บท 29: A Virus' Identity Theft
P.S : I've posted my D iscord in the description of this novel. It isn't fully complete, but you're welcome to join and discuss the novel. It's always interesting to see your suggestions and ideas.
***
"Are you SURE, you're alright?" Aunt May attempted to shake Peter's tall shoulders in vain before glaring at Uncle Ben, who wore an innocent expression while stuffing his face with mashed potatoes. "Why on earth did you let him outside?!"
"He's gonna turn eighteen in a few months, May," Ben shrugged, dumping a ladle of gravy on his food. "He had all the information, and he made his decision. He's back here in one piece, isn't he?"
"Y-you..." May jabbed a finger at the potato-enjoying Ben as she struggled for words.
"Aunt May, I thou..."
"And you! Quiet!" May interrupted Peter, looking up at him in frustration. "No matter how tall you are, you're still a kid. You shouldn't have gone out today! Didn't you hear about the terrorist attack? The explosions?"
"I did, but..."
"No talking back!" May practically howled, her eyes simultaneously containing a mix of anger, fear, and relief. "Back to your room! Now!"
"Okay..." Peter gave his best sigh, spotting Ben mouthing 'One and a half weeks' as May turned to him with rage in her eyes, as though she was a heavenly tribulation waiting to descend upon him.
'Good luck,' Peter mouthed back, adjusting his glasses before leaping up the stairs, now in complete control over his strength.
***
BAM!
A metallic tentacle slammed into an airport car, crumpling it in seconds.
"AAAAARAGHHHH!" Otto yelled out in anger as he stood near the runway before the broken earth.
The metallic plates on his armor flickered back into reality as its cloaking melted away, the charge required to keep it on fizzling out. He had planned everything - from deducing Killian's choices to scamming him out of the techno-organic implant, but when it was time to reap his rewards, a bunch of super-power creatures who were gifted power instead of earning it whisked it away.
"FUCK YOU! WHOEVER YOU ARE!" He roared at the sky, his tentacles bristling with power, as though responding to his rage.
Just then, the sonar in the suit pinged - warning him of two objects behind him that seemed to appear out of thin air.
"Who-! Where did you come from?" he whirled around before asking in surprise, finding two people before him, a woman and a man who were staring at him with anger. His confusion quickly dissipated when he recognized the white-haired woman as the one who'd teleported another superhuman onto the runway. "It's you! You piece of shit!"
Two of his tentacles blasted forward toward the woman with incredible speed, but she barely reacted, as though she knew she was in no danger. Both her and the emo boy had the very same blank expression.
BOOM!
Two glowing white, armored hands caught the tentacles as the emo kid seemed to appear before the woman, fantastical European-themed armor engulfing his body.
[ Where is Shaw? ], he growled, while the woman behind him vanished into the shadows.
***
CLICK!
"Whew!" Peter sighed, sitting on the bed, processing everything that happened at lightning speed.
He'd just killed a man. He was a famous villain who would just as easily massacre innocents as he would chickens, but a man nonetheless. The problem wasn't the fact that he was going through a moral dilemma, but that he wasn't. In both of his lives, he was conditioned to view killing and death as something unnatural and heretical despite it being one of the major factors of existence, which made him feel some cognitive dissonance when he shanked Shaw with absolutely no hesitation.
He didn't despise the thought of killing in his past life, but would definitely not be able to do the deed if he was forced to. But now, it felt absolutely natural. It was just another option that he could use.
'The serum most probably erased my irrational aversion to death after deeming it something akin 'injury' and regenerating it,' he thought, getting up once again, his emotional turmoil resolved in seconds - perks of having an incredibly fast brain.
He walked over to the fridge and opened it, revealing the usual ordered tools that he uses for both chemistry and biology. But in the very back of the first shelf, sat three futuristic syringes filled to the brim with blood. Two were named 'Panacea' and the other named 'X'. He'd placed them there by sneaking in to the house before officially entering it, as walking in with syringes filled with blood near midnight didn't look all that good.
The amount of blood he had was more than enough to extract Extremis and study the X - Gene, thus he had already disposed of Killian's body with great prejudice. The one thing he hated the most was needless violence - the inflicting of pain for fun, and this version of Killian deserved the worst punishment he could take.
