Leander reached out and ruffled both of their heads, his hands lingering for a second. The warmth of the morning and the innocent laughter of the kids felt like a precious commodity he had to protect.
"All right, you two behave and play here," Leander said, his voice regaining its usual steady calm. "In a bit, Aunt Jenny will call you for lunch. Ned, remember to tell your mom that I've got some business to take care of for the internship. Bye-bye."
"Bye-bye!" the two boys chirped in unison, already distracted by a particularly large snowball Ned was trying to hoist onto the snowman's torso.
Leander turned on his heel and walked back into his house, moving straight to his workshop. He locked the heavy reinforced door and closed the window shutters, plunging the room into a dim, blue-tinted light. He reached into a drawer and pulled out the small, palm-sized holographic emitter Tony had mailed him weeks ago. It was pulsing with a rhythmic, urgent amber light.
The moment he set it on the polished concrete floor, a life-sized, flickering projection of Tony Stark shimmered into existence. Tony wasn't wearing his suit, but his shirt was rumpled and his hair was a mess—the universal sign that he had been staring at data for too many hours without a break.
"Leander, glad you picked up," Tony said, his image flickering slightly as he turned to look at the boy. "Tell me, do you keep tabs on the Javier Desert? Or is your radar strictly limited to the tri-state area?"
Leander crossed his arms, his eyes scanning the data streams floating around the projection. "Javier? That's out in the middle of nowhere. No, I haven't heard a thing. What happened?"
"Interesting. S.H.I.E.L.D. only pinged me about ten minutes ago," Tony snorted, tapping the air in his own workshop. The motion was mirrored on Leander's end, causing several high-resolution satellite images and tactical maps to bloom in the air. "A military experimental base there—Project: Cobalt—was breached. Someone hit the panic button, but by the time the response team arrived, the base was a graveyard. Three choppers went in; none of them made it out."
"Let me guess," Leander said, his jaw tightening. "The hide wasn't green."
"Spot on," Tony said. He swiped his hand, and a virtual screen appeared, playing a grainy, chaotic POV from a helicopter's nose camera.
In the footage, the Javier base looked like a scattering of industrial warehouses half-buried in the sand. Suddenly, the ground seemed to erupt as a huge, earth-yellow giant surged out of a hangar. It moved with a terrifying, predatory speed that didn't match its massive frame. The giant smashed the first chopper head-on, its fist puncturing the cockpit like it was made of soda-can aluminum.
The second chopper, which was just beginning to lift off, was snatched by its tail rotor. The giant slammed it back into the earth with a violent, jarring force, causing the fuel tanks to ignite in a massive fireball.
The third helicopter, the one filming, banked hard and began hammering the leaping figure with its side-mounted M240. The heavy-caliber rounds pinned the creature down for a second, but they didn't penetrate. They just sparked off its hide like pebbles off a tank.
Then, a new figure emerged from the shadows of the hangar. He was smaller than the yellow giant, but his arms were grotesquely thick, bristling with long, jagged bone spikes. The yellow giant—Abomination—grabbed this new arrival and hurled him toward the circling chopper. As the spike-man neared the aircraft, the jagged protrusions on his arms actually launched, propelled by some unseen muscular contraction.
The footage jerked as a soldier in the cockpit slumped over, a six-inch bone spike buried deep in his throat. The recording cut to static.
"So, Leander," Tony said, his projection flickering as he paced. "Nick Fury clued me in. He's already prepping a flight. Want to take a look at the crime scene?"
"Sure. But why hasn't S.H.I.E.L.D. moved in yet?" Leander asked. "If they've wiped the base, shouldn't they be long gone?"
"That's the weird part," Tony said, sounding genuinely puzzled. "They haven't budged. They wiped out every soldier and every security detail, but the thermal signatures show they're still sitting right in the middle of the base. It's a sitting duck situation. The Pentagon is already talking about a tactical missile strike to just glass the whole square mile."
"No," Leander said firmly. "A missile strike won't kill him. It'll just make him harder to find. I'll come find you in a bit."
Leander shut down the device, the holographic images vanishing into the dark. He dashed out of the workshop and poked his head into the kitchen. "Aunt Jenny, I've got to head out! Something came up with the Stark project—won't be back for lunch. Bye!"
"Wait, Leander! It's New Year's Day! Where are you—"
He didn't hear the rest. Leander was already down the block, moving with a light, rhythmic sprint that carried him far from prying eyes. Once he hit an empty alleyway, a violet-tinted phantom streak shot skyward, breaking the sound barrier as he angled his flight path straight for Malibu.
Barely ten minutes later, the air in Tony's workshop shimmered as Leander decelerated, his boots touching down silently.
"Hey Mr. Stark, I'm here."
Tony was sitting in his chair, his eyes fixed on a massive projection of the Abomination's last known location. He didn't look up. "Leo, give me the professional opinion. You saw the footage. How's this yellow guy different from the green one? Other than the obvious lack of a tailor?"
