44: Chapter 44 Ghostly Appearances!

Lynn deactivated the Binary Fusion and returned to his human form.

He looked up at the massive cosmic wormhole in the sky, and without a moment's hesitation, pressed his right hand directly onto the Bloodtrix on his left wrist.

"Click."

The dial rotated, locking onto an icon of a distorted, white, ghostly phantom.

A blinding red light erupted once more, but this time, there was no deafening sound of cracking bones within the radiance; instead, it exuded an extremely cold, deathly aura.

The temperature in the surrounding streets plummeted below freezing instantly.

The red light dissipated.

Lynn's figure vanished.

In his place was a bizarre creature floating in mid-air, its entire body shrouded in greyish-white, wrinkled skin.

It had no legs; its lower body resembled smoke drifting in the wind.

Its face had only a few vertical black cracks, and a single eye, flickering with a scarlet glow, slid extremely irregularly along the tracks of these cracks.

[Alien DNA Activated: Ghost Phantom (Spectral Variant)!]

In mid-air, Tony Stark, who had just rebooted his armor, heard a harsh, discordant beep from his mask's radar.

"Jarvis, scan that newly appeared white monster." Tony stared intently at the bizarre figure floating below.

"Sir... unable to scan."

The voice of the AI butler Jarvis had a hint of stuttering, "Thermal imaging, sonar, and mass detectors all show no feedback."

"According to the physical sensors and energy radar, that location... is empty. He does not exist in the physical dimension of reality."

"What the hell." Tony felt his scalp tingle.

A creature clearly visible to the naked eye, yet radar showed it didn't exist? This was completely beyond the scope of human scientific understanding.

On the street.

[Ghost Phantom] slowly raised its greyish-white hands, which were twisted like sharp claws.

"Whoosh—"

There was no engine thrust, no airflow.

Lynn's spectral form ignored Earth's gravitational laws entirely, shooting into the sky silently like a greyish-white afterimage.

His speed was immense; in the blink of an eye, he passed through the clouds.

"Swish, swish, swish!"

Several Chitauri flyers circling nearby spotted Lynn and immediately turned their muzzles, firing dense plasma beams.

However, a terrifying scene unfolded.

Those plasma beams, capable of melting steel, passed straight through his body as if they were moving through a hologram the moment they touched Lynn's greyish-white skin, firing off into the empty distance.

No explosions, no damage.

Absolute immunity to both physical and energy attacks!

Lynn's scarlet eye didn't even glance at those flyers, flying straight toward the cosmic wormhole.

...

On the other side of the wormhole, the cold, dead silence of space.

The massive Chitauri cross-shaped interstellar mothership hovered behind the wormhole, like an impregnable steel fortress.

The mothership's exterior was shrouded in a light blue, high-intensity energy shield.

Lynn's spectral form passed through the wormhole and arrived in space.

No need for breathing, no need for a spacesuit.

In his spectral state, Lynn completely ignored the lethal environment of the cosmic vacuum.

He drifted straight toward that massive mothership.

The energy shield on the outside of the mothership could withstand meteorite impacts and bombardment from space main guns.

But when Lynn's spectral form touched the shield, it was like a breeze passing over water; it merely caused a faint ripple before penetrating it without any obstruction.

Next came the mothership's three-meter-thick special alloy outer armor.

Lynn did not destroy a single hatch; he was like a ghost walking through walls, his body merging directly into the cold metal walls, threading through the complex internal structure of the mothership.

Mothership, core command hall.

The high-ranking Chitauri Commander was standing in front of a holographic sand table, waving his scepter irritably.

"Damn it! That Leviathan has lost all signs of life!"

The Commander roared angrily into the communicator, "What exactly is that red monster on Earth? Immediately mobilize the second echelon, prepare to deploy..."

"What are you preparing to deploy?"

A voice, extremely cold and hoarse, as harsh as fingernails scraping against glass, sounded without warning behind the Commander.

The Commander stiffened and spun around sharply.

The dozen or so elite Chitauri guards nearby also raised their energy rifles simultaneously.

Under the blue light of the holographic sand table.

A bizarre creature, entirely greyish-white and floating in mid-air, had appeared in the very center of the command hall without anyone knowing when!

The mothership's highest-level internal warning system had failed to sound a single alarm from start to finish!

"Kill him!" The Commander retreated in terror.

"Bang, bang, bang!"

A dozen energy rifles fired simultaneously, their blue beams instantly turning the greyish-white figure into a sieve.

But the Commander hadn't even had time to breathe a sigh of relief.

He saw that the spectral form, riddled with holes, did not bleed from the wounds.

The greyish-white skin rolled like smoke a few times and instantly returned to normal.

"Is that all the heat you have?"

Lynn's scarlet eye slid to the center of his face, staring fixedly at the high-ranking Commander.

"Quick! Fire! Keep firing!" the Commander screamed in fear.

But Lynn had lost his patience.

His spectral form instantly became intangible, turning into a greyish-white stream of light that passed directly through the bodies of the three guards in front of him.

Those three guards didn't even let out a scream before they fell straight down, devoid of life—in the instant he passed through, Lynn's spectral form had frozen their internal organs and neural centers.

The next second.

Lynn was already right in front of the Chitauri Commander.

"You..." The Commander widened his eyes, wanting to swing his scepter.

But Lynn's greyish-white claws had already thrust straight into the Commander's chest.

There was no physical resistance. Lynn's hands, along with half of his intangible spectral form, drilled directly into the Commander's body!

Possession!

"Ugh, ahhhhhhh!!!"

The Commander let out a heart-wrenching scream, and the scepter in his hand fell to the ground.

His body began to convulse violently, his originally greyish-brown pupils instantly rolled back, and immediately after, a trace of extremely tyrannical scarlet light shone through from the depths of his eyes.

"Click, click, click..."

The Commander's bones made strange, twisting sounds.

His brain nerves, memory centers, and even his genetic chains were being crazily ravaged and read by the spectral form inside him in an extremely brutal manner!

[Target locked.]

[Beginning consumption: Chitauri Commander genetic sequence.]

[Memory reading in progress... Obtaining mothership master control authorization codes... Obtaining Chitauri swarm neural network frequency band...]

In just three seconds.

The Commander's struggle ceased.

He stood stiffly in place like a marionette, but the corners of his mouth slowly curled into a chilling sneer that belonged to Lynn.

The surrounding guards held their rifles, looking at their own Commander, too terrified to even have the courage to pull the trigger.

"The mothership's defense network, weapon systems..."

The "Commander" slowly raised his head, feeling all the master authorizations just stripped from his mind; in those pupils now occupied by scarlet, extreme greed shone through.

"Now, this ship is mine."