Blonsky let out a short, self-mocking laugh. Then his eyes turned vicious.
From the leg pocket of his tactical suit he pulled out a vial—greenish, viscous, unmistakably blood. The Hulk's blood.
The moment Banner had been captured, General Ross had ordered an immediate blood draw. That job had gone to Blonsky.
No scientific basis for what he was about to do. Just instinct. His gut had always told him that this blood held something that could change him—change everything.
He'd held back before, unwilling to let that animal savagery take root in him. But tonight, staring down the gap between what he was and what the Hulk was, he stopped clinging to old principles. If this was the price of beating that monster, he'd pay it. He'd pay any price.
His arm was recovering enough to move. With a shaking hand, he drew the blood into a syringe, pressed the needle to his own neck, and slowly pushed the plunger down.
It felt like a torch had been lit inside his veins.
For a moment he was convinced his heart was melting—an enormous wave of energy flooding the organ and then rushing outward through every artery and vein, spreading to his extremities.
The energy felt bottomless. His injuries healed in an instant. Whatever that tiny repair consumed couldn't have been one percent of the total.
He watched what was happening to his body in silence. The foreign blood was aggressive—it didn't negotiate, didn't integrate. It simply replaced, pushing aside his own human blood, then began reshaping his heart, his organs, his vessels, his lymph system, his skeleton.
His bones became something close to structural steel. As they expanded, they split his skin from inside. Muscles he'd spent over twenty years building through pain and sweat tore apart like wet paper—but before the nerve signal even reached his brain, new ones had already grown to replace them.
Thick. Dense. Cast-iron hard. Muscle groups like architectural columns pushed up through his frame and kept growing.
He let out a cry—and then the spinal column hit.
It was like a giant fist reaching inside and ripping his spine straight out from the back.
The vertebrae—already warped and rebuilt—underwent one final, grotesque transformation. Bone spurs erupted through his back, tearing muscle and skin, which bled and healed and tore again in an endless cycling loop. His musculature swelled without restraint. The Kevlar tactical suit couldn't hold—it shredded. His boots disintegrated into fragments.
When Blonsky came back to himself and reasserted control, he found that everything had changed.
The soldier. The captain. The man who had been called Blonsky—none of that existed anymore.
The caved-in wall of the steel cell caught the light like a mirror. He saw his face in it.
A bald skull. Scorched-yellow skin. His spinal column jutting fully exposed through his back. Everything about his reflection told him he was no longer Blonsky.
He even had the sense that, though he hadn't lost his mind the way the Hulk did, he also couldn't revert to a normal human the way the Hulk could. From here on out, this was the face he'd live with.
He smiled at the reflection. It was an ugly thing, that smile.
But his mind had been remade along with his body. He found, examining himself, that he was satisfied. More than satisfied.
He'd always been short. He'd trained harder than any other man in his unit—ten times the effort, ten times the sweat—and still the first thing anyone thought when they looked at him was he doesn't have the build for it. Height meant strength, and he'd never had enough height.
Now he had height. Over eight feet tall. (nearly 2.5 meters)
The whole world felt smaller. And he felt immeasurably stronger.
Blonsky let out a roar and charged off in the direction the Hulk had gone.
Outside, the situation had completely unraveled.
The Hulk's rage was beyond control. Not hurting Betty was the absolute limit of his restraint—everything else was open season. The soldiers who had shot at him got no mercy.
Hit you and you die. Touch you and you bleed.
Regular soldiers had no super-soldier serum cushioning them. They lasted less than one round against the Hulk. A trail of blood wound through the corridors and out into the open.
General Ross had been in the middle of working his colleagues over with carefully chosen words when he went completely blank. Especially when one of the guards stepped past him to report directly to the Secretary of Defense: it was Blonsky who had freed the Hulk.
The Pentagon was packed with officers, but against the Hulk, rank meant nothing. Every man in uniform was equally fragile. The casualty report was devastating.
Previous engagements had cost them dozens of enlisted men and hundreds of civilians. Today's report was different: how many junior officers, how many field-grade officers.
General Ross went ashen. A liability this size had nowhere to go. The best he could hope for now was that old allies showed mercy and let him walk away and grow corn somewhere quiet. The worst outcome—well, it wasn't that much worse. Just a choice between a firing squad and a noose.
Blonsky, you son of a bitch. He thought it clearly, repeatedly, and said nothing at all. Even the neutral parties were looking at him like a dead man.
The Secretary of Defense stayed outwardly composed—partly because the Hulk was running outward, not on a killing rampage through the building.
"Activate Armory Three. Kill that thing." On his orders, a long-sealed vault opened. Soldiers carried out weapons that looked almost science-fictional—energy arms captured from Red Skull's HYDRA forces during World War II, all of them powered by the Tesseract. Anything they hit got disintegrated by concentrated energy rays. Weapons, in a word, that were terrifying.
The stored energy wasn't unlimited—this was strictly a one-use arsenal.
After Howard Stark had salvaged the Tesseract and deposited it with S.H.I.E.L.D., the military had tried repeatedly to access that energy. They'd been refused every time—the world's other powers didn't want America that strong, and the joint pressure, combined with Nick Fury's lies and willful evasions, had kept the Tesseract off the table.
But today, the Pentagon itself had been breached. The casualties were catastrophic. If there was ever a time to use this arsenal, it was now.
Twenty soldiers carrying energy weapons divided into four squads and moved to intercept the Hulk. These twenty rifles were the last fully functional units in inventory. The Secretary still didn't feel confident—he ordered the laser tanks deployed as well.
Also HYDRA black-tech, of course.
Deploying sixty-year-old stolen technology against a present-day threat—the Secretary held on to whatever optimism he could manage, and found it wasn't much. Events proved him right.
Soldiers in helicopters found the Hulk quickly. They aimed and fired. The weapons were idiot-proof—lightweight, zero recoil, point-and-shoot. Blue-white energy rays cut through the air without sound and struck the Hulk's body.
The energy weapons hit harder than standard firearms by a considerable margin. Against a human target they'd reduce the person to fragments. Against this target—they barely broke the Hulk's skin.