The sanctum was silent, save for the soft hum of void-shielded servitors and the whisper of cogitators devouring foreign data.
Beyond the vaulted do of the Forge-lab, the sky above was still black. Luthar stood motionless at the central command room, frad in shadow, as hundreds of scout drones launched silently from their cradles—sleek and predatory, vanishing into the night.
Each drone carried custom data-absorption engines, tuned to siphon electromagnetic signatures, digital fraworks, biotech readings, and energy emissions. Stark Tower. Aim. Wakandan satellites. All were marked.
"Continue acquisition," Luthar intoned.
One of the drones chirped a compliance rune as it warped into camouflage and vanished.
He returned to his inner sanctum, passing through hexagonal doorways that dilated with chanical grace. A projection blood before him—helices of data, DNA strands rotating like cathedral spires. Thousands. So human. Others not.
"For too long," he muttered, adjusting a chemical focus lens on the nearest strand, "I dismissed this branch of study as I did not have the ti."
The words were not regretful. They were recorded.
The helix pulsed—his own.
Segnts glowed red, annotated with binharic glyphs indicating surgical augntation, nanitic overlays, and spliced Martian optimisation. Others glowed blue—alien, acquired from chanicus archives. Still others were yellow: unclassified deviations.
Luthar's ocular lenses humd softly, splitting their focus across dual hololithic arrays. One displayed genetic archetypes designed by sages. They spun and unravelled before him: the perfect gene-lines of ancient warriors, the failures of corrupted clones, and his modified DNA, spliced with vault-sealed sequences once forbidden even to the most Magi Biologis.
Beside it, another stream ca alive—Necron constructs. Their living tal, necrodermis, flowed in simulation: a material that thought. Luthar's enhanced mind processed both streams in tandem, not as a contradiction but a complent. He did not blink as the two fields rged on his screen.
Silence followed. Only the cogitator's low pulse, the breathing of machines.
Then—
A soft hiss. The door opened.
Lily stepped through, her arms folded around a nutrition pack wrapped in sterile foil.
Looking at him, she said, "Didn't you say you were planning to take a break from your work after finishing Pym particles?"
He didn't turn.
"It's not work. It's studying. Both are two different things," he murmured.
"It's the sa thing, as even your study is related to work." Saying this, she handed over the nutrition pack.
He accepted the pack without comnt, setting it beside a tray of surgical servo skulls.
Lily glanced at the suspended genetic field.
"You're not studying the gamma mutants anymore."
"I don't need to study gamma and mutants," Luthar replied. " plus, I got sothing better to study."
A flick of his hand brought up a composite between a Necron alloy and human neuromorphic scaffolding.
"Structural replication and my own family's genetic knowledge—one would make future constructions easy, and the other will help with genetic enhancents."
His voice didn't rise. It never did. But the hunger in it was real.
Lily observed him silently for a mont, then spoke in a asured tone. "You might consider studying your own digestion first. As for the construction replication, they can wait until Hephaestus and the others complete their study."
Luthar remained silent; he couldn't explain why the study mattered to him.
Normally, he held no secrets from Lily—after all, efficiency thrived on transparency—but this was different. He could not discuss his system, which was feeding him fragnts of knowledge from the entire 40k universe, as long as he continued his research.
However, he couldn't reveal this to her; who knew what entities might be listening? In comparison, his identity as an outsider was not that important..
"That's going to be hard, as they are still back in the Dungeon world, which ans when I get them to this universe, they won't have too much knowledge," he said, trying to finish the nutrition pack.
"Then just get them here quickly so they can continue the study with you, which would be more effective," she suggested.
Luthar, looking at the energy model, said, "Well, it would take a few more weeks to have enough energy to go and bring them to this universe."
As Luthar and Lily continued their daily life, there was another person who was having a ltdown.
Inside the S.H.I.E.L.D. Headquarters, the surveillance room was filled with the sll of coffee and stress. Monitors flickered, casting an eerie pallor over Director Fury's face as he reviewed the Harlem footage again.
There it was—fra by fra.
Rumlow, body was augnted far beyond that of soone who was just supposed to work as a security guard and do spy work for S.H.I.E.L.D.
*Luthar.*
Fury clenched his jaw, fingers drumming against the table.
"This is a goddamn joke," he muttered, the voice barely audible.
He rewound again. Rumlow's posture. The way he deferred. Subtle markers of conditioning—**reprogramming**.
"Two agents," Fury growled. "Two. Both planted. Both compromised."
Maria Hill, standing stiffly at his side, glanced at the screen. "It's not just them, sir. We lost visuals in the Harlem lab three hours after the encounter. Satellite sweep shows it's—gone."
Fury's one eye narrowed.
"And you think *that* was an accident?"
"No, Director."
He turned, tension burning behind every word. "Abomination might be weaker then Hulk, but it was sothing no military can contend with—even so, he has been captured."
Hill remained silent.
"Either we're dealing with soone playing ten steps ahead—or he is not playing the sa ga."
Fury leaned back. "And I hate both possibilities."
There was a pause. Then Hill asked, "Should we inform Stark?"
Fury exhaled slowly. "No need. He's already too depressed. No need to increase his anxiety."
What he didn't know was that Stark might be depressed, but he was still keeping tabs on the entire situation around the world.
Tony Stark stared out across the skyline, fingers tight around a glass of green liquid he pretended to call 'breakfast.'
The light of the afternoon sun did nothing to warm the cold hum gnawing at his core—literally.
The arc reactor still thrumd quietly in his chest, but the palladium levels were spiking again. The temporary fixes weren't holding.
But even that wasn't the biggest weight.
On the screen behind him: freeze-fras of Luthar walking through a wall of fla, Rumlow kneeling, Abomination *falling*.
Stark scoffed bitterly.
"Right. Magic tech-priest with god-tier weapons and soldiers built like radioactive tanks. And here I am, still running on poison and band-aids."
Jarvis's voice chid softly. "Sir, the comparative energy outputs from Luthar's zombie soldiers exceed our current arc reactor designs by approximately 423%."
"Yeah, J, I noticed," Tony muttered. "That's why I've been rewriting the Mk VIII armour specs since 4 A.M."
He downed the drink, winced, then tossed the glass into the sink.
"I still don't know if this is an arms race or a funeral march."
As he prepared himself for today's work, Luthar's mini-drones had already begun to pick up technology around the world, and one of them finally arrived at the most advanced country in the world.
High above the borders of Wakanda, sothing small shimred in the sky.
No larger than a coin, the drone moved in silence—its surface cloaked in layered phase-absorption plating. A chanicus survey construct. Observational only.
For now.
Below it, the Vibranium-rich forests of Wakanda. The drone paused for a mont—scanning, cataloguing, watching.
At least for now, no one could notice him.
Author's note: help with advice or with cash to improve this novel.
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