a different flavor of absolutely terrifying.
Jake didn't hesitate. He spun the dial and locked onto the most explosive-looking figure in the lineup.
The taxi was seconds from impact.
A wild, almost unhinged grin split across Jake's face.
No words. No dramatic speech. No time.
He slammed the dial down.
BANG!
A pillar of brilliant emerald light erupted from the watch, so bright it made the afternoon sun look dim by comparison. The energy wave that followed rippled outward in a perfect ring, blasting away every shard of broken glass, every piece of loose debris, every scrap of trash in a fifty-foot radius.
The taxi came screaming down — two tons of yellow metal death, barely six feet above the mother and daughter's heads.
The mother screamed.
And then the scream cut off. Because the expected impact — the crushing weight, the pain, the end — didn't come.
Instead, a wave of blistering heat washed over them. Not burning them, but close enough to feel like standing in front of an open furnace. Then came the sound — a hissing, sizzling roar that drowned out everything else.
SSSSSZZZZZ—!!!
The taxi hit an invisible wall of superheated air and simply... ceased to exist as a taxi. Several tons of steel and glass melted instantaneously under temperatures that would make a blast furnace jealous. The metal dissolved into glowing orange droplets of liquid iron, raining down in a dazzling cascade of molten sparks — but every single drop was caught by the heat barrier, deflected harmlessly away from the mother and daughter below.
Not a scratch. Not a burn. Not a single singed hair.
The entire block went silent.
Every screaming pedestrian, every honking car, every crying child — all of it stopped at once, like God had hit the mute button on Manhattan. Hundreds of eyes turned toward the source of that impossible light.
The smoke cleared slowly, dramatically, like the universe itself was directing the scene.
And standing where Jake Rivers had been, there was something else entirely.
A humanoid figure made of dark crimson rock, cracks of molten orange glowing between the stone plates like lava flowing beneath the surface. Its head burned with open flame — not hair, not a helmet, but actual fire — and its massive hands crackled with heat so intense the air above them shimmered and warped. The asphalt beneath its feet had gone soft and black, melting into two deep, charred footprints.
Jake — no, Heatblast — looked down at his hands.
He flexed his fingers, watching the flames dance and curl around his rocky knuckles, and felt the fire energy coursing through his body like a second heartbeat. It was everywhere — in his chest, in his limbs, behind his eyes. Limitless. Eager. Hungry.
He clenched his fists, and the ambient fire elements in the air rushed toward him like iron filings to a magnet, drawn by some invisible gravitational pull.
This is... incredible.
He turned around to face the mother and daughter. Through the shifting flames that made up his face — somewhere between a skull and a tribal mask — something that looked remarkably like a confident grin took shape.
"I know the weather's already hot enough," Heatblast said, his voice a deep, crackling rumble that sounded like a campfire had learned to talk. "But do you mind if I turn up the heat at this party just a little more?"
The mother stared up at him, mouth hanging open, arms still locked around her daughter. The little girl peeked out from between her mother's arms with wide, awestruck eyes, tears still wet on her cheeks.
"Cool..." the girl whispered.
Heatblast — Jake — felt something warm bloom in his chest that had nothing to do with the fire.
Then he raised his head, and the playful energy vanished.
His burning eyes pierced through the billowing smoke and locked onto the Abomination in the distance, still rampaging through the ruins of Harlem like a force of nature that had decided it hated architecture.
Jake's jaw set beneath the flames.
"Heatblast," he growled.
And then he launched.
Meanwhile — S.H.I.E.L.D. Stealth Jet, several blocks above Harlem.
"Director! We've got an anomaly!"
Agent Maria Hill's voice cut through the controlled tension of the command deck, sharp enough to make every head in the cabin turn. Her fingers flew across the holographic display, pulling up readings that were making the sensors throw a fit.
"We're picking up an extremely high-energy heat source in Harlem — and sir, these readings are completely off the charts. Nothing in our database matches this thermal signature. Not Stark's tech, not Banner's radiation — nothing."
Nick Fury's single eye narrowed.
He turned slowly toward the main screen, where the satellite feed showed the chaos below in crisp, unforgiving detail. The Hulk and the Abomination were still tearing Harlem apart, but now there was something new in the frame.
A streak of green-tinged fire was rocketing upward from street level like a meteor flying in reverse — blazing, brilliant, and heading straight for the Abomination with the kind of reckless confidence that was either very brave or very stupid.
Fury's eye tracked the fireball.
"Well," he said quietly, his voice carrying that particular brand of calm that meant someone was about to have a very bad day. "That's new."
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