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The Sage of the Mind: Chapter 44 [May 2010]
–Axle Riddle–
He could feel it in his bones. With undeniable certainty. He couldn't deny it anymore.
He just knew that….he was a fool.
"God…" He sighed and muttered to himself as he watched the seven hulks brawl with each other, play fighting as if they were kids instead of fully grown adults. Though the Hulk enhancement made it so that it would be almost impossible to tell their age through sight alone, he knew that they were well into their 30s at this point.
They looked in their prime though, so that was it, but this kind of behaviour was not something that was expected from them, especially not from his team who he was hoping to mold into the world's best superhero team.
The competition was not there yet but he would be ready for them.
The Avengers.
The Defenders. Though, he wondered how much of that part of canon he had screwed over with his actions. Frank's rescue alone would derail some of it but he had a hunch that he would get to interact with some of that show's protagonists sooner or later.
Actually, that one of the protagonists of that team, was going to be the first real mission he would have them do.
Jessica Jones. If his memory served him right, it would be right about this time that she would encounter Kilgrave and serve an extended period of time under his tender mercies. That would set the tone of her life for several years to come, wreaking havoc on all of her relationships, familial or otherwise.
He wondered if Kilgrave could affect Samuel and the others. If that happened, it would be disastrous. They were certified powerhouses, definitely above even Spiderman level powers.
They were nowhere near Bruce Banner's Hulk level but they were certainly a grade above the street criminal level not to mention their sheer durability and endurance, making them walking pieces of tanks that would shrug off damage that any modern weaponry could inflict on them.
He had tried to crush them by just exerting force on their skin and it had taken a lot more effort than he had anticipated to make them feel pain. Of course, Tim, being the special case since he could transform between his solid state and semi liquid state with ease.
Tim could take the most damage but conversely, he was also the most vulnerable once he was back in his solid form. All in all, the team was well rounded, filling any gaps their brothers might have.
He could still remember his bewilderment when he first interrogated this bunch of brothers.
Apparently, Daniell Whitehall was involved with the Inhumans on a whole other level. He had never really stopped his pursuit of his human enhancement goal. Encountering one of their kind had only further fueled his hunger to find more of their king to experiment on.
Armed with Jiaying's organs, through which he regained his youth, he had probably continued committing atrocities wherever he could.
These seven brothers were special in the case that they were born of two Awakened Inhumans, at the same time. Yeah, it must have been quite a doozy for their mother to carry all of them at the same time.
They were born together and after undergoing terrigenesis at the same time as well, they emerged as formidable powerhouses.
Yeah, Jiaying apparently thought that their shared existence was some sort of sign regarding their powers so she ordered a custom Terrigenesis chamber to be built. All seven brothers were tossed into that chamber and exposed to the Terrigenesis crystals, kickstarting the Inhuman process.
Her gambit paid off because all seven of them came out, looking exactly the same as they did before, except with the seven glowing eyes.
That's it, that was how their powers manifested in the beginning but after extensive testing that every Awakened Inhuman goes through, they found that their powers were linked together.
Yes, all of them had a single power only. The power to live and die at the same time. A type of shared immortality, if you will.
As long as a single one of them lives, you can't kill all the other six. That doesn't mean that they heal any faster though. When they were just Awakened Inhumans, they could fight together as one, channeling everybody's strength into one, or sustaining fatal injuries without going down, like nothing happened.
In that dark tunnel, he had conducted a thorough interrogation of them, as to how they reached Manhattan, how they turned into Hulks, and what their motive was.
And that's how he found out what had actually happened.
Jiaying, in her quest to absorb more life force to extend her lifespan, had approached her parents with a proposal.
Apparently, it was just an open secret in the small village that Jiaying led that she was killing some of the Inhumans to absorb their life force. So, Jiaying openly approached the brothers' parents and presented her proposal to them.
She proposed to absorb limited amounts of life force from all seven of them, such that they won't die. As long as a single one of them was alive, the other six would remain alive as well. Jiaying wanted to turn all seven brothers into her personal life force furnace.
What a disgusting thing to do.
She had even successfully convinced their parents and that had been the last straw. The brothers, after a small scuffle, left the village after realising the extent of Jiaying's brainwashing of the whole village.
They left the village, to then explore the rest of the world. They travelled as far as they could, doing odd jobs to survive. They never really came to America though, too afraid of immigration, they told him.
After travelling for years, they decided to go home and see if their parents could be convinced, or rather, they were just feeling nostalgic since they certainly knew that their parents would be the same as they left them.
On their way to the village, they encountered Whitehall who immediately recognised their oddity. Oddly, he didn't immediately capture and dissect them. That seems to be his MO.
Unaware of the continued existence of HYDRA, the brothers were tricked into following after Whitehall who had all the resources in the world. He promised them to help topple Jiaying, after being surprised at her continued survival of course.
That was when Ross was contacted by the Heads of HYDRA in his quest to gather resources to make another batch of Hulks. As interested as HYDRA was in that exact plan, they didn't mean to make any overt movements regarding it as they knew it would bring undue attention when they still weren't ready to complete their goals.
As such, the seven brothers were bribed and "loaned" to General Ross for his experimentation, on the condition that all seven would undergo the experiment at the same time.
In normal times, General Ross would have denied that without a second thought, it would have been too risky to make non American people into Hulks, if the experiment succeeded that is.
Unfortunately, Ross must have been at his wit's end, what with no official support from the government on top of the hounding that Fury must have subjected him to. As such, he took the resources that HYDRA had given to him in exchange for the test subjects.
He must have justified it to himself by telling himself that the method to make more Hulks would remain with him.
That was how these seven brothers came into existence.
They came out of the test tubes, looking the same as before but vastly changed underneath. Ross must have been disappointed with the results and had ordered them to be dropped near Manhattan.
They were given orders to create distractions in Manhattan so that the Invisible Man's attention would be drawn away.
Well, that sounded like a lie to him, Axle thought to himself.
Fortunately, one of the brothers, Randall, was smart enough to do some research beforehand. He realised that antagonising the Invisible Man was a death sentence, even with the amped up powers.
So, they approached the soup kitchen, hoping to get some sort of audience.
And they did.
And now, he was stuck with a superpowered team of seven people.
Sure, it was way too risky on his part to trust a group of completely unknown people but the solution for that was provided to him by none other than the Ancient One.
She had been quite exasperated with him when he approached her with the problem he was having.
Something about having power but not knowing how to use it, she muttered to herself as she handed a book to him.
The book was titled: "A Dummies Guide to Spiritual and Soul Contracts".
So, yeah, that was how he got seven legit superpowered minions, someone who could not betray the contract conditions without him being notified immediately about it.
No, he did not make them sign slavery contracts. He was not evil.
But some reasonable restrictions that, when broken, would alert him immediately, in exchange for a safe space, was a viable deal in his opinion.
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