"What on Earth is this?!"
A scream erupted from within the lab, followed by a series of loud, chaotic noises. Then, Reed emerged from the lab door, not running on his feet, but propelled out by his tentacles touching the floor.
"Oh my God! I've turned into a monstrous octopus!"
Suddenly, Otto, holding his arm, shuffled out of the lab, supporting himself with his own tentacles. He adjusted his glasses and said, "Don't be so dramatic. Think about how you would no longer need lab assistants, you could wash eight test tubes yourself. Doesn't that sound cheering?"
"What's so cheering about that?" Reed complained as he hobbled around like a newborn just getting used to its limbs. As he was about to scream again, Otto impatiently picked his ear and said, "Stop whining. What was installed in you are tentacles similar to Stark's. Each tentacle costs millions of dollars."
"But I've become a monster!!"
"Can't you control them with your nerves to shrink them? Didn't you hear anything I just explained to you about the instructions?"
Reed paused, then slowly, the four tentacles behind him began to retract and then shrunk into thin tattoo-like patterns that clung to his back.
Reed turned around in place a few times, desperately craning his neck to look back. Otto sighed and said very impatiently, "Countryside bumpkin."
Reed's eyes widened and he was about to retort when Dr. Connors walked past the lab door, adding, "I recorded the whole process just now. Once this tech is available to the general public, we'll use this footage as a negative example for instructional videos so they can see the idiocy."
Reed was left speechless by the seemingly coordinated attack. He then glanced down at the armor on his legs. At the moment, a thin layer of mechanical armor was attached to his limbs. It wasn't any heavy armor, it was so thin that it was barely discernible, almost as if his arms and legs were wrapped in a layer of sun-protective clothing.
"What's this?" Reed asked, puzzled.
"Doom's power armor," Doom replied in his usual emotionless mechanical tone, "It will allow you to fly and deliver punches with thrice the human strength. It comes with armor-piercing shockwave effects."
"Doom, you damned..."
"Doom knows that you haven't built a cutting-edge armor yet, leaving you as weak as a chicken. But don't worry, Doom is generous enough to help you. Cheers to Doom."
Reed was on the verge of losing it. At this point, Connors returned, "The armor contains two versions of healing potions. One is a fast-acting regenerative potion that can regenerate all your organs in a jiffy. The other is a slow-acting healing potion that not only fixes minor injuries on your body but also replenishes your energy very quickly."
"You are mistaken." Reed said in disbelief. "You are not seriously considering me to fight those bugs on the front lines, are you?"
"We just hope that when we're slaughtering away, you would manage to die a bit slower." Banner expressionlessly passed Reed standing by the wall and headed towards the spaceship's cockpit.
As the other scientists went to control the spaceship, only Shiller and Doom, the last to come out, trailed behind. Doom looked at Shiller and said, "Doom doesn't understand the meaning of this. Even though we have strong destructive powers, there's no need for us to waste time going to the frontline."
"I know what you are trying to say. We could be of greater value in the rear, but things aren't that simple."
Shiller looked around and saw that Peter and Banner had both gone to operate the ship, and Reed went back to the lab to familiarize himself with the new equipment and abilities. They were the only two people left around.
So, Shiller lowered his voice and said, "That's certainly one of the targets."
Doom's eyebrows perked up beneath his mechanical mask. He leaned in with interest, and the two of them huddled together and whispered for a while. In the end, Doom nodded and said, "Doom agrees with your choice. Doom will start preparing now."
Soon, the escort ship launched. The Kree escort ship wasn't renowned for its speed, so it would take some time to approach the front line around the Great Delivery Portal Star Area of Xi'a Empire. During this time, Reed was adjusting to his newly gained abilities, and Doom was busy setting up in another lab.
As the escort ship drew closer to the frontlines where the battle with the Insect Race was taking place, the views visible through the portholes left several human scientists at the helm agape. The phrase 'meat grinder' would be an understatement for the current state of the battlefield.
Large-scale wars within the cosmos are far more brutal than those on a small planet like Earth, and now the two parties have entered a strategic stalemate, where they have to inflict ten times the loss on their opponent to make a slight advancement in the battle line.
For a small creature like humans, the once vast cosmos is now so crowded that not even a small spaceship could pass through.
Banner looked at the depiction on the radar scan in shock. The entire scan was red, but that was not because of the background color of the scan. It was because of the dense obstacles.
In plain sight were countless insect limbs that had been cut, burned by energy weapons, or blasted apart blocking their way. Moreover, fragments of spaceships of the Intergalactic Civilization Alliance Army and humanoid corpses were seen in even larger quantities.
Banner slowly clenched his fist, and Peter quickly came forward to hold his shoulder. Otto also comforted from the side, "Calm down, Dr. Banner. We all know that war is cruel. We must make these sacrifices meaningful."
