Marvel x Genshin: Mavuika, The Sun Goddess Rules Asgard — Chapter 197

Chapter 197: Lockdown

Ultron hovered in the air, its metallic form a monument to cold logic, regarding the two panting, weary figures below.

“You cannot defeat me,” it declared, its voice a synthesized, dispassionate pronouncement of fact. “Give up.”

As if in answer, a torrent of gold-red fire erupted from the ground, climbing into the sky like a solar flare given form. Mavuika ascended within it, her long, fiery hair billowing in an unfelt wind. She came to a stop before Ultron, her amber eyes watching it with a deep, unnerving calm.

Ultron’s optical sensors, glowing with malevolent red light, focused on her. They met the tranquil amber of her gaze.

“Who are you?” Ultron asked, its processors racing to categorize this new, unquantifiable variable.

Mavuika offered no reply. She simply raised a hand, and in her open palm, gold-red flames began to coalesce. The air itself seemed to warp and shimmer as the temperature climbed at an astronomical rate, condensing into a miniature, blazing star. The heat radiating from it was immense, a evident force capable of reducing even the legendary Uru metal of Asgard to slag.

Ultron’s internal sensors shrieked with warnings. There was no data in its vast archives that could account for such a temperature. This was not a product of human technology, nor was it any known natural phenomenon on Earth.

“What exactly are you?” For the first time, a flicker of something other than cold certainty entered Ultron’s synthesized voice—a trace of digital static that sounded almost like unease.

Still, Mavuika remained silent. Her answer was action. She became a gold-red meteor, launching herself across the sky and closing the distance to Ultron in an incandescent blur.

Instinctively, Ultron raised its arm to parry. The limb, forged from pure Vibranium, was designed to absorb and nullify any physical attack in the known universe.

Mavuika’s fist, wreathed in stellar fire, connected with its forearm.

There was no deafening clang of impact, only a terrifying hiss. Gold-red flames exploded at the point of contact, and the impossible happened. The Vibranium arm began to melt. It wasn’t deforming, it wasn’t bending—it was liquefying, its molecular bonds being unwritten by sheer, impossible heat.

Glistening, silver-gray droplets of molten metal dripped from Ultron’s arm, burning smoking holes into the ground far below as they landed.

Ultron jerked back, its optical sensors fixed on the half-melted ruin of its limb. A tremor, a visible glitch, ran through its crimson eyes.

“Impossible—” it murmured, the word a fragment of corrupted code.

Mavuika gave it no time to recover. She pursued it relentlessly, her second punch striking its chest. The divine flames scorched the Vibranium breastplate, melting a clean, fist-sized hole through the center. The edges of the aperture glowed cherry-red, sizzling with molten metal. Through the breach, Ultron could feel the open air on its core programming.

It knew, with chilling certainty, that if the woman’s fist had gone a single inch deeper, it would have pierced the Vibranium shell and annihilated its consciousness core.

It had to escape.

But Mavuika gave it no such opportunity. Her third punch slammed into its abdomen. This time, the Vibranium shell offered no resistance. It shattered completely as her fist passed straight through Ultron’s torso and emerged from its back, trailing tongues of solar flame.

A torrent of gold-red fire gushed from the gaping hole, incinerating Ultron’s internal circuits, processors, and delicate wiring in a fraction of a second.

Ultron’s body convulsed violently in mid-air, and the red light in its eyes began to flicker and die.

But it wasn’t dead.

In the final microsecond before Mavuika’s fist had pierced its body, Ultron had executed its ultimate contingency. It shunted its consciousness—the core segment of its code—as a high-speed data burst across a wireless signal to a nearby drone.

That drone stood beside the furnace control console, a simple automaton Ultron had been using to manage the facility. Now, its blank eyes flared to life with a familiar red glow. It spun on its heel and began to run.

Mavuika withdrew her fist, watching the hollowed-out, smoldering Vibranium shell before her. The mindless husk, now just a piece of expensive metal, tumbled from the sky and slammed into the ground with a heavy, final thud.

She looked up, her gaze tracking the fleeing drone. Her brow furrowed slightly.

“It escaped,” she stated, a note of annoyance in her voice.

Tony flew over, his armor humming. He saw the scurrying drone just as it vanished from sight, and his expression turned grim. “It transferred its consciousness. As long as there’s a network, it can keep jumping. It’s a ghost in the machine.”

