High above the chaos, Ethan Cole hovered in the air with a faint smile resting on his lips. From this height, the disaster unfolding below looked almost surreal, like a scene from a movie playing on an enormous screen. People screamed and struggled in the rising water, cars drifted helplessly through flooded streets, and alarms echoed between the buildings, yet none of it stirred the slightest ripple in his emotions. He watched everything with the calm detachment of someone who had long since stepped outside the ordinary human world.
It was the kind of indifference only someone with overwhelming power could truly possess.
A moment later, Ethan's eyes shifted slightly as he sensed something approaching. Far off in the distance, a streak of fiery red cut across the sky, moving at astonishing speed and dragging a long tail of flame behind it. The glowing figure closed the distance in seconds before slowing down and hovering directly in front of him.
Ethan raised an eyebrow, and the smile on his face became much more obvious once he saw who it was.
"Well, damn," he said casually. "You actually made it."
The newcomer was Tony Stark.
His armor had clearly undergone another round of upgrades. The suit gleamed in a deep crimson finish, its surface sharper and sleeker than previous versions, with glowing repulsor nodes embedded along the chest and palms. Tony had always preferred technological evolution over biological enhancement, and this new armor made that philosophy obvious.
Ethan tilted his head slightly as he examined it.
"Mark III?" he asked with an amused smile.
Tony's faceplate retracted with a mechanical hiss, revealing an irritated expression. "Did you cause this mess?" he demanded.
Ethan shrugged as if the entire flooded district beneath them was of little consequence.
"From the looks of it," he replied calmly, "yeah. I guess you could say that."
He paused for a moment before adding with a faint grin, "But if you're going to talk to me up here, shouldn't you at least be polite about it?"
"Fuck," Tony muttered under his breath.
He clearly wanted to curse Ethan out properly, but he also knew exactly who he was dealing with. Their relationship was complicated—sometimes allies, sometimes rivals—but one fact had never been in doubt. Ethan Cole was terrifyingly powerful, and provoking him too far was never a good idea.
Tony exhaled sharply and decided not to push it.
Without another word, he angled his armor downward and shot toward the flooded streets below. His boosters roared to life as he dove into the disaster zone, clearly intending to clean up the situation.
Ethan watched him go and shook his head slightly.
"Still the hero, huh?" he murmured with quiet amusement.
From Ethan's perspective, the scene unfolding below looked like a high-budget virtual reality film. Tony had already landed on one of the submerged streets, where waves of seawater surged between stalled vehicles and debris. Within seconds, he pulled a man struggling in the current out of the water and carried him to the side of a nearby building.
Then he launched himself back into the flood.
Tony's armored figure streaked back and forth across the street, weaving between buildings and wreckage. In only a few minutes, he had already rescued dozens of people who had been trapped in the rising water.
Fortunately, the waves Ethan had stirred up earlier weren't massive tidal walls. At worst, the streets had become violent torrents of seawater that swept through the city blocks with tremendous force. Anyone who could swim still had a chance of survival, though the churning water was so murky it was impossible to see what lay beneath the surface.
Which made rescue work dangerous.
As Ethan continued observing the scene, his gaze suddenly shifted again toward another part of Manhattan's skyline.
A second red figure appeared between the towering buildings.
This one was much slimmer and far more agile. The figure swung rapidly through the air, occasionally firing thin white strands from a device mounted on his wrist. Each strand latched onto a nearby structure, allowing him to sling himself forward through the flooded streets in graceful arcs.
Ethan narrowed his eyes slightly.
"Well, look at that," he said with mild curiosity. "Spider-Man showed up too."
He was still watching the web-slinger swing toward the disaster zone when his instincts suddenly flared.
Without warning, Ethan sensed a violent surge of power behind him.
He turned around instantly.
A bolt of lightning crashed down from the sky.
CRACK!
The explosion of light was blinding. A massive pillar of electricity tore through the air like thunder splitting the heavens, its blinding brilliance filling Ethan's entire field of vision. The raw power contained within the strike was immense, easily rivaling—perhaps even exceeding—the electromagnetic attacks he had once seen Magneto unleash.
The lightning slammed directly into Ethan's body.
He raised an eyebrow.
Then he casually lifted one hand.
A strange distortion rippled through the air in front of him, as if an invisible force had suddenly warped the space around his body. The lightning bolt bent unnaturally the moment it reached him, sliding past his figure like water flowing around a stone.
The diverted electricity streaked through the air behind him instead, scorching the atmosphere and leaving the smell of burning ozone lingering in the sky.
When Ethan looked up again, he realized the sky had changed.
Dark storm clouds had gathered overhead without warning.
High above him hovered a woman wearing a sleek silver suit that clung tightly to her body. Her dark skin seemed almost luminous against the backdrop of the storm as she floated effortlessly in the air, suspended between layers of swirling black clouds.
Those clouds rotated slowly around her like a massive vortex.
Inside them, countless streaks of lightning flickered and twisted like living creatures, darting back and forth through the storm.
Electric energy gathered around her body, bathing her in a glowing halo of silver light. Her eyes had turned completely white, reflecting the power coursing through the storm behind her.
She looked less like a human and more like a goddess of thunder.
The next second, the woman raised her hand and pointed directly at Ethan.
Behind her, thousands of lightning bolts gathered within the storm clouds, writhing together like a swarm of electric serpents. With a single gesture from her fingers, the entire mass of lightning exploded forward.
The sky lit up as the storm unleashed its fury.
Ethan's eyes narrowed slightly.
"Storm," he said quietly.
Even with his immense power, his internal danger instincts finally stirred at the sight of that attack. The sheer density of lightning surging toward him was enormous, and if he simply stood there and took the strike head-on, it would probably hurt.
But instead of dodging, Ethan smiled.
He took a slow breath.
The air around him suddenly twisted.
A violent current of energy surged outward from his body, distorting the surrounding atmosphere. The incoming lightning abruptly slowed as if trapped in an invisible web. For a brief moment, the countless bolts of electricity froze in midair.
Then something strange happened.
The lightning began to break apart.
What had once been blinding bolts of destructive energy dissolved into countless glowing particles of light, like fragments of electricity being shredded into tiny sparks. Those sparks spun toward Ethan as though drawn into a vortex.
In an instant, they were absorbed into his body.
Storm's expression changed dramatically.
"What?" she gasped.
She had never seen anything like it.
Her lightning wasn't ordinary electricity. It was a storm she had personally summoned and controlled, concentrated into a devastating attack capable of tearing apart armored vehicles. Yet the man in front of her had simply swallowed it as if it were nothing.
Was he even human?
At that moment, Ethan slowly opened his mouth.
Inside, arcs of electricity crackled between his teeth like living lightning.
His entire body was briefly illuminated by silver flashes as the remaining energy coursed through him, turning his eyes the same glowing silver color as the storm above.
"Gulp."
He swallowed.
The lightning inside his mouth flickered one final time before disappearing completely.
The glow around Ethan's body faded just as quickly, and the silver light in his eyes gradually returned to normal. He looked up at Storm again, the faint smile still present on his face.
"Got anything else?" he asked lightly.
Just moments earlier, he had dismantled the lightning into raw energy and devoured it outright. The Phoenix power within him possessed the ability to consume nearly anything and convert it into fuel, turning even something as violent as a thunderstorm into nothing more than nourishment.
.....
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