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Chapter 31: Fear of Lack of Firepower
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"Anything for you, my love," She purred.
Trust --, Adam noted in his mind.
[Huh?]
[WTF!?] [+1] [+1] [+1] [+1] [+1] [+1] [+1]
[She acts affectionate, and he loses trust in her??!! Wyhat?]
[Confused Pikachu Face.jpg]
[My mind is so rocked right now that I think Hydra is attempting brainwashing.]
[What in the Hydra is this?]
The sentiment was an automatic rejection.
The World is too dangerous. It hasn't been kind to him.
Therefore, her easy affection felt like a tool, a manipulation, and his first, second, and third instinct was to distrust it.
[He's so broken he can't even accept genuine affection.]
[Is Domino being genuine? With her power, she probably knows this is the best timeline for her.]
[This is so sad and so fascinating at the same time.]
Shrugging off the emotional static, he retreated to his sanctuary: the bunker workshop.
The moment the reinforced door hissed shut, the world outside ceased to exist.
His eyes, which could be so expressive, settled into a calm, focused stillness.
A true smile, one of pure, unadulterated love, touched his lips as he looked upon his kingdom of scraps, circuit boards, and half-built marvels.
Creation was his only true solace.
It was the one thing everyone failed to understand about Adam Cypher. The years of suffering across two short lives had hollowed him out.
He had known so little love that he no longer knew how to process it.
Deep down, in a place he rarely acknowledged, he viewed everyone and everything as a tool, a variable in the grand equation of his survival and ascent.
He wondered, in a detached way, if that fundamental wiring could ever be changed.
A quiet urgency always hummed beneath his focus, a distraction from the pure joy of engineering.
The clock was ticking.
Tony Stark had been missing for nearly two months. Soon; late this month or early next; the billionaire would escape his captors and return, heralding the birth of Iron Man.
This universe's timeline was a messy collage, but the emergence of Iron Man was a fixed point, a catalyst that would send the world spiraling from one catastrophe to another.
It was also an unparalleled financial opportunity. Stark Industries stock was about to plummet and then skyrocket.
The money from his "sugar mommy" is substantial, but his ambitions were vast.
He needed more.
Thus, he has to turn Hell's Kitchen, and the world, upside down. To do that, he needed to take risks. He wanted to take risks.
He sealed the workshop and spoke into the quiet hum of machinery. "Alice, let's begin."
"Right away, Master," A gentle, synthesized voice responded. A mechanical arm whirred to life, controlling a projector.
A holographic figure materialized in the center of the room; a brunette woman with a kind face and a soft smile.
Alice. His Artificial Intelligence, modeled on the appearance and name of his mother from his past life.
The only beacon of light in both his miserable existences.
A woman who, despite his own early death, fate had cruelly taken first.
He smiled at the hologram, for some reason, feeling no grief or reminsence, only peace, then took a seat and crossed his legs.
[My eyes are tearing up.]
[...]
[Yea, I don't think he will be a villain. He can still be fixed.]
[+1, I can fix him.] [+1]
[I feel so bad for him. Cheer up!]
[Hey, I may be a dude, but here, have a hug, brother.]
[I may be a dude, but have a kiss, mwah!]
[...]
[So, a hologram of his mom is calling him Master? I see what you did there, my man, wink wink.]
[??????????]
[I knew it, I knew someone would ruin the moment.]
[This is the internet, you surprised?]
[To be fair, he does seem to have mommy issues.]
[Is he broken Irl too? Speaking of which, who's the actor behind Adam? I've never seen him before.]
[...]
[Wait...]
[Wait...]
[WTF, I haven't either.] [Me neither.][This is getting creepy.]
[Internet, do your thing and investigate!]
[This is the clue we've all been waiting for!]
[We can determine if the show is supernatural if we find Adam Irl!!]
[But the fact that no ones know of him... This is so creepy.]
[I'm starting to believe.]
His Cyberpathy flared, a direct neural link to the workshop's systems.
