11 March 2008
Afghanistan was a shithole.
Lucius flew high above Kunar Province and gave the landscape every chance to improve itself. It failed repeatedly. The higher he climbed, the wider the view became, and the wider the view became, the more the entire region looked like God had started a mountain range, got annoyed halfway through, and thrown dust over the rest out of spite.
The geography was hostile, the weather was rude, and the human contribution had somehow made both look civilised.
He gazed down at another stretch of hard ground and scattered villages and wondered, not for the first time, why no sensible country had ever solved the problem by turning the whole place into decorative glass.
Still, ugly terrain had one professional advantage. It made hiding easy.
The ambush site from the news coverage had been chosen well. Narrow road, broken lines of sight, enough rock and elevation to make a convoy feel surrounded before the first shot even landed. Anyone with a decent map and a malicious disposition could have picked it.
Lucius remained high in the air and started building drones.
The first emerged between his hands as a delicate construct of orange light and then solidified into something no larger than his thumb. The shell was smooth, the lift surfaces compact, the internal sensors absurdly overqualified for what was essentially a flying spy toy. He made dozens; by the third set, he had settled into rhythm.
Each drone was linked to the aviator glasses he had built earlier. Each one fed vision, position, altitude, and terrain back to him in a live stream that sat at the edge of his sight without obscuring the real view. It felt less like using technology and more like teaching the sky to report to him.
He let them spread.
They moved out in disciplined arcs, crossing ridgelines, peering into valleys, mapping roads, cave mouths, settlement clusters, and truck routes. Lucius watched the province assemble itself around him in layers. Heat signatures. Paths of movement. Human patterns. He did not need satellites now. He had his own airborne bureaucracy, at least within the province.
After nearly two hours, the map was complete enough to matter.
Three cave systems fit the profile.
One lay too far from the known ambush site and showed only low-level movement. One matched transport routes and weapons traffic. The last carried a mix of vehicles, guards, and enough interior space to hide something worth stealing.
Lucius looked at the three marked locations hanging in his display and smiled.
"Good," he murmured. "Now the day has shape."
He turned invisible and dropped lower.
As he moved through the province, he began brushing against local minds. Multilingualist had turned languages into a solved problem. He did not need dictionaries, context, or patience. Meaning simply aligned itself when he touched a mind deeply enough.
It was one of the cleaner gifts Phastos had left behind, and every time Lucius reviewed the Eternal skill list, he returned to the same conclusion. The Celestials had built the Eternals as shepherds for humanity.
And humanity, if one followed that chain far enough, existed as livestock for the Celestial sleeping in the heart of the planet.
Lucius found the arrangement morbidly elegant.
The villagers were useful in the way frightened people often were. Their memories ran on loops of caution and repetition. Which road not to take after sunset. Which caves belonged to which terrorist group. Which valley had lost three daughters in one season. Which trucks meant looting, which meant conscription, which meant rape of women, goats, and sometimes men.
By the time he reached the first cave system, Lucius already knew it was not the one holding Tony Stark.
It was, however, full of armed rapists, thieves, and assorted parasites.
Lucius looked down at the entrance from the cover of the cliffside and considered his options.
Then he decided the place could still be educational.
He entered unseen, then decided against it a step later.
He dropped the invisibility, walked into the mouth of the cave in plain sight, and raised a hand in a small, almost polite greeting.
Two guards near the entrance turned first. One barked a warning, the other laughed when he realised the newcomer had arrived alone.
Lucius tilted his head and looked past them as if evaluating the property.
"Before we begin," he said in Pashto, a guttural and ugly language. His tone, however, stayed courteous; he was a gentleman after all. "I have a few questions. Rough numbers will do. What is your ratio of victims to rape? I heard you prioritise the inclusivity and not focus on female victims alone; DEI will approve that mindset. What I would like to know is your daily average and weekly, if you track trends. And how long do the enslaved locals last before they perish?"
"And while we are at it," he added mildly, "I have heard some rather creative rumours involving livestock. I assume those are exaggerations, but who knows. Do you maintain separate statistics for those poor goats as well?"
The nearest guard stared at him, then broke into open laughter. The second joined in, calling down the tunnel for others. Boots thudded, voices rose, and a handful of men gathered with the easy confidence of people who believed the situation had already resolved itself in their favour.
One of them, older and carrying authority, stepped forward and looked Lucius up and down.
"You walked in alone," he said, amused. "Are you from some university? Here to research the local culture, maybe?"
Lucius nodded once.
The man grinned at his companions.
"We will have answers," he said, "after we decide the price. Are you rich? Is there anyone to pay your ransom?"
His mood elevated. "Perhaps we thank the villager who sent you by not killing his family this year."
More laughter. One of the younger men circled behind Lucius, already imagining his entertainment for the coming days.
Lucius listened, then sighed very softly.
"That is unfortunate," he said. "You are not keeping up."
The leader's smile thinned a fraction, confusion arriving just ahead of irritation.
"Let's proceed," he said, and the pest behind him froze. Lucius fixed him against the cave wall with telekinesis, compressed the ribcage just enough to stop the lungs doing their job, and waited until the panic in his eyes turned to vacancy.
That told him something important.
He turned to the group, who had already raised their guns and were stepping back.
He lowered the body to the ground and moved on. "Not one rib broken." The expectation of congratulations in his voice was sincere.
