The Winter Soldier was built that way.
He wasn't a machine, exactly. He had enough mind left to think, enough instinct left to improvise, but not enough humanity to make him sentintal. Emotions, for him, were more like distant weather than sothing that actually governed his life.
"Alright," Drex Valen said with a faint smile. "Let's take the champion to collect his prize."
He would not have minded if S.H.I.E.L.D. had sent Hawkeye instead. That would have been interesting. But it looked like the Hydra-infested branch of S.H.I.E.L.D. was patient for once.
Or maybe Nick Fury had been tied up by sothing else.
Because if he had seen one hundred War Machines sitting on a table, he would have lunged for them without hesitation.
No one would have been able to stop him.
As Bucky was escorted away, the Hydra agents lurking nearby felt sothing was off, but they could only wait outside and hope for a better opening.
anwhile, Blonsky and several bio-enhanced soldiers moved through the crowd without drawing attention, quietly dragging away the targets Drex had already marked.
It was almost unfair.
Drex was a Kryptonian with psionic abilities now. He had read the ntal fluctuations in the crowd the mont they surfaced, like the world had opened a private channel straight into his head. The Hydra operatives were the easiest to spot. Their thoughts were the loudest.
They were nervous.
Restless.
Predatory.
So he picked them out first.
"Let go of ! Do you know who I am?"
"You better think hard before you put your hands on !"
The Hydra agents were shoved into a black Chevrolet SUV, and after that, their voices disappeared.
Blonsky climbed out of the vehicle and imdiately signaled the surrounding bio-enhanced soldiers to spread out and keep watch. If sothing went wrong, he wanted eyes on every direction.
The transformation had changed him in more ways than one.
Even without shifting, his base form had beco monstrously strong. He could take on a hundred versions of his old self and win. The more he understood that power, the more he wanted what Drex had promised next.
The ultimate bio-enhanced soldier.
The beast god general.
And beyond that?
If World Serpent kept moving like this, it might end up rewriting the entire planet's balance of power.
Between Drex Valen, War Machine, and the bio-enhanced soldiers, they were already decades ahead of everyone else.
Bucky was taken into the lab.
The second he was brought in, Drex used his psionic force to lock down his mind. Around the room, several other chosen super bio-enhanced candidates were already lying in their tanks, waiting for their own turn.
"Boss," Connors asked as he secured Bucky to the table, "what do you want to turn him into?"
Drex glanced at the man in front of him and answered without hesitation.
"The strongest one."
He liked Barnes. There was no reason not to. Captain Arica's best friend had to be worth sothing, right?
The strongest super bio-enhanced soldier was the one with a triple skeletal structure. The original bones, plus two additional exoskeletal layers, wrapped in an exterior shell made from an extrely hard biological material.
Drex had already decided what to call that form.
Asura Horn Beetle.
The unlucky Hydra agents he had collected were converted into bio-enhanced soldiers as well. After that, Drex used them as his own underground links, letting them trace the Hydra chain upward until he could grab their handlers too.
Then he'd do the sa thing again.
And again.
If the opportunity was right, he might even turn Hydra itself into one of his assets.
But Hydra had too many heads.
The Baron handling the Inhuman project was one thing. The Viper in Japan was another. Depending on whether this world followed the films or the comics, Drex didn't want to take unnecessary risks.
Not yet.
"Once I'm stronger," he thought, "then I'll deal with them."
Inside S.H.I.E.L.D., Nick Fury sat in his office with his usual deadpan expression.
Outside, the temperature was a blistering forty degrees.
Inside, he still wore that absurdly heavy coat.
There were reasons for that.
First, the office air conditioning was strong enough to freeze a corpse. Second, the coat had its own cooling system built in, so he didn't even feel the heat. Third, the thing concealed more weapons and intelligence tools than most governnts had access to. And fourth, it was excellent at stopping bullets.
He stared at the data in front of him.
"An unrestricted combat tournant," he muttered. "What the hell is Drex Valen planning?"
S.H.I.E.L.D. had obviously been watching him.
A man like that could not be ignored.
But Fury hadn't found anything suspicious about Drex Valen's identity. Once Drex had created Black Queen, he had Black Queen clean up the records, erase the Midnight Hotel trail, and rewrite the background into sothing neat and believable.
From the outside, it looked clean.
Too clean.
Fury had originally thought Tony Stark would be S.H.I.E.L.D.'s big hope. He had spent plenty of ti watching him, protecting him, making sure he didn't get himself killed before he beca useful.
Then another genius had appeared.
A younger one.
One with more raw output.
One with more ambition.
Secondary Kryptonite. War Machine. Miniature arc reactor technology.
Each one of those alone would have been enough to put Drex Valen beside the greatest scientific minds of the century. Einstein. Tesla. Maybe even a few nas the public had never heard of because governnts had buried them.
The problem was that S.H.I.E.L.D. on the surface was just what it claid to be: a global security organization founded by the big powers to keep the world from tearing itself apart.
It wasn't supposed to have a private army of War Machines.
If it did, Fury could have quietly redirected enough budget to buy a hundred or two.
But that was not the world he lived in.
He wanted Drex working for S.H.I.E.L.D.
That much was obvious.
But you could not force a man like that.
You could only make yourself useful enough that he chose you.
Then ca the report.
Drex had contacted Wilson Fisk and arranged an underground fight event.
Fury stared at the file for a long mont.
This was what he was doing?
Hosting black-market cage matches with the Kingpin?
The first thought that crossed Fury's mind was that it sounded ridiculous.
Fisk was dangerous, sure, but not in the sa league. If Fury wanted him gone, he could make that happen with a single order. There were more important pieces on the board than the Kingpin of New York.
So why was Drex using him?
The answer ca a little later.
One of Fury's people found out that Drex Valen had made another breakthrough in biology. The tournant, apparently, was tied to that invention.
Fury's expression changed.
Now that was different.
If Drex had another world-changing invention sitting out there, then it was only a matter of ti before the wrong people took notice. And if the wrong people got their hands on it…
S.H.I.E.L.D. would be cleaning up the ss for years.
He made a decision.
Black Widow would go in.
She would infiltrate Blade Technology Industries, get close to Drex, and make sure that invention stayed protected. Or at least that was the official justification Fury would give himself.
If things went sideways, Natasha Romanoff was still one of the best tools he had.
"Drex."
Urd entered the lab on a pair of sharp heels, passing through the voice lock and the mouth scan without issue.
The mont she stepped inside, she saw him.
Drex Valen was working shirtless, his upper body exposed under the lab lights. He was bent over his equipnt, focused and calm, one hand adjusting sothing delicate while the other moved with the ease of soone who had long since stopped worrying about ordinary human limits.
Urd's heartbeat picked up.
That was unfair.
The angles of his shoulders. The line of his collarbone. The hard definition of his abdon.
It was the kind of sight that made concentration difficult for entirely unscientific reasons.
"Obadiah Stane from Stark Industries wants to speak with you," she said, forcing her tone back into professional territory.
Drex didn't even look up right away.
"Obadiah?"
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