So Franklin hadn't been lying about everything.
Drex Valen recorded the conversation anyway, storing every detail for later analysis. But he still refused to trust the boy completely.
That kind of caution ca naturally to a scientist.
What if the "Franklin" he t had been so disguised dinsional entity?
What if Franklin himself had ulterior motives and intentionally twisted the truth?
And besides, Drex had already been broadcasting his psychic power for quite a while now.
Still no sign of the Phoenix Force.
Which ant either Franklin had omitted sothing… or the process took longer than expected.
anwhile, Earth's political landscape had started settling into a new balance.
Or rather, a more corrupt version of the old one.
S.H.I.E.L.D., under Alexander Pierce's leadership, had its annual budget slashed by more than half.
An intelligence organization that hadn't even existed for a full year had already been gutted politically.
The CIA, on the other hand, received a massive increase in classified funding.
An absurd amount.
Of course, anyone who understood how Arican intelligence agencies actually operated knew congressional funding was only part of the equation.
If the CIA relied solely on legal appropriations, it would have collapsed decades ago.
Coups.
Proxy wars.
Political destabilization.
Smuggling networks.
Narco-financing.
The global drug trade had long since beco one of the hidden arteries feeding modern intelligence operations.
Afghanistan alone was proof enough.
After the U.S. invasion in 2001, opium production exploded. Within just a few years, Afghanistan beca the world's largest heroin supplier. Entire regions turned into industrial-scale poppy farms, feeding markets across Europe and North Arica.
Officially, everyone condemned narcotics.
Unofficially, too many people profited from them.
Cartels, banks, intelligence agencies, warlords, private military contractors, politicians. Entire economic ecosystems had rooted themselves around the drug trade.
And where there was narcotics money, there was money laundering.
Major banks had already been caught processing cartel money before. The fines they paid were laughable compared to the profits involved.
Nobody truly wanted the system destroyed.
Not completely.
Even the Global Defense Bureau operated on a budget exceeding one hundred billion dollars annually. Officially, it ca from United Nations funding.
Unofficially?
Drex could make a few educated guesses.
The narcotics economy had word itself too deeply into global infrastructure to erase cleanly.
And technically, dismantling it wasn't even within the Bureau's jurisdiction.
But that didn't an Drex intended to leave it untouched.
Drugs weakened humanity.
Blunted ambition.
Destroyed potential.
From his perspective, that made narcotics just another threat to human evolution.
Which ant the Monster Association could be very useful.
After all, monsters didn't distinguish between "good" humans and "bad" humans. If they happened to destroy drug production facilities and destabilize narcotics networks…
The resulting chaos would ignite hatred from criminal organizations, corrupt financiers, and the people making fortunes off the trade.
At the sa ti, it would make the Global Defense Bureau look even more necessary.
Two birds.
One very large stone.
Afghanistan.
xico.
Latin Arica.
Even regions that publicly claid to have replaced narcotics crops with legitimate agriculture were still producing drugs in secret.
And the locations Drex didn't already know about?
Black Queen could uncover them easily enough.
Afghanistan.
Territory controlled by the Ten Rings.
Fields of blooming poppies stretched endlessly across the mountainside, waves of pale pink flowers swaying beneath the wind like clouds spilled onto the earth.
Won, elderly workers, and children moved silently through the fields harvesting opium bulbs by hand.
Only those who turned over enough raw product received food from the Ten Rings.
If the crop failed, they starved.
That was the system.
Under Ten Rings control, the Pashtun settlents in the region cultivated tens of thousands of acres of poppies. And this was only one of dozens of such farms scattered throughout Afghanistan.
Everyone grew poppies here.
The Taliban.
The Ten Rings.
Local tribes.
Warlords.
The entire country had beco chained to narcotics production.
Without drug money, they couldn't buy weapons.
Without weapons, they couldn't survive.
The cycle fed itself endlessly.
Clusters of filthy children sat near the fields in eerie silence.
Most had rotten teeth.
So parents fed their children small amounts of opium to keep them quiet while they worked. Crying stopped quickly once the drug took hold.
None of them understood addiction.
To them, it was simply survival.
Several workers were missing hands.
Punishnt from the Ten Rings.
Anyone caught hiding product for themselves lost a limb.
This land was already dying.
It didn't need Iron Man.
It didn't need Captain Arica.
And it certainly didn't need gods.
What it needed was destruction.
Whether anything better could rise afterward depended entirely on the people left standing in the ashes.
Then the sky split open.
A gigantic figure crashed down from above.
"HAHAHAHA! Humans! I am the Ice Cream Monster, born from eating too much ice cream! Tremble before !"
The monster slamd both hands into the ground.
A tidal wave of frozen cream exploded outward.
The substance looked harmless at first glance, colorful and soft like lting dessert, but its temperature was catastrophically low. Flesh froze solid on contact. Skin blackened. Muscle tissue shattered apart monts later.
Before it could reach the workers, the poppy fields were swallowed first.
Endless rows of flowers vanished beneath expanding layers of supernatural frost.
The won, elderly workers, and children stared blankly.
The poppies were gone.
Which ant the food was gone too.
In the distance, alarms erupted across Ten Rings territory.
The destruction had been impossible to miss.
And what truly drove the Ten Rings into a frenzy wasn't the monster itself.
It was the fact that their poppy fields had just been annihilated.
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