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  .................

  Chapter 124: All Hail Adam!!

  .................

  But Adam was faster.

  His technopathy is the natural nemesis of such failsafes, a predator that chased the fleeing data through the network, catching it before it could escape into oblivion.

  He preserved perhaps seventy percent of what had been here; and what remained was a jackpot.

  This facility wasn't focused on human experimentation. There were no cages of suffering mutants here, no torture chambers for extracting genetic secrets.

  This was a tech hub. A research center dedicated to creating killing machines of steel and circuitry.

  Harn Ryker was the architect. A cyberneticist obsessed with the fusion of man and machine, his end goal was his own transformation; a perfect cyborg body that would grant him immortality and power.

  He hadn't succeeded yet. His own form was a testament to failure, a walking junkyard of abandoned prototypes.

  But his research...

  The files Adam recovered were a treasure trove of taboo knowledge.

  Neural interface designs that made his own cybernetic arm look primitive, though admittedly, neural technology isn't something he's focused on yet because his technopathy made it so he doesn't need it.

  But he would definitely not refuse the designs because they're a treasure trove with plenty of potential.

  Then there were Prosthetic blueprints for limbs that could integrate with the human nervous system very well.

  Combat algorithms that could turn a cyborg soldier into a perfect killing machine.

  Power systems that could sustain such abominations for very very long. Autonomous drone schematics. Remote-controlled assassination ptforms.

  And the rats.

  Harn's brother, Simon Ryker, was a high-ranking officer in the US Army.

  He supplied the 'volunteers'; Soldiers wounded in Iraq, decred dead or missing in action, their disappearances buried in bureaucratic paperwork.

  They arrived expecting salvation. They found Harn's operating table.

  None survived. Even when the cyborg conversion "succeeded," Harn was never satisfied.

  He pushed for perfection, tweaked and modified, until the subject's brain couldn't handle the strain or the body rejected the impnts. They all died eventually.

  Screaming. Begging. Cursing.

  There were no test subjects here. Only victims.

  [ARNIM ZOLA IS IN THE HOUSE! Digital cockroach supreme!]

  [Damn, forgot about Arnim Zo, the thing is a menace, no?]

  [He has plot armor, don't know if his armor is effective against Adam, but guess we'll see/]

  [Cyborg research. Neural interfaces. It's disgusting how lucky Adam is, exactly what he needs...]

  [Simon Ryker is supplying his own soldiers to be butchered. Hydra is special, man.]

  Adam's eyes, still staring at nothing, slowly focused. Harn's preaching had become white noise, filtered out by his concentration.

  Now, with the data secure, the madman's voice returned.

  "...So you see, it's hopeless! Hydra always wins! We've been winning since before your grandparents were sperm cells! Join us, and you can be part of...."

  "Shush," Adam murmured.

  He wasn't speaking to Harn. He was speaking to himself, to the universe, to the audience watching the show.

  "A mind capable of such atrocities," He said softly, "Never fails to amaze me. The potential for evil is truly boundless. Incomprehensible."

  He tilted his head, regarding the carnage around him with the detached curiosity of a scientist examining a specimen.

  "It's why I constantly seek to upgrade my own hardware and software. To keep up. To stay ahead."

  His voice shifted, taking on a strange, eerie quality; the tone of a man peering into an abyss and finding it cozy.

  "But here I am. Seated atop a blood fountain that would make a sughterhouse blush."

  "The bodies around me aren't just dead; they're deconstructed. Architectural."

  "I've got torsos forming a spiral pattern, heads as a perimeter wall, limbs arranged like a mosaic of a screaming face if you look from above."

  "The Gorgon's head in my hand still has warm blood dripping from the neck, and his eyes; his sandy eyes; are starting to cloud over like a winter sky."

  "The fountain behind me pulses in rhythm with my heartbeat, and I think, somewhere in this mess, a chunk of someone's lung just nded in my hair. It all... Awakens the poet with me."

  He paused, considering. "I just killed many people. Sure, they were evil from my perspective."

  "But some of them had families. People who will miss them. People who will never know what happened, who will wait by windows forever, hoping for a return that will never come."

  His smile didn't waver.

  "I know all of that. And I feel nothing." He chuckled. "Scratch that... I enjoyed the massacre."

  "But I suspect that without that enjoyment, without my nature as a hedonist of violence, this would feel like... deleting lines of code. Just another file moved to the trash. Nothing."

  He looked up, directly at where he perceives the imaginary camera to be; directly at the audience.

  "The rational part of my mind, if such a thing still exists, tells me I'm not evil. I'm just super sane. But then again..." He winked.

  "I could just be delusional and hypocritical. What do you think, my lovely imaginary friends? Am I the vilin of this piece? The hero? The comic relief?"

