Marvel Brave: A power-lacking boy aims to be the strongest in a world of heroes. - Genius and Evil God — A Shattered Daily Life

Sixty-second floor of Stark Tower. Three weeks had passed since Haruto was assigned to the lab floor known as "Workshop Beta." The floor was polished white resin, with countless cables hanging down from the ceiling in orderly rows. The air carried a faint smell of ozone, and somewhere, the high-frequency noise of electronic equipment constantly tickled the eardrums. The four-hundred-square-meter floor held sixteen workbenches lined up in rows, where a handful of interns silently immersed themselves in their own projects. Haruto's job was checking the wiring of devices used in the lab and preparing parts for replacement. The simplest tasks, the kind anyone could do. With a bundle of wiring cords in hand, Haruto ducked under a workbench. As he used a blower to clear dust from the connection terminals, he glanced toward the far end of the floor. There was a small, private booth partitioned off by glass walls. Through the frosted glass, he could faintly see a figure moving. On his first day, a senior intern had warned him, "Whatever you do, never go near that place." "Who's in there?" Haruto had asked the senior intern once. The senior frowned and answered in a hushed voice. "A special researcher named Lili. They say she's only sixteen. IQ of 198, one of the top minds even at Stark. But she doesn't talk to anyone. If you so much as try to speak to her, she calls security. No one has any idea what goes on in her head." Sixteen. Only one year younger than himself. As Haruto polished the connection terminals, he looked at the glass booth once more. The shadow cast on the frosted glass didn't move an inch. It was like a statue of ice. Just then, a janitor approached. "You're one of the interns, right? Sorry to bother you, but the wiring panel behind that booth seems to be acting up. The power system's unstable, and if it's left like that, it could affect the electricity for the whole floor. Can you take a look?" Haruto stood up and brushed the dust from the knees of his work clothes. "Got it. I'll check it out." As he moved deeper into the corridor, the other interns grew sparse, and soon there was no one else around. The glass booth sat isolated at the very back of the lab floor. Storage racks and cable drums were piled haphazardly around it—a place no one normally approached. When he circled around to the back of the booth, sure enough, there was the wiring panel. Removing the cover, he found several cables with loose connections, the terminals slightly scorched. Haruto took a screwdriver from his toolbox and began carefully tightening each connection, one by one. Behind him, the glass door opened without a sound. "—What do you think you're doing?" The voice was cold. Devoid of warmth, like the waters of a midwinter glacier. Haruto turned around. Standing there was a small girl in a white lab coat. Her platinum blonde hair, so pale it seemed to lack pigment, hung straight down to her waist, and her eyes, peeking out from beneath blunt-cut bangs, were a clear, translucent light blue. Her skin was sickly white, her height around 152 centimeters. With both hands still shoved in the pockets of her lab coat, she looked up at Haruto with a completely expressionless face. "The wiring was loose, so I'm fixing it. The janitor asked me to." "I asked who gave you permission." Lili took a step closer to Haruto. Her footsteps made no sound at all; only the hem of her lab coat swayed. "This is my domain. Entering without permission—I can't imagine you're in your right mind." "I'm sorry, but this panel seems to affect the floor's power supply—" "—Haruto Ishido. High school grades in the top forty-seven percent. Math deviation score of fifty-three, science fifty-five. Below-average athletic ability. Quit his club activity in the second semester of first year. No notable qualifications or abilities whatsoever." Lili recited Haruto's data in a flat, mechanical tone. "I understand you became an intern through Pepper Potts's special recommendation, but you are far inferior to the other interns who passed the entrance exam. In other words, you are an existence lower than garbage, unfit for this lab. Do you understand?" Haruto caught his breath. More than that, the question of how she had managed to investigate him so thoroughly flashed through his mind. "...You really did your homework." "Of course. I make it a point to investigate every person who enters my domain. It took me less than five seconds to pull your data from Stark's servers." Lili pulled one hand from her lab coat pocket and touched the wall of the glass booth. A section of the wall transformed into a panel, and a security call button surfaced. "Leave. I've already dispatched a separate drone for your task. There is nothing here that requires you. Nothing at all." Her finger moved toward the button. Watching her, Haruto did not let go of the screwdriver in his hand. He kept polishing the scorched terminal. "...What are you doing? I told you to leave." Haruto finished polishing the terminal and, as he wrapped a new sleeve around it, spoke. "I need this job to protect someone important to me. Her name's Sakura. So I'm going to do it right." Lili's finger stopped for a moment. "Sakura? Protect? That makes no sense. Are you telling me you're here for such an irrational reason?" "Yeah, I am. I'm not strong, and like you said, I'm useless. But I decided I'd do it. No matter what anyone says." He finished securing the terminal and closed the panel cover. Haruto stood up and clapped the dust from his toolbox. Lili stared intently at Haruto. Her clear blue eyes narrowed slightly, as if observing some unknown creature. "I might have called security and had your intern status revoked. Yet you continued working. Why?" "Because I was asked to." "That's not a reason. What about compensation? Don't you calculate things like what you stand to gain from doing this, or whether you can earn my favor?" "I'm not that smart. I can't be bothered to