Marvel: Terror Stream

Chapter 10: Ch 10: The Daily Bugle Incident I

A week had passed since Luke awakened his Quirk.

He had quit his job at the golf club the very next day. No dramatic resignation speech, no two-week notice—just a quick text to his manager saying, "Personal reasons. Thanks for everything."

The man probably thought he was lazy.

If only he knew.

This week had been the most physically grueling seven days of Luke’s entire life. Both lives!

From dawn till late afternoon, he was in the abandoned garage, pushing his body and quirk to the limit. Sweat, explosions, pain, repeat. He tested everything he could think of—control, output, stamina, flight. His hands were covered in fresh calluses, and his shoulders felt like they’d been hammered by a blacksmith.

But the results spoke for themselves.

His quirk mastery, which was at 50.68% after purchasing the well... quirk mastery from the Terror Shop, had jumped to 51.07%.

Now, floating a few feet off the ground with controlled explosions bursting from his palms, Luke grinned. The phone was also floating beside him, he was recording himself, a practise for quirk as well as camera control for streaming.

He thrust his right hand forward while curling his left hand into a ring-like shape around his open palm.

"AP Shot!"

A focused blast of explosive energy shot out like a bullet, punching a clean hole through a rusted metal barrel across the garage.

"Not bad," he muttered as he landed, then he angled his palms for the next special move....

"Howitzer Impact!"

A spiraling tornado of explosions was unleashed with him at the centre, sending dust and debris flying. The shockwave made his phone wobble mid-air even with Luke’s Phone Telekinesis trying to keep it stable.

At first, even with the 50% quirk mastery, he had nearly dislocated his shoulder trying to replicate the Howitzer Impact. The centrifugal force was no joke. But by day four, he was sticking the landing.

He had the essentials down: Stun Grenade for the flash, AP Shot for the precision, and enough raw output to mimic Bakugo’s power level during the Provisional License Exam. He wasn’t a god yet, but he was definitely more than an "F+."

Well, D- to be exact. As per the app’s power system.

When he wasn’t training, he was researching. (Online stalking).

Gwen Stacy. The Spider-Woman. She’d been active for about a year, popping up in local news reports and shaky cellphone videos. She got her powers around two months after Loki’s alien invasion fiasco.

She’d graduated from high school six months ago and enrolled at Columbia University. The same Columbia where Alex went. The same Columbia where Charles Xavier had once guest-lectured for a day, a couple of weeks ago.

Gwen was a science major. Physics and biochemistry. Her friends were Peter Parker and Betty Grant. Luke made a note of that.

Then, as always, he looked into her friends; he looked into Peter Parker. The guy was getting bullied. Like, textbook nerd-harassment.

He also dug into George Stacy, Gwen’s father, and NYPD Captain. Which led him to an interesting discovery: his case— the convenience store psychopath — had been handed off to one Jefferson Davis. The lead officer from that night. Who just so happened to be Miles Morales’ dad. ƒreeωebnovel.ƈom

What a coincident!

Using the T-Stream app’s Terror Tools, he’d dipped into the NYPD’s systems. Mid-level security only, but that was enough. He read the case files, the internal memos, the frustrated emails between Davis and Stacy. They had nothing. No leads, no evidence, no clue what they were dealing with.

’Nice!’

He closed the files with a satisfied smirk.

He also took some time to properly explore the Terror Shop. Since he’d managed to get something as ridiculously useful as Phone Telekinesis for only 3 TP, Luke figured there had to be other hidden utility skills buried in the catalog.

And he was right.

[Signal Jammer (Terror Tools Feature): 2 TP]

[Disrupts nearby network signals, wireless signals, communications, and standard surveillance transmissions within a maximum radius of 50m. User’s phone is immune.]

This feature was a must-have. For a hostage situation.

This next stream needed a bigger stage. More hostages. More spectacle. More chaos.

If he wanted to call out Spider-Gwen, he couldn’t do it in a city outskirts convenience store. He needed a stage that would force her to show up—and force the police to keep their distance.

"The conditions are 20 minutes and 10 hostages," Luke mused, his mind already drifting toward a specific landmark in the city. "But if I want that bonus for fighting a ’superpowered individual’, I need to make sure the guest of honor is close enough to the location to actually accept the invitation."

It can’t be the university, it’s too big, too open, and it’s her home ground. Also, it’s not the kind of location in which he can hold and control 10 hostages while also fighting Spider-Gwen.

More importantly, he needed a way to keep the NYPD in check while he fought. The cops had breached the back door way too fast last time.

