Chapter 176: The Blacklight Virus — Acquired!
"He's been in there way too long. Don't tell me he's in there working out how to take all the credit for this mission himself."
Cull Obsidian stood outside the crashed ship and muttered this to himself.
"Maw. Did you find it? If you did, come out. We don't have time to be standing around here."
"Maw? Come in if you're reading me."
No response. Cull tried twice more. Still nothing.
The relaxed attitude he'd maintained until now began to shift.
"Maw. This is my final attempt at contact. I'm hoping you're not playing games with me."
"If you stay silent, I'm going to assume something went wrong and head back to the ship."
"Maw. Come in."
One second. Two. Three.
The silence held.
Cull looked up at the ship's entrance. Inside, the fires were still spreading. Black smoke continued to pour from scorched conduits.
He stood there a moment, then turned and started walking back the way they'd come.
He'd taken maybe four steps when something hit the ground behind him.
A heavy impact. Close.
He stopped and spun, weapon up.
Behind him, a shorter figure was pulling itself up from the ground in a way that didn't match how bodies were supposed to move. Arms and legs bent at the wrong angles. The sternum collapsed visibly inward across a wide area. And yet whatever this was remained entirely active.
The firelight reached it.
Cull got a clear look.
Ebony Maw.
Through the transparent faceplate of the containment suit, a face he knew well, now rotting and falling apart, stared back at him. The pupils had gone white. Blood ran from the mouth. The teeth had sharpened into something that didn't belong in any face Cull recognized.
Every trace of the composure and elegance Maw had always carried was gone. What was left looked exactly like the things wandering the streets.
Cull ran a quick assessment. Other than the injuries from the fall, there were no wounds on Maw's body. Nothing from an attack. He looked almost clean, as though the ambush inside the ship had never touched him.
And yet.
Something had turned him.
Before Cull could work through what that meant, Maw slowly raised his broken right arm.
The next instant, Cull's containment suit was seized by something invisible.
Then it was torn apart.
In less than a second, the suit that had been keeping the planetary atmosphere out of his lungs was scattered across the ground in metal fragments.
When it was done, a satisfied expression settled across Maw's ruined face. His psychic ability had apparently survived the transformation in some form. Even as a zombie, he retained enough clarity and enough of himself to plan.
Cull held his breath.
There was no point engaging with whatever Maw had become. He turned and kept moving toward the ship at a sustained pace.
A wet, grating sound came from behind him. Something between a laugh and a hiss.
Maw raised his arm again.
A half-collapsed building lifted out of the ground at the roots and came across the distance toward the ship at speed.
It hit.
The sound of the impact carried through the entire area. A massive section of the ship's outer hull buckled inward. Falling debris rained across the engine housing and destroyed one engine outright. The ship was not going anywhere.
Cull looked at what was left of their ride. He was quiet for a moment. Then he turned and found Maw, and when he spoke his voice carried the particular roughness of someone who had given up on pretense.
"Some things don't change. Enemy or ally, I have never been able to stand the look of you."
Whether the zombified Maw understood any of that was unclear, but the expression on his ruined face widened.
He raised his hand again.
Several lengths of rebar ripped up from the ground and launched toward Cull like thrown spears.
They moved faster than bullets.
They did nothing. Cull's skin stopped them without effort, and they fell.
Heavy footsteps on the street. Cull's charge. The sound of it also drew the attention of the dead wandering nearby.
Maw didn't take the charge head-on. He became a blur and lifted into the air, putting distance between them immediately.
He knew exactly what he was doing. Even zombified, his read on Cull's limitations was intact.
Cull Obsidian was enormously strong and almost impossible to damage. But he couldn't fly. That had always been the gap in his capability, which was why his weapon was a massive grappling hook: designed to catch things at range and drag them within reach.
In the original timeline, Tony Stark had found this out the hard way when that hook had closed around him before he could react.
Maw knew this. The moment Cull threw the hook, Maw's telekinesis intercepted it and knocked it aside.
His intelligence had degraded, but not his situational awareness. He knew exactly what his next move was.
Wait.
The entire atmosphere of the Chitauri homeworld was saturated with the virus. Anyone exposed to that air long enough would inevitably contract the T-Virus.
He didn't need to do anything else. He just had to keep Cull from leaving until Cull became the same thing he was.
Titan.
Thanos sat on his throne, holding a report from his subordinates, his expression flat and dark.
Half a month had passed since Ebony Maw departed.
In all that time, not a single transmission had come back. Not from Maw. Not even from Cull Obsidian, who was not generally the type to go quiet.
That was worth thinking about.
"My lord. Should we dispatch additional personnel to the Chitauri homeworld to search for Lord Maw and Lord Cull Obsidian?"
The subordinate to his side waited.
Thanos glanced at him. "No."
"Furthermore. Designate the Chitauri homeworld a restricted zone. No exploration until further notice."
The absence of any transmission from either of them, combined with the abrupt signal loss, made the situation on that planet self-evident. There was no reason to send more people into it.
They had other things to manage. The Chitauri Scepter and the Space Stone were still priorities, but they weren't the only ones. The remaining Stones would need their own timelines established.
Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Earth.
In a conference room that managed to feel official despite the beer bottle in Logan's hand and his feet on the table, Storm, Cyclops, and several of the school's other senior members were seated and watching him.
"Logan. Your friend Matthew Lawrence apparently asked you recently about the location of Sebastian Shaw's body."
"Did he tell you what he was planning to do with it?" Storm asked.
