Gideon Malik began to waver a little.

Two weeks ago, a team of researchers led by two of his best scientists had finally come up with a plan that might welcome Hydra's great leader back from another world. With all the hope of a surviving organization or a revival on it, Malik sent his best team, led by the two scientists, through the portal to another world to find the whereabouts of their great leader.

After that, even he couldn't believe that he had really done something that Hydra had never done for hundreds of generations. He almost couldn't help but want to laugh out loud when he saw the leader parasitic on Jonathan Burt, an elite agent he had sent, crawl out of the portal.

The family lore is not mentioned in the details, but Malik only has a rough idea that the exiled leader of the Hydra was actually the first Inhuman born of the Cree genetically modified on Earth. However, it was only now that he realized that this Inhuman was essentially a collection of parasites that could parasitize the human host, control the host's body and gain their memories.

Now, two weeks later, Malik is beginning to wonder if he made the right all-or-nothing bet.

Since crawling out of that portal, the hive, the "god of hydra", has spent most of its days sitting on a couch in a special room. He does not need to eat or excrete, nor does he need to sleep. Twenty-four hours a day, he sat down on the couch like a stupid stake, watching TV in the exact same position.

At first Malik arranged a television in front of him, but he was soon not satisfied, and two days later he asked for four. Three days later, he was watching eight TVs at the same time, and each screen was playing a very different content at a very fast pace. His eyes kept moving between eight screens, like a sponge thrown into the water, frantically absorbing, as if determined to make up for the thousands of years of knowledge he had missed in the shortest possible time.

Then he started reading. He reads books at an equally fast pace, with a stack of books piled up on the couch in one day. And he is not picky, and he will not turn down books published in any language and in any field of expertise. Malik had to arrange for someone to load his whole car with books on a trolley every day, and it felt like this guy wanted to learn to be a generalist in all subjects in a week.

One of the things that bothered Malik was that the other party didn't seem particularly willing to talk to him. Malik asked if he needed a better host, to which the guy replied nonethelessly; Malik tells him about Hydra's current predicament, and the guy doesn't seem to be interested, as if the organization doesn't matter to him in the first place.

Perhaps the most disturbing of all is the conversion of Giera.

Giera is Gideon Malik's henchman, a powerful Inhuman with the ability to move non-living objects by mind. Malik never doubted Giera's loyalty to himself and Hydra, he was a devout believer, and even if Malik ordered him to rush into the fire, he would do it without blinking.

He watched as a pale yellow mist of tiny parasites was projected from the hive's fingertips, burrowing into Giera's eyes, mouth and nose like gas. Giera appeared unaffected afterwards, but Malik noticed a change in the way he looked at the hive. If Gira had questioned the Hive's abilities as previously as Malik, he has since behaved like a brainwashed string-ripping puppet who worships the god from the bottom of his heart.

A day earlier, the Hive had made another request to him.

"Bring me five people." These are his exact words, and at the end he emphasized, "To live." ”

So Malik arranged for him to find five men who were as healthy and strong as he could. The hive asks to be alone with them, leaving everyone else waiting outside the room. No one saw what was happening, but when they opened the door, they saw only that the room was filled with crimson blood like a river, and the hive stood in the middle of the dripping blood, with five charred dead bones lying beside them, the dark red blood coagulated on the surface of the bones, and every drop of flesh was gnawed away. The blood-red skull's eyes were sunken and its mouth was wide open, as if screaming silently.

Gideon Malik considered himself a man accustomed to seeing blood, but even he had to admit that he was shocked by the horror of the spectacle.

He began to suspect that perhaps the one he had put back from the other world was not a god at all.

Maybe he put back a devil.

***

From the moment he accepted the invitation to come to the United States, Doom was determined to use their technology to build a machine that could penetrate Hades and help him rescue his mother.

Dom ostensibly maintains a good relationship with the military, but in fact uses their resources to obtain all the necessary materials to build this machine for his personal purposes. As far as Doom was concerned, the military's uninformed idiots were so easy to fool him that he just had to keep giving the guys the bare minimum of developments, and the guys would happily give him the highest compliment.

After years of accumulation, Doom now seems to have finally touched the border of realizing his dream. He built the machine, in the private lab that fits into his dormitory.

From the outside, it was basically a metal seat, followed by a bunch of intricate wiring, behind which assembled a homemade generator of Doom.

Thanks to Michael Paso's visit three days ago, his small proposal perfectly solved the biggest problem with the operation of Doom's machine, and after three full days of sleepless modification and debugging, Doom is now confident that the machine is officially completed and can take on the task of breaking through the dimension with his soul and breaking through the gates of Hades.

After the final commissioning, Doom turned on the power and sat down in the seat himself. The generator worked well, and the electricity was fed into the chair through a patchwork of wiring, lighting up each of the luminous luminaries above and below the chair with an eerie green light.

Everything was ready, and Doom picked up a black helmet to put it on. But then he paused for a moment, remembering the advice Michael had given him three days earlier. Michael solved the biggest problem with the operation of the device for him, but warned him that he was still some way from success.

What does that guy mean? Does that mean I'm not ready for hell?

But the thought was fleeting.

He is Victor von Doom, and he is fearless.

Doom put on his helmet and activated the device's switch. The machine starts, and the majestic energy rolls through the line, and red electricity bursts out in all directions. For a moment, Doom felt as if a thousand currents had pierced through his helmet and into his cochlea, and then all the way into his brain. The snake-like electricity violently stirred his nerves, and the pain almost pierced him through with an extreme pain.

He tried to scream, but found he couldn't open his mouth.

He felt like he was disappearing.

(Thanks to book friend AsinauuKi for the 1,000 starting coins, alucious for the 500 starting coins!) ）