Free Web NovelChapter 65: Chapter 65 - Can’t Touch This
Lucius blinked at the hammer.
Mjolnir stood exactly where it had been, planted in the crater as if nothing at all had happened.
He cleared his throat, drew himself up with what he felt was admirable restraint, and tried again.
"Sacrifice?"
This time it came out sounding more like a polite request than a command of mystical authority. He heard it, hated it, and hated the result even more. freewebnoveℓ.com
Nothing changed.
The bloody entity behind Bob, or whatever part of the system decided these things, simply refused to accept Mjolnir as a valid sacrifice. There was no glow, no pull, no hunger, and no result. The hammer sat there in the dirt like a smug little verdict on effort.
Lucius stared at it for one long second.
All that work for nothing.
He had teleported across states, read divine runes, cheated a God King’s enchantment, stolen the use of another god’s favourite toy, and built a sacrificial array around it in the middle of a SHIELD site under a dramatic storm. That should have counted for something. Instead, he had managed to prove only that cosmic shopping rules remained arbitrarily idiotic.
With one irritated sweep of his hand, he erased the runic etchings of the ritual from the dirt.
"Fine," he muttered. "Be difficult. See if I care."
He absolutely cared.
The failure needled him all the same, but he was not foolish enough to waste a whole trip because one divine hammer had developed standards. Thor remained close, and even stripped of most of his active power, the prince of Asgard still carried a physiology Lucius was interested in.
He rose from the crater and floated away from the hammer with the sour dignity of a man refusing to admit he had just lost an argument to an object.
"I’ll get the Aesir template at least."
That made the journey worthwhile again.
On his way towards the holding cells, he reached out through the compound’s systems and burnt the servers and cameras with enough quiet violence that the whole network began dying in neat little pockets. Consoles flickered. Monitors cut to static. Data storage failed. Locks glitched. Somewhere above him, agents started shouting into radios that might still have worked for another minute or two if the weather had not already given them such a useful excuse.
If SHIELD blamed the thunderstorm, fine. If they did not, also fine. Lucius could not possibly care less what explanation they settled on as long as they stayed out of his way.
He moved through the compound unseen and found the holding block without trouble.
Thor sat inside one of the cells, looking exactly the way fallen princes were supposed to look when the universe had finally started correcting them: tall, shredded, and handsome enough to make weaker men resentful on sight. Even without the armour, even with his power stripped, even in mortal clothing and after a proper series of humiliations, the man still looked offensively well-made.
Lucius stopped outside the cell and felt the first sharp edge of something very close to jealousy.
The bastard had the body shape without effort, with no need for planning, no need for tailored compromise, and no need to work out what bone, muscle, and tissue would need shifting where. He had simply been born like that because divine lines, like wealth, often landed on the least deserving people first.
Lucius’s irritation turned useful at once.
He decided then and there that before using the Array of Convergence again, he would get Mystique’s mutation. Once he had that, he would not need to work for a second to look the way he wanted. He could redesign himself on the surface and call it efficient work.
He smirked.
"Oh, how smart I am."
The answer, in his view, was way too much.
If self-praise had been a skill, he would have held triple S rank in it and worn the medal to breakfast.
He teleported into the cell and remained still for a moment because he wanted to see whether the film’s sequence had already passed or not. Loki was supposed to appear here eventually. Coulson could also have arrived, all neat posture and restrained concern, to poke at the fallen prince or show off how badly SHIELD understood gods.
Neither happened.
Lucius counted one minute and twelve seconds in silence.
That was more than enough patience for one night.
He approached the downgraded God of Thunder and used matter manipulation to read.
This was the real reason he had come.
He mapped everything.
Not just the surface, and not just muscle, bone, blood, and organ structure. He dug through the whole pattern of Thor as he currently existed, including the body, the inherited template, the magical residue dimmed by Odin’s punishment, the energy channels, and the way the flesh still held an Asgardian standard even after the king had taken back the active storm-power and the easier divine excess.
Thor’s magic felt muted, but not absent.
That was the first useful thing.
The second came when Lucius recognised the same signature pattern he had felt from Mjolnir, namely storm, thunder and weather manipılation in the metaphysical architecture that matched the hammer’s enchantment closely enough to confirm the relationship. The weapon only contained a fraction of the power on its own. It enhanced Thor’s power, not the source of it. Odin had stripped that template down, throttled it, and sealed it under the punishment, but the shape remained.
Lucius smiled slowly.
There it was.
