Marvel's Strongest Mage

Daniel sat cross-legged in the attic of his home, his posture still as stone. A soft hush blanketed the room. Moonlight spilled through the tall arched glass window behind him, bathing him in silver-blue luminescence. He looked like a monk carved from jade—serene, but unyielding.

His eyes were shut, but his mind was anything but quiet.

Inside his sea of consciousness, rivers of magic coursed in disciplined arcs. His power flowed through ancient channels, bound to the arcane structure of runes. His breathing slowed until it became imperceptible, yet every cell in his body throbbed with mana.

And tonight, he was experimenting.

His thoughts hovered over a lattice of new runic constructs—complex magical architecture built from the Nordic rune system he had inherited. The only problem was that there were only twenty-four runes that had survived to his generation. The rest, lost to time.

But Daniel didn't believe the ancient world stopped at twenty-four.

The very nature of existence—the stars, the void, emotion, matter, spirit—was too vast to be confined by just two dozen runes. He was convinced the true system contained at least thirty-six… maybe more. Odin himself had paid for the complete system with an eye. A small price for infinite knowledge.

Odin alone had grasped all the runes—sacrificing flesh for wisdom beneath the branches of Yggdrasil, the World Tree.

Daniel had no World Tree. What he had was decades of exile in the frozen hell of Jotunheim.

There, the cold shaped his soul, and ice magic became his blade. Among the twenty-four runes, he had mastered them all, but only ice magic had borne fruit strong enough to elevate him into the legendary tier. It was inevitable. In a place where blizzards howled like wolves and the sun forgot to rise, what else could bloom but frost?

But Earth was different.

The moment he returned, he felt it—his destiny was being interfered with.

Something... or someone... had touched the threads of fate wrapped around him. The weave had shifted. That's when he made the decision: to discard the path of ice, and pursue a new one.

The twenty-four runes. Twenty-four diverging paths.

One of them had to be his.

But forging a new path in Earth's magic environment was like swimming through tar. The elemental inertia here was suffocating—ten times worse than Jotunheim. Every rune resonated slower, resisted harder. If he followed a new path from scratch, it would take him at least ten years to return to the legendary realm.

And ten years from now, Thanos might already stand on Earth's bones.

Even if he ascended again, would it matter? A single legendary mage couldn't change the tide of a galactic war.

That's why Daniel had turned his gaze to something greater—the Cosmic Cube.

He didn't know where Fury had hidden it. Not yet. But the key might lie elsewhere.

The new element.

Tony Stark had created it, not from scratch, but as an imitation of the Cube's particle structure. That alone proved the principle: reality could be bent to mimic the infinite.

In the magical worldview, Daniel understood that "new" elements were not created—they were revealed. This element wasn't new. It had always been part of the world. Stark had simply peeled back the curtain.

Daniel was now attempting the same, using runic magic instead of science.

Reconstructing the structure of the imitation particles, not as energy conduits, but as magical elements.

The theory was sound, but the practice was brutal.

Stark had the privilege of a blueprint, left by Howard Stark, who laid the groundwork before him. A legacy passed through time. A genius paving the way for another.

Daniel had no such luxury.

He had personally scoured every version of the Stark Expo across the decades. Collected every schematic. Memorized every transformation. And still, every attempt to build the new magical construct ended in failure.

Trial after trial.

Even now, he was only simulating inside his consciousness. If he attempted to build the rune lattice with real magic elements, even a slight miscalculation could trigger a rupture—one strong enough to wipe his mind clean.

 Stark hadn't done it alone either.

Nick Fury had delivered classified S.H.I.E.L.D. material to Stark's doorstep. Years of black-ops data. Files Daniel didn't yet have access to.

No wonder Stark succeeded.

A faint hiss escaped Daniel's lips.

He exhaled a slow stream of green mist—the accumulated waste byproduct of Earth's impure mana. Even purification couldn't eliminate the drag Earth's elements placed on his body. The stronger he grew, the more Earth's resistance seemed to tighten around him.

He needed an Infinity Stone.

With one in his grasp, Earth's elemental inertia would dissolve like morning fog. With it, he could step into the legendary realm again in days—not years. And if that Stone was Space, his progress would become… exponential.

But where was the Cube now?

