On the remaining bridge deck, Bruce was working with a few others to lift a flipped-over car and rescue the person trapped underneath.
With a shout of "Heave!", everyone exerted their strength together, successfully lifting the sedan and placing the injured from underneath onto a stretcher.
Just as Bruce turned around, he saw a flash of light heading his way. He yelled and rolled to the side, but he was still blasted off his feet.
"Watch out! Watch out!" he heard Aisha screaming.
Bruce landed hard on the ground, his head hitting against the rubble, resulting in a bleeding wound. His arm was also scratched by a piece of metal, and his right thumb was completely numb, possibly broken.
Yet Bruce still managed to crawl up from the ground because he saw the recent missile overturning a bus parked near the roadside. Several people who had rushed to lift stretchers from the bridge deck were trapped underneath.
Fortunately, the bus had previously been bombed and burnt to a mere wreck. The people crushed underneath were not immediately killed and were still screaming in pain.
Bruce hurriedly rushed over, and the nearest civilians and medical personnel also rushed over, hoping to help lift the wreckage.
Yet, blasted as the bus was, it was not as light as a sedan. Its size was a real problem. They stood no chance of lifting it unless they exerted evenly distributed force from one end to the other.
When Bruce arrived, his peripheral vision glimpsed the water beneath. He saw that the newly arrived firefighters and the emergency rescue team equipped with a large amount of equipment did not come up the bridge. Instead, they went to rescue most of the cars that fell into the water.
Helpless as they were, with insufficient manpower and equipment at hand, they should indeed rescue the more dangerous drowning cars first. The injured on the bridge can still hold on for a dozen minutes or so, while those trapped in the cars can lose consciousness in minutes due to lack of oxygen.
Seeing rescue as hopeless, a few who came running could only give it a try. Four lifted the front and three lifted the rear. Everyone exerted their strength together, muscles bulged, faces turned red, and angry roars shouted from their mouths.
"Heave!!!!!"
The good news is that one side of the bus finally got lifted a little, two people underneath were pulled out. The bad news is that more people were still inside and lifting the bus was proving impossible.
Lifting the car slightly and completely raising it away from the ground are two different things. Those who were deeply crushed were still screaming as the bus was lifted.
Bruce was completely exhausted. When he withdrew his hands, he could not even feel the existence of his forearms. His lungs felt like a bomb that had suddenly exploded, blasting blood around his throat.
The intense adrenaline spurred him on, but his muscles could not squeeze out more strength. On the contrary, the mental exhibition would heighten sensory levels. The screams of the victims echoed more clearly in his ears, and the smell of blood rushed into his nose.
Bruce had never felt such desperation. The impact of murder and mass disasters was incomparable. If there were a hell on Earth, it would not be thousands of feet beneath the surface, but in the dystopia of disaster.
Bruce had just taken a moment to regain his senses when he heard a shriek in front of him. It sounded very childish, as if a young girl had screamed it.
Human instincts would make us more sensitive to the cries of infants. Bruce was awakened immediately. He turned his head and found that a girl probably around ten years old was screaming while running towards him.
Behind her was an out-of-control Mecha, obviously one that had broken control system and crashed down. The young girl ran while screaming in despair. She realized she could not escape the range of the explosion and had to squat down with her head in her hands.
Bruice forced himself with all his strength to rush towards her, but failed to see the dense fog that had risen above the water and shrouded the entire Golden Gate Bridge.
With a heavy step forward, there was no explosion, no screams, no blood flowing into a river, Bruce fell to the ground. He pushed himself up with his hand and looked around. The thick fog had blanketed vision.
The mysterious Fog Realm again?
Bruce furrowed his brows painfully, gasping for breath, swallowing saliva, suppressing the adrenaline spike and forcing himself to get up from the ground.
The flow of time inside the Fog Realm was different from the outside. If he left now, he would still have the chance to rescue the young girl, which meant he needed to leave right away.
Bruce staggered into the depths of the fog, realizing that losing consciousness could let him escape the Fog Realm.
But as he ran forward, a shadow emerged, running towards him. As the two bursted through the limits of the fog, they stopped as they recognized each other.
One was Bruce Wayne, and the other was Peter Parker.
The problem was that both of them were in poor condition. Bruce was covered in blood, the flow from his head had blurred his facial features.
Peter was worse. He had three blood holes in his body - the kind that could let light through, granting him a view of the backdrop.
But Peter wasn't bleeding, nor was he pale. His wounds were extremely smooth cuts, about which some strange particles were pouring out. It looked like part of his body had been cut off.
Both were shocked at each other's conditions.
"Are you okay?" They both said in unison.
"I'm fine." They answered in unison again.
