And then the giant tarantula was unceremoniously blasted to pieces by Nick Fury's atomic pistol.
"Starting to feel more and more like Men in Black," Zodhis remarked, watching the scene unfold. This battle was meant to build confidence among the S.W.O.R.D. agents. Not every weirdo was invincible.
In fact, after this fight, Nick Fury himself realized that weirdos were not quite as terrifying as he had imagined. They could be beaten. It was not absolutely necessary to rely on superheroes!
"Fury, one more bit of bad news. The radiation from that atomic pistol of yours might cause complete necrosis of your hair follicles."
Zodhis's voice crackled through Nick Fury's earpiece.
Nick Fury's face instantly darkened a few shades deeper.
He had no idea whether Zodhis was telling the truth or not. If he was, then the billion plus dollars he had embezzled during his S.H.I.E.L.D. director days to invest in hair regrowth research would have all been for nothing.
Motherfucker!
Naturally, Nick Fury kept that curse locked firmly inside his head. Who knew if this ever smiling director of theirs was secretly the vindictive type behind that grin?
But while Zod was busy ribbing Nick Fury, a report from one of his subordinate agents caught his full attention.
An agent with a two digit designation had discovered something deeply wrong inside a warehouse.
The warehouse in question had originally been a grain silo used for loading and unloading crops.
The United States was the world's largest exporter of grain, responsible for over twenty percent of the global total. Grain silos like this one, situated near the port, had been built by many of the large agricultural conglomerates. The facility had only been abandoned after the expansion of the New York harbor, when the grain companies relocated their storage directly to the city.
There had been signs of resistance here at first, but S.W.O.R.D. agents did not stand around arguing. Most of them were World Serpent personnel, and armed with atomic guns and laser rifles of devastating power, they had even less patience for nonsense.
Zod arrived at the site. Inside the warehouse was a concealed freight elevator. It descended nearly twenty meters before coming to a halt.
Stepping out of the elevator shaft and passing through a short corridor, Zod and the S.W.O.R.D. agents found themselves staring at an enormous subterranean chamber.
The vast empty basement sprawled across at least three thousand square meters.
Thirty colossal pillars supported the ceiling of the entire space. Nearly a hundred high wattage incandescent bulbs blazed overhead, illuminating the underground facility with the harsh brightness of full daylight.
The ceiling was at least ten meters high. Simple iron ladders and railings divided the space into two levels.
More than seventy personnel patrolled this sprawling underground complex.
Have you ever seen those tiny pine saplings meant for Christmas decorations planted in the ground? To conserve land, tree farms cram the disposable little seedlings together into impossibly dense rows, ensuring a richer profit come the holiday season.
Those saplings grow packed tight, branch brushing branch, pine needle overlapping pine needle. Even their root systems tangle and fuse together.
A single glance at such a sight would make anyone with trypophobia's skin crawl.
Right now, the S.W.O.R.D. agents felt their skin crawl. But not from trypophobia.
What was being cultivated down here were not Christmas trees.
They were human beings. Planted. One by one.
Yes, planted. The adjective was not wrong. Thousands of people were bound and packed in dense rows, each sealed inside a vertical glass chamber.
The chambers stood upright, anchored to the floor with three support struts, just like Christmas trees ready for decoration.
Most of the bound humans stared blankly ahead, their eyes unfocused, their pupils fixed on nothing at all. A drainage tube was inserted into the vein of each person's left arm.
Vivid red blood flowed through the tubes into collection canisters mounted outside each glass chamber.
Whenever a canister reached its four hundred milliliter capacity, the blood draw would automatically stop.
Then another tube, this one forced directly down the person's throat and into their stomach, would begin pumping in a substance resembling baby vomit.
Perhaps it was some kind of highly digestible, high energy nutrient slurry, something designed to help these living trees produce more blood. Who could say?
A life sign monitor was attached to each chamber. The moment one of these human trees' hearts stopped beating, the drainage tube would kick to maximum suction, draining every last drop of blood from their body.
You could watch as an adult male deflated like a leaking balloon, shriveling rapidly. Every blood vessel collapsed inward as pressure vanished entirely.
The body turned stark white from blood loss, as though someone had painted it straight from a bucket of whitewash.
Once the final drop of blood was extracted, that human tree had outlived its usefulness. An automated machine would swap out the spent unit.
A fresh, blood rich body would be strapped into the glass chamber to continue the work.
And that was only the first level. The second level contained far fewer human trees than the first.
Here, the trees were women and children. The food they were fed was graded by quality and rank.
Blood from adult males was the lowest tier product. The blood of women and children occupied a higher grade.
The exquisite blood of untouched virgins and the tender blood of young children were the most supreme delicacies of all.
Every square meter of this underground space had been used with brutal efficiency. This was a factory.
A factory for the mass production of blood plasma. And the sole buyers of that plasma, it went without saying, were vampires.
Unlike the refrigerated blood packs offered by human blood banks, here, if you had the money, you could enjoy the freshest, warmest blood straight from the source.
As long as you were in the greater New York area, one phone call got you free delivery citywide. They even supplied the vast quantities of blood needed for large parties.
Flavors came in a wide variety. The silky blood of young children. The sweet fragrant blood of beautiful women. The life brimming blood of pregnant women.
As long as you paid, this blood company hidden beneath New York City could satisfy your every craving.
A single hundred milliliter blood pack ranged in price from a low of fifty dollars to a high of six hundred.
This blood factory churned out millions of dollars in wealth every single day.
It was a factory of blood and tears in the truest sense. Every dollar earned here was soaked in the blood of the innocent.
"Intruders!"
The seventy patrolling guards finally noticed the breach. What greeted them was the merciless fire of atomic guns and laser rifles.
There was no need for words. One look at this scene, and it was clear that whoever owned this warehouse and the underground complex beneath it was an enemy of humanity. A weirdo. A disaster. A target that S.W.O.R.D. was duty bound to eliminate.
"To think they'd set up an operation this big."
Zod did nothing to stop his subordinates from carrying out their slaughter. With his hands clasped behind his back, he was already turning over in his mind exactly how to deliver a proper lesson to this brazen coven of vampires.
As for the victims' vacant expressions, the look was reminiscent of what happened after a frontal lobotomy. That procedure had once been used to treat mental illness. Once the frontal lobe was severed, a person would end up looking exactly like this.
/-\
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