Leander walked over to the screen, his eyes narrowing as he studied the ripples in the Abomination's musculature. "I know a bit about him. I fought him a few years back during the Harlem incident. I was pretty reckless back then; I tried to bind him with standard alloys. He broke both my arms. It wasn't a win for me; it was a survival lesson."
Leander pointed to the bone spurs on the Abomination's elbows. "He's a pure killing machine. Unlike the Hulk, who fights with raw, clumsy rage, Blonsky has special forces training. He knows how to use his weight. He knows how to exploit weak points. Conventional weapons can't scratch that hide—it's like he's wearing a layer of organic ceramic armor."
Tony watched the replay of the Abomination shredding the helicopters. "Blinding speed, crazy jumping power, monstrous strength. He's a tactical nightmare. If we can't pierce the skin, we're just throwing toothpicks at a mountain."
"He has weak spots," Leander noted, his mind racing through the physics of the fight. "The eyes are soft tissue. The joints are vulnerable if you can get enough leverage. But the real problem is his healing factor. We don't know how fast he regenerates."
Tony muttered, his fingers drumming on the desk. "Looks like a real headache. Maybe the Pentagon has the right idea—just blow the whole place and hope for the best."
"No," Leander said, his voice turning as cold as the metal he manipulated. "Missiles won't do it. Let me handle it. It's time I settled the score for what happened in Harlem. He's my responsibility."
Leander glanced at the screen one last time and turned to leave. "Send the coordinates to my phone, Tony. Expect good news."
Tony watched Leander's departing back, dazed for a second by the sheer confidence in the boy's voice. He leaned back in his chair, a small, lopsided smile curling his lips. "Kinda interesting. The kid's actually growing a spine of vibranium."
Deep in the Javier Desert, the air inside the Project: Cobalt base was thick with the copper tang of blood and the smell of ozone.
The base was a slaughterhouse. Every one of the two-hundred-plus soldiers had been torn apart with a ferocity that suggested it wasn't just a breakout—it was a statement. Bodies and discarded weapons littered the corridors, but the silence that followed the massacre was even more terrifying.
Yet, amid the carnage, two people remained alive. Two white-robed technical staff members sat trembling on the floor of the main laboratory. They were the lead geneticists who had overseen Blonsky's "sedation" protocol.
The titanic Abomination stood over them, dripping with the gore of his latest victims. He was stark naked, his yellowish skin stretched tight over corded muscle, his spine bristling with bone spurs that twitched with every breath.
He stared down at the scientists, his gravelly, hoarse voice vibrating in the small room. "It's been a long time since I was conscious enough to speak. Tell me... have you improved the formula? I want a new enhancement. I want more."
After his defeat in Harlem and his subsequent imprisonment, Emil Blonsky had become obsessed. He was convinced that the reason he had lost to the Hulk—and that metal-manipulating brat—was because his serum was an inferior, "knock-off" version. He wanted to be perfected.
"W-we don't... we don't have a new protocol yet, Emil," the lead tech stammered, his eyes darting toward the exit. "The serum we used on you... it was the limit. We can't push the cellular stability any further without... without complete organ failure."
Abomination's fist slammed into the concrete floor, the impact sending out a shockwave that cracked the foundation. Stone shards flew like shrapnel, slashing the technicians' faces. Blood trickled down their cheeks, but they were too terrified to wipe it away.
"Liar," Abomination growled. "I saw the files. You were testing the variant humans. You were using my blood to create more. Where is the distillation?"
He seized the speaker by the front of his lab coat, lifting him until their faces were inches apart. The technician could smell the rot on the monster's breath.
"All the variants here... they were failures!" the man shouted, the fear finally overriding his stutter. "The side effects were too high! The bone-growth was uncontrolled! We need years to verify the data! If we inject you now, you won't be a soldier—you'll be a mass of tumors!"
The bone-spiked man—the only successful variant Blonsky had spared—stepped forward from the shadows. His arms were so heavy with bone protrusions that they dragged on the floor, leaving deep furrows in the linoleum.
"Emil," the spike-man said, his voice thin and raspy. "The military has already noticed the silence. If we don't leave this hole now, the jets will be here. We won't get out."
Abomination's huge frame whipped around, his eyes burning with a yellow fire. The spike-man stumbled back, his heavy arms swinging clumsily.
"I don't need a lapdog telling me what to do," Abomination bared his blood-stained fangs. "One more word out of you, and I'll use those spikes of yours to pin you to the hangar door."
Blonsky turned back to the two scientists. His mind, already fragile from the serum, had begun to fray during his years of sensory deprivation. He didn't care about tactical retreats. He didn't care about the military's response. He only cared about power.
"Inject me," he commanded, his voice a low, terrifying rumble. "I want the upgrade. Use the raw concentrate from the variants. That's your only choice—give me the power, or I'll start eating this base one person at a time."