"Daisy—help him range the target. Fast!"
Nick Fury's voice cut through on comms. At least someone in the back understood both the tank and what she could do.
Oh. She finally got it. A heads-up earlier would've been nice—she'd assumed the ancient thing needed a warm-up cycle.
"Range five thousand five hundred meters (3.4 miles), altitude twelve hundred meters—fire!"
"Range four thousand three hundred meters (2.7 miles), altitude twenty-five hundred meters—fire!"
With her visual acuity, tracking the Hulk's arcing descent and feeding real-time firing solutions wasn't particularly difficult.
The driver and gunner were sweating through their uniforms. They didn't stop to ask how she was doing it—they just followed her data and poured fire onto the Hulk in an unbroken stream.
Against a normal person, this gun would reduce them to ash. Against the Hulk, the results were modest—but noticeably better than energy weapons. Under continuous bombardment, the Hulk was steadily pushed back.
His right arm had been taking the worst of it, raised to absorb repeated impacts. It was soaked in blood now, and despite his extraordinary regeneration, there were moments where the bone showed through.
"It's working—keep going. Wait—" Her words cut off. "Why are you getting out?!"
Four soldiers were climbing out of the tank.
"Run while you can!" the tank commander called back to her, already sprinting. "We're out of ammunition!"
Daisy stared after them. Of course.
She muttered something under her breath and kept moving.
She was not happy about this. Ever since the heart-shaped herb enhancement, she'd spent an unreasonable amount of time being chased. The Mandarin. Now the Hulk.
Yes, cheetahs were famous for their speed. But even by cheetah standards, this was excessive.
Did the Panther Goddess's blessing come with a curse on the fine print?
The Hulk soaked seven or eight direct hits, ignored the fleeing soldiers entirely, and methodically demolished the Red Skull tank—methodically being a relative term. Then, still not sufficiently satisfied, he locked back onto Daisy and resumed pursuit.
"Daisy, we have a complication..."
Fury's voice again, right when she was finally pulling the Hulk toward the edge of the populated area.
"What now? You're still not set up?!"
The signal kept cutting in and out at speed. Fury repeated himself: "Another creature appeared at the Pentagon. Looks similar to the Hulk—but the skin is yellow."
"The generals want you to bring the Hulk back. Let the two of them destroy each other."
Daisy pinched the bridge of her nose. "If I bring him back through all those streets again, there will be thousands more casualties. Who's responsible for that?"
She had no particular attachment to the American public's welfare, but chains of accountability needed to be established before the bloodshed, not after.
"Ross. General Ross will own everything."
Daisy almost laughed. Ross taking personal responsibility. As if. By now the man was almost certainly under custody and serving as someone else's scapegoat.
Still—if there was a name on the liability, she wasn't going to argue.
People of Virginia! Your beloved green giant is coming back!
She banked hard, reversing course. She was nearly to North Carolina. Now she was flying north again.
It was unavoidable—but she wasn't entirely heartless about it. She tried to retrace the same path. The houses were already rubble; being re-rubbled barely mattered. The cars were already pancakes; a second pass was irrelevant. And as for the people who were already gone... she told herself they probably wouldn't mind.
The return trip was easier. Someone came out to meet her.
A billboard came flying at her with tremendous force, cutting through the air with an audible shriek. The angle was clever—retreat and the Hulk would close the distance; hold course and she'd eat the billboard. Daisy short-range-blinked clear of it.
Below, she finally got a good look.
Same approximate height as the Hulk. Same approximate weight class. Different coloring—this one was a burnt, jaundiced yellow, with a faint smell that reached her even at altitude.
Blonsky.
Daisy took it in. He really did a number on himself.
The Hulk, for all his chaos, had a certain brutal elegance—ignore the purple shorts and his muscle definition was almost artistic. Blonsky's current state was considerably less aesthetic.
The bone structure had fully augmented—but the muscle development was only partway through. The energy in his blood had run dry before the process completed. He was a half-finished product, though the residual super-soldier serum in his system had combined with the new factor and produced something novel.
Where the Hulk had kept his hair through the transformation, Blonsky was completely bald—not a strand left. His skeleton had grown and thickened to the point where it protruded, forming something like external bone armor over his entire body. And because that armor covered everything...
He'd sacrificed his dignity for power.
Quite literally everything.
"You—" Blonsky's voice was a ragged rasp, like something scraped raw over gravel. "Get down here."
He'd worked hard to catch up to the Hulk. The moment he'd finished transforming and burst out ready to fight, Daisy had appeared out of nowhere, grabbed the Hulk's attention, and the two of them had vanished.
This transformation wasn't complete—speed and endurance both fell short of the Hulk's baseline. He'd tried to follow for a few strides and been left in the dust.
That had infuriated him. But the veteran soldier in him still worked even through the rage. If they wanted to draw the Hulk away, he'd force them to bring the Hulk back.
Attack what they had to defend.
He'd turned that logic on the Pentagon—not to break out, but to tear the place apart. He dismantled buildings and killed as he went, getting acquainted with his new strength in the process. He had nothing left to lose where the military was concerned.
Stryker up in Canada can stay in Canada. By the time he gets here, it'll all be over.
Now the Hulk was circling back—and running straight into him.
Blonsky recognized Daisy. The woman flew, which gave him a moment of pause. Not fear of her, exactly—he reasoned that if the Hulk had been chasing her and failing to catch her, his own roughly equivalent power meant similar results. But it unsettled him.
The world was bigger than forty years of certainties had led him to believe.