Lucius sat on top of the Sears Tower and looked down at the daily chaos of Chicago. Cars crawled below like metallic insects. People moved along the pavements with the determined misery of citizens who believed their schedules mattered to the universe. Wind pushed at his coat, but that was background noise compared to the real problem.
Finding Phastos.
Reaching Illinois had been easy. Teleportation had turned distance into a matter of mood. The problem was that Chicago held nearly three million people, and only one of them was an ancient cosmic engineer he wanted to murder politely.
Lucius rested his elbows on his knees and thought it through again.
Phastos lived with his husband and a little boy. That much he remembered. The husband was human. The child was human, too, unless the MCU had decided to improvise when he was not looking. That narrowed the field a little. Not enough to be useful, but enough to be annoying in a more specific direction.
He muttered under his breath, "Somewhere in this city, there is a fat, gay engineer living with his husband and their son. It should not be too hard to find such a target..."
He looked over the skyline again and clicked his tongue.
There were worse hunts. At least this one did not involve sewers, feral mutants, or people named after weather patterns.
His first stop had been the Chicago Public Schools district headquarters. Central records. Enrolment data. Addresses. The sort of bureaucracy that usually solved a problem if one had patience, forged credentials, or invisibility. Lucius had chosen the most elegant option and gone with the last one.
The building had no real defence against someone like him. Security cameras only recorded empty corridors. Locked doors remained locked right until he teleported behind them. Filing rooms gave up their secrets without even knowing they had been violated.
He read records, searched family entries, and checked guardianship forms with speed that would have impressed a clerk and horrified a lawyer.
It got him nothing.
Not one useful Jack with two fathers, one of them being an engineer.
By the time he teleported back to the pavement outside, he was irritated enough to contemplate arson on principle.
He stood there with his hands in his coat pockets and looked up at the building he had just robbed of nothing useful.
"Very educational," he murmured. "I have now confirmed that bureaucracy can waste time even when you break into it directly."
He considered kicking the wall.
Then he remembered he was the sort of man who now had several better ways to express frustration.
So instead, he vanished and reappeared near the Cook County Clerk's Office.
Marriage records, residency documents, and public filings were less poetic and more useful. In the movie MCU decided Illinois needed more rainbows and legalised the same sex marriges before it happened in reality.
Corvus returned to his search. He worked faster there. Search terms narrowed the field. Male spouse, dependent child, and one guardian listed under engineering or technical work. The county system coughed up the first real lead after a couple of hours.
A boy named Jack with two fathers. He still shook his head at the thought of such couples being allowed to adopt children. He still remembers the news of such people from his previous life. Returning to his findings, one of the fathers was listed as an engineer, with the residence entered in Lincoln Square.
Lucius stared at the entry for several seconds, then smiled.
"Now we are talking."
Lincoln Square matched what he remembered far better than the rest of the city had. It had broad residential streets, older detached houses, quiet trees lining the pavements, and the sort of middle-class calm that existed only where people trusted the price of their homes more than their neighbours. The roads were clean, the front gardens maintained, and the houses looked lived in rather than wealthy enough to apologise for themselves.
More importantly, the neighbourhood resembled the scenes from the film. The same domestic calm. The same sense that a cosmic immortal had retired into suburbia and decided to become someone who worried about school runs, getting railed and dinner.
Lucius stood across the street from the house and let memory line itself up with reality.
He looked at the windows, the front path, and the side of the property. Then he reached outward with telepathy. No minds inside. No one in the immediate rooms. The house was empty.
He teleported inside and walked through the house slowly, examining the layout with the patience of a surveyor rather than a burglar.
The original plan had been to place smaller arrays throughout the house and wait like an ambush predator for the Phastos to step into one of them. After a minute, he shook his head and dismissed the idea. It was too complicated.
Instead, he stepped back outside and looked at the property line.
A single circle would be cleaner.
He crouched near the edge of the front garden and began drawing the sacrificial array into the soil and stone that bordered the house. The circle followed the natural perimeter of the property. It ran through the grass, along the concrete path, around the side yard and behind the house before closing again near the front gate.
