"I saw Peggy Carter many times. She should have died a year ago; the spell I cast on her barely dragged it out to now, giving her time to deal with her affairs. But death is unavoidable; this day was always coming. I don't need to be present for something destined to happen. Besides, I hate churches—you know why." Solomon still wore that smile, vague about his itinerary. "Compared to churches, I care more about the trajectory of this world. This is Austria, after all. I've found a lot of good places to eat lately, from food trucks to Michelin stars, and I plan to try them all." The sorcerer's tone was light, as if nothing weighed on him, as if he were just a tourist in Vienna on a food tour.
"You don't seem to care much about the Sokovia Accords." Natasha Romanoff was intrigued by this state. "This affects you too—you're an enhanced individual. Once this is signed, the UN Security Council will have a pretext to go to war with Latveria. Aren't you worried?"
"Why would a lion concern itself with lambs? Their bleating is annoying, sure, but do they dare butt me with their horns? Reaching consensus always takes blood. That process can't be stopped. One side's spine has to be broken, forced to its knees, pressed into the mud—only then can both sides sit properly at the negotiating table." Solomon fished a mini bottle out of the minibar and mixed a simple cocktail with a mixer. What Natasha saw on his face wasn't the smugness that should have been there, but regret and sorrow. It was only for an instant. He quickly resumed the bearing of the King of the Eternal City, confidence radiating like light, stirring the heart of anyone standing near him.
Natasha Romanoff narrowed her eyes and examined him closely. This was unusual. She had assumed it was an illusion wrought by magic; now it seemed to be something even more mysterious. "You could call it foolish; you could call it brave. It's also the quality I most admire in the human race." Solomon's tone was hard to read—lament or mockery. "But all I can do is make sure they bleed instead of my own, nothing more. My goal is to reduce humanity's internal friction, and I happen to have the ability to do that."
In the time ahead, Europe and North America would be a cauldron brimming with anger and flame. If the White House seized the chance to rally the GOP's main voting blocs—veterans and police—into the war, Solomon was prepared to go all in and destroy them completely.
Everything the Eternal City was researching was set up for that. Almost all industrial equipment and technologies could break free of Western-led industrial systems, with extremely high risk resistance. For instance, the central generator cluster that had just hauled deuterium-tritium fusion core units into the power plant—once Transylvania was taken, they could be fully independent of other countries' nuclear fuel supplies, ensuring that Latveria's current industry and household power would not be affected.
There was also the suite of production lines for various types of military factories, all personally built by the Eternal City and the Martian Foundry, so there were no technology-barrier issues. Latveria could already independently produce laser weapons and tracked armored vehicles. Drivers of those seemingly low-tech light armor could even keep a straight face when facing conventional anti-armor weapons like the RPG-7, because the armor materials could stop a frontal hit. Add a turret-mounted heavy explosive coaxial machine gun and a forward-facing laser cluster cannon, and the Eternal City had, by brute force, turned tracked APCs into main battle tanks.
In addition, the food issue he cared most about was also being solved. The Martian Foundry dealt in more than machinery; it had gene tech as well. Bio-farms were now providing short-term training and safety education to newly hired Latverians. In three months, the first batches would be loaded onto trucks and shipped to villages across Latveria. Because the civil war ended so quickly, rural food production hadn't suffered much. Coupled with the first grain shipments Victor von Doom had procured, getting through the next three months would not be a problem, and the material base for civilians would rapidly improve. Bioprotection, vaccine campaigns, and a census were steadily underway. Although Wakanda had not fully supplied the promised goods under the agreement, Princess Shuri still approved a large batch of extra-contract vaccines for Latveria—Maya Hansen had said she once saw, at the BSL-4 lab at Fort Detrick in Massachusetts, a freezer filled with samples of every known filovirus on Earth, and those Wakandan vaccines had been proven to induce antibodies in Latverians against several of them.
This was preparation against a potential bioweapon release.
The reason Crossbones Rumlow's last mission targeted that virology lab was to obtain the latest samples. The Eternal City wanted to compare them with the virus samples at Fort Detrick to see whether the mutations showed human-directed selection or modification targeting genetic traits of Slavic and African populations. Neither Victor von Doom nor Solomon wanted to defeat the White House head-on only to look back and find diseases running rampant on their own soil—the Eternal City had once found a village ravaged by Ebola in the African jungle. Despite their best efforts, they were unable to save anyone. In a matter of days, the infected died, each corpse soaked through by internal bleeding.
Then the virus kept spreading. In the end, the Eternal City had no choice but to cordon off an area and use white phosphorus, gasoline bombs, and radiation bombs to eradicate every plant and animal within as a means of sterilization—granting that land a final mercy. A nun sent by the Catholic Church to provide medical aid, once infected, chose to walk into the sea of fire of her own accord. No one ever found her body in the ashen wasteland afterward. Her rosary is still one of Solomon's treasured keepsakes, in memory of her great sacrifice and the radiance of her humanity; even Pope Francis, after hearing of it, asked him for the rosary and failed.
Solomon has never forgotten that scene. The sky above that blood-weeping, terrifying forest, filled with drifting ash, struck the soul more profoundly than anything he had ever experienced. You didn't need Infinity Stones to wipe out half of humanity; a single drop of blood in that forest would suffice. The chill that crawled up his spine was not fear for his own safety, but fear of humanity's risk of extinction. Before that, he had never realized that the power of annihilation was not limited to the spiritual or extra-dimensional—that it had been lurking beside everyone all along. Afterward, he grasped the Kamar-Taj iron law—"let the majority live"—more deeply.
He knew the Sorcerer Supreme was right—they had no right to let those people go on living.
With Rumlow's failure, the Eternal City could only dispatch assassins to the U.S. military's biolab in Albania to steal samples, while the Eternal City's biolabs and the Martian Foundry's gene labs rushed to produce vaccines based on the test results of those samples. Solomon's hole cards were more numerous than others could imagine, as if he had contingency plans and optimal solutions for everything, and knew how to find the most effective professionals to carry them out.
Thanks to outstanding domestic governance and Stephanie Malick's merciless driving of her subordinates, Latveria after war was already much better than during the former monarchy. That was the fundamental reason most Latverians were studying Unified Truth; why youths were enlisting enthusiastically and dreaming of becoming fighter pilots (unfortunately, that slot belonged to future academy students—too much specialized knowledge; pilots had to be well educated to fly aerospace fighters), super-heavy tank crew (this one was somewhat possible; in fact, some Latverians were already super-heavy tank crew, though their habit of finding a spot to hang a teapot could not be changed no matter what), or bipedal recon mech pilots (this only required training on industrial equipment, since the rigs were improved from the Martian Foundry's light handling machinery). It was why they supported Latveria's current king—because they knew who truly cared about them, who wanted them to live.
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