Chapter 178: The Progenitor Plan
"Am I... alive?"
The training ground. Sebastian Shaw looked around with the wide eyes of someone who had not yet processed what his own presence here meant.
The last thing his consciousness had registered clearly was the coin going through his brain. And then, without any gap between those two moments, he was here.
Before he had time to do anything with that, Matthew hooked one finger. A grenade flew off the weapons rack at the far end of the room and landed in front of Shaw. Matthew pulled the pin as it settled.
"If you still have what you had before, use it."
He said it without ceremony. He wanted to know whether the resurrection had carried the ability along with the man.
The Megamycete's original property had allowed it to record biological information from every organism that died after contracting the Mold. After being absorbed through the Blacklight Virus's Evolution Field, that property had shifted: it now recorded information from every organism that died after coming into contact with the Blacklight Virus.
The act of draining someone's life essence through the Evolution Field absorbed their DNA, their abilities, and their consciousness simultaneously. That qualified as contact by any reasonable definition.
So the question was whether Shaw, revived through that process, would wake up with what he'd had before.
The grenade hit the floor in front of Shaw and rolled to a stop.
The fuse was nearly at the end when Shaw's hand came up on instinct and closed around it.
Then it went off.
The energy discharge from the explosion hit Shaw's palms and was absorbed immediately. Shaw in that moment was a dry riverbed receiving a sudden downpour. He took all of it, without resistance, without effort.
A few seconds passed. The fire at his palms faded.
He opened his hand.
Steel ball bearings from the fragmentation grenade pattered out of his palm and across the floor.
Matthew's eyebrow went up.
He genuinely had not expected that. He'd hoped for it, had designed the test on the possibility of it, but seeing it work was something else.
If it worked this cleanly...
His mind was already moving.
The world had no shortage of powerful people currently alive. Dead powerful people were an even longer list. Once Umbrella finished acquiring the relevant remains, he could run the same process on all of them. Select the twenty strongest from the results, put them through an enhanced Astartes modification procedure on top of their existing abilities.
He'd have Progenitors.
The thought settled into a clear plan.
He turned to Shaw, who had been saying something to himself since he woke up.
"Sebastian. I'm going to have someone take you to the lab level for a physical assessment shortly. Don't resist."
"Your ability, once it's been refined and scaled down, is an excellent fit for standard Astartes units. A portable energy absorption field. A biological Void Shield."
Translucent, the Vought asset — actual Void Shield technology, the kind capable of rendering a person electromagnetically invisible and impervious to standard damage — was not something that could be engineered through any existing tech path, even with Tony's assistance. Not in the near term.
But mutant abilities ran on genetics. The X-gene was the mechanism, which meant it was a biological engineering problem. And biological engineering was the one category in which Umbrella Corporation was, without exaggeration, ahead of everyone else on the planet.
Extract Shaw's energy absorption X-gene and install it in an Astartes. That was a biological Void Shield. Organic, compact, and already tested.
Shaw heard the words "physical assessment" and something shifted behind his expression.
He was experienced enough to know precisely what that phrase meant in a facility like this one.
But he was also under what Matthew's absorbed consciousness had termed the "host suppression" — the Las Plagas network's foundational subordination effect, now operating through the Blacklight Virus framework. Whatever Shaw wanted to say, his body and his will worked in the same direction as Matthew's without him having chosen that.
He nodded quietly and said nothing.
A research team arrived and escorted him out.
Matthew watched him go.
Shaw's resurrection had opened up a cleaner picture of where things could go from here. The most immediate priority had resolved itself into one clear sequence of actions.
Find Apocalypse.
Hunt him. Absorb him.
Then make him the most useful subordinate Matthew had ever acquired.
He walked out of the training ground and into the office.
Ada was at the fish tank, doing what she always did when she was in this room. Eleanor had positioned herself at Matthew's desk with her laptop, and was working through something with the focused efficiency she brought to everything.
Both looked up when he came in.
Ada's signature half-smile appeared immediately. "If it isn't the man who's far too busy benefiting humanity to spend time with us. Back already? Found a gap in your packed schedule of public service?"
Matthew's mouth pulled sideways. "I actually came to tell you both something."
Ada glanced over at Eleanor. "As expected. Mr. Lawrence never appears without a reason. Never visits unless something needs doing. Isn't that right, Eleanor?"
Eleanor adjusted her gold-rimmed glasses without looking up from her screen. "I don't know. I find a man who's genuinely absorbed in his work quite attractive."
"I much prefer this to someone who spends every evening on entertainment."
Ada: "..."
That was not the play. The play was supposed to be both of them working together to get this man to actually spend time with them for once. Eleanor was not supposed to immediately defect and take his side.
That was exactly the kind of coldly composed move she should have predicted from Eleanor, and somehow she hadn't.
The air between them sharpened.
Matthew read the signs and stepped forward before it developed further, moving straight to the point.
"Ada. Eleanor. I need you to look into a mutant called Apocalypse. This is directly relevant to my plans going forward."
"Apocalypse?" Ada's eyebrow went up. She reached across the desk, tore open a bag of chips without ceremony, and settled onto the edge of the desk. "First the alien invasion, now Apocalypse and his Four Horsemen. Are you planning to declare war on God next?"
Eleanor, characteristically, came at it from a different angle.
"Sir. Is 'Apocalypse' a codename, or is that actually what he's called?"
"And beyond the name, what else do you currently have on him?"
Matthew answered directly. "His full name is En Sabah Nur. Born in the First Dynasty of Egypt, around 3000 BC. One of the longest-lived mutants in Earth's recorded history."
"At some point thousands of years ago, during a ritual, he was buried alive in a pyramid complex as part of a conspiracy against him. He's been in a dormant state ever since."
"That's the limit of what I have, which is exactly why I need you both on the investigation."
"If you find his location, or any meaningful information about him, I want to know immediately."
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