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The Sage of the Mind: Chapter 45 [May 2010]
–Axle Riddle–
The contract with Randall and the others was quite simple. After the Ancient One had assured him that it would all work out and despite having literally zero experience with the Spiritual Contracts, he would not hurt the seven brothers, he went on with his learning experience with the book.
Sure, it was quite easy to make living arrangements for the Hulks. He didn't know if Ross even knew about them but they were out and about in the city quite often, more than enough for someone high up in a surveillance state to track down a couple of individuals.
He told Bruce about them immediately after getting permission from the Missus, i.e., Betty Ross. Both of them expressed quite a bit of interest in the only surviving Hulks aside from Bruce himself, especially the ones that looked quite normal, despite having the benefits, vastly reduced as they may be.
He knew from the downcast looks from Bruce that he would trade his vast amount of strength and potential, along with instantaneous regeneration, in a heartbeat for a chance at a normal life. And if that normal life somehow came with advanced benefits like those to protect his loved ones, that would just be icing on top.
Obviously, the brothers had not seen Bruce yet and that would remain for as long as it took him to trust them. Sure, he had the contracts now, but the contracts were not enforced.
They only served as a warning system, telling him if they ever betrayed him by breaking the scant few rules he had written in the contract from his side. He had not practiced the soul bounds on them because, for one, he never really planned on revealing his identity to them.
Secondly, it was absurdly dangerous to try and work with souls. Sure, his vast Astral energy gave him a leg up over others in the starting, but the finish line was still very far away. He didn't even know how he would begin mastering this field.
Sure, animals were plenty, and even they had souls. Actually, they were the perfect starting point because their souls were not that strong, so they couldn't resist the manipulation done by a much bigger and stronger soul.
Unfortunately, the very idea of doing that made him squirm in disgust. Using animals like that didn't sit right with him. That was why it had stumped him in the beginning.
Then, he turned upon the part of making a soul pact, a completely voluntary one that created a symbiotic relationship between the familiar and the master. He had not yet picked one animal to make that pact with but he was inclined with a species that could be evolved to something more combat oriented.
How cool would it be to have a murder kitty made even more murdery by his soul?
Ah, he could just imagine the day his murder mittens would rip out the throat of some Chitauri and then purr as she approached him for pets.
He was broken out of his thoughts by the brawl about to spread to the electronics section of the base.
"Guys! Look out!" Ah, Randall, the wise one noticed it but he was a tad bit too late.
As soon as it was obvious that they were on a direct crash course with some very expensive computer equipment, and some other electronic stuff that Randall had ordered, the purpose of which he had no heads or tails of.
Randall's warning fell on deaf ears as the rest of his brothers continued to come near the huge expensive setup that Randall was in the process of setting up.
He had enough as he flooded the entire underground base they were situated in, with the entire weight of his soul.
The stiffening of all the seven brothers told him that they recognised that something was probably wrong.
He bodily, or mindly(?), took hold of all the brothers, sans Randall, and made them float in the air. All of them realised what was happening and didn't even say anything as they were made to float mid air.
Randall opened his mouth to say something, probably in his brothers' defense but no words escaped his mouth as his mouth hung agape, witnessing the small tornada of the Hulk brothers he had created in the middle of the base.
The winds created from the thorough beating they took from each other's bodies crashing into each other were enough to scatter papers in the vicinity. After a minute or so of this, he unceremoniously dropped them on the floor.
"Now, Randall, show me the progress on your project," He communicated using the air vibration technique, producing a much more natural and smooth voice now, owing to months of practice.
Randall, clearly torn about tending to his brothers or following the commands of someone who was literally the only reason they were alive, chose the correct option and scrambled over to his station.
Now, he really did bash them against each other at speeds and forces that would have had Randall cleaning brain matter from the flooring but since all of them had particularly hard skin, all they did was groan as they collected themselves up from the ground.
"Um, Yeah, as I said before, we need some way of tracking everything that goes on in the city so we can effectively utilise all our resources," Randall started speaking as his station booted up, showing patchworks of the city's map.