  He chuckled. "Bit part in my own show? That would be the real tragedy. Thirty chapters of build-up and I die in a deleted scene because the editor thought I was 'too much.' Hah!"

  [The fact that he's speaking directly to us! It makes me feel a certain type of way, a hard way.]

  [Ah, I feel the same, hard, proud, and filled with joy!]

  ["Super sane." That's one word for it, Adam... Ahem, delusion.]

  [That was dark man.]

  ["Bit part in my own show." Meta humour at its finest.]

  [All hail Adam the First! I'm your believer, and I believe you are doing the right thing!!]

  [I believe! If something you do is perceived as evil, it's because our limited human mind cannot comprehend the extent of your thoughts!]

  [We the Illuminati, will always believe! We pray to you every single day!]

  [We believe, and we'll follow to the ends of time!!] [+1] [+1] [+1] [+1] [+1] [+1] [+1] [Hail Hydra!] [Hail Adam the First!] [Hailey, I miss you!!]

  Harn's crazed ughter cut through the moment. "We're not so different, you and I! You see it now, don't you? The futility! The madness!"

  "But it's unfortunately too te for you to turn back! They'll never accept you! The world will never..."

  Adam ughed with him.

  The sound was bright, genuine, and utterly terrifying in its synchrony with the madman's cackling.

  "I know, right?! It's hirious! The cosmic joke of it all!" He wiped a tear from his eye. "You know what's even funnier? Your missiles."

  Harn's ughter cut off. His mad eyes widened.

  "Oh yes," Adam said, grinning. "The self-destruct sequence. The 'if all else fails, scorched earth' protocol. I felt it the moment I breached your inner holes."

  "You've got bunker-busters on the way, thermobaric warheads, enough explosive yield to turn this entire facility into a smoking crater."

  He tilted his head. "Standard Hydra procedure. Kill everything, leave no witnesses, no evidence. Very thorough."

  He stood, letting Shishido's head fall to the floor with a wet thud. "Unfortunately for Hydra, life and misfortune have been absolute sluts for me recently. So I'm going to survive. In fact..."

  He spread his arms, embracing the impending doom, "...I've been waiting for the bombs. Just to make sure every single trace of every single one of you is burned to ashes and tiny pieces."

  "Then I'll collect those ashes. Use them as charcoal. Cook the nicest st meal Hydra ever had."

  His grin was a ssh of white in the blood-spattered face. "Win-win, wouldn't you say?"

  "My guests get to taste my divine cooking. And you... all of you... never get to be resurrected. Just... ash. Ready for the barbecue."

  Harn's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

  No words came out.

  Adam's hand moved. A blood-bde extended from his fingers, and with a casual flick, Harn Ryker's head parted from his shoulders.

  The body hung in its chains for a moment, twitching, before going still.

  The only reason he kept him alive was just in case the valuable data was incomplete.

  But it's not. At least, not the data he's most interested in, and he realized a fanatic like Harn was never going to talk anyway.

  He patted the dead man's cheek. "Enjoy oblivion."

  He looked up.

  His technopathy reached out like a mind-wave, brushing against the incoming projectiles; a swarm of guided missiles, less than a minute away, their warheads armed and hungry.

  He smiled.

  Then he dissolved into mist.

  The bck-red vapor rose through the shattered ceiling, through the upper levels of the facility, through the crater left by the Mephisto Scratcher's initial bst.

  At the surface, the mist condensed into a bat; a tiny speck against the night sky, barely visible, utterly insignificant.

  The missiles arrived.

  The first impact was a sun-bright fre of thermobaric destruction. The second followed a heartbeat ter, then the third, the fourth, several warheads detonating in precise, overpping sequence.

  The earth heaved. The crater deepened, widened, became a wound in the ndscape that glowed with residual heat.

  Shockwaves fttened trees for a distance in every direction. The sound was less an explosion and more an apocalypse.

  When the fire faded, nothing remained. No facility. No bodies. No evidence. Just a smoking crater lined with gss, slowly filling with groundwater that hissed and steamed.

  Adam, perched on a distant hillside in human form, watched with satisfaction. Then he raised his arm; his real arm, flesh and blood; and gestured.

  High above, the Mephisto Scratcher's thrusters ignited. It descended, hovered high over the crater, and fired again. And again. And again.

  Three more psma bsts, each one erasing any possibility that anything beneath could have survived.

  Just in case, Adam thought. Can't be too thorough with cockroaches.

  ["Use their ashes as charcoal." I'm never eating barbecue again.]

  [My man is unhinged.]

  [But he's right, the amount of bullshit resurrections that occurred in Marvel is ludicrous, I don't think even what he did is enough.]

  [Real, Marvel is a cockroach den.]