Chapter 244: A Distress Signal from Cancer-Ridden Universe 10011
Back in the underground naval port, once Nick Fury finished laying out exactly where all eight billion had gone, Matthew didn't linger any longer. After a brief goodbye, he headed straight back to Umbrella Corporation.
But before his seat had even had time to warm up, someone knocked sharply on his office door.
Knock knock knock—
"Come in." Matthew said flatly.
A moment later, a figure in a white lab coat pushed the door open. William Birkin.
"William... something you need?"
Matthew asked, puzzled, looking at Birkin's face, which carried a distinct flicker of excitement.
Birkin's expression settled slightly at that. He cleared his throat twice, then spoke. "Boss, that problem with the Bio-Phantom Virus, the one where we couldn't mass-produce the Terminator units? We've fully cracked it."
"And beyond that, we've successfully combined the Terminator serum with the Astartes Blacklight Prototype."
"Just like we hoped. Once injected with the Terminator serum, the Blacklight Prototype not only gains electrical discharge abilities, it can also condense the high-voltage arcs inside its body into a functional shield."
"And here's the important part."
"As soon as we distribute the Terminator serum, every future Blacklight-type Astartes Tyrant will have a body tough enough to withstand a low-yield nuclear detonation at close range."
"By that point, even without the heavy powered armor on, they'll still be strong enough to be practically unstoppable!" With that, Birkin's excitement settled slightly. "Boss, that's my report."
It looked like the research had hit a major breakthrough. Birkin stood ramrod straight, a certain kind of pride on his face that only belonged to genuine genius.
Matthew looked at Birkin, who'd come specifically to deliver this report, and nodded, satisfied. "Good work."
"Beyond the three billion bonus I already promised, want me to give you and your team a few days off?"
Hearing Matthew offer time off, Birkin waved both hands quickly. "No, no, no. Boss, I really don't think my team or I need any time off at all."
"Compared to wasting my life on something as shameful as rest, I'd much rather push past my own limits and create more value for the company."
"Boss, is there anything else you could give me and my team to study?" Birkin looked at Matthew with a smile, his eyes brimming with anticipation.
Listening to him, Matthew considered it for a moment.
He looked at Birkin, who'd basically become a mad scientist at this point, the light of pure intellectual hunger flickering endlessly in his eyes, and finally, out of genuine concern, pointed out: "William, hasn't your team gone without a single break for over a year now?"
"Are you sure you don't want me to give you all some time off?"
"You know what they say. Work and rest need to..."
"Really, we don't need it! Boss! I love my work!" Before Matthew could even finish, Birkin cut him off.
This was the first time Birkin had ever interrupted him, and of all things, over the question of taking time off.
Seeing how set he was on it, Matthew didn't push the matter any further.
He gave a light snap of his fingers.
A Demon Terminator, one of the Pass rewards, materialized with a toss of his hand.
"This is a Demon Terminator. Stronger performance, tougher body than the standard model. Go see if you can reverse-engineer how it's made."
Birkin looked at the Demon Terminator that had just materialized in front of him, his breathing gone a little ragged, as if the thing in front of him wasn't some horrifying monster that devoured people indiscriminately, but some kind of once-in-a-lifetime treasure.
Matthew watched Birkin and the Demon Terminator walk off together, his mouth twitching.
This guy. Not only did he love working himself, he practically forced his own employees to never stop working either.
Matthew wouldn't be surprised if his staff spent every day cursing out Birkin's parents behind his back.
Once Birkin was gone, Matthew swept his X-ray vision through the office door, checking the area.
Seeing that Ada and Eleanor were both busy with their own work, and no one else seemed to be looking for him, he finally adjusted his office chair to a comfortable angle and propped both legs up on the desk.
"Nobody's going to bother me now, right." Matthew murmured to himself.
He closed his eyes, ready to take advantage of this rare bit of quiet for a short nap.
But just as drowsiness was starting to settle in, Cosmic Awareness, which had stayed quiet for a long while, suddenly gave a jolt.
The next instant, a broken, fragmented distress signal flooded straight into his mind.
"Universe 10011... requesting..."
"Repeat! Universe 10011 requesting reinforcements! We can't hold much longer!"
"The Spawn and the Many-Angled Ones pouring out of the rift outnumber us completely, and the front line is collapsing by the minute."
"Once these things finish devouring our universe entirely, they'll tear through the barrier between worlds like a plague and spread straight into neighboring universes!"
"Requesting reinforcements! Requesting reinforcements!"
