Chapter 105: Building Momentum — The Opening Move
Kodiak Island — Kaiju Black Market District
Marcus was operating under a different face today.
The T-1000 surface overlay had given him a clean alternative appearance — sharper features, darker hair, the kind of forgettable-but-distinctive look that said professional without saying anything more specific than that. Since Marcus Foster was simultaneously enrolled in the PPDC Ranger Academy intake process under a fabricated identity, showing up to the Kaiju black market as himself would have been sloppy tradecraft. Two separate identities, two separate operations, zero overlap.
The black market persona was theater, and Marcus knew it. A one-day performance designed to plant a flag, generate buzz, and establish the existence of a product that didn't exist anywhere else in the known market. The actual business infrastructure would come later.
Victor Strand was still standing in front of him, working through the mental arithmetic of the situation. His eyes moved from Marcus to the T-800 perimeter and back, with the careful deliberateness of a man recalibrating.
What had caught Strand's attention — Marcus could read it clearly with a Spirit attribute of 39 — wasn't the price or the banner or even the twenty identical men in suits. It was the hardware.
The T-800s were carrying military-specification assault rifles. Not handguns. Not shotguns. Full automatic assault rifles with the kind of load-bearing setup that indicated these weren't decorative accessories.
Strand's operation ran on handguns. Kodiak Island's reduced firearms regulations since the Kaiju war began had made pistols relatively accessible. Assault weapons were a different category entirely — controlled, tracked, requiring military-grade procurement channels to acquire legally, and the kind of thing that got people asking questions if they appeared in the wrong hands.
Twenty of them, in identical hands, surrounding a man selling alien-derived pharmaceuticals from a chair that appeared to have rearranged itself.
Who exactly is this person, Strand was thinking. Marcus didn't need telepathy to see it.
"Price isn't the issue," Strand said finally, committing to the negotiation. "What happens if the product doesn't deliver?"
Marcus smiled — genuinely, not performed. "Doesn't deliver."
He stood up.
The distance between his chair and Strand was approximately five meters. In the time it took Strand to register that Marcus had moved, Marcus was standing directly in front of him — less than an arm's length away, close enough that Strand had to actually tilt his head slightly to maintain eye contact.
Strand's reaction was involuntary. He stepped back half a pace before he could stop himself, which was the kind of thing that a man in his position, in front of his own crew, very much did not want to do.
Marcus reached out and patted Strand's shoulder once — casual, unhurried, completely relaxed — and then was back in his chair before Strand had fully processed the first movement.
The market noise continued around them. Nobody in Strand's crew had been fast enough to react. They were standing in slightly different defensive positions now, alert without having agreed to become alert, responding to something their nervous systems had flagged before their conscious minds caught up.
Strand looked at Marcus with an expression that had shed the performance layer entirely and was now just honest assessment.
"You used the serum," he said.
"Yes," Marcus said. He didn't elaborate. He didn't need to — Strand had just watched a live demonstration of what the product did to someone who'd already used it, and the demonstration had been more persuasive than any sales pitch.
"I'm buying," Strand said. "How do you want payment?"
"Cash. Old bills, non-sequential. On delivery." Marcus kept it simple. Black market commerce had universal rules that crossed every world he'd visited — untraceable currency, no paper trail, physical exchange. Bank transfers in a market like this were an invitation to problems that weren't worth the convenience.
Strand nodded to Torres, who disappeared with two other men.
"Since you're the first customer today," Marcus said, "I'll handle the injection personally."
Strand blinked. "That's the special treatment?"
"It means I'm ensuring the administration is done correctly," Marcus said. "The compound is sensitive to injection technique. Done wrong, you lose efficacy. Done right, you get the full effect." He paused. "Also I want to watch."
Strand absorbed that, clearly unsure whether he'd just been offered a courtesy or set up for another observation at his expense. He decided not to ask.
Torres returned nine minutes later with two brushed-aluminum briefcases. Strand gestured at them. "One point two million. Old bills, non-consecutive. Standard count."
"No need," Marcus said, and pushed a very gentle thread of mental suggestion into the exchange — not a command, just a reinforcement of the social contract already in place. You don't shortchange someone surrounded by twenty assault rifles. "Victor Strand doesn't cheat on delivery. The consequences wouldn't be worth it."
A thin film of cold sweat appeared on Strand's forehead almost immediately, the body's response to something the conscious mind hadn't fully articulated.
He didn't say anything about it.
Marcus snapped his fingers. A T-800 stepped forward with the brushed-steel incubator case. Marcus opened it, removed one vial of the sky-blue enhancement serum — catching the way the bioluminescent color shifted slightly in the afternoon light, the same blue as the Kaiju blood it had been derived from, just cleaned of everything that made the original lethal — and loaded it into the needle-free injector.
