Drex Valen's little side business was paying off beautifully.
Tarikha had been wiped clean. Every single mber, including their leader, had been hunted down by Barnes. With the soul radar active, nobody could get more than five thousand ters away before Barnes closed the gap.
The Tarikha leader's soul was so thoroughly rotten that it had automatically transford into a black hole creature inside Drex's Black Hole Dinsion.
Drex had no real use for black hole creatures, though. Powerful or not, it was better to let the Black Hole Dinsion devour it outright.
Soul energy was far stronger than the vacuum zero-point energy Drex had been absorbing on his own, and it was faster too. He had grown much stronger already, but the road to the multiverse was still far off.
No matter. Drex had found a new single universe, and it looked like a mutant universe.
He slipped into it smoothly. Even though he was a dinsion lord, Drex had a physical body, so this universe did not resist him all that strongly.
"Second universe conquered. Who should I pick as my knight this ti? Magneto?"
Drex considered the question, and right in front of a bar, a commotion suddenly broke out.
A man in a leather jacket stepped outside.
The mont Drex saw that unmistakable bushy beard, he knew he had found his knight.
When Logan lit a cigar and got into his car, he realized soone had already taken the passenger seat.
"Get the hell out of my car," Logan snapped.
Drex did not even look bothered. "Such a miserable wolf. Do you want to know your past?"
Logan froze.
He had been about to throw a punch, but those words stopped him cold.
"You know my past?"
The wandering loner could not help asking. He had spent so long searching for his own history, trying to learn whether he had family, trying to figure out who he had been before everything went dark.
"Of course." Drex's expression stayed calm. "But first, you need to sign a contract."
He had expanded the contract business too. With a casual motion, he produced a sheet of parchnt.
"What are you, the devil?"
Logan frowned at the incomprehensible writing on the page and imdiately sensed sothing was off.
"No. I'm the benevolent god of destruction and ruin."
Drex said it with complete righteousness. Devil? He had no idea what Logan was talking about.
Logan reached out to tear the parchnt in half.
The mont his fingers touched it, pain shot through him and a drop of blood fell onto the contract.
"That's enough. Your past is actually very simple..."
Drex put the contract away.
Logan had been getting impatient, but once Drex began explaining his history, the restless fury in him gave way to focus. He listened, completely absorbed.
To make sure he was being perfectly fair, Drex even showed Logan the whole thing as a film reel, practically screening him his own prequel.
After watching his story unfold, Logan fell silent.
He lit another cigar.
"Contract complete."
Drex smiled, then vanished.
Logan knew exactly what he needed to do now.
He needed to hunt the wicked.
Ti was forever.
His target was the Reyes Group in Texas, where he was currently staying.
The Reyes Group smuggled hallucinogens through the area. Their drugs ca up from xico and Colombia and were funneled into the United States through their routes.
A lot of the group's mbers were mutants. Ruthless, cruel, and depraved. Anyone who crossed them ended up losing everything. The only way to stay alive was to leave Texas entirely.
The FBI had planned several operations against Reyes before. Every single one had ended in heavy losses and no results.
A brand-new Dodge Ram drove along the interstate with the volu blasted all the way up, tallica's "Fade to Black" roaring from the speakers.
"Life it seems, will fade away
Drifting further every day"
In the passenger seat sat a bald Latino youth with a thick beard. He had a little girl clutched in one hand.
His body was covered in bite marks and claw scratches, blood running down his skin. Clearly, taking her had not been easy.
"Fuck! Benny, I really don't get why we're hauling this kid back to El Paso. We still have five kilos in the trunk! If anything goes wrong, Bolton is going to skin us alive!"
"You don't get it, Marlin. Have you ever seen a kid this age with that kind of strength? She's a mutant, brother. We hand her over to Bolton, then flip her in Juárez, and we make at least eight hundred grand. Eight hundred grand! You get ? That's enough to run twenty loads past the cops."
Juárez had an underground fight market that specialized in buying mutants and forcing them into savage, bloody matches. Gang leaders from xico and South Arica, officials from Washington, investors on Wall Street, stars from Hollywood, they all had clients there.
An adult mutant could fetch a million two. A child mutant could go for two million.
Even after Bolton took his cut, that was still a fortune for the two of them.
Young mutants were especially valuable. After brainwashing and brutal training, they made excellent cannon fodder and bodyguards. Plenty of gang bosses loved buying them at a premium.
And since this mutant was female, she was worth even more.
After all, a girl could be used for other things when she was not needed for work.
Mutants, even in their own universe, were not exactly treated kindly.
Following the interstate, they soon returned to El Paso and pulled into the front of a tire shop.
A pair of eyes watched them through the little inspection window in the roll-up door.
"Closed today. Not open for business."
"Cut the act, Bates. We left here forty minutes ago with the shipnt."
There was a beat of silence inside the shop.
Then the roll-up door opened, and Marlin and Benny drove their truck in.
Before they had even fully parked, several rifles were already pressed against the windows, aiming in from all directions.
"That's not how this works, Benny. Even if you ran into trouble on the road, you don't co back here. You screwed up, man!"
A bald, heavily tattooed man walked up to the driver's window with a nasty look on his face.
"No, Louis, there were absolutely no cops on our tail. You don't understand what we ran into on the road. A mutant! Seven or eight years old! That's a huge payday. Bolton won't bla us for this."
Louis's expression eased.
If they really had captured a mutant, then changing course mid-run could be forgiven.
What they did not know was that a wolf had already tracked them here.
With the soul radar guiding him, Logan had beco a Ghost Rider too.
He did not use guns or conventional weapons. He simply took one of the vehicles Drex had prepared for all the Ghost Riders from the armory.
A motorcycle.
Drex had prepared plenty of other vehicles too, even monstrous things like giant excavators, but the riders did not seem interested in those.
Logan parked the bike outside the tire shop and bit down on a cigar wreathed in hellfire.
"Working for the devil doesn't seem so bad," he muttered to himself. "At least the cigars are free. And they hit hard."
...
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