WHAM. WHAM. WHAM.
The streets of Harlem looked like someone had tossed them into an industrial blender set to puree. Every impact sent shockwaves rippling through the ground, cracking pavement, rattling foundations, and shaking loose whatever glass hadn't already been shattered.
In the middle of the ruins, a bone-armored monstrosity was getting absolutely demolished.
The Abomination — that terrifying, unstoppable engine of gamma-fueled destruction — was pinned flat on his back in a crater of his own making, getting pounded into the earth by a crimson giant with four arms and zero mercy.
"Weren't you talking tough a minute ago? Huh?" Jake's voice boomed like a war drum as his fists came down again and again. "Come on, big guy! Let's hear that bark one more time!"
Jake was having the time of his life.
In terms of raw strength, the freshly mutated Abomination was probably in the same ballpark as an adult Tetramand. On paper, it should have been a close fight. But "on paper" didn't account for the fact that Jake had four arms and the Abomination had two — and more importantly, it didn't account for the fact that the Abomination fought like a bar brawler who'd never thrown a punch before getting juiced, while a Tetramand was a species literally bred for gladiatorial combat across the cosmos.
The Omnitrix didn't just change your body. It loaded you up with instincts, muscle memory, and combat data from an entire civilization of warriors.
Jake's upper pair of hands had the Abomination's arms locked in an iron grip, wrenching them outward and leaving his entire torso wide open. His lower two hands had become pistons — blurring with speed, hammering into the Abomination's abdomen and ribcage like a jackhammer that had developed a personal grudge.
THUD. THUD. THUD.
Each impact came with the sickening crunch of cracking bone. Green blood seeped from the corners of the Abomination's mouth, and that insufferable arrogance from five minutes ago had been thoroughly beaten out of him.
"L-let... go of me..." The Abomination's voice came out as a wet gurgle, his body writhing uselessly under the four-armed pin. He couldn't roll over. Couldn't break free. Couldn't do anything except take the punishment.
"The Omnitrix stores hundreds of combat styles from across the galaxy," Jake said, his golden eyes gleaming. "You never stood a chance."
With a grunt of effort, all four hands seized the Abomination's body and heaved. Jake lifted the several-ton monster clean over his head, arms locked, muscles straining — the classic overhead press, ready for a throw that would crater whatever it landed on.
But before he could release—
A pulse of raw, primal fury erupted from the far end of the street. The kind of energy that didn't just register in your brain — it hit your survival instincts like a cattle prod.
"HULK!! SMAAASH!!"
The roar was a physical force. Windows that had somehow survived the previous ten minutes of chaos finally gave up and exploded. Car alarms shrieked to life. The air itself seemed to flinch.
A massive green blur dropped from the sky like a falling meteor and slammed into the center of the battlefield with the force of a bomb.
BOOOOOM!!!
The shockwave — a wall of displaced air and flying rubble — ripped the Abomination out of Jake's grip and sent both fighters tumbling in opposite directions. Jake felt the blast hit his Tetramand body like a freight train; even with Four Arms' massive weight, he was launched backward, his four feet carving deep furrows through the asphalt before he finally ground to a halt a good thirty feet away.
The dust settled.
Standing in the center of a fresh crater — fists clenched, veins pulsing, nostrils flaring with every heavy, snorting breath — was a figure about eight feet tall. Every muscle on his body was swollen to cartoonish proportions, his skin a furious shade of emerald green that practically glowed with barely contained rage.
The Incredible Hulk had arrived.
And he did not look happy.
Hulk's burning green eyes swept the scene. He glanced down at the Abomination, who was lying in a crumpled heap of bone armor and regret, barely conscious. Then his gaze swiveled to Jake — the eleven-foot red giant with four arms who was still a full head taller than him.
The gears in Hulk's brain — never the most sophisticated machinery to begin with — ground against each other and produced a very simple conclusion.
Big thing = enemy.
Red thing (same color as that military jerk who kept shooting at him) = bad enemy.
Taller than Hulk and has more arms than Hulk = cheating enemy who Hulk hates the most.
Verdict: SMASH.
"Red monster!" Hulk jabbed a finger the size of a baseball bat at Jake, flecks of spit flying with every word. "Hulk hates red! HULK SMASH YOU!"
Jake released the tension in his fists and rolled all four shoulders, feeling the joints pop.
[DING! Omega-level lifeform detected: Hulk.]
[Scanning Gamma mutation gene... Progress: 10%...]
Jake's four golden eyes lit up.
The Hulk. The actual, real, no-kidding Hulk. And the Omnitrix is scanning his DNA.
If he could integrate Gamma mutation data into the Tetramand template — or any template — the potential was staggering. The kind of power ceiling that made everything else on this planet look like a warm-up act.
"Perfect timing." A savage grin spread across Jake's crimson face. "Let me see just how high Marvel's power ceiling really goes."
He didn't retreat. He charged.
Two living freight trains — one red, one green — collided on the streets of Harlem with the subtlety of a head-on car crash between two semis hauling dynamite.
BOOM!!!
Two fists against four hands.
