Marvel's Kryptonian Scientist Chapter 1 1

"No...!"

Drex Valen dropped to one knee in the dirt like he had just been thrown through a blast door. For a long mont, he could only stare, breathing hard, trying to make sense of the world that had slamd itself around him.

Then the truth hit.

"I got… reincarnated again?"

He looked up slowly.

Around him stretched a dry Texas landscape, all dust and heat and endless sky. Off to one side was a farmhouse, and beyond it a broad field of corn standing in neat green rows, alive under the sun.

"Earth?"

The sight of the corn was enough to confirm it. He had arrived on Earth. But that only raised the bigger question.

What year was it?

By the tiline he rembered, Clark Kent should already have grown up by now.

Drex was a Kryptonian. More than that, he had once been human, then sohow crossed over and beco one.

The mont he learned he was Kryptonian, his excitent had nearly gone through the roof.

This was the most absurdly overpowered bloodline in existence.

Super intellect. Super strength. Super stamina. Super speed. Super senses. Flight. Invulnerable skin. Heat vision. Freeze breath. Rapid healing. The list went on.

Kryptonian biology was terrifyingly adaptable, with an upper limit so high it was almost indecent. Under Earth's lighter gravity and the Sun's radiation, their bodies turned into living engines.

Solar energy flooded their cells, supercharging their muscles and amplifying every sense they had. The more sunlight they absorbed, the stronger they beca. That stored power could manifest in all kinds of ways, from heat vision to enhanced hearing to microscopic-level sight.

At first, Drex had assud he had beco the Zod he knew from the movies.

He had been wrong.

The movie version was General Dru-Zod. Drex Valen was soone else entirely.

They did not even look the sa. Drex was tall, broad-shouldered, and striking enough to stand out even among Kryptonians. He stood around six foot three, with a physique that could go toe-to-toe with Superman's most famous depictions of brute, heroic power.

And unlike the version of himself that had been locked up in Phantom Zone hell for years, Drex had entered this world with a family that actually gave a damn.

He had tested the boundaries more than once after being born on Krypton, trying to break the rules before the planet swallowed everyone whole. Like General Zod, he had been suppressed every ti. The difference was that Drex had a father who helped him survive those early years instead of burying him.

Because of that, he had never been thrown into the Phantom Zone.

When Kal-El was born, Drex took a risk. He stole the Codex and injected it into his own body. Then, while resisting capture, Krypton went down in a cataclysm of fire and light.

The explosion dragged him with it.

Now he was here.

"First things first," he muttered. "I need to figure out where the hell I landed. Hopefully not Gotham. Or tropolis."

He stepped toward the farmhouse.

A white middle-aged man working in the cornfield noticed him at once.

"Hold it. Who are you?"

The man had started to reach for a gun, then froze when he got a clear look at Drex.

Whatever he had expected, it was not this.

Drex wore a strange black suit of armor, but through the translucent visor his face looked human enough, at least by Earth standards. White. Clean-cut. Not exactly the profile of a threat, at least not yet.

The farr kept his guard up, but only just.

This was Texas, after all. Not too far south, and you were practically staring at the xican border. Smugglers, cartel couriers, border tunnels, and all the other scavengers of the frontier turned this stretch of land into a place that often felt beyond the reach of police.

"Sir," Drex said calmly, "I'm lost. Can you tell where I am?"

The armor on his body was Kryptonian combat gear, naturally. In the original tiline, Kryptonians who reached Earth had relied on this sort of technology to go toe-to-toe with Clark Kent, who had spent years bathing in the Sun. With enough tech, they could even overwhelm him.

And the armor Drex wore was even better.

It had been forged from a super-hard alloy synthesized from rare cosmic minerals his father had gathered, then built with cutting-edge Kryptonian engineering. It was stronger than the standard armor worn by Zod's people. Of course it was. By the ti the movie-era Kryptonians had been stuck in the Phantom Zone for so long, their gear was already outdated junk.

The farr crossed his arms over a chest and stomach that looked carved out of hard labor and stubbornness. "You're near the U.S.-xico border. If you're lost, I can call the police. Not sure they'd be in a hurry to co out here, though."

Drex frowned slightly.

The U.S.-xico border?

He had spent too long on Krypton. Geography like this did not stick anymore. Still, English itself was no problem.

In the end, he decided the best source of information was the man in front of him.

After asking around and confirming that there was no tropolis, no Gotham, and no obvious sign that he had landed in so familiar version of Earth, Drex still had no idea what world this was.

The farr's na, however, he learned.

Shelley King Jadriel.

He was from Washington, and had co out here to this remote patch of land because he had lost his job. With a daughter to support and school fees to cover, he had been forced to take over the farm his father left behind.

"Texas," Drex said at last, with a faintly strange expression. "So I landed in Texas."

Texas had a reputation for a reason. Guns were everywhere. So were gun shops.

There were places in Houston where ard robberies happened often enough to feel routine, especially in the Black neighborhoods and Chinatown. And Houston's cri rate had long been enough to keep it near the top of the country's most dangerous cities.

And Drex had landed sowhere even worse.

Right on the border.

Still, the armor made the imdiate situation manageable. Once he confird he was reasonably safe, he removed his helt.

The effect hit him instantly.

Information flooded his mind with the force of a wave breaking over his skull. It felt like trying to breathe underwater while an entire ocean poured into his brain. For a few seconds, he hovered on the edge of suffocation.

Then his Kryptonian mind adjusted.

The transition was faster than it would have been for many others, and Drex knew exactly why. His body had been built for research and analysis. His brain likely had more room for developnt. It processed the incoming sensory data far more quickly than the average Kryptonian.

Shelley was originally against letting him stay.

That argunt ended the mont Drex casually punched a crater into the ground.

After that, the farr beca much more reasonable.

Drex also took control of Shelley's only link to the outside world, a handheld phone, with the sort of quiet entitlent that made it clear he was not asking permission.

Within three days, he had figured out where he was.

Mostly because this place was so isolated, the information was painfully outdated. If the world were more connected, he would have realized it sooner.

Anyone who had ever ended up in the Marvel universe knew the trick.

Stark Industries.

Osborn Industries.

That was all the confirmation most people ever needed.

Drex found it in a magazine cover, along with a certain genius billionaire playboy who looked so arrogant on the page it almost hurt to see. The man was described as having slept with every model on the cover, and, according to the article, he had apparently been with the hottest actress in Hollywood the night before.

Drex stared at the photo for a mont, genuinely impressed.

That was not the Tony Stark most people knew from the movies.

He was even more shaless in person.