Silence is a powerful thing.
After the botched assassination attempts and the subsequent "restructuring" of the hit squad into Luther's personal security detail, the attacks just… stopped.
To the outside world, this silence was terrifying. In the corporate ecosystem of America, if you spit in the Pentagon's face and threaten to sell tech to Russia, you usually get raided by the FBI within the hour. You get shut down. You get disappeared.
But Emperor Industries? They were still open for business. The lights were on. The coffee was brewing.
The business world isn't naive. Even the fresh MBA grads knew what that meant. It meant Emperor Industries wasn't just a startup; it was a titan. It meant they had backing so deep and so powerful that even the U.S. government had to back off and play nice.
Rumors started flying. Who owns them? Is it the energy lobby? The Vatican? A secret cabal of trillionaires?
They looked at the political landscape—the eternal wrestling match between the Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans currently held the White House and the military brass, while the Democrats were biding their time in opposition. Usually, a company picks a side to survive.
But Luther? Luther picked neither.
Sitting in his office, scrolling through reports of panicked congressmen, Luther actually laughed.
"They think I care about their elephants and donkeys," he mused, swiping the screen off. "When you can punch a planet in half, the difference between a tax cut and a social program feels pretty irrelevant."
He didn't need to bribe senators. He didn't need to lobby. He was a Kryptonian. The petty squabbles of human politics were like watching ants fight over a crumb. He didn't care who was in the Oval Office, as long as the checks cleared.
And oh, did they clear.
The valuation of Emperor Industries exploded overnight. They went from a curious biotech startup with a 2 billion dollar initial investment to a behemoth valued at over 50 billion.
The phone lines were jammed with venture capitalists, hedge fund managers, and angel investors begging to get a piece of the pie. They were throwing money at the gates.
"Tell them no," Luther told his secretary without looking up. "We don't need their money. We don't need a board of directors telling me what to do. We stay private."
The mood inside the company shifted dramatically. The employees—mostly brilliant kids from Ivy League schools who had joined for the paycheck—suddenly realized they were working for the most important company on Earth. They walked with a swagger. They were the gatekeepers of human evolution.
It was the ultimate business model: Monopoly.
Antitrust laws? Good luck enforcing them on a product that literally no one else can make. It was a license to print money.
The Department of Defense, realizing they couldn't bully Luther, decided to try the next best thing: buying him out slowly. They placed an initial order for one billion dollars.
"They're going to try to reverse engineer it, you know," his newly brainwashed security chief mentioned, handing Luther the contract. "General Ross is going to take this batch straight to a lab and try to figure out the formula."
Luther signed the document with a flourish. "Let them try. They can put it under every microscope in the world. It's not chemistry; it's biology. My biology."
He wasn't worried. The "Compound One" was derived from his own cells. Unless they had a spare Kryptonian lying around to act as a catalyst, the formula was useless without him.
So, the check cleared. A cool billion, instantly replenishing half of his startup costs.
With the military contract signed and the cash flow secured, Luther gave the green light for the public rollout.
It wasn't just a press release. It was a cultural event.
Washington D.C. The Triskelion.
The headquarters of S.H.I.E.L.D. stood as a testament to surveillance and control. But inside the Director's office, control was slipping away.
Nick Fury stood by the window, staring out at the Potomac. Despite the sweltering D.C. summer heat radiating off the glass, he was wearing his signature long black leather trench coat. The man dressed for intimidation, not the weather.
Behind him, a massive monitor was playing a loop of the Emperor Industries commercial that was currently airing on every channel, streaming service, and digital billboard in the country.
Music swells—inspiring, orchestral.
A montage of athletes breaking records, old men throwing away their canes, soldiers standing tall.
The voiceover was smooth, comforting, inevitable.
"Compound One. It's not just medicine. It's the next step. Double your strength. Halt the aging process. Break the limits of what it means to be human."
"Emperor Industries: Unlocking the God within you."
"Something big has happened," Fury muttered, his one good eye narrowing as he watched the screen.
He didn't like surprises. And he really didn't like billionaires who popped up out of nowhere with technology that made Captain America look like a prototype.
Emperor Industries had been a ghost for a year. Just a shell company hiring bio-geneticists. Now? They were selling superpowers for ten million a pop.
Fury turned away from the window, pacing the room.
"Evolution of all humanity," he scoffed. "Bullshit. It's an arms race."
He ran the scenarios in his head. He didn't see people getting healthier; he saw chaos.
If everyone is a super soldier, then the police need tanks. If the police have tanks, the criminals get rocket launchers. If a small border skirmish between two minor nations involves soldiers who can run forty miles an hour and punch through brick walls, it's not a skirmish anymore—it's a massacre.
"Escalation," Fury whispered.
And what about the buyers? Emperor Industries claimed they were neutral. They'd sell to anyone with the cash. Drug cartels. Warlords. Terror cells.
If a terrorist cell got their hands on a crate of this stuff…
But that wasn't what scared Fury the most. What scared him was the silence.
He had contacts everywhere. The CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon. And nobody was moving on this guy Luther. The Department of Defense had just cut him a billion-dollar check.
A no-name company invents a Super Soldier serum that puts the 1940s Erskine formula to shame, and the U.S. government doesn't raid them? They don't shut it down?
Fury stopped pacing. He looked at the logo of Emperor Industries on the screen.
"There's no way a private company survives this," Fury concluded, his paranoia connecting dots that didn't exist. "Not without top-cover."
He thought about the "Great Figures" in the shadows. The Council. The military-industrial complex.
"They didn't just buy the product," Fury realized, his face grim. "They built the store."
In his mind, there was only one explanation. Luther wasn't a rogue element. He was a front. Emperor Industries had to be a black-budget operation sanctioned by the highest levels of the U.S. government—a way to mass-produce super soldiers while maintaining "plausible deniability."
"America finally figured out how to bottle the lightning," Fury said, turning the TV off. "And now they're going to sell it to the world."
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