Transmigration by SMS: Earth 199999

Chapter 105: Chapter 105 - Superior Evidence

Lucius was in a rather good mood.

His illusion remained in the royal library, stretched across a couch with a goblet of wine in one hand while a book floated before him. The pages turned at irregular intervals, and the projection occasionally glanced towards the women sharing the table nearby. It was the sort of demanding scholarship that required excellent wine and attractive research assistants.

His real body walked invisibly towards his new target.

The dungeon had become considerably more interesting since the masked prisoner joined its population. Lucius had already watched the man pass Loki’s cell with the posture of someone infiltrating a prison rather than entering one. The Asgardians had now searched, recorded and locked him behind one of their glowing barriers.

The face beneath the mask belonged to Algrim.

Lucius stopped outside the Dark Elf’s cell and studied him through the wall. He teleported into the cell while telepathy gave him the surface structure of the man’s thoughts without requiring a conversation. A simple touch went deeper, tracing muscle, bone, organs and the channels through which the strange alien body moved energy. The strange green-like object was hidden in the stomach.

Algrim had not yet become Kurse.

That was mildly disappointing, like finding a present that had not been unwrapped. The final product would be much more useful after the device transformed a loyal Dark Elf into a murderous furnace with armour. Lucius preferred before-and-after samples whenever the universe volunteered them.

He added the present scan to his mental catalogue and moved on.

Asgard’s dungeons held an impressive collection of racial specimens. Apparently, ruling Nine Realms for ages produced enemies, rebels and drunken visitors who misunderstood local hospitality. Lucius regarded the entire prison as a badly organised biological archive with armed librarians.

The Kronan occupied the first useful cell. Its body relied on mineral-dense plates rather than ordinary skin, with fibrous tissue binding the slabs together at the joints. Blunt force spread across the plates with little effect. Repeated vibration, sharp changes in temperature and attacks aimed at the softer seams were another matter.

Lucius recorded the result.

Kronan tissue offered armour without the inconvenience of wearing armour. The price was becoming a walking stone wall with knees that still needed to bend. Nature had created a fortress and then ruined the design by insisting on mobility.

The Sakaaran prisoner had layered chitin over compact muscle and a respiratory system that could isolate damaged sections. It could keep fighting after injuries that would drown a human in its own blood. Its exposed breathing valves and poor tolerance for sustained cold made the design less impressive once someone knew where to put the knife.

Useful for survival, Lucius decided, provided he never developed the matching face.

The Easik looked almost fragile until his scan reached the skeleton. Cartilage reinforced by woven organic fibres allowed the bones to flex under impacts that should have shattered them. The same flexibility became a liability under steady compression. A body designed to survive a fall could still be folded by something patient enough to keep squeezing.

That one might combine well with Kronan plating. Flexible stone had commercial possibilities, although the phrase sounded like something Tony would patent out of spite.

The Yrd possessed two linked circulatory pulses and redundant filters around the liver and kidneys. Poisoning one would require either an embarrassing quantity of toxin or the competence to disrupt both rhythms at once. Lucius approved of redundancy in principle. Central points of failure were engineering offences, even when evolution committed them.

The R’malk’i was built for speed. Conductive sheaths around the nerves shortened the delay between intention and movement, while narrow bundles of fast muscle handled sudden acceleration. The arrangement also provided a delightful weakness. A sufficiently strong electromagnetic pulse could turn the exquisite reflexes into a full-body argument between nerves and limbs.

It was a fast species until someone switched it off.

The sole Svartálfar specimen was Algrim himself. Dark Elf’s muscles packed more force into less mass than the Asgardian records suggested, and his eyes processed narrow traces of light that a human would miss. His organs conserved energy with ruthless efficiency, which explained how his people could endure long periods of deprivation. Their recovery slowed sharply when forced to spend that reserve too quickly.

Efficient, dangerous and miserly even at the cellular level. Lucius could respect a race that treated metabolism like inherited wealth.

He returned to Loki’s cell last.

The prince appeared Asgardian as Loki preferred that shape, but the deeper structure remained Jotunn. His tissues tolerated cold that would stop most hearts, his muscles were denser than a human body’s proportions permitted, and his internal temperature could fall without shutting down the chemistry that kept him alive. Sustained heat forced the body to spend energy correcting what cold would have preserved.

Loki raised his eyes towards the apparently empty corridor.

His scan of Loki was not new. He had already learned enough from Thor to establish an Aesir category, and Loki’s body supplied another branch of the nine realms. What mattered now was the combination. Mineral armour from a Kronan, nervous speed from a R’malk’i, redundant circulation from a Yrd, flexible structure from an Easik, Jotunn cold tolerance and whatever Kurse would eventually become could produce something magnificent.

