Chapter 78: Good Neighbors in New York
The superheroes of Metropolis simply gave Doctor Octopus a cold glance.
"If you were wise enough, you wouldn't think of attacking parallel universes."
"How do you know I didn't do this after I knew everything?"
Doctor Octopus asked with his neck stiff.
He didn't wait for a reply.
Superman flew to Iron Man and carried him out of the ruins of the laboratory. Halfway through, the man broke free of his arms and said, "No, thank you. I can still afford the gas."
The ruins were quiet for a while.
Doctor Octopus raised his tentacles and began to move out carefully.
Superman lifted a piece of steel bar with a block of cement on it from the ground, shook the weight, and then threw it at the back of Doctor Octopus' head like a normal person throwing a dart.
With a "pop", the super villain, who had already fought Iron Man to the point of being exhausted, fell to the ground motionless as if he were a skewer on a bamboo stick.
The sunlight at noon in winter was not so bright and seemed a little decadent, but the sky in Houston was still clear, not affected by the explosion at all. Tony took off his head armor, took a deep breath of the air that still carried the smell of burning after the explosion, and suddenly said, "Actually, you really should have come ten minutes earlier."
Superman looked at him with blue eyes full of gentleness and understanding: "He'll be fine."
"…No, sorry, you know how I talk—that's not what I meant. It's my fault."
"It's not your fault. He will be fine. Spider-Man is an independent person and a superhero with his own will. He has the ability and courage to bear the consequences."
This is why when heroes from different alliances encounter their own opponents, they rarely help each other unless the person concerned takes the initiative to ask for help. Out of trust and respect, this is a tacit understanding between them that does not need to be stated. The system jokingly calls it the "non-interference law of superhero personal movies."
Then again, with a system as a contact person, Superman could certainly rush to Batman and Spider-Man every time they get into trouble, but that would be meaningless.
They all have obstacles that they must overcome alone.
Unless someone is in mortal danger.
But to be honest, every superhero has faced the shadow of the goddess of death more than once in his life. At that time, their companions may not have had time to get over it. Being powerless and being abandoned by the dead seem to always be the two things that run through all those who struggle on the line of fate. They always send away those who love them first, and then take the initiative to say goodbye to the ones they love.
"There's nothing wrong with what you say," Tony said, "but he looks like he's fucking sixteen. What did you mean by that thing you just said to that octopus?"
He looked a little dazed, but his emotions did not fluctuate much. Instead, he looked numb and calm, like a person who had been hanging on a thin thread for too long and was about to fall.
"Superboy." Superman felt the situation was difficult and gave up comforting him for the time being. He decided to solve the problem first. "Go contact your friend and ask him if he has any video footage of the lab before the explosion."
His calm tone quickly soothed the panicked young man. Connor moved closer, lowered his head and sent a message to Damian, saying, "I should have stayed in the lab a little longer. Damn, I was on fire at the time, and I thought he could handle it, so I went to the cold water reservoir next door..."
Superman pressed his shoulders hard: "Calm down, you did a good job, now we just need to figure out what happened."
The warmth of the adult's palm made Connor shiver in the cool breeze. He sniffed to cover it up and said, "I received a file. Play it here?"
"Send it to me." said Iron Man.
He held a small projector in his hand so that everyone could see the picture.
The first time was at single speed, from Spider-Man fighting Myrlen to working with Connor to lock Myrlen in a protective shield. At the end, the villain showed a vicious and desperate sneer. Spider-Man straightened up and looked at the camera. His mouth moved but there was no sound. They disappeared in the white light in the blink of an eye.
Connor's eyes and nose turned slightly red. He gritted his teeth and asked, "Can I go beat up Doctor Octopus again?"
"Wait a minute." Superman turned to Tony and said, "What is the lowest speed of the slow-motion camera?"
The other party did not answer, but silently raised his hand and wiped the screen.
Play it for the second time.
This time the screen looked like a PowerPoint presentation, with no abnormalities from the shield shutting down to restarting. When Myron smiled again, his skin glowing red, a colorful block suddenly appeared in the center of the particle collider behind him, which looked a bit like the color screen of an old TV set from the last century when the signal contact was poor.
"Here." Superman motioned for others to pay attention to that location, "Can it be big?"
"I need to make up for it." Tony finally spoke. His voice was hoarse, but no longer as calm as before. This new discovery seemed to give the mentality of luck a chance to survive. "Give me three seconds. Three, two, one. Done."
In the restored footage, a black shadow suddenly appeared in the laboratory at the moment of the explosion, and then rolled and crawled forward. Following closely behind it were two light green mechanical tentacles, which fumbled around in the gaps in space, and finally somehow caught Myron, who was taking revenge on society, and wrapped him tightly and dragged him into the colorful portal.
