"Boss, here's the decay curve of the atom's energy signature."
Dr. Otto Octavius snapped Nolan out of his deep contemplation. The idea that he might be walking straight into the destiny of becoming a Sorcerer Supreme, someone who could master time, magic, and multiversal science, was shelved for now.
Frankly, the job didn't seem too hard. Protect Earth, don't get vaporized by a cosmic entity or eldritch horror. Simple enough.
And besides, Earth wasn't defenseless.
Its reputation hadn't caught up yet, but soon the universe would learn what kind of monsters lived here.
Earth: tiny, chaotic, and absolutely stacked with freaks of nature.
Nolan glanced at the massive stack of papers Otto had handed him. This was the value of intelligent subordinates, especially ones who could process high-level data without breaking a sweat. They saved him time.
"Leave the math to me," Nolan said. "By the way, any updates on your AI system?"
"I've started coding a portable interface," Otto replied, gesturing toward the nearby workbench. Lined across it: eight mechanical tentacles, each humming faintly with power.
He'd reached his breaking point with the interns. Utterly useless.
The only people who could follow his train of thought at Oscorp were Nolan, Connors, Norman, and the kid, Peter. And even then, Nolan was leagues above them all. But Nolan wasn't here to do Otto's work.
Connors was deep into bioengineering. Norman was split between research and corporate affairs. Peter? Lately, I've been obsessed with gene therapy, shadowing Connors more and more.
Which left Otto... alone.
So, he dusted off a side project: his precision tentacle rig. Now he just needed the neural latency issue solved. No human nervous system could keep up with eight simultaneous control streams. The answer?
A portable neural-AI hybrid backpack, he'd control the AI, and the AI would control the arms.
"Send me the blueprints when you're done," Nolan said. "And tell Norman your funding's approved. Pull whatever you need."
Then, casually, he grabbed a pen and scratched a highly complex atomic formula onto a notepad.
"Wait—that's it? You solved the decay curve?"
Otto stared. This was absurd. No one should be able to do that off the cuff.
"But... boss, these decay rates are insane. The atomic structure would've collapsed. This should've degraded into light atoms by now."
"Exactly," Nolan said, not even looking up. "Because while it releases energy, it's also absorbing it."
Otto's jaw tightened. That... changed everything.
Decades of nuclear theory were upended.
"Is that even possible in this universe?"
"Run a small-scale fission experiment," Nolan said. "Not full scale, I like my lab un-exploded. Use low temperatures, slow build, extra coolant rods."
He left Otto to process his existential crisis and stepped into the next lab.
Inside, Dr. Curt Connors was deep in research, running simulations on Mystique's DNA.
Ever since Nolan had acquired both her genome and the Space Stone fragment, he'd told Otto and Connors to prioritize analysis over everything else.
Connors looked up as Nolan entered and handed him a stack of biological charts.
"According to your genetic model, this is... not natural."
Nolan raised an eyebrow. "How so?"
"This genome shouldn't exist," Connors said, almost breathless. "It's mutable. But not unstable. It mutates consistently."
Even as he said it, he sounded like he didn't believe his own words.
In Connors' world, mutation meant chaos. But this?
This was controlled evolution.
If someone had told him last year that DNA could mutate in real time while remaining biochemically stable, he'd have laughed them out of the room.
But the data didn't lie.
He hadn't been this mentally disarmed since he learned about the wave-particle duality of light.
That moment had shattered his classical view of physics and introduced him to the quantum world.
Now, the same was happening with biology.
Nolan scanned the report, then nodded. "That's the beauty of mutantkind."
He closed the folder. "You'll handle the first prototype of the serum."
"I'll send you my genome model as a reference. If things go south, I'll clean up the mess. But I want you to build it."
Connors hesitated. "I... I might ruin it."
"You won't," Nolan said, steady. "Believe in your work. You've already brought our enhancement serums into clinical testing. This is just another step."
He paused. "Besides—if you screw up, I'll just fix it. That's the luxury of having a boss like me."
Nolan knew the road ahead would only get more complex.
His projects were piling up: energy manipulation, biotech upgrades, system enhancement, multiversal theory, and now magic.
Even with his intellect, time was limited.
That's why he was building a network of minds he could trust: Connors, Otto, Norman. Maybe even Peter.
Each one was a future pillar.
The more they could carry, the more he could push forward toward the real frontier...
Power that surpassed all categories.
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