Luther didn't start Emperor Industries just to stack cash. Don't get him wrong, the billions were nice—having "buy a small island" money was definitely a perk—but the company served a much more vital purpose.
It was camouflage.
See, the Marvel Universe is a weird place. They have Captain America, they have Gamma monsters, they have Norse gods dropping out of the sky. Interestingly enough, they also have DC Comics—but here, Superman is just fiction. He's a drawing on a page, not a guy flying around Metropolis.
But that didn't mean Luther was safe.
His power set was a carbon copy of the Man of Steel. Flight, heat vision, freeze breath, invulnerability. If he just showed up in spandex and started catching airplanes, people wouldn't shout, "Look, it's Superman!" They'd shout, "Alien invasion!"
And in a world with guys like Reed Richards and Tony Stark, getting labeled an alien was dangerous.
Stark calls himself a "futurist," but he's really just a guy with massive anxiety and a god complex. Reed Richards is even worse; the guy's brain is a terrifying weapon. If they figured out Luther's biology—if they realized his cells reacted to solar radiation—it wouldn't take them long to figure out the weakness.
Red sun radiation. Magic. Maybe even synthesizing Kryptonite if the mineral elements existed in this universe.
"I need a cover story," Luther had realized early on.
If he claimed his powers were the result of his own genius—his own "Super Soldier" research—then nobody looks for an alien weakness. They just assume he's a brilliant, narcissistic scientist who kept the best stuff for himself.
And honestly? That's exactly how American capitalism works.
Look at Apple. Look at Boeing. You think the iPhone 15 is the absolute best technology they have in the lab right now? Please. They're sitting on the iPhone 20 prototypes. They release the "new" tech incrementally, milking every dollar out of the previous generation before rolling out the upgrade.
It's the "Planned Obsolescence" model, applied to superpowers.
If Luther sold a serum that doubled human strength, everyone would be amazed. And when Luther himself lifted a tank? They wouldn't think, "He's an alien." They'd think, "Oh, obviously the CEO is on the Version 5.0 Alpha Build, while he's selling us the Version 1.0 beta."
It was the perfect disguise.
"Mutants usually get one cool trick," Luther mused, scrolling through a S.H.I.E.L.D. database he'd casually cracked while eating breakfast. "Cyclops has the eye-beams. Wolverine has the claws and healing. Storm has the weather."
Even the Inhumans were usually one-trick ponies.
But Luther? He was the whole package. He was a Swiss Army Knife of godlike violence. If he claimed to be a Mutant, no one would buy it. Mutants are accidents of evolution. Luther looked designed.
So, "Mad Scientist who hacked his own DNA" was the narrative. It made him scary, sure, but it made him a human kind of scary. And humans have rights. Aliens get dissected.
"Sir, we have a new notification."
Luther glanced at his monitor. He was currently coding. And not just copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow—he was building an Artificial Intelligence from the ground up.
He needed an assistant. Someone to handle the logistics of a fifty-billion-dollar empire while he was busy sunbathing.
He knew Tony Stark had J.A.R.V.I.S., but Luther wasn't about to borrow code from Stark. That would be suicide. Stark probably had backdoors nested inside backdoors. If Luther used even a line of Stark's source code, Iron Man would be digging through Luther's hard drive within a week.
"Show me," Luther said, his fingers never stopping their blur across the mechanical keyboard.
A news clip popped up. It was Tony Stark, looking tailored and tipsy at a charity gala, holding a glass of champagne while reporters shoved microphones in his face.
"Look," Stark was saying, his signature smirk in place. "I'm all for innovation. I love the future. I built the future in a cave with a box of scraps. But this 'Emperor Industries'? They're selling performance enhancers to warlords in Afghanistan. I saw the reports. Local insurgents are suddenly bench-pressing Toyotas. It's irresponsible. It's dangerous. And frankly, it's tacky."
Luther snorted, leaning back in his chair.
"Rich," he muttered. "Coming from the Merchant of Death."
The irony was thick enough to choke on. Stark was currently lecturing the world on moral responsibility while his own company, Stark Industries, was double-dealing missiles to the Ten Rings under the table. Granted, Tony didn't know that yet—Obadiah Stane was the one pulling the strings—but the hypocrisy was still hilarious.
"Tony Stark placed an order, by the way," his AI—currently just a text interface named 'Prime'—flashed on the screen.
"Of course he did," Luther grinned. "He wants to reverse engineer it. He wants to see if he can make an Iron Man suit that doesn't need servos because the pilot is strong enough to rip a tank turret off manually."
Luther approved the order. "Send it to him. Charge him triple. Call it the 'Asshole Tax'."
He wasn't worried about public pressure. Let the keyboard warriors rant on Twitter. Let the pundits debate the ethics of human enhancement on CNN. Controversy generated free advertising. Every time Stark ran his mouth, Emperor Industries' stock went up another two points.
Luther closed the coding window. "Time for a recharge."
He took the private elevator down to the sub-basement. Or rather, the sub-sub-basement.
This was his sanctuary.
It was a massive, spherical chamber lined with polished mirrors and high-grade solar focusing lenses. Above, a complex system of fiber-optic channels funneled sunlight from the roof of Emperor Tower, condensing it, intensifying it, and shooting it straight down into this room.
Luther stripped down and stepped into the center of the chamber.
"Activate," he commanded.
The room exploded with light.
It was blinding, golden, and intense. The concentrated solar radiation hit his skin, and his cells drank it in like a man dying of thirst. He could feel the energy knitting into his muscles, densifying his bones, sharpening his senses until he could hear the heartbeat of a pigeon three blocks away.
But as he floated there, bathed in the artificial sun, a dark thought crept in.
How far does this go?
Luther wasn't Kal-El. He wasn't the "chosen one" from the comics. He wasn't the Codex-born miracle who would become Superman Prime One Million and juggle galaxies.
He was a Kryptonian. A generic, rank-and-file Kryptonian.
In the lore, normal Kryptonians had limits. They hit a ceiling. Their cells could only store so much energy before they plateaued. They didn't have the infinite growth potential that Superman seemed to have due to his unique birth and plot armor.
"I can feel it," Luther whispered, flexing his hand in the golden light. "The tank is filling up fast."
Once he hit saturation, that was it. He would be powerful—easily powerful enough to smack the Hulk around or dismantle an Iron Man suit—but in the Marvel Universe? That wasn't enough.
Thanos was coming. The Celestials were out there. Dormammu. Galactus.
Being "strong" wasn't enough. He needed to be an absolute catastrophe. He needed to be an extinction event.
If his genetics had a hard cap, he needed to break the cap.
He recalled the ancient Kryptonian history. The forbidden experiments. The creature that couldn't die, that evolved every time it was killed, that grew stronger with every second of combat.
Luther's eyes glowed a menacing, deep red as he looked up at the light.
"Ordinary Kryptonians have limits," he said, his voice echoing in the chamber. "I need to break those limits."
He clenched his fist, feeling the raw power surge through him.
"I need to figure out how to turn myself into Doomsday… without losing my mind."
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