Just as Tony was about to ask the Spider-Man who was speaking Japanese whether this was the year 2099, the other man's attention shifted toward the sky before he could.
A strange celestial phenomenon immediately drew both of their gazes.
An energy surge so intense that it pushed JARVIS's sensors into the red erupted overhead. Centered on the point of detonation, it produced a halo visible to the naked eye even beneath the clear skies of Japan.
After the explosion subsided, Tony employed his array of observation systems to scan the upper atmosphere. Unsurprisingly, his optical scanners quickly picked up a familiar figure.
Joey burst through the clouds, plummeting toward Earth from beyond the atmosphere.
"Excuse me!"
Iron Man was just about to take off and intercept Joey before his free-falling body could carve a massive crater into the surface.
Then the Spider-Man beside him raised his right hand and made a few adjustments to the electronic wristband on his arm.
A four-wheeled race car shot out from nearby. Without thruster flames, and in complete defiance of physics, it soared into the sky. Moving at incredible speed, it caught the unconscious Joey and returned him safely to where the two stood.
"...Huh?"
Tony Stark was already feeling a little dazed.
Unfortunately, things were about to become even more weird.
"Please follow me."
After dispatching the flying car—or perhaps it was more accurate to call it a spaceship—to retrieve Joey, the oddly accented Spider-Man, who somehow pronounced Spider-Man like Supaidaman, nodded toward Tony.
"My Spider-Sense has already foretold his arrival. When two immense powers in the universe collide, within that radiant light, the Herald of Doom shall descend."
"I thought Spider-Sense was just a 'suddenly getting the chills' kind of ability!"
Half convinced and half skeptical, Tony looked at Joey's body lying in the vehicle. A quick scan confirmed vital signs, allowing him to relax slightly.
Still alive.
And recovering.
He couldn't help but wonder what kind of monstrosity could injure someone like Superman—a being who could catch missiles with his face without so much as flinching.
If the unconscious Joey could answer Tony's question right now, he would have said:
A cosmic-scale traffic accident.
And the other party was entirely at fault.
---
[Sir, this is hardly the time to determine liability. Our lives are now intimately connected. Could we perhaps call a temporary truce first?]
The collision had been accompanied by a violent clash between a bio-field and pure light itself. Both parties had suffered severe damage.
The two of them now resembled lumps of differently colored clay mashed together—distorted, fused, inseparable. Part of one existed within the other.
"Truce my ass!"
Joey had barely arrived in this universe before being rammed into near death by a red light sphere that resembled a cosmic dump truck. The fact that he wasn't already demanding compensation was a miracle in itself.
Fortunately, he was a Kryptonian.
A mere fatal injury could be solved by spending some time in the sunlight.
Had an ordinary person been struck head-on by a faster-than-light energy sphere like that, they would have been vaporized into atoms and quarks on the spot.
[My deepest apologies. However, ordinary humans do not typically appear unannounced in the vacuum of space. Incidentally, my name is Lipiah, from the M78 Nebula. Mighty cosmic traveler, from where do you hail?]
"...What?"
Ever since nearly getting flattened by what amounted to a cosmic wrecking ball, Joey had been mentally combing through everything he knew about the Marvel Universe, trying to identify the source of this bizarre red sphere.
Now that the other party had introduced himself, Joey was even more stunned.
A red sphere of light.
M78.
Lipiah.
Wasn't this basically the original—
"Ultraman?!"
[ Ultraman? An great name. Your understanding of my existence is remarkably profound. Then how should I address you? ]
[ Superman. Super Human? An intriguing name as well. ]
[Though, now is hardly the time for casual conversation within our subconscious. Please open your eyes. A powerful enemy is about to arrive!]
"As if I don't want to wake up!"
At the moment, Joey's condition resembled that of a lucid dream.
His consciousness could clearly communicate with the other energy inhabiting his body, yet he remained unable to control or even properly sense his physical form.
"I just need a little more time!"
Hopefully Tony would realize what needed to be done and drag his body into direct sunlight for ten or fifteen minutes. That should solve the problem.
[Regrettably, I cannot offer much assistance.]
Joey was not the only one who had been gravely injured.
The original Ultraman from the Land of Light had suffered just as badly.
Rather than saying that the original Ultraman had been driving a cosmic dump truck and nearly flattened the innocent bystander Joey...
It would be more accurate to say that a heavily overloaded hundred-ton truck had slammed into a concrete pillar.
Neither the driver nor the concrete pillar came out of the collision in good shape.
