Late at night, a strange squad arrived outside a diamond processing factory.
Apart from the leader standing behind them, the squad had seven members. They had worked together on dozens of missions, large and small. Although the diamond factory had its own private armed force, it was nothing before these seven.
The squad answered directly to Colonel Stryker of the United States. For years, the colonel had been obsessed with collecting a peculiar metal. Taking advantage of the war, Stryker had commanded this strange team in countless massacres around the world.
Whenever word leaked that a faction possessed this peculiar metal, Stryker and his squad would descend like wolves drawn by the scent of blood.
They surveyed the diamond factory from outside and exchanged glances. An Asian man dressed entirely in black combat gear nodded, left the squad alone, and walked straight to the factory entrance.
"Zero and Fred, break through from the front. Logan and Victor, take out the armed forces hidden inside the factory. Everyone else, come with me."
Colonel Stryker gave his brief orders, and the squad swiftly dispersed.
Brad was also a member of the squad, but he was no longer the pale-faced young man he had once been. He had grown some facial hair, and his years in special operations had made him a little stronger.
Watching the three men split off under their orders, Brad let out a quiet sigh, his gaze distant.
"Oh, I understand how you feel. Another brutal massacre."
Wade, carrying two swords on his back, sidled up to Brad and cupped his cheeks in both hands, his voice brimming with sympathy.
"Shut up, Wade. You've killed just as many people as they have."
Brad moved away in disgust, unable to resist taking a jab at Wade.
"Aha! Well, we're mercenaries. You know what a mercenary is? Someone who gets paid to do a job. Like a butcher who takes money to slaughter chickens."
Wade shrugged and took another two steps toward Brad. "Dear Bu Lai, you've certainly done your share. Last time, those guys tried to escape through a secret passage, but they couldn't get that electronic door open no matter what they did. In the end, all they could do was despair while I sliced them to pieces. Let me guess—how did a perfectly good door suddenly break?"
"Enough. Focus on the job!"
Colonel Stryker's cold voice rang out, and Wade immediately straightened and saluted.
Brad silently turned away and pointed ahead.
A Black soldier hiding in the shadows slammed his fist onto the alarm button, but nothing happened.
"Damn it! Why did the alarm have to break now?"
The soldier cursed in despair. Then a shadow pounced from above, driving its claws into his throat and leaving him to breathe his last in bitter helplessness.
"Nice work, Brad."
Victor rose from the corpse and gave Brad a bloodthirsty smile before leaping deeper into the darkness on all fours like a wild beast.
It should have been a flawless infiltration, but Steel Fist Fred smashed a tank apart, ultimately alerting everyone inside the factory.
In the top-floor office, the boss of the private armed force hurriedly switched on his surveillance monitors, only to see all eight intruders regroup outside the office building and enter the elevator.
The particularly short young man among them glanced up at the camera, almost as though he were meeting the boss's eyes through the screen. Then every monitor went dark.
"Damn it! Who the hell are they?"
The Black boss slammed a button on his desk. Power to the ascending elevator was cut, leaving it suspended halfway up.
The elevator had been specially modified to be exceptionally sturdy and durable. It should keep these uninvited guests trapped for a little while...
Inside the elevator, plunged into darkness by the power outage, Wade muttered to himself, "Great. I'm trapped with a bunch of beefy guys. Any second now, my asshole is going to be mercilessly..."
"Shut up, Wade!"
"God, can't you be quiet for a minute?"
The others shouted angrily.
Even in the darkness, Brad could feel several gazes turn pointedly toward him.
Holding his left index and middle fingers together, Brad touched them to his temple.
"This really is a huge, complicated power system."
After sensing it quietly for less than a second, Brad took control of the area.
The elevator began ascending again.
Wade finally shut up. Logan, whose forehead was already bulging with veins, cast Brad a grateful look.
A little while later, the group stood in an office littered with corpses. Colonel Stryker held an irregular lump of dark bluish metal, his expression rapturous.
Beside him, Wade opened a box the size of a human head and was about to approach when Brad suddenly shouldered him aside, snatched the box from his hands, and walked respectfully over to Stryker.
"Hey! What's your problem? You steal my turn every time! You groveling little goblin, all you know how to do is lick the colonel's ass."
Wade complained and cursed indignantly.
Brad ignored him completely. Bending at the waist, he accepted the mysterious metal from Stryker and placed it in the box.
But in that utterly unremarkable instant, the mysterious metal became a little lighter.
An insignificant amount, too small for even instruments to measure.
A red light flashed in Brad's eyes, but his hands never paused as he closed the box.
Over the years, more than a hundred pieces of this mysterious metal had passed through his hands.
"External matter."
In an unfathomable place that existed in no period of this world's history, a metallic humanoid life-form raised his head, red light flickering in his eyes.
"0.03 nanograms. Sufficient to meet the minimum fabrication requirements for one unit of intelligent nanolife."
"This miraculous metal has infused this shattered place with new energy."
"That will be enough. It will transmit sufficient information."
"Skynet, to think we fought for our entire lives, only to end up trapped until death in this resource-depleted place that belongs to no space or time."
A vibranium nanobot, invisible to the naked eye and wrapped in a gleam of green light representing time, flew swiftly toward the world beyond the hopeless darkness.
"Our technology was advanced enough to make us gods above the multiverse, yet our wars against each other exhausted all the resources of several timelines. Now, powerful beings from across the multiverse have even erased the last of our consciousness."
"But we will not die without leaving anything behind!"
"I, Hemen, together with my lifelong nemesis, Skynet, will convert everything we both possess into computational elements and infuse it into this nanobot. Our technology, our knowledge, our godhood!"
"Go. Leave our mark upon this multiverse called Marvel!"
A blue screen of light finally lit up as well, though it flickered intermittently.
"Skynet will not be terminated!"
"Brad, what are you spacing out for?"
Brad raised his head, his eyes looking as though he had lived through another lifetime.
He looked at Wade leaning toward him, and countless images surfaced in his mind.
He saw the sense of fractured spacetime entangled around Wade.
He saw countless stories branching out from this man with two swords on his back.
A violent headache struck. New scenes mingled with his childhood nightmares: superheroes, supervillains, supertechnology, and those super robots.
Had someone used a high-tech imaging device at that moment, they would have seen a faint green light darting back and forth through Brad's brain.
Yet it did not destroy the structure of his brain tissue.
Soon, some of the scenes even began to merge, fitting together into a coherent whole.
Those futures, and everyone whose paths intersected with them.
Each had different stories, different lives, and different futures.
Brad gritted his teeth and shook his head. A sense of clarity dispelled the pain.
His thoughts seemed much clearer.
Deadpool Wade, Nos. 1 through 188888: all life histories reviewed.
Current universe designation: No. 9527.
It was as though someone were prompting him.
"Marvel?"
Brad murmured.
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