Publicly, Drex Valen reacted to the bombing attempt with furious outrage.
Privately, once the cameras and agents were gone, he leaned against a wall and calmly exhaled.
Not even slightly angry.
The rage had been an act.
A performance.
Because the attack itself made no sense.
The bomb had been far too weak.
Drex wasn't imagining conspiracies out of paranoia. Based on everything the world believed he could do, that explosion should never have been expected to kill him.
Realistically, it probably wouldn't even injure him.
And the placement bothered him even more.
The bomb had detonated inside the sewer system beneath the road. Under normal circumstances, a blast of that scale should have ripped apart multiple streets and collapsed surrounding infrastructure.
Instead, it had only created a crater.
Too controlled.
Too convenient.
"If I could fully map atomic motion instead of only fragments…" Drex muttered, frowning slightly. "I could trace the chain backward."
Unfortunately, his predictive perception still wasn't perfect.
Which meant he had to rely on the Black Queen.
But before she could finish investigating, S.H.I.E.L.D. suddenly stepped into the spotlight.
They publicly announced that they had identified the masterminds behind the attack.
Supposedly, the evidence led toward both the CIA and FBI.
Unfortunately, S.H.I.E.L.D. claimed it lacked jurisdiction to continue investigating further.
The instant S.H.I.E.L.D. inserted itself into the situation, Drex understood exactly who was behind the scheme.
Hydra.
Specifically, Hydra operatives inside S.H.I.E.L.D. trying to frame the FBI and CIA.
Ironically, even the Hydra agents involved apparently didn't realize they were setting a trap targeting Drex himself. Otherwise the information would have eventually reached him through his own embedded channels.
Instead, the operatives treated it as a routine political maneuver and never bothered escalating the report.
Drex sighed.
His intelligence protocols still had flaws.
That much was obvious now.
Still, the overall picture had become clear.
Alexander Pierce wanted to use the bombing to weaken competing intelligence agencies while strengthening S.H.I.E.L.D.'s authority.
Unfortunately for him, Drex had no interest in playing fair.
Pierce had carefully avoided leaving behind real evidence.
Unlike Obadiah Stane, he wasn't stupid enough to store incriminating information on accessible systems.
But evidence didn't necessarily need to be real.
Not anymore.
Using the Black Queen's synthesis technology, Drex fabricated a highly convincing audio recording and anonymously leaked it to both the FBI and CIA.
The result was immediate chaos.
The two agencies, already under crushing political pressure, seized onto the recording like drowning men grabbing a life raft.
Inside the fabricated conversation, Pierce's voice was unmistakable.
"Director, are we really doing this? If anyone discovers we bombed Drex Valen, we're finished."
"It won't trace back to us," the false Pierce replied calmly. "Every trail points toward the FBI and CIA. This is S.H.I.E.L.D.'s opportunity."
In an era before sophisticated voice synthesis technology existed publicly, the recording looked devastatingly authentic.
Legally, audio evidence alone still lacked full prosecutorial power.
Politically?
It was a nuclear strike.
Pierce was immediately dragged into furious questioning by American leadership. Several members of Congress even began discussing replacing him outright.
To stabilize the situation, Pierce was forced to spend enormous political capital and secretly rely on additional Hydra resources.
Which only exposed more Hydra activity for the Black Queen to monitor.
Meanwhile, the FBI and CIA became openly hostile toward Pierce.
Especially the CIA.
At one point, senior personnel seriously considered releasing every piece of dirt they could uncover on him.
It wouldn't have been the first time they destroyed someone that way.
And if Pierce ever lost his position completely?
Well.
People sent to "anti-suicide detention facilities" in America had a strange tendency to commit suicide anyway.
After retaliating against Pierce's maneuver, Drex lost interest in the aftermath.
There were more important things happening.
Elsewhere in the world, a sleek cone-shaped aircraft descended vertically toward a military testing facility.
Engineers and military researchers stared upward in disbelief as the craft landed.
"The current recorded flight speed exceeded ten thousand kilometers per hour," one scientist said excitedly. "And that's while carrying passengers. The engine still wasn't operating at full output."
The surrounding researchers erupted into discussion.
"The fuel costs are insane, though," another researcher added while reviewing the data. "Operational expense per hundred kilometers is over three hundred thousand."
"Round-trip flights burn through tens of millions like paper."
Still, nobody sounded disappointed.
If anything, they looked exhilarated.
"One prototype is enough," an older scientist said quietly. "I honestly believed aircraft like this wouldn't exist for another century."
A senior researcher surnamed Yang stood nearby watching the aircraft with complicated emotions.
He was widely considered one of the nation's greatest scientific minds.
And even he found the machine difficult to comprehend.
The origins of the project were equally extraordinary.
Although the country had failed to recruit the world's top scientific talents directly, they had still managed to acquire a large number of advanced technical blueprints over the years.
Many designs had once been considered impossible to manufacture due to material limitations and insufficient industrial precision.
The situation resembled theoretical projects left behind by scientists during World War II:
Brilliant concepts trapped behind inadequate technology.
Then Drex Valen introduced secondary Kryptonian alloy.
An absurd material that outclassed virtually every known alloy on Earth.
Once that happened, manufacturing technologies across entire industries advanced explosively.
Old theoretical designs suddenly became possible.
The aircraft now resting on the runway represented the first successful realization of one of those abandoned concepts.
"We're approaching the level of the great twentieth-century scientists," someone said excitedly. "Scientific progress always begins with material science. With secondary Kryptonian alloy, we may actually surpass relativity and quantum mechanics within our lifetime."
The surrounding researchers became even more animated.
Professor Yang, however, merely shook his head.
Surpass Einstein and quantum theory within one lifetime?
Maybe if Einstein himself came back from the dead.
Still…
He looked toward the aircraft again thoughtfully.
"Secondary Kryptonian alloy…" he murmured.
Secondary.
Meaning there was probably something better.
Or perhaps Drex himself still considered the material incomplete.
Based on current projections, Yang estimated humanity would need at least seventy years to reproduce the alloy independently.
Seventy years.
Drex Valen hadn't merely created a material.
He had effectively erased decades of scientific bottlenecks for humanity.
And if a fourth industrial revolution truly arrived in the future…
History would remember Drex as one of its founding architects.
...
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