“Damn it, do any of you actually understand what human serum is?” “Did the desert wind dry out your brains, or are they stuffed with salad dressing?” “Fumbling even basic fusion—how have you idiots managed to stay alive this long?” Luca Stark, wearing an ill-fitting lab coat and clutching an empty test tube, shouted at the hazard-suited terrorists standing before him.
The terrorist researchers exchanged glances, but none dared to talk back; they simply kept their heads bowed toward the control console.
Beyond the console’s glass partition lay a sealed laboratory.
On a gurney inside lay a test subject who had just drawn his last breath.
The poor bastard had originally been one of their own comrades, dragged in as a guinea pig after fucking up.
Just moments ago, because the fluid ratio in the test tube was wrong, the guy had twitched violently for two and a half minutes before going off to meet his Creator.
A bunch of completely hopeless idiots.
Luca rolled his eyes and tossed the test tube into the trash bin.
With a skill level that wouldn’t even pass middle school chemistry, their delusional dreams of genetic engineering were a total joke.
“Report…
the subject’s vital signs have vanished,” one assistant reported timidly.
“I’m not blind, pal.
Even without looking at the monitor, just hearing that duck-like screeching stop was enough to tell me he was done for.” Luca leaned against the console with his arms crossed over his chest, looking thoroughly impatient.
“Hurry up and get someone to clean it out.
What, are you saving him for Thanksgiving?” “The air filtration here is bad enough already.
I have no desire to keep smelling roasted meat.” As a few lackeys scrambled to move the corpse, the lab’s automatic doors hissed open.
Pushed roughly aside, the doors admitted a bald man striding in with several heavily armed soldiers.
The man was a mid-level boss at this base, directly overseeing the laboratory.
A scar stretched from the corner of his eye all the way down to his chin, giving him a ferocious appearance.
“Luca Stark!” The bald leader bellowed, his voice rattling the glass panels.
“Didn’t you claim to be the world’s top biologist?
Aren’t you the head of Stark Pharma?” “Why is it that after two whole months, you can’t even figure out a simple human serum?!
What on earth are you actually researching?!” Faced with a beast on the verge of spitting fire, Luca chose to ignore him.
He gave a nonchalant shrug and casually straightened the collar of his lab coat.
“Pal, do you have any idea what an experiment is?
Science isn’t like grabbing a gun, robbing a bank, and calling it a day once you fill a sack with cash.” “Science requires rigor, data, and above all, time and plenty of subjects.
Do you think human serum is ketchup on a store shelf?
You think you can just shake the bottle and squeeze it out?” Luca stared at him like he was looking at a complete moron.
“If this were that easy to pull off, the data you stole wouldn’t be a pile of waste paper that even you can’t read.” “If I weren’t here out of the goodness of my heart, sorting through those illogical formulas, you’d still be staring blankly into a microscope.” Trembling with rage, the bald leader pulled the pistol from his belt and slammed it heavily onto the desk.
“I don’t give a damn about science!
My patience has run out.” “Listen to me, you damned Stark.
I am giving you one last chance.
Adjust your serum formula.
In one hour, we conduct the final injection test.” “If the subject dies again, if your serum is still useless…” The bald leader glared at Luca, his eyes brimming with lethal intent.
“…then you can go down to the bottom of the cliff and reunite with the rest of the junk.
I’m sure you’ll love the scenery down there.” Snorting coldly, the leader turned and strode out of the laboratory with his soldiers.
As the door shut behind them, Luca kept his infuriating grin, muttering under his breath.
“What a temper.
Classic case of poor health maintenance—endocrine disruption leading to an enlarged prostate.
He’s bound to drop dead of a stroke sooner or later.” But the moment he turned around, a sharp gleam flashed in his eyes.
He let out a long internal sigh of relief.
He had bet right.
The guy was indeed late-stage OCD combined with severe mysophobia.
Over the past two months, Luca had thoroughly mapped out the bald man’s habits.
Anyone who annoyed him or lost their usefulness was executed immediately.
But he never killed them inside the base, considering it too messy for his floors.
He preferred having prisoners marched out to a barren cliff edge outside the base, shooting them through the head, and kicking their bodies off into the deep abyss to destroy the evidence.
That was precisely what Luca wanted.
It was his only way of getting out of this damn place alive.
Turning back, Luca activated the main control screen.
His fingers danced across the keyboard, entering a string of code known only to him.
A hidden progress bar popped up on the display.
A line of bright green text stood out sharply: [Compatibility: 98%] Staring at the nearly filled bar, Luca’s mind drifted back two months.
Damn it all.
To think that he, Luca Stark, was not only one of the sole two heirs to Stark Industries, but also Howard Stark’s second child, Tony Stark’s younger brother, America’s favorite playboy, and the chairman of Stark Pharma…
How had he ended up slaving away in a godforsaken base like this?
It was all that bastard Tony’s fault.
A little over a month ago, he had still been in New York, exploring the mysteries of human ergonomics with a pair of Victoria’s Secret models.
Chilled champagne sat on the table, and a brand-new limited-edition sports car was parked in his underground garage.
Then Tony had come storming in to say he was heading to the Middle East to demonstrate their newly developed Jericho missile to the US military.