This time, he had to open with something massive. Something terrifying. A bold, explosive statement right at the start that clearly told the authorities: Interfere, and people die.

This past week was enough to scout the terror location as well... Luke was just finalizing the finer details.

The training, the planning, the preparation—all of it took another nine days.

Now, at 1 AM on a quiet Wednesday morning, Luke was ready.

He stood in the abandoned garage, backpack slung over his shoulder, phone already cloaked in anti-surveillance mode. That had become a habit—always, always anti-surveillance. He wasn’t about to let some random traffic camera or security feed ruin his career before it really began.

"Alright," he muttered, pulling his hoodie tight. "Showtime. Well, setup time. Showtime’s later."

Before coming to this abandoned garage at outskirts of city, he’d told his family he was crashing at a friend’s place for a couple of days. Phil had given him a thumbs-up. Claire had told him to text every now and then so she knew he wasn’t dead. Alex hadn’t looked up from her book. Haley was out clubbing with her boyfriend, Dylan, after finally bagging a job.

Standard Dunphy fare.

They had no idea their youngest was about to terrorize New York.

Two hours of roundabout travel later—switching buses, walking through alleys, doubling back twice just to be paranoid—Luke arrived.

Harlem. The new Daily Bugle office building.

It was a sleek, modern structure, twelve stories of glass and steel, still gleaming with that brand-new construction smell. The furnishing was complete, the logo was already mounted in the lobby, and the grand inauguration was scheduled for three days from now. The building was usually empty.

Today, a small inspection team was coming. Five important people from the Bugle’s main office, plus the building staff who’d be guiding them around. Eighteen people total. More than enough to meet his quota, with room to spare.

Luke had scouted the location three times over the past week. He knew every entrance, every exit, every blind spot in the security coverage. The building’s security system wasn’t fully operational yet—construction crews had priority over IT, apparently, which made infiltration almost laughably easy.

At 3 AM, under the cover of darkness, Luke slipped inside through a service entrance and began setting the stage.

At 1 PM, three black sedans pulled up to the front entrance.

The building staff— the manager, two assistants, and a few maintenance workers—greeted them at the door with nervous smiles and firm handshakes.

"Welcome, welcome! Miss Brant, Mr. Foswell, everyone—please, come in. We’re honored to have you here."

The group filed inside. Five staff members stayed in the lobby. The remaining thirteen, five Bugle people, eight building staff, crowded into the elevator and began their tour.

Twelve floors. By 2:03 PM, they’d reached the top.

By 2:23 PM, they’d even finished inspecting the CEO’s corner office and settled into the main meeting chamber for a break.

The staff had prepared snacks, sandwiches, coffee—the whole spread. Trying to impress.

"Miss Brant, I hope you didn’t find any inadequacies during the inspection, hehe."

Matthew, the construction project manager, wore an awkward, nervous smile. He was a paunchy man in his fifties, sweating slightly despite the air conditioning.

Betty Brant was no building expert—she was the secretary, not an architect—but she was the one standing closest to Jonah Jameson’s ear.

And in Matthew’s line of work, the person with the boss’s ear was the person you needed to impress.

Betty opened her mouth, offering a polite, practiced smile. "Everything looks perfectly up to standard, Matthew. Mr. Jameson will be—"

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.

A detonation so massive it felt like the sky itself had split open. The entire building shuddered violently—glass panes rattled in their frames, dust rained from the ceiling, and somewhere down the hallway a fire alarm began to shriek.

AAAhhh!" Betty screamed, clutching her head as her ears rang with a piercing, high-pitched whine.

The room plunged into chaos. Matthew fell backward over his chair, his face turning a ghostly shade of white. The other staff members scrambled for the corners of the room, some sobbing, others shouting questions that nobody could answer.

"An earthquake? Was that a bomb!?"

"The elevator! Check the elevator!"

Then wooden door of the meeting chamber swung open.

"Ahem."

The voice cut through the polite chatter like a blade through silk.

Every head in the meeting chamber turned toward the door.

A man stood there—tall, lean, dressed in an impeccably tailored black suit that seemed to swallow the light.

His face was obscured by a clown mask, its painted grin frozen in amusement. Beside him, a smartphone hovered in the air at shoulder height, its camera lens glinting like a single unblinking eye.

The room went very, very still.

"Sorry to interrupt, ladies and gentlemen," The masked man raised a handgun, its barrel sweeping lazily across the room. His voice was calm. Almost pleasant. "I apologize for the abrupt change in the itinerary. The inspection is over."

"From this point on," he said, letting the words hang in the smoky air, "you are my hostages!"

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