Helicarrier. Hangar bay.
The hangar had once housed S.H.I.E.L.D.'s pride — a fleet of Quinjets worth more than some countries' annual budgets, arranged in neat rows, maintained to mirror-finish perfection.
Now it looked like a scrapyard after a meteor shower.
BOOM!!
The wreckage of a fighter jet — tens of millions of dollars of aerospace engineering, crumpled like a beer can — sailed through the air, hurled by the Hulk with the casual contempt of a man tossing junk mail.
Jake didn't dodge. His upper two arms crossed in front of his face in a protective X-block while his lower two caught the jet's landing gear mid-flight. His feet carved twin lines of sparks across the hangar floor as the impact drove him backward, but he planted himself and held.
"This is such a waste of taxpayer money!"
He tossed the wreckage aside and charged — thirteen feet of blood-red Rage Mode Tetramand muscle barreling across the hangar like an angry freight car.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Red and green collided in the ruins.
The impacts were catastrophic — each exchange sent shockwaves through the hangar, buckled support beams, and turned everything within arm's reach into shrapnel. Four Arms in Rage Mode could match the Hulk blow for blow, fist for fist, raw power against raw power.
But Jake was noticing a problem.
A serious, escalating, fundamentally unfair problem.
The Hulk was growing.
When the fight started, he'd been around eight feet tall — massive by any standard, but within the range Jake had fought before. Now he was pushing nine and a half. His skin had darkened from bright green to a deep, bruised shade, and every punch he threw displaced air in visible pressure waves that hadn't been there five minutes ago.
The angrier he got, the stronger he got. And fighting him was making him furious.
This is the infinite rage scaling. Every second I spend trading punches, he climbs another rung. There's no ceiling. There's never a ceiling with this guy.
Jake's four hands were starting to go numb.
The Hulk ripped a massive steel floor plate from its mounting and raised it overhead — a several-ton slab of metal that he intended to bring down on Jake's skull like a flyswatter.
"GET AWAY FROM MY FRIEND, BEAST!"
The shout arrived with the sound of thunder.
Thor came through the hangar like a lightning-wreathed missile, Mjolnir extended, and slammed into the Hulk's lower back with enough force to make the entire room shake.
THUD!
The Hulk stumbled forward one step. Just one. Then he turned his head, and the look in his bloodshot eyes said you just made a mistake.
"ROAR! GOLD MAN!"
Whatever dim recognition Hulk had of Thor, it wasn't fond. He abandoned Jake entirely, pivoted with terrifying speed, and swung a fist that could cave in a tank.
Thor brought Mjolnir up to block.
CLANG—!
The impact launched Thor backward across the hangar, boots carving furrows in the metal floor for thirty feet before he stopped. But he stayed on his feet, and the grin that spread across his face was the particular expression of a warrior who'd been looking for a proper fight.
"A mortal body harboring such monstrous strength?" Thor rolled his shoulders and shook out his tingling hand. "It's been an age since I've found a punching bag this durable!"
"STOP PLAYING, THOR!"
Jake was bracing a crumbling support pillar with all four arms, the structural integrity of the hangar collapsing in real-time around them.
"This ship is falling apart! If you call one more lightning bolt in here, we're going to be swimming in the Atlantic! All of us!"
The hangar was riddled with holes. The gale from ten thousand feet of open sky howled through the gaps, and every impact from the three-way brawl was punching new ones. At this rate, they didn't need Hawkeye's sabotage team to bring down the helicarrier — the three of them would tear it apart from the inside.
"Then what do you suggest?!" Thor grappled with the Hulk, trying to lock his arms, but Hulk shook him off like a dog shaking water.
"Brute force can't hold him down. He just gets stronger the more you hit him."
Jake's eyes narrowed. The tactical math was clear: every form of direct combat was a donation to the Hulk's rage engine. Punching him was feeding him. Wrestling him was feeding him. Even winning exchanges was feeding him, because losing made him angrier, and angry was the only currency that mattered.
The answer wasn't more force. The answer was physics.
"Time for a new approach."
Jake released the pillar and slammed the Omnitrix. The dial spun past red, past blue, past crystal and fire, and stopped on something he'd never used before — a heavy, dense icon that practically radiated gravitational pull.
"Give me a heavy hitter."
He slammed the dial.
A deep, steady pulse of dark reddish-brown light expanded outward — not a flash, but a wave, heavy and slow, like the light itself had mass.
Four Arms vanished.
What took his place was something that looked less like an alien and more like a small celestial body that had decided to grow legs. A massive, reddish-brown creature made entirely of living rock, thick-limbed and immovable-looking, with a core that glowed like a miniature star through the cracks in his chest. The top of his head was cratered like a volcanic caldera, and the air around him bent — light, dust, loose debris, all of it curving toward him in subtle, lazy spirals.
Gravattack. Galilean. A species that generated and controlled gravity as naturally as humans breathed.
"Hulk."
Jake's voice was different in this form — deep, resonant, carrying a harmonic echo as if the words themselves had mass. Like a planet learning to speak.
"You're strong. Maybe the strongest thing I've fought. But I'm curious — have you ever studied Newton's Laws?"
The Hulk, who had been in the process of turning Thor into a wall decoration, paused. His burning green eyes locked onto the walking boulder that had replaced the red giant.
"HULK... HATES ROCKS!"
He charged. Full speed. No subtlety. A green locomotive with the engine stuck at maximum, fist cocked back with enough force to punch through a mountain.
"Then let's cool you down."
