The ruins of Sokovia still smoked when Alex moved in under the cover of night. Servo-skulls flitted through the rubble, their crimson optics sweeping every shattered street for traces of Ultron's mechanical husks. The Avengers had barely departed, the world still reeling from what had nearly been its end, and yet here was Alex, whispering canticles of harvest and reclamation as his mechadendrites scraped charred alloy from the wreckage. Ultron's sentries lay scattered, their bodies split and twisted, fragments of vibranium-laced exoskeleton glinting beneath layers of dust.
The system whispered, highlighting schematics and potential yields in Alex's vision. His nanites swarmed from beneath his sleeves in silver streams, crawling over broken limbs, shattered torsos, and severed heads. They consumed what was left, digesting alien alloys and synthetic muscle, reformatting them into raw feedstock for the forge. When the last of Ultron's fragments dissolved into swirling black dust, Alex murmured a benediction to the Omnissiah. To him, these remains were relics of blasphemy and genius alike, both to be studied and purified.
The vibranium Ultron had stolen became the seed for Alex's greatest experiment yet. Following the system's blueprints, he refined the metal into microscopic constructs, birthing a new swarm of nanites far beyond his earlier prototypes. Where once they were tools, now they were a weapon, adaptive and resilient, carrying in their circuits fragments of Mechanicus machine-prayers bound in code. His body strengthened with each infusion. Beneath his nanoflesh façade he was becoming something both more and less than human, hidden beneath the guise of normalcy, the regeneration cradle's modifications cloaking his augmetics beneath lifelike skin.
The world noticed the scars of Sokovia, but none noticed the scavenger-priest moving unseen among the wreckage. Yet whispers began to spread. S.H.I.E.L.D. remnants, the United Nations council, even Stark's private systems logged anomalies in the battle's aftermath power spikes, missing fragments of vibranium, faint traces of corrupted signals buried in the chaos. They did not have the power to act. The Sokovia Accords, soon to be ratified, bound the Avengers and hamstrung every investigation. All they could do was quietly mark the unknown scavenger as an emerging variable, a shadow they could not yet confront.
Alex, meanwhile, had already set his sights forward. Vibranium nanites and optimized servo-skulls had granted him the tools to stand among gods. Yet his path demanded more. Knowledge and technology lay scattered across timelines, and only one key could unlock them. He required the Pym Particles. The ability to contract and expand the physical form, to bypass barriers of space, and if his system's calculations were correct to breach the boundaries between worlds themselves.
He began his vigil. Servo-skulls blended with the shadows of San Francisco, their lenses trained upon a man named Scott Lang. The thief who would soon inherit a mantle far larger than himself. Alex watched as events unfolded, as Hank Pym passed fragments of his legacy into Lang's hands. In those particles lay the gateway to Alex's true destiny: the traversal of infinite dimensions, the harvest of boundless technologies, the weaving of Mechanicus faith into every reality.
As Gear's voice whispered strategy into his mind and his nanites consumed what the world left behind, Alex knew he could not remain a scavenger forever. Soon, the great powers of this world would see him not as a ghost in the ruins but as a rival. For now, he remained patient, cloaked, and vigilant, awaiting the moment when Pym's secrets would be within his grasp. Only then would the true expansion of the Machine God's will begin.