Sebastian Shaw. A class four mutant with the ability to absorb any form of energy and convert, store, and redirect it at will. The threat level he had represented was not abstract: both Professor X and Magneto still carried the weight of what he had done to them. Hearing his name brought up again produced a visible tension in the room.
Logan took a pull from the bottle and shook his head. "He didn't say. I didn't ask."
"Didn't feel like I needed to. Everything I've seen from Matthew Lawrence tells me he's a genuinely decent person."
"A decent person?"
"Absolutely. If you've been following the news lately, you'll know he just expanded several more orphanages, and the daily free treatment count for disabled patients has doubled. If that's not a decent person, I don't know what is."
Logan's opinion of Matthew had been steadily climbing since they'd first met. In his experience, most people who made real money either spent it on themselves or used it as a way to accumulate more. Matthew was the first person in a long time he'd encountered who seemed to genuinely take what he'd earned and put it back into the people around him. Back into the communities it came from.
That kind of person didn't steal corpses for bad reasons.
Storm's expression shifted, somewhere between skepticism and something she didn't put words to. "Logan, I understand Matthew Lawrence has been good to you, so..."
"No." Logan cut her off. "You've got it backwards. He's been good to all of us."
"Beyond the conversation about Shaw, he also spent some time talking to me about mutant re-employment."
"He doesn't think mutants should be looked at as something abnormal. He thinks we should be integrated into society. Using what we can do."
Storm's response came without hesitation. "For example? Deployed as biological weapons to kill people on a battlefield?"
The bias behind that came through clearly. It had taken root the moment Matthew had asked about Shaw's body, and it wasn't going anywhere easily.
Logan recognized the subtext and set his feet down from the table.
"Ororo. I hear what you're implying. But that's not what he had in mind."
"His actual thinking was about placement. How to find real roles for mutants in society that made use of their abilities."
"Mutants with exceptional speed doing food delivery and disaster response. Mutants with psychic abilities working with law enforcement on interrogations." He kept going, and eventually got around to Storm specifically.
"Your ability would be ideal for artificial rainfall in drought-affected regions."
Storm said nothing.
Which was appropriate, given that she was thinking about her ancestors, who had possessed the same ability to command weather long before she joined the X-Men. Before the X-Men existed. Her family had spent generations doing exactly what Logan was describing: cloud-seeding, rain-calling, managing the weather for the communities around them. The work of a weather deity, performed quietly, generation after generation.
Cyclops leaned forward, visibly curious. "Logan. What about my ability?"
"Tree felling, steel cutting, tunneling through terrain."
"What about me?" Iceman asked.
"You? Coffee shop ice machine. Those places go through a lot of ice."
Iceman stared.
"That was a joke," Logan said, waving it off. "You're better suited for fire department support. Serious fire situations are exactly where your ability belongs."
"We spent a lot of time in that coffee shop going through different scenarios for how mutants could be placed. Which is why I've never once suspected Matthew had anything bad in mind for Shaw's body."
The room sat with this for a moment.
"So you gave it to him."
"He asked. Why wouldn't I? It's just a body." Logan spread his hands with the air of someone who did not find this complicated.
"There was one other thing he asked me, though. Strange question."
"Strange how?" Everyone asked at once.
"He wanted to know if I'd ever heard of someone called Apocalypse."
"Apocalypse?"
The room went quiet in a different way.
None of them recognized the name. Or rather: in this timeline, Apocalypse had not appeared in 1983 the way the original story described. That event, and everything that followed from it, had not happened here.
Umbrella Corporation. Lowest level.
Under cold white light, Matthew stood without expression in front of a cryogenic storage unit, looking through the glass at Sebastian Shaw.
Shaw's eyes were closed. A small wound sat on his forehead, roughly two centimeters across. Through the wound, the brain tissue inside was visible, frozen solid.
He was still wearing the suit he'd died in. Still carrying the composed, unhurried bearing he'd had in life.
Matthew had gone to the trouble of acquiring him for one reason: preparation. Something to strengthen himself with when the time came.
He moved his gaze from Shaw to the System point counter, which was climbing at a steady rate.
After everything that had accumulated over this stretch of time, Stage 1 of the Blacklight Virus Pass was almost within reach. Tonight, if nothing disrupted the pace, was when it would arrive.
He watched the interface tick over. Points arriving in small increments: +5, +1, +2. He didn't feel impatient. He waited.
Time moved.
Then a notification tone sounded, and Matthew's eyes, which had been closed, opened.
[Cumulative System points: 120,000. Pass reward: Blacklight Virus DX-1118C x1 (deposited to System storage).]
[Next stage reward at cumulative 130,000 System points. Please continue using your System rewards to benefit the people.]
Matthew let the notification register, then spent a moment forcing the excitement back down to something manageable.
He had the Blacklight Virus.
He looked at it.
His first instinct was not to fuse it. That was the old rule, and the old rule still applied.
Optimize first.
Yes, the Blacklight Virus was powerful. He also thought it could be more powerful.
System. Optimize.
The thought moved, and the System interface opened immediately.
The Blacklight Virus description materialized in front of him.
[Blacklight Virus: A mysterious substance characterized by the ability to consume a host's genetic material and evolve from it. Strictly speaking, it is not a "virus" in the conventional sense but rather a kind of "quasi-organism."
Its existence is not oriented toward reproduction.
It is oriented toward evolution, toward the creation of a perfect living being.
To enable its own evolution, it can consume other life forms, extracting their genetic advantages and integrating them into itself. Its existence is, in every meaningful sense, synonymous with the concept of evolution itself.]
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