"Roll up your sleeve," Marcus said.
Strand rolled up his left sleeve without hesitation. He'd committed to the purchase and he wasn't a man who hedged after committing.
Marcus held the injector against the skin of Strand's forearm. "For the record — there will be pain. Roughly sixty to ninety seconds of it. Your body is rebuilding its physiological baseline in real time. The discomfort is proportional to the effectiveness."
"How bad?" Strand asked.
"Bad enough that you'll want to warn people before you administer it to them." Marcus pressed the button.
The injector released with a soft pneumatic sound. The serum transferred subcutaneously in a fraction of a second.
Strand felt the initial coolness — then nothing for about four seconds — and then it hit.
The sound Strand made was not dignified. He went rigid, then started moving in the involuntary way that people moved when their nervous system was receiving signals it hadn't been designed to interpret, arms and legs working against the sensation as though physical movement could redirect the pain.
His crew watched with varying degrees of alarm. Nobody moved to intervene, partly because they weren't sure what they were looking at and partly because the T-800 perimeter hadn't shifted at all, which somehow made intervention feel like the wrong call.
Seventy seconds later, it stopped.
Strand stood still. Then he took a slow breath, rolled his neck, and looked at his hands. He made a fist — slowly, then fast, then faster, testing the response time. His expression shifted into something that was not quite disbelief and not quite euphoria but landed somewhere between them.
He turned to the largest man in his crew — a security contractor named Hansen, built like a defensive lineman, who'd been with Strand's operation for four years.
Strand hit him.
Not a slap, not a shove — a proper right hook, delivered with the casual confidence of someone testing new equipment rather than starting a fight.
Hansen went down.
He got up slowly, looked at his employer with genuine confusion, and said, "Boss — what—"
"Come on, Hansen," Strand said, with the particular energy of a man who had just discovered something he very much liked. "Let's see what you've got."
What followed was, objectively, not a fair contest. Hansen was bigger, younger, and had thirty years of accumulated fighting experience. Strand had sixty seconds of genetic enhancement and the psychological momentum of someone who'd just had his physical capabilities rewritten.
Strand won.
Marcus watched the whole thing with the detached appreciation of someone observing a demonstration go exactly as planned. He slow-clapped once when it concluded. "Excellent. Outstanding performance. Really captures the product value proposition." He paused. "Next purchase gets two percent off."
Strand, breathing hard and grinning with an expression that the gold teeth made look slightly unhinged, turned back to Marcus with the focus of someone who had moved past the sample and was now thinking about volume.
"I want the rest," Strand said. "All seven remaining doses."
Marcus tilted his head. "I should mention — the first dose is always the strongest. Second dose produces roughly half the effect due to biological adaptation. Third and beyond continue to attenuate. The ceiling improvement over baseline, across all doses combined, is approximately double. That's the upper limit with current formulation."
Strand waved this off. He wasn't thinking about himself for all seven doses, Marcus could tell — he was thinking about who else in his operation could benefit from a fifty percent enhancement on first administration, and what that was worth to his competitive position.
"I'm buying all seven," Strand repeated.
"They're available," Marcus said. He began the transaction process for the remaining doses, each one handled with the same precise protocol — incubator open, vial removed, injector loaded, administered within the ten-minute temperature window.
As Strand's men settled the additional payments, Strand moved closer to Marcus with the slightly lowered voice of someone asking a question he was genuinely curious about.
"How many doses have you personally used?" he asked.
Marcus looked at him for a moment, letting the question sit just long enough to be interesting.
"Enough," he said.
Strand looked at the speed demonstration he'd witnessed — five meters covered in a fraction of a second, contact made, return completed before a trained security professional could respond — and did his own arithmetic.
He didn't ask a follow-up question.
Smart man, Marcus thought.
The transaction completed. Eight doses, total revenue of $9.4 million in non-sequential cash — one point two million for the first dose plus the surcharge, one million each for the remaining seven.
As Strand's crew moved the briefcases out and the market crowd that had gathered at a respectful distance began filtering back into the district's normal flow, Marcus remained in his chair, unhurried.
The product existed now, in the market's collective awareness. Victor Strand — the most connected figure in Kodiak Island's black market ecosystem — had purchased the full available inventory, experienced the effects personally, and watched his own crew demonstrate its efficacy.
By tonight, every operator in the district would have heard about it.
By tomorrow, the story would have reached people outside the district.
By the time Marcus had a consistent supply chain running through the dimensional gate from Umbrella's production facilities, the demand would already be waiting for him.
That was how you built momentum.
Support Rewards
500 Power Stones = 1 Chapter
10 Reviews = 1 Chapter
30+ advance chapters on P7treon (DarkFoxx)