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I'd been missing sleep the last few nights. Let the reports of the Hulk smashing shit keep me awake. He was why I couldn't sleep. My serotonin had never been lower than when Banner's monster finally reached my town. I was too tired to be afraid, but not too tired for... Irritation. This was my plan all along - I had only to be stung by a bee, to be enraged enough to work it out. A smart man doesn't try going toe-to-toe with the Hulk. I'd been letting myself get pissed off all week, gradually feeling myself get smarter. By the time he totalled my car with a chunk of cement, I was pushing 500 on IQ tests (I had to invent a new one by Wednesday) and I was already out of the car and on my feet.
Tired, yes, but insanely well-armed. I saw the patterns in its movement. The Hulk had just got done ripping a chopper down from the sky. I judged which squad-car it would aim for, moved accordingly, ducked under the projectile with a comfy ten centimetres clearance. Now I had his attention - rampant rage-monsters hate nothing more than an unfair miss. So we started dancing; me predicting ten moves ahead, him doing anything but disappointing. I just had to get more pissed off, wait for a solution to become clear, and avoid being flattened. The army was hanging back as they saw the Compensator was handling it. Improv, if I'm honest.
It wasn't working. Why wouldn't I get angry? This is why I stayed up, and I lost all that sleep for nothing. I was even feeling fatigue, almost running out of breath and all for nothing. My master plan wasn't working. This was unacceptable and my hands started to shake with - - anger.
They were tumours, really. The Hulk's body, muscles growing beyond their specifications. Unwanted mass with a deadly side-effect. I wanted those, too. My brain, juiced up by days of frustration, overrode itself and served my skeletal muscles with a "grow" order and they kept growing. I had to keep the Hulk off me so my throat muscles contracted too far and retched out a glass-shattering rumble that broke my voice and staggered the caveman monster. I needed energy. I mentally designed a new enzyme that broke down concrete and with some careful manipulation of hormones, hotwired every gland in my GI tract to produce it. Nanoseconds glided by. I selected some choice pebbles and chowed down, even as the confused Hulk wasted entire heartbeats thinking like a trilobyte. Bulges appeared on my skin, pain plucking on my senses but instead of turning it off I used it, turned my anger into overload.
My IQ quietly crossed its fifth digit.
The Hulk rallied and rushed me. I punched its oncoming hand with my own. Concrete had formed on my knuckles, cleverly redirected by my own circulation, and the force of my cancerously hijacked muscles cancelled the Hulk's swing. I let out another sub-sonic burp and the frequency rang against ancient proto-human protocols inside Banner's mutant brain, shutting down everything but the most basic fight/flight/fuck indecision, and then crippling it so he was stuck on the precipice of action. What once was designed to prepare us for action when we heard the infra-sonic grumble of a saber-toothed predator now left my enemy clueless.
I wasn't done. More sounds left my mouth, twisted by an autonomously warping throat (I must have looked terrifying to onlookers). The brain has responses to all sorts of frequencies. I picked something comfy and soft, craning my neck to allow the sound to echo through the Hulk's skull. Synapes in his head fired. I could almost see them in the way his eyes twitched. All this time, I kept overriding my amygdala, waves of neural impulses forcing it to make me angrier and angrier. I reached up and tapped the Hulk's eyelids, sequentially, making a pattern of impulses that spilled off the optic chiasm JUST SO, lighting a tiny little nucleus, which in its own turn couldn't help but agitate a gland further down. I whispered, sending a parallel signal down the inner-ear. Static washed out into a message, and the message made his pineal gland practically detonate. Melanine flooded the Hulk's brain. He staggered, realising what I was doing somehow, and tried to swing. By the time I caught his fist, he was already asleep.
I turned off anger. I would need to write myself a new IQ test. I reckoned I had about seven digits to accomodate now, accounting for bias of course.