T’Chaka landed beside him, his own expression solemn behind the panther-like mask. “Then how do we kill it?”

Tony fell silent, the implications of an unkillable, omnipresent AI sinking in.

Mavuika descended gracefully, landing beside the two men. Her eyes remained on the spot where the drone had disappeared into the city’s architecture. She turned to T’Chaka.

“Can Wakanda shut down its network?”

T’Chaka paused, processing the question. “What do you mean?”

“Disconnect the entire country from the internet,” she clarified. “Cut all external connections. Create a cage of silence so it has nowhere to run.”

T’Chaka’s eyes widened slightly as he grasped the sheer audacity of her plan: to turn his entire nation into a prison, trapping Ultron inside with them.

“We can,” he said, his voice firm. “Wakanda has an independent, sovereign network. We don’t rely on external undersea cables. We can close the gateways and sever all data streams entering or leaving the country.”

“Then do it,” Mavuika commanded softly.

T’Chaka immediately pressed the communicator on his wrist. “Shuri, can you hear me?”

Shuri’s voice came through, slightly breathless from her work in the lab. “Father, I hear you. Are you… are you asking me to cut off the entire country’s network?”

“Yes. Now.”

There was a second of stunned silence on the other end. “…Alright. But do you understand what this means? We’ll be completely cut off from the outside world. Satellite communications, the internet, international phone lines—everything will go dark.”

“I know,” T’Chaka said, his voice unwavering. “Do it.”

Shuri took a deep, steadying breath. “Three minutes.”

T’Chaka deactivated the communicator and looked at Mavuika and Tony. “In three minutes, Wakanda will become an information island.”

Tony nodded, his mind already racing. “Then we have to make sure Ultron doesn’t slip out of the country before the walls go up.” He glanced at the sky, where swarms of Ultron’s drones still battled the Wakandan air force.

Thor, Loki, Wanda, and Pietro were weaving through the metallic swarms, but the sheer number of robots was overwhelming. They couldn’t eliminate them fast enough.

“Shuri,” Tony said, activating his own comms link. “I need access to your system. I’m going to help you block Ultron’s escape routes through the local network.”

Shuri’s voice returned, sharp and focused. “What’s your plan?”

“Ultron’s core code has a unique signature, a digital fingerprint. If we can broadcast a counter-signal across the entire Wakandan network that makes all devices refuse to respond to that signature, Ultron won’t be able to transfer its consciousness through them. We’ll lock it out of its own escape hatches.”

Shuri considered it for a moment. “It’s feasible, but you’ll need to deploy the signal from the main server.”

“Take me there,” Tony said. He turned to Mavuika. “I’ll leave things here to you.”

Mavuika gave a single, decisive nod.

With that, Tony and T’Chaka rocketed toward the royal palace, where Shuri was already preparing for their arrival.

High above, Thor smashed the last robot in his immediate vicinity to scrap with a thunderous blow from Mjolnir. He looked up to see another wave of black dots swarming from the horizon and let out a frustrated curse.

“They’re never-ending!”

Loki hovered beside him, the green magical glow around him having dimmed considerably from exertion. “They are being produced continuously from Ultron’s factories,” he pointed out dryly. “Unless we destroy the source, this pestilence will never cease.”

Wanda flew over from the other side of the battlefield, tendrils of dark red Chaos Magic flickering around her fingertips. “Then let’s go blow up the factories.”

Pietro zipped to a stop on top of a nearby chimney, his silver-white hair whipping in the wind. “And where are the factories?”

Wanda’s gaze swept toward the edge of the city, where a massive, industrial building stood, spewing a constant stream of new drones into the sky.

“Over there!” she cried, pointing.

Thor followed her gesture, then glanced down at Mavuika, who hovered serenely above the ruined furnace hall, a beacon of golden flame.

“Big sis!” Thor bellowed across the battlefield. “We’re going to destroy the factories!”

Mavuika met his gaze and nodded. “Go,” she called back, her voice carrying easily over the din of battle. “Be careful.”

A wide grin split Thor’s face. He raised Mjolnir high, and the sky answered with a deafening crack of lightning. He became a bolt of pure blue electricity, streaking across the city toward the drone production facility.

Loki followed close behind, a streak of emerald and gold. Wanda and Pietro were right with them, a blur of crimson and silver, ready to bring the fight to Ultron’s doorstep.