Luther had zero interest in chasing the American Dream the old-fashioned way. He wasn't about to grind for a Green Card or pledge allegiance to a flag that wasn't even from his original dimension. He was a tourist in the grandest sense, and tourists in America did one thing really well: spend money.
Armed with the "inheritance" he'd digitally liberated from those dormant accounts, Luther headed straight for the neon oasis of Las Vegas.
Walking onto the casino floor was like stepping inside a kaleidoscope. The lights, the noise, the smell of cheap perfume and desperation—it was a lot. But for Luther, it was a playground.
He stood at a roulette table, nursing a whiskey he didn't plan to drink. The wheel spun. To the average person, it was a blur of red and black. To Luther? It was moving in slow motion. He could see the microscopic friction on the ball, the slight tilt of the wheel, the bead of sweat rolling down the croupier's neck.
He placed a stack of chips on Black 17.
Click. Click. Click… Plunk.
"Black 17," the croupier announced, his voice cracking slightly.
Luther raked in the chips with a polite smile. It was almost too easy. Which honestly begged the question: Why was Clark Kent always so broke?
Seriously, Luther thought, watching the pile of high-value chips grow. The guy has a brain that works faster than a quantum computer. He can turn coal into diamonds with his bare hands. And yet, his mom is stressing about the mortgage on the farm? Bruce Wayne has to buy the bank to save the house? That's just bad financial planning, Clark.
Luther wasn't going to make that mistake. Being a superhero was fine, but being a rich superhero was sustainable.
He walked out of the casino three nights later with a cool billion dollars in winnings.
He expected trouble—maybe some guys in cheap suits trying to break his kneecaps in the parking lot. Instead, the casino management treated him like royalty.
"Mr. Luther," the floor manager said, practically bowing as he escorted Luther to a waiting limo. A team of burly security guards flanked them. "We hope you enjoyed your stay. Please, come back anytime. We've comped your suite for the next month if you decide to return."
Luther blinked. Right. The whale strategy.
If you win big, they don't beat you up; they market you. He was a walking billboard. Look at this guy! He won a billion! You could be next! The casino would make his winnings back in a week just from the suckers hoping to replicate his luck.
"I'll keep that in mind," Luther said, sliding into the limo.
With a billion dollars in legitimate, laundered cash, Luther turned his eyes to Wall Street.
He didn't go crazy. If he won every trade, the SEC and the FBI would be kicking down his door before breakfast. Insider trading was the one thing the government took more seriously than alien invasions.
So, he played the game. He used his Super Brain to analyze market trends, digest global news, and predict fluctuations faster than any algorithm. He lost a few trades on purpose, just to keep the heat off, but his wins were surgical.
Within six months, that one billion turned into two and a half.
"That's enough," Luther decided, closing his portfolio. "Time to build something."
He didn't want to be a day trader. He wanted infrastructure.
He founded "Emperor Industries." The name was a little inside joke—a nod to the "Monarch" organization from the Godzilla movies he used to watch. He dropped two billion dollars into the startup, focusing entirely on biological and genetic research.
Step one: Hire the brains.
"Mr. Luther, your grasp of the material is… disturbing," Professor Landa said, adjusting his glasses. The old man was a leading expert in cellular regeneration, and Luther had hired him as a consultant—which was polite code for "private tutor."
Luther sat across from him in a makeshift office, surrounded by stacks of medical journals that reached the ceiling. "Disturbing good or disturbing bad, Professor?"
"Disturbing in its speed," Landa admitted. "You've absorbed three doctoral degrees' worth of biology in a month. It took Tony Stark a night to learn thermonuclear astrophysics, or so the legend goes, but biology is messy. It's not just math. It's intuition."
"I'm a fast reader," Luther shrugged.
He wasn't trying to become a scientist for the accolades. He was doing it out of paranoia.
He was a Kryptonian in the Marvel Universe. Who knew if the physics here worked the same way? Maybe the yellow sun here gave him cancer instead of powers in the long run? Maybe his cells would degrade? He needed to know what made him tick before he started playing hero.
The problem was the gear. The high-end, cutting-edge sequencers were locked down by government contracts or monitored by S.H.I.E.L.D. He didn't want to end up on a watchlist by ordering specific isotopic scanners.
Fine, Luther thought. I'll do it myself.
He didn't need a microscope. He was a microscope. His vision could zoom in to the cellular level. His brain could process the data better than a Cray supercomputer.
The only hard part was getting a sample.
Luther sat in his private lab, staring at a diamond-tipped industrial drill bit. He'd tried needles; they bent. He'd tried scalpels; they snapped.
"Okay," he muttered. "This is going to suck."
He activated his heat vision, focusing it into a microscopic, intense beam on the inside of his elbow, softening the skin just enough. Then, with a grunt of exertion, he jammed the diamond drill down.
CRACK.
A single, ruby-red drop of blood welled up.
"Gotcha."
For the next year, Luther effectively vanished. He locked himself in the lab of his newly constructed headquarters. He avoided the sun completely, living under artificial light, running tests on his own blood.
"Sample 115," Luther narrated into his recorder, his voice raspy from disuse. "Exposed to simulated solar radiation. No degradation. Hyper-active mitosis observed."
"Sample 191. Stable."
"Sample 239. Still stable."
He tested everything. Different light spectrums, different temperatures, toxins, radiation.
The conclusion was a relief: His cells were essentially biological solar batteries. They didn't just tolerate the energy; they craved it. As long as there was yellow sunlight, he was effectively immortal.
Luther slumped back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. He was pale, looking more like a vampire than a Superman after a year indoors.
"We're good," he whispered. "I'm not going to explode."
He stood up and walked out of the lab, taking the elevator up to the penthouse of the newly finished Emperor Tower.
It wasn't the prettiest building in New York—Stark Tower was flashy, all glass and curves. Emperor Tower was a brutalist monolith. Five hundred million dollars of concrete-encased steel, reinforced alloy foundations, and lead-lined panic rooms. It looked like a fortress because it was a fortress.
Luther stepped out onto the balcony.
The morning sun hit him like a physical blow.
It wasn't painful; it was ecstatic. He could feel his cells drinking it in, the fatigue of the last year evaporating in seconds. His skin flushed with color. His muscles swelled with renewed power. He took a deep breath, and the air in his lungs felt like rocket fuel.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. It was his accountant.
"Boss?" the voice on the other end sounded panicked. "We need to talk about the burn rate. The tower construction, the R&D… we're in the red. Like, deep red. Wall Street is calling you crazy."
Luther smiled, eyes closed, face tilted toward the sun.
"Let them talk," Luther said. "I'm just getting charged up."
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