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New Delhi, India [April 18, 2011]
–Jack Sullivan–
“Ah, that’s the stuff,” He sighed contentedly, patting his full stomach as he looked at the massive pile of dishes that had piled up once he had started eating. Apparently, his appetite was becoming somewhat of a problem due to the sheer energy deficiency in the food of the mortal world. Kamar-Taj had that problem sorted long ago as they were sourcing their nutrients from mystically rich places that were full of CHI, the life-giving force of the universe. The normal food that he was eating was way off when it came to his dietary requirements. Not to mention the processed crap that had found its way even into the most luxurious of hotels. One such 5-star hotel was the one where he was eating his food. He had found a contact in New York who worked as some sort of Black Market concierge, willing to provide any and all services in exchange for money.
It was neat for him because he had lots of money to spend because of all the drug busts he had made because even after giving away literal millions of dollars in the span of weeks, he still had millions of dollars of hard cash on him and the person did not mind taking it off his hands in exchange for some top-notch services. Of course, that didn’t mean that the broker had gotten off scot-free. He had destroyed his base of operations from the inside and only stopped when the Broker agreed, on threat of death, to stop slave trade rings in his contacts. Human trafficking of any sort was banned by him and thus, Broker, the single biggest neutral party of the Black Market in the USA stopped dealing in humans, giving a big blow to the human trafficking rings. It didn’t help their cause when he gave all of their bosses a visit and killed the ones who were less than amenable, providing their rivals to take over their wealth and allowing them to pursue alternate means of business. That broker was the one who was also eating with him at the same table.
Well, eating would be a bit of a stretch since all the Broker had touched during the hour-long binge eating session was a glass of water, and even then he didn’t drink it. The Broker had expressed interest in having a face-to-face with him to discuss their future endeavours and what not to do since the Broker did not want any confrontation with him. He had obliged since he was not exactly worried about anything and even if the Broker did anything, well, he was just a portal away from the cold darkness of space.
“What?” He finally asked Broker who was constantly staring at his face. Well, it was a face mask that was basically capable of moulding itself to his face, allowing him to eat and drink like a normal person.
“I was thinking, just where is all that food going? You don’t look all that big to me,”
“Ah,” He chuckled and then wagged his fingers, “Well, Broker-kun, if you must know, it is because my body needs very high energy to function properly, and well, as you probably know, food isn’t all that nutritious these days, not to mention the toxins added in between,” He went on a tirade about the diminishing nutritional value of food as the output of agricultural activities continued to increase exponentially, even though it took more and more food to reach the same nutritional macros.
“Alright, fine. You are passionate about food, I get it,” The Broker interrupted him and then leaned on the dining table.
“What is your end goal?” The Broker waved away the waiters from their private dining table and once the door was firmly closed with his bodyguards standing guard outside, he finally asked the question that must have been bugging him all this while.
“Hmm? What do you mean by that?” He tilted his head to the side as he ate the absolutely delicious ice cream.
“Don’t make a fool of me, now. Nobody gets that strong without some sort of goal in their mind. I have a few enhanced people in my employ and I know what sort of training and determination it takes for someone to reach the pinnacle of their power, even after having the best resources available.”
He raised an eyebrow at the Broker and continued to slowly eat his ice cream, all the while maintaining eye contact. He enjoyed the way the BRoker sweated.
After a while, he finally gave mercy to him, “Look, you are a criminal. The lowest of the low. The only reason I am even talking with you is that you proved to be adaptable enough and stopped doing those awful trades. More than that, I don’t have anything to say to you and I don’t think you will want to know as well. Just stop doing human trafficking of any sort and we’ll be fine. Of course, sexual assault of any kind is forbidden, as I have made clear many times, as is evident by your very dead former competitors.”
“Y-Yes, Thank you for that again. Don’t worry, your will will be done,” The Broker bowed at him and didn’t lift his head for a long time before finally looking as if he was hesitating to ask something.
“What is it?”
“It’s the Russians, sir. Despite my warnings, they have some sort of shipment with girls inbound tomorrow. I don’t have the pull necessary to stop that as the order seemed to have come from high up. They are bypassing all the red tape and bringing in everything legally, somehow.”
