Chapter 697

Coulson’s team had barely had a moment to breathe lately.

They had cracked one major case after another, to the point that it sometimes seemed as though the entire organization had disappeared and SHIELD had been reduced to Coulson’s little squad.

The strangest case by far involved one of Coulson’s former trainees, a Black female agent named Adoma.

During an operation, Adoma had been captured and fitted with a mechanical eye rigged with a self-destruct mechanism. From that point on, the former SHIELD agent had been reduced to a controlled puppet, receiving orders through text messages sent to the artificial eye.

Her captors had first drawn attention to her when she robbed several million dollars’ worth of diamonds from a subway train in Sweden.

But when Coulson’s team dug deeper, they discovered the diamonds weren’t the real objective. Adoma had been using the proceeds to acquire intelligence.

Following the trail eventually led them to a mysterious organization that had ordered her to infiltrate a secret research facility and steal a mysterious formula along with a strange architectural diagram.

After a long series of twists and close calls, Coulson’s team managed to rescue Adoma and derail the operation. They even tracked down the person giving her orders.

Unfortunately, their victory was short-lived.

The moment they caught the man, he was assassinated.

The mysterious organization vanished again, leaving almost nothing behind.

The case had been so bizarre, convoluted, and packed with unexpected turns that when it was finally filed away, the team gave it an unofficial title:

The Agent Coulson Eyeball of Doom.

Sky had also joined Coulson’s team around this time, and the case had given her a chance to prove herself. Her skills as an information specialist had been invaluable, and she had repeatedly offered useful suggestions during the investigation.

Everyone agreed that the shock Evenson had given her during their previous encounter seemed to have pushed her in a surprisingly healthy direction.

Given enough time, she might actually grow into an agent they could trust.

Unfortunately, that trust wouldn’t last long.

Sky was about to face the greatest crisis of trust in her life.

It started with the case that had brought Coulson’s team to Hong Kong.

SHIELD had received an alert that Chen Haoran, an Inhuman under their surveillance, had suddenly disappeared.

Chen had been classified as a high-priority threat because his powers were exceptionally dangerous.

When he lost control, he was essentially a human flamethrower operating at industrial temperatures.

SHIELD took his disappearance very seriously.

According to Agent Quan, SHIELD’s senior authority in Hong Kong, Chen hadn’t simply vanished.

He had been kidnapped.

And whoever had taken him knew exactly what they were doing.

The kidnappers had left behind fragments of fire-resistant material, suggesting they had thoroughly researched Chen’s abilities and prepared specifically to contain him.

What Agent Quan reported next made everyone uneasy.

The kidnappers had managed to locate Chen despite SHIELD’s surveillance because SHIELD’s cybersecurity network had recently been breached.

And the people responsible weren’t amateurs.

They were an old acquaintance.

The globally notorious hacker collective known as Rising Tide.

Every pair of eyes in the room immediately shifted toward Sky.

SHIELD protocol left no room for sentimentality. If Rising Tide had breached their systems, and Sky had connections to hackers, she had to be investigated.

Sky insisted she was innocent.

Coulson wasn’t interested in arguments.

"You want me to believe you’re innocent?" he said. "Easy. Prove it."

So Sky did.

Right in front of the team, she tracked down the hacker responsible for the breach.

Miles Lydon.

Even among hackers, Lydon’s name carried weight. He was practically the Michael Jackson of the hacking world.

Rumor had it he’d even hacked the Kremlin.

And, according to another completely reliable and definitely-not-ridiculous rumor, the famous photograph of Putin riding a bear shirtless had been his work.

Now that they had a name, Coulson’s team moved immediately.

They needed to find out who Lydon had sold Chen’s information to.

There was no way they believed a hacker who had spent years operating from the shadows had personally planned and carried out the kidnapping.

They were wrong about one thing, though.

Sky had never completely severed her ties with Rising Tide after joining SHIELD.

Lydon wasn’t merely her contact.

He was one of Rising Tide’s leaders.

And he was her boyfriend.

During the arrest operation, Sky took a serious risk and secretly warned Lydon.

She even managed to ditch Ward and meet with him personally.

Unfortunately for both of them, Melinda May had already realized something wasn’t right.

By the time May tracked them down, Sky and Lydon had already gone to bed together.

May caught them in the middle of the aftermath.

The silence that followed was spectacularly awkward.

Needless to say, Sky’s performance left the entire team deeply disappointed.

The interrogation of Lydon produced another unpleasant revelation.

He had indeed sold Chen’s information.

