Nick Fury stared grimly at the video footage.
The file had been rushed to his desk half an hour ago, and it showed every second of the black Hulk-like monster's assault on the Zandara Tribe.
The first few images were nothing but battlefield chaos. The next were the shattered remains of Zandara Tower.
By now, Benghazi was in chaos. Libya itself was boiling over. While the Zandara Tribe had existed, the city had survived under their shadow, forced to live by their rules and their violence. Now that they had been erased, there was only one question left.
Who would claim the territory they left behind?
That was what really made Fury's headache worse.
The black giant had already drawn the attention of the world's highest-level power structures. If this really had sothing to do with Drex Valen, then it ant Drex had crossed a very dangerous line.
The reason S.H.I.E.L.D. had been given the file in the first place was simple: the major powers wanted Fury to find out whether Drex Valen was involved.
And they were not leaving the job to S.H.I.E.L.D. alone.
The United States had already dispatched the CIA and the FBI.
Russia's Leviathan had started moving as well.
China's Bureau of Superhumans had not reacted yet.
Britain and France hardly needed ntioning.
Fury had no intention of dropping the investigation, but that only made him more irritated. There was a real chance the entire effort would lead nowhere.
The black Hulk had never appeared in any official Superhero Association records.
As for the internal registration files, Drex Valen could simply refuse access by citing trade secrets.
In Arica, that excuse was practically untouchable.
After all, Drex really was running the Superhero Association like a company. The heroes were his flagship products.
rchandise. Figures. Films. Comics. Novels. A full industrial chain built around them.
And because superheroes actually existed in the real world, Hollywood had been flooded with superhero films lately. The industry was making so much money that producers were turning green with envy.
A ten-billion-dollar special effects movie pulling in fifty billion at the box office, and still climbing? It was hard not to be jealous.
What made it worse was that Drex had launched a Marvel Cinematic Universe line, grouping all of the superheroes under that brand. Fans loved it.
None of them realized Drex was simply repackaging reality itself.
He had also bought out the DC Comics company, scrapped the editors' planned Superman material, and pushed hard for new superhero concepts instead, building a separate DC superhero universe.
With the two biggest superhero properties in his hands, and his insistence that everything was protected by business confidentiality, Fury couldn't simply force the issue.
Not without angering the corporate class.
If this ss had never started, Natasha Romanoff would still be working at Blade Technology Industries, and the investigation would have been far easier.
So why had he ever lost his temper back then?
Fury let out a long, annoyed sigh.
A mont of impulse had cost him dearly. Drex Valen had dealt with the fallout cleanly, and Fury had even lost an agent he had worked hard to place.
After Heracles had finished off the Zandara Tribe, Drex teleported him back to the base beneath the Pacific Ocean.
By then, World Serpent's land-based facilities had also been fully converted underground and underwater.
Once the Sentinel robots had been developed, all human construction work had been replaced by robotic engineering. That made expansion much faster.
World Serpent now had more than fifty bases beneath the sea.
To protect them from underwater earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and the occasional monster surfacing out of nowhere, every facility had been built with an outer shell of atomic alloy. The structures could withstand imnse water pressure, natural disasters, and direct attacks.
Still, the Atlanteans had to be accounted for.
Atlantis was an ancient civilization that had existed alongside Lemuria on Earth tens of thousands of years ago, before both were swallowed by catastrophic floods.
The Atlanteans considered themselves the children of the sea god and held the ocean in deep reverence.
They had not gone extinct. Instead, they had miraculously preserved a spark of civilization and carried their lineage forward in the depths of the Atlantic.
The true history of Atlantis went back even further, to the Celestials.
Those cosmic giants had descended on Earth a second ti.
The first had been four billion years ago, when they altered primitive humans. The X-gene Drex had discovered ultimately evolved from that experint.
Those modified humans had split into three major groups: Eternals, Deviants, and humanity.
The Eternals were a new kind of godlike being, capable of studying, absorbing, and converting cosmic energy. Their lifespans were vast, and they were almost immortal.
They had once established three great cities on Earth.
The Arctic city in Siberia.
The underwater city in the Pacific.
And Olympia in Greece, where humans once worshiped them as gods.
Over ti, these people migrated and changed, and at one point conflict broke out among them. Their leader, Zuras, exiled his brother A'lars into space.
That exile would eventually beco the father of Thanos, the Mad Titan.
Using his extraordinary talent and powerful vitality, A'lars rebuilt a ho on Titan and ford what beca known as the Eternals.
Trace the bloodline far enough back, and Earth's humans and Thanos were still, in a distant sense, related.
On the opposite side were the Deviants.
They built cities on land, developed genetic engineering, and used Lemuria as their capital while attempting to dominate the entire planet. Their civilization existed at the sa ti as Atlantis.
Deviant mutations occurred at a very high rate, so their children often bore no resemblance to their parents at all.
The only thing they consistently shared was their differences from one another.
They also held intense hostility toward all other life forms, which made Lemurian civilization violently expansionist and earned them many enemies.
Their destruction ca in 16,000 BCE.
That was when the Celestials descended on Earth for the second ti and destroyed the Deviants' capital, Lemuria.
The resulting upheaval shifted the continents themselves. Atlantis was caught in the disaster and sank into the Atlantic Ocean.
This ancient history was probably preserved only in fragnts at Kamar-Taj. At that point in ti, Kamar-Taj was not especially powerful either.
Atlantis remained in the Atlantic, but World Serpent's Pacific bases also needed to stay hidden from them.
Fortunately, Drex Valen was no helpless Kryptonian researcher from his earliest days. He simply adjusted the local magnetic field and erased the bases from Atlantean perception.
Even if they pressed their eyes directly against the area, they would see nothing.
As for World Serpent's underground bases scattered across the world, their number had already reached one hundred.
By 2003, World Serpent's mbership had already broken through the one-hundred-thousand mark.
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