S.W.O.R.D. wasn't just another intelligence agency.
It was tied directly to the survival of humanity itself.
That meant even minor corruption could become catastrophic.
Drex Valen, however, wasn't particularly concerned.
Nick Fury could handle it.
Sure, Fury had somehow failed to notice S.H.I.E.L.D. turning into HYDRA headquarters right under his nose, which was admittedly a spectacular management failure. But there was a reason he was considered one of the few true Level 10 agents on Earth.
He'd simply been blindsided.
Nobody would've expected HYDRA to survive so thoroughly after World War II, much less infiltrate and expand inside S.H.I.E.L.D. itself.
And once Fury finally learned the truth, he'd immediately used himself as bait to draw HYDRA into making a move.
Aside from occasionally trying to pull Batman-level mind games without actually being Batman, Fury was extremely capable.
Drex had no doubts he could clean up the mess.
Meanwhile, S.W.O.R.D. itself entered a major restructuring phase.
Originally, most governments had assumed the organization was temporary. Necessary, yes, but only until the monster crisis ended.
That assumption led to ugly behavior behind the scenes.
Individual agents abused authority for personal gain.
Governments abused authority for national gain.
The deeper investigators dug, the uglier things became.
Then they uncovered something explosive.
One hundred registered Decepticons had vanished.
Completely.
The hangars were empty.
Now technically, Decepticons could fly away on their own, but that wasn't the issue. Every deployment required authorization and constant tracking. Some of these missing units hadn't even been assigned pilots yet.
The disappearance immediately triggered the highest security alerts.
Drex, on the other hand, already knew the answer.
In the Marvel universe, whenever something insane happened and nobody knew who was responsible...
The safest assumption was usually HYDRA.
After the Battle of New York, Loki was taken into custody and prepared for transport back to Asgard.
Thor remained obsessed with locating the missing Tesseract.
The artifact had been specifically ordered returned to Asgard, but despite searching everywhere, he couldn't find it.
Before leaving Earth, Drex casually asked if he could examine Mjolnir.
Thor handed it over without hesitation.
To him, the hammer was impossible to replicate anyway.
Unfortunately for Thor, Drex had already reached the quark-level understanding of matter.
To him, Mjolnir looked less like a divine weapon and more like a very advanced set of building blocks.
"I see," Drex murmured after studying it for a while. "So this is what Asgardian divine power actually is."
"Well... now I have Asgardian divine power too."
More specifically:
The power of Thor.
After finishing his analysis, Drex returned the hammer.
Thor was in an unusually good mood after making so many powerful friends on Earth. Before leaving, he enthusiastically challenged Drex to a future rematch.
Drex immediately responded:
"Why wait? Let's do it now."
Several minutes later, Thor stood beside Loki with bruises covering half his face.
"Heimdall!" Thor shouted. "Send us home!"
Rainbow-colored light descended from the sky.
The two Asgardians vanished within the Bifrost.
Drex barely spared them another glance.
His attention had already shifted elsewhere.
HYDRA.
Then, almost casually, he created another Mjolnir in his hand.
A perfect replica.
Whoever wielded this hammer would gain the power of Thor.
In Asgard, Heimdall nearly panicked after witnessing the scene.
He immediately reported everything to Odin.
The Allfather listened silently, expression complicated.
"Leave it alone," Odin finally said.
After all, Drex Valen wasn't merely a powerful human anymore.
He was the Emperor of the Kryptonian Empire.
Even Odin himself couldn't tell Thor's original hammer apart from the replica.
For a brief moment, Odin even suspected Drex had somehow acquired the Reality Stone and used it to duplicate Mjolnir perfectly.
Meanwhile, Drex noticed Heimdall observing him.
Without hesitation, he activated the Mind Stone and completely blocked Earth from Heimdall's sight.
Then he returned to researching divine weapons with obvious enthusiasm.
If Mjolnir could be replicated...
What about other legendary artifacts?
Something like Wonder Woman's equipment set, perhaps.
That line of experimentation led him to another discovery:
Uru metal.
Once Drex fully analyzed Mjolnir's structure, obtaining Uru became trivial.
At the end of the day, metal was still matter.
And matter, at its core, was just atomic structure.
Someone with quark-level manipulation abilities could produce practically limitless quantities.
So Drex started experimenting.
Eventually, he created something new.
The Sword of Hephaestus.
Not Wonder Woman's original version capable of subatomic cutting.
Drex's version was forged from a combination of Uru metal, Vibranium, and Proto-Adamantium.
Then he added Asgardian divine power...
And the runes carved into Mjolnir itself.
Rune magic.
Fortunately, Drex had already awakened abilities similar to Superman's magical adaptations. Otherwise, merely seeing the runes wouldn't have been enough to reproduce their effects.
The resulting weapon was absurd.
The Sword of Hephaestus generated divine flame rather than ordinary fire.
It could burn in a vacuum.
It could ignite water, ice, and even substances that should've been completely nonflammable.
At full output, the flames could exceed one hundred thousand degrees.
Anything struck by the blade was simply cut apart.
Whoever wielded the sword would gain the authority of a Fire God:
Flight.
Super strength.
Super speed.
Super endurance.
The weapon was fully comparable to Thor's hammer.
Drex immediately packaged one hundred of the swords and sent them to the Kryptonian Empire.
Esdeath would know how to distribute them.
Before long, he'd probably have an entire order of Fire God Knights under his command.
HYDRA Underground Base.
Modern HYDRA looked very different from its World War II incarnation.
It appeared enormous from the outside, but internally, its structure had become fragmented and chaotic.
After HYDRA's North American branch suddenly went dark, the remaining cells across the world became highly alert.
Nobody particularly respected Alexander Pierce as a leader, but someone capable of erasing him without a trace was terrifying.
Inside the underground base, one of the Five Fingers of the Hand arrived for a private meeting.
Murakami.
HYDRA had contacted the Hand claiming they had business to discuss.
"Welcome, Mr. Murakami."
A man stepped forward from the shadows.
Murakami narrowed his eyes.
"And you are?"
The man smiled faintly.
"Clairvoyant."
Murakami's expression changed instantly.
He studied the man again, much more seriously this time.
"So you're the Clairvoyant."
The title carried enormous weight in the underworld.
Almost nobody knew what the Clairvoyant looked like, but everyone had heard the name.
Rumors claimed his influence stretched across countless organizations and black-market networks. He was also supposedly involved in several classified human-enhancement projects.
Even S.H.I.E.L.D. had encountered his operations multiple times.
Every single mission ended the same way.
The Clairvoyant's forces always seemed one step ahead.
Plans were exposed before execution.
Operations collapsed before they even began.
Over time, people started believing the Clairvoyant possessed actual precognitive abilities.
Among HYDRA and groups like the Hand, there were even whispers that the Clairvoyant himself was one of HYDRA's hidden leaders.
Whether that rumor was true or not hardly mattered.
The name alone represented enormous influence.
The man smiled again.
"Yes," he admitted freely.
"I am."
...
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