The dinosaur invasion hadn't drawn much public attention; due to the intervention of Hydra and S.H.I.E.L.D., few outside observers even knew it happened, and it certainly caused no waves on a global scale.
This time, however, was different. The Battle of New York raged from dusk to dawn. Amidst the panic gripping Manhattan, the entire world witnessed the clash between good and evil via helicopters from Eddie Brock and other news outlets.
Yet to ordinary citizens, they couldn't really distinguish the subtle differences between the Avengers, the Justice League, Captain America's temporary task force, and S.H.I.E.L.D.
Even though Batman painstakingly laid out the entire sequence of events—from the secret mission in Latveria up to the present day—explaining everything bit by bit after the battle concluded, civilians looking back on the ordeal still categorized the superheroes into three groups: Captain America, Thor, and other superheroes.
One was a spiritual leader of a bygone era and a living legend; the other was a genuine god descended from myth, dropping from the heavens at the direst moment.
In comparison, Iron Man—who spent half his time contacting the Fantastic Four and the other half with a scrapped armor suit—and Batman, who only showed up in person at the very end to speak a few words, naturally found their luster dimmed quite a bit.
The rest were hardly worth mentioning.
Similarly, the public couldn't tell the difference between Hydra, the Viper Clan, and Latverian criminals. However, the Frost Giants—who made a grand entrance at the end before being blasted underground by Thor's thunderbolts—were so striking that many people couldn't stop thinking about them.
These interested individuals were mostly teenagers and urban explorers, whose motivations for tracking down the Frost Giants were simple: they were cool and rare.
However, starting from the second day, Times Square was placed under strict lockdown by the Manhattan Police Department, with several teams from the Pentagon and the FBI arriving to analyze and investigate the scene.
By the time the corpses, bloodstains, and rubble in Times Square were cleared away, three days had passed.
The area remained closed off, but as the police officers and FBI agents gradually withdrew and construction crews filed in, it became impossible to keep out those determined to break in.
The deep crater left behind when Thor burst through the ground and the cavernous pits where over a dozen Frost Giants were hammered into the earth couldn't be filled anytime soon.
At this moment, a group of teenagers with dyed hair of various colors, wild hairstyles, dressed mainly in jackets, leather coats, and denim jackets, were embarking on what they considered a thrilling and dangerous underground expedition.
Superheroes—apart from Tony Stark, Iron Man—were notoriously hard to track down or approach.
The Frost Giants, however, were dead, and their corpses were still buried underground. Surely getting a look at them wouldn't be too hard.
Unfortunately, these kids weren't a professional team. After descending roughly a hundred meters using ropes, the chilling drafts and strange noises echoing from below extinguished their desire to keep exploring.
"We can't tell Schumacher and the others that we left without seeing a Frost Giant. No one says a word once we get back to the surface!"
"Let's hit a burger joint later to align our stories. This is going to be our ultimate bragging right from now on."
The youth with short hair who led the group instructed the others.
The others nodded repeatedly. Having ventured deep underground was already enough capital to brag about with other street punks. As for whether they actually saw the Frost Giants' corpses, who cared?
Not long after this group of teenagers left, another team of mountaineering explorers equipped with professional climbing gear and a thousand meters of rope arrived.
Unlike the teenagers who abandoned the quest halfway, even upon hearing strange noises from the depths, these explorers didn't shrink back in the slightest; instead, their eyes sparkled with excitement.
As they descended deeper and deeper, they finally hit bottom at a depth of nearly five hundred meters below the surface.
The strange sounds were merely scattered stones falling and bouncing off the underground caverns, and the draft was nothing more than natural subterranean airflow.
This was clearly the battlefield between Thor and the Frost Giants. As searchlights were turned on one after another, the scene beneath revealed itself to the exploration team.
Contrary to expectations of seeing dead Frost Giant corpses right as they landed, there were no bodies in sight. Apart from noticeable, massive fist marks and footprints, the cavern was riddled with caves of various sizes.
Seeping groundwater had submerged half the cavern, but not a single Frost Giant corpse was to be seen.
Dead? Could dead Frost Giants have gotten up and run away on their own? Or were they never dead to begin with?
No one in the exploration team dared to speak loudly. After cautiously exploring every inch of the underground cavern, they gathered back together.
The sound of dripping water echoed continuously until someone finally broke the silence:
"Do you think... this water could be melted from the bodies of those Frost Giants?"
The moment those words were spoken, the team members felt a wave of nausea, followed closely by a surge of novelty:
"That's actually possible! Let's collect some water samples and take them back to the surface. We can test if there's any truth to that!"
And so, after a bout of busy work, the professional team also left disappointed.
Similar scenes played out almost every hour. At peak times, several teams even descended underground from different pits simultaneously.
Yet by the fifth day, no one had obtained any information or artifacts related to the Frost Giants.
Instead, rumors began to spread through New York that "the Frost Giants never died, but transformed into Lava Giants underground to continue their rampage."
When these rumors reached Batman's ears via Venom Robin, Batman said nothing; he simply told Robin to spend more time training rather than wearing a realistic mask to go clubbing.
The Frost Giants' corpses naturally hadn't vanished into thin air, nor had they melted into water.
In fact, on the night of the Battle of Manhattan, Batman and Thor had gone underground together and carried all those corpses away.
At this moment, these corpses were laid out in the subterranean levels of Bat Island—inside the Batcave itself.
This place had plenty of room even for displaying a giant Tyrannosaurus Rex over fifteen meters long and five meters tall, let alone Frost Giants.
However, Batman wasn't displaying them as trophies. Instead, he had constructed a massive surgical table and was currently dissecting a Frost Giant.
Over the past five days, Batman had spent most of his time with Thor, giving him a general understanding of the guy.
His physical strength could rival the Hulk's, and his speed could surpass the fastest among superheroes—provided he was swinging his hammer.
His durability was extraordinarily high, completely unfazed even by large-caliber sniper rounds.
Fire, freezing, toxicity, oxygen deprivation, electricity, radiation, aphrodisiacs... none of these had any effect on Thor. Batman even suspected that if you threw the guy onto Proxima Centauri, he could fly back, hammer and all.
When Wonder Woman first left Themyscira, she would occasionally be bound by her own Lasso of Truth and lose all her powers, though she eventually overcame that weakness.
With Thor, however, Batman was almost certain the guy possessed no obvious physical flaws.
Since he couldn't put Thor on an operating table for dissection, the one lying on the table ended up being a Frost Giant.
Batman wanted to see what secrets lay within the physiology of a creature that, like Thor, hailed directly from mythology.
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