Publicly, Drex Valen reacted to the bombing attempt with furious outrage.
Privately, once the caras and agents were gone, he leaned against a wall and calmly exhaled.
Not even slightly angry.
The rage had been an act.
A performance.
Because the attack itself made no sense.
The bomb had been far too weak.
Drex wasn't imagining conspiracies out of paranoia. Based on everything the world believed he could do, that explosion should never have been expected to kill him.
Realistically, it probably wouldn't even injure him.
And the placent bothered him even more.
The bomb had detonated inside the sewer system beneath the road. Under normal circumstances, a blast of that scale should have ripped apart multiple streets and collapsed surrounding infrastructure.
Instead, it had only created a crater.
Too controlled.
Too convenient.
"If I could fully map atomic motion instead of only fragnts…" Drex muttered, frowning slightly. "I could trace the chain backward."
Unfortunately, his predictive perception still wasn't perfect.
Which ant he had to rely on the Black Queen.
But before she could finish investigating, S.H.I.E.L.D. suddenly stepped into the spotlight.
They publicly announced that they had identified the masterminds behind the attack.
Supposedly, the evidence led toward both the CIA and FBI.
Unfortunately, S.H.I.E.L.D. claid it lacked jurisdiction to continue investigating further.
The instant S.H.I.E.L.D. inserted itself into the situation, Drex understood exactly who was behind the sche.
Hydra.
Specifically, Hydra operatives inside S.H.I.E.L.D. trying to fra the FBI and CIA.
Ironically, even the Hydra agents involved apparently didn't realize they were setting a trap targeting Drex himself. Otherwise the information would have eventually reached him through his own embedded channels.
Instead, the operatives treated it as a routine political maneuver and never bothered escalating the report.
Drex sighed.
His intelligence protocols still had flaws.
That much was obvious now.
Still, the overall picture had beco clear.
Alexander Pierce wanted to use the bombing to weaken competing intelligence agencies while strengthening S.H.I.E.L.D.'s authority.
Unfortunately for him, Drex had no interest in playing fair.
Pierce had carefully avoided leaving behind real evidence.
Unlike Obadiah Stane, he wasn't stupid enough to store incriminating information on accessible systems.
But evidence didn't necessarily need to be real.
Not anymore.
Using the Black Queen's synthesis technology, Drex fabricated a highly convincing audio recording and anonymously leaked it to both the FBI and CIA.
The result was imdiate chaos.
The two agencies, already under crushing political pressure, seized onto the recording like drowning n grabbing a life raft.
Inside the fabricated conversation, Pierce's voice was unmistakable.
"Director, are we really doing this? If anyone discovers we bombed Drex Valen, we're finished."
"It won't trace back to us," the false Pierce replied calmly. "Every trail points toward the FBI and CIA. This is S.H.I.E.L.D.'s opportunity."
In an era before sophisticated voice synthesis technology existed publicly, the recording looked devastatingly authentic.
Legally, audio evidence alone still lacked full prosecutorial power.
Politically?
It was a nuclear strike.
Pierce was imdiately dragged into furious questioning by Arican leadership. Several mbers of Congress even began discussing replacing him outright.
To stabilize the situation, Pierce was forced to spend enormous political capital and secretly rely on additional Hydra resources.
Which only exposed more Hydra activity for the Black Queen to monitor.
anwhile, the FBI and CIA beca openly hostile toward Pierce.
Especially the CIA.
At one point, senior personnel seriously considered releasing every piece of dirt they could uncover on him.
It wouldn't have been the first ti they destroyed soone that way.
And if Pierce ever lost his position completely?
Well.
People sent to "anti-suicide detention facilities" in Arica had a strange tendency to commit suicide anyway.
After retaliating against Pierce's maneuver, Drex lost interest in the aftermath.
There were more important things happening.
Elsewhere in the world, a sleek cone-shaped aircraft descended vertically toward a military testing facility.
Engineers and military researchers stared upward in disbelief as the craft landed.
"The current recorded flight speed exceeded ten thousand kiloters per hour," one scientist said excitedly. "And that's while carrying passengers. The engine still wasn't operating at full output."
The surrounding researchers erupted into discussion.
"The fuel costs are insane, though," another researcher added while reviewing the data. "Operational expense per hundred kiloters is over three hundred thousand."
"Round-trip flights burn through tens of millions like paper."
Still, nobody sounded disappointed.
If anything, they looked exhilarated.
"One prototype is enough," an older scientist said quietly. "I honestly believed aircraft like this wouldn't exist for another century."
A senior researcher surnad Yang stood nearby watching the aircraft with complicated emotions.
He was widely considered one of the nation's greatest scientific minds.
And even he found the machine difficult to comprehend.
The origins of the project were equally extraordinary.
Although the country had failed to recruit the world's top scientific talents directly, they had still managed to acquire a large number of advanced technical blueprints over the years.
Many designs had once been considered impossible to manufacture due to material limitations and insufficient industrial precision.
The situation resembled theoretical projects left behind by scientists during World War II:
Brilliant concepts trapped behind inadequate technology.
Then Drex Valen introduced secondary Kryptonian alloy.
An absurd material that outclassed virtually every known alloy on Earth.
Once that happened, manufacturing technologies across entire industries advanced explosively.
Old theoretical designs suddenly beca possible.
The aircraft now resting on the runway represented the first successful realization of one of those abandoned concepts.
"We're approaching the level of the great twentieth-century scientists," soone said excitedly. "Scientific progress always begins with material science. With secondary Kryptonian alloy, we may actually surpass relativity and quantum chanics within our lifeti."
The surrounding researchers beca even more animated.
Professor Yang, however, rely shook his head.
Surpass Einstein and quantum theory within one lifeti?
Maybe if Einstein himself ca back from the dead.
Still…
He looked toward the aircraft again thoughtfully.
"Secondary Kryptonian alloy…" he murmured.
Secondary.
aning there was probably sothing better.
Or perhaps Drex himself still considered the material incomplete.
Based on current projections, Yang estimated humanity would need at least seventy years to reproduce the alloy independently.
Seventy years.
Drex Valen hadn't rely created a material.
He had effectively erased decades of scientific bottlenecks for humanity.
And if a fourth industrial revolution truly arrived in the future…
History would rember Drex as one of its founding architects.
...
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