Drex Valen barely lifted a finger.
He simply let the energy inside his body convert into ultraviolet light and flash outward.
The Reapers charging him screamed as the burst hit them full-on, their bodies collapsing into ash before they could even reach him.
Chad Norma took several cautious steps backward.
"What did you do?"
"Relax, Prince Norma." Drex's tone was almost bored. "I just want the R virus in your body. Cooperate while I take a sample, and then you can leave."
He reached out with his mind before Chad could respond.
The telepathic pressure slammed down hard, seizing Chad and the Reapers behind him at once.
Drex looked faintly amused.
"Easier than I expected. Controlling vampires really isn't much different from controlling humans."
He made Chad and the Reapers perform absurd little motions under his psychic grip, rolling like dogs, then writhing like worms across the floor. It was oddly entertaining.
Drex watched them with interest, wondering for a moment whether Professor X spent his afternoons doing things like this.
As far as he was concerned, telepathy was far more useful than invisibility. Men spent their whole lives fantasizing about being unseen, but the ability to take someone over completely, to bend them with a thought and make them dance however you wanted, was far more satisfying.
Hypnosis was crude by comparison.
Telepathy was cleaner.
Sharper.
More practical.
And, with the right imagination, much more fun.
He exhaled softly.
"Still only useful for controlling enemies, though. Shame."
He sounded genuinely disappointed.
After that, Drex brought Chad Norma back to the Blade Tech Industries base and completed the sampling process there. Once he had what he wanted, he sent Chad and his Reaper minions crawling down into the sewers.
Before letting them go, he planted a powerful mental suggestion in Chad's mind.
From now on, Chad Norma and the Reapers under him would only attack vampires and scum.
No one else.
By that point, a full night had passed since Chad's attack.
All that remained was the security footage.
The recordings moved up the chain, from one vampire authority to another, until they finally reached the hands of New York's highest-ranking vampire ruler.
The Great Duke of the vampires.
Elidar Markinos.
When the great duke watched the footage, he summoned his most elite vampire warriors and began assembling a plan of his own.
Elidar Markinos was the oldest known vampire in all of the Americas, a figure of immense authority and the unquestioned ruler of New York's vampire society.
That kind of status usually came with the classic image: elegant, brooding, aristocratic, almost beautiful in a cold, immortal way.
Not Elidar.
He was ugly.
Worse than ugly.
His body had decayed into a sickly bluish corruption, a warped shell in which hair could no longer grow. Veins rose beneath the skin like exposed river channels, and oily fluid leaked from the surface of his flesh in a way that made people's skin crawl.
He looked less like a noble immortal and more like a corpse that had refused to lie down and rot properly.
Standing beside his daughter, Nissa Markinos, that ugliness became even more pronounced.
For a vampire of his age, Elidar should not have looked like this.
Other pureblood vampires of his generation, even older ones, still retained their beauty and refinement.
Elidar had become grotesque because he had chosen power over rest.
He refused to sleep.
Refused to enter hibernation.
He was willing to let his strength weaken and his body decay so long as he could remain on the throne and keep his eyes on every move made by his empire.
To preserve his supremacy, he built the Blood Guard and recruited elite warriors to massacre any vampires who dared oppose him.
He even cooperated with human power brokers to maintain his position.
Everything was for control.
Everything was for power.
If there was one phrase that defined Elidar Markinos, it was that he would sacrifice anything to keep what he ruled.
And yet, no matter how twisted his body had become, there was no denying the truth.
He was still the ruler of the vampire empire.
Still the master of every vampire in New York.
Chad Norma's appearance made Elidar realize his son was planning to come back with revenge.
And because he understood exactly how dangerous the Reaper variants were, he knew he would need help.
The final piece of his plan would also be handled at the same time.
Drex, for his part, had no interest in the politics of vampire nobility.
The newly acquired R virus, a mutated strain of vampire biology, was far more interesting to a researcher like him.
During his investigation, he discovered something unexpected.
The R virus was not actually immune to silver.
It simply had such a violent metabolic rate that it could burn through the damage using raw energy. The same mechanism also let it neutralize and expel anticoagulants that were deadly to ordinary vampires.
It was an ugly little survival trick, but an effective one.
Unfortunately, Extremis was another story.
Even a trace amount of Extremis slaughtered the R virus without effort.
That was disappointing.
Drex had been hoping for more.
Still, the virus did have one remarkable quality.
Its infection rate was far greater than the standard vampire virus.
By a staggering margin.
In fact, a single cell was enough to trigger full-body infection and transformation.
Drex leaned back slightly, studying the data.
"Dangerous world," he muttered.
Marvel's population really was reckless beyond belief.
The R virus was basically an upgraded T virus with teeth.
The only mercy was that it could not survive in the air.
If it could spread through the atmosphere, then one scratch, one burst of body fluid from Chad Norma or one of his Reapers, and the whole city would have turned into a Marvel-style bioweapon nightmare.
After finishing his research, Drex headed to New York's underground fight circuit.
After screening a batch of beast soldiers, he had not stopped supporting the event.
Only the incentive had changed.
Instead of war machines, he paid in money now.
The hundred War Machines originally promised to the champion had already been taken back to Hydra by Bucky Barnes, which exposed several of Hydra's hidden bases to Drex in the process.
At the moment, he was preparing a "snake swallowing snake" operation of his own.
And the underground fighting scene continued to thrive.
Kingpin had managed it with real care.
The KOF tournament was likely the hottest underground fighting event in the world right now.
Nobody knew yet that Blade Tech Industries was backing it, but people did know the funding was absurdly deep. That alone attracted all kinds of desperate killers and ambitious monsters.
Drex had always believed that if the world of King of Fighters could produce so many lunatics, there was no reason the Marvel universe should have been empty of superhumans and supervillains in its early years.
And he was right.
The KOF tournament produced plenty of extraordinary fighters.
Some tore through the bracket with overwhelming ease, crushing every opponent in their path.
The Black Queen recorded every match and analyzed the combat data in detail.
Even better, the physical examinations conducted before the tournament proved extremely useful.
They gave Drex easy access to samples from promising subjects.
When he found someone strong enough to matter, World Serpent would send an invitation.
If they refused, then the real approach began.
A quieter one.
A more permanent one.
Using that method, World Serpent recruited quite a few capable people.
There were disappointments too, of course.
Most of the fighters were not mutants at all.
They were just humans who had trained themselves into dangerous shape.
Still, that was useful in its own way.
Drex's people even captured a future third-rate villain, Master of Mimicry.
And among the few who did possess mutations, most were only a few times stronger than an ordinary person.
That was enough for some.
Not nearly enough for him.