Black Widow used her shock bracelet to incapacitate a smaller Mutant on his left flank, but the larger ones barely reacted to the electric shocks.
On the rooftop of an apartment building, Hawkeye fired an arrow trailing a steel cable that tripped a Mutant—but the creature snapped the cable with a single tug.
They had to hold back.
These monsters were innocent civilians.
The heroes couldn't kill them.
The helicopter landed in an open area three hundred meters behind the cordon.
As Lynn jumped out, the field commander came to meet him. He was a white man in his forties, wearing a S.H.I.E.L.D. uniform with a colonel's insignia on his chest.
His first reaction to seeing Lynn was exactly what Lynn had expected.
"The expert Director Fury mentioned is—you?"
"I'm the doctor here." Lynn pushed up his glasses. "Give me a work area within fifty meters of the front line. I need firsthand samples."
"Fifty meters?" The commander's face said, You've got to be crazy. "The Mutants are active within fifty meters of the front line—"
"Then make it sixty."
The commander was about to say something else.
A tactical vehicle from the assault team pulled up from the side and stopped.
The door opened, and Hawkeye—Clint Barton—jumped out.
A triangular gash marred his left shoulder. A Mutant's claws had torn it open, leaving the flesh exposed and blood still seeping out.
Barton glanced at Lynn.
"Fury said you were coming." He looked at the medical case in Lynn's hand. "What do you need?"
"A blood sample from a Mutant. Ideally, someone who transformed less than an hour ago. Also, if you can get any shed tissue from a Mutant—skin or scales, anything will do."
"Your shoulder—"
"First things first." Barton turned and ran back to the front line.
Lynn watched him go.
All-Things Diagnosis assessed Hawkeye's shoulder wound in the background: a laceration 1.2 centimeters deep, clear of the tendons, with moderate blood loss.
It wasn't life-threatening, but if left untreated, it would affect his archery.
Five minutes later.
Barton returned.
He was quick.
He now held two things in his other hand: a tactical syringe filled with dark purple blood, and a gray scale about the size of a thumb.
"I drew the blood from a guy who'd transformed less than forty minutes ago. The scale came off another one." He handed them to Lynn. "Is that enough?"
"That's enough."
The commander assigned Lynn an armored communications vehicle to use as a temporary lab.
Inside were a folding table and a power outlet. Lynn unfolded the Stark Portable Biochemical Analyzer and finished warming it up and calibrating it in two minutes.
The scale sample came first.
All-Things Analysis kicked in immediately.
The microscopic structure of the gray scale unfolded before his eyes. It had a keratin base, but its arrangement had been completely rewritten.
Normal keratin formed an alpha helix. This thing's keratin had been reprogrammed into beta-pleated sheets, twelve times denser than normal.
This wasn't a natural mutation.
Someone had designed it.
He put the blood sample into the analyzer.
The data began to stream in.
At the same time, All-Things Analysis ran a parallel examination of the viral vector in the serum.
The key component was identified.
A modified retrovirus.
It targeted a noncoding sequence in the human genome called the "Potential X-Gene," then forcibly activated it with a variant CRISPR-Cas9 system.
The activation instructions were random, which explained why everyone mutated in different ways.
But the virus had one fatal flaw.
There was no "off switch" built into the activation process.
Once a gene was activated, it couldn't be stopped. The mutation would continue until the host's genome completely collapsed.
At the same time, the virus damaged neural pathways in the brain's limbic system as it edited the genes. That was why the Mutants lost their sanity.
"Hydra handiwork," Lynn muttered.
Crude, brutal, and indifferent to the consequences.
Like a gun without a safety: it could fire, but where it would shoot was anyone's guess.
A voice came over the communications channel from the front line.
Captain America: "How's the analysis going back there? We've got two large Mutants advancing on the cordon. Conventional weapons aren't working."
Lynn picked up a spare earpiece.
"Give me twenty minutes," he said.
"Twenty minutes?" another voice cut in over the channel. It wasn't Captain America's; it was lighter and quicker. "These blocks might not even exist in twenty minutes."
"Then let's keep them standing for twenty minutes." Lynn cut the connection.
He needed to concentrate.
All-Things Analysis took apart the retrovirus's gene-editing sequences, piece by piece.
The Cas9 protein's recognition site, the guide RNA's targeting sequence, the regulatory elements controlling the activation promoter—each layer unfolded in his mind, as clear as an engineering blueprint.
There was only one thing he needed to find: where the promoter's "lock" was.
Every genetic switch had a way to be turned off.
The problem was that Hydra's designers hadn't built in a way to shut it down. But that didn't mean no way existed. Nature's genetic regulatory systems always had redundant mechanisms.
All-Things Analysis ran at full speed.
The clock began to count down.
Twelve minutes passed.
The situation over the communications channel grew increasingly tense.
A Mutant more than two meters tall, covered in scales, broke through the first barricade on the left flank.
He overturned an armored vehicle. Three soldiers were injured and being dragged to the rear.
Captain America's shield slammed into the Mutant's chest and bounced back.
The Mutant staggered but didn't fall.
His regeneration was fast. The dent left by the shield smoothed out within seconds.
"Back there!" Captain America's voice came through again.
"Eight minutes left." Lynn's voice came over the channel, calm as could be.
Black Widow spoke over a nearby channel. "He said eight minutes, so it's eight minutes. Stop pushing."
The front line fell silent.
Lynn's brain processed information at a speed far beyond ordinary comprehension.
All-Things Analysis wasn't mere calculation—it gave him an almost instinctive understanding of biological molecules.
A bioinformatician would need a computer to simulate protein folding. Lynn could simply see the folded structure.
The fourteenth minute.
He found it.
Upstream of the promoter sequence was a "silencer" region—a regulatory element that normally suppressed the promoter's activity.
Hydra's virus had damaged the silencer while forcibly activating the promoter.
But the silencer's core binding site was still intact.
If he could synthesize a molecule that precisely fit that binding site, he could "lock" the activated gene again.
The mutation would stop, and the genetic changes that had already occurred would slowly reverse under the silencer's suppression.
He began designing the molecule's structure in his mind.
Before you continue