Malphegor
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MCIM Ch. 02
🕑 Added 2025-08-29 00:53:15 +0000 UTC[Stark Industries CEO Tony Stark went missing today in Afghanistan...]
"Mamma Mia..."
Mario crumpled the newspaper he'd grabbed from a street vendor and shoved it into his pocket. Now he finally knew exactly where he'd landed, and it wasn't good news.
Manhattan, New York. 2008. And to make things worse, he was standing in the middle of Hell's Kitchen. Tony Stark hadn't become Iron Man yet, which meant the Age of Heroes was still just a gleam in some cosmic entity's eye.
At first, he'd figured he was just stuck in the Blade universe, bad enough with the whole vampire apocalypse thing. But now? This was the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where the danger scale didn't just go from one to ten. It went from one to "cosmic horror that could erase reality with a snap."
He looked up at the building across the street, where a small sign read "Nelson & Murdock, Attorneys at Law." Even in the dim streetlight, he could make out the name clearly.
Matt Murdock. Daredevil. The Man Without Fear.
In another life, as a kid, Matt had pushed a blind man out of the way of a truck carrying radioactive chemicals. The stuff had splashed into his eyes, blinding him but cranking his other senses up to eleven. Years of brutal training under a mysterious mentor called Stick had turned him into Hell's Kitchen's unofficial guardian angel.
"Tutorial NPC," Mario muttered under his breath.
It made sense. In every isekai story he'd ever read, Daredevil was usually the first hero that transmigrators bumped into. His power level was manageable, enhanced senses and martial arts skills, sure, but still mostly human. Unlike certain billionaire playboys who built flying metal suits or gods who summoned lightning.
He turned and walked away. He had zero interest in getting tangled up with Marvel's heroes. Well, except for Blade. That guy he could work with. But the rest of them? They had a tendency to attract exactly the kind of cosmic-level bullshit that he was hoping to avoid.
Wait. Something's off about the timeline.
The law firm shouldn't exist yet. In 2008, the guy should still be training, maybe just starting his vigilante career. But there it was, clear as day.
Reality doesn't follow the movies. Figures.
He had been wandering Hell's Kitchen for the better part of six hours, and honestly? The place was a disappointment. Sure, he'd seen a couple of muggings and heard some gunshots in the distance, but it wasn't the war zone the movies had made it out to be. More like your average sketchy neighborhood with better PR.
But right now, Hell's Kitchen was perfect. No money, no ID, no legal way to exist in America, this was exactly the kind of place where someone could disappear into the cracks of society.
That's when he saw them.
Ten drumsticks, floating at the edge of his vision like some kind of augmented reality display. The first one looked like someone had taken a bite out of it.
"What the hell?"
Mario stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at the bizarre sight. He blinked hard, rubbed his eyes, even turned his head left and right. The drumsticks stayed put, hovering in his peripheral vision like a video game HUD.
Nobody else seemed to notice them. Pedestrians walked past without so much as a glance.
Is this... a hunger bar? From Minecraft?
The pieces started clicking together in his head. The resurrection. The "system" that felt more like a mod loader than actual artificial intelligence. The class selection that looked straight out of a video game interface.
Holy shit. I'm not in some knockoff isekai story. I'm literally Steve from Minecraft.
It made perfect sense. Minecraft was a sandbox game with unlimited potential. You could fight monsters, craft equipment, build massive structures, and, most importantly, install mods that could turn the game into anything you wanted. A vampire hunting simulator, for instance.
As someone who'd sunk a lot of hours into Minecraft across multiple platforms, he knew the game inside and out. But if he'd somehow become the real-world equivalent of Steve, why could he still feel pain?
He pinched his arm experimentally. The sharp sting was definitely real.
That's when he noticed the stares.
Every person within a twenty-foot radius was looking at him with expressions ranging from pity to concern. He'd been standing in the middle of the sidewalk for the past few minutes, eyes closed, shaking his head and now apparently inflicting minor violence on himself.
They probably thought he was mentally ill. Or high. Or both.
His face flushed red as he realized how he must look to them. Without a word, he pushed through the small crowd that had gathered and took off down the street. People scrambled out of his way like he might be contagious.
