"Be good, Hulk. I want to be your friend."
After a fair amount of very one-sided "friendly conversation," Drex finally used his psionic power to soothe the raging giant.
If he pushed the Hulk too hard and crushed that raw, limitless potential too early, then all that beautiful rage-to-strength growth would die before it had a chance to bloom.
The Hulk cald down.
Then he collapsed into unconsciousness and shifted back into Bruce Banner.
Drex carried Banner back to Blade Technology Industries.
Dr. Connors took over imdiately and drew blood samples from Banner's body.
"Careful," Drex warned. "He's saturated with high-concentration gamma radiation."
Connors nodded and suited up before continuing his work. Even as a beast soldier, he was not immune to being cooked alive by prolonged gamma exposure.
If Drex could turn the Hulk into a serum, then he could build an entire Hulk army.
The thought was enough to make him almost grin.
A Hulk army.
That would be enough to sweep across the stars.
What Three Great Empires? What Dark Council? None of them would matter.
Then everything stopped.
The air itself seed to freeze.
Connors stood motionless mid-action, and a figure in a brilliant orange cloak appeared without warning.
"Stop."
The voice was calm, but it carried absolute authority.
The Ancient One stood before Drex, head shaved smooth, expression unreadable.
"Your actions are seriously affecting the future."
For all the other changes Drex had forced into the world, the Ancient One had not interfered. Not for War Machines. Not for secondary kryptonite. Not for the Firestarter reactor, Vitamin Infinity, or the beast soldiers.
But Hulk research was different.
This was a rupture.
The future had gone blurry. Distorted. Unreadable.
Drex knew exactly who he was looking at, but he did not say it.
Instead, he played it like a first eting.
"And you are?"
"I am a sorcerer," the Ancient One said. "Mr. Valen, I need you to abandon your research into the Hulk."
Drex looked at her for a mont, then nodded.
"Fine."
There was no point pretending otherwise.
Right now, he was not a match for her.
If he pushed this, the Hulk project would die here.
The Ancient One gave him a slight nod, as if she had expected exactly that kind of answer, then departed as quietly as she had arrived.
Ti resud.
Connors blinked, still standing in the sa pose, only now the blood sample and Banner were both gone.
"What happened, boss?"
Drex's expression had already gone flat again.
"Nothing. Continue your beast soldier research."
Then he vanished.
He did not ask to go study magic at Kamar-Taj.
That world ca with a price tag attached.
Magic in the Marvel universe always did. Even white magic under the Vishanti had a cost. Maybe not as ugly as demon bargains, but still a cost. Power extracted paynt sowhere, and Drex had no interest in handing over his soul just to borrow a few spells.
Besides, people liked to joke that Kryptonians had poor magic resistance.
That was a joke.
Not a weakness.
If the Ancient One would not let him study the Hulk, then he would simply study the Red Hulk.
Ross was already right there. If gamma radiation could make Banner into a monster, then it could make Ross into one too.
That would solve the problem from another angle.
But for now, Drex had sothing more imdiate to do.
He slipped into Tony Stark's ho.
Black Queen masked his presence and suppressed JARVIS's awareness, while Drex scanned the floor plan of the Stark estate and the industrial model data tied to Stark Industries.
That was enough.
He extracted the particle structure of the new elent.
Back ho, he started working imdiately.
That was when the real work began.
Kryptonian chemistry and Earth chemistry overlapped in so places, but not enough to make this easy. This elent was unlike anything he had seen before. In a way, it was impressive that Howard Stark had even found it in the first place.
Once Drex understood the particle structure, reproduction beca simple.
In principle, a naturally radioactive alpha stream could be used to synthesize the elent, with the help of an accelerator.
That was one possibility.
Another was that the elent was not truly an elent in the ordinary sense at all, but an exotic isotope or stable energized state tied to the Cosmic Cube's energy signature. That would explain how Stark had managed to derive it in the first place.
After all, Earth's technology at the ti should not have been capable of identifying sothing like that under normal conditions.
Still, Drex was less interested in the academic debate and more interested in what it could do.
If Stark could use it to store massive energy in a compact form, then so could he.
A battery with absurd capacity.
A power source that could hold enough energy to feed systems far beyond the current standard.
And if he could stabilize it properly, then the applications were endless.
Power. Armor. Flight systems. Weaponization.
Everything.
Drex looked over the data once more, then smiled faintly.
This world was full of gifts.
The trick was knowing which ones were traps.
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