Imagine Manhattan under siege from the monstrous entity Eldest possessing the Hulk, which it separated from Bruce Banner. Terrifying pink, skeletal monsters are roaming the streets. The National Guard is barely holding the line while evacuating civilians.
Inside the Baxter Building, Reed Richards is frantically working against the clock. He records an emergency audio message meant for Iron Man, Spider-Man, Vision, and Amadeus Cho. Why is he recording this message? Because Reed knows that if things go wrong, somebody else will have to finish what he started. He embeds schematics for a device that he hopes will save everyone.
Reed’s Secret Weapon
While Sue Storm, Ben Grimm, and Johnny Storm fight off the monster horde outside, Reed reveals his secret weapon: the Immaculate Engine.
Its core is a tree supposedly grown from the blood of the One Above All, which releases a purifying hormone that works as a functional opposite of the “Infernal Hulk.” Through quantum entanglement, the machine would link the tree to Earth’s biome, spread the hormone through the atmosphere and undo the “Hulk effects” worldwide.
Reed admits there are risks. It might wipe out a bacterium crucial to ocean life, or depower mutants or superhumans like him. But when the team found the tree, it healed a wounded Tony while Bruce Banner, Vision, and Skaar were unaffected. With life on Earth being turned into abominations, he concludes that nothing he does in the lab could make things worse.
At that moment, Sue, Johnny and Ben enter the lab with a captured monster inside one of She’s force-fields. Reed needs a tissue sample to calculate how much purifying hormone is required for different climates. Johnny looks at the creature and asks if this thing was once a normal person? Johnny recalls that Wanda Maximoff (the Scarlet Witch) warned them about Hulk kidnapping mutants, including members of the X-Men. Ben grimly hopes no one they know are inside those monstrous bodies. Both men are shaken by the thought of losing your mind, your personality, and your family to become a hideous creature.
Then, out of nowhere, a massive POOOOM shakes the building and cuts the power.
Trapped in the Basement War Garden
Reed was just ninety seconds away from turning the machine on! Backup power is not strong enough to run the engine, and the disturbance came from deep underground.
Reed puts the Sanguine Tree into a protective glass sphere. He decides it’s too dangerous to leave the tree in the lab next to the captured monster. So he brings it along as the team heads down to the basement to restore power.
Johnny uses his flames to light the dark way down. As they descend past the basement levels, they find massive roots and glowing seed pods bursting through the concrete foundations, thirty meters into the bedrock beneath the building. Ben touches one of the pods, triggering a loud pop. He realizes right away that these pods are made of the exact same slimy material as the monsters upstairs. The pods are living incubators for Hulk’s army!
A dark voice echoes from the shadows, mocking them. “Your little tree is most beautiful.”
The Infernal Hulk steps forward, revealing that he has been growing a massive “war garden” directly under the Baxter Building.
The Fall of Earth’s Mightiest Family
Sue tells Reed to take the tree and get back to the lab while the rest of the team holds Hulk off.
At first, things are looking good. Sue traps Hulk in a powerful force-field bubble, and Ben lands some solid blows. But Hulk can see through the eyes of everyone he has infected. He looks right at Johnny and speaks his real name. Hulk whispers that he felt Johnny’s fear and heard his desperate prayer to die rather than be turned into a monster.
Hulk breaks free from Sue’s bubble and attacks Johnny. When Ben punches Hulk, his own stone fist shatters with a sickening crack. Green and blue energy surges into Ben’s arm, turning it grey, frozen, and numb.
Johnny overcomes his fear and blasts Hulk with a massive stream of fire. “Everything burns, right?” he quips as he douses Infernal Hulk in flames. But it’s not enough. Hulk bursts through the fire to grab Johnny and corrupts him on the spot. His flames flare out of control as he screams in agony.
Sue loses her composure and attacks Hulk with giant force-field constructs of a massive hammer and a heavy sword. Hulk laughs off the attack and strikes her down. Red tendrils and bloody wounds break out across Sue’s body. Her own force-field powers twist into a terrifying, translucent blue serpent. She seemingly loses one of her arms in the process. “Earth isn’t yours. You’ll never beat all of us,” Sue gasps.
“Let us find out together,” Hulk says in response to Sue’s threat.
Hulk then sets his sights on Reed, who is cradling the Sanguine Tree near a pile of rubble. Hulk mockingly thanks Reed by explaining that the scientist was the one who accidentally led him to the tree in the first place. Hulk’s blue energy serpent wraps around Reed, stretching and warping his face into a melting, disfigured shape.
Reed manages to grab the tree, tells Sue he loves her, and promises he will come back for them. He runs up the stairs with the corruption spreading through his body.
Reed crashes through a high window and splats onto the street below, broken and deformed. As he lies dying in the street, his pre-recorded message reaches its end. Hulk has claimed the Baxter Building for himself. The Fantastic Four have fallen and the Immaculate Engine is offline.
“The machine and the tree are the whole ball game,” Reed warns. “Pick up my work where I left off…and turn it on. If you don’t… well…welcome to the Age of Monsters.”
Above the ruined city, the giant blue serpent coils around a burning skyscraper, roaring into the night.
A Flaming Ray of Hope
The story then takes us far away from the chaos of New York City to a quiet RV camp in the Texas desert.
A tall man wearing a trench coat, heavy combat boots, and an eyepatch walks into the camp. It’s Nick Fury Sr. The local workers watch him closely as he walks up to a young boy named Leo, who’s sitting next to an old military motorcycle with a star painted on the side.
Nick looks at the bike. “Nice bike,” he says in Spanish.
Leo says the motorcycle belongs to his uncle. Nick mentions he heard a Ghost Rider hangs around the camp to protect a kid named Leo. He hands the boy a military Purple Heart medal, asking Leo to let his uncle “come out and play for a little bit.”
Why does Nick need Leo’s uncle? Because there’s a twisted garden growing in New York City. And the only kind of fire hot enough to burn it to the ground is hellfire.
As Leo takes the medal, the old motorcycle bursts into bright, mystical flames. Sgt. Sal Romero, the Ghost Rider of 1944, is ready for war.