The shockwave was visible this time — a rippling distortion in the air that radiated outward in every direction, shattering windows, cracking walls, and sending debris skittering across the ground for half a block. Whatever buildings were still standing in the immediate vicinity suddenly found themselves with significantly fewer structural components.
The instant they connected, Jake's expression shifted.
Heavy.
The word didn't do it justice. It was like trying to arm-wrestle a landslide. An overwhelming, crushing force transmitted through his upper hands and down into his entire skeletal structure. His upper pair of arms held — barely — catching Hulk's fists and locking them in place, but the ground beneath Jake's feet couldn't take the pressure. The asphalt crumbled and his legs sank half a meter into the earth, the concrete cracking outward in jagged spiderweb patterns.
This guy... is on a completely different level from the Abomination.
"GO AWAY!"
Hulk's eyes blazed with green fire. The fact that this red thing hadn't been immediately flattened wasn't just confusing — it was infuriating. And when Hulk got angry, the laws of physics started filing noise complaints.
His strength surged. Not gradually, not incrementally — it jumped by a solid thirty percent in a single heartbeat, like someone had kicked his engine into a gear that shouldn't exist.
Crack.
A faint, deeply concerning sound came from somewhere inside Jake's right forearm.
[WARNING: Detecting exponential increase in opponent's strength output.]
[Gene scan complete. Recommendation: Disengage immediately.]
Right. Got what I needed. Time to be smart about this.
Jake's tactical mind — enhanced by Tetramand combat instincts — ran the math in a fraction of a second. Four Arms was strong. Genuinely, terrifyingly strong. But Four Arms had a ceiling. A fixed upper limit that, while astronomical by most standards, was still a finite number.
Hulk didn't have a ceiling. Hulk had a staircase that went up forever, and every time you made him angrier, he climbed another flight. Fighting him in a straight contest of brute force was like arm-wrestling an equation that kept adding zeroes to itself.
Which meant brute force wasn't the answer anymore.
"Big guy, your strength is incredible," Jake called out, his voice strained but steady. "But can you do this?"
He released his grip.
The sudden absence of resistance threw Hulk forward for a split second — just long enough for Jake's lower two hands to shoot out, seize Hulk's waist in a vice grip, and pivot.
Pure technique. No wasted strength. Just four arms working in perfect coordination, using Hulk's own forward momentum against him.
Jake torqued his entire body and launched Hulk over his shoulder in a textbook throw that would have made an Olympic judo coach weep with joy.
The Hulk sailed through the air — actually airborne, a look of green confusion on his face — before cratering into the pavement thirty feet away with a satisfying CRUNCH.
Go. Now. Before he gets up.
Jake's fingers were already sliding across the Omnitrix emblem on his chest.
You want to play the raw power game, big guy? Fine. Let's see how you handle something you can't just punch through.
"Switch!"
ZZT—BANG!
The green flash erupted again — but this time the transformation felt different. Colder. Sharper. Where Heatblast had been wild heat and Four Arms had been dense muscle, this was something crystalline and precise, like the entire concept of hardness given a physical form.
Hulk was already on his feet, already roaring, already charging with a fist cocked back that carried enough force to punch through the hull of an aircraft carrier.
"DIIIE!!" Hulk bellowed.
His fist rocketed forward — a green missile aimed directly at the spot where Jake's face had been a second ago.
But the red giant was gone.
In his place stood a wall of crystal.
CLAAANG!!!
The sound that rang out was unlike anything the battle had produced so far — a pure, ringing tone, like striking a church bell made of diamond. It echoed off the ruined buildings and hung in the air, almost beautiful if you ignored the context.
Hulk's world-ending punch had slammed full force into a shield of pale green crystal that had erupted from the ground like it had been waiting for this exact moment.
The shield cracked. Spiderweb fractures raced across its surface from the point of impact, and for a heartbeat it looked like the whole thing might shatter.
But at the same time, the recoil force hit Hulk like a slap from God. His fist bounced back so hard his entire arm shook, and the green giant actually stumbled backward two full steps, shaking his hand with a grunt of pain.
"Ow!"
Before Hulk could process what had happened, the cracked shield healed. The fractures sealed themselves in a ripple of crystalline light, the surface smoothing out until it was pristine and gleaming, as if the Hulk's punch had never happened.
The shield slid aside like a curtain.
Behind it stood something new.
A humanoid figure composed entirely of pale green crystal — every surface faceted and angular, catching the light like a gemstone the size of a man. His body was lean but perfectly defined, as if some master sculptor had carved the ideal warrior out of the world's largest diamond. Four sharp crystal spikes jutted from his back like a crown of blades. His face was sharp, angular, expressionless — and radiating an aura of absolute, unbreakable permanence.
"Petrosapien," Jake said, his voice now a cool, resonant chime — like words spoken through glass. "Diamondhead."
"Who... what... is that NOW?"
General Ross had given up trying to maintain his composure. He was gripping his binoculars so hard the casing was creaking, his face cycling through shades of red that were approaching medically concerning territory.
"First he's a walking bonfire. Then he's a four-armed red giant. And now he's — what — a diamond man?" Ross's voice cracked on the last two words. "What kind of monster is this?! Can he just evolve at will in the middle of a fight?"