He followed the structure deeper. Aesir biology was different from mutant biology. It did not feel like Eternal biology either. It sat somewhere else, an old fusion of dense physical resilience, long-lived vitality, magical compatibility, and a body designed to conduct power without collapsing under it. Not truly divine in the abstract sense, but not human either. It was its own category, and that alone pleased him enormously.
He took the vascular patterns first, then tissue resilience, then the subtle way the bones carried and distributed force. He checked the nerve conductivity, endocrine balance, recovery potential, and the faint residual echo of the power Odin had bound rather than removed entirely.
The fatherly love involved in that decision was enough to make him almost laugh out loud.
Apparently, ruining the firstborn had not been enough for Odin. Hela had not satisfied his appetite for catastrophic parenting, so he had moved on to the second child and done a similar job with a different aesthetic. Truly, the old bastard should have been a leading candidate for Father of the millennium.
Once he had memorised everything worth taking, Lucius stepped back with half-satisfied pleasure.
Still, it was progress.
Then he vanished.
Thor remained alone in the cell, none the wiser about the exact nature of what had just happened around him.
-
Lucius reappeared outside the compound with far too many useful thoughts at once
There were so many things to do now, new prayers to answer, and new infidels to turn into a botanical DEI report.
One of the finest examples of Aesir physiology alone would take time to unpack. He would try to replicate the magical template. The weather and thunder signature would be nice additions.
Then there was Mystique; he had not forgotten that. He already has her X-Gene template, which means more and more prayers to answer. Once he finishes mixing the Aesir template with shape shifting and the Eternal biology of himself, he will use the Array of Convergence again, and all these new addons will be transferred to his lovely soul. Safe and far away from any technology humans or aliens could use to suppress him.
He also needed souls.
Just to be on the safe side. Knowledge, power, biology, and stolen divinity were one thing. Shopping through Bob remained another, and Bob preferred hard currency in the form of souls. Lucius had started thinking of them as a budget, as moral language only slowed useful systems down.
He floated up into the New Mexico night and let the wind move around him while he sorted the priorities: Mystique’s and Thor’s template, and the more souls problem, postponed but not forgotten.
He smiled to himself and headed back east.
--
Far from New Mexico, Stryker was planning the attack with the kind of appetite decent men reserved for revenge and indecent men called duty.
Now that Noctis was out of the city, the logistics improved at once. Fewer civilians and less press. Wider routes for containment. Better room to move personnel and helicopters without turning the whole thing into a filmed scandal before the objective was secured.
Stryker stood over a table spread with maps, routes, photographs, and timing estimates. His finger moved across the marked sectors with proprietary focus. Beside him, Lady Deathstrike waited in silence, all sharpened intent and coiled violence. Jason Stryker sat farther back, pale and watchful, the sort of presence that only looked harmless to people who had never had their minds invaded properly. Leech remained where handlers had placed him, small and useful in the worst possible way.
General Ross had delivered what he promised: five helicopters, a specialised battalion, transport support, containment teams, and enough armed men to make the whole thing feel military parade than covert ops if one ignored the mutant child and the adamantium-clawed assassin standing in the room.
Ross appeared on the secure monitor with the severe expression of a man who already believed success had begun because his assets had been assigned.
"You have the air support. Ground teams are in place. You’ll have your transport corridor the moment the target is captured."
Stryker kept his eyes on the map.
"He will be secured."
Ross heard the confidence and approved of it because men like him often mistook certainty for competence until the paperwork arrived later.
"I want him alive."
Stryker’s mouth moved in something too dry to count as a smile.
"He will be as obedient as these little puppies."
He said as he smacked Deathstrike’s butt.
That was true enough. Stryker wanted Lucius Noctis on one of his slabs, stripped down to blood, tissue, and whatever made a mutant that dangerous work. The thought alone forced him to keep his excitement under control. Years of discipline held it in place, but not by much.
Ross leaned closer to the camera.
"Make sure you succeed in one strike. If he gets a chance to escalate, we’re all going to pay a high price. I do not want to be the second SHIELD."
Stryker did not bother pretending that possibility had not already occurred to him.
"He won’t get the chance." freeweɓnøvel.com
Around him, the team waited.
Lady Deathstrike’s claws stayed hidden, but the posture gave her away.
Jason watched the map with his own unsettling calm.
Leech looked bored and cold, which in a child would have been sad if the room had contained a single decent adult.
Both men, on different ends of the secure line, were hoping for the same thing.
A successful hunt.
Neither of them had yet learned how much they were going to regret that hope.
