What surprised Drex Valen most was the mutation itself.
Sowhere in the middle of the process, sothing had changed. Even while in her diamond form, Emma could still use telepathy.
And that wasn't the only anomaly.
"Looks like diamond," Drex said, studying her with visible interest, "but the hardness is at least a hundred tis greater. What exactly did you turn into?"
The result fascinated him.
Ordinarily, the harder a material beca, the more brittle it was. Diamond was a perfect example. Incredible hardness, terrible flexibility. But Emma's transford body broke that rule entirely. Her crystalline structure possessed both extre durability and unnatural resilience. Even heavy blunt force wouldn't shatter her like glass.
Emma stared at her own hands in disbelief.
So this was what Sebastian Shaw had ant.
Potential.
The Black King had seen sothing in her long before she understood it herself.
"Congratulations," Drex said. "You're officially one of us now, Emma. And judging by the results, your aptitude's pretty exceptional."
Emma looked up at him.
"What exactly are we?"
At this point, blindly following orders no longer felt like an option.
Drex answered without hesitation.
"We are Jormungandr. The Serpent That Encircles the World."
Emma frowned slightly.
The na alone sounded less like a legitimate organization and more like the final boss of a global extinction event.
Drex smirked faintly after catching the thought through her mind.
"Please. That's no worse than Russia naming an intelligence network Leviathan. Besides, I considered Quetzalcoatl, Behemoth, Kraken, Fenrir, Cerberus, Xiangliu, even Taotie."
Emma blinked.
"You can read my mind too?"
"Telepathy isn't exactly rare around here," Drex replied casually.
He wasn't lying.
At any mont, he could grant every mber of Jormungandr telepathic abilities through Thought Waves. The problem was scale. Too many minds connected at once would beco noise even for him.
So he kept the system selective.
"Co on," Drex said. "I'll show you around."
He led Emma out of the laboratory and into a massive underground chamber.
The first thing she saw was two monsters tearing into each other.
The impact of their blows shook the floor.
Emma stopped cold.
"What the hell are those?"
"Zoanoids," Drex explained. "Jormungandr's mass-produced combat units. Humans enhanced with biological transformation abilities."
As she watched, one of the creatures was beaten into the ground. Its monstrous body twisted and shrank until it reverted back into a battered human being.
Emma's worldview tilted sideways.
Mutants.
Telepaths.
Monsters wearing human skin.
The deeper she looked into Jormungandr, the larger the world beca.
But fear never really took hold.
Emma Frost wasn't built for fear.
That was one reason Drex had brought her directly to the organization's true headquarters instead of feeding her carefully curated lies.
"So I'm going to beco one of those?" she asked.
"You?" Drex shook his head. "No. Zoanoids are for people without real potential. Disposable soldiers."
He glanced toward the training arena.
"Not that you're necessarily stronger than them yet. But your abilities are unique enough to qualify you as elite personnel."
Truthfully, Drex had already started losing interest in mass-producing Zoanoids.
After personally experiencing power on the level of the New Gods, his perspective had shifted completely.
What was the point of creating thousands of biological soldiers if a truly godlike being could erase them in seconds?
It was inefficient.
Better to build a small force of monsters than an army of cannon fodder.
Sothing closer to Thanos and the Black Order.
Right now, the closest thing Drex had to Black Order-level operatives were Morgan, currently studying at Kamar-Taj, the upgraded Abomination Emil Blonsky, Wanda Maximoff, whose potential had barely begun to awaken, and Esdeath, enhanced with Kryptonian military genetics.
The rest of his forces combined might be enough to contend with a single mber of the Black Order.
Still, Earth's potential was absurd.
Whether in comics or film, Thanos had conquered countless worlds before assembling warriors of that caliber.
Drex had found comparable raw material on a single planet.
Granted, Morgan and Esdeath had never existed in their original tilines.
As for General Ross, Drex didn't count him among Jormungandr's true assets despite the Thought Wave conditioning implanted in his mind.
Ross still belonged to himself.
After touring the headquarters, Emma felt as though an entirely new universe had opened in front of her.
Any lingering hesitation vanished.
If anything, she felt lucky.
She had chosen correctly.
Drex soon arranged combat training for her, focusing on practical use of her powers and battlefield adaptability.
Then he returned to the laboratory.
Emil Blonsky was already waiting on the operating platform.
Drex had finally discovered a thod to further refine the Hulk serum.
Not long ago, he had sent people to collect a large quantity of blood from Ross. Now it was ti to push Blonsky's evolution even further.
Blonsky himself was visibly excited.
Drex had already shown him the data gathered on both the Green Hulk and Red Hulk.
Bruce Banner grew endlessly stronger through rage.
Ross amplified himself by absorbing energy.
Compared to them, Abomination felt incomplete. Inferior. Like a flawed imitation.
Blonsky hated that feeling.
But now Drex had found a solution.
Once preparations were complete, Drex injected a massive amount of Ross's blood directly into Blonsky's body.
For an ordinary human, the blood alone would have been lethally toxic.
Blonsky's immune system reacted instantly.
His body temperature skyrocketed. The Extremis Virus within him flared violently, generating imnse heat in an attempt to destroy the invading cells.
Drex intervened personally.
He protected the new cells long enough for them to stabilize and multiply.
Blonsky's body had beco a biological war zone over the years.
Extremis.
Mutated Abomination cells.
Zoanoid genetics.
Dozens of incompatible alterations stacked on top of each other like unstable explosives.
Drex stripped almost all of it away.
Only the Abomination cells remained.
Then the Red Hulk cells and Abomination cells collided.
Drex monitored the process from beginning to end with microscopic precision. Whenever one side began overwhelming the other, he imdiately suppressed it, maintaining equilibrium between them.
Eventually, the two cellular structures devoured and fused into sothing entirely new.
Blonsky transford.
His body expanded into a monstrous giant as bone structures erupted outward from beneath his skin. His skeleton continued growing even after his musculature stabilized, forming a natural exoskeleton lined with massive spikes.
Bone protrusions burst from his elbows, wrists, spine, and shoulders.
His face beca distorted beneath heavy skeletal growth, almost resembling a living skull.
Gigantic.
Savage.
Nightmarish.
Drex observed the transformation through microscopic super-vision and gave an approving nod.
"Way better than the original Abomination," he said. "Not even close."
The naturally ford exoskeleton dramatically increased Blonsky's defensive capability.
After all, the durability of arthropod exoskeletons was one of nature's most efficient designs.
But that wasn't the real prize.
Blonsky had finally obtained the ability he'd always wanted:
Kinetic absorption.
Any attack carrying kinetic force could now be absorbed and converted into biological energy, continuously strengthening his body.
The external bone spikes no longer possessed the old thermal-blade properties they once had, but in exchange, their hardness and toughness had beco vastly superior.
Combined with Blonsky's combat training and brutal close-quarters style, his lee lethality had reached an entirely different level.
A living siege weapon wrapped in bone armor and violence.
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