The Innocent Finale — Part 2

Section 1: Ten Years Ago

Ten years ago.

Marvel sat in a high school classroom. Somehow, even back then, he was dressed exactly the same—a black pantyhose pulled tightly over his head and the same Zhongshan suit he wore today.

He was chatting with a girl beside him, and the two seemed to be getting along surprisingly well. They had been talking for over an hour, jumping easily from one subject to another, laughing as if they had known each other for years.

Then Marvel noticed someone watching him from the far corner of the classroom.

A boy sat there alone, dressed nothing like the other students. He wore a floral shirt beneath a blazer, a pair of slacks, and thin wireframe glasses. His hair was curly.

It was PhD.

Marvel turned back to the girl and continued their conversation, but a moment later, he glanced over again.

PhD was still staring at him.

There was something strange about that gaze. His eyes looked soft, almost jealous, with a quiet hurt underneath—as if there were something he desperately wanted to say but couldn’t.

Marvel’s smile slowly faded.

Wait… PhD wasn’t looking at the girl. He was looking at him.

Could it be…?

Section 2: The Unspoken Love

The memory shifted again—to a scorching summer day, during a class-wide trip to a remote hot spring resort in the mountains.

In front of the entire class, a girl shyly approached PhD and handed him a tiny plush doll, no bigger than the palm of his hand. The moment he accepted it, the class erupted in teasing laughter.

“Aww! They’re dating!”

“You two look so good together!”

Everyone clapped and cheered, egging them on.

Marvel happened to walk by at that moment. He looked at PhD, then at the girl, and smiled warmly.

“I… I think you two… two look good together,” he said. “I wish… wish you both happiness.”

Then he continued on, brushing past PhD as they crossed.

At the time, Marvel thought nothing of it. But looking back now, there was something he had completely missed.

The moment Marvel walked away, PhD’s expression collapsed. He lowered his eyes as silent tears rolled down his cheeks, then looked up again, watching Marvel disappear into the distance.

“I never wanted to be with her…” he whispered.

His fingers tightened around the little plush doll.

“The one I wanted to be with… was you. Don’t you get it, Marvel?”

Section 3: The Love Letter

The memory shifted once more—to a snowy winter day.

The streets were blanketed in white when Marvel and PhD crossed paths again by pure chance. Both were bundled in heavy coats, their breaths misting in the cold air.

They exchanged a simple greeting as they passed, but PhD had a letter tucked inside his coat. His hand moved toward it, and for a moment, he seemed ready to pull it out.

Then he hesitated.

In the end, he quietly pushed the letter back into his pocket and let Marvel walk away.

Marvel had never thought much of that moment. But looking back now, the memory seemed impossibly clear. Somehow, he could see the envelope perfectly—even from an angle that made absolutely no sense.

Then, as if zooming in on an old photo on a computer, the tiny writing on the envelope grew larger and sharper in his mind until every word became perfectly clear:

I love you, Marvel.

From the bottom of my heart,

—Stiffen Hawken

The memories faded, and Marvel found himself back on the street beside the trash can, tears streaming down his face.

It all made sense now—the looks, the jealousy, the tears, the letter. For ten whole years, the answer had been right in front of him.

Marvel pressed a trembling hand against his chest. His lips quivered as fresh tears welled in his eyes, overwhelmed by the truth he had failed to see for all these long years.

“So… so all along… the one and only… it was… it was always me.”

PhD stood frozen as Marvel slowly approached him, step by step, tears still glistening in his eyes.

“Hey! Snap out of it!” PhD shouted, backing away. “Nothing ever happened between us, okay? You just got hit by my Golden Dick’s flash. Those memories aren’t real!”

But Marvel didn’t seem to hear him.

“All these long years… I… I ignored you. I never… never saw the love you… you had for me. But… but deep down, I think… I’ve always loved you too, PhD.”

PhD stared at him—and then he felt it. Marvel’s adrenaline was rising fast. His muscles tensed, his face twitched, and his body began to swell as an uncontrollable surge of power tore through him.

Marvel had transformed into a beast.

A weeping beast.

Section 4: The Unbreakable Beast

PhD immediately backed away. “Hey—HEY! Don’t do anything crazy! Don’t do anything inappropriate!”

“Holy fuck…” he muttered. “I have no idea how to cancel the Golden Dick.”

Marvel lunged.

PhD tried to dodge, but Marvel was already on him. Two massive arms wrapped around his waist, trapping both of PhD’s arms inside a crushing bear hug. PhD gritted his teeth and struggled with all his strength, but it was useless. Against Beast Marvel, even PhD couldn’t break free.

There was no escape.

Marvel clung to PhD as if this were the embrace he had been waiting ten years for. PhD twisted desperately inside Marvel’s grip, but he couldn’t break free.

Marvel suddenly tightened both arms around his waist and lifted him clean off the ground. Before PhD could react, Marvel drove him backward into a wall, seized both of his wrists, and pinned them firmly above his head.

PhD gathered every ounce of strength he had and drove his knee straight into Marvel’s crotch.

BOOM.

The impact sent a violent shockwave through the street. Hats flew off pedestrians. Loose items blasted from nearby vendor stalls. Even the pavement beneath Marvel’s feet cracked outward in a spiderweb pattern.

But the blow did absolutely nothing to the beast.

A few passersby turned to look, then simply turned back and continued on their way.