calculate every little thing." Haruto smiled a little. He always forced himself to smile when things got tough. The small scar at the edge of his right eyebrow twisted along with it. Lili stared at that scar for a few seconds, then pulled her finger away from the security call button. "...Irrational. Your behavior completely exceeds the scope of my understanding." "I get that a lot." Lili returned her hand to her lab coat pocket. "Do you want to know why I don't trust people?" It was a sudden question. "I do. Or rather, if you want to talk, I'll listen. If you don't, I won't force you." Lili lowered her gaze slightly and stared at her own reflection in the glass wall. "Ever since I was a child, I could understand things many times faster and many times more than others. I loved writing papers, and by the time I was ten, I'd been published in an academic journal. But the adults wouldn't allow it. The research team mentoring me stole my paper, took all the credit for themselves, and I was driven out of the lab. And that wasn't all. The same thing happened three times." There was no anger or sadness in her voice. She simply recited facts that had frozen solid in the distant past, flat and emotionless. "Other people either exploit my abilities or tear me down out of jealousy. Those are the only two options. Use or be used. In the end, that's all relationships are. You should be the same. Protecting someone named Sakura? Ultimately, that's just self-satisfaction. An act born from nothing more than wanting to think of yourself as a good person." Lili's words were sharp as blades, stabbing deep into Haruto's chest. Haruto listened in silence. He wanted to argue. But he understood that this girl's words came not from simple malice, but from deep wounds inflicted by her past. So he said just one thing. "...You've been through a lot." Lili's blue eyes wavered faintly. "—What?" "I can't even imagine half of what you've experienced. But I can tell that as a kid, you were betrayed by adults and hurt over and over again. And because of that, you stopped being able to trust people. That's not your fault." Lili said nothing. But the hand she clenched inside her pocket trembled ever so slightly. "...What a stupid attempt at comfort." "It's not comfort. Just an observation." The cold air of the lab flowed between them. It felt as though something had melted, just a little. —That was when it happened. !!——Large-Scale Intrusion Alert!! Target: Tower upper levels, Tony Stark's lab floor. All personnel, begin evacuation immediately—— The emergency announcement of the AI "JARVIS" blared throughout the lab. The ceiling lights flashed red, and the atmosphere on the floor snapped taut in an instant. The interns all looked up at once, screamed, and ran for the exit. "What the—!?" As Haruto burst out of the glass booth, Lili was already operating the wall panel. Her fingers flew across the keyboard at high speed, and images began appearing one after another on the three large monitors inside the booth. "—I've hacked the security cameras. Pulling up footage from the upper floors." "Hacked!?" "Shut up and watch." The central monitor displayed footage of Tony Stark's lab. Tony, clad in his iron suit, was confronting an intruder. The intruder was a tall, elegant man. His long black hair was swept back, he wore exotic armor of black, gold, and green, and in his hand he held a staff glowing with blue light. On his face was a cunning, cruel smile. Loki—. "—Earth's mightiest defender, is it? You're less impressive than the stories suggest." Loki's voice came through clearly, even over the monitor. "Whoa, if we can talk, let's talk. Though I'd recommend taking off that Halloween costume first." Tony cracked a joke. But there was clear tension mixed into his voice. "Arrogant." The next instant, blue energy burst from Loki's staff. Tony barely managed to dodge, but the blast sent lab equipment flying to pieces. Tony countered with a repulsor blast, but Loki merely flicked his staff to create a barrier, easily deflecting the beam. "—Too slow." Loki raised his hand, and an invisible force seized Tony. Telekinesis. Tony's body was slammed against the wall. "Gwah!!" The wall cracked, and the armor of Tony's suit warped. "You are insects. Kneeling and worship suits you best!" Loki was laughing. Tony tried to stand, but Loki closed the distance in an instant and placed his hand toward Tony's chest. "From where I stand, you are nothing more than a man in a toy suit of armor. Your heart... I'll be taking it." Loki's hand touched the center of Iron Man's chest—the Arc Reactor. Kishuuuuu—. A sound. The suit's power rapidly drained. The pale blue light in his chest flickered, and then—went out. Tony's body collapsed to the floor like a marionette with its strings cut. The suit lost its life-support functions, and blood spilled from his mouth. Palladium poisoning and damage exceeding the suit's shock absorption limits were eating away at his body from the inside. "Tony Stark. This is the end that awaits those who defy a god." Loki glanced at the Arc Reactor in his hand, then tossed it to the floor as if it were garbage. A hollow clang echoed through the silent lab. The footage cut off. On the monitor, the cold words: 'Signal Lost.' Only the red warning lights of the lab continued to spin round and round in the oppressive silence. Haruto's legs trembled. A chill, like ice water poured over him, crawled up from the core of his body. The sensation in his fingertips vanished, and he could do nothing but wait as what had just happened before his eyes seeped into his brain. "...No way." This had to be a joke. That Iron Man. The man who had defeated every enemy, crushed like an insect—. "...Lili?" When Haruto turned around, Lili was crouched in the far corner of the glass booth, covering her ears with both hands. Her small body was trembling violently. "N

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Episode 4

Name: Marvel Brave: A power-lacking boy aims to be the strongest in a world of heroes.
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