The second man got to live longer because Lucius wanted data. He pulled the joints apart one by one without breaking skin, just enough to make the body understand helplessness before pain arrived properly. Shoulder first, then elbow, then knee. The man screamed in a language Lucius now understood perfectly and begged every god available for intervention.
Lucius listened for a moment.
Then he reached into the man's mind and made him relive the last house he had entered with his friends, except this time he watched it from the floor. He became the father with the smashed teeth. Then the mother, dragged by the hair. Then the small daughter, held against a wall. Lucius fed him each perspective without mercy and without haste. He couldn't do it from the goat's perspective, though.
The man broke long before his body did.
Another useful application of telepathy.
The skill could do more than erase and read. With enough control, it could impose sequence, role, shame, memory, and terror until the target's identity loosened around the edges.
Lucius left him alive for another six minutes in his own mind. He froze the rest of them while searching their minds for names, supply routes, command structure, and routines.
Then he peeled their skin and broke their legs with telekinesis and went deeper into the cave.
The compound had perhaps two dozen men spread across chambers and side tunnels. Their sleeping positions were randomly chosen. Even the cave they used as armory was not secure enough. This was a case study for OSHA.
Two women locked in a rear space. Four boys old enough to carry rifles and young enough to still look surprised when ordered to use them.
Lucius freed the women first by removing the metal latch from their door with molecular manipulation and pointing them toward the exit.
He wished them luck. The most probable outcome for them was to be killed by their own family. At least the rapes will stop, or he hoped so. This was the reality of this region.
The boys were left alone. They had the same unfortunate fate as the women, and yet to kill or do anything harmful to anyone. He let them go as well.
The adults became a workshop.
One guard at the inner junction lost both femurs when Lucius decided to test whether bones could be bent from within rather than snapped from without. Surprisingly, they could. The angle was appalling, the scream was educational.
Another became the subject of a blood experiment. Lucius suspended the man in the air and separated the iron distribution from proper circulation for less than four seconds. It was enough. The body convulsed, the face greyed, and the vascular system tried very hard to explain mortality to the brain all at once.
It was an interesting aspect of molecular manipulation.
He made a note of the threshold mentally and moved on.
The next test involved chemistry.
He had his own knowledge from two lives, one in biochemical engineering, the other in chemical engineering. Combined with Eternal intellect, that knowledge no longer sat in separate compartments. It unfolded into practical options the moment a body presented itself.
He took one prisoner to the floor and altered the pH balance in the blood just enough to let acidosis begin without immediate death. The man trembled, vomited, and begged. Lucius corrected the imbalance before organ failure, watched the relief hit, then induced the opposite problem. Alkalosis this time. Nerve excitability changed first. Hands curled. Breathing went wrong. Eyes rolled.
The man did not survive the correction cycle.
Lucius sighed and kicked the dead pest.
"This was the first time in your miserable life to be useful," he told the corpse while kicking it, "and you simply die." One more kick for a good measure.
Another subject allowed him to test organ replacement.
He built a structure of cosmic energy and condensed matter to mimic a kidney, then removed the original one through a combination of telekinetic separation and guidance that would have impressed any surgeon and horrified every regulatory body on Earth.
The body rejected the replacement within minutes.
The second design lasted longer.
The third integrated for almost twenty before systemic collapse arrived like an insult.
By the seventh subject, he had improved the vascular interface, reinforced the membrane, and understood that the body demanded more than shape. It demanded biochemical conversation. The organ had to speak in the right chemistry, or the host treated it like a foreign invader.
That failure annoyed and fascinated him in equal measure.
By the twelfth subject, he had a crude artificial liver that functioned briefly before haemorrhage ruined the trial. By the fifteenth, he managed a synthetic section of bowel that the body accepted just long enough to suggest the line of inquiry had promise in more civilised circumstances.
These living beings were terrorists. Worst of the worst.
So he adapted.
One cave became a telekinetic disassembly exercise. Another became a telepathic interrogation chamber where every man learned intimately what their victims had felt while Lucius emptied their minds for logistics. A third became a place where blood, tissue, and molecular structure were all treated as editable drafts.
When he finally stopped, every adult in the compound was dead.
The boys were gone. The women had escaped. The cave stank, voided bowels, blood, cordite, and fear cooked into stone.
He reviewed what he had taken from them: names, hierarchy, more supply routes, and weapon caches.
The location of the second and third compounds.
And, more importantly, improved control.
He could now manipulate bones without touching the surrounding tissue. He could drive a target through curated memory sequences until they confessed before he asked the question. He could alter blood chemistry, restructure soft organs, and replace parts of the body with his own constructs, even if stability remained a work in progress.
By the time he started feeling truly confident, the stock of test subjects had run out.
He looked around at the dead men and felt sincerely inconvenienced.
He moved to the rear chamber, took the weapons and stashed them in his inventory.
The second compound sat further east in rougher terrain. He knew the way, the faces and which lieutenant answered to which commander and which trucks moved prisoners instead of ammunition.
Tony Stark could wait a little while.
Before meeting Raza and his cave full of ambitious goat fuckers, Lucius preferred to continue his experiments somewhere with fresh material.
He rose into the air, turned invisible, and headed for the next compound with the calm efficiency of a man on his way to improve himself.