This was Flushing City. In this absurd Kung Fu world, a sidewalk shockwave powerful enough to crack concrete barely qualified as something worth stopping for. Vendors went back to their business. Pedestrians kept walking. Within seconds, the street carried on as if nothing had happened.

Marvel didn’t move.

Then, slowly, he began to lower himself.

PhD’s face went pale.

“No, no, no—please!” he shouted. “Look, I know I’ve done terrible things! I objectified women! I abused the Golden Dick! I’ll atone for my sins!”

Marvel kept going.

“But even I don’t deserve this kind of punishment!”

PhD clenched his jaw and desperately tried to keep himself composed as Marvel disappeared lower from view. Marvel’s tongue flicked and writhed with a strange, almost serpentine rhythm, while PhD fought to keep his body completely still.

“Stay calm,” he muttered to himself. “Stay calm. Don’t react. Don’t—”

His entire body stiffened. His body had already stopped listening. A sudden, uncontrollable arousal hit him, and he became fully erect. Then an unstoppable force began pushing Marvel backward.

Slowly at first, then steadily, Marvel’s entire body was forced farther and farther away. His shoes dragged across the pavement, scraping out a trail of sparks as the distance between them grew to nearly thirty centimeters.

Yet Marvel showed no sign of slowing down. His tongue kept curling and writhing like a snake coiling around a thick, rigid iron rod, moving faster and more rhythmically with every passing second.

If anything, the beast only became more relentless.

MACHINE GUN SUCK!

PhD’s eyes widened in disbelief.

“No! This is impossible!”

Section 5: The Living Mosaic

A pair of friends happened to walk past the entrance to the dead-end alley, and one of them casually glanced inside.

From where he stood, he couldn’t actually make out what was happening. Marvel’s head and tongue were moving so ridiculously fast that they had blurred into an indistinguishable patch, perfectly obscuring everything that might otherwise have been inappropriate to see.

It was, quite literally, a living mosaic.

The man stopped walking. “Holy shit. Am I in real life or in a movie? I swear I can see a mosaic.”

His friend leaned over and stared into the alley for a few seconds. “…I have no idea. Maybe we drank too much.”

“Yeah, probably.” The first man nodded slowly. “We should get out of here and go home before we get ourselves run over by a truck like Richard the Dick. That would be utterly stupid.”

“Good point.”

Neither of them looked into the alley again. They simply turned around and headed home.

Then—

BOOM!

Something erupted with the force of a Kamehameha right in front of Marvel’s face.

Marvel staggered back. His pantyhose-covered face was now splattered with a thick white substance, and for the first time since transforming, the beast finally loosened his grip.

PhD broke free.

He dropped to the pavement, half kneeling, half collapsed, breathing heavily as he stared at the creepy pantyhose-covered beast in front of him. He didn’t know who this man really was.

He didn’t want to know.

“Whoever you are,” PhD murmured in a weary voice, “this is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.”

All he knew was that this entire experience had been utterly embarrassing and stupid.

PhD lowered his head, looking completely defeated.

Marvel stared at him, and something inside his chest began to ache. Seeing PhD broken like this, he finally understood that they could never be together. Theirs was a forbidden love—a love that could never be.

Marvel abruptly turned away.

“I’m sorry!” he cried. “I’m so sorry! Maybe… maybe we were never meant to be together!”

Then the beast dropped onto all fours and bolted out of the alley.

He disappeared down the street at tremendous speed, kicking up a massive cloud of dust behind him. Within seconds, the cloud rolled back into the alley and swallowed PhD’s kneeling figure completely.

And just like that, PhD disappeared behind the dust.

Section 6: Forbidden Love

Several blocks away, Marvel finally ran out of strength.

The beast stumbled into a small patch of grass beside the sidewalk and collapsed flat on his back, his arms and legs spread wide as he stared silently at the blue sky above. His breathing gradually slowed, and somewhere along the way, the enormous muscles covering his body began to shrink. The beast faded, leaving behind the same ordinary Marvel beneath the black pantyhose and Zhongshan suit.

For a long time, he said nothing. Then a tear slid down the side of his face.

After all these years, he had finally found it. After all the rejections, all the misunderstandings, all the women who had called him a pervert and run away from him—Marvel had finally discovered the true love buried deep inside his heart.

And that love was PhD.

Marvel slowly placed a hand over his chest.

“But… but we can never… never be together.”

His voice trembled.

“Maybe this is… is what they call forbidden… forbidden love.”

He closed his eyes as another tear escaped beneath the edge of his pantyhose.

What Marvel didn’t realize was that none of those memories had ever happened. The classroom, the hot spring, the snowy street, the love letter—all of it had been manufactured by the Golden Dick.

But to Marvel, the emotions were real. In a matter of minutes, the technique had given him ten years of love for a man he barely knew.

And he had absolutely no idea.

Section 7: The Disappearance of PhD

After that day, PhD never published another book.

He vanished from public view almost overnight. His lectures were canceled, his upcoming appearances quietly disappeared from university schedules, and before long, he resigned from his position without offering any explanation.

No one knew what had happened to him.

Some said he had simply grown tired of the seduction business and decided to leave it all behind. Others believed he had finally found true love and was now living a quiet, happy life by the sea with someone he loved.

There was even a rumor that he had contracted AIDS and died.

They were all wrong.

The truth was much simpler. After his nightmarish encounter with Marvel, PhD was so deeply traumatized that he disappeared from public life indefinitely.