Lucius went down only after the reception confirmed that the private office was ready. He took the lift in no hurry at all and stepped into the lobby with the calm of a man about to collect money from people who considered him a necessary part of their circulatory system.
Heads turned, briefcases shifted, and bodyguards straightened in small ways that would have meant nothing to an ordinary observer and everything to Clint Barton.
Lucius's butler moved to him at once, inclined his head, and guided him toward the office that had been arranged on the far side of the lobby. Once Lucius entered, the butler returned to the queue with his notebook and began calling numbers.
The process moved quickly and without interruption.
A client went in. A few minutes passed. The client came out lighter in hand and heavier in expression. Then the next one followed.
Natasha and Clint watched the pattern develop with growing certainty. Most men who entered the office carried a briefcase. Most men who left did not carry the same briefcase out. Some left with nothing in their hands at all, others had small boxes prepared to carry the vials. One thing they all had, though, was the exact look of people who had just spent more money than propriety allowed and were still delighted with themselves.
Clint folded his arms and watched another elderly man emerge wearing the face of someone who had purchased extra years and intended to use them badly.
"This is a good business," he muttered. "In one hour, this bastard makes more than both of us combined."
Natasha kept her eyes on the office door.
"I'm fairly sure we can add Hill and Coulson to the comparison and still not reach half of his daily income."
Clint glanced at the queue again.
The bodyguards stayed sharp but calm. Hotel security hovered at the edges, trying to look neutral, which was difficult when several of the guests were carrying enough money to buy small islands and enough armed protection to defend the purchase.
As usual, business took around two hours.
Lucius's regulars tried to buy as much as he would allow. One man attempted to secure next week's supply in advance. Another offered to pay the hotel bill for the whole year if Lucius promised to remain in the same place and continue receiving visitors in an orderly fashion.
Lucius declined nothing directly. He simply smiled, accepted the money, and sold what he wished to sell.
When the final customer left, Lucius rose, thanked no one, and walked out of the office the same way he had entered. Every stack of cash went into his inventory. The briefcases went too. Several of them were excellent brands, and Lucius saw no reason to leave expensive luggage behind when other people had already paid for it.
Natasha and Clint watched him re-enter the lift and return to his suite.
They waited another minute, then moved to the office.
The room was clean, almost deliberately so.
No cash. No vials. No cases. No hidden compartments visible at first glance.
Clint went for the drawers while Natasha checked the desk, the sideboard, and the seams of the upholstered chairs. She found a folded note placed exactly where someone performing a competent search would eventually look.
She opened it and read it once before handing it across.
Clint read it aloud under his breath.
"You can take the monkey out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the monkey."
Natasha looked around the room again.
"Considering the situation," she said, "he might have a point."
Clint folded the note carefully.
"Yeah," he replied. "Might."
Lucius dropped his invisibility half a minute after they left the office.
He had turned invisible after he entered his suite, teleported to the office and watched the whole search with quiet appreciation. They had been neat, with no panic or theatrics, and Romanoff and Barton searched like professionals, which already made them superior to most of their colleagues.
Still, they had searched.
That justified the note.
He teleported back to the suite and locked the door mostly for form. Then he took out the device to scan for cameras and listening hardware. Phastos's construct creation was still one of the best things he had ever sto-... barrowed from anyone, even setting aside the whole cosmic godhood issue.
It was a slim hand-held frame no larger than a television remote. The outer shell looked like brushed metal until one looked too closely and realised it had no seams. Beneath the surface ran a mesh of technopathic routing structures that would ping, identify, and map electronic surveillance within range while also letting him tell each device to develop a sudden and terminal lack of purpose.
He swept the suite once with the device, then again with his own senses. Nothing showed on both of the scans, which pleased him.
Then he started brewing.
The suite kitchen had not been built for his methods, but it was expensive enough to be forgiving. He set out water, fruit, spinach, honey, and the rest of the familiar ingredients, then began the process by memory. He combined measured amounts of water, fruit, spinach, and honey in the correct ratios, guiding the mixture with precise intent until it stabilised and separated into finished vials without the need for any conventional brewing.
While he worked, his mind wandered to the first Iron Man film.
Tony Stark should be building the first suit around now.
On the X-Men side, things would likely remain relatively quiet for another couple of years, at least if the mysterious SMS deity had fused the settings with the structural discipline of someone making a sandwich while drunk.
That meant he had time to get stronger, time to enjoy the relative silence, and time to hunt more Eternals.
He could also go to Afghanistan and help Stark. That had possibilities.
Tony, alive and grateful, was one thing. Tony alive and carrying a personal grudge against SHIELD for what they had done to Lucius would be much better. Lucius imagined explaining the whole story to him in detail and seeing one-eyed menace's reaction when Stark inevitably chose offence over nuance.
He smiled to himself while stashing the first finished batch.
Then he paused.
No, not the one-eyed thing.
He had been calling Fury that in his head too often.
Bad habit.
If the man ever somehow heard one of those thoughts, it would become a whole issue.
"Fury," Lucius corrected aloud. "That was safer."
That settled, he brewed for another couple of hours, packed the finished vials away, and teleported out of the suite.
The journey toward Afghanistan began as an exercise in irritation.
Lucius did not yet have true long-range point teleportation to places he had never seen. For now, he was still moving by a method that combined short-distance teleportation with fast telekinetic flight. He would rise, fix on the furthest clear point he could see, teleport, then fly again until the next jump made sense.
It worked, but it felt insulting now that he possessed cosmic energy manipulation and technopathy.
He crossed the ocean and sky in stages until he found himself hovering above the Atlantic with nothing around him but cold air, open water, and the slow realisation that he was still travelling like a hamster on ecstasy instead of like a man with cosmic engineering powers.
Lucius stopped mid-air and cursed at length. After a while, he did the sensible thing and built a solution.
If he could link to existing satellites and route visual data through a wearable technopathic interface, then he could see through systems already in orbit and treat anywhere on Earth as a viable destination. He was not about to teleport twenty-seven thousand times to cross a continent. Humanity had already built the infrastructure. He simply needed to hijack it in style.
Orange energy formed between his hands and spread outward in thin, precise bands. He shaped the frame first. Classic Ray Ban lines. Dark lenses. Clean arms. Stylish enough to pass without comment and ordinary enough to avoid attracting immediate suspicion.
The internal structure was where the real work happened.
Layer by layer, he built a set of linked functions into the construct. One layer handled signal acquisition from communication and imaging satellites already in orbit. Another translated raw feeds into a usable live perspective without overwhelming his eyes. A third allowed him to tag locations, switch viewpoints, and narrow geographic searches in real time. The final layer connected the whole thing to his technopathy, so the glasses would not merely receive information but command access where needed.
He put them on.
The world changed immediately.
Data slid across his sightline in quiet, translucent overlays, showing satellite positions, feed handshakes, and signal routing as the search frames narrowed over the globe in response to his intent. Before going through with his plan, he linked the device to himself. It would destroy itself the moment anyone else tried to use it.
Lucius focused first on archived news coverage of the Stark convoy attack.
The glasses pulled the relevant footage together from public and semi-public sources, then linked it to terrain views, military grid references, and later images of the attack route.
He found the location, allowed himself a brief, satisfied smile, and teleported.