He leaned forward in interest, “Any suspects?”
“Aside from some rich fuck having pull with some senators? None. I don’t think it is them either because organising this would be very risky for anyone in the government save for the CIA, maybe,” The Broker replied fearfully, carefully wiping the sweat from his forehead.
“Alright, I’ll do it,”
“Wh-what?”
“That’s what you wanted me to do, right? Take care of your competition. Why go through all these roundabout ways? They tried to do something that I expressly forbade in my city and they are going to pay for that. Simple as that. Anywho, I guess you got the bill? Take it out of the next shipment of cash I give you. Bye now,” He waved at the Broker as he slid right into the portal that appeared beneath him. He promptly found himself covered in his barriers, right in the middle of snowy nowhere. He never really went straight to his home or any of the places that could connect back to him without taking a stop first.
He snapped his fingers and the next moment, found himself buck naked in the middle of snowy Canada. It was a good thing he was a super soldier otherwise this would have been enough to give him frostbite. Then, the clothing came back on. That was a complete sanitation spell that removed everything except the things that had the owner’s DNA on them. It was fantastic for removing any bugs that others might have slipped into his food or water. It even removed microscopic bugs that were invisible to the eye.
Tony really had come far with nanotechnology because while the bugs were not quite at the nanoscale that Tony would make in the future, they were much smaller than even the tech SHIELD had access to.
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“Hmm, Russians, huh? Well, they fucked around, now they will find out,” he muttered to himself before writing a note about getting the details of their shipments and flung it straight into a portal that led to a cave in the Middle East where another portal opened up which sent the note to the Brokers’ mailbox that he had installed specifically for his requests. It was safe to say that the Broker was very much terrified of him and would do everything he could to stay on his good side and while it did disgust him at the beginning, to let him go despite knowing all the bad he had done, it was, in the end, a net positive as he had gone on to become the single biggest player in the city, allowing him to create a very silent atmosphere in the criminal underbelly of New York. Well, that was his good deed for tomorrow decided. What should he do today? It was the weekend so he had taken a little break from his daily sky patrolling and he usually practised with the advanced applications of his powers on this day but he just didn’t feel like exhausting his mind to enable more and more complex applications of his powers. Creating an incredibly realistic Godzilla and then creating three more of them, while piloting them at the same time was his current limit and he felt that it should be enough, at least for the
Chitauri.
“Jack, get your little ass down here!” He snickered as Luke’s enraged voice entered his loft. He had a great time tormenting Luke during his brief stay in Pops’ spare room and now that he had moved to his own place, he felt as if he owed something to Luke, as a farewell gift.
He went down and absolutely howled in laughter as Luke Cage, the Future Power Man, overall badass, was completely covered in pink from head to toe with a paint that the Broker had assured him was extra hard to remove. He had employed the classic bucket on top of the door and was rewarded with the absolutely mad face of Luke Cage.
Finding out that Luke Cage did have his powers was a very simple matter as he had noticed glass shards that should have penetrated his skin, at least a little bit, just hitting him and falling down. His enhanced reflexes allowed him to see that even the ones that hit part of his face fell down all the same, confirming that Luke Cage did have his powers at the moment and that realisation was both sad and delightful for him. Sad because it meant that Luke was now a fugitive and was on the run after being illegally experimented on and delighted because he was going to see the real live-action hero Luke Cage in action. After all, Luke Cage was actually bulletproof.
He jumped above Luke’s outstretched hand as he tried to grab his collar and then after kicking Luke’s shoulders for extra measure, he landed right in the shop, which was thankfully empty because, for some reason, the weekends were really slow in the evening.
“Tada!” He presented himself like a circus performer and bowed to the slow-capping Pops who was trying to contain his laughter.
“Take it off, Brat!” Luke shouted as he tried to, once again, get him from behind. Well, he just ducked at the last moment and jumped back, straight into his stomach.
“Oww!” He said as he stumbled back from hitting Luke’s iron stomach. He rubbed his forehead as it stung for a few moments before it healed completely but he kept up the charade for a few more moments.
“What are you made of, iron?” He asked Luke as he pretended to be hurt. Suddenly, Luke got all flustered and left the shop in a hurry, completely staining parts of the floor pink.