The symbols were spaced carefully so the energy would flow through the full circumference. Anyone inside the house when he activates it would fall within the boundary.
Lucius paused when that thought settled in his mind.
Phastos was the target. The husband and the child were simply… collateral.
He stood there for a moment with the chalk resting in his hand and considered the moral question with the seriousness it technically deserved.
The boy was as innocent as any child. The other man, he didn't give a f.. care about in the slightest.
Lucius sighed. He would move the child out before sacrificing the others.
Then he finished carving the next symbol.
"Unfortunate," he muttered to himself while brushing dirt from his hands. "But efficiency is efficiency."
He straightened and walked the final stretch of the circle, completing the last rune near the front steps.
The markings were almost invisible unless someone knew exactly what they were looking for. To anyone else, it would look like small scratches in the soil and concrete. The only visible marks were near the front door, which Lucius spread some dead leaves to cover them.
He stepped inside the boundary and looked around the quiet street.
"Yes," he murmured with satisfaction. "This will do nicely."
He turned invisible and settled in to wait.
--
Far away from Chicago, inside a cave that smelled of metal, sweat, and old explosives, Tony Stark hammered another piece of scrap into shape and told himself not to pass out.
The Mark One was coming together one brutal compromise at a time. Tools scraped against metal. Sparks jumped. Yinsen watched him work with the calm of a man who had accepted that surviving Tony Stark required patience, prayer, and occasional disbelief.
Tony wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist and looked at the arc of crude metal plating in front of him.
He should have been dead.
That thought had come back more than once since the missile strike.
When the convoy had exploded, he still had Noctis's vials on him. Four LHP. Two LSP. He had drunk all of them in the chaos, half choking on fruit-based salvation while his company's weapons turned the road into a fire pit.
The potions had helped. They had kept him alive long enough to lose consciousness instead of his life. They had reduced the injuries enough that Yinsen and a car battery could do the rest.
But they had not made him invincible.
The shrapnel still sat near his heart. Pain still arrived on schedule. Breathing still came with effort whenever he pushed too hard.
Tony set down the tool and leaned against the half-built suit.
"Soon as I'm out of here," he muttered, "I'm buying that lunatic a drink. Or a laboratory. Depends on how charming he turns out to be."
Yinsen glanced over.
"You know him?"
Tony gave a tired laugh.
"I know he makes juice that works better than most hospitals."
He straightened and picked the tool back up.
"And right now I am feeling unusually grateful for modern agriculture."
-
Back in the United States, news of Tony Stark's disappearance kept sharing headlines with the mutant unrest. Cable channels cut between burned federal vehicles, interviews with mutant rights advocates, and the last footage of Stark leaving his Jericho missile demonstration alive.
Weeks had passed without confirmed news.
Under normal circumstances, SHIELD would have moved harder on the Stark situation. There would have been satellite coordination, intelligence sweeps, pressure on military channels, and a cover story ready to soften the public edge of whatever they found.
Those were not normal circumstances.
SHIELD was already drowning in its own disaster.
Noctis had made certain of that.
Alexander Pierce, by contrast, was having an excellent time.
He stood by the window of his office with one hand in his pocket and read the latest internal movement report with restrained pleasure. Three more departments had shifted under Hydra influence during the administrative fallout created by the Noctis operation. Personnel transfers, emergency oversight, temporary replacements, and rushed restructuring had opened doors faster than he ever could.
Chaos remained the most efficient time for harvest in Washington D.C.
Pierce set the report down and reached for another.
Lucius Noctis remained missing.
That part amused him. Hydra agents assigned to monitor the young man had disappeared alongside SHIELD personnel. He chuckled softly.
The young man had begun as an inconvenience and developed into a most promising force multiplier. A man willing to punish institutions and remove obstacles without moral friction was not a civilised company, but he was philosophically adjacent to useful.
Pierce tapped the file once.
"Noctis," he murmured, "you really are learning."
He was still nowhere to be found, but that would change.
Men like Lucius did not vanish forever. They vanished only until the next opportunity looked too profitable to ignore.
Pierce intended to create that opportunity by making the rich look for more of Noctis's potions. He will come out to sell, and HYDRA will make contact with him.