The man's grotesque appearance barely earned a second glance from the holess crowd.
People like him weren't unusual down here.
The tunnels were filled with the sick, the addicted, the dying, and the forgotten. n whose bodies had been hollowed out by disease, chemicals, or sheer bad luck.
Compared to so of them, the skinny holess man almost felt healthy.
Looking at the sympathy in the drifter's eyes, the tall figure paused slightly.
Then he smiled.
A dry, rasping cough escaped his throat before he finally spoke, his voice sounding like sandpaper dragged across bone.
"Yeah. First ti here."
The skinny man imdiately brightened once he realized he'd gotten a response.
"You know they pay cash here?"
He leaned closer conspiratorially while digging a bottle filled with dark red liquid out of the cloth sack hanging from his waist.
"No limits either. Sell as much as you want, they'll buy it. Prices are good too. Hell, they even buy bottled blood."
The tall man's expression twitched faintly.
A trace of mockery curled at the corner of his mouth.
Still, he said nothing.
He only nodded.
"Chad Norma. You're up."
A woman in a business suit stepped out and called his na.
The tall drifter rose to his feet, gave the skinny man a final nod, then followed her deeper into the tunnel.
High above the city, Drex Valen sat casually on the edge of a skyscraper.
With his x-ray vision focused downward, the underground massacre unfolding beneath Hell's Kitchen played out before him like a live film screening.
Beside him sat an open bag of chips and a bottle of cola.
By the ti Chad Norma began slaughtering everyone inside the vampire blood bank, Drex had already infiltrated the facility himself.
The underground storage chambers held staggering quantities of plasma.
The Black Queen had already gathered enough data for Drex to understand the scale of the situation.
Human blood reserves across the country had dropped below ergency thresholds.
Patients were dying on operating tables because hospitals lacked transfusion supplies.
And the missing plasma?
Most of it had beco vampire food.
Arica constantly encouraged its citizens to donate blood for free. During holidays, donation buses lined the streets with volunteers waiting patiently to help save lives.
In another world, maybe that would have been sothing noble.
In the Marvel universe?
It was business.
The U.S. governnt didn't pay ordinary citizens a single cent for their donated blood.
But every 100-milliliter bag of plasma sold to vampire organizations brought in four hundred dollars.
That was the deal.
People weren't dying because vampires consud too much blood.
They were dying because human greed had monetized survival itself.
The blood banks weren't empty.
The plasma had simply been sold off.
The governnt called for free donations from taxpayers, then turned around and sold the blood to the vampire empire at absurd markups.
The profits were astronomical.
Nick Fury knew about it too.
And he did nothing.
Not because he approved, but because the interests involved ran too deep. Too much hidden funding flowed through unofficial channels connected to organizations like S.H.I.E.L.D.
According to Drex's information, vampire-controlled industries and taxes throughout North Arica contributed nearly two hundred billion dollars annually to the United States economy.
Their influence was everywhere.
The vampire race had existed for far too long to be uprooted cleanly.
They had infiltrated governnts, aristocracies, corporations, banks, and financial institutions over centuries. Long before modern capitalism existed, they had already embedded themselves within the ruling classes of Europe.
Religious institutions once acted as one of the few reliable thods for identifying and suppressing them.
Vampires couldn't participate in many sacred rites.
That alone had exposed countless infiltrators throughout history.
From the Roman Republic to the imperial era, powerful figures had willingly embraced vampirism in pursuit of immortality.
Nero himself had maintained extrely close ties to vampires.
Though in his case, he'd apparently preferred demonic contracts.
Still, many Roman nobles and officials surrounding him had practically turned the imperial court into a vampire convention.
By the ti the Industrial Revolution arrived, vampires had already beco so of the earliest major investors in banking, comrce, and industry.
Then ca the world wars.
Then international finance.
Then Arica.
Over centuries, they evolved into sothing larger than a hidden species.
They beca part of the machinery of civilization itself.
Parasites wrapped around the nervous system of global capitalism.
People often called bankers vampires.
In many cases, the description was disturbingly literal.
S.H.I.E.L.D. could battle alien invasions.
They could fight rogue supervillains, interdinsional entities, even Hydra itself.
But vampires?
That was different.
Because vampires weren't outside the system.
In many ways, they were the system.
At least economically.
"You are?"
The voice interrupted Drex's thoughts.
But of course, he had sensed the intruder long before the man spoke.
Chad Norma stared at him cautiously.
He couldn't sll the stench of a vampire on Drex.
Human.
Behind Chad, groups of Reaper variants prowled restlessly through the blood bank, repeatedly glancing between Drex and the massive stockpile of plasma surrounding them.
"Holess blood is filthy," Drex said calmly.
"With my vision, I can practically see the bacteria and viruses swimming through it. More than ninety percent of this plasma is contaminated."
His enhanced vision had already evolved far enough to observe molecular structures directly.
To him, the blood looked like a microscopic battlefield.
Chad Norma's instincts scread that the man standing before him was dangerous.
Trouble.
Real trouble.
Then Drex started walking toward him.
Imdiately, the Reapers behind Chad lost control.
The creatures lunged at Drex in a frenzy.
Drex sighed faintly.
"Your control over them is weaker than I expected."
User Comments
0 comments from readers