---
Chapter 3: Building Foundations
Leo woke up to the dull glow of early morning light breaking through a dusty windowpane. His body ached slightly from the night spent on a makeshift mattress, but his mind was sharper than ever.
The events of the past 24 hours replayed in his head—dying, reincarnating, becoming Leo, discovering he was in Marvel's universe... and now, here he was, a 17-year-old dropout in the middle of New York City. After confirming his location through signs, accents, and newspapers, he knew exactly where to go.
F.E.A.S.T. Community Center.
The very same place Aunt May worked, though Leo had no interest in nostalgia or comic-book cameos right now. He was there for one reason: survival. A long, hot bath and a full stomach.
Two hours later...
"Thanks for your help. I'll definitely pay you all back a hundredfold," Leo said without looking back, adjusting his shirt and walking out of the community center gates.
"Yeah, you're welcome…" May replied, only to trail off as he was already halfway down the block.
'What a weird boy,' she thought, before turning back inside.
With his stomach finally full and body refreshed, Leo's face shifted into a focused expression. "Now that I'm fresh and fed... time to get to work."
Using his perfect photographic memory and Sage's superhuman information processing abilities, he navigated through the streets with surgical precision until he found a small cybercafé tucked into a busy block. He paid in cash and claimed a corner system.
The screen flickered to life.
Within seconds, his fingers danced across the keyboard.
He combed the entire internet—digging into news reports, blogs, forums, archived files, even some hidden IRC chats. The patterns emerged: this was January 2007, a full year before Tony Stark would get kidnapped in Afghanistan. The Avengers Initiative hadn't started. The world was on the brink of the superhero age.
He found recent news about a group of four super-powered individuals calling themselves the Fantastic Four, and scattered reports about mutants—some accepted, many feared, most hidden. Xavier's School, Magneto's Brotherhood, S.H.I.E.L.D., The Hand, Stark Industries, Oscorp...
Leo absorbed it all, each piece of data locked into his memory like a photograph sealed in glass.
Then, he shifted gears.
He began downloading everything he could on programming, hacking, and cybersecurity—courses, guides, scripts, source codes, dark web wikis, CTF writeups. With Sage's mental prowess, he tore through beginner to advanced content in minutes.
His brain, now a living supercomputer, began to evolve. He didn't just learn hacking—he optimized it, developed new methods, and started building original frameworks in his head.
But eventually, theory hit its limit.
He needed real-world practice.
With a glance around the café, he identified a college student accessing their university email. Within seconds, Leo cloned the email server and retrieved the student's credentials—just to test his finesse.
One by one, he scaled up.
He breached local government servers. Bypassed low-level firewalls. Then, he found an easy target: a corrupt city politician with a record of buried scandals and embezzlement. Leo traced the transactions, exposed fake charities, and found several hidden foreign bank accounts.
Smiling to himself, he initiated a transfer—half the funds discreetly routed to nonprofits and victim compensation groups. The rest?
Straight to a clean offshore account under his newly created alias: Virendra Singh.
Total: $28.4 million USD.
All of this—information gathering, skill acquisition, live testing, financial hacking—took just six hours.
As he walked out of the café, sunlight warming his face, Leo wore a wide, satisfied grin.
"Now with this small fortune... I can finally start planning ahead."
He hailed a cab and made his way to one of the finest hotels in Manhattan. With crisp bills and fake documents, he paid upfront for three days in the presidential suite. The staff, dazzled by the overconfidence of this "young entrepreneur," didn't ask questions.
As he entered the luxury room, he felt something he hadn't in days—comfort.
He stepped into the bathroom and let the hot water run again, scrubbing the city off his skin. Then came a proper meal, room service delivered in silver trays. And finally, the jacuzzi.
Sinking into the warm water, Leo let out a relaxed sigh. "After a long day... this is heaven."
But even now, his mind didn't rest.
He began building a fortress—a mental palace crafted by Sage's psychic capabilities. The first layer: multiple false realities and illusions, mental dead ends meant to trap intruders. Anyone trying to read his mind would see only what he allowed them to.
Then came the encryption: a custom internal operating system for his mind, structured like a quantum supercomputer. And a code language of his own invention—so complex that even someone as intelligent as Tony Stark or Reed Richards would need days to begin cracking it.
But that was assuming they had telepathy, which, thankfully, they didn't.
Leo smiled again.
He was just getting started.
End of Chapter 3
---