He and Pops looked at each other and the pink stains on the ground and then vice versa a couple times before he sighed, shoulders drooping, “Fine, I’ll clean it,”
“That’s more like it. Come on, I have a customer coming in around 8,”
“Yeah yeah,”
_____xx______
Stark Tower
–Tony Stark–
“Sir, I believe that it would be safe to call it a success”
“Uh-huh. Well, let’s just call it Mark I for now, shall we? It is still nowhere near the strength of the real thing,”
“Sir, we are already past the strength of six inches of steel at this point. Going any further will increase the strain that the Arc Reactor simply cannot sustain,” Jarvis’ words only seemed to increase his determination.
There was a small inconspicuous-looking block of blue energy floating in front of them and that same small block of blue light was what he had been laser-focused on for the past week or so. It was a cheap imitation of the real thing.
Jack’s barriers, even when he was not uber-powerful like he was now, were stronger than anything he had ever seen in the world. The one in front of him, while not as strong, was capable of being projected from his suits without giving them any additional bulk. The Third Generation Arc Reactor was a necessity for them but just these barriers meant that he was now essentially capable of tanking even the strongest of the weapons the US Military had to offer, save for the nukes. He was somewhat certain that the shield could even take a few of the Hulk’s punches if need be.
He was also doing some parallel research on the portals that Jack opened and aside from figuring out that he was creating stable wormholes with safe event horizons, he had not made any further inroads with that. It was understandable because figuring out instantaneous transport across even the planet would be enough to guarantee even his death. Nothing would save him from that level of technology and in a way, he was glad that it was so incomprehensibly difficult to achieve what Jack does with a wave of his hand because imagining terrorists getting their hands on such tech made his spine shiver. Being able to transport troops, resources, bombs, and more while ignoring distance and time would be the only advantage that any nation would need. It would mean that the concept of people being safe behind borders would become a thing of the past.
“I don’t think how much of a threat he has made of himself by showcasing his ability to create portals,” He muttered, mostly to himself as he thought about the threat ratings that the US Government had assigned to Jack. Ironically, his ability to create portals that turned him into the single biggest threat that the country had ever come across, also made it so that the government finally stopped their efforts to contain him. They realised that trying to catch him would be a fool’s errand and if, perchance he wanted revenge for doing so, it would take nothing more than a portal to their home with a grenade to give them a quick death. The alternative methods that had been proposed by some of the military analysts had been very creative in their methods of ways Jack could grant someone a very slow and painful death. It ranged from exposing them to the extreme colds and then the extreme heat and then watching them die from shock or just leaving them in an extreme environment.
He had stopped reading after a while but it would seem that the US government would not be bothering Jack for a while. They had even placed him above the Hulk as a threat.
“Now, Jarvis, how close are we until the fourth gen’s parts arrive here?” He asked Jarvis as he closed down every single screen open in front of him with a wave of his hand. He had done it. He had built a fourth-gen arc reactor. A large arc reactor capable of creating so much energy that the entire city of New York could double its annual consumption and the reactor could still continue to supply it with clean energy. He had used up all the vibranium he could find in the Black Market but he had finally built the core that would never extinguish itself, a true unlimited energy reactor. Of course, the rest of the parts would need frequent replacement, especially due to the excess energy coursing through them but the core of the reactor would stay the same for decades to come. Apparently, his father was trying to create an artificial replacement for some element that was alarmingly closer to Vibranium.
He had then attended a few black market auctions and then scooped up all the vibranium he could find, which amounted to little over a kilogram. He used all of it to make that core and it was now the single most valuable thing he owned.
Once that Arc Reactor was installed in the building, the energy consumption would be a negligible issue as the building would be able to shield itself from everything short of a thermonuclear weapon. Oh, he could not wait to surprise the flying Greeny with his shield.
“A little over a week sir,”
He closed his eyes as he began to doze off on the couch nearby, “Alright, wake me when Pepper’s home, will you, J?”
“Alright, sir,” His eyelids felt heavy as he finally succumbed to sleep after over 30 hours of being awake.
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Word Count - 2872
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