As for the powerful enemy Ultraman had mentioned, it was probably some sixty-meter-tall cosmic monster—one of those absurd creatures where stats and game mechanics somehow coexist, while science is nowhere to be found.
Joey sincerely hoped Tony's luck would hold out.
For the next ten or fifteen minutes, he absolutely needed Tony to resist the urge to play hero.
If anything went wrong—if he got stepped on by a monster or died to some inexplicable aoe attack—it would become a serious problem.
Tony, who had never really thought about the source of Joey's powers, carried Joey down from the vehicle and thoughtfully placed him beneath the shade of a tree.
After all, this was Japan in the middle of summer.
The sun was brutal.
He couldn't exactly leave his buddy roasting under direct sunlight until he suffered heatstroke, could he?
"Tony, prepare for battle!"
The Spider-Man beside him—Yamashiro Takuya, whose name Tony had learned only moments earlier—furrowed his brow and looked toward the valley below the mountain road.
"It has arrived much sooner than expected!"
Tony followed his gaze.
All he could see was a lush, green forest filling the valley below.
But Spider-Man's grave expression made him unwilling to take any chances.
He activated twenty-three different sensor systems within his armor and scanned the area repeatedly.
The only thing he detected was the cheerful chirping of birds among the treetops.
"Is the enemy some kind of cloaked—"
Before he could finish his sentence, he watched Spider-Man leap into the driver's seat of the flying car and start the engine.
Yamashiro Takuya swung the vehicle around and aimed it toward the direction his Spider-Sense had indicated.
Several autocannons extended from the front of the vehicle and immediately unleashed a torrent of fire.
The forest was engulfed in explosions.
Under the overwhelming bombardment, a transparent figure finally emerged.
The gigantic creature's profile was as thin as a sheet of paper.
Its body was covered in brownish-black scales, while metallic armor concealed its face. Blue light glowed from the hole-like openings that served as eyes.
Forced into visibility by the attack, it slowly turned around to face Yamashiro Takuya and Tony.
"Heh heh... your observation skills are impressive! My name is Zarab. Be proud—you are the first Earthling capable of detecting me!"
As the creature turned, Tony noticed something bizarre.
Its side profile appeared to possess virtually no thickness whatsoever.
It looked like a two-dimensional object.
Even now, while facing him directly, every sensor inside the Iron Man armor remained unable to detect its existence.
Only his eyes and optical cameras could see it.
An enemy that large was basically a walking target.
Naturally, this called for weapons of mass destruction.
Tony was already preparing to test every wonderfully ridiculous gadget packed inside his armor on the alien creature.
Before doing so, however, he hoped Spider-Man would retreat from the firing zone to avoid friendly fire.
"Fall back, I'm about to—"
"Damn it! You cursed cosmic mechanical monster!"
Hot-blooded enthusiasm overwhelmed Yamashiro Takuya.
Interrupting Iron Man's targeting sequence entirely, he charged ahead.
As Spider-Man, he carried both his father's grudge and the hatred of the Planet Spider.
The things he despised most in the universe were alien invaders who caused destruction wherever they went.
Facing an enemy that his Spider-Sense had already warned him about, Yamashiro Takuya immediately summoned his ultimate trump card.
A spaceship from the M77 Nebula—
"MARVELER!"
With a thunderous roar, the earth split apart.
A colossal spacecraft nearly one hundred meters long emerged from the fissure.
Tony could only stare in stunned disbelief.
Wait.
Hadn't Joey told him that Spider-Man was basically a street-level hero?
You know...
The whole friendly neighborhood type?
What exactly was this interstellar battle cruiser doing here?!
Unfortunately, things only became more absurd from there.
The next thing Spider-Man shouted nearly made Tony's jaw hit the floor.
"Leopardon! Transform!"
The massive spaceship began transforming while still in flight.
By the time it touched the ground, it had become a giant sixty-meter-tall robot.
Watching this unfold, Tony suddenly remembered something he had said thirty minutes earlier.
The multiverse was wild.
But wasn't this a little too wild?!
What part of this qualified as a street-level hero?
What kind of neighborhood was so dangerous that it required a sixty-meter-tall friendly neighbor to protect it?
Completely ignoring Tony's horrified stare, Yamashiro Takuya swung upward on a web line, landed on the giant robot's shoulder, and entered Leopardon's cockpit.
Facing Zarab directly, he struck a dramatic pose and declared:
"An emissary from hell! The man who crushes all evil!"
"Supaidaman!"