The following days rolled by with me doing nothing more than research and study in a repeating cycle.
I sometimes left the house for fresh air and sometimes I found myself at Charlie's and spend some time talking with Natasha and Yelena. Both of them decided to work at the bar and I still didn't know why they decided on that.
Yelena was 15 this year, but with them being spies and all that, faking an identity was just like breathing to them.
With all the time I spent coming to the bar, I had hoped that Charlie would remember me but then again I only worked here for like two months before ghosting for two years, not to mention that I looked completely different than I did two years ago. The difference was like that of pre and post Captain America Steve Rogers.
The days went by with little to no difference which was something I dearly appreciated.
Since I wasn't making headway with the program I was trying to create, I focused most of my time on training my abilities.
Somehow I had been able to get the ice form of Bobby Drake and also the fire form of Johnny Storm. It was just a situation of multiplication and division.
I didn't use the fire form since… well it burned my clothes a lot. Like every time.
It did make controlling the elements way easier so I wasn't complaining much.
Electricity on the other hand was very hard. It was like swinging a slippery snake, no a fish. It was bound to leave your control and then mess up everything around you.
When I reviewed all the fights I've had to so far, they were either too close or my abilities were too diverse for the enemy to keep track with.
Sure, I was stronger than most of the opponents I've faced so far but there would come a time when I would be rendered helpless in front of a terrifying foe. It was a fact that I acknowledged.
There was always going to be someone stronger than me. Especially in this universe.
It was for this fact that I took the training of my abilities to a new level.
Combining elements.
So far, I've gotten various degrees of… failure. It was so jarring that I was forced to stop that facet of training. It was just impossible that I could very well feel it.
Besides, I didn't know what would happen if you mix fire and water conceptually. I couldn't form the results in my mind which was one of the reasons why I didn't have any form of progress.
Fire and water had way too many concepts in both of them. Different religions and teachings had how they described fire and water and all those concepts stuffed inside just two elements made true mastery of them impossible.
All the superheroes I knew who could produce fire or lasers only used them for burning and cutting, also flying. My point is, if that was all I could think of fire, all my fire would do was burn and if I tried to add water to it… then.
So instead of trying to fuse two elements, I tried using one to influence another of my ability. This was a more successful venture as it was something I had already done before, although to a smaller scale.
Using my body's electricity and amplifying it, I was able to spread out my senses in a way that my superhuman body could never do. It was what I used against the Sentinels back in Moscow and also at Lake Alkali.
Electricity increased my active sensors by folds while also decreasing the capacity of the lower passive minute ones but this problem was solved as all I did was let my brain focus on every part of my body and I easily bypassed the thin field stopping small impulses from travelling to my brain. While it wasn't a power up, it was a huge qualitative increase.
With the electricity part taken care off, what I then used in influencing it was my supercharged brain waves.
Using the energy in my body to amplify the reverberating power of my brain waves, and then combining it with my bio-electricity I was able to create a small imperceptible room with myself at the epicenter that I could directly influence.
It was like a zone or domain where I was always at my best. It boosted my reflex and sensory abilities and also made manipulating my abilities easier.
I felt that I could fight without my eyes anytime I expanded my senses with this application. It was like a rave, but I was the only one invited as well as being the host.
I was elated by the prospects of this discovery because it was the first time I had been able to use my brainwaves to directly affect the surroundings. Maybe with more training I would be able to use only my brainwaves to affect things rather than intertwining it with another ability.
The only downside of this ability was that psychics and any other arcane master would be able to sense the psychic field around me because that was what it was basically. Meaning they could disrupt it, but then again it didn't have any disadvantageous effect on my abilities.
While these findings didn't have any attack potential to them, it was an entirely different case when using it in conjunction to others. They were multipliers to my ever increasing arsenal.
All I could say was that my training paid off in full.
Then came the business.
Marky was over the moon when we made over a million dollars but was just as stumped after he realized he just sold 57% of the company to me. He didn't let it get to him since he thought I'd sell it when the time came.
Due to Facebook's monumental success, Fmail also started gaining traction. I was also debating whether to release ViewTube now and with the Christmas holiday by the corner gave me the thumbs-up.
Sure there were other apps which had the same function as ViewTube but none of them had the easy accessibility that mine had. And also dark mode. In fact that was my selling point.
The company would run on its own with Mark at the helm until I decided otherwise, which Mark seemed to know and was doing a very good job to make me not think otherwise. It was funny seeing him work that hard but was also understandable because the company was essentially mine since I had higher shares than him and also most of the aesthetics of the app came from me and while he could pull a smart ass move and try to break free, Facebook would still be mine while he'd have to start anew and at the same time try to give it the same popularity as its predecessor had.
