Free Web NovelChapter 68: Chapter 68 - Filth and Logistics
Lucius watched the boy vanish.
Leech had never fully understood what was happening around him. He had been turned into a tool long before Lucius arrived, a child worn down to function, rocked into numb little rhythms so adults could move him from room to room and call the arrangement necessary. When the sacrificial array answered, it took him the same way it took the others, cleanly, efficiently, and without asking whether misery cared for innocence.
His nullifying gift did not go with him.
That, in Lucius’s view, was the useful part.
He felt the transfer settle into him almost at once, not as some dramatic surge, but as a new dead zone folded into his available options, an absence he could place where needed, activate or disable at his will. The boy was gone. The gift remained for the foreseeable future.
Lucius did not feel guilty.
On the contrary, he had done the child a favour. There were lives worth saving and lives worth ending cleanly before the next owner laid hands on them. Leech’s had been the second kind for some time.
"Now then," he murmured.
He stepped out of the array and let his telepathy widen again through the facility. The illusion on the slab still breathed in perfect, drugged little rhythms for the cameras. Stryker still believed his prize slept under a collar, restraints, and sedation. Ross still waited on the distant line like a man trying not to sound eager about a crime he wanted very badly.
Lucius reached through the soldiers and handlers already inside his influence and began moving them where he wanted. Quiet changes first. A guard redirected down the wrong corridor. Another paused at a door and forgot why he had come. One technician looked away from the screen at exactly the moment Lucius took over the facility’s network. A nudge here, a softened thought there. A shopping trip for a whole-ass facility. Network, infrastructure, and whatever passed for brains inside those thick skulls. All at the gloriously unbeatable price of absolutely nothing. Bargain of the century, really
Security architecture opened under his understanding, like cheap machinery pretending to be statecraft. He walked through camera loops, lock controls, internal communications, data archives, personnel records, research directories, and buried partitions. Stryker clearly believed nobody else had earned the right to read.
There were acquisition files. Biological notes. Mutant indexing. Ross’s traffic manifests. Procurement chains. Quiet lists of impossible materials, medical equipment orders, sedatives, restraint types, body disposal documentation dressed up in military abbreviations, and the cold official language men used when they wanted horror to sound like logistics.
He also found Stryker’s private records.
That was where the real filth always lived.
-
While he read, he kept the colonel under influence just enough that nothing sharp in his mind turned into action against the sleeping illusion in the lab. Stryker still believed the body on the slab was helpless. Lucius had no intention of letting impatience ruin the theatre early.
Colonel William Stryker sat at his desk and watched the screen with the bright, reverent attention of a choirboy looking at a priest he intended to impress.
Expectation had stripped ten years off his face. Excitement had done the rest. The live feed showed Lucius Noctis exactly where Stryker wanted him, still on the slab, collar in place, restraints tight, unconscious and available for proper work. It had taken time, force, money, five helicopters, a specialised battalion, three mutant assets, and more coordination than some overseas operations received, but the result was there in front of him.
A living answer.
His gaze moved across the other security feeds.
Jason, his own private shame turned useful instrument, sat in his room with the faint smugness of a dog waiting to be told he was a good boy. Lady Deathstrike was in her quarters, cleaning up and waiting for the summons she knew would come sooner or later. In another room, the little freak Leech had been taken off by the handlers after transport, still rocking, still useful, still proof that a mutant power only mattered once a good man found the right chain to put on it.
Stryker smiled.
His newest favourite subject gave a small movement on the slab.
-
The illusion was perfect. A shift at the shoulder. A drag of breath. The sort of shallow pre-conscious response sedatives often failed to hold beyond the half-hour mark.
He stood at once.
"Time to greet my new masterpiece."
At the remote line, Ross’s voice cut in before he could leave the desk.
"Is he waking?"
"He’s coming round."
Ross did not bother hiding what mattered to him.
"When you get him under, I want production immediately."
Stryker’s mouth curved.
"You’ll have your serums, General."
Ross leaned closer to the secure screen in Washington, his face all old ambition and military entitlement.