“…”
“So?” Connor was confused. “What does this mean?”
"It means that the explosion caused by the desperate virus did not happen in our world. The mushroom cloud here should be the result of the water-cooling machine pipes outside the factory bursting, causing the heat to move rapidly upwards under the buoyancy of the cold air."
While speaking, Superman glanced at Iron Man calmly and found that he had no expression on his face and didn't know what he was thinking. "And Doctor Octopus's particle collider probably caused the collapse, overlap or distortion of space, resulting in the collapse of houses and the shaking of the ground. Well, I haven't learned professional knowledge, so my description may not be so accurate."
“…”
Tony said, "Let me make a call."
A few minutes later, a dozen excavators with the Stark logo on them came over to shovel the soil. At the same time, a SHIELD helicopter took Doctor Octopus and Maya Hansen away.
I guess they must be confused when they meet.
"There's no need to call so many trucks, boss," the team leader said confidently, "Give me an excavator and I can level this garbage dump today."
"Do you think you are cleaning the Suez Canal? I give you 24 hours to do it?" However, his boss did not give him any face at all. He was on the verge of emotional ups and downs and angry. "I only give you half an hour. Under the condition of not causing landslides, there must not be a single hair left under the ruins."
Seeing that this was not the right time to flatter, the construction team leader immediately ran back to work.
Ten minutes later, they had shoveled away the loose soil on the surface.
"Are you still going on, boss?"
"Keep going until I say stop."
The excavation continued for two hours.
They dug dozens of meters down from the old laboratory site. The engineers knew nothing and dared not ask anything, so they had all kinds of guesses in their minds until a machine's excavator suddenly hit something hard.
Everyone tried to get the thing out of the soil, and a sculpture with gorgeous colors and abstract shapes emerged from beneath the surface.
Oh shit, did the boss bury a piece of art passed down from ancient times here?
The staff were stunned.
Superman said: "This should be caused by the space fluctuation just now."
It's a bit like stalactites in a cave.
He walked up and carefully knocked on the outer shell of the thing, then before the construction team could react, he punched it, and the stone immediately broke into pieces, revealing the hollow interior.
"Thank God! Superman?! Aren't you in Metropolis? When did you get here?"
Before the onlookers could protest, they all discovered that there were two people trapped in the sculpture, wearing similar uniforms with spider web patterns but different colors. One of the Spider-Men, the Spider-Man in the red uniform, was stuck in the stone cracks inside the sculpture in a weird posture. He struggled out and rubbed his joints. He walked with a limp but didn't seem to be seriously injured. He asked in a relaxed tone, "By the way, how did you find us? I thought I would stay here for the rest of my life and become a human-shaped amber."
Superman winked at him.
He bent down and picked up a piece of debris: "I don't know if it contains lead. I couldn't hear your breathing or heartbeat just now."
As he spoke, he moved to the side and continued, "Hello, Spider-Man, nice to meet you. We will have many opportunities to chat. Iron Man is worried about you. Would you like to chat alone?"
You have to overcome your own difficulties, young people.
Spider-Man's eyes widened.
Then he cleared his throat vigorously and said to the gloomy Avengers consultant: "Hi, Mr. Stark, I'm glad that I can still see you and the sunshine of Houston today. I suggest you smile at the sun, which will make you feel better... Wow, what is this?" He took out a machine that was crushed into powder from his pocket, "Uh, it's the communication device of S.H.I.E.L.D., it was crushed by the stone."
Tony Stark folded his arms and said nothing.
Peter Parker then patted the kid in black uniform beside him and said, "Also, I met Spider-Man from a parallel universe. He was fighting Doctor Octopus from their world just now, but he accidentally fell to our side. That doctor is a woman, nicknamed Little Vee, and sounds cuter than the one here."
The black Spider-Man shook his head wildly.
"Who else but Ms. May would call Doctor Octopus "Little Vic"... Seriously, what's going on?" Miles Morales, the successor of Peter in the parallel universe, looked at Superman, then at the black-faced Iron Man, subconsciously moved closer to the first generation Spider-Man, and said in a low voice, "I actually met two living Peter Parkers in one day! Can you reimburse the other Parker's burger money?"
Before he finished speaking, the Spider-Man, who had just turned sixteen, shuddered and covered his mouth fiercely: "We can talk about this when we are alone!"
It's too late.
Superman showed a sympathetic expression, but he didn't know what to say.
Iron Man stood in front of the underage Miles like a prison chief interrogating a criminal and said without question: "Tell me everything you know."