Hearing Soren's indifferent dismissal, Killian's heart twisted in a poisonous mix of humiliation and relief.
His pride lay shattered. His bones stung, and every breath carried the bitter taste of failure. Yet despite his broken state, he forced himself up.
Staggering, bloodied, Killian fled.
He ran like a beaten dog, never daring to look back, his once-fiery aura wiped out.
"I will never come back to this cursed place again."
No matter how strong he became, no matter what unholy power he might possess, he swore he would never cross paths with Soren again. T
This humiliation burned hotter than any flame could conjure.
Rather than reflect, his twisted mind sought a scapegoat, and it found one easily.
Tony Stark.
'If that smug bastard had taken me seriously… If he hadn't abandoned me… I would never have gone down this road!'
Unable to challenge Soren, Killian transferred every ounce of hatred onto Tony.
The shame of his failure turned into hatred, hatred that would fester, grow, and drive his already unstable mind further into madness.
The mind of a man consumed by ego rarely points its blame inward.
Everlife Medical Center
Soren, however, spared not a single thought for the defeated Killian. He held something far more valuable in his hands now a vial of crimson, faintly glowing genetic material.
[Extremis Gene (Imperfect)]
The diagnosis had confirmed it. Now, at last, he understood why Killian had sought him out not to threaten him, but in desperate hope.
The infamous reputation of Everlife, the stories of impossible cures and legendary treatments, must have led Killian to believe Soren could perfect Extremis for him.
And he wasn't wrong.
'Extremis… unstable… volatile… yet incredibly adaptive. It might be what I need to solve Zilant's case.'
For weeks, Soren had been battling with Zilant's genetic instability.
The boy was a unique anomaly, carrying several powerful foreign gene sequences in his body genes that should never coexist.
They fought constantly, clashing violently within his DNA, threatening to tear him apart from the inside.
… Maybe this was the missing piece.
The unifier.
In the dimly lit laboratory of Everlife, with arrays of magical instruments and futuristic equipment glowing faintly in the dark, Soren set to work.
He isolated the inferior, unstable portions of the Extremis gene, strands corrupted by impatience and recklessness.
Line by line, strand by strand, he trimmed and rewrote the code, purging imperfections and enhancing natural integrations.
A lesser scientist, even one of Soren's caliber, might have collapsed from exhaustion, but his obsession, his pursuit of perfection, carried him through.
At last…
[Extremis Gene (Perfected)]
Its glow was deeper, now steady, powerful, and alive. Soren could feel its terrible potential radiating from the vial, the way it thrummed with life.
This… this can work.
Soren prepared the genetic solution and carefully extracted a sample of Zilant's own unstable, mixed DNA, a volatile soup of foreign genes. There were at least four unstable sequences battling within: serpent, predator, shadow, and fire-blood.
As the crimson Extremis gene was introduced into the mixture, a reaction was instantaneous.
Violent.
The foreign genes rioted immediately, their unique energies lashing out, trying to obliterate the intruder. Each carried a different elemental signature — venomous, burning, suffocating, and searing and yet, the Extremis gene stood firm.
Not only did it resist.
It pushed back.
Its regenerative power and adaptability absorbed and neutralized the chaotic surges, its resilience forming a stabilizing backbone through the chaos.
What had once been a genetic battleground now began to reorganize. The foreign genes, while still turbulent, began orbiting around the Extremis core, their attacks weakening as if grudgingly acknowledging it.
Coexistence.
Soren's heart raced. His breathing shallow.
'It's working… this is it. The gene that can unify them all.'
But it wasn't enough to wait.
To fully test compatibility and evolution, Soren consumed a vast amount of mental energy, drawing ancient sigils in the air as he activated Time Compression Magic.
The flow of time within the gene solution accelerated a hundredfold, while the outside world remained unchanged.
Inside the glowing vial, what should have taken years of evolution and stabilization unfolded in mere minutes.
Soren kept his gaze fixed on the solution, sweat beading on his forehead as the volatile mixture evolved, stabilized, and reformed itself again and again.
At last, the formerly clashing genes stopped their internal war.
Not only had they stabilized they had begun fusing into something new.
Where once there were four foreign, clashing forces, there was now one cohesive, terrifyingly powerful sequence.
Soren's hands trembled slightly, not from fear, but from excitement.
Even through the containment glass, even within a hyper-compressed time field, the sheer presence of the genes made his skin prickle. The new gene's energy radiated a terrible strength.
'This is an apex gene.'
It possessed Extremis' regenerative and tolerance abilities, fused with the attributes of those foreign genes: serpentine resilience, predatory instinct, shadow adaptability, and fire-blood's sheer power.
Together, under the unifying force of the perfected Extremis, they had evolved into something far beyond what nature ever intended.
"What have I created…?"
꧁𓊈𒆜༺⚜༻𒆜𓊉꧂
Fellow Phantoms and aspiring Phantoms to be, if you seek to access advanced parts of this story procced to my shadowy realm of p@treon.
PhantomDream