What caught Natasha Romanoff off guard was that Drex Valen had seen straight through her.
It was unsettling.
Was he reading her that easily?
She never got an answer. Drex simply told her to get back to work, as if the entire eting had already served its purpose.
Which was ridiculous, considering he was the one who had summoned her in the first place.
Natasha left with a frustrated tug at her zipper.
With the Sword Bureau now standing behind him as a legal, governnt-backed giant, Drex could finally begin pushing the next stage of his plan.
One of those next steps was Egypt.
The other was Antarctica.
Digging up Apocalypse was one task.
Pulling Captain Arica out of the ice was another.
The two could almost be treated as the sa kind of job, but Antarctica was not sothing he was going to trust to Nick Fury. Fury was too slippery for that.
He had never even ntioned the Cosmic Cube to Drex, and that alone was enough to make Drex suspicious. Maybe the United States simply did not want to hand over sothing that dangerous. Either way, there was no way a genius like Drex would be allowed to study the Cube freely. If Hydra's leftover energy weapons were still ahead of the rest of the world, then giving Drex the Cube would have been like handing a match to a supernova.
After considering it, Drex decided to send Tony Stark to Antarctica instead.
"Steve Rogers? He's missing, and you found his location?" Tony asked, staring at the file Drex had handed him like it was so kind of prank.
"You want to go dig up his ashes?"
It sounded absurd even to him. A man frozen for seventy years, if he could even be found at all, would probably be little more than dust unless he had been preserved by sothing special.
"There's no ash," Drex said flatly. "It's Antarctica. You should find a perfectly intact popsicle."
Tony gave him a look.
"I actually like that word. But why bring him back at all?"
Drex had an easy answer.
"Symbolism. He was the first superhero."
That was not entirely perfect, of course. Captain Marvel had existed too, and technically there were argunts to be made about who counted first. But in the way humanity understood the idea of a superhero, Steve Rogers was the earliest one that mattered.
Tony leaned back in his chair.
"So let get this straight. You want to dig up this frozen popsicle, haul him back here, and let him lie around on our battleship while every bored employee in the Sword Bureau walks past him all day, staring and poking at him?"
His expression turned even stranger.
And then he added, "Besides, why send to do this? Isn't this the sort of thing you'd give to a superhero?"
That was the real question.
Tony did not think a simple retrieval mission was worth bothering him over. He had bigger things to do, like strengthening the Sword Bureau's reach and tightening its control.
Drex answered without hesitation.
"Because I trust you," he said. "And only you. The Sword Bureau was built by several nations together. They can insert people into it whenever they want. I don't know who's loyal and who's a spy, so you're the only one I can actually use for this. Bring him back, Tony."
Then he ended the call.
Tony would be the one to go into the ice. When Steve Rogers woke up, the first face he saw would be Tony Stark's.
Drex did not know exactly what would happen after that, but he was confident enough to let it unfold.
With Tony's intelligence, there was no way he'd need weeks to figure out Steve was alive the way Fury had. He'd probably realize it imdiately.
And knowing Tony Stark, he would thaw Steve out just because it sounded interesting.
After that, Drex turned his attention to another matter.
He called in Brock Rumlow, the forr leader of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s rapid-response tactical unit.
Crossbones was trained by the obscure villain Taskmaster, but because he had fought Captain Arica so many tis, his reputation and na recognition were much higher. Taskmaster, in the background sowhere, would have been furious.
Rumlow had no idea why the Sword Bureau's director wanted to see him. He understood that he was probably the only Hydra operative who had successfully infiltrated the bureau. Everyone else had already been blocked out by Drex.
Drex didn't waste ti talking.
If Rumlow had not been so aggressive, so competent, and so useful in combat and command, Drex would not have bothered with him at all.
Right now, Drex needed people who could execute orders without hesitation.
Bronski was one. Bucky was another, though he still could not be brought out into the open. Rumlow made a third.
Then Drex brainwashed him.
Just like that, Brock Rumlow beca a proud soldier of World Serpent.
Better yet, he believed he had always been one. In his mind, he was a Hydra agent planted inside World Serpent, now carrying out a mission to infiltrate it from within while also helping more Hydra operatives slip into the Sword Bureau.
The only problem was that his real loyalty was no longer to Hydra.
It belonged to World Serpent.
"Sir!" Rumlow snapped to attention, bringing his right fist down hard over his left breast in the World Serpent salute.
Drex nodded.
"Rumlow. Good work. From today onward, you're the commander of the Sword Bureau's Symbiote Troops."
"Long live World Serpent!"
Rumlow was almost vibrating with excitent.
At last, he had returned to the embrace of the World Serpent family.
He already knew the Sword Bureau was under World Serpent's control. Drex had basically perford a clean, open-handed takeover, using a few superheroes and a mountain of political leverage to drag World Serpent from the shadows into the light.
Compared to Hydra spending decades worming into S.H.I.E.L.D. only for the agency to collapse anyway, Drex's thod was cleaner, faster, and far more terrifying.
Following a leader like this was much more promising than following Alexander Pierce.
Rumlow blinked, then frowned slightly.
"Symbiote Troops?"
Drex gestured toward the equipnt waiting behind him.
"I developed a biological armor system. Put it on, and even an ordinary person can beco superhuman instantly."
The symbiote armor was far more practical than the beast soldier project.
Once bonded, a user could survive wounds that would normally be fatal, including getting their head blown apart by heavy sniper fire. The symbiote had a recovery system much like the one in Guyver, except far faster than the twenty-four hours a Guyver cell might need to fully restore a host.
And unlike Guyver's central tal weakness, this armor did not have that kind of vulnerability.
Standard light weapons could not even break through it.
It could also reshape itself into cold weapons on the fly.
Tentacles like Doctor Octopus.
Claws, blades, whips, shields, or any other close-combat form Drex wanted.
All of it was already viable because he had refined the design into a mature biological battle suit.
The beast soldiers were stronger overall, but their appearance was wrong for Earth.
They looked like villains out of a nightmare, the kind of thing that would terrify children and send civilians screaming in the wrong direction.
The symbiote armor, on the other hand, had been tuned to resemble a sleek Guyver-style exosuit.
It looked futuristic.
Clean.
Dangerous.
Exactly the kind of thing people on Earth would accept as a superhero weapon instead of a monster.
At the end of the chapter, a line of text in the original scroll asked what kind of character readers wanted to see Drex create next.
Drex, naturally, kept moving forward.
...
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