For one million dollars, he had handed it over to a woman named Rena who always dressed in floral-patterned clothes.

When Sky learned the truth, already crushed by everything that had happened, she exploded.

"You were selling the information?"

Lydon stared at her.

"You told me Rising Tide existed to fight SHIELD’s corruption and authoritarianism! You told me we weren’t doing any of this for money!"

Her voice rose with every word.

"I believed you! I lived in a van, ate bread, worked my ass off stealing information for you people, and then I find out you’ve been selling everything for cash?!"

Lydon looked genuinely guilty.

He sighed.

Then, with surprising gentleness, he gave her the truth.

"Wait. You actually believed all that?"

Sky’s expression went blank.

"Did you seriously not realize you were the only person in the entire organization doing this for free?"

Sky stared at him.

So she was the idiot.

The one person in Rising Tide who hadn’t been getting paid.

Fortunately, both of them were handcuffed at the time. Otherwise, Sky might have found a chair and beaten her boyfriend to death with it.

As for the woman who had purchased Chen’s information, Rena was one of the people behind the mysterious Centipede project that SHIELD had uncovered earlier.

She was an exceptionally talented manipulator.

Centipede’s biggest problem was simple.

The soldiers they created overheated.

Then they exploded.

Rena believed Chen could solve that problem.

Chen could generate enormous amounts of heat from inside his own body without suffering the same consequences. That suggested his body contained some kind of natural mechanism capable of suppressing the explosive effects of extreme heat.

If they could isolate that mechanism, they might finally solve Centipede’s greatest flaw.

So Rena first used her charms to lure and kidnap Chen.

Then she sold him on a dream.

Chen, unbelievably, fell for it completely.

He genuinely thought he’d stumbled into the opportunity of a lifetime.

He didn’t even manage to get a kiss out of her.

Instead, Rena manipulated him from beginning to end.

And then she turned him into a lab rat.

The Centipede researchers eventually discovered that Chen’s resistance to overheating was closely tied to a unique type of platelet in his blood.

So they began extracting it.

And extracting it.

And extracting it.

By the time they were finished, Chen had barely any of those special platelets left.

He was in such terrible condition that his own power was beginning to tear him apart.

It was almost impressive in the worst possible way.

The organization had absolutely no concept of sustainable resource management.

Nadia had been getting her blood drawn at the Fuying Corporation for months and was somehow still perfectly healthy without even realizing what was happening.

Centipede, meanwhile, had found a useful biological resource and immediately drained the patient dry.

That was what happened when nobody bothered to think about long-term planning.

By now, Coulson had located the secret laboratory where Chen was being held.

He and the Hong Kong SHIELD team launched a rescue operation.

They expected to find a badly injured captive.

They weren’t prepared for what they actually found.

Chen’s body had suffered enormous physical damage.

His mind had changed, too.

Something inside him had broken.

He had gone dark.

The moment Agent Quan and the rescue team arrived, Chen killed Quan.

Then he turned his fury on Coulson and May.

"Ah..."

Flames erupted from both of Chen’s arms.

Coulson reacted instantly.

He dove aside, twisted through the air, rolled behind a low wall, and stayed there.

Whatever graceful sequence of evasive maneuvers he had just performed, the important part was that he was no longer standing in the fire.

May slowed down to cover him.

By the time she reached the wall, she was a step too late.

Flames raced toward her back.

Her eyes flashed green.

May spun and slammed her palm backward.

The moment her hand touched the fire, the flames turned green.

Then they vanished.

May’s expression hardened as she ducked behind the wall.

Damn it.

If that bastard hadn’t ordered her to keep her abilities hidden, she’d have already gone over there and beaten Chen into the ground.

Then Chen screamed.

His own power was hurting him.

The special platelets that had once protected him had been nearly drained from his body. Every time he used his abilities now, his body paid the price.

The skin along his arms had already begun to char.

The pain was clearly enormous.

Coulson immediately switched tactics.

He was a veteran agent for a reason.

"Chen! We know you’re in pain. Let us help you!"

Chen answered with a massive fireball.

"People can endure oppression for only so long before their anger erupts. The Chen Haoran who was suffering might have believed your lies."

His voice rang through the facility.

"But the Blazing Hero won’t."

Apparently, Chen had decided he was now the Blazing Hero.

And the Blazing Hero had no feelings.

Coulson stared at him.

Not only had the man gone completely off the rails, he’d apparently developed a severe case of superhero theatrics.

Coulson glanced at May.

