"What exactly did he just do?"
Nick Fury and the Fantastic Three were all stunned by the question.
The difference was that Fury had a team of scientists monitoring the battlefield in real ti.
"One of our instrunts detected a subtle change between the device on his back and the surrounding magnetic field," one of them reported. "The most likely explanation is that the creature called the Deep Sea King was crushed by a force of millions of tons for a split second and simply overloaded. It detonated under the pressure."
"The device on his back?"
Fury had noticed that strange chanism the mont he saw it, the thing crackling with electricity behind Drex Valen's Dark Knight armor.
"We believe it was an electromagnetic generator," the scientist said with clear admiration.
"Can we copy it?"
Fury was interested now.
"Yes. But it would not an much, because we cannot control magnetic fields the way Drex Valen can."
Fury's one eye widened.
"The Strategic Holand Intervention, Enforcent and Logistics Division gives you all that money every year, and you still cannot control a magnetic field?"
He did not sound pleased.
"Director, we are not Drex Valen," the scientist said, spreading his hands. "There will probably only ever be one Drex Valen in this century. That is what genius looks like. If it were that easy, the scientific community would not still be struggling to fully digest the knowledge left behind by the scientists of World War II."
He sounded half resigned, half reverent.
No one knew whether war had accelerated science, or whether the scientists of that era truly had been the most brilliant minds humanity had ever produced. Their blueprints and theories had been left behind for decades, and even now the world's best researchers had not fully absorbed them.
Humanity was still living in the shadow of Einstein's relativity and the quantum frawork established by a parade of legends. Planck. Bohr. Heisenberg. Schrödinger. Pauli. de Broglie. Born. Fermi. Dirac. Einstein. Compton. The list went on and on.
Had the world really failed to produce anyone smarter since then?
Of course not. That would be insulting to the size of the human race itself.
Drex Valen simply believed the real problem was fragntation, duplication, and the waste created by too many separate research efforts.
Without shared technology, every country had to repeat the sa experints from scratch. That burned through ti and resources on a planetary scale. Only if humanity ever managed to unify its efforts and concentrate its power might it have a real chance of surpassing the generation of physicists that had practically been elevated into gods.
Fury opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Damn it.
He hated how reasonable that sounded.
"Hello, Dark Knight."
The Fantastic Three were still trying to process what they had seen. Drex had destroyed the Deep Sea King with a single handshake. More specifically, with whatever happened inside that handshake.
Reed was the first to speak, his eyes bright with feverish curiosity.
"How did you do that?"
The question ca from a man with no hope of being saved from his own research obsession. Reed could ignore his girlfriend's feelings if a scientific mystery was in front of him.
Susan was not doing much better, either. Doom had been her fiancé, and yet after only a few days of his disappearance, she had already fallen back into Reed's orbit.
No wonder Doom had gone dark.
He had lost everything, and then his fiancée got stolen from him too. Anyone would resent that.
"I built the device on my back as an electromagnetic generator," Drex said simply. "Then I made a controller that lets manipulate the magnetic field."
Reed's expression shifted instantly into understanding, like a puzzle piece clicking neatly into place.
Drex did not care if anyone copied the idea and tried to design a counterasure like a degausser. The generator on his back was not especially high-powered to begin with. It existed partly to misdirect attention, and partly to let the Fantastic Three spread the explanation for why he was so strong.
He did not want people assuming the armor itself was responsible for everything, or worse, that Drex Valen had sohow mutated into a superhuman.
"You really are a genius," Reed said, clearly sincere.
He looked like he wanted to keep talking, probably for hours.
"I have other things to handle," Drex said, cutting that idea off cleanly. "I'm leaving this to you."
He nodded once to them, then turned and flew away without a sound.
Once magnetic force and field control were under his command, there was no need to rely on energy jets like Tony Stark did. His flight was faster, smoother, and immune to the shockwaves, sonic barriers, and heat barriers that would normally interfere with high-speed travel.
The next day, as expected, the military showed up.
They ca to strike first, filing complaints about the War Machines' quality and questioning their combat performance.
"Major General," Uld said coolly, facing down the silver-haired Air Force officer across the table, "you need to understand sothing. War Machines were never designed for fighting monsters. They were built to counter the majority of human military hardware. In fact, since their introduction, most tanks and fighter jets have been on the road to obsolescence. War Machines have already fulfilled their purpose. Wouldn't you agree?"
The general stared at her for a mont and quickly understood that this woman was not so easy-to-bully young executive.
No wonder Drex Valen trusted her with a company this size.
Still, losing twelve War Machines hurt. Badly. It ant the Air Force had seen its practical strength shrink, and that did not sit well with the n in charge.
As for the Deep Sea King's remains, Drex Valen had completely disintegrated them at the molecular level. Add in the fact that it had been raining at the ti, and the entire evidence team spent all night searching without finding a single trace of DNA.
A total loss. No body, no samples, no payoff.
The military had ended up with nothing but frustration and a bruised ego.
"We already made the terms clear in the contract," the Blade Technology Industrial legal team said flatly. "The company is not responsible for compensation when a War Machine is destroyed or damaged in combat. Warranty coverage only applies if the defect is caused by the product itself."
The lawyers were not wasting their paychecks.
The general drumd his pen against the table, irritated enough to grind his teeth. Contracts were the kind of thing nobody bothered to read carefully, especially when the other side was the United States military. Nobody expected anyone to tamper with the fine print.
And Blade Technology Industrial's clause was perfectly standard. Not a trap. Just a shield.
Then Uld's earpiece chid with an incoming ssage.
She looked across the table at the Air Force general.
"Our boss, Drex Valen, says he has a new product," she said. "Would you be interested in taking a look, General?"
The man straightened imdiately.
Drex Valen had a new product?
Well, of course he wanted to see it.
And then they did.
The new machine looked a lot like a War Machine, except it had four tal arms mounted on its back.
"I designed this as War Machine Mark Two specifically for the monster called the Deep Sea King," Drex said. "It has a secondary krypton-alloy coating on the exterior, which gives it significantly better defense than War Machine Mark One. I also increased the output and startup speed of the palm energy cannons. The power core has been replaced with a magnetic flux fusion reactor, abandoning palladium entirely. That gives it much longer combat endurance, and its flight speed is higher than War Machine Mark One as well..."
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