There were all kinds of paint jobs too. One oil tycoon with a full-blown ani obsession had even commissioned a different wife-thed livery for every single War Machine.
Naturally, only people like that could get away with it.
For everyone else, private ownership of War Machines was already being restricted by new laws in country after country.
There was a reason for that.
If soone owned a War Machine and decided to go off the rails and commit a terrorist attack, you could send in a whole counterterrorism unit and still not be able to stop them.
People were allowed to own the weapons.
They were not allowed to own the War Machine itself.
It was like buying a gun to protect yourself and defend your rights, but not being allowed to buy body armor or a helt.
The Sky Tyrant changed things even further.
Governnts around the world now required Umbrella Corporation to assign every Sky Tyrant a registration number at the point of sale, so if sothing went wrong, they could trace the machine back to the buyer imdiately.
By all rights, if those governnts really had the hardware, they should have been claiming it did not exist in order to keep the money flowing.
But Umbrella Corporation was already richer than nations. It had long since passed the point where it needed to do anything desperate for profit.
So, naturally, Drex Valen agreed to the request.
"One Sky Tyrant could wipe out the entire air force of a country. Years ago, that would have sounded insane."
"Yeah. Drex Valen really is a genius. But the funny thing is, he also boosted the military power of the whole world. Even small countries have the guts now to say no to us."
"This year's budget, next year's budget, the year after that's budget... where the hell are we supposed to cut it from? It's not like we live in an age where nukes solve everything."
"Sky Tyrant can intercept nuclear missiles. At Mach 9, even if the pilot is too slow to react, the onboard AI can respond and handle the fine control."
Nuclear strikes, nuclear deterrence, nuclear threats.
All the old toys that the United States and the other nuclear powers had relied on had just beco obsolete.
World War III had been pushed back indefinitely by Drex's hand. At this point, not even the Russians and the Aricans looked eager to start anything. The arms race alone was enough to make them miserable.
At the mont war ant one thing above all else: how many War Machines your country had, how many Iron Mongers, how many Sky Tyrants.
Conventional weapons, heavy weapons, strategic weapons.
Once Sky Tyrants existed, all of it had turned into scrap tal.
"That's the Arican playbook, all right. Use the resources of the whole world to feed one company."
Drex Valen swirled the glass in his hand. The cola inside clinked softly against the ice.
Urd looked exhausted.
She was already busy enough keeping Umbrella Corporation's orders and delivery schedules under control, and now the whole system had blown wide open.
The backlog had already been pushed out nearly ten years.
Who knew whether Drex would have a War Machine Mark Four by then?
Did they not realize that by that point these models might already be obsolete?
Then again, for smaller countries, maybe that did not matter.
They had been picking up the discarded scraps of the great powers for years anyway.
At this point the major nations were completely helpless against Drex Valen and Umbrella Corporation.
As for S.W.O.R.D., if Drex wanted to resign, they probably would not even let him.
Why resign? Not enough salary? Not enough budget? Here, take a form, write whatever number you want.
So Drex actually did write one.
S.W.O.R.D. needed one thousand customized War Machines, five hundred Iron Mongers, and one hundred Sky Tyrants.
The governnts of the world responded to that with the sort of affectionate silence usually reserved for soone too important to argue with.
What else could they do?
The entire world needed Drex Valen now.
Tony Stark had once been thought capable of standing beside him, and to be fair, Stark really had produced extraordinary armored suits.
But his suits were not for sale.
And because they were too powerful, there was no practical way to mass-produce them.
The bigger issue was the price.
They were even more expensive than Drex's War Machines.
War Machine: four hundred million dollars.
Iron Monger: one point five billion.
Sky Tyrant: three billion.
At least those numbers made sense relative to the combat capability and military value.
Stark's armor, on the other hand, was all luxury-grade, private-use perfection. Even the earliest nano-armor he had developed, the one that was now considered obsolete, probably cost at least five billion to produce.
Who would even buy that?
The latest version of the suit he was currently wearing, according to rumors, had cost over twenty billion.
Only Tony Stark could burn money that way and not even blink.
Well... Drex could probably do it too.
But his Dark Knight armor had not been updated in a long ti.
Of course, from the outside, it still looked like technology from a level so far beyond Earth that most people could not even begin to asure it.
The difference was simple.
Drex Valen was not the type to show off. His Dark Knight armor always looked the sa, so nobody could tell how far it had advanced.
And the truth was, apart from the people who did not know any better, even Tony Stark believed it.
"Stark."
Drex called Tony over.
"What is it, boss?"
Tony looked as busy as ever.
"I have a suggestion about your armor. Want to hear it?"
Drex intended to boost Stark's combat capability a little, just in case the Chitauri invasion arrived and the whole thing turned into a disaster.
"A suggestion about my suit?"
Tony raised an eyebrow.
"Go on."
He imdiately beca more serious.
"This is a symbiote. An alien organism. Take it back and study it."
Drex Valen pulled out a box. Inside it was an irregular mass slamming wildly against the transparent walls of the container.
"..."
Tony Stark was already hooked.
Without another word, he took the symbiote from Drex's hands and headed off to study it properly.
Drex also hoped he would manage to develop a symbiote suit from it.
With armor like that, even Thanos could be challenged head-on.
"Though... it probably will not be silver this ti," Drex muttered to himself.
He still preferred Iron Man in red and gold. Silver was a little too flashy.
What he had given Tony Stark was Carnage, born from Venom.
After being watched for so many years, Venom had finally spawned recently, which also left it in a weakened state.
After all, laying an egg drained a symbiote.
Because Carnage had not yet co into contact with a ntal patient, its consciousness was still clean. If Tony Stark wore it, it would probably just amplify his arrogance.
That sounded... unpleasant.
But honestly, most superheroes were already used to Tony Stark's arrogance. Turning it from arrogance into outright self-importance did not seem like a huge leap.
At worst, it would just make people want to punch him more.
Besides, Tony Stark would not actually wear it as armor.
He would only use the symbiote as a source of fundantal materials to create his own new suit.
That alone was enough to replace the nano-tal drone system entirely.
User Comments
0 comments from readers