Truth be told, Luca had zero interest in selling weapons.
The two brothers’ talents lay in completely different fields.
Tony was a mechanical and physics genius who spent all day obsessing over metal junk that could blow people sky-high.
Luca, on the other hand, was a monster in the fields of biology and medicine.
He preferred studying genetic codes and finding ways to make humans live longer and grow stronger.
Not that Tony didn’t understand biological science, or that Luca was ignorant of mechanical engineering.
It was just that both brothers were competitive to a fault.
Thus, Stark Industries had been split into two major arms.
Tony managed tech and weaponry; Luca ran biomedicine.
They did their own thing, yet they were close enough to share a pair of pants.
The Middle East was hot and dry; normally, Luca would never have gone.
But Pepper and Obadiah had been driving him crazy lately.
Pepper chased him every day with stacks of documents to sign, while Obadiah kept playing the overbearing elder, bossing him around about his personal life.
Luca hated moral guilt trips more than anything.
To get some peace and quiet—and maybe have a little fun in the Middle East—he hid it from Pepper and Obadiah and snuck onto Tony’s private jet.
Sure enough, if anything could go wrong, it did.
Who could have known that after getting there safe and sound, there would be no turning back?
After demonstrating the Jericho missile—which flattened an entire mountain ridge—the brothers were sitting in a military Humvee, blasting rock music and drinking chilled whiskey.
Tony was still boasting to the soldiers in the front row about sleeping with cover girls.
The next second: *BOOM!* The Humvee blew upside down.
Luca didn’t even keep a grip on his glass before the shockwave threw him outward.
His head cracked against the door, knocking him out cold.
When he woke up, he was surrounded by a bunch of headscarf-wearing, AK-wielding terrorists.
Those terrorists must have been utterly bewildered.
The job they took was supposed to be kidnapping the weapons genius Tony Stark.
Who would have thought that upon arriving at the scene, it was a buy-one-get-one-free deal!
Lying next to him was a guy who was even handsomer than Tony and carried the exact same Stark surname!
The terrorists were thrilled out of their minds.
One Tony Stark specializing in physical technology and weapons manufacturing, and one Luca Stark specializing in biotechnology and pharmaceutical R&D.
The two brothers were cash cows of the tech world.
And so, both were hooded, stuffed into a truck, and brought to this base belonging to a terrorist organization called Advanced Tech.
During the first few days of their captivity, Luca and Tony had been locked up together.
It was a pitch-black, damp cave.
Tony had been hit in the chest by shrapnel from a bomb made by his own company; fortunately, a balding doctor named Ho Yinsen had saved his life.
The method of saving him was exceedingly crude, however: hooking a beat-up car battery to Tony’s chest to hold the shrapnel away from his heart.
Seeing Tony regain consciousness, Luca had leaned over right away.
“Tony, that’s quite a unique look you’ve got going.
Environmentalists are going to love you.
You’re a hybrid human now.
I’m definitely taking a picture when we get back to use as a Stark Industries eco-campaign poster.” Tony glared at him weakly.
“Shut up, Luca.
You oxygen-wasting bastard, how come the blast didn’t blow your mouth off?” “If I lost my mouth, who’d be around to snap an egomaniac like you back to reality?
Take a look around—it’s all weapons made by our family.” “Bro, we’ve become the biggest arms suppliers around, except our clients are unwashed terrorists.” The two kept bickering back and forth.
The guards standing outside couldn’t understand them at first, but eventually grew thoroughly sick of it.
These two brothers ran their mouths all day long.
From mocking the cave’s interior design to roasting the terrorists’ outfits, and even ridiculing their accents.
Finally, the terrorists reached their breaking point.
They realized that keeping both Starks together meant getting zero work done.
So they forced open the iron door and dragged Luca away.
Tony yelled anxiously at the time: “Hey!
Where are you taking him?
Leave him here!
I’ll die of boredom without him!” Luca was brought to a high-tech lab hidden deep inside the mountain.
At first, these people had indeed planned to use him directly as a guinea pig.
They showed Luca an incomplete set of biological research files and demanded his cooperation.
The files they wanted him to study were almost laughable.
In truth, they were stolen after murdering a brilliant scientist from another nation.
The research did have genuine merit, with a grand vision: it aimed to enable human cells to absorb ambient free energy, inducing self-evolution.
But to Luca, it was purely theoretical, with practically zero practical viability.
The third-rate researchers hired by the terrorists couldn’t even understand the core formulas.
But Luca did.
Not only did he understand it, but he saw in it a beam of hope for survival.
To escape, simply playing along wouldn’t cut it.
He needed raw power.
Luca’s mind raced, instantly formulating a self-rescue strategy as a crazy plan took shape in his mind.
He took over the console directly, pointing out over a hundred fatal errors in their experimental procedures within minutes.
He displayed a level of top-tier intelligence that crushed everyone present.
The terrorists were completely stunned.
They immediately changed their minds.
A living genius was infinitely more valuable than a dead test subject.
Just like that, Luca naturally stepped into the role of head researcher.
Though guarded by armed men at the door, making him a prisoner in essence, at least he gained control over the lab.
For him, that was enough.
With control secured, Luca began crafting his escape plan.
He was going to restart his father Howard’s Super Soldier Program!!