Make sure to check my Patre.on out if you want to support me and want to read advanced chapters: Patre.on.com/VQuintessence
[20 Chapters in Advance on Patre.on]
...........
Chapter 68: Boku No Pico
...........
"If you are not gone in one hundred and twenty seconds, I will have you all deleted from existence."
He paused, letting the absolute, murderous certainty sink into the silence.
"And I do not care for the consequences."
Adam's words hung in the air, an illusory guillotine blade suspended over General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross's pride.
The rage was a physical heat behind the General's eyes, veins pulsing at his temples.
He had been ignored for minutes as Adam comforted a world-ending psychic entity, and now he was being given a two-minute ultimatum by a man who looked like a disheveled fashion model with robot octopus arms.
It was insufferable.
Yet, the animal instinct honed in a hundred battles screamed at him to listen.
He'd seen the footage from his advance scouts before they'd… ceased transmitting.
He'd seen the woman; codenamed 'Phoenix' reduce two platoons of Stryker's fanatical Purifiers to swirling ash with a thought.
He'd seen tank shells hang in the air before dissolving into molten slag. She was a natural disaster in a leather jumpsuit.
And this man, Cypher, had just walked up and hugged her. Had calmed the hurricane with a touch and a whisper.
Ross's strategic mind warred with his monumental ego. Pushing further felt like suicide.
But backing down felt like capitulation to the very freaks he'd dedicated his career to controlling.
He analyzed the X-Men. They were idealists, pacifists at their core. The Phoenix had only unleashed her fury on Stryker and his ilk; clearly a retaliatory, if excessive, measure.
She hadn't turned her power on his men, only defended. They were still bound by their naïve morality.
Ross drew himself up, his voice a low, gravelly boom through the megaphone, aiming for a tone of strategic warning rather than defeated bluster.
"Cypher. Adam Cypher. I know who you are." He let the name carry weight.
"You're walking into a minefield of your own making. The media firestorm around you is just beginning. Your identity as a mutant is public knowledge."
"Your company headquarters in New York is currently surrounded by a feeding frenzy of reporters."
"You have enough problems without making an enemy of the United States Armed Forces. Stand down. Do not make this worse for yourself."
[Ross is trying to play the 'you're in trouble' card! He doesn't know Adam thrives on trouble!]
[He's right about the media, though. It will all be big trouble for the company.]
["Do not make this worse for yourself." Famous last words to a chaos engine.]
Indeed, in the scant hours Adam had been away, the meticulously laid traps had sprung. Alice had been feeding him a quiet, continuous stream of alerts.
The headline: CYPHER ENTERPRISES FOUNDER EXPOSED AS MUTANT.
The source was a tearful, compelling testimony from his estranged parents, dredged up from whatever hole HYDRA or whoever had kept them in.
The court of public opinion, already primed with anti-mutant sentiment, erupted.
The articles were a masterclass in coordinated character assassination, numerous articles. He was hot news after all.
"Silent Manipulation: Did Cypher's Hidden Power Fuel His Meteoric Rise?" Speculating his success was due to mental powers influencing investors and competitors.
"Insider Trading or Psychic Theft? The Stark Industries Mystery." Directly linking his financial windfall to mutant abilities.
"Connections to Terror: Questions Surround Cypher's Whereabouts During Stark Kidnapping." A masterpiece of insinuation, tying him to Tony's kidnappers through sheer geographic coincidence and mystery.
But the crown jewel was the visual evidence. A stunningly clear, 4K image, captured from a building across from Cypher Tower, showed Adam in his white-and-black six-armed suit, leaping into the sky.
It looked like a still from a big-budget sci-fi film.
The spin was immediate and vicious.
"Warlord in a White Suit: Cypher's Private Army Revealed."
"Hell' Kitchen Butcher: New Evidence Links Cypher and Magneto to Kingpin's Death."
"Weapons of Mass Disruption: Is Cypher Enterprises a Front for Mutant Supremacy?"
The floodgates were open. He was a liar, a cheat, a terrorist sympathizer, and a warlord.
[The smear campaign is PERFECT. Hydra's PR division deserves a raise.]
[That picture is cinematic as hell. It's doing more for his aesthetic than any ad campaign.]
[They're throwing everything at him. This is a total takedown attempt.]
[Tf? His company is done for, no? It all seems hopeless.]
[How do you fight this? If it's all due to Mephisto's influence, then good god, he's so fucking scary.]
[It's all Hydra and Mephisto's fault.]
Adam monitored it all through Alice, a faint, unreadable smile on his face as he stood across from Ross.
The scandal, the outrage, the global attention… it was magnificent.
Bad publicity is good publicity; That is a flawed concept for most. For him, it was rocket fuel.
