"Dr. Banner."
"Don't co any closer!"
The mont those words left his mouth, Bruce Banner's whole body burned hot with panic. Then his reason snapped.
Drex watched it happen in real ti.
Banner's skin turned green.
His fra swelled.
And in just a few breaths, the man in front of him beca a towering monster of muscle and rage.
Drex looked up at the giant and tilted his head slightly.
"Should I scream now? Or say, 'Oh my God'?"
The joke was dry, almost lazy.
He was supposed to use psionic power to calm the Hulk down, and under normal circumstances he would have. But Drex had co here for more than Banner's nuclear physics.
He had co because he wanted to fight.
"Hulk!!!"
The giant roared at him with raw fury.
Not hatred, though.
Not yet.
The Hulk had been born only monts ago. Right now, he was still simple. A child made of rage and muscle, with no real malice behind the bellow.
Drex waited a second.
Then he raised one hand and flicked a finger against the Hulk's chest.
Boom.
The monster launched backward like he had been hit by a cannon, crashing through tree after tree until he finally stopped.
That did it.
The Hulk got angry.
Even bigger, too.
"Hulk!"
He charged back in, ca down with a fist the size of a car, and smashed it straight into Drex's head.
Drex did not budge.
Not an inch.
The ground under his feet did not even crack.
The shockwave and kinetic force vanished the mont they reached him, swallowed by his body and converted into strength.
The Hulk's fist, however, did not survive the encounter.
The massive knuckles bent inward at a horrible angle, like a normal man had punched a slab of steel and lost.
The Hulk howled in pain.
Drex's eyes flashed red.
Heat vision tore out from them in a brilliant beam.
It struck the Hulk full in the body, lting through his impossible skin and boring deep into the flesh beneath. The beam punched straight through him.
The Hulk roared louder.
Angrier.
The wound healed in front of Drex's eyes, and the creature's body grew even more powerful as it did.
Then the Hulk ripped up a tree and hurled it like a spear.
Drex did not even bother to raise a hand.
The tree smashed into him and exploded into splinters.
The Hulk stared at the remains in confusion.
Just long enough for Drex to move.
Crackle.
He lifted one hand, and the energy inside him converted into electricity.
A massive bolt of lightning slamd into the Hulk.
Ten thousand volts, then more.
The monster convulsed violently, trembling from head to toe, but only for a mont.
He fought through it.
Drex was faster.
His power shifted again.
This ti the energy beca wind.
A violent gust burst outward and beca a screaming hurricane in an instant. The Hulk dug in his feet, trying to brace himself against the ground, but the force caught him anyway and dragged him into the storm.
The wind kept feeding on itself, spiraling harder and harder until the simple hurricane beca sothing much worse.
A super hurricane.
The Hulk spun helplessly inside it, slamd around by invisible force while Drex stood outside the storm with complete composure.
Black Queen had already blanketed the area in suppression fields, so no satellite would notice the sixth-level disaster ripping through the wilderness.
Humanity barely had a category five scale for hurricanes.
If they knew a six had just happened, Washington would probably start praying.
Drex, anwhile, did not feel like so unbeatable god.
He just felt like a man who had found a very inconvenient ceiling.
Above him was the Father-level tier, and even that was only a midpoint in the Marvel cosmos. Reaching it would take ti. A lot of ti.
Still, he was not unhappy.
"In a way, this counts as using softness to overco hardness," he muttered.
Watching the Hulk, a brute with absurd strength, get dragged around by an invisible current without any way to strike back… yes, this definitely qualified.
Drex nodded to himself, satisfied.
Then he noticed the Hulk was not getting weaker.
If anything, the monster was growing.
Wider.
Heavier.
Harder to move.
A newborn Hulk had no training, no fear, no discipline. He would not be cowed easily.
So Drex absorbed most of the wind energy back into himself, and the hurricane vanished.
The mont the Hulk hit the ground, he lunged at Drex like a starving animal.
Drex welcod him.
He drove a straight punch into the Hulk's chest.
Deep.
Then he rolled with the motion and threw the monster over his shoulder.
Even on Krypton, Drex had not been a soldier by profession. But he had the Life Codex, and that ant he had inherited the full spectrum of Kryptonian potential. Military strength was part of that package.
Add in a super brain, and Earth's fighting styles were trivial.
An hour of study had been enough to make them second nature.
The Hulk landed and tried to rise.
Drex was already on him.
He hauled the monster up and snapped him backward in a brutal spine break.
Crack.
The Hulk scread.
His spine had been broken clean through.
Then Drex went for the joints.
Joint locks. Dislocations. Muscle and tendon destruction.
The kind of technique that would make ordinary martial artists blanch.
He used the Eagle Claw style's most vicious thod, turning steel-hard hands into instrunts of surgical cruelty. One by one, the Hulk's major joints were torn apart.
The monster howled and thrashed, but with every second Drex remained calm.
At last, the Hulk collapsed onto the ground, his entire body reduced to miserable twitching.
His eyes were bloodshot, bulging with rage, but he still could not do a thing to Drex.
A quick scan with Drex's x-ray vision told the rest of the story.
The Hulk's body was already repairing itself at absurd speed, even after that level of damage.
What a monster.
The Hulk's internal voice, if it had one, would have been saying the exact sa thing.
Who the hell was the monster here?
Less than ten seconds later, he had already healed back to full.
And he was still furious.
If anything, he looked more annoyed that he had not been able to make Drex sweat.
So Drex blew out a breath.
Frozen breath.
The air instantly flashed white, and the moisture in the atmosphere locked solid. The Hulk was caught in the blast and turned into a giant green ice sculpture.
Drex did not give him ti to recover.
He reached inward with psionic force, tugging at the cosmic energy around him.
Then the power of Captain Marvel answered.
A glowing photon mass gathered in Drex's palm.
He pushed it forward.
Photon energy burst outward in a concentrated wave and slamd into the frozen Hulk. It did not explode. It simply drove him backward with crushing force, pure radiant impact tearing through him and leaving him in agony.
"Hulk!!!"
The Hulk roared once more.
Drex was already there.
He teleported straight above him, grabbed the top of that massive green skull, and slamd it into the ground with one hand.
"Can you say anything else?" Drex asked. "Co on. Repeat after ."
He seized the Hulk by the head.
"Drex Valen is the strongest and the best!"
Boom.
To make sure the lesson stuck, Drex drove the Hulk straight into the earth.
Then he punched through the ground by hand.
A huge green arm burst out from below, trying to wrap around him and drag him in. The Hulk pushed with everything he had, trying to wrench Drex into his embrace, but Drex stood there like a statue.
Not moving.
Not giving ground.
The Hulk strained until the veins in his arm looked ready to burst, and still he could not shift Drex even an inch.
Instead, Drex grabbed the arm, gave it a light yank, and the earth exploded upward in a spray of dirt and rock.
The Hulk was yanked into the air.
Drex teleported above him in an instant, lifted his right leg, and ca down in a brutal axe kick.
The Hulk's bones snapped under the force.
Gravity and montum did the rest.
The monster slamd into the ground hard enough to carve a crater hundreds of ters across and several ters deep.
The impact shook the forest apart.
The shockwave shattered the Hulk's organs, and the green giant coughed up pieces of them along with a spray of blood laced with high-intensity gamma radiation.
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