Banner lowered his head slowly, pursing his lips as he spoke, "I've never been on a battlefield. I don't have any idea what war is like. If I had known...it's all my fault. I shouldn't have been drinking, and I shouldn't have activated the machine."
Connors, on the other hand, just smiled. "You'll get used to it. At least no humans are dying here. Once you're ensnared in the hell of civil war within your own race, you'll find that at least wars against invading alien races are magnificent and just."
The atmosphere in the control room went silent. In fact, it wasn't just Banner. The rest of them hadn't experienced anything like it either— they had always been working in the back, at most only getting information about the war situation from images transmitted back by monitoring equipment. The feeling was completely different from being on the front line.
About ten minutes later, Banner operated the spaceship while speaking, "We can't go any further. The front line is right ahead. Our ship doesn't carry the acknowledgment signal from the friendlies. We could be caught in the crossfire if we proceed."
At this point, Shiller came in and said, "We just got news from the outpost. The Oblivion Worms have divided into at least five core fleets, led by the Annihilator, Emperor Salo, and the three queens, respectively. The whereabouts of the Annihilator are currently unknown. The main force at the front line right now is the hive army led by the three queens."
"The Queen Eladica's troops are the closest to us right now. This worm queen is a trusted lieutenant of the Annihilator, and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call her his confidante. She is more adept at defense than her siblings, and the front-line defenses are tightly arranged."
"But we need to get past the defense line and move further into the center of the universe now. Because our target is Emperor Salo, whose life form is more similar to the Annihilator. His troops are stationed near the antimatter universe teleportation gate channel in the center of the universe, waiting to receive the worms coming from the positive matter universe."
"I can go down and open up the way," Banner offered first. He pushed the middle of his glasses with his index finger and said, "I'm responsible for at least half of this mess. It's time for the Hulk to do something productive."
"Connors and I can't be of much help in such a grand scene. But I've brought a few mini-sun generators. The worms here probably haven't evolved strong light resistance. Maybe they will be of some use," Otto added.
"I can go down with Dr. Banner," Peter raised his hand and volunteered, "Those bugs can't catch me. I can give them some trouble."
"You all make good points," Shiller summarized, "But we're not trying to confront them head-on. We just need to find a way to sneak past their defense line."
"Let's do this: The Hulk and Spider Man pretend to be supers from the Human United Army and attack the main ship where Eladica is. This will create a tense atmosphere as if we're trying to capture the queen in order to capture the pawns, forcing them to focus on defense."
"I will turn into a gray mist and envelop our escort ship, find a loophole in their defensive line, and sneak past. Once the ship reaches a safe position, I'll come back to pick you guys up."
"We can't use the teleportation gates?" Peter asked.
"The mages have definitely entered the battle by now. The bugs might have discovered their most useful teleportation methods. We don't know if they have a way to counter it yet, so it's better not to take the risk."
Everyone nodded their heads in agreement, ready to carry out this two-pronged plan. The Hulk roared and jumped out of the ship, followed closely by Spider Man. As soon as the two appeared, they caught the attention of the worms, causing an even bigger commotion than they had anticipated.
Simply put, worm queen Eladica was seriously frightened by these human superheroes.
Not to mention the mages who popped in and out through teleportation gates like some pesky freeloaders, several times appearing right in front of Eladica's face. But those strange individual supers with diverse talents—one pops up as soon as one is driven away, if you knock off the small ones, the big ones come—were enough to keep these worms flustered.
The worms' resistance evolution is often geared towards handling an entire large troop. Most species in the universe also only have a few specialized abilities for their entire race. Some are like the Skrulls, who are mechanically violent soldiers, and others like the Ferocious Feather Tribe, who draw from divine power.
Normally, a race on the standard evolutionary path can't have it both ways, because resources are limited. But with humans, each individual is unique.
There are those who control ice, and those who control fire, those with incredible strength, those who fly at rapid speed, those who use magic, and those who use machinery. The worms from the Antimatter Universe have seen all kinds of things over the years they've developed, but they've never encountered a race as flashy as the human race.
So, when two unusual humanoid entities appeared on the battlefield, the worms were utterly alert, afraid these new arrivals would pull another strange trick that would land them in front of the queen.
In less than ten hours, this sort of surprise had happened seven or eight times. If Queen Eladica had been capable of having high blood pressure, she would have evolved a pressure-reducing function by now.
In the chaos of the worm defenses, Shiller took the opportunity to turn into a gray mist and envelop the entire escort ship, quietly flying past under the eyes of the worms. The escort ship was large compared to humans, but in the grand scheme of the universe, it was a mere drop in the ocean— it successfully and quietly slipped through unnoticed.
Soon, Shiller returned to pick up the Hulk and Spider Man, and they continued to sneak past one defense line after another in the same way. As they handled it very carefully, no large-scale alerts were triggered for the time being.
As the escort ship neared the border of the Central Black Hole Star Zone, everyone standing in front of the ship's side window were in awe.
"I never thought the center of the universe would look like this."