The rcenaries' rifles split apart along with their bodies.
Clean cuts.
Smooth enough to look machine-made.
Once the Dark Knight armor entered the battlefield, the fight ended quickly.
Cleaning up afterward was the difficult part.
War Machines sealed off the scene while reporters flooded the surrounding streets, only to be stopped outside the periter. No one in the military or police wanted the dia getting unrestricted footage of what had happened inside Blade Tech Industries.
Surprisingly, the reporters behaved themselves.
Mostly because the authorities were acting very differently than usual.
And none of the journalists present seed eager enough to die for the spirit of "press freedom."
At S.H.I.E.L.D., Nick Fury received Natasha Romanoff's footage and intelligence report on Drex Valen's new armor almost imdiately.
After watching the recording, Fury fell into silence.
The machine called the Dark Knight was vastly more advanced than the standard War Machines. In pure combat capability, it could probably overwhelm hundreds of soldiers by itself.
That part did not surprise Fury.
Drex Valen inventing terrifying military technology was practically expected at this point.
What concerned him was why Drex had developed it.
That question bothered Fury more than the armor itself.
Suspicion lingered in the back of his mind.
For now, though, protecting Drex remained the top priority.
The rcenary assault had infuriated the Arican governnt. They already knew about the underworld bounty placed on Drex Valen, but the scale of the attack raised far uglier questions.
How had heavily ard rcenaries entered the country so easily?
How were they carrying Arican-made weapons in that quantity?
Soone on the inside had clearly helped them.
The investigation moved fast.
Military officers connected to the attack were identified almost imdiately.
Then things got strange.
Every single one of them died.
So committed suicide.
The others died in accidents.
One man was electrocuted after a leak supposedly reached the bathroom floor while he was using the toilet.
Another slipped down a staircase and broke his neck.
Individually, the incidents sounded ordinary.
Together?
Not even remotely.
The Black Queen intercepted the classified reports and forwarded them directly to Drex.
The mont he saw the pattern, he already knew who was behind the attack.
Hydra.
The only strange part was that the North Arican branch had not sent any warning signs beforehand.
After all, the hundred War Machines Drex had distributed to "champion" Bucky Barnes through the underground fighting circuit had already been activated by Hydra cells. That had exposed several of Hydra's hidden bases throughout North Arica.
Blade Tech Industries had quietly tracked those locations and abducted the exposed Hydra operatives one by one for Drex's own brand of ntal conditioning.
So if Hydra was attacking now...
Then it probably was not the North Arican faction.
Hydra had many heads.
Mada Viper in Japan.
Barons in Britain.
Alexander Pierce in North Arica.
If another branch had set its sights on Drex Valen, that made perfect sense.
At this point, his influence was impossible to ignore.
Blade Tech Industries did not attempt to suppress news of the assault.
Instead, Drex held a press conference himself.
"I'm deeply concerned about Arica's security situation," Drex said coldly before a wall of caras.
"This was downtown Washington, D.C. A heavily ard group walked into the city carrying Barrett rifles, automatic weapons, and RPGs, then opened fire in broad daylight. And despite that, we waited a full ten minutes before military and police support arrived."
He paused, letting the silence sharpen.
"I think every Arican citizen deserves to ask what exactly their taxes are paying for."
The statent hit hard.
The governnt did not particularly care about public opinion.
But corporations did.
And when a man like Drex Valen started openly questioning whether tax money was producing competent protection, plenty of wealthy people suddenly beca interested in the conversation.
The governnt quickly organized its own press conference in response.
Officials expressed deep regret over the terrorist attack and promised compensation for all damages suffered by Blade Tech Industries.
They also vowed to strengthen security asures.
More patrols in wealthy districts.
Expanded controlled zones.
Tighter screening policies.
The usual things.
Once the compensation package arrived, Drex lost interest in pushing the matter further.
Dragging it out served no purpose.
The governnt had effectively paid him an enormous amount of "reassurance money" to calm his dissatisfaction. They also promised to establish a dedicated task force to investigate the bounty placed on him and identify whoever issued it.
At the sa ti, interest in the Dark Knight armor exploded.
Nick Fury himself attempted to approach Drex quietly to ask questions about it.
He did not even make it inside.
The beast soldiers had fully taken over Blade Tech Industries security operations.
They did not care about badges.
Or identities.
Or federal agencies.
Fury could have walked in wearing an FBI jacket and still gotten stopped at the door.
As for the Dark Knight itself, Drex's answer was simple.
"Not for sale."
According to him, it was a personal modification project based on the War Machine platform.
Maybe he would sell it soday after replacing it with sothing better.
Maybe.
The military offered astronomical prices anyway.
Drex refused all of them.
At this point, he already had more money than he could reasonably spend. He could do the sa thing Tony Stark used to do: buy entire buildings just to demolish them for fun.
News of the assassination attempt spread rapidly across the globe.
Before long, multiple countries reached out with invitations and promises.
Their nations were safe.
Their security was reliable.
Drex Valen would never need to fear another attack under their protection.
Drex ignored all of them.
He was busy with sothing much more interesting.
From samples taken from several underground fighters, he had discovered a strange genetic sequence.
It resembled the X-Gene found in mutants.
But it was different.
And in Marvel's Earth, strange genetics almost never appeared by accident.
Humanity had been experinted on constantly throughout history.
The Kree had conducted biological research on Earth long before modern civilization existed, attempting to engineer powerful living weapons.
Then there were the Celestials.
And countless other ancient forces running their own bizarre projects.
Which led Drex to one conclusion.
The gene sequence might belong to the Inhumans.
Millions of years ago, during the war between the Kree and the Skrulls, the Kree established research stations throughout the solar system.
At so point, they beca fascinated by the genetic potential of early humanity.
So they experinted on primitive humans.
The purpose was twofold.
First, to study thods of overcoming the stagnation of Kree evolution.
Second, to create powerful mutant soldiers for war.
Eventually, they succeeded.
They created a race of humanoids with extraordinary latent abilities.
Then, for reasons still unclear, the Kree abandoned the project entirely.
That abandoned race beca the Inhumans.
Over ti, they developed their own isolated civilization and advanced technology far beyond ordinary human society.
Through exposure to Terrigen Mist, they awakened unique superpowers.
But the process also damaged and distorted their genetics in unpredictable ways.
Drex studied the genetic data in silence.
A slow smile appeared beneath the glow of his monitors.
Now this...
This was interesting.
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