Drex Valen found Hydra's sches mildly entertaining at best.
The Hand interested him even less. Unless the Black Sky appeared, the organization barely registered on his radar.
That said, a Hand-controlled Ghost Rider would definitely beco a headache.
anwhile, Hydra had reached the point where the pressure surrounding the stolen Decepticons beca unbearable.
Reluctantly, they dumped all one hundred units in a hidden location and anonymously leaked the coordinates.
As painful as it was to give them up, they understood the alternative was worse.
If the investigation continued long enough, Hydra itself would eventually be dragged into the light.
And once that happened, they were finished.
After recovering the missing Decepticons, Nick Fury still refused to ease up on the internal investigation.
Traitors. Sleeper agents. Suspicious factions.
Everything remained under scrutiny.
The reason was simple:
The strongest man on Earth stood behind S.W.O.R.D.
As long as Drex Valen remained on their side, Fury wasn't afraid of anyone.
Neither were his agents.
The fear generated by the Saiyan invasion and the Chitauri incident accelerated S.W.O.R.D.'s restructuring far beyond anyone's expectations.
Governnts that usually moved with the speed of rusted machinery suddenly operated like they were being chased by extinction itself.
The rebuilt S.W.O.R.D. implented mandatory monthly investigations for every single agent. Extensive background checks. Financial audits. Psychological reviews.
To prevent bribery or political interference, the world's major powers rotated oversight responsibilities between themselves.
No one trusted anyone anymore.
Still, their fears were sowhat misplaced.
Ironically, Earth itself was far more dangerous than most extraterrestrial civilizations.
Across the Marvel universe, truly powerful individual fighters were actually rare.
Gamora, for example, had earned a reputation as the deadliest assassin in the galaxy, yet her level of strength would hardly dominate Earth's upper tier.
The Hulk had rampaged through the Grandmaster's arena effortlessly, despite the fact that the arena collected elite combatants from countless worlds.
Earth's civilization lagged behind the interstellar empires technologically, but the planet itself was absurdly abnormal.
A random laboratory accident, radiation exposure, genetic mutation, or failed experint could produce a superhuman powerful enough to beco a major cosmic threat.
It was as though the planet itself kept generating monsters.
Most alien empires simply didn't value individual combat power the sa way Earth did.
Could the Kree Empire create super soldiers?
Of course they could.
Ronan the Accuser himself was essentially the product of advanced Kree enhancent technologies.
But from an interstellar military perspective, building fleets was far more efficient than creating singular warriors.
Why spend astronomical resources producing one super soldier when you could build another planet-killer cannon instead?
Even if soone possessed power on the level of an Eternal, what did it matter against a stellar bombardnt weapon?
When a civilization could erase planets outright, the difference between a weak individual and a powerful one often beca aningless.
There were exceptions, naturally.
But they were rare.
That imbalance explained why the Avengers repeatedly humiliated supposedly superior alien invaders.
Earth's superhumans were simply outrageous by cosmic standards.
If soone counted the number of top-tier combatants below the godlike level, Earth might genuinely rank among the highest concentrations in the universe.
The Kree had once beco intensely curious about that phenonon.
Compared to Earth's accidental superheroes, the Kree spent enormous wealth and effort creating enhanced warriors with wildly inconsistent results.
So of their best creations still fell short of the Avengers.
At one point, they had even considered capturing Earth's heroes for live experintation just to understand what made the planet so abnormal.
Ironically, most superheroes themselves had no idea how terrifying they actually were.
They were born on Earth. Raised on Earth.
To them, aliens still carried an instinctive sense of superiority and mystery.
Any extraterrestrial threat naturally made humanity nervous.
The Saiyan invasion alone had nearly pushed the world into panic.
Russia reportedly produced over a hundred nuclear warheads within a single month afterward.
The United States and China weren't much calr.
Then ca Thor's arrival.
Even though S.W.O.R.D. had contained the incident successfully, humanity finally understood how vulnerable it truly was.
The Chitauri invasion only accelerated global militarization further.
Tony Stark had even approached Drex Valen about collaborating on a more advanced Iron Legion.
Drex declined imdiately.
Given the existence of Ultron sowhere in the future tiline, he had absolutely no interest in accidentally creating a nightmare version powered by Kryptonian-level technology.
Instead, Drex chose a different approach.
If humanity wanted stronger deterrents than nuclear weapons...
He would give them one.
The announcent shook the entire world.
Drex Valen had discovered a second extra-periodic elent.
During the global press conference, the room remained utterly silent as Drex spoke.
"During a recent experintal process, I identified a new high-energy fusion-capable elent designated SG5903."
"A highly active material with extraordinary internal energy potential."
No one interrupted him.
The revelation was too overwhelming.
The discovery of even a single new elent represented a monuntal leap for human civilization.
For nations, it ant industrial revolutions, military revolutions, energy revolutions.
Everything changed.
And now Drex had discovered two.
At this point, so scientists had already begun calling him the Father of the New Elents.
Technically, Drex had only released the symbolic designations and classification frawork rather than the complete molecular structures.
But for researchers like Tony Stark, that alone was enough to begin the hunt.
Every new elent required an entirely new classification logic to define its behavior and placent.
Without ndeleev, humanity would never have properly organized the periodic table, even after discovering new elents.
In the sa way, Drex's second extra-periodic frawork essentially handed scientists both the opening clue and the final answer.
All that remained was solving the equations in between.
And that process would eventually reveal how to manufacture the elents themselves.
Drex continued calmly.
"The previously discovered elent FG2506 generates massive energy through instantaneous aggregation reactions."
"One milligram of fully combusted FG2506 releases energy equivalent to approximately two million tis the sa mass of uranium."
He paused.
"SG5903 possesses energy output exceeding that by a factor of ten."
The implications were horrifying.
Human civilization had just stepped into an entirely new era of energy science.
Or weapons developnt.
Depending on who you asked.
Umbrella Corporation wasted no ti capitalizing on the discovery.
Its newest weapons division unveiled a new category of strategic armant personally authorized by Drex Valen.
New Elent Destruction Bombs.
Or more simply:
New Elent Warheads.
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