His adjutant wisely said nothing.
Jake looked down at his crystal arm, watching the last hairline fracture from Hulk's punch seal itself shut and vanish.
That was close. Way too close.
Hulk's raw power was genuinely absurd. That single punch had nearly exceeded Diamondhead's defensive threshold — and Petrosapien crystal was one of the hardest known materials in the Omniverse. If Hulk got angrier and hit harder, there was a real chance he could shatter through the regeneration.
But Jake kept his expression — such as it was on a face made of crystal — perfectly composed. Cool. Unbothered. The kind of calm that said I've got this handled even when the internal monologue was screaming that was a REALLY close call.
He raised his right arm, and with a smooth, liquid motion, the crystal reshaped itself — flowing and reforming until his entire forearm had become a razor-sharp spear point that caught the light like a weapon forged from a star.
"Hulk," Jake said, his chiming voice carrying an edge of authority. "Calm down. Unless you want me to turn you into a display piece."
Hulk snarled, muscles bunching, clearly seconds away from another charge—
SCREEEECH.
The whine of a high-performance engine cut through the tension like a knife. A black Audi R8 drifted around the corner in a move that belonged in a car commercial, tires smoking, and slid to a perfect stop at the edge of the battlefield. The kind of parking job that was either extremely practiced or extremely reckless.
The window rolled down.
The woman behind the wheel had red hair, sharp green eyes, and a face that was simultaneously beautiful and completely unreadable — the kind of expression that told you absolutely nothing about what was happening behind it.
Natasha Romanoff raised one hand to the communicator in her ear, her gaze fixed on the crystal figure standing in the middle of the ruined street.
"Director," she said, her voice flat and professional, "I think we need to re-evaluate this target's threat level." A pause. "He just changed again."
Through Diamondhead's crystalline eyes — which refracted light in ways that gave him near-perfect peripheral vision — Jake had spotted the Black Widow long before she'd stopped the car.
S.H.I.E.L.D. is here. Natasha Romanoff in the flesh.
Which means the "First Appearance" mission is basically in the bag.
But Hulk was still snarling, still coiled to spring. And behind him, the Abomination was stirring in the rubble — shakily climbing to his feet, one arm hanging at a bad angle, but alive and stupid enough to be thinking about round two.
Two gamma monsters. Both still breathing. Both still angry.
Time to end this.
"Still want to fight?" Jake's crystal voice rang out across the battlefield, cold and sharp. "I don't have time to babysit."
He slammed both palms flat against the ground.
"Then sit down."
The Omnitrix emblem on his chest blazed green as Jake channeled every ounce of Taydenite energy in his body downward, flooding it through his arms and into the earth below.
RRRRRUMMMMBBLE—!!!
The ground screamed.
It started as a vibration — a deep, subsonic hum that you felt in your bones before you heard it with your ears. Then the pavement began to bulge and crack, hairline fractures racing outward from Jake's hands in every direction.
And then the crystals came.
Massive pillars of pale green crystal — each one as thick as a tree trunk and sharp enough to split atoms — erupted from the earth like a forest being born in fast-forward. They punched through asphalt, through concrete, through the twisted wreckage of cars and lampposts, growing and branching and multiplying at a speed that defied everything geology had ever promised about how rocks were supposed to behave.
The crystal forest spread across a fifty-meter radius in seconds.
Hulk saw them coming and leaped — but he was too slow. Massive crystal formations shot up around his legs, locking his ankles in place, then his thighs, then his wrists as he tried to tear himself free. Within seconds, the Hulk was suspended in a cage of interlocking crystal pillars, roaring and thrashing with enough force to send cracks spider-webbing across every surface — but the crystals regenerated as fast as he could break them.
The Abomination fared worse. He'd barely gotten to his feet before the crystal wave hit him, and he didn't have the Hulk's reflexes. Spikes of every size grew around him, through him, boxing him into a crystalline prison so tight he couldn't even twitch. He looked like a prehistoric insect frozen in amber — except angrier and significantly uglier.
In the span of five seconds, the ruined street had been transformed.
Where there had been rubble and chaos, there was now a forest of gleaming pale green crystal, catching the afternoon sunlight and refracting it into a thousand rainbow fragments that danced across the surrounding buildings. It was simultaneously the most beautiful and most terrifying thing anyone on that street had ever seen.
Hulk raged inside his crystal prison, and the structures holding him groaned and cracked under the strain. It wouldn't hold him forever — maybe another minute, maybe less.
But it was enough.
Jake rose slowly to his feet. The sunlight caught his diamond body and shattered into prismatic light — rainbows cascading off every faceted surface, turning him into something that looked less like a combatant and more like a living work of art.
He turned his head toward the black Audi R8 at the edge of the battlefield, where Natasha Romanoff was watching with an expression that had finally — finally — cracked just slightly from its mask of professional neutrality. Not much. Just the faintest widening of the eyes, the tiniest part of the lips.
On Jake's angular crystal face, something that might have been a smile caught the light.
"Beautiful lady," Diamondhead said, his voice chiming like wind through crystal, "you need a ticket to watch this show."
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