Bang!
Masonry sprayed outward as a human-shaped hole burst violently through the wall.
Qi Li turned his head and saw a superhuman storming inside in a fury, clad in a red-and-blue battle suit and sporting a dark Southeast Asian face.
Qi Li glanced at him, ignoring his bellowing, and tapped his earpiece immediately. "Unplanned complication. What's going on?"
"Fuck!" the director's exasperated voice crackled through the comms. "I'm checking... Got it! This guy is King Kong, the superhero in charge of keeping order in this neighborhood!"
Qi Li frowned. "You didn't notify him beforehand?"
The director replied with a hint of embarrassment, "He never patrols during the day—he's always worked nights. So... we didn't notify him."
To put it bluntly, Vought couldn't care less about fourth- or fifth-rate superheroes like King Kong, who holed up in Southeast Asian communities—places treated as the marginal scraps of society. After a brief skim of his file revealed he never showed his face during the day, they hadn't even bothered to give him a heads-up.
Qi Li was left speechless.
He could have understood if Vought suspected King Kong had some under-the-table dealings with the people in this warehouse and intentionally kept him in the dark.
Turns out they just couldn't be bothered?
Earlier, he had even remarked that aside from the superheroes, everyone else at Vought was fairly professional.
Seeing this now, it was better not to set his expectations too high.
"Fuck! I'll have someone call him right now and tell him to get the hell out!" the director scrambled to do damage control.
Though billed as a live broadcast, Qi Li's operation actually ran on a ninety-second delay.
The viewers watching the stream hadn't yet seen King Kong's aggressive intrusion.
And Vought would never allow a reckless idiot like King Kong to tarnish their meticulously crafted superhero brand.
Soon, King Kong's manager was sweating profusely under a blistering tongue-lashing from Vought, and King Kong's phone vibrated incessantly in his pocket.
Right now, however, King Kong paid no mind to anything else. Seeing that his girlfriend, Isla, was unharmed, he embraced her tightly, face full of tenderness.
"Forget it. I'll handle it myself," Qi Li said, curling his lip.
All things considered, given how cozy King Kong was with this family, Vought's failure to notify him had ended up being a lucky accident.
He stepped forward.
King Kong noticed his approach and finally registered the gruesome state of his girlfriend's family.
He hastily shielded Isla behind him and glared at Qi Li with cold fury, fire blazing in his eyes.
"This is my neighborhood! You damn Chinaman, who gave you the balls to come running wild here?!"
Qi Li didn't bother wasting his breath.
His feet left the ground as he shot forward in a horizontal burst, crossing dozens of meters in an instant. Wrapping his arms around King Kong's waist before the man could react, he kept flying outward without shedding an ounce of momentum.
Splat!
A sickening sound, like a watermelon violently smashed to pulp, rang out first.
As everyone knew, just a second prior, King Kong had shoved his girlfriend behind him.
With such a violent backward slam, combined with a superhuman's physical durability...
Hughie could certainly tell you a thing or two about that.
Crash!
Soon followed the roar of collapsing masonry.
King Kong was in no state to care about walls, his mind going completely blank.
Dazedly, he felt a sudden splash of warmth coating nearly every inch of his back, and noticed a fragment of skin that had landed right on his eyelid.
With trembling hands, he gingerly picked it off and brought it before his eyes. Preserved intact across the scrap of skin was a section of a tattoo.
The pattern was all too familiar—it belonged to his girlfriend, Isla.
"No!! I'm gonna kill you! I'll fucking kill you!"
Moments later, King Kong's murderous howling echoed across the open sky.
Yet when he tried to strike back, he realized Qi Li had carried him high up into the air.
Gales howled around them. Hovering midair with one hand gripping King Kong's collar, Qi Li offered consoling words:
"Such 'touching' romance. Pity that you personally killed your terrorist girlfriend. Of course, even if you hadn't, she was going to die anyway. You put justice before kin—no need to beat yourself up over it."
"Fuck you—!" King Kong glared at Qi Li with eyes blazing with such fury they looked ready to pop from their sockets.
Before he could reach out to grab him, Qi Li loosened his grip.
King Kong immediately plummeted in free fall.
In the end, all that remained was his drawn-out howl:
"I will kill you—!"
Looking down, Qi Li shrugged. He made a mental note of the man and flew right back.
Boom—
A deafening sonic boom reverberated inside the warehouse once more.
Qi Li was as quick to return as he had been to leave.
Under Joseph's pointed gun, before the three surviving terrorists could even think of making a move, Qi Li was already back on the job.
The timing was impeccable.
"Everyone, could you step this way, please? Don't stand in front of that broken wall. Perfect."
"Where should I stand? Here? Got it."
Taking advantage of the final seconds, Qi Li listened to the directions in his earpiece and rearranged the scene.
Soon, the broadcast caught up in real time.
Nobody knew that another superhero, King Kong, had arrived in a flash and been dispatched just as abruptly.
All they saw was Qi Li sweeping forward with unstoppable momentum, carving cleanly through opposition from start to finish, and ultimately taking down his target: the head of Shining Light's New York cell.
Afterward, the police arrived, and Qi Li personally snapped the chains that bound freedom and dignity. Amid the weeping of liberated women and children, the broadcast drew to a close.
A flawless opening! A flawless execution! A flawless finale!
Though the stream had ended, viewers were far from satisfied. They flooded across social media platforms, unleashing an overwhelming tidal wave of awe and praise.
In no time at all, search trends and hashtags regarding Bronze rocketed straight to the number-one spot across every major platform.
Capitalizing on their head start, Vought seamlessly segued to ace host Cameron Coleman, who anchored a special titled Inside Bronze, immediately setting a record for the season's highest ratings.
Before long, Qi Li's follower count across Twitter and Instagram smashed through the fifty-million mark.
On the Godkin University ranking list, his score at number one pulled away so vastly that anyone in second place would look at it in utter despair.
And that was merely on the surface.
The real, tangible impact was unfolding on Monica's end.
She called Qi Li in high excitement, reporting breathlessly, "It blew up! It totally blew up! My phone hasn't stopped ringing for a second! Just now, I received sponsorship inquiries from twelve new brands! And movie offers! Do you know what they are? Fast & Furious 9, A Quiet Place Part II—Spielberg himself even sent an email inviting you to star in his next film! Qi Li, you are an absolute sensation!"
Cruising through the sky, Qi Li answered the call in high spirits. "Really? Then we definitely need to celebrate!"
With that, he banked around and flew toward the hotel from the night before.
Human joy and sorrow rarely align.
At that very moment, Deep Sea punched straight through his television screen as it broadcast news about Bronze.
Clutching his head in bitter dejection, he seethed in resentment:
"Fuck! Fuck! All of this should have been mine! Fuck..."
Chapter 60