After calming the Hulk down, Nick Fury boarded the plane with a head full of thoughts.
He piloted a helicopter himself, quietly heading for one of his secret bases.
Don't ask where his secret bases came from.
He was Nick "Cunning-Rabbit-With-A-Thousand-Burrows" Fury. If he didn't have a thousand secret bases, where was the style in that?
And besides, the Director building a few secret bases, can you call that greed?
That's called being cautious!
In short, one hour and forty minutes later, Nick stopped on a mountain ridge.
He didn't enter the base. Instead, he walked between two bushes and reached under the weeds, scratching at the ground.
No water flowed out…
A moment later, he flipped the soil aside and pressed the button underneath.
Nothing happened around him, but he wasn't anxious. He simply stood there and waited in silence.
A full three minutes passed before faint noise finally appeared in the air.
The space in front of Nick looked like a mirror shattering, refracting countless copies of Nick.
Then, a small spacecraft fully appeared before him.
Whoosh.
The hatch opened slowly, and two green-skinned figures stepped out, both wearing fitted purple outfits.
"Nick Fury… long time no see!"
The lead green-skinned man gave Nick a huge hug.
After the hug, Nick habitually glanced left and right, then followed the green-skinned man onto the ship.
Once the hatch closed, Nick let out a long sigh.
"Buddy, what's with you? You look really tense. Were you followed?"
"No, no." Talos shook his head. "I'm just… you look like you ran into trouble."
"A big trouble. The kind that comes from the universe," Nick said.
He sat down casually on Talos' ship and even propped his feet up on Talos' workbench.
Talos didn't mind at all. He and Nick were old comrades. The more natural Nick acted, the happier Talos was.
Talos sat beside him, handed him a cup of Skrull sweet wine, and asked softly, "A big trouble from the universe? That shouldn't be happening. You've got Asgard, and Carol. No one wants to provoke Earth."
"But it happened anyway." Nick's face went serious. "Talos, have you ever heard of Kryptonians?"
In an instant, Talos' huge eyes widened.
"Kryptonians?!" he blurted.
"Are you kidding me?"
"Did you forget I lived on Earth for a long time?"
"I've read your comics, especially the biggest one!"
"But he showed up anyway, buddy. I'm not making this up!"
As he spoke, Nick showed Talos the Heisenberg videos as usual.
"Look. That power, flight, heat vision, freeze breath, and the bio-field he's shown recently. It matches the comics almost exactly!"
"Mhm. You're not wrong, Nick." Talos frowned and watched the video for a long time, then couldn't help adding, "He's even stronger than the comics."
"At least in Superman comics before 1986, Kryptonian Superman had a hard time even lifting a large airplane!"
"Mhm." Nick muttered helplessly. "It's like the stronger our comics got over time, the stronger his abilities became too."
After a beat, Talos stared at Nick deeply.
"We have to notify Carol. This could be a huge problem."
"What?" Nick was shocked.
Decades ago, when Carol left, she did give him a contact device.
But he'd buried that thing for decades, not because he planned to use it now!
Talos seemed to see Nick's tension. He patted Nick's shoulder and comforted him.
"You don't need to contact her. We have ways to reach her."
"And this isn't about Earth. It's mainly that this so-called Kryptonian's power gives me a very bad feeling."
Talos took a sip of wine and began explaining slowly.
"Our Skrull Empire was one of the universe's three great empires hundreds of thousands of years ago. Even the Kree Empire, which still counts among the big three today, used to be our vassal."
"But I have to admit, even at our peak, the strongest Shi'ar Empire still beat us into the ground."
"And the Shi'ar's top combat power includes two people. One is the Supreme Gladiator, and the other is the Supreme Nova."
"This Kryptonian…" Talos' expression turned heavy. "I don't believe he walked out of a comic. And I don't believe the three great empires split the universe for millions of years without discovering a planet with infinite potential like Krypton!"
"Besides, the Kryptonians he talks about. If they truly have such gifted genes, wouldn't they have made a name for themselves long ago?"
"The universe doesn't only have yellow suns on Earth."
"So I have to suspect this is a scheme from the Shi'ar, or from someone opposing the Shi'ar."
"Maybe it's some experiment tied to the Supreme Gladiator's legacy, or more likely, an experiment by Shi'ar enemies imitating the Supreme Gladiator."
"In any case, Carol has a good relationship with the Nova Corps, and the Nova Corps is the Shi'ar Empire's standing army."
"I have to ask her about this."
After that, Talos simply clapped his hands.
A Skrull seated at the pilot's position nodded.
The moment he did, a call prompt appeared on the ship's viewport.
A moment later, seeing the projected image of an American auntie on the viewport, Nick nearly ground his back teeth to dust.
Damn it!!!
I held onto that beeper for thirty years and never had the heart to press it once!
And you're telling me you could always contact the Skrulls?!
Are you even an Earthling?
You were just too lazy to come back, weren't you!
You really forgot your old buddy Nick, didn't you!
He was furious, but Nick Fury still forced a smile immediately.
Captain Marvel, after being genuinely surprised for a moment, couldn't help asking Nick, "Huh? Fury, why are you here?"
In that instant, Nick painfully accepted the judgment that the person on the other side really was Captain Marvel.
Back when he met Carol, he had deliberately told her this.
He only liked people calling him Fury. He never let people call him Nick.