They obviously both knew the urgency of the situation, so Bruce simply started talking: "Currently, there are two Starks battling above the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The Golden Gate Bridge has been blasted apart and many cars have fallen off. The bridge is still under continuous bombing..."
Bruce sat on the ground, explained his ordeal in the simplest terms he could manage, and then looked to Peter with clear curiosity as to how he had ended up in this condition.
Peter sighed heavily and began to tell Bruce what had happened since their last meeting.
After Peter left the Fog Realm, he didn't think too long about it. Focusing on the task at hand, he rushed to the laboratory as quickly as he could.
At that time, Otto was conducting his final collision experiment with the High Energy Collider's ignition factor. Expecting significant breakthroughs from this experiment made him hurry Peter over.
Peter was not optimistic about the results of this experiment. He was not there to observe the results, but to persuade Otto to take a cooler approach. He warned against rushing a large-scale collision experiment, as its consequences were unpredictable.
But his persuasion didn't affect Otto, who didn't want to lag behind Stark. Stark was the benchmark in the field of energy. Aside from his personal Ark Reactor, Stark Group's artificial sun project was also leading globally, although it took a different approach than Otto's.
Every master researcher wants to prove that their path is the right one. Otto knew Stark was one step ahead, but he couldn't allow him to stay ahead indefinitely.
Previously, Otto was anxious because he hadn't achieved any breakthroughs. The ignition factor he had found was promising, and he didn't want to delay any further.
Peter understood this. He knew he wouldn't be able to dissuade Otto, but he offered to go with him in case there was an accident, so he could save Otto, who was just an ordinary man.
And unsurprisingly, an accident did happen, and it was no ordinary accident.
Otto hadn't had the ignition factor for long, and the tests he'd run weren't enough. He started the collision experiment without really understanding what he had.
The moment of the collision, Spider Man vowed he had never heard his Spider-sense alarm so loudly before.
But the Spider-sense was useless since the instinct that would usually allow Spider Man to avoid danger had nowhere to take him—they were trapped.
In an instant, the laboratory was filled with countless high-energy particle streams, like bullets traveling at high speed, and these particles penetrated Peter's body.
Peter blacked out momentarily. When he came to, he found himself engulfed in fog. Peter surmised what that so-called mysterious ignition factor might be as the time when Otto obtained it almost coincided with the appearance of the strange fog phenomenon.
After discovering the holes in his body, Peter had an absurd desire to laugh. He just hoped his organs were doing well in some other dimensional space.
Now, he was not focusing much on his own situation. So after briefly and hastily describing his ordeal, he asked Bruce, "What on earth is going on? Why are there two Iron Men and why are they fighting each other? What happened to the Golden Gate Bridge? And the injured?"
Bruce sighed, knowing there was a long story to tell. But he stood up and said, "I need to leave right now. I have to save her..."
He was unable to continue speaking as he thought back to the scene of lifting the car.
In fact, he could feel that his strength didn't contribute much to lifting the car. Two citizens, likely infected with the extremis virus, who were standing at the back, had exerted at least 400 pounds of force which played a crucial role.
What difference would his leaving now make? The outcome was likely that he would rush toward the little girl and both would be killed by the missile, just dying there without preventing any disaster.
Bruce rambled all these thoughts out loud, mainly because the adrenaline hadn't worn off and he felt uncomfortable if he didn't let it out.
"I should go and find the virus first, or find a spider," Bruce said in confusion. "Even if I had an additional 200 pounds of strength, I wouldn't be left like this..."
Bruce somewhat dejectedly sat back down, but Peter suddenly shot forward, pulling Bruce up with his remaining hand and holding his shoulder as he said,
"Don't give up yet, we still have a way."
Peter's eyes glittered as he pulled out a small metal piece from his clothes with his remaining hand. The metal piece instantly enlarged into a special communicator in his palm.
He pressed a button on the device and said,
"Hello, Director Fury, this is Spider Man. Via my communicator, you should be able to identify which universe's Spider Man I am. I have news for you—I'm dying."
"Because of a serious experimental accident, I have three lethal penetrating wounds. But because I accidentally entered a Mysterious Space, I have been given more time."
"Time seems to be at a standstill in this Mysterious Space, which allows me to keep living even with these deadly injuries."
"Meaning, I'll die as soon as I leave this space. And since I can't stay here forever, I'm going to die one day."
"But the world can't be without Spider Man, Nick. Thousands of citizens in San Francisco are waiting for Spider Man to show up."
"I hope Spider Man will go, even if they don't have much time left. I hope Spider Man can guard their last night."
After speaking, Peter pressed a button on the back of the communicator. The communicator transformed into a beam of light and vanished. Peter then turned to Bruce and said,
"I will leave here to die, and then you will find a new spider. It will give you the power you desire."