It could also produce a deformed corpse with flexible rocks for organs.

That was why a responsible scientist used test subjects.

Lucius continued towards Algrim’s cell. The Dark Elf was the only specimen on the list with an expected upgrade, and Lucius had no intention of wasting him before the universe finished the free work.

He would wait for Kurse.

Then he could decide which pieces belonged in his own Frankenstein.

--

Far from Asgard, Malekith waited.

The false signal he believed to be the Aether still burned against his awareness. It had led him back towards the enemy that had taken the weapon, ruined Svartalfheim and left his people buried beneath a universe polluted by light.

Algrim had entered Asgard. That much of the plan was complete.

One of his lieutenants approached the stone table. "The weapons are prepared."

Malekith rested his hand over the map of Asgard. A point of pale light marked the realm he hated.

"Then keep them ready."

The warrior bowed and withdrew.

Malekith had survived the destruction of his world. He could survive a little longer while his oldest enemy taught itself to ignore the knife already inside its walls. Once Algrim had been placed among the other prisoners and the guard had settled into familiar patterns, the attack would begin.

They would reclaim the Aether.

They would take vengeance upon Asgard for stealing it and for destroying Svartalfheim.

Then the universe would be returned to its first, pure state, before light had spread across creation and named its desecration life.

-

Jane Foster had spent her life trusting that reality, however complicated, possessed rules.

Asgard was making the position difficult to defend.

The guarded chamber opened onto a broad balcony high above the city. Two Asgardian warriors remained outside the only door, which preserved Odin’s decision that she was an unwelcome prisoner while allowing Thor to insist that she receive air, light and a view. Jane suspected the compromise had required shouting.

The view had not helped.

Beyond the gold towers and the long curve of the city, rivers reached the edge of Asgard and fell into open space. They did not descend towards another continent or curve around a planet. The water simply poured from the shining land into the cosmos, while stars remained visible beyond it.

From where Jane stood, Asgard looked less like a world than an enormous object placed in space by someone who regarded astrophysics as a polite suggestion.

She gripped the balcony rail and tried to construct a model that did not collapse immediately. A flat mass that large should pull itself into a sphere. The atmosphere should escape. The water should either freeze, disperse or return under gravity. Day, night, pressure and orbital stability all demanded mechanisms she could not observe.

The waterfalls kept flowing into the stars as if the unknown were an acceptable drainage system.

Everything she knew about physics and astrophysics followed them over the edge.

Thor had been no help.

He understood how to cross the distance between realms, strike something at the destination and return in time for a feast. The why and how interested him only when either could be hit with Mjolnir. Every question Jane posed about Asgard’s structure produced another account of a battle from his life, complete with giants, impossible beasts and the names of warriors who had apparently solved most scientific problems by cutting off the dangerous part.

He had lived for roughly fifteen hundred years and had somehow avoided becoming curious.

Jane returned to the bed. Thor slept across half of it, one arm thrown over the blankets, and his breathing already deep enough to become a snore. He had spent every night since her arrival trying to make up for his long absence. The effort had not improved his understanding of astrophysics, but it had demonstrated considerable practical expertise in bedroom sports.

Thor was dense, ignorant of the questions she cared about and capable of fucking her so thoroughly that her legs had become theoretical objects.

It was an unfair combination.

She pressed her feet against the mattress and managed to feel three toes, which counted as progress.

Her gaze returned to his face. The reunion had made it easy to forget the problem because forgetting was much more enjoyable while he was naked. The problem remained after the pleasure stopped, and she was able to walk around.

Thor was fifteen hundred years old and still considered young. Jane was in her early thirties. Ten more years might leave her looking close to the woman he had met in New Mexico, although stretching even that assumption felt generous. Afterwards, the difference would become harder to ignore. Thor might still be described as a young prince when her body no longer permitted her to climb a staircase without planning the campaign.

Could she stand beside him until her life ended?

Would Asgard allow it? Would Odin tolerate it? Would Thor remain devoted once decades changed her and barely touched him? Jane did not have enough information to answer any of it, which made the relationship feel less like romance and more like an experiment whose principal investigator had skipped the risk assessment.

That accusation would have carried more dignity if she had not touched an alien substance with her bare hand.

She was a scientist. She had equipment, training and enough experience with impossible objects to know better. She had still reached for the crimson material without gloves, isolation tools or a plan for what happened after contact. Whatever standard she used to judge Thor’s lack of curiosity had to survive the embarrassing fact that she had volunteered to become an alien sample jar.