Of course, it was just an old agent's little trick. Nick Fury loved playing word games like this.
Almost everyone around him got assigned a special way to address him.
That way, if someone was disguised, the moment they called him "Nick Fury," he could tell whether they were real or fake.
But the more certain Carol was real, the more heartbroken Nick felt.
I waited for you this long, clutching that beeper, too stingy to use it even once.
And you never once mentioned you could contact Skrulls?!
You could have said it earlier!
Still, thinking about it, it made sense.
Even if the Skrulls were down on their luck now, they used to be one of the universe's three great empires.
Cross-galaxy communication shouldn't be hard for them.
For a moment, Nick's heart trembled.
He hesitated for a long time, then spoke quietly.
"Long time… no see…"
Sometimes the most helpless words are exactly that line after years of separation.
Long time no see…
Ahem. Enough chatter.
Carol, seeing Nick Fury, looked genuinely happy too.
When she got happy, dazzling light flared all over her body.
In the next moment, she pierced through more than three spacecraft with her own body.
Only after finishing her work did Carol finally make time to chat with Nick and the others.
Her first line was, "You got this old, Fury. And your eye…?"
"It's fine. My eye is a small matter!" Nick answered instantly.
But Carol wasn't stupid. She quickly remembered.
"My God. Back then, when the Flerken…" Her expression turned guilty. "It's my fault. I should've told you, if you get scratched by a Flerken, you have to smear triceratops blood on it to recover."
"I didn't know it back then either. I heard it near the Centaurus region, on a planet called Tai'a."
"You poor thing. Just a scratch from a cat and you…"
"No, no, no!!!" Nick's face went black on the spot.
He explained urgently, "You're overthinking it. That wasn't the fat orange cat's doing."
"Later I got betrayed by a friend, and in that incident, I lost my eye!"
Carol: …
Talos: …
No one knew whether they believed him or not, but soon the three of them started talking about Heisenberg.
Carol first expressed surprise.
Because when she was a kid, her favorite comics were Captain America and Superman.
Of course, she liked Captain America a bit more. She could enlist, but she couldn't become an alien.
As long as she enlisted, she could get closer to her idol, Captain America.
But when she grew up, she realized she not only hadn't gotten closer to Captain America, her abilities had ended up closer to Superman…
In short, the topic of Kryptonians was something almost every Earthling in Marvel had a story about.
After a long while, Earth, the Skrulls, and the Shi'ar Empire could be considered three parties that barely formed a plan against Heisenberg.
First, they had to guarantee Nick Fury's safety.
Since Heisenberg was incredibly powerful and incredibly domineering, Nick, who always liked to scheme, was in a dangerous position.
Second, to verify whether the Kryptonian bloodline was real, the Skrulls would dispatch one or two professional agents to impersonate Nick Fury and someone else in S.H.I.E.L.D.
In short, those two would both replace Nick Fury to ensure his safety, and find ways to make contact with Heisenberg.
Then they would use the Skrulls' talent, shapeshifting, to transform deeply into Heisenberg himself.
The reason Skrulls could become one of the universe's three great empires was precisely because of that terrifying gift.
They could replicate everything about a person, inside and out.
If they encountered Captain America, they could replicate Captain America's appearance and strength.
If they encountered the Hulk, they could even replicate the Hulk's normal-state strength.
The reason this ability didn't really show in Captain Marvel's movie was simply because Earth back then didn't have that many supernatural weirdos.
The Skrulls didn't have suitable genetic samples, so they didn't mass-copy Earthlings.
And after that, Carol rose up.
This auntie's bloodline was decent, but her power ultimately came from the Space Stone, not from her own genes.
So Carol, who couldn't be "used," formed a strategic alliance with the Skrulls.
In the end, Nick Fury decided to officially move into the Skrulls' hidden base, then remotely command the Skrull impersonating him to figure out everything about Heisenberg.
As for who the other Skrull should impersonate…
Nick couldn't help thinking of his deputy commander, Hill.
"Talos, set the other disguise target as Hill. Execute it!"
"Of course. No problem!" Talos laughed cheerfully.
After laughing, Nick and Talos started drinking happily.
But drinking was drinking. They were both top-tier spies of their respective worlds. Who knew how many clashes flashed across that table.
Talos, as the temporary leader of the Skrull refugee team, wouldn't let his people walk into danger without profit.
So what profit did the Skrulls want from Earth right now?
To be honest, only the Hulk.
Talos wanted the Hulk's genetic sample to mass-equip Skrull refugees with a Hulk transformation form.
That crossed Nick Fury's bottom line. He would never give the Skrulls a Hulk army.
The two quickly started cursing each other out.
To make them stop, Carol had to draw their attention away.
So she started telling Talos about what she'd seen out in the universe.
She knew that Talos, who was currently hiding away and barely surviving, loved information about the major powers in the universe most.
Carol spoke slowly.
"Recently the universe's situation seems a bit tense. Thanos' forces have been prowling near Kree territory."
"Kree Accuser Ronan seems like he might betray the Kree Empire."
"And the Chitauri, Thanos' dogs, have started gathering nonstop lately."
"They've practically assembled their main force."
"Who knows which planet Thanos' vanguard will bite into this time."
"Good thing they're absurdly far from Earth. They won't come to Earth, right?"
"Yeah." Talos added. "They won't come to Earth."
/-\
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