You two are from the same region.

Maybe you can talk some sense into him.

May resisted the urge to draw the hunting knife strapped to her back and solve the problem personally.

Instead, she called out in Cantonese, her pronunciation reasonably good.

"Mr. Chen, I know you’re angry. I’m sorry for what happened to you. But violence can’t solve every problem. If you keep going like this, you won’t be able to turn back."

"I don’t want to turn back."

Chen answered in Cantonese as well.

"Whether you arrest me or he arrests me, what’s the difference?"

Coulson couldn’t understand a word of it.

"So... things are going pretty well?"

May responded with a flat stare.

That answered his question.

"All right."

Coulson pulled out his tranquilizer gun.

"We’ll put him down."

He arranged for May to provide cover while he circled around behind Chen.

It was a solid plan.

Unfortunately, Chen had apparently unlocked his next stage.

Flames erupted from his body.

His entire form became wrapped in fire, blazing like a miniature sun.

Coulson fired.

The tranquilizer dart never reached him.

It was vaporized in midair.

Coulson and May retreated behind cover again.

May’s hand tightened around her hunting knife.

She had already drawn half the blade.

If things got any worse, she was seriously considering knocking Coulson unconscious first and then charging Chen herself.

Meanwhile, Chen had reached a completely different conclusion.

He was invincible.

He threw back his head and laughed.

"As the saying goes, Heaven has given me talent for a reason!"

A strange sound suddenly filled the chamber.

Then music started playing.

A distinctly old-school Cantonese pop song, complete with dramatic shouts in the backing track. It sounded like something straight out of the seventies or eighties.

"Ultimate techniques, mighty skills..."

"How many in this world can reach the summit?"

"Success, glory..."

"How many men can truly call themselves heroes?"

"Who is the great hero?"

Everyone froze.

Then someone began singing along.

Coulson and May exchanged a glance.

The moment they recognized the voice, both visibly relaxed.

Everything was going to be fine.

A figure appeared at the end of the narrow corridor.

He walked toward them while bobbing his head to the music, holding a phone in one hand.

Evenson Richter.

He stopped in front of Chen and spoke in Cantonese.

"Mr. Chen, would you say you’re a great hero now?"

May immediately stood up from behind the wall.

"You?"

She looked genuinely surprised.

"What are you doing here? We didn’t call you for help this time."

"That’s a long story."

Evenson waved the question away.

Then he looked at May.

"By the way, how was my Cantonese?"

May smiled awkwardly.

"Terrible. I barely understood a word."

Evenson sighed.

"Yeah. I thought so."

There wasn’t any disrespect behind it.

He simply had the same problem he’d always had with Cantonese.

It sounded like another language entirely.

He could barely understand it, let alone speak it.

Before the conversation could continue, Chen’s face twisted with rage.

"Are you seriously standing there playing music while I’m talking?!"

He had been completely ignored.

That wasn’t helping his mood.

Chen raised both hands.

Six fireballs shot toward Evenson.

Evenson lifted one finger.

He rotated it casually through the air.

The six fireballs immediately converged into a single mass and stopped dead.

Evenson snapped his fingers.

The enormous fireball exploded and vanished.

He looked at Chen.

"You tried to burn a Warlock?"

He shook his head.

"You’ve got to be kidding me."

Warlocks might not possess the absolute greatest command over fire among every supernatural discipline, but their resistance to flame was among the highest.

And Chen had only just begun to understand and control his own abilities.

He wasn’t even remotely on Evenson’s level.

Chen stared in disbelief.

His attack had been neutralized effortlessly, and Evenson had done it with a technique Chen had never seen before.

Evenson stepped past the others and walked calmly into the middle of the chamber.

"Mr. Chen, let me make something very clear."

He raised one finger.

"You’re not my opponent."

His tone remained almost conversational.

"If I wanted to kill you, it would take nothing more than a gesture."

Chen’s flames flickered.

"But I’m not interested in fighting."

Evenson smiled.

"I’m much more interested in ending fights."

He took another step.

"So let’s talk."

His smile faded slightly.

"And don’t reject my offer out of pride. Not everyone gets the opportunity to receive mercy from me."

If Chen still possessed all of his special platelets, perhaps he might have presented a little trouble.

Now?

A single spell would be enough.

But Evenson had no particular desire to kill him.

For one thing, Chen was, at least by a generous definition, a fellow countryman.

More importantly, the man had been manipulated, tortured, and pushed to the edge.

Evenson was willing to give him one chance to turn things around.

Just one.