The sudden distress signal in his mind caught Matthew completely off guard.
For a split second, he actually thought he'd misheard it.
But at his level of perception, there was no such thing as mishearing.
So... that distress signal had actually been real?
His eyes narrowed slightly, and Cosmic Awareness spread outward in an instant.
In that instant, a flood of chaotic information from across the universe poured into his mind like a tide.
At the same time, a mass of information about the universe being eroded by outside forces came flooding in too, as if the universe itself, having sensed the danger, was sending out a call for help to anyone capable of receiving it.
Under his field of perception, Matthew looked at the dense scatter of red points across the current universe and felt a headache coming on.
For a moment, he found himself almost missing the zombie universe, where he'd been able to hunt down and wipe out those red dots one by one.
Too bad this universe, right under his feet, was his own home. He obviously couldn't just erase every one of those red dots because it was inconvenient.
No one could say how long passed before Matthew, still deep in his sensing state, suddenly frowned.
"This is..."
He murmured under his breath, and his legs, still propped on the desk, came down on their own.
In his field of perception, an unusually massive red point hung silently deep within the universe.
The area it covered was absurdly vast, dwarfing every other red glow across his entire field of view.
But compared to the other dots, its color was still faint, like a mist of blood that had been heavily diluted.
Look closely, though, and you could see it was steadily thickening, growing more solid with every passing moment.
"So it's already picked its point of invasion, but it's still trying to actually manifest here."
Matthew's brow knit tight, and just as he was about to get up and go find the Ancient One for an explanation, a figure beat him to it, appearing in his office first.
It was the Ancient One.
The gold and red sparks of a portal not far off hadn't even fully faded before she was already standing in front of his desk.
She looked at Matthew's grim expression and got straight to the point, no pleasantries. "You sensed it?"
"Yeah." Matthew sat up straight, looking back at her with the same grim expression.
"They don't seem to have any interest in hiding themselves. They're planning to come into our universe in full force, out in the open, which is exactly why I picked up on them without any trouble at all."
Universe 10011, also known as the Cancer-Ridden Universe.
It was also a parallel world that had been completely overrun by the Old Ones of Cthulhu Mythos.
It happened because that world's first Captain Marvel, Mar-Vell, had made a deal, on his deathbed, with an Old One known as the Many-Angled Ones.
In exchange, he'd gained the power to kill the very concept of "death" itself, within that universe.
In return, the Old Ones would be allowed to pour in and take the universe for themselves.
And because "death" itself had been erased, no living thing in that universe could truly die anymore, and every one of them had, instead, become twisted, malevolent, undying things.
Even Earth's own superheroes, in that universe, had been warped into evil, twisted versions of themselves under that same power, turned into nothing more than lackeys and hounds serving the Old Ones.
"Oh, right, Ancient One."
"Didn't you say before that you'd only ever observed three approaching crises?" Matthew looked at her, confusion flickering in his eyes. "Why didn't you see this one coming, this collision and erosion between our universe and Universe 10011?"
The Ancient One shook her head slowly at that. "I never said I'd foreseen every crisis there was."
"Honestly, the three I did foresee were just the most obvious ones, the surface-level threats."
She took a couple of steps forward, her gaze passing through the floor-to-ceiling window out toward the sky beyond. "The reason I never foresaw this crisis with Universe 10011 is probably because, up until now, it's been held in check the entire time by the beings still living inside that universe."
"The powerful beings in that universe, twisted as they've become, have still been using what strength they had left to hold off the Old Ones' full arrival."
"But now, with the war entering its final stage, the native life there can't hold them back any longer, which is exactly why this crisis has suddenly broken loose."
"Of course, I can't rule out the possibility that our universe has only recently drifted close to Universe 10011 either." The Ancient One pulled her gaze back and looked at Matthew.
"Ever since the earlier collision, every universe has been drifting toward and away from each other constantly."
"Movement on that kind of scale is something even I can't predict in advance."
Listening to her, Matthew fell silent.
The office stayed quiet for a long stretch, with only the occasional sound of wind from outside drifting in.
No one could say how long passed before he looked back at her. "This crisis. Are you..."
"I won't be stepping in on this one." Before Matthew could finish, the Ancient One cut him off, direct and unambiguous.
"The Dark Dimension is in open revolt right now."
"I can feel it. They want to use the Old Ones' entry into this universe as their opening, to break through the barrier of reality itself in one push."
"If I split my attention now to deal with the Old Ones, and the Dark Dimension comes crashing in from the other direction, this universe just dies faster."
