"Boss, I want to quit."
Natalie said it while helping Urd deliver a stack of docunts to Drex Valen's desk.
Drex looked up.
The mont he saw that it was Black Widow, his expression sharpened at once.
"Quit? Why?" he asked. "Not enough pay? Fine. I'll double it."
He really did not want to lose her.
Not because she was beautiful. Drex's tastes still leaned more toward an Asian aesthetic.
It was because Natalie was useful. Extrely useful.
She could handle the work of several secretaries and assistants by herself. Even Urd had admitted that things had beco much easier with Natalie around.
Drex did not know why an agent had managent skills this good, but there was no way he was letting such a perfect tool slip away.
After all, a spy always worked with total focus.
"Boss, it's not about the salary. I just have so things to deal with..." Natalie said, her fingers tightening slightly.
Since she had started working at Blade Tech Industries, she had been able to buy every handbag and costic she once could not afford, and then so. She had even bought full sets of them. But she still had not been able to fully get her work going, and Nick Fury was growing impatient. On top of that, sothing had happened in Africa recently that required her attention.
"Are you sure?" Drex held up four fingers. "Four tis."
Natalie hesitated.
She was no longer quite as certain.
If she handled the African situation as fast as possible and ca back, would she still make it in ti?
Nick Fury would definitely assign soone else to cover her work, so telling him she was basically holding two jobs at once was probably not realistic.
"Fine," Drex said. "Six tis."
He kept raising the stakes without even blinking. After just striking a hundred-tis-capital deal with Stav, Drex was in no mood to act stingy.
Natalie took a deep breath and decided she needed to go back and have a serious talk with Nick Fury.
The work at Blade Tech Industries could only be done by her.
Watching her leave in a hurry, Drex read the mories in her mind and gave a satisfied nod.
Looks like very few people in the world really could not be solved with money.
Then he signed the docunts at absurd speed and imdiately teleported into space.
Reed had detected an anomaly in the data and wanted to abort the probe.
But Doom did not agree.
If they stopped now, he would be ruined. Reed was only telling him there was a data error at this point?
Before he could even start blaming Reed, the strange cosmic-ray radiation storm was already sweeping in.
"Damn it!"
Everyone on the station wore the sa expression of despair.
"Sothing feels off," Drex murmured.
He was right beside the station and could see the cosmic-ray storm's fluctuations clearly. They were wrong. Abnormal. And then the storm swept over him too.
Inside the space station, the five people aboard all began to evolve.
Yes, evolve.
With Drex's vision sharpened all the way down to the atomic level, he could see that this was not mutation. In the middle of that radiation storm, their bodies were completing a process that should have taken humanity millions of years, maybe even hundreds of millions.
As for Drex himself, he welcod it all.
Every last bit of the radiation storm was absorbed into his body without leaving a trace behind.
Then his entire body began changing as well.
"Not bad," he said, watching his cells transform.
It was fascinating. If anything went wrong, he could always roll it back.
But this ti, the result surprised even him.
No new ability appeared.
It was almost as if the radiation storm had not affected him at all.
And yet his cells had definitely changed.
Drex thought for a mont.
Maybe because of his interference, the space station had suffered an accident. The five people inside were about to suffocate to death after the station's hull ruptured.
He had no choice but to take them out.
Fortunately, with psychic transfer, it was not difficult.
When he grabbed the Invisible Woman, Susan Storm, she woke from the pain of suffocation and saw Drex Valen.
But since he always went out in the Black Knight armor, there was no risk of exposing himself.
Her mont of awareness was brief. Soon, the suffocation dragged her under again.
When she woke once more, she was in a hospital.
"Sis! You know what? Black Knight Drex saved us!"
Her younger brother, Jonathan "Johnny" Storm, rushed in the mont she woke, practically vibrating with excitent.
"Black Knight Drex?"
Susan stared at him in confusion.
Johnny gave her the look of soone deeply disappointed in an out-of-touch adult, then pulled out the news report.
That was when Susan saw the familiar black armor.
"It's him."
She rembered the figure she had seen while unconscious, and then she saw the face beneath the armor.
Drex Valen.
She had never paid much attention to Black Knight Drex himself, but as a scientist, Drex Valen was soone she knew very well.
A genius. A once-in-a-century genius.
Any one of his achievents would have been enough to beco a textbook example for generations. He was the kind of person who left a mark on human history.
The project her boyfriend Reed Richards had spent his entire life trying to develop still could not compare to the scientific achievents Drex had produced in barely twenty years.
And Reed had not even succeeded yet. He had failed.
Drex did not pay much attention to the Fantastic Four after that. He simply extracted their genes and moved on.
As for Doom, Drex arranged for him to be discharged early and brought to the World Serpent research base.
That base was his three-thousand-plus-acre ranch in Texas.
Beneath the surface, nearly everything had been excavated and converted into a World Serpent facility.
Doom was still unconscious. According to the film version of the story, he should be turning into a tal man.
"Doctor Doom... or just Doom," Drex murmured.
It was rare to get the chance to study a villain who might eventually beco a threat on the scale of a cosmic, all-powerful entity. Naturally, he was not going to be polite about it.
After a careful round of checks, Drex confird it.
This was the movie version of Doom.
Good.
That ant the Marvel universe he was in, even if it was not the film universe, probably was not too dangerous.
"Where is this?"
At last, Doom woke from his sleep and imdiately demanded answers after seeing the unfamiliar surroundings.
Then he saw Drex Valen.
"Drex Valen!"
Doom looked genuinely shocked.
How was Drex Valen here?
"Hello, Doom," Drex said. "I'm not really in the mood to chat. As villains go, you should just stay still and keep sleeping."
He twisted the magnetic field.
The instant Doom tried to resist, Drex stopped his atomic motion.
Doom froze in place, his consciousness slipping away.
Blue light flared in Drex's eyes.
A freeze beam struck Doom head-on.
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