Marvel: Terror Stream

Alex opened her mouth to fire something back. Then the ground under her feet started shaking hard. The camera on her end bounced wildly.

Luke’s eyes went wide just as the call cut off.

It looked like a massive earthquake, or more likely, a terrifying avalanche tearing through the ice sheet.

Luke had no way of knowing what was actually happening on the other side of the planet.

But he knew one thing.

She was in trouble.

And suddenly, he was back there again.

The terrifying memory of her near-miss helicopter crash flooded his mind, bringing back that raw, suffocating fear of losing his family.

That helplessness had haunted him.

The fear of losing his family.

The guilt of being too weak.

The desperate wish that, just once, he could have been strong enough to protect the people he loved.

Luke clenched his fists.

Except this time… He wasn’t helpless.

His eyes hardened.

This was the crisis he had been forging himself for. He had clawed his way to gain these powers, so that his family would never be victims again.

This was the purpose of his powers.

Luke did not waste a single second.

He activated the anti-surveillance mode on his phone with a quick voice command, and in the next blink, he vanished right out of the Dunphy kitchen without leaving a trace.

A second later, Phil walked into the living room.

“Prepare to be amazed by the Great Dunphini!” he shouted, striking a dramatic pose, but the man found it completely empty.

His shoulders slumped. He wanted to show Luke an outdoor magic trick he had been practising in the garden until now, but he was gone somewhere…

Kids these days… they can never stay at one place for long.

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[A few seconds earlier… the moment Alex’s Video Chat ended.]

Halfway across the world, the transition from a boring video call to absolute chaos took less time than a sneeze.

One moment Alex was rolling her eyes at her laptop screen, and the very next, the metal floorboards buckled violently beneath her heavy winter boots.

The entire research station lurched sideways. Alex grabbed the edge of a metal table as her laptop slid across the surface. Outside the reinforced windows, a wall of white was already rising in the distance, a living mountain of snow and ice that was racing toward them faster than anything that size had any right to move.

“What the hell is happening?” someone screamed from across the room.

The lead researcher, a man named Leonard Hofstadter who had spent as many days in Antarctica as Alex, was pale as a ghost.

“We need to leave! Right now! Everybody out!”

Alex bolted toward the exit with the rest of them, her boots thudding hard against the trembling floorboards while the low, hungry growl of the glacier outside swelled into a deafening roar.

Right as they scrambled for the threshold, the reinforced side wall buckled under the immense pressure, shattering into a million frozen splinters as a massive wall of white death surged straight into the hallway.

Alex’s eyes went wide as she saw it from the corner of her vision, the white death rushing toward her with impossible speed.

She did not even have time to scream.

Then she felt it. A hand, warm and solid, pressing gently against the back of her head.

The next moment, the world went completely dark.

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A while later, after the furious avalanche had finally settled and the freezing world stopped shaking, something incredibly strange rose from beneath the heavy blanket of snow.

A small black dome of ash pushed its way up through the frozen surface like a mushroom deciding to ignore the laws of nature. It sat there for a moment, silent and still, before the dense ash quickly expanded and shifted inward, weaving itself into a towering, ten-foot-tall furry construct that looked exactly like a giant black Yeti standing in the middle of the icy wreckage.

Luke wasn’t here as Veritas at all.

He just wanted to rescue his sister, and while he could not teleport here as Luke Dunphy for very obvious reasons, he also did not want Veritas to be spotted in Antarctica. That would raise way too many questions.

Luke was completely unaware of the structure of the research stations in Antarctica. But his paranoia made him use a disguise in case there was an outpost far away with a freaking telescope.

And since he lacked a red coat, red pants, red hat, and fake white beard, he chose a Yeti, which was the first thing that came to his mind.

In his arms, he held a glasses-wearing girl who was completely unconscious but very much alive.

Luke crouched down and gently laid Alex on the snow beside her equally unconscious colleagues.

The state-of-the-art research laboratory was entirely gone, completely crushed under tons of ice, leaving nothing behind except a few battered pieces of metal equipment scattered across the fresh snowbank.

A few pieces of equipment were scattered here and there, but their laboratory was completely gone, reduced to a pile of twisted metal and shattered ice. The survivors were all lying on the snow, breathing but out cold.

Luke counted the total number of researchers. Twelve of them.

He had saved every single person inside the research station, but he had no idea if someone else had been outside and gotten swept up in the avalanche.

He could not do anything for them now. He did not have a life-scanning ability, and he had zero knowledge or experience rescuing humans buried under tons of snow. Some things were just beyond his skill set.

As he scanned the silent white plains, a sudden flicker of movement along the mountain ridge caught his attention.

Luke tilted his head to get a better look, and his ten-foot ash Yeti body mirrored the exact same awkward motion.

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High above on the snowy mountain peak, six figures watched the giant monster in stunned silence.

These people belonged to the Tribe of Fire, an isolated group of humans who lived along the mysterious, hidden border where the deadly sub-zero frost of Antarctica met a strange, warm land tucked away beneath the ice sheet.

Leading the group were Squad Chief Gahck and their tribe’s shaman, a young woman named Afiya. And right now, her eyes were wide with pure panic.

Gahck, Afiya, and four of their strongest warriors had hiked up here today on a simple assignment: scare away the noisy “Outlanders” before they wandered too close to the tribe’s hidden border.

The plan was supposed to be a basic intimidation display, but someone had accidentally kicked the wrong rock ledge, sending a terrifying avalanche roaring down the mountain.

They almost got swept away as well, but fortunately all of them survived without a scratch.

Gahck initially brushed it off as a lucky shortcut. After all, if the freezing mountain decided to bury the intruders alive, it saved his team the trouble of chasing them away.

That comforting thought completely evaporated the moment they spotted the ten-foot black creature standing calmly, shielding the humans from death.

Gahck stood frozen in place, but the real terror set in when Afiya gasped loudly and fell straight onto her knees in the snow. Her golden eyes shrank to tiny dots as sheer panic overtook her face.

“Aham drishyam dekhti! tabhahi aati gand fatti gahck!” Afiya babbled in a terrified, high-pitched chant while clutching her chest.

(I just had a vision. That is the great spirit of the snow mountains. We made a grave mistake, Gahck. We just brought doom upon our tribe.)

Gahck felt his heart violently thump against his ribs as he processed her horrifying words, and when he slowly looked back down at the snowy valley, he realized the giant mountain spirit had already spotted them and was staring directly into their terrified souls with its burning orange eyes.

“Chudgai chud gayi bhago bc,” he hissed through clenched teeth.

(Damn it, it saw us. Run right now!)

The six of them turned and fled across the snow. The black yeti did not chase them… it just stared at them as they ran away.

After several miles of hard running, they began to hope they had escaped for the day.

That hope lasted only a few more steps.

A huge black figure dropped from the sky like a meteor and landed directly in their path.