He didn't stop running until he reached the alley where he'd first respawned. It felt like coming home, in the weirdest possible way. This narrow, garbage-filled space between two apartment buildings was the closest thing he had to a safe haven in this entire city.
And it's got my piss stain on the wall. Lovely.
"At least I'm not tired."
He'd just sprinted for fifteen minutes straight, and aside from losing another drumstick from his hunger bar, he felt fine. Not even winded. That had to be part of the Steve package.
Mario held up his hands, examining his skin. Then he looked down at the grimy stone pavement beneath his feet. Time for the ultimate test.
He crouched down and tapped the concrete with his knuckles.
Tiny black cracks appeared across the surface of the stone slab. Each tap spread the damage a little further, creating the familiar spiderweb pattern he'd seen a lot of times in the game. A grin spread across his face.
"It works. The most important ability is still here."
If he couldn't break blocks, then this whole Minecraft thing would be useless. But if he could mine...
Crack.
The stone slab under his feet vanished with a sharp sound, leaving behind a floating miniature block that bobbed in the air for exactly half a second before shooting straight into his chest.
"Jesus!"
The sudden impact, or lack thereof, caught him completely off guard. He frantically patted down his torso, expecting to find some kind of wound or embedded object. But there was nothing. The block had simply... disappeared into him.
"Okay, that's definitely going into my inventory," he muttered.
The moment the thought crossed his mind, a familiar interface materialized in front of him. Translucent and glowing faintly blue, it was exactly what he'd expected: a 4x9 grid with 36 inventory slots, just like the game. Sitting in one of the squares was a gray cobblestone block, the one he'd just mined.
At the top of the interface was the standard 2x2 crafting grid, and along the left side were four equipment slots for armor and weapons.
But where Steve's character model should have appeared, there were instead two toggle switches:
[FULL DATA MODE]
[ON] [OFF]
[EQUIPMENT DISPLAY]
[ON] [OFF]
Both were switched off.
Mario stared at them for a moment, then he focused his thoughts on the inventory interface, mentally selecting the stone slab he'd just collected. The familiar weight materialized in his hand, about five inches across, smooth and perfectly cubic.
He crouched down and aligned it with the gap he'd created in the concrete. A translucent outline appeared, showing exactly where the block would go.
Place.
The slab vanished from his hand and snapped into position with a soft click. If he hadn't done it himself, he never would have believed that piece of pavement had ever been removed at all.
"That's actually useful."
But useful as his new block-placing abilities were, they wouldn't keep him alive. He needed resources. Lots of them. And wood was the foundation of everything. Without it, you couldn't make a crafting table. Without a crafting table, you couldn't even craft a wooden pickaxe. And without tools...
"Well, you're basically fucked."
He looked up, trying to gauge the time by the sun, but the buildings on either side of the alley blocked out most of the sky. From what he could see, it looked like mid-morning. Maybe ten or eleven.
Need to find a park. Somewhere with actual trees I can harvest without getting arrested.
His memory of New York was sketchy, most of it came from movies and video games like Prototype, whose map was modeled after Manhattan. He was pretty sure Manhattan had a big park. Central Park, wasn't it? Famous enough that even someone from the other side of the Atlantic had heard of it.
After stopping a few pedestrians for directions, and getting some weird looks for his accent, he found himself standing at the edge of Central Park. Behind him was the concrete and steel jungle of Manhattan; ahead, nearly 850 acres of green space in the heart of one of the world's biggest cities.
From now on, I'm living in this park.
Central Park was perfect. Big enough to hide in, public enough that one more homeless guy wouldn't attract attention, and most importantly, full of trees.
The park was crowded as hell. Tourists everywhere, taking photos, pointing at landmarks, chattering in a dozen different languages. Mario eyed the distant tree line, but even from here he could see people wandering through the wooded areas.
Even trying to punch a tree is complicated in this place.
He found an empty bench and sat down to wait, pulling out three euros in cash, a pack of Italian cigarettes, and a cheap lighter. Not much, but better than nothing.
