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Floating high above, Jiro looked down at the HYDRA base beneath him.
With his current strength, he could level this place with a single breath.
But then, something occurred to him. He dove down.
He landed in the main control room and found the data hub labeled Serum Program.
Skimming through the records, he realized he'd been chosen completely at random. HYDRA had found his body at the car crash site. For some reason, he still had faint signs of life—so they dragged him back and used him as a test subject.
"So... all this happened just because I had bad luck? A damn car crash dumped me into the Marvel Universe?" Jiro frowned.
[Ding! Host's question detected. Clarification: The host's selection was not random. The system detected a spatial-temporal anomaly. There was a quantum fluctuation at the exact moment of the host's death...]
Jiro rolled his eyes. "Speak human."
[To put it simply: you were supposed to die. But the universe glitched.]
Jiro couldn't help but laugh. "So now I'm a literal bug in the system?"
He shut down the database and shot back into the sky.
Sunlight shone down on him, making his blue lab uniform flap in the wind.
Jiro suddenly realized—he now had the power to change the world.
"If I've been given a second life..." He looked toward the distant skyline of New York.
"Superman?"
"No. I'll do whatever the hell I want." Jiro lifted his head, eyes full of determination.
Right before leaving, he fired off a blast of heat vision, reducing the entire base to rubble.
He broke the sound barrier, leaving behind a white sonic boom, and vanished into the sky.
A shadow silently streaked across the clouds above New York.
Jiro landed on the rooftop of an abandoned factory in Queens. The cold wind blew against his thin HYDRA lab uniform.
He rubbed his temples as his super hearing spread out like an invisible radar net. The noise of the entire city flooded into his ears.
"...The gold's getting delivered to the docks tonight..."
"...This batch is 92% pure. Same spot as usual..."
"...Black Mask gang's deal is happening tonight..."
Countless shady conversations filtered through Jiro's mind.
Three minutes later, he locked onto a promising target.
A strip club in Brooklyn called The Red Snapper. In the basement, the Irish mob had stashed three months' worth of illegal earnings.
Jiro glanced at a passerby's wristwatch.
12:17 AM. New York time, of course.
Perfect time to strike.
A faint smile flickered across his face before he disappeared on the spot.
In the club's back alley, two bodyguards were smoking.
"Word is, Devon got his hands on some Stark Industries prototype weapons?"
"Shh! Don't talk about that. The stuff's locked in the vault..."
Before he could finish, a breeze passed by.
Bodyguard A suddenly felt a chill on his neck, then everything went black as he collapsed—dead before he hit the ground.
Bodyguard B reached for his waistband, only to freeze—an Asian guy now stood in front of him, eyes glowing with an eerie red light.
"Wanna stay alive? Then shut up," the guy said, his voice laced with a strange vibration.
Bodyguard B's pupils widened. "Okay."
Jiro nodded in approval—then knocked him out cold with a swift karate chop.
With super speed, he moved through the club like a ghost, bypassing layers of security. Every security camera he passed mysteriously glitched out.
In front of the underground vault, Jiro used his x-ray vision to see through the 30-centimeter-thick alloy door and analyze the inner mechanism.
He focused his heat vision, precisely melting all twelve locking bolts without setting off a single alarm.
Inside the vault, he raised an eyebrow at what he saw—not just piles of cash, but three metal crates marked with the Stark Industries logo.
He casually opened one. Inside was some kind of weapon prototype.
He pulled out a phone—snagged from one of the unconscious guards—and snapped a photo of the weapon.
Then he peeled off the ugly top half of his lab uniform and dumped everything into his system's storage space.
That haul would last him a while.
As Superman, he wasn't worried about getting traced—but still, trouble was trouble. He wasn't the Grim Reaper; he didn't kill everyone in his way.
Otherwise, he wouldn't be human anymore—he'd be death itself.
And besides, this kind of petty cash grab? It was a one-time thing.
Just as he was about to leave, his super hearing picked up an unfamiliar electronic voice from upstairs.
Jiro narrowed his eyes. Using x-ray vision, he saw inside the third-floor VIP room—Black Widow was interrogating the club's owner.
"Where's your smuggling network?" Natasha's voice was ice-cold.
"I swear to God I don't know! We just deal in... regular human trafficking!"
Jiro shook his head. He had no intention of meddling in other people's business.
Silently, he turned and walked away—like he'd never been there at all.
5 a.m., Midtown Manhattan. A luxury apartment.
A half-asleep real estate agent opened the door, only to find a well-dressed young Asian man in a suit standing there.
"I want to rent this place," the man said, handing over a thick stack of cash. "Right now."
The agent blinked awake in an instant. That was exactly six months' rent—$96,000 in cash.
"You... don't want to look at the apartment first?"
"No need." The young man smiled, and for a second, it looked like a flicker of blue light flashed through his eyes.
Two hours later, Jiro was soaking in the hot tub of his brand-new home, surrounded by three floating laptops he'd just bought.
His super brain was absorbing information about this world at a ridiculous speed.
"Iron Man just went public... Captain America's still frozen... Spider-Man saved someone again…"
Jiro mumbled as his fingers flew across the keyboard, pounding out lines of code.
Ten minutes later, he had a flawless new identity.
"Jiro. Chinese-American. Orphan. Dropped out of MIT. Currently a freelance programmer."
There was no other way—no matter what universe he was in, getting a legit Chinese ID was always a pain.
Now that he had Superman's powers, he had two options:
Option one: Launch himself into the sun and chill there for ten years, then get slapped into a coma by Thanos when he finally shows up.
That one sucked too—he hadn't even started enjoying life yet.
Option two: Be a proper Superman, get a nice little "good guy" badge.
Also no. Pass.
He wasn't Clark Kent—he didn't have that kind of moral compass. Unless one day he woke up in a really weird mood, he just wasn't cut out for that kind of gig.
Which meant there was only one real choice left:
Do whatever the hell he wanted.
Jiro didn't dwell on it. He walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked down over New York City.
Sunlight lit up his sharp features, casting deep shadows in his eyes.
"First, get familiar with this world," he murmured. "Then..."
His super vision pierced through a dozen city blocks, zooming in on the Daily Bugle building, where a red-haired female reporter was typing up an article about Iron Man.
Elsewhere, in a secret base, a one-eyed Black man stared at energy readings on a screen.
At the top of Oscorp Tower, Norman Osborn was fiddling with some shady tech.
Jiro smiled.
In this Marvel Universe crawling with danger, he didn't want to be a hero. But he wasn't interested in being a villain either.
What he did know, though, was this:
When the time comes, the whole world will know there's a god walking among them.
But for now?
He needed coffee. And way more intel.
"....."