Not even Alexander Pierce—former director of S.H.I.E.L.D. and a leader of Hydra—had known. Nick Fury alone controlled its movements.

Daniel would have to wait.

Wait for Loki.

The God of Mischief would come, Cube in hand. And with him, the Mind Stone hidden within the scepter.

Timing, though, was treacherous.

The more powerful the pieces involved, the more fragile the equation became. Every variable introduced more risk. Just one error could spiral the future off course.

Daniel sighed, letting his mana slow. His pulse steadied. His mind cleared.

And then—he heard it.

A sound. Faint. Wrong.

Daniel's eyes opened in a flash.

He didn't need to reach out with magic. His ears, attuned to the city's rhythm, picked up the disturbance like a conductor hearing a wrong note in a symphony.

He had lived on this street for days. He knew the cadence of the neighborhood—the late-night hum of transformers, the occasional siren, even distant gunfire. All familiar. All part of the pattern.

But this? This wasn't familiar.

This was hostile.

In a blink, Daniel vanished from the attic.

In the glowing nightscape of Manhattan, a red blur swung through the sky.

Spider-Man.

Peter Parker whipped through the air, web lines snapping from wall to wall. But his usual confidence was gone—fear danced in his chest.

Three oblong aircraft zipped after him—drones unlike any he'd seen. Small, nimble, and fast enough to keep up.

One misjudged a turn and slammed into a wall. It exploded violently, shrapnel embedding itself in concrete like knives.

Peter winced. "Okay! Not toys! Definitely not toys!"

He'd already downed four earlier, but three more had appeared. Now two remained.

No, wait—

Another one? From the front?!

Panic rose in his throat. He fired webs frantically, trying to divert the ones behind, but they dodged like they knew what he'd do.

Too smart.

Then he saw it.

An opportunity.

He baited a mistake—left an opening in mid-air, made it obvious.

The drones took it.

Blinding beams fired from the front and back.

At the last second, Peter dropped like a stone.

The beams missed.

The rear drones smashed into their ally, erupting in mid-air.

Two gone.

Peter landed hard in a narrow alley, rolled, but couldn't immediately stand. His side burned. Breathing ragged.

The last drone hovered overhead.

For a moment, it hesitated.

Peter looked up. "What are you waiting for…?"

A sudden glow and it charged.

He dodged again… barely.

He shot a web which snapped out and stuck to the drone's belly.

Peter yanked hard.

It slammed to the ground and detonated.

Silence returned.

Peter stared at the wreckage, chest heaving.

"Who the hell… sent these things…?"

Too advanced for amateurs. Too dangerous for a prank. He'd made enemies—plenty of them. Three years of playing neighborhood hero had stacked up a hit list.

He couldn't afford to guess. Not now.

Still wincing, he vanished into the night.

On a rooftop nearby, Daniel stood watching the last explosion fade.

He had been ready to intervene.

Spider-Man couldn't die. Not yet.

Daniel needed him alive, a beacon to draw out both villains and SHIELD alike. A public chess piece.

He didn't bother following.

He already knew the truth. The kid in the red mask? He was Peter Parker.

What interested him more was the drones.

The tech was advanced—stealth signatures, adaptive AI. Whatever clues had been onboard, they were wiped clean. No serial numbers. No tracking signals. No chance of salvage.

But they'd try again.

Whoever was behind this wouldn't stop at one failed attempt.

Deep within a hidden underground base, a wall of surveillance screens flickered. Most feeds were now offline, but two still tracked Parker's movements from afar.

Even after destroying all the drones, Spider-Man hadn't evaded the eyes watching from the shadows.

In the control room, tension hung like smoke.

"You hesitated, Spencer!" someone shouted. "If you had pulled the trigger when I told you, he would've been dead!"

The accused didn't respond.

But from a corner, a voice rose—calm, measured, and cutting.

"My father is not a killer."

A boy in a wheelchair stared back at the shouting man. His expression was cold.

He continued, "He's the world's foremost robotics expert. If anyone could have built the drones to kill Parker, it's him. But he's not you. He doesn't need blood to prove his brilliance."

The shouting man backed down.

But the truth was clear.

The man behind tonight's ambush—the puppeteer pulling strings from the dark—was none other than Norman Osborn.

A genius.

A madman.

And a father obsessed with ending Spider-Man.