Even after taking Drex Valen's full-force punch, Hyperion didn't go down.
His foot shifted slightly.
Then he vanished.
A blazing afterimage shot forward as Hyperion accelerated upward at over Mach 10 in an instant, his fist trailing a burning red streak through the air.
BOOM!
The punch slammed directly into Drex's palm.
Force equivalent to hundreds of thousands of tons exploded outward… and disappeared without effect, like a stone sinking into a bottomless ocean.
Drex countered immediately.
His fist came crashing forward at a speed so absurd it bordered on incomprehensible.
Hyperion barely managed to raise an arm in defense before the impact detonated through his body.
Pain struck first.
Then numbness.
The arm he used to block nearly lost all sensation from the sheer force behind the blow.
Hyperion's body flew backward, skidding violently across the ground while dragging up a massive trail of dust and shattered concrete. He smashed clean through a reddish-brown building, splitting it in half before crashing into a gigantic crater.
For several seconds, rubble shifted quietly.
Then Hyperion climbed out.
Feeling gradually returned to his arm as he stared at Drex from across the ruined battlefield, silently reevaluating his opponent's strength.
Half a second later, he launched himself forward again.
A sonic boom exploded behind him.
Drex answered with another punch.
The attack was terrifying beyond words.
The pressure generated by the punch alone blasted dust thousands of feet into the sky. Pure kinetic force mixed with overwhelming energy, bearing down like an entire mountain range collapsing at once.
Hyperion moved.
His body blurred sideways like a fish slipping through water, narrowly evading the attack.
The shockwave alone traveled hundreds of meters and obliterated a distant skyscraper into fragments.
Then Hyperion's eyes flashed gold.
Atomic vision erupted forward.
Drex allowed the beam to hit him directly.
Every cell in his body functioned like a microscopic black hole singularity. The atomic vision vanished instantly upon contact, devoured completely before it could inflict even the slightest damage.
Then Drex's own eyes ignited crimson.
Blazing energy surged outward like unsheathed divine blades aimed straight at Hyperion's face. The violent pressure scattered the surrounding dust while excess energy shattered the ground across hundreds of meters.
Golden-red light crossed two miles in an instant.
The sheer energy was suffocating.
Hyperion's eyes widened.
Then he vanished beneath the blast.
Reduced to ashes…
Except not really.
In reality, Drex had already activated the Space Stone and quietly sealed Hyperion inside a temporary pocket dimension.
Alive.
Contained.
Owned.
Tony Stark landed nearby and pointed accusingly at Drex.
"You always wait until the absolute last second to show up. You love the dramatic entrance thing way too much."
Drex looked entirely unapologetic.
"I'm not Director of S.W.O.R.D. anymore. I'm not even a superhero. Expecting a businessman to save the world every time something explodes seems a little unreasonable."
Tony opened his mouth to argue.
Then stopped.
Technically… Drex wasn't wrong.
Steve Rogers stepped forward instead.
"What about hiring you?"
Drex glanced at him.
Steve's memories had been altered after Drex released him, so although Steve knew he'd become vastly stronger than before, he believed S.W.O.R.D. had simply recovered and revived him from the ice.
"Hire me?" Drex snorted. "I own Umbrella Corporation. Who exactly could afford to hire me?"
Then he disappeared.
To be fair, he wasn't exaggerating.
Umbrella Corporation's annual post-tax revenue had already climbed close to ten trillion dollars, dwarfing the tax income of entire nations.
The United States collected roughly 4.6 trillion dollars in taxes annually.
Umbrella made more than double that.
A corporate monster on that scale wasn't something governments could casually "hire."
Back when Drex still served as Director of S.W.O.R.D., the United Nations had initially paid him one billion dollars annually.
The next year, they raised it to three billion.
When he resigned, panic spread through the UN so quickly that they offered him ten billion dollars per year to stay.
Drex rejected them without hesitation.
Shortly afterward, he learned that the Baxter Building was being put up for sale.
Which was honestly surreal.
That was the Fantastic Four's headquarters.
How were they bankrupt?
After looking into it, Drex discovered the team was apparently so deep in debt that they were being forced to sell the building just to survive financially.
The situation was genuinely baffling.
They owned one of the most recognizable landmarks in New York. Their public visibility rivaled celebrities. Reed Richards was one of the greatest scientific minds on Earth, and the other members worked as highly paid S.W.O.R.D. heroes.
And somehow they still managed to end up broke.
At this point, financial self-destruction practically qualified as a superpower.
Still, Drex refused to touch the Baxter Building with a ten-foot pole.
Everyone knew Reed spent most of his time conducting insane dimensional experiments inside the tower. Every other week some bizarre extradimensional creature crawled out of a portal somewhere in the building.
Buying that place sounded less like a real estate investment and more like volunteering for cosmic harassment.
Sooner or later, some nightmare monster would probably emerge from a bathroom mirror and start eating people.
No thanks.
Umbrella Corporation was already expanding aggressively into real estate anyway, though Drex himself was the company's greatest source of value.
More importantly…
Raccoon City had already begun construction.
Not inside any existing country.
Drex had simply started creating new land in the middle of the ocean.
A colossal artificial continent.
The scale of the land reclamation project stunned the United Nations into silence. Population growth and shrinking land resources had become a global problem, and now they were watching an entirely new landmass appear in real time through satellite imagery.
An actual continent.
The reaction from island nations was especially intense.
Countries with chronic land shortages practically lost their minds.
The Japanese government contacted Umbrella Corporation almost immediately, openly stating they were willing to pay any price if Drex would use the same technology to expand their territory.
The United States had similar thoughts.
Several officials quietly began calculating how much they would need to spend to expand strategic coastal regions.
Tony Stark watched all of this unfold in exhausted silence.
Then sighed.
Somehow, Drex had managed to outdo him again.
Creating continents now?
What kind of absurdity was that?