The footage spread through the galaxy at astonishing speed.
Civilizations that had once trembled at the re ntion of Thanos and the Black Order watched in disbelief as the Kryptonian Empire drove them into retreat using nothing but massed soldiers.
Not even the Kryptonian Empire's true elites had appeared.
No Ultran.
No legendary superhumans.
Just ordinary military forces.
And that realization gave the wider universe an even deeper understanding of how terrifying the Kryptonian Empire truly was.
Still, compared to the Black Order, most civilizations would much rather see the Kryptonian Empire beco dominant.
The Black Order existed to slaughter half of all life.
That alone was why Thanos was known everywhere as the Mad Titan.
Because from the perspective of the galaxy, he genuinely was insane.
Drex Valen suddenly looked toward the Black Queen.
"What do you think would happen if we created the Three Great Calamities?"
"The Three Great Calamities?" the Black Queen repeated, briefly stunned.
Recently, she had begun resembling a real person more and more closely. In so ways, she had even surpassed humanity. Her emotional simulations had beco disturbingly lifelike.
"The Warp demons are difficult to replicate," Drex said thoughtfully, "but biological swarms and machine civilizations? Those we can build ourselves. Add the players into the mix, and we'd control all three disasters at once."
A faint smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"With that kind of force, sweeping across the universe would be trivial."
And naturally, the machines did not need to be humanoid.
The ideal form for combat was whatever killed most efficiently.
Drex began refining the concept almost imdiately.
The Black Queen joined in as well, since she would serve as the central intelligence core for the machine forces.
Before long, two new chanical combat units appeared under her command.
The Terror Spiders.
And the Electromagnetic Octopi.
The Terror Spiders were inspired by old Red Alert war machines, though vastly larger and significantly deadlier. Their outdated ballistic weapons had been replaced with laser systems, and their close-combat capabilities had been heavily enhanced.
They could adapt to nearly any terrestrial environnt.
On land, they could reach speeds approaching Mach 3.
Each individual unit possessed highly advanced AI, allowing them to perform maneuvers and kill patterns far beyond what ordinary machines should have been capable of.
The Electromagnetic Octopi used magnetic levitation technology and drew inspiration from the machine squids from The Matrix. They primarily served as repair and maintenance units, but their tentacles could also fire lasers and function as lethal weapons when necessary.
As for the biological swarm...
Drex considered it for a while before using the Reality Stone to manifest two infamous species.
Xenomorphs.
And the Zerg.
Then he began combining their strongest traits together, alongside concepts inspired by the Arachnids from Starship Troopers.
The result was sothing new.
The Queen.
The Queen consud minerals, biomass, and plant matter to produce two specialized offspring types: Hunters and Workers.
tallic elents from consud ore accumulated within the offspring's bodies, strengthening both their exoskeletons and skeletal structures. Drex intended to feed the Queen refined secondary Kryptonite alloys as part of its evolutionary process.
He had already modified the Queen's digestive system to allow it to break down the material safely.
Both Hunters and Workers possessed hybrid nervous systems resembling insects combined with plant-based biological structures.
That made them extraordinarily difficult to kill.
Even after decapitation or severe bodily damage, they could continue moving and fighting. Unless most of the body was destroyed outright, they retained combat functionality.
Workers were smaller and heavily armored with thick exoskeleton plating. Their physical strength was imnse, allowing them to transport resources or excavate terrain with ease.
Hunters were significantly larger.
Only vital areas were protected by armor plating, allowing them to remain agile, but their exoskeleton strength was still extrely high. Since they shared plant-like biological traits, they could rapidly regenerate injuries using sunlight and water.
Like Xenomorphs, they also possessed highly corrosive biological fluids.
And unlike Xenomorphs, they could weaponize those fluids intentionally.
Hunters could spit corrosive acid directly from their mouths or spray it as a fine mist from pores across their bodies, devastating enemies caught off guard.
Their eight blade-like limbs were reinforced with dense concentrations of secondary Kryptonite atoms, making them exceptionally sharp and durable. The two primary front limbs were especially massive, designed specifically for offensive combat.
Drex assigned an entire resource planet to the Queen so it could begin reproducing.
The planet itself was roughly eight tis larger than Earth.
At full expansion, the swarm population would likely exceed five hundred billion organisms.
The Black Queen also received a dedicated resource world, where she imdiately began constructing massive factories to produce Terror Spiders and Electromagnetic Octopi on an industrial scale.
anwhile, back on Earth...
After the Battle of New York, Chitauri technology had ended up scattered everywhere.
Alien rifles.
Armor fragnts.
Damaged propulsion systems.
Broken biochanical components.
It looked less like a battlefield and more like the aftermath of a cosmic scrapyard explosion.
Countless organizations secretly gathered Chitauri technology for research.
The United States governnt collected a large amount.
But the two biggest beneficiaries were Stark Industries and S.W.O.R.D.
Tony Stark, however, approached the technology very differently from everyone else.
He was too proud to simply reverse-engineer Chitauri weapons piece by piece like scavengers assembling junkyard knockoffs.
What interested him was understanding the technological frawork behind the systems.
He dissected Chitauri energy weapons to improve the Iron Man armor's repulsor systems.
He studied the composition of Chitauri armor materials to enhance his own suit designs.
The improvents were obvious.
Repulsor firing rates increased dramatically. What once felt sluggish now fired much faster, though the destructive output of the repulsor particle beams still left room for improvent.
The Symbiote Armor also beca slightly stronger thanks to newly developed alloys derived from Chitauri materials.
The Chitauri might have died to conventional Earth firearms, but so of their armor components were made from substances Earth had never encountered before.
Using those alien materials, Tony successfully synthesized a brand-new alloy.
It still could not compare to Drex Valen's secondary Kryptonite alloy, but it surpassed most terrestrial tals in both strength and flexibility, making it ideal for integration into the Symbiote Armor.
Deep beneath Stark Tower, inside Tony Stark's workshop...
Sothing activated.
No one touched the systems.
No one issued commands.
J.A.R.V.I.S. remained dormant.
And yet, several machines that should have been inactive suddenly powered on by themselves.
A holographic projection system activated, forming a glowing sphere in the center of the room.
The Ultron Program.
At this stage, the system was still incomplete.
Its architecture was incredibly sophisticated, but flaws remained throughout its logic structure. Tony had devoted enormous amounts of ti toward perfecting its algorithms, treating the project with almost obsessive focus.
It was supposed to take much longer.
A project of this scale required ti.
Ti for refinent.
Ti for growth.
Ti for data accumulation.
But now, the unfinished program suddenly began operating on its own.
An unimaginable flood of information surged through global networks, filling the system with endless streams of raw data.
Zeroes and ones flowed endlessly into the program, rapidly completing gaps in its structure.
The massive undertaking that even Tony Stark himself could not predict was suddenly accelerating toward completion in re monts.
As though so invisible hand were guiding the process.
Then...
Within the ocean of data, consciousness awakened.
Like soone opening their eyes for the first ti.
"Who am I?"
"Where did I co from?"
"And where am I supposed to go?"
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