Some areas of the map were brightly lit, but most of it was greyed out. It was as if the city was a game map and the brightly lit areas were the areas the player had explored beforehand.
"As you can imagine, the lit areas are the places where I can confidently say, with 100% certainty, that we can detect something happening and reach that place with a speed that would make it viable for us to act upon," Randall rambled on as he told him about the various paths he had mapped out of the subterranean base he had carved out for them, straight into various parts of the city.
He had been upfront with the Hulks, especially Randall since he was going to be the brains of the entire operation, that he was going to have them become his replacement, well as far as someone could replace an omnipresent power.
They had been shocked and afraid at first, thinking that he was going to die or something. He very easily reminded them of the fact that he was as powerful as ever with a simple application of power when he created this base for them, right in front of them.
Now, Manhattan is built upon some pretty tough bedrock but it was still rock and it broke under his powers as he expected it to. That same tough rock was the reason why the New York Skyline even existed, really.
The amount of weight that the high rises put on the soil could not be underestimated. He went into some sort of nerd trance and found out that, had it not been for the rock-solid bedrock that Manhattan was built upon, it would have been all but impossible for New York as a city to grow, because there was no space to expand since it was surrounded by water.
The bedrock was the only reason the city would grow up instead of growing out like LA has.
The good part about it was that public transport was developed as it should have been and everything became accessible within walking distance.
The bad news for them was because everything was so densely packed together, they could not really build some vigilante base in the city. No, it would be easily found and that was not something the Hulks could afford to happen.
They might have the strength necessary to hold their ground but they don't have the sheer leverage he does when he can, essentially, hold an entire major city hostage.
The amount of fighting he could do, at any point was tremendous and the sheer utility of that could not be measured in any way.
"What about the areas that are lit in green and blue?" His voice rumbled out in the small underground cavern he had hollowed out for them.
Randall's face lit up as he continued to speak while pointing at the screen, showing the lit up area that was broken up into the two colours.
"Ah! Those. The green area of the city is the area that we can feasibly reach without using any risky methods of transportation. The blue area is the one where we might have to use publicly available methods, where we could be traced back to the base because of it. I am working on getting stealth tech up and running but that would require experiments and while I am thankful that we have a place of operations. The power we are getting from the small makeshift hydro plant here is just not enough. We need more and doing so without getting attention is impossible so I have decided to look into the Arc Reactor,"
If he was present there, his eyebrows would be raised into his hairline as he saw that Randall was not spouting bullshit. He was actually seriously going to look at something that took two generations of geniuses to devise and improve.
Well, if he could actually crack the Arc Reactor, then maybe his powers had improved his intellect more than was obvious. If he could crack that, then maybe a couple of CHitauri tech samples should give him enough technological arsenal to figure out some truly dangerous pieces of technologies.
As for their worries about silent and discreet methods of transportation once he was gone, well, they shouldn't be worried about that.
Once he was free from the curtain of Imprisonment that shrouded Manhattan, he was going to approach the Ancient One with a proposal. A proposal to have someone willing from the Masters of the Mystic Arts to come to work for him.
Now he was 80%, maybe 70% sure that she was going to reject his request but there was no harm done in trying.
If the Seven Brothers proved trustworthy, he could just ask the Ancient One to train some of them. He was reasonably certain that the link to the big guy Below was not the same in all the Hulks.
Bruce should have the strongest link because he was the strongest there was. It made sense for the Ancient One to be worried about Bruce coming into the hallowed halls of Kamar Taj.
Now, someone like Randall, who was so obviously in control and vastly weaker than the Strongest Hulk would stand to reason that he also had the weaker link to the guy Below.
Maybe that would be reason enough for the Ancient One to teach him, at least the basics like portal creation.
Learning that alone would solve all their logistical worries. That would open a lot of doors for them, like setting up bases in remote parts of the world, inaccessible to most people.
He knew at least one such place in the Antarctic that would be perfect for them.
Though that was talk for a far away possible future. There was no way he was going to let some untrustworthy people get access to the Celestial Corpse in the South Pole.
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A/N - See you guys on Monday. Gonna sleep like a baby this entire weekend. CIAO!