"Not eventually. Immediately. I want him turned into a puppet as soon as possible. Once that’s done, I want as many Strengthening Potions as he can be made to brew. No rationing. No ten-vial nonsense. I want a continuous supply."
Stryker approved of the language.
Puppet was honest.
"You’ll have more than that. Once he’s broken open properly, we won’t be limited to him alone."
Ross heard the promise and liked it too much.
"Then do your job, Colonel."
The line cut.
Stryker took one more look at the sleeping body on the slab and left his office with the long, steady stride of a man walking towards ownership.
Unseen by him, Lucius floated in the upper dark of the corridor outside and listened to the whole exchange with a smile that should have warned the walls.
So they wanted a puppet.
He followed Stryker at a distance through cameras, thoughts, and the facility’s own electronic nerves.
The colonel took the central stairwell. Two guards fell in behind him. Another pair moved ahead to clear the lab corridor, neither realising the only dangerous thing in the building was currently above them and amused.
Lucius checked the lab feed again.
The false unconscious body still lay where it should, collar intact in appearance, chest rising in controlled intervals, wrists motionless under the restraints. He had built enough little failures into the camera buffers that nobody would notice a discrepancy before he wanted them to. In the meantime, the colonel was marching towards a performance set for him by the very man he meant to own.
That alone made the evening respectable.
--
Far from Alkali Lake, Asgard was rotting under secrecy.
Loki moved through the palace with the stillness of somebody who had finally decided movement itself ought to lie for him. Odin slept, and Thor was gone. The throne had not been offered, but absence and timing had opened enough space for a lesser son to tell himself he fit the shape. That was the first lie.
The second was older.
Loki carried it in his blood and had only recently been forced to look at the truth. Laufey’s son. A stolen child. Raised in splendour and war stories, but never in honesty. The revelation had gone into him like ice under the ribs. He had not become someone else because of it. He had simply stopped pretending the old hunger would ever be fed honestly.
So he visited his biological relatives privately.
There was no point dressing it up as reconciliation. Loki did not go to confess himself, and he certainly did not go to share his wounds like some mortal fool in need of sympathy. He went because Laufey still wanted revenge, still wanted the Casket of Ancient Winters, and still believed hatred could pass for strategy if he wanted something badly enough.
The agreement itself was simple in structure and rotten in motive. Loki gave Laufey a path into Asgard, a way past the protections, and an opening to reach Odin while the old king lay helpless in the Odinsleep. In return, Laufey would get his chance to strike at the man who had humbled Jotunheim, while Loki moved one step closer to the story he wanted the realm to believe.
That story depended on timing. Laufey would enter Asgard believing he had been granted a real opportunity for revenge and recovery. Instead, he would be walking into a scene Loki intended to control from beginning to end. Odin would lie vulnerable. Laufey would make his attempt. Then Loki would kill him and stand revealed as the son who had defended his father, protected the throne, and succeeded where Thor had only made noise.
That was the version of events Loki meant history to keep.
Whether it would actually happen that way was a separate problem, and one he preferred not to examine too closely while the pieces were still moving.
On Midgard, other problems moved faster than old kings. ƒrēewebnovel.com
Sif and the Warriors Three had already gone to Earth. Heimdall had allowed it. That changed everything.
Thor was no longer isolated, no longer just a fallen fool stumbling around a desert town. Once his friends reached him, the lie about Odin’s death would not hold for long. They knew Asgard too well. They knew Thor too well. Worse, they were exactly the sort of loyal idiots who would throw themselves into danger and force the story back into motion through sheer devotion.
Loki could not allow that.
He stood before the Destroyer with all pretence stripped away.
The armour waited, immense and obedient, all stored violence and royal command. It had no doubts, no pride, and no need to be lied to. Loki appreciated that in a servant.
He set his hand to it and gave the order cleanly.
"Make sure my brother does not return. Destroy everything."
There was no grief in the command. No noble regret. Only decision sharpened by fear and the simple fact that Thor, alive, remained a threat to everything Loki had built since the Bifrost observatory.
If Thor survived, then the problem would return larger than before.
If Thor died, then at least one loose end would finally be cut.
