Death didn't come with fanfare.
For Victor Ashburn, it came in silence, the kind that fills an empty apartment at 3 a.m. The dull glow of a monitor cast shadows across his pale skin, eyes glazed over, hands stiff on the keyboard. One final heartbeat, then none.
No screams. No lights. No last-minute epiphany. Just... nothing.
Until he opened his eyes.
He stood in a void. No floor, no sky. Just stars suspended in a dark sea that stretched infinitely. He was naked, unafraid, and oddly lucid. Then, it appeared — not a shape, not a voice, but a presence.
It didn't speak with words, but Victor understood it all the same.
"Victor Ashburn. You've died. Yet your soul resonates."
Victor raised an eyebrow. "Resonates?"
"You carried potential. Ambition. Discipline. The kind not born of circumstance, but forged by choice. And for that, I offer you five wishes before your rebirth."
He paused.
He should be panicking. But instead, he felt a familiar calm. The same kind that once guided him through loss, betrayal, and sleepless nights coding systems for companies that forgot his name a day after he died.
He gave a faint smirk. "Then let's not waste time."
---
First Wish: The Shadow Monarch's power. A dominion over death. But not just the ability to summon shadow soldiers — he wanted access to everything they were: skills, memories, weapons, traits. If he made them his, they would be truly his. Tools. Extensions of will.
Second Wish: A simplified system interface. No leveling, no flashy stats. Just essentials: scan enemies, access inventory, monitor condition. He didn't want distractions — only utility.
Third Wish: Doomsday Evolution. Any threat, any force, he would adapt. Be it fire, magic, psychic interference, or even cosmic phenomena. His body would learn to survive. Slowly, painfully, if needed — but it would learn.
Fourth Wish: To become a singularity. Untethered from timelines, beyond the reach of reality resets, immune to multiversal fluctuations. No matter what happened — Snap, incursion, time heist — he would persist.
Fifth Wish: To be reborn in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, before the rise of heroes, before Tony Stark built his first suit. The age of beginnings. A time when shadows still moved unnoticed.
---
When Victor opened his eyes again, the world was different.
Concrete. Smog. Sirens in the distance. His new body stood tall in an alley behind a nightclub in downtown Los Angeles, circa 2004. In his pocket: a cheap phone, a fake ID. In his mind: clarity.
> [SYSTEM BOOTING...]
Name: Victor Ashburn
Title: Shadow Monarch
Status: Stable
Skills: Shadow Extraction, Shadow Exchange, Scan, Inventory
Traits: Singular Core (Passive), Evolution [Dormant]
No blinking windows. No health bars. It was exactly what he wanted — silent, responsive, and brutally efficient.
Victor cracked his knuckles.
Then he vanished into the night.
---
The first kill came on the second night.
A small-time gang dealing weapons behind a strip mall. They laughed. Drank. Abused. They didn't see him coming.
He emerged from the shadows like smoke. Three seconds. Three bodies.
Then, his power activated.
> [Shadow Extraction Available]
Would you like to extract shadows?
— Yes.
> Shadow Soldier Created: "Gutter" – Ex-Gang Enforcer
Shadow Soldier Created: "Latch" – Weapons Specialist
Shadow Soldier Created: "Snaps" – Driver
They knelt before him, eyeless and silent, cloaked in dark mist.
Victor studied them. They were tools now. Soldiers. But also... assets.
Gutter knew how to navigate local crime circles. Latch had ties to black-market arms. Snaps knew routes, drop points, dirty cops.
Victor smiled. "Time to build an empire."
---
Over the following months, Los Angeles's underworld began to shift.
Small-time traffickers went missing. Dirty money got rerouted. Victims vanished from ledgers, never to be seen again.
And yet, the police had nothing. No bodies. No evidence. Just rumors of a new player who never showed their face.
Victor operated in silence.
Each night, more criminals fell. Each became a shadow. Each shadow brought something new — skills in hacking, laundering, logistics, and even insider trading. He killed the worst society offered — murderers, slavers, extortionists. The scum who would never see justice.
He funneled the stolen funds through a new identity — Ashburn Capital — and began buying shares in companies he knew would matter soon. Especially one in particular: Stark Industries.
He started small. Silent buy-ins. Names hidden behind shell companies. No attention. No trail.
By the end of 2006, his firm held 0.3% of Stark stock. A whisper. But growing.
And Victor had time.
---
One night, while walking through Chinatown, Victor paused by a rooftop. A local gang had begun moving girls through an abandoned theater.
He didn't speak.
He descended.
A dozen shadows poured from the alley behind him, swirling like smoke given form. The gang never saw the darkness sweep them off their feet.
Victor didn't leave bodies. He never did. When the fighting ended, there was only silence — and a dozen new soldiers in his growing army.
He turned to his shadow soldier "Lumen," formerly a trafficker with connections in East Asia.
"Start spreading rumors," he said. "Whispers of a ghost that eats monsters."
She nodded and vanished.
---
He kept to the edges of the world.
SHIELD was active, yes. HYDRA even more so. But Victor was a ghost. A being beyond their scanners. His Singularity trait ensured no tech could track his energy signature. Not even Wakandan vibranium would notice the anomaly hidden in the dark.
He wasn't here to change the world.
He was here to prepare for it.
He knew what was coming: Iron Man, then Thor, then the Tesseract, Loki, Ultron, the Snap, the Multiverse, incursions.
The others would play their part.
Victor Ashburn would play his — from the shadows.
He sat at the edge of a rooftop as the city pulsed below. His black coat drifted in the wind. A faint glow flickered behind his irises as his system responded.
> [Shadow Count: 137]
[Inventory Capacity: 3,400 lbs / 10,000 lbs]
[Adaptation Progress: 3.6% — Immune to Night Vision Detection, Basic Mind Probes, Mild Toxins]
He stared toward the coast, toward Malibu.
Soon, Tony Stark would take that fateful trip to Afghanistan.
And when the world finally saw Iron Man...
Victor would already be waiting in the dark behind him.
Watching. Waiting. Building.
A Monarch of shadows.