Victor von Doom was back, and the air around him reeked of anger. Blood-red lightning—Solomon saw his mood at a glance, and Victor von Doom made no attempt to hide it. The once-mascot, ferocious goose took one look at him from afar and bolted without a backward glance. He didn't speak, but used a spell to jam the entire course of his negotiations with the Latovinian royal family into Solomon's mind—it took all of two seconds. To everyone else, Victor von Doom merely locked eyes with Solomon, and then the air grew heavy.
"As expected." Solomon's expression was as calm as his mood. The Latovinian royals' reaction was entirely predictable. Once the Undying City imposed a communications blackout, their thinking became as shallow as a dish of water—you could see the bottom at a glance.
Victor von Doom had tried to sway the royals' decisions by magic in the dead of night, only to be surprised to discover a spellcaster at the royal court. The stench of that caster's soul was cut off by the layers of brick and soil beneath the castle, so Victor hadn't noticed him immediately—once he did, his suspicion of the royals only deepened. He feared they planned to use the lives of civilians for some evil ritual to reverse their defeat. That is precisely why Solomon was able to overrule opposition within Kamar-Taj and join the war: publicly as an overseer of the conflict, in reality as a second leader of the Latovinian regulars.
As for the sorcerer Victor von Doom cared about, Solomon didn't give him much thought.
In the night he stretched his awareness and strolled through the minds of the capital's commoners, tasting their fear; his thoughts skimmed across the brains of the Latovinian royals as easily as a summer-evening walk along a riverside. As for the black sorcerer hidden beneath the castle, his mind was, to Solomon, nothing more than a door hung with rotten chains; the warlock slipped into his soul without drawing notice and sampled every shard of plan that flashed across it—American instructors, previously found within the castle, had fled, and Latovinian scouts were in pursuit; a royal had tried to leave the capital by helicopter and been shot down by long-prepared anti-aircraft guns; the secret tunnel under the castle leading outside had already collapsed; the royal guard was now digging furiously, hoping to get people out before the assault began.
"After saturating the castle with artillery, have tracked armor carry an elite detachment straight into the city. Wipe out the royal troops, pull the civilians out, and withdraw. Drone bombers will support from the flank. In fast, out fast—two hours to break their resistance. Don't worry about the buildings; they'll be rebuilt into a new city anyway. Latovinia's future is a high-tech metropolis—there's a price to pay in shifting from an agricultural nation to an industrial one." Everything Solomon said exuded a pragmatic streak and a certain dark humor. He figured that tunnel would collapse under heavy shelling; cutting off the royals' escape at just the right moment was, to him, a perfect punch line.
By "elite detachment," he meant soldiers handpicked by Victor von Doom—men of iron will and honed skill, with startling gifts for tactics and strategy. They were pulled out and formed into a heavy infantry century called the Exemptors.
These soldiers were issued full black sealed ballistic armor, closed-circuit respirators and helmets, high-powered laser rifles, and a large array of individual heavy weapons to meet special-operations needs. Even if wounded, they would receive priority prosthetic augmentation (in fact, a small amount of drug-based conditioning dampened the brain's fear response). On the battlefield they were a precise, lethal dagger; the royal family's household guard would not be their match.
Compared to the fighting here, Solomon was more concerned about the northern line, where the trouble was greater than anything posed by the Latovinian royals.
The war machines deployed there were like a spring compressed to the limit; so were the interstellar missile pods hanging in Latovinia's orbital sky. The moment NATO forces moved, they would be unleashed to showcase the Undying City's devastating war potential. The biogenics lab's half-finished projects had already been partially armed and sent to the front. Constantine sat in command there and oversaw the gene-modded warriors until Solomon finished here and took the lead of the modified troops and Latovinian auxiliaries.
"Two hundred shells will be enough to shatter that black sorcerer's plans," Solomon said. The evil in that soul amounted to no more than a pinky's worth—not much of a problem.
He was unwilling to use the supernatural to change the royals' decisions. The people of Latovinia had to undergo a painful metamorphosis, one that would set the steel of Latovinian will for centuries to come. They had to forge the soul of The Unified Truth with sacrifice.
No one cherishes what comes too easily—and a far bloodier war awaits them. Everyone here knew what loomed on the northern line. They had no time to rest or train; every able-bodied adult had to go to the front—even if that choice meant the Latovinian girl who had just tried to bring him a glass of water and a plate of biscuits might be blown to pieces by a shell; even if it meant the middle-aged man crawling under an off-road truck to make repairs would end up writhing in agony and dying. Paper ideas had to be turned into a prairie fire.
In the Undying City's plan, Wakanda and the Avengers had limited futures. There was no high-end individual force in this world that could stop the rise of The Unified Truth. As for other problems, Victor von Doom and Solomon would solve them by decapitation strikes—the reason Asgardians so alarmed Earth's governments was that they possessed a cosmos-level ability to project force, and paired with their fearsome individual combat power, there was no organization on Earth that could withstand decapitation carried out at such intensity. Solomon and Victor von Doom shared the Asgardians' advantages; once operations began, any regime would have to weigh carefully the consequences of its leadership being wiped out in an instant.
"If that guy isn't dead, I'll go take his head. Don't forget, I'm Kamar-Taj's inspector in name; it's perfectly compliant," Solomon said brightly. He hadn't had a proper fight in a long time; even a hack of a black sorcerer was enough to delight him for a while.
With a suggestive psychic pulse, Victor von Doom felt his mood directly and immediately rolled his eyes.
Even without Victor's discovery, Solomon would have found a way to join this war. The Sorcerer Supreme had told Solomon to do what he believed was right; with the Ancient One's tacit consent, Kamar-Taj's restraints on him were about as thick as a parchment scroll. Even the Darkhold, dangerous beyond measure, was kept in the Undying City rather than the dungeons deep in the Himalayas.
Without that consent, the Undying City could never have been built; all opposing voices would have long since fallen silent, and the Kamar-Taj of the future would speak with one voice—provided Solomon found an opportunity to kick some fool and round up two candidates for Sorcerer Supreme to foster healthy competition. That task only he could do; after all, nudging a person's fate is no simple matter, and he had no desire to let Stephen Strange die in a car crash.
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