Iron Monger's thick metal arm had been clamped around Pepper so tightly that no matter how hard she had struggled before, it had not budged even in the slightest.
But at this moment, a pair of long-fingered hands pressed down on it and pried it open with effortless ease.
The locked metal joints were forcibly twisted, letting out a shrill mechanical wail.
There was not the slightest pause in the motion. It was so smooth it hardly seemed real, as if what Fenris held in his hands was not a war machine forged from advanced metal at all, but nothing more than a rubber toy he could squeeze however he liked.
Pepper only felt the pressure around her waist suddenly loosen. The next instant, Fenris had pulled her completely free from Iron Monger's grasp.
"Stop screaming. You've already been saved."
The whole thing took less than a second. The beautiful trail left in the air did not even pause for an instant.
After rescuing Pepper, Fenris carried her upward into the wind. The speed, originally too fast for the naked eye to follow, gradually slowed to adapt to an ordinary human body.
Only when Fenris's slightly helpless voice sounded beside her ear, and Pepper realized she had not slammed into the ground along with everything else, did the trembling in her body finally begin to ease.
"I've been saved?"
Her piercing screams at last came to a halt. When Pepper opened her eyes, she found herself gripping Fenris's arm tightly, while behind him two pairs of slender light-wings with a span of more than ten meters beat slowly, suspending them quietly in the sky.
Boom!
A massive crash sounded below them. Hulk and Iron Monger had both hit the ground, smashing a sizable crater into the dark black rocky cliffside by the coast.
Fortunately, Hulk's body was powerful enough that a fall of only a few hundred meters meant almost nothing to him.
After climbing back up, he merely shook his head and had already recovered.
Obadiah was not so lucky.
Even with the armor protecting him, he was still only an ordinary man. He looked badly hurt and took quite a while to rise again.
"Monster!"
Looking at Hulk standing not far in front of him, Obadiah almost instinctively wanted to get away.
This thing that had appeared out of nowhere was completely unreasonable. Attacking him for no reason would have been bad enough, but it had actually dragged him straight out of the sky.
Now one of Iron Monger's thrusters was offline. Without the advantage of flight, was he not going to get torn to pieces by that creature?
But just as Obadiah instinctively fell into a defensive stance, Hulk's attention had already shifted to Fenris, who had suddenly appeared.
His bloodshot eyes locked tightly onto the man in the air. For some reason, that person gave him an especially familiar feeling.
Hulk felt like he should know him, but his simple mind could not remember no matter how hard it tried.
Then Hulk's gaze fell on Pepper Potts beside Fenris.
"Bad guy!"
"Put. Her. Down!"
A blurred image of Betty being held hostage flashed through his mind. As if some hidden trigger had just been struck, Hulk suddenly roared in fury. Then, to Obadiah's utter disbelief, he leaped high again and swung his right fist hard toward Fenris.
"You know this big guy?"
Fenris had come only to save someone. He had fully intended to enjoy a good show between Iron Monger and the Hulk, so he had not expected to become Hulk's target in the blink of an eye.
He shot one incredulous glance at the utterly bewildered Pepper, casually tossed her aside, then beat his wings once and vanished from where he had been standing.
"Get back down there."
Fenris was nothing like a bulky machine such as Iron Monger. His figure flickered once, and he was already behind Hulk.
Taking advantage of the fact that Hulk had no leverage while hanging in midair, Fenris sharply twisted his waist and turned, then whipped his right leg out like a Godzilla tail strike.
Though he wore a human shape, Fenris's own strength was anything but small.
That enormous force poured into Hulk's body without the slightest restraint. The downward strike of his leg directly crushed the momentum of Hulk's upward charge.
Bang!
The two figures, one large and one small, looked wildly disproportionate when they collided, and yet the impact exploded with tremendous force.
Even the air itself seemed to compress in that instant. The next moment, a massive shock wave blasted outward in every direction.
Since Hulk's birth, although he had constantly suffered bombardment from General Ross's endless weapons, he had never encountered such pure suppression by brute force.
Under that overwhelming power, his body stalled in midair, then slammed heavily back toward the ground.
Boom!
The hard stone surface was smashed into another enormous crater. But this time, Hulk lay on his back in the pit and did not get up at once.
"My God."
"The world's gone insane."
Off to one side, Obadiah had witnessed everything from beginning to end. In that instant, the beliefs he had held for decades felt as though they had collapsed.
A winged man, someone who did not even look particularly strong, had actually beaten a muscle-brained monster into this state?
"HULK!"
From within the crater, Hulk stared unblinkingly into the sky.
For some reason, a surge of anger abruptly rose inside him, as if that man should have been his friend, and yet had hit him this hard anyway.
A sense of hurt that even Hulk himself did not notice was completely transformed into rage. His body began swelling again without warning.
In only a few seconds, Hulk, who had originally been a size smaller than Iron Monger, expanded until he stood a full head taller than it.
Gulp.
Obadiah swallowed hard on instinct. The thick armor wrapped around him no longer gave him even the slightest sense of safety.
After instinctively backing up two steps, all the arrogance and confidence swelling inside him earlier had completely vanished. He was now terrified of drawing the attention of either of those monsters.
No way. Absolutely no way.
He was just a businessman. There was no need for him to stand out in public.
Right...?
At the same time, high in the sky.
Fenris moved like a phantom. From tossing Pepper aside to suppressing Hulk, all it took was one sweep of his light-wings before he reappeared next to Pepper and pulled her firmly under his protection once more.
"You okay?"
"I'm okay. I'm okay."
Still shaken, Pepper patted her chest.
After so many shocks in a single day, she was starting to develop the strange feeling that she might actually be getting used to it.
Roooar!
Amid the huge scream of thrusters, a red-and-gold figure shot in from the distance. Pepper only felt her vision blur, and the next moment Tony, clad in armor, had already come to a stop beside her.
"Pepper?"
Tony took Pepper from him. Once he saw she was unharmed, his voice beneath the faceplate immediately filled with relief. "You scared me to death. Are you okay?"
"Fenris got here in time, so I'm okay."
Pepper nodded and threw her arms tightly around Tony's cold armor, though her body was still trembling slightly.
"Fenris, I need you to take Pepper back."
Tony's gaze immediately locked onto the towering Iron Monger below, his voice thick with hatred.
That man. Obadiah.
Tony had treated him like an uncle of his own, yet for selfish gain he had tried to destroy Pepper and kill Tony himself.
If Fenris had not been here, the consequences would have been unimaginable.
Rage surged through him so strongly that even the armor seemed to sense it, letting out a low mechanical growl.
"Fenris, please take care of Tony..."
A portal opened at once. Even though Pepper was worried sick, she ultimately went obediently back to Tony's mansion.
"I'm the one being targeted too."
Fenris lowered his head and quickly spotted Hulk, who had already straightened up out of the crater once more.
Seeing that Hulk's body had swollen larger again, Fenris's right hand almost instinctively went to the battle-axe at his waist.
His eyes sank, and deep in his consciousness, the third page of the Titan Codex had already flipped open, eager to move.
"Forget it. If I split him with that axe, there won't be much of a friendship left afterward."
With a light sigh, Fenris shook his head. Deep inside his body, the atomic furnace began running at full power, and his eyes also lit with a faint blue glow.
"Come on."
"Let's see how you like a Godzilla-style beatdown."
(End of Chapter)
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