It was a sha Drex Valen had already vanished, warehouse and all, the mont he took the structure with him.
Wakanda sealed off the surrounding area for kiloters in every direction. They searched for days and still found nothing. The stolen vibranium warehouse had simply disappeared into thin air.
The entire nation was thrown into a panic.
They had been watched. They had been robbed. And they had not even noticed.
Wakanda had informants planted in plenty of countries, yet sohow soone had slipped past every layer of defense and walked off with a massive cache of vibranium right under their noses.
T'Chaka was visibly exhausted by the whole thing. He could not sleep. He could not relax. The more he thought about it, the more obvious it beca that the thief knew Wakanda far too well. They knew where the storage site was. They knew how to bypass the defenses.
That ant one thing.
There had to be an insider.
While Wakanda was still tearing itself apart with suspicion, Drex returned with the warehouse still in hand and imdiately realized sothing else.
The outer layer of the warehouse itself was vibranium too.
Damn Wakanda.
That was just criminal waste.
Vibranium was being treated like common construction material. If it were in Drex's hands, he would put every gram of it to better use.
Wakanda had at least not gone insane enough to make the floor out of vibranium too. If they had, Drex would have seriously considered packing the whole country up and taking it with him.
This warehouse did not seem important. Inside were only a little over five hundred tons of vibranium.
Which, converted into dollars, ca out to about twenty-five trillion.
Drex was still using the official Wakandan rate of ten thousand dollars per gram when he did the math. In reality, the insider Wakanda had produced had already sold it for more than fifty thousand dollars per gram.
Wakanda had simply been too naive. They did not know how to do business.
If Drex had been running the place, he could have sold it for a million dollars a gram without breaking a sweat.
With a full stockpile now on hand, Drex had room to breathe.
And since vibranium was a naturally occurring tallic ore, it could be used directly in alloy experints.
If he accidentally produced so new supertal in the process, then he would be sitting on a gold mine.
While Black Queen began analyzing vibranium's possible pairings with other tals and materials, Drex sat down to eat breakfast.
He worked this hard and made this much money for one reason beyond security.
He wanted to enjoy his own life.
He had no interest in becoming like Clark, all power and no proper household, forced to rely on Batman to buy him a house through so bank loophole. Drex preferred a different model.
He wanted to be a fusion of Batman and Superman.
Breakfast had been prepared by a Cantonese dim sum master invited especially for him.
Drex, in his previous life, had been from Guangdong. After being away from ho for more than twenty years, he naturally missed Cantonese food.
Take shrimp dumplings, for example. In a decent tea house, shrimp dumplings were built around five shrimp, and the quality of the whole dish depended heavily on the chef's skill. In fact, in many Cantonese tea houses, chicken feet, shrimp dumplings, char siu buns, and rice rolls were the four kings of dim sum.
On Drex's table sat shrimp dumplings, chicken feet, char siu buns, red rice noodle rolls, beef tripe, siu mai, stead dumplings, white phoenix claws, boat congee, and more than twenty kinds of tea snacks in total.
Food he had once eaten until he was sick of it now tasted like mory itself.
And also delicious.
The chef had been expensive, of course. He served Drex alone, and he was apparently shocked by how much Drex knew about Cantonese breakfast. Did this foreigner used to live in Guangdong or sothing?
"How is it? I told you it was good, didn't I?"
Drex glanced at Uld.
Uld had already been pulled headfirst into the dim sum pit and was now too busy eating to argue. Even holding chopsticks was a struggle for her.
For foreigners, Cantonese breakfast was probably the easiest of the eight major Chinese cuisines to accept. The flavors were lighter than Shandong or Sichuan food, less aggressive, and the variety was huge. Even in Chinatown districts in places like San Francisco and Chicago, Cantonese breakfast places usually did not need to adapt their food much for local tastes.
And "breakfast" was barely the right word.
It could last from morning until afternoon. So restaurants even stayed open into the night, serving the sa style of food the whole way through.
Uld especially liked the item called chicken feet.
And the white chicken feet, too.
Drex, with his much larger appetite, could clear an entire table of dim sum in one sitting, though he personally was not fond of items like turnip cakes.
"It's good," Uld said between bites. "Really good."
She kept saying good, over and over, because her vocabulary had thinned out under pressure. Drex could still read her mood easily enough. Her hormones were up. Her body was happy.
"The most important part is really the tea," Drex said. "This one's pu'er. This one's tieguanyin. And this one's longjing."
Pu'er and tieguanyin were the ones he was used to. He did not care much for other green teas, black teas, or things like lei cha.
After eating until he was full, Uld's face had turned slightly red.
She had wanted to be more graceful, more polished, like a proper elite.
But chopsticks were harder than they looked.
The more anxious she got, the worse she handled them, and the whole thing spiraled until she looked genuinely flustered.
Drex did not mind.
He glanced at the view, then turned away and got back to work.
The World Serpent branch base was hidden in the desert along the U.S.-xico border.
Tony Stark was being held there.
Every day, Drex staged new scenes for him. Beast soldiers played out the role of terrorists threatening civilians, then gunning them down in front of him. The translator and doctor who had replaced Yinsen's role would step in at the right monts and explain exactly what Tony was seeing.
It was a neat little machine designed to deepen his guilt.
Drex did not know whether that would eventually create so darker version of Iron Man, so "unjust Iron Man" variant, but he did not really care.
If that ever happened, he could kill him easily enough.
Tony Stark woke from a restless sleep feeling like his mind was scraping against the edge of collapse.
The day before, those terrorists had executed a group of innocent civilians right in front of him.
"They died because of you," the fake Yinsen said to him. "Because of your advanced weapons, the local governnt troops can't beat these terrorists' firepower. So they do whatever they want here. I've seen scenes like this hundreds of tis."
It was both an accusation and a condemnation.
Tony sat on the edge of the crude concrete bed and buried his face in his hands, fingers dragging violently through his hair.
To him, this place had beco an invisible torture chamber and a hell all at once.
He felt as though he could hear the dead screaming.
That part was not entirely imagination.
Drex had arranged for n to lean close to Tony's ears and wail after he fell asleep. With beast soldiers' senses, they could do it without ever being noticed.
Under that kind of sleep deprivation and psychological tornt, the fact that Tony was still standing at all ant sothing.
The heroic spirit inside him had already started to wake up.
The terrorists were demanding that Tony Stark build an Iron Suit.
At first, Tony had only dragged his feet.
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