Every article read, every news segment watched, every angry comment posted was another data point, another flicker of observation feeding the [Information] panel.
His influence was spreading virally, and with it, his Information grew. He didn't want to quell the storm; he wanted to ride the lightning, then become the thunderclap.
Let them write their lies. They were only building his legend. And for all intents and purposes, making him stronger.
If they sought to weaken him or destroy his mental, they were failing miserably. Quite the opposite, actually.
So, in response to General Ross's dire warning about his public image, Adam simply smiled. A wide, bright, unnerving smile.
He turned his head slightly, as if Jean were still beside him, and spoke loudly enough for his words to carry on the wind. "If they're still on our lawn in ninety seconds, my dear… kill them all."
The smile never left his face as he said it. It was the smile of a man discussing the weather while ordering a massacre.
General Ross's blood drained from his face. The last of his bravado shattered against that serene, insane certainty.
The fucking madman!!
"RETREAT!" Ross bellowed into his radio, his voice cracking. "ALL UNITS, PULL BACK TO PERIMETER ALPHA! NOW!"
The military machine clattered to life. Engines revved, vehicles reversed in disciplined chaos, soldiers piled in.
Within the two-minute deadline, the last Humvee vanished down the driveway, leaving only tire tracks and spent shell casings.
In the retreating command vehicle, General Ross's expression smoothed from panicked rage to smug calculation.
He glanced at the soldier manning the comms. "The bodycams? All active? We got it all?"
"All feeds were live and recording, sir," The soldier confirmed.
Ross allowed himself a tight, victorious grin. Footage of the Phoenix's terrifying display, of Stryker's brutal fate, of Adam Cypher's unhinged threats; it was a goldmine.
It would be the perfect catalyst. The public would see the monster behind the mutant.
The need for control, for the Superhuman Registration Act he'd been quietly championing, would become undeniable.
Stryker's own extremism could be edited out; the narrative would be about mutant lawlessness.
He hadn't lost. He'd secured the ultimate propaganda tool. Does Adam really think he won? No, he gave him ammo. Idiot.
[I bet you all my sperm they've got nothing.]
[True, Ross thinks he's playing 4D chess. He doesn't know the board is digital and Adam is the admin.]
["All feeds were live and recording." Oh, you sweet summer general…]
[He's gonna get home and find all the footage is of static or puppy videos.]
[Better yet, imagine he finds that hentai, what's its name? Boku no Pico!!]
[...]
His misunderstanding was profound. He operated in a world of steel and orders.
He didn't understand that in the presence of a high-level Technopath, no electronic eye was truly his own.
Every bodycam, every drone feed, every encrypted transmission within a mile had been gently, irrevocably pilfered.
The "footage" he would review would show nothing but corrupted files and looping images of peaceful landscapes.
Adam had already deleted the evidence from existence, just as he'd promised to delete the men.
As the last echoes of the military convoy faded, Adam let out a low, genuine chuckle of amusement.
The chaos was so… entertaining. The political games, the media circus, Ross's bluster; it was a delightful sideshow.
But the main event, the game with Mephisto, still felt hopelessly unbalanced.
The scales were tipped by cosmic magnitudes.
He needed to change the equation, and he now had the currency to try.
Standing alone on the scarred lawn, he focused inward. The [Information] he'd accumulated was a vast, swirling reservoir.
He understood its mechanics better now. He could guide it, focus it, attempt a targeted awakening.
For weeks, amidst the engineering and the scheming, he had been subtly trying to steer the audience's perception, the world's observation of him, towards a specific mechanical concept; a mechanical ability.
Something that would elevate him beyond belief. Even if a weaker version of what he hopes awakens, it would still be enough.
He took a deep breath and plunged the entirety of his accumulated [Information] into the panel, hoping for that envisioned capability.
In but a few seconds, a new line etched itself into his status with painful, undeniable clarity.
He stared at it. His mind, capable of digesting blueprints for arc reactors and the schematics of hell, went completely, utterly blank.
[Information: Barely Richer Than An Ant]
[Natural Traits]
Envy(B): Slow. Stupefy. Brittle. Misfortune. Fade. Hollow. Recoil.
[Information Traits]
Technopathy(A). Mechanical Force(B). Information Vision(B). Ying Yang Harmony (A).
Ying Yang Harmony.
The term itself was familiar; a fundamental concept of complementary dualities from Chinese philosophy: light and dark, hot and cold, creation and dissolution.
The power to balance and manipulate such fundamental forces would have been a universe-altering boon.
But that's not what he got.
...............................
[ 800 Power Stones For An Extra Chapter! ]
[ 1600 Power Stones For Another Extra Chapter! ]
...............................