She paused, her gaze steady. "So stopping them is a job that's going to have to fall to the rest of you."
"And if none of you can hold them back either. Then this universe is going to end up exactly like Universe 10011."
Listening to her, the corner of Matthew's mouth twitched, a faintly self-mocking smile crossing his face.
He rose slowly from his chair and turned to look out the window. "They always say, when the sky falls, there's always someone tall enough to hold it up."
"But right now... looks like I'm the tallest one around."
"Oh?" Before the words had even finished, a cluster of golden particles suddenly gathered inside the office.
The next instant, Odin appeared between the two of them, the Eternal Spear glowing cold in his hand.
He looked at Matthew and spoke, flat and even. "The tallest one, hm?"
"By that logic... I suppose the King of Gods himself falls a head shorter than you, then?"
He crossed the room and came to a stop across from Matthew, the same familiar authority burning in his single eye. "Rest assured. If this crisis threatens the entire universe, Asgard won't be sitting this one out either."
With that, he shifted course. "Before all that, though, I think Holy Terra needs to get every power in Midgard on the same page first."
"Wouldn't want the front line to hold up fine, only for your own backyard to catch fire while your back's turned."
Hearing that, Matthew nodded too. "Yeah. You're right."
"If this is a threat on a universal scale, then everyone should be pulling their weight, not just sitting back and letting others carry it."
Holy Terra moved faster than anyone expected.
Once word came in about Universe 10011, Matthew didn't sit on it. He went straight to sending an encrypted briefing, under Umbrella Corporation's name, to every country on Earth simultaneously.
The briefing didn't waste time on diplomatic softening or pleasantries. It contained nothing but the raw distress signal translated straight from Cosmic Awareness, and a threat assessment of the Old Ones' incoming invasion.
Every leader who received it fell silent at first, and then, one after another, went straight into round after round of internal meetings.
They were, understandably, of two minds about the whole thing.
Some of them figured the whole "encrypted briefing" business was just Umbrella having gotten a taste for war and looking for any excuse to keep starting more of it against other countries.
But once they saw the footage Matthew sent over the following days, streaming in from Universe 10011 itself, specially processed for viewing, every last doubt vanished at once.
In the footage, the things called the Spawn of the Old Ones came pouring endlessly out through a rift in space.
Their forms were twisted and grotesque beyond description.
A single glance was enough to trigger visceral, involuntary revulsion in anyone watching.
Behind them, more twisted shadows kept slowly surfacing from the depths of the rift, enough to chill anyone watching straight through.
Once world leaders saw the footage, every country dropped its usual foot-dragging and delay, and answered the call without hesitation.
As if there was any other choice.
Sit on the sidelines and refuse to help now, and this really might turn into the actual end of the world.
To keep casualties in this fight as low as possible, Matthew went ahead and triggered his fourth "Evolution" initiative.
He gave the order to deploy, on a global scale, the heavily refined, enhanced strain of the T-Virus.
In an instant, the T-Virus spread through the atmospheric circulation system into every corner of the globe.
This time, the virus wasn't just about strengthening immune systems and physical constitution anymore.
This was, in the truest sense, a full-population evolution.
Once an ordinary person was infected, their strength and speed would climb, within a matter of days, to roughly a third of what the Super Soldier Serum granted, with their recovery ability doubling on top of that.
Sure, the gains were nowhere close to Astartes-level, but at least ordinary people would now have some fighting chance if a real crisis actually reached them.
Meanwhile, Tony wasn't sitting idle either.
He released a simplified version of the Sanwiston neural-acceleration system's patent to every country's military.
Sure, it was a stripped-down civilian version, but installed in an ordinary soldier's body, it could still multiply their reaction speed several times over.
In just a few short days, the entire world turned into a war machine roaring back to life, running full tilt.
Factories ran around the clock, labs never stopped, and militaries everywhere started mass-producing and outfitting their forces with new equipment.
And above all of it, Matthew finally gave the order to unseal the secret naval port buried underground.
As a massive gate, spanning several kilometers across the ground, split open, over a thousand silver-grey ships, each stamped with the double-headed eagle and the Umbrella logo, rose slowly up from beneath the earth.
The roar of their engines merged into one continuous rumble, like a thunderstorm rolling straight up from the planet's core toward the sky.
The capital ships broke through the cloud cover first, hovering above it.
The medium and light ships followed right behind, spreading out into combat formation above the city, their dense batteries of guns pointed out into the depths of space.
All that was left was the order to fire.
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