To Zod's surprise, an anomaly in Emma's mutation enabled her to use telepathy even in her diamond form. But that wasn't the only unusual trait—her "diamond" was much harder, boasting a durability surpassing that of natural diamond by a factor of over a hundred, with an added toughness that made it resistant to shattering from blunt force.
Emma looked at her body's transformation in disbelief. Was this the potential the Black Emperor had spoken of?
"Welcome to our ranks, Emma," Zod said with a slight smile. "It seems you're well-qualified."
Emma frowned. "What exactly are we?"
"We are Yemengarde—the serpent encircling the world," Zod replied.
Yemengarde? The name unsettled Emma. It sounded like something dark, even sinister.
"Not unlike Russia's Leviathan," Zod chuckled, noting her hesitation. "I did consider names like Quetzalcoatl, Behemoth, Kraken, Fenrir… but Yemengarde felt fitting."
"Can you read my mind too?" Emma asked, surprised by how perceptive he was.
"It's just telepathy, a fairly common ability," Zod shrugged. He could grant telepathy to all Yemengarde members but found the mental network more trouble than it was worth.
"Come, I'll show you more of Yemengarde," he said, leading Emma out of the lab.
In another room, Emma watched in awe as two monstrous creatures fought viciously.
"What… are those?" she asked, her voice a mix of intrigue and horror.
"They're our beast soldiers," Zod explained. "When people lack latent powers, we enhance them with transformations like these."
Emma watched as one of the creatures fell, shifting back into its human form. The transformation was almost too much for her to process, but she felt strangely exhilarated.
"Will I end up like that?" she asked.
Zod shook his head. "Not you. They lack innate abilities, so they require enhancements. You, however, possess natural gifts and can serve as an elite."
He briefly considered the limitations of his current experiments with beast soldiers, realizing that a figure of god-like strength could wipe out an army of them with ease. With Emma at his side, Zod hoped to create an elite class of warriors.
Zod then left Emma to her combat training and returned to the lab. There, Bronsky lay on a metal table, prepared for a new experiment.
Bronsky, frustrated by his limitations compared to figures like the Green and Red Hulks, had eagerly anticipated this moment. Zod was about to purify his Hulk serum, enhancing Bronsky's "Abomination" form. Injecting Bronsky with a sample of Ross's blood, Zod monitored as Bronsky's immune system went into overdrive, battling the foreign cells. However, Zod stabilized the process, guiding the transformation.
Bronsky's physiology shifted as his abomination cells merged with his new Hulk-like genes. His body expanded, bones erupting from his skin, forming an exoskeleton adorned with jagged bone spurs that resembled a skeletal mask.
"The new look suits you better than your old form," Zod mused, admiring Bronsky's terrifying transformation. His exoskeleton provided both durability and kinetic energy absorption—a trait enabling him to convert the impact of blows into energy, making him progressively stronger in combat.
Equipped with an exoskeleton and deadly bone spurs, Bronsky was now a force to be reckoned with, his power fully realized.