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….
I caught her just as she started to sag, scooping her up into my arms and carrying her gently toward the still-open car door.
By the second step, full-body shivers were racking her, a brutal reminder of the stress her system's been through.
My little intervention, gentle as it was, still felt like yanking the wheel hard into reverse, and for nerves already hanging by a thread, that was no small ordeal.
Even a regenerator's body needed a minute to shake it off and reboot.
Diving straight into nagging Tony about rounding up scientists, "Get me more eggheads! Lock 'em all in black-site labs, KGB-style! Find a way out of this damn universe! Schnell! Schnell! Arbeiten!", would've been a dick move in the big picture.
Let the guy sort his own mess first, settle into the CEO gig. Then I could drop a subtle hint about "promising avenues" down the line.
End result would be cleaner that way, way better than if he started flailing around in panic mode right now.
So after wrapping up with Stark, I figured, hell, one way or another, Tony's gonna suck up all the spotlight from the usual suspects.
Fury's losing one of his top agents, for starters, and the Pentagon brass? Their wet dream of commandeering Iron Man tech just got a copper tub dumped over it with the billionaire's "recovery."
Seemed like the stars were aligning, so why not tie up another loose end I'd been digging into for ages?
Left my illusion behind to wrap up the lesson and keep flirting with Storm, priorities, right? While I slipped off to the heart of the American empire.
Cue one Stryker face-down on the floor and a trembling mutant girl in my arms.
Eased her into the passenger seat, still looking shell-shocked, then fished a bottle of brandy from the car's mini-bar.
Poured a generous splash into a glass and handed it over to my former body-squatter. Booze's mellow haze was exactly the ticket right now.
"Here, drink this. It'll help steady you out." Her fingers, slender but wired with freakish strength, clamped down on the glass like a vice.
It creaked in protest but held, though it was damn close to cracking. One wrong twitch…
She stared off into nothing for another beat or two, then lifted it to her lips. Gulped it down like she was dying of thirst.
Cough-cough-hack. The shakes hit the Asian girl hard as it burned its way down.
"Easy now," I said, pitching my voice low and soothing as I could manage. "You're good. It's all good." Got a quick nod back… followed by another swig, smoother this time.
Progress. While she nursed it, I let my mind wander back through the fat slob's memories, piecing together what I'd yanked from his skull.
Enough dirt in there to fry him on the electric chair and take a dozen more power players down with him, hell, you could slap forty-to-fifty in supermax on half a hundred senators and congressmen easy.
But the kompromat stash? That was just the appetizer. The real jackpot was the adamantium recipe, and like all genius shit, it turned out dead simple.
Nah, none of that bonkers movie crap with young Wolverine, Deadpool puppeteered like a text-adventure game from some basement PC, big bro Sabretooth, and a half-ton of random nonsense including a meteor crash-landing adamantium.
Thank the gods for small mercies, I'd been sweating that until the last second, even after eyeballing Logan's X-ray.
Screw the lack of bullet holes in that unbreakable skull or slugs lodged in his gray matter; this was Marvel Cinematic Universe!
Here, Mjolnir's powers flip ass-backwards along the same timeline, from a storm-god hammer to a glorified power-dampener for Thor's personal juice, after Hela's been slinging lightning with it like it was her personal joy buzzer.
Don't ask; I got no clue how that tracks. MCU logic: anything goes. Talking raccoons included.
Anyway, back on point. The adamantium alloy breakthrough? Total accident, while they were reverse-engineering vibranium for Cap's shield.
Base was titanium mixed with a cocktail of rare earths, fifteen-ish metals, blended in exact sequence and ratios.
Nothing crazy about it; melt points didn't even touch the extremes of your run-of-the-mill weapon steels.
The bitch was handling the stuff post-solidification. Once it set, no furnace on earth could touch it.
Vibranium, for comparison, was stubborn but meltable if you cranked the heat. Adamantium? They never pinned down its melt point. Stayed liquid down to three hundred degrees, cooler than lead, and locked solid at two-fifty, no exceptions.
As for Stryker and whether his noggin was the only vault for this intel? Guy thought he was the sole keeper, or close enough.
He'd offed every scientist in the loop, scrubbed every file. Didn't buy that anyone'd crack the formula fresh without his notes.
Expected stuff, really, that's what I'd geared up for. Without captive Magneto in the mix, I figured William Stryker was small potatoes on the global threat scale. I wasn't dead wrong, but…
Enter Project X-23.
Yeah, that one. Female Wolverine clone, groomed from the crib to be a compliant puppet for Uncle Sam's dominance games.
Stryker was just a mid-level suit on it, not even top dog. His role boiled down to adamantium shipments and picking the kid's "training curriculum."
Still, the project existed here, and our mutant-hating colonel knew all about it.
Same with the other gem: bio-weapon to wipe mutants off the map, cooked up from… drumroll… the virus that dusted every vampire back in the early '90s!
Hey there, badass Black dude with the katana. Blade, you bespectacled son of a bitch, turns out you're canon here too!
But get this, the mutant genocide op was overseen by the same headcase running X-23: Zander Rice.
Total loose cannon of a prick; no wonder Stryker fanboyed him hard while plotting to leapfrog the guy, even though he had a good twenty years on him. Yeah, I think I'll pay Rice a house call too.
Look, for all my current headspace, loose as a goose from this clusterfuck, knowing some buried bunker near the Mexican border's churning out this kinda nightmare and sitting on my hands? Nah, not my style.
The real debate was logistics: bolt for the bunker now and yank X-23 out, or wrap up with the colonel first?
Time was ticking, and the splash from this could spook the "Weapon-X" revival crew into going dark. But rushing in half-cocked? Bad juju.
….
Bonus Chapter on every 500 power stones;
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