Something was wrong! Definitely wrong!
Wearing contact lenses with his head tightly wrapped in bandages, William Stryker walked out of a well-known company and sank into thought.
This was the fourth person he had visited today. Like the others, this wealthy businessman had once sworn to support him, but today his attitude had turned evasive. When Stryker asked him for funding, he began making excuses and changing the subject.
When he visited the first businessman, Stryker had assumed the man was reluctant to part with his money or afraid his investment would go down the drain. But four people in a row had reacted the same way. There was no way that wouldn't catch his attention.
Someone was targeting me!
William Stryker never imagined that these people, like him, had awakened their X-Gene overnight and become the mutants they despised. He simply assumed that, because of public opinion, his enemies and those fools who had been deceived into sympathizing with mutants were working behind the scenes to win over his prospective partners.
Stryker really had rotten luck. Although these partners had become mutants, none of their appearances had changed. He was the only one with a visible mutation.
Kraft had originally thought that targeting only Stryker's partners might well tip him off that something was wrong. He didn't care if Stryker discovered it, though. He would be triggering a global evolution before long anyway, so whether he was found out didn't matter.
All anyone could say was that Stryker's luck was terrible. Even something with odds this low had happened to him.
And after this round of behind-the-scenes meddling, Kraft discovered that these people were different from Stryker. Their opposition to mutants and support for his human experimentation on them had largely been driven by self-interest.
Some politicians, for example,