Across the room, several small drones, equipped with advanced holographic emitters he'd designed, activated.
The Danger Room's tech was the first factor in his fixation on creating this technology.
Sure, the Danger Room isn't nearly as advanced as he knows it will be in the future. But it helped a ton.
However, he'd taken most inspiration from the concept of Mysterio's illusions to pioneer his own.
The drones flickered, and then, standing in the workshop were three perfect holographic copies of Adam Cypher.
They were solid, detailed, and convincing from a distance.
But they were far from perfect. As he watched them move, one of the hologram's legs glitched, its foot phasing through the floor.
Another's shoulder momentarily distorted into a blocky mess of pixels. And a ton of other issues.
When static, they look perfect, but when performing any form of complex movements, they start to malfunction.
"Alice, run diagnostic 7-B on Emitter, E3," He commanded. "The limb stabilization algorithm is failing."
"The data suggests a power flux in the primary capacitor," Alice's gentle voice replied. "I recommend increasing the buffer by 0.4 percent."
Adam's mind, enhanced by Doom's stolen genius and Cyberpathy, analyzed the code in a moment.
"No, that will create a feedback loop in the refractive index calibration. The issue is in the inertial dampening subroutine. It's overriding the positional data."
He rewrote the line of code with a thought.
"I've added the solution to my Databank," Alice said. "Shall I cross-reference this with the emotional resonance profile you requested for the Domino variable?"
Adam sighed internally.
The AI he had created was, to put it bluntly, kind of retarded and schizophrenic.
It hallucinated connections and offered solutions that were often as problematic as the initial bug.
[Classic.]
[Domino variable? Is Adam doing the Batman thing, documenting even his closest allies?]
[Ohh, I like that.]
[Prepare for everything, and as he says, just in case.]
It was a far cry from the seamless, intuitive AI he knew Tony Stark possessed.
Pioneering true artificial intelligence alone was a Herculean task.
But as Alice continued debugging the illusion projectors, he was simultaneously debugging her, tirelessly correcting and improving her, one line of flawed logic at a time.
There was a reason he was asking her questions about subjects or issues he'd already had answers to; he was training her.
It was a labor of love, and for now, it was enough.
In the sterile, humming light of his bunker workshop, Adam Cypher was a symphony of focused motion.
An advanced engineering helmet with multiple retractable lenses covered his eyes, displaying schematics, thermal readings, and power flow diagnostics.
In his hands, he wielded a micro-laser welder and a bonding tool. But his hands were only two of the instruments at work.
Through his Cyberpathy, he controlled a couple of additional mechanical arms suspended from the ceiling, their movements a fluid extension of his will.
He was working on two projects simultaneously, his mind partitioned like a supercomputer running divergent processes.
On the left workbench lay a weapon of terrifying potential. It was a massive, brutishly elegant sniper rifle, nearly two metres long.
Its design was undeniably inspired by, and built from, scavenged Hydra technology.
The guards at his former prison had wielded plasma rifles; he had brought several back to Xavier's in his duffel bag, and now he was refining to create something suiting his vision.
This was "The Harvester." While his curses could debilitate and his tricks could misdirect, Adam feared a fundamental lack of raw, overwhelming firepower.
Basically, the fear of lack of firepower.
The Harvester was his answer; a single-shot, capacitor-based plasma cannon that sacrificed rate of fire for the promise of vaporizing anything it touched... If it works.
[He's building a plasma sniper! That's so cool!]
[But is it enough? What about when demons or Dormammu show up?]
[No way, he would need a star destroyer for that.]
[Nah, even that won't be enough. It's difficult to fight magical beings with just raw firepower.]
[My man is preparing for a small war, not universal warfare, like, what are we discussing here?]
On the right workbench, under the direct focus of his hands and two of the mechanical arms, was a project of a more personal nature.
It was a single, segmented mechanical tentacle, over seven feet long.
The inspiration was clear: the future work of Doctor Otto Octavius. Adam was building his own set of appendages.
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[ 1000 Power Stones For An Extra Chapter!!! ]
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