Apart from that, I also had a program hidden in the Facebook servers that alerted me of any change, which in fact was an anti-embezzlement ping. No one was stealing anything from me anytime soon. I've been too poor for far too long to let something like that happen.
So while Mark ran around as the face of Facebook and got all famous with connections and shit, I'll just be chilling and fighting whatever the universe, or whoever brought me here, throws at my face.
Life is good when you know how to get what you want.
Apart from what was happening in my daily life, I had also called Fury to see if he could help me track down Ulysses Klaue.
Although I wanted nothing more to do with Wakanda and most of the main characters of the Marvel-verse, there however were some pretty little things scattered around the planet that no one would miss if I took a few… or a truckload.
I had important use for the Vibranium ore… Well everyone did, but then again I was the one getting it. I figured I could use it to make Bucky's new arm and given that the Lake Alkali base was sunk underwater I would have to find a new source of Adamantium.
While I would never try to fuse Adamantium with my skeleton, its denseness however was very important to me. In my personal opinion, I'd rather choose Adamantium than Vibranium. Although the latter does indeed have some nifty tricks like its shock absorption and redirection, it still wouldn't do to make a full weapon out of it.
But Adamantium was different. The denseness of the material alone and the fact that it could not be remolded after casting was such a priceless feature. Although Vibranium would be the go-to ore for a suit of armor, unfortunately I wasn't looking for a suit of armor, but I would reconsider if it came in a custom-made tuxedo or designers.
I wanted an axe while Bucky needed an arm. Mine was solely for attack while Bucky's could function in versatile ways… I mean it was an arm. It was the very definition of versatile
As far as I know, Dr. Myron MacLain was already dead which meant I couldn't know the formula for Adamantium since Proto-Adamantium was a fluke and also the fact that it was a top secret of the US.
And that's where HYDRA comes in.
They already had a place where they stored some Adamantium but according to the files, it was a really small amount that's why I was not already on my way to hike it out.
I could leave Ulysses Klaue alone for a while since no one was coming for his ass anytime soon and it would stay like that for more than a decade, but then again itchy fingers. I could just turn off that emotion off but that would just be mean to myself.
Fury for his part was highly skeptical about me looking for a notorious arms dealer but the perks of knowing a super spy was the fact that he could turn his one good eye and let me do my thang.
I was still waiting for council to do something stupid but I doubt they'd want to do it now anyway since the tension was still high in S.H.I.E.L.D according to Fury and I also doubted they were fools. Sure they were to me, but that could just be my bias since I hate the government, and there was no way they could get that kind of position if they were all not above a certain level of competence.
I took my mind off the council for now and went back to thinking about what kind of features I wanted my weapon to have.
Uru was a no-go since, well since I have no hope of getting it, and also the fact that I couldn't use magic since Uru without some kind of magic would just be a really strong weapon but the plus side was that runes and other magical matrixes could be carved into it. But the bummer of it all was that not everyone could wield a weapon made of Uru.
Any weapon made of Uru was a top-tier weapon which also made the prerequisite more strict. So rather than thinking of an ore I had no current hope whatsoever to get, I'd rather think of what I could find with some plane tickets and a bus ride.
Though my metallurgy was coming in hand since I had started working on some few things in a little room I built in my backyard since I very well couldn't study a subject like metallurgy without practice so I had been working on some small things during my free time. It helped a lot in getting my thoughts in order or just forgetting about somethings which was what I was currently doing.
It would be a good idea to mix in some Vibranium with the Adamantium structure of my axe like what I wanted to do for Bucky since I would also be using the axe for defense as much as I would be using it for offense and having it shock absorbing property would enable me to tank stronger attacks that I couldn't defend against.
The reason I was pushing for the weapons was because the fight with the Sentinels had me seriously under-armed and then the fight with Doom. While I could always use my fist, having a weapon was just a good way to cleave through nuisance.
If I had a strong enough weapon during the battle with the Sentinels then we wouldn't have waited until Stryker blew up the dam.
And talking about Stryker, well he's dead.
Although there might have been an argument between me and Fury about whether killing him was a good idea and giving the smug look he was giving me and the shit that was happening, happened, I just couldn't take a chance and let Fury's oily hands get him to work on some weapons for S.H.I.E.L.D which prompted me to laser a hole through his chest.
Fury might have been mad, he still was, but like I'd been saying for a long while – I didn't care.
Sure Fury was a friend but that wasn't enough of a clearance for me to just let him go with someone who clearly had a massive hate for metahuman kind. What does he think would happen when the aliens come? Giving Stryker alien tech was just dooming the world.
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Read ahead at pa*treon.com/Draul_TheOminous.