The terrorists never actually laid a hand on him.
The mont they realized Tony Stark still refused to build the armored suit, they simply turned around and left.
Drex Valen glanced at the bio-enhanced soldiers standing nearby.
"For the next few days, switch languages when you talk around him. Tony Stark already learned Arabic from listening to your conversations with Yinsen."
The room went silent.
"What?"
Several of the soldiers stared at him in disbelief.
No way.
That kind of thing shouldn't even be possible.
Drex had only noticed it because Tony's expression had changed. Earlier, whenever the n spoke Arabic around him, Stark wore the sa blank, irritated look of soone trapped in a conversation he couldn't follow.
But recently, that look had vanished.
Instead, Tony listened carefully, eyes narrowed in thought.
So Drex had probed his mind.
What he found surprised even him.
Tony Stark had already learned most of the language.
Ridiculous.
Then again... this was Tony Stark.
Not long after, Tony realized sothing was wrong.
The terrorists had started speaking in an entirely different language.
Tony frowned.
"Hansen, what language are they speaking now?"
Antonio Ruiz hesitated deliberately before answering.
"Sounds like Hebrew. Probably Israeli."
Outwardly, he kept his composure.
Inside, though, alarm bells were ringing.
Tony Stark had really done it.
The man had actually learned Arabic just by listening.
A normal person couldn't even distinguish dialects that quickly, much less pick up an entirely new language inside a cave.
Monster.
At this rate, they'd need to switch languages every few days.
Drex, anwhile, wasn't worried in the slightest.
The Middle East alone had enough linguistic variety to keep Stark busy for months. And if that failed, there were always regional Chinese dialects brutal enough to sound like encrypted radio chatter to outsiders.
If Tony Stark sohow learned those too...
Well.
There were plenty more waiting in line.
At first, Tony stayed stubborn.
Then the food stopped coming.
That was when panic finally set in.
Because he knew this trick.
The previous terrorist group had done the exact sa thing.
Back then, he'd complained about their food, demanded wine, steak, cheeseburgers, anything except the disgusting paste they kept feeding him.
They hadn't argued.
They'd simply stopped feeding him entirely.
By the fourth day, Tony had licked the plate clean enough to sha a starving dog.
Hunger stripped people down to their animal core.
Even strong-willed n eventually broke. People ate dirt, paper, cloth, anything they could force into their stomachs just to silence the pain for a few minutes longer.
Compared to torture, starvation was cleaner.
More efficient.
Drex wasn't interested in beating Tony bloody. Stark's body wasn't built for that kind of abuse. Break him too hard and he'd end up permanently damaged, sickly, useless.
Hunger, though?
Hunger worked on everyone.
Like waterboarding, except slower and crueler.
Honestly, Drex considered it the superior thod.
Besides, a few missed als wouldn't kill Tony. If anything, it might help him lose the slight curve forming around his waistline.
The billionaire lived on rich food and alcohol.
Wine wasn't the problem.
The fact that he drank like a fish was.
A temporary detox might do wonders for his liver.
Tony originally thought he could hold out longer this ti.
He was wrong.
By the second day, the hunger beca unbearable.
His stomach twisted so violently he found himself staring at scraps on the floor and wondering if they were edible.
Eventually, Tony surrendered.
Drex imdiately had the n bring him a high-fiber al designed to clean out his digestive system.
Judging from the look on Tony's face afterward while he spent the better part of an hour in the bathroom, years of chronic constipation had probably just been cured.
Satisfied, Drex withdrew his attention from Stark.
It wasn't necessary to watch him constantly anyway.
The Black Queen monitored Tony around the clock. If anything unusual happened, Drex would know imdiately.
anwhile, under Drex's orders, Emil Blonsky had successfully returned to Britain and gone dark, waiting for the day General Ross inevitably ca looking for him.
No telling how long that would take.
This was clearly a long-term assignnt.
Blonsky hated sitting idle, but he could only suppress the impatience simring under his skin.
As for the Hulk...
Drex had no intention of letting that go.
If the Ancient One wouldn't allow him to acquire the Hulk serum directly, then he'd simply take a different route.
Indirect acquisition was still acquisition.
Sure, the Ancient One would remain alive until the Chitauri invasion of New York years later, but Drex doubted she'd intervene a second ti just to stop him from obtaining Banner's blood.
Recently, people had begun disappearing throughout New York.
No one paid much attention to it.
Most of the victims ca from Hell's Kitchen.
In a place that rotten, bodies vanished all the ti.
Drug dealers, junkies, gang runners, drifters. Human debris swallowed by a city too exhausted to care.
Still, with the Black Queen watching the city's surveillance networks nonstop, Drex noticed patterns others missed.
The missing people all operated at the street level of Hell's Kitchen's narcotics trade.
And the caras occasionally captured sothing else.
Fast-moving shadows.
Drex narrowed his eyes.
"Reapers?"
There were plenty of monsters lurking around Hell's Kitchen. The Hand's creatures. Psychotic vigilantes. Serial killers dressed like urban legends.
But considering the tiline...
The most likely answer was the vampire mutation strain.
The Reapers.
That made things interesting.
Their mutated viral biology held enormous research value.
Especially the virus inside them.
So Drex decided to investigate personally.
Hell's Kitchen, New York.
Night.
Deep beneath the city, abandoned subway tunnels stretched like rotting veins beneath the streets.
Groups of holess people wandered through the darkness without purpose.
In New York, scenes like this were almost ordinary.
The brighter the city looked from the outside, the uglier the decay beneath it.
Most drifters gathered in parks, alleys, or forgotten underground tunnels like these whenever they needed shelter.
New York's subway system was ancient. Over the decades, entire sections had been abandoned and sealed away.
Places like this beca natural refuges.
Or feeding grounds.
Tonight, more than a dozen holess people loitered inside one of the tunnels.
Not aimlessly.
They stood in a loose line.
At the far end, several well-dressed n examined people one by one before guiding them deeper into the tunnel.
Nobody seed alard.
The n who returned looked pale, but otherwise unhard.
And each of them carried cash.
One gaunt holess man sat cross-legged near the line, nervously rubbing his hands together. Eventually, he leaned forward and tapped the large figure seated ahead of him.
"First ti selling blood, brother?"
The man in front of him wore a tattered trench coat with the hood pulled low.
Slowly, he turned his head.
The holess man froze.
The stranger's appearance was deeply unnatural.
His skin was corpse-pale, like soone who had never seen sunlight in his life.
No hair.
No eyebrows.
No beard.
Nothing.
In the dim tunnel light, his gray-blue eyes looked cold and strangely lifeless.
But the most disturbing feature was his jaw.
A long split-like scar stretched across it, as though his chin had once been torn apart and crudely stitched back together.
Sothing about him didn't feel human.
And in the stale underground air, that realization spread like ice water down the spine.
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