Jake raised one massive rocky palm. The gravity core embedded in the center of his hand blazed to life — a swirling point of orange-gold light that warped the air around it like a heat mirage.
"Gravity — reverse."
VROOOOM—!!
The effect was instantaneous and absolute.
An invisible force field enveloped the Hulk mid-charge. The ground beneath his feet stopped mattering. Gravity — the one constant that every physical being relied on, the invisible leash that kept everything tethered to reality — simply inverted for everything inside the field.
The Hulk's several-ton body went weightless.
His feet left the floor. His forward momentum carried him upward instead of forward, and suddenly the most powerful being on the helicarrier was floating — arms windmilling, legs kicking at nothing, mouth open in a roar that came out more confused than furious.
"ROAR??"
He grabbed at the air. Reached for walls that were too far away. Twisted his body, trying to find something to push off of. But in zero gravity, infinite strength had nowhere to go. There was nothing to grip, nothing to push, nothing to punch. Every ounce of gamma-powered muscle was completely, utterly useless.
This was the terror of Gravattack. It didn't matter how strong you were. Without a surface, without ground, strength was just mass — and mass was just something to manipulate.
"I'm not done."
Jake turned his other hand toward the wreckage scattered across the hangar — shattered Quinjet hulls, concrete chunks, twisted metal beams, all of it floating in the disrupted gravity field like debris in orbit.
"Gravitational capture."
The debris shuddered. Then moved. Drawn by invisible tidal forces, tons of rubble began orbiting the suspended Hulk in lazy, accelerating circles — a ring system forming in real-time around a very angry green planet.
One second of orbital mechanics.
Then the ring collapsed.
"Planetary Devastation!"
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Every piece of debris — reinforced concrete, steel plating, Quinjet wreckage, support beam fragments — slammed inward simultaneously, drawn by gravitational compression that mimicked the formation of a celestial body. Layer after layer impacted the Hulk's floating form, wrapping around him, compacting, hardening, building.
In the span of three seconds, the Hulk was entombed.
A sphere of compressed rubble over fifteen feet in diameter hung in the air where the Hulk had been — a man-made asteroid, held together by gravitational force, with the Hulk trapped at its core.
"ROOOOAAAAR!!!"
The roars coming from inside the sphere were volcanic. The surface cracked in places, green light leaking through the fissures as Hulk raged against his prison. But every time a piece broke loose, gravity pulled it back, resealing the shell.
"Get — down."
Jake swung both hands in a sharp downward arc, and the gravitational intensity around the sphere spiked to twenty times Earth normal.
But he didn't slam it into the hangar floor — that would've punched through every deck between here and the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, the invisible gravitational hand threw it — hurling the Hulk-sphere sideways through the gaping hole in the hangar wall and out into open sky.
WHOOOOSH—
The sphere — several tons of compressed metal and concrete wrapped around a furious Hulk — arced out over the ocean and began to fall, tumbling toward the clouds ten thousand feet below like a meteor launched in reverse.
"Phew..."
Jake exhaled. That move had cost him — Gravattack's power was immense, but manipulating gravity at that scale burned through stamina at an alarming rate.
He was about to release the gravitational field and let physics handle the rest.
Then the Omnitrix screamed.
A burst of piercing static. The dial flickered between green and an unstable blue-white.
[WARNING: High-intensity gravitational wave interference detected.]
[Resonance with "Space Stone" energy signature in local area.]
[Space-time anchor point — SHIFTING.]
"What—?"
Jake's vision doubled.
For a fraction of a second — barely a heartbeat — the world in front of him split. The Atlantic Ocean was still there, still real, but layered over it, like a crack in a mirror showing what was behind the glass, was somewhere else.
Another New York. Night. But the sky was wrong — an eerie, luminous purple that no earthly atmosphere had ever produced. The skyline was similar but subtly different, and swinging between the towers on lines of shimmering web—
A girl.
White hooded bodysuit. Goggles pushed up on her forehead. Moving through the air with the fluid, acrobatic grace of someone who'd been doing this for years. She twisted mid-swing, her head turning, and for one impossible instant—
She looked directly at Jake.
Across dimensions. Across realities. Through a crack in spacetime that shouldn't have existed.
Their eyes met.
"Gwen?"
The name left Jake's lips before his brain caught up.
ZZZ—!
The vision shattered. The crack sealed. The Omnitrix's glow stabilized back to steady green, and the ocean was just the ocean again — gray waves, distant clouds, no purple sky, no spider-girl, no window into another world.
"Jake?" Thor was beside him, brushing concrete dust off his cape. "What were you staring at? Your watch seemed to... discharge something."
"Nothing." Jake took a slow, controlled breath, forcing his pulse back to normal. "Just a glitch."
But it wasn't a glitch. And he knew it.
That had been Spider-Gwen. Ghost-Spider. From a parallel dimension. And Gravattack's gravitational waves — resonating with the Space Stone's ambient radiation from the Tesseract — had briefly torn a hole in the fabric of the multiverse.
The Omnitrix wasn't just a DNA library.
It was a key. A key to dimensions, to realities, to an infinite web of possibilities that extended far beyond this single Marvel universe.
The days ahead, Jake thought, just got a lot more interesting.
He filed it away. Deep. For later.
"Let's go, Thor."
Jake detransformed in a flash of green light, back to human, and picked up a bent metal panel to use as an improvised shield against the wind howling through the ruined hangar.
"Tony should have the engines back online by now. We need to regroup, clean up whatever mess Loki left behind, and then—"
He looked east. Toward New York. Toward the skyline that was still intact, still standing, still unaware of what was coming.
"—get ready for the real war."
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