The thing inside her shifted with a faint pressure beneath her ribs.

Jane went still until it settled.

Thor’s hand moved across the blankets and closed around her hip without waking. The simple contact quieted the panic more effectively than any of her unanswered equations.

That was another unfair point in his favour.

The relationship was wrong on more levels than she could count, and most of those levels might operate under laws of nature that Asgard had thrown over a waterfall. She should have demanded answers. She should have refused to let exhaustion, fear and a spectacular body decide for her.

Thor snored beside her.

Jane released a heavy sigh and tested her toes again. Five responded this time.

She covered her mouth to soften a giggle, settled against his chest and allowed sleep to take the problem until morning.

-

Far from one very satisfied scientist and farther still from Asgard, Wakanda maintained its oldest national illusion.

The world saw fields, mountains and a poor nation with little worth stealing. Beneath that disguise, Wakandan scientists worked inside laboratories built from technology no foreign government knew existed. Their latest project sat in three transparent chambers at the centre of a sealed analysis room: Light Healing Potion, Light Stamina Potion and Strengthening Potion.

Wakandan intelligence teams had acquired the samples through foreign buyers and intermediaries. The first repaired injury and illness. The second produced roughly three hours of heightened vitality before the inevitable crash. The third multiplied strength, agility, endurance and healing fivefold for thirty minutes.

The last vial had occupied the laboratory for days.

The lead scientist studied another failed analysis and removed his gloves. The potion contained beetroot, apple and honey. Every instrument agreed. No rare catalyst appeared in the fluid, no engineered carrier survived inside it, and no hidden machine activated when the mixture entered living tissue.

Ordinary ingredients produced an outcome that Wakanda’s best equipment could measure but not reproduce.

He disliked impossible answers, especially when the king had requested a possible one.

An assistant rotated a three-dimensional tissue model above the workbench. "The effect resembles the enhancement pattern, but the sample contains no trace of the Heart-Shaped Herb."

"Run it again."

"We have run it eleven times."

The lead scientist closed the model with a sharp movement. "Then the twelfth result will be easier to explain to the king."

He left the laboratory before the assistant could offer arithmetic as a defence.

King T’Chaka received him in the throne room. The hidden city glittered beyond the windows, every tower another proof that isolation had preserved what the rest of the world would have squandered. Wakanda possessed Vibranium, the Heart-Shaped Herb and generations of knowledge no outsider deserved.

T’Chaka had killed his own brother to protect those truths.

He would not become less careful for a stranger selling miracles in glass vials.

"You have an answer."

The scientist placed the tablet before the throne. "We have an ingredient profile. We do not have a mechanism."

T’Chaka’s expression hardened.

The scientist expanded the report. "The Strengthening Potion contains beetroot, apple and honey. We found no trace of the Heart-Shaped Herb and no biological carrier derived from it."

"Yet it enhances the body."

"For thirty minutes. The pattern is temporary and broader than the effect produced by our herb. That does not make the source identical."

T’Chaka rose from the throne and walked towards the windows. Wakanda had hidden superiority behind an image of poverty because every other nation took what it could not create. They stole metal, land, labour and knowledge, then wrote laws to make possession respectable. Even other African nations would demand a share if they learned what Wakanda protected. They will be invaded by their own brethren. T’Chaka was not blind to the Ethnic engineering Europe was going through, one concealed crime at a time. He was not going to let that devestation to reach his nation.

They would receive nothing.

"Foreigners did not create something superior to Wakanda from fruit and honey."

The scientist kept his attention on the report. "The evidence does not support theft from Wakanda."

"The evidence supports concealment."

Lucius Noctis had appeared without a history worth trusting, sold healing that embarrassed modern medicine and then produced physical enhancement no laboratory could copy. T’Chaka did not require the thief to leave a leaf floating in every vial. A skilled criminal removed evidence. An arrogant one sold the stolen result openly.

Ulysses Klaue had been the first thief. He had taken Vibranium and escaped a nation that considered its technology superior to everything beyond its borders. The failure remained an insult; no explanation had been provided.

Now there were two.

Noctis would not enjoy Klaue’s freedom. His residence was practically public information to Wakandan intelligence. His enemies, business dealings and movements could be studied. The potion seller had made himself visible because wealth and attention pleased him.

T’Chaka intended to make that vanity expensive.

The scientist lowered the tablet. "What would you have the laboratory do?"

"Continue the analysis."

T’Chaka turned from the window.

"Prepare an extraction team. I will lead it myself. We will remind both thieves of the cost of stealing from their superiors."

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