He lit one of the cigarettes and settled in to wait. The nicotine helped calm his nerves. His hunger bar had dropped to seven drumsticks, but as long as he didn't move around too much, it should stay stable.
Wonder if my family is freaking out about me disappearing. Probably think I got mugged or something.
Time ticked away. He sat on the bench, smoking occasionally, watching the endless stream of tourists pass by. He had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, so he waited with the patience of someone who'd spent way too many hours grinding resources in video games.
As the sun started to set, the crowd finally began to thin out.
"Finally. Show time."
The wooded area he'd been watching was almost empty now. A few stragglers here and there, but nothing like the daytime crowds. He stubbed out his cigarette, stood up, and walked into the trees.
He picked his target carefully, a massive oak tree that had to be at least three feet in diameter. If he was going to do this, he wanted maximum resource gain for minimum risk.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
His fists connected with the bark, and he was surprised by how painless it felt. Like punching a bag of sand instead of solid wood. Cracks began spreading across the surface. But it was taking longer than expected. Much longer than the stone slab.
Come on, come on...
He glanced around nervously. A jogger passed by about fifty yards away. An elderly couple sat on a distant bench, feeding squirrels. Nobody seemed to be paying attention to the weird guy punching a tree.
CRACK.
The entire oak tree exploded into blocks.
Mario stood frozen for a moment, half expecting someone to start screaming or calling the cops. But the jogger kept jogging, the elderly couple kept feeding squirrels, and nobody else seemed to have noticed that a massive tree had just spontaneously converted itself into Minecraft blocks.
Move. Move now before someone sees.
He rushed forward and began scooping up the blocks as fast as he could. They zipped into his inventory as soon as he touched it.
Twenty-three oak wood blocks. Four oak saplings. And not a trace left behind except a bare patch of dirt where the tree had been.
He'd expected the tree to work like it did in vanilla Minecraft, break one block, the rest hover in midair until you break them individually. Or maybe follow real-world physics and come crashing down like a giant game of Jenga.
Instead, the whole thing had just... dissolved. Much better for stealth operations.
He opened his inventory and navigated to the crafting grid. One wood block broke down into four wooden planks. With four planks arranged in a square, he crafted the cornerstone of Minecraft survival: the crafting table.
He looked around one more time, making sure nobody was watching, then placed the table on the ground. It materialized a pale brown cube about three feet on each side, with a pair of tools hanging from one corner.
Above the table, faint lines appeared in the air, forming a three-by-three grid. When he focused on it, a proper interface opened up, just like the game, but with a pleasant surprise waiting for him.
A recipe book.
An actual fucking recipe book.
"Thank God. I was starting to think this was some hardcore old-school version."
He knew most of the basic recipes by heart, you didn't spend hundreds of hours in Minecraft without memorizing the essentials. But some of the more obscure items? The complex redstone contraptions? The weird mod recipes he'd experimented with over the years?
How the hell do you make a cake again? And what was the recipe for those vampire-hunting tools?
He crafted a wooden pickaxe, three wooden planks and two sticks, arranged in the classic T-pattern. Then he broke down the crafting table itself, watching it shrink into inventory size and zip back into his storage.
Time to go underground.
Mario looked around the now-empty clearing where the oak tree had been. Central Park was an island of green in the middle of Manhattan, but Manhattan itself was an island. Leaving meant bridges, and bridges meant checkpoints, and checkpoints meant questions he couldn't answer.
Better to stay put and dig down. See if he could find stone, maybe even some basic ores. Build himself a proper base underneath one of the most famous parks in the world.
The grass broke easily under his fists, seven or eight hits, and he had a neat hole leading straight down into the earth. He jumped in, then quickly sealed the entrance above him with dirt blocks.
Instant darkness.
Click.
His lighter flared to life, casting a faint glow. The flame was tiny, barely enough to see by, but it was better than nothing.
And then, completely unbidden, his grandfather's voice echoed in his memory: "Plant your feet deep, and your family tree will grow tall."
Mario chuckled. "Thanks, Nonno. Pretty sure this isn't what you had in mind, but I'll take whatever wisdom I can get."