He'd ripped apart his face and body before mixing the tiny pieces and blood into the murky sewers, which was one of the best places to dispose of a body, due to the sheer amount of DNA already in it. This meant that the only key to Extremis was in his hands.
'I need to get Gwen to take a look at these syringes. They seem highly useful,' he thought to himself as he carefully took out one of them named Panacea before realising something.
'Gwen... I really can't leave her hanging, can I?' he sighed to himself, his heart skipping a tiny beat. He walked over to the machines on the table and placed the syringe on a piece of cloth before slipping into one of the brand new lab coats that Dr. Connors had graciously gifted him.
'I'll shoot my shot next week. I'm having dinner with her family, after all.'
***
The clock silently ticked as Peter continued to work throughout the night, his superior brain able to forgo sleep with ease. While he didn't totally understand how it was possible, he deduced that his brain was probably constantly resting parts of his brain throughout the day, or even resting one half of his brain every day and another half at night, to keep him functioning at peak condition.
"Might as well give the subject reality-warping powers at this point," Peter sighed, leaning back from the computer as he finished analyzing and understanding the data he gleaned from the Panacea blood sample within six hours, his superhuman brain making the highly tiring work flow fairly smoothly.
He was right in thinking that Extremis was the greatest step in human evolution - of course, excluding his BOE and BIHT. Killian and Maya Hensen didn't come close to his genius in that field.
The powers it coded for were so numerous that the body could not biologically function if it had all of them, for now at least. To make the serum somewhat viable for a normal human, one had to turn off the genes that coded for the other powers, as though one had to pick and choose which combination of powers didn't blow you up.
The one Killian had taken was the safest combination.
Superhuman Physicality.
Exothermic Manipulation.
Extreme Regenerative Healing Factor.
Biological Immortality.
This was the combination that would most likely not make you explode in a giant fireball, but even this had less than ten percent chance of success with a guarantee of going insane, which really showed how unfinished the serum was.
But if one listed all the possible powers one could gain via the serum, it was truly a genetic marvel.
Removes Requirement For Sleep.
Appearance Alteration.
Enhanced Brain Function.
Technopathy.
Cybernetic Interface.
Bio-electrokinesis.
Claw-like pincers.
Complete body control.
Exothermic Manipulation.
Superhuman Physicality.
Extreme Regenerative Healing Factor.
Biological Immortality.
Biological Mental Barrier.
"Yeah, this is actual bullshit," he muttered, grumbling about the sheer potential of the serum before remembering the fact that he himself had created the Lizard Serum that easily surpassed this. "Nevermind... it is reasonable."
He got up from the chair and began pacing the room, going through numerous ways he could stabilize and perfect the serum.
Extremis was important to him due to the sheer amount of applications it possessed. Hell, in his past life, not many people even understood Extremis in its entirety, as the 'Extremis Serum' wasn't a serum in the first place - it was a virus.
A typical virus cycle when it finds a host cell, in crude terms - is that it attaches to the cell, enters the cell via endocytosis or fusing to the cell membrane, releases its genetic material and hijacks the cell machinery to assemble more of the virus copies before exiting the cell via a process called cell lysis that was the equivalent of the FBI busting through your door - attempting to get out instead of in.
This kills the cell and the other virus copies go on to do the same to the other cells, making more copies of itself and so on.
'But Extremis was modified to be special, wasn't it?' Peter chuckled to himself. 'A biological concept theorised in my previous life being applied here. Incredible - using viruses for genetic modification. The Extremis virus doesn't produce more copies of itself - it just deposits the DNA in the cell, allowing the natural DNA repair mechanisms to take over and accept the foreign DNA before fucking dying.'
"But why access the recovery centre...", he frowned before deducing the answer the very next instant. 'It probably rewrites the centre to view the entire body as an injury, which basically allows Extremis to replace the body with a much stronger version of itself.'
"You are just something else," he looked at the data on the computer, sighing at the ingenuity required to come up with something like this. Not only would Extremis allow him to bring out Gwen's true potential and exceed it, it could be the basis of his own next Evolution.
"The first thing I need to do is to fix this mess of a virus."
***
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