[A slightly original universe; some plot points and character settings differ from the original.]
[Tomato changed my multiple-harem tag. I won't say any more; those who know, know.]
[Marvel's grand stage awaits anyone with a dream!]
"Damn it, do you even understand what a human serum is?"
"Did the desert sandstorms dry out your brains, or are they stuffed with salad dressing?"
"You can't even get basic mixing right. How have you managed to stay alive this long?"
Luca Stark wore a poorly fitting white lab coat and held an empty test tube as he shouted at several terrorists in protective suits in front of him.
The terrorist researchers exchanged glances. None dared talk back; they just lowered their heads and stared at the workbench.
Behind the glass at the workbench was a sealed laboratory.
A test subject who had just breathed his last lay on a lab bed inside.
The poor bastard had originally been one of their own, but after making a mistake, he had been dragged here to serve as a guinea pig.
Just now, because the proportions of the liquids in the test tube were wrong, the guy had convulsed for two and a half minutes before going to meet his Allah.
What a bunch of hopeless idiots.
Luca rolled his eyes and casually tossed the test tube into the trash.
They couldn't even pass middle school chemistry, yet they dreamed of doing genetic engineering. It was utterly ridiculous.
"Report... the test subject's vital signs have disappeared," a subordinate reported nervously.
"I'm not blind, man. Even without looking at the screen, I could tell he was done for when he stopped squawking like a duck."
Luca leaned against the workbench with his arms folded, impatience written all over his face.
"Get someone to clean up in there. What, do you want to keep him around for Thanksgiving?"
"The air filtration system here is bad enough already. I don't want to smell roast meat on top of that."
Just as several subordinates scrambled to move the corpse, the lab's automatic door hissed.
The door was shoved open, and a bald man strode in with several heavily armed soldiers.
The man was a minor leader at the base and the person directly in charge of the lab.
A scar ran from the corner of his eye all the way down to his chin, giving him a fierce appearance.
"Luca Stark!"
The bald leader roared, making the glass in the lab tremble.
"Didn't you claim to be one of the world's top biologists? Aren't you the head of Stark Pharmaceuticals?"
"Why has it been two whole months, and you still can't figure out one little human serum?! Just what the hell have you been researching?!"
Faced with a beast on the verge of breathing fire, Luca chose to ignore him.
He shrugged unconcernedly, even taking the time to straighten his lab coat's collar.
"Man, do you have any idea what an experiment is? Science isn't as simple as taking a gun to a bank and calling it a day once you've filled your sack."
"Science needs rigor, it needs data, and most importantly, it needs plenty of test subjects and time. You think human serum is ketchup on a shelf, ready to squeeze out with a quick shake?"
Luca looked at him as if he were an idiot.
"If it were really that easy, the data you stole wouldn't be a pile of worthless papers that even you can't understand."
"If I weren't here generously helping you sort through those utterly illogical formulas, you'd still be staring blankly into microscopes."
The bald leader trembled with rage. He immediately drew the pistol at his waist and slammed it onto the table in front of him.
"I don't give a damn about science! My patience has run out."
"Listen, damn it, Stark, I'm giving you one last chance. Adjust your serum formula. In one hour, we'll conduct the final injection test."
"If the test subject dies again, if your serum still doesn't work..."
The bald leader stared hard at Luca, his eyes full of killing intent.
"Then you can join those pieces of trash at the bottom of the cliff. I'm sure you'll enjoy the view down there."
With that, the bald leader snorted, turned, and strode out of the lab with his soldiers.
Luca watched the door close, an infuriating grin still on his face as he muttered under his breath.
"What a nasty temper. You can tell at a glance he doesn't take care of himself. He's got an enlarged prostate from a hormonal imbalance. Sooner or later, he'll drop dead."
But the instant he turned around, a glint flashed in his eyes.
He let out a long sigh of relief inwardly.
His gamble had paid off.
Sure enough, the guy had advanced obsessive-compulsive disorder and a severe obsession with cleanliness.
Over the past two months, Luca had long since figured out the bald man's habits.
He immediately killed anyone he disliked or any piece of trash that had outlived its usefulness.
But he never killed them inside the base, because he didn't want to dirty the floor.
He always liked to have prisoners escorted to a bare cliff outside the base, shot in the head, then kicked into the bottomless abyss to dispose of the bodies and erase the evidence.
That was exactly what Luca wanted.
It was also his only way to leave this godforsaken place alive.
Luca turned around and opened the control screen in front of him.
His fingers flew over the keyboard, entering a string of code that only he could understand.
A hidden progress bar popped up on the screen.
A line of green text stood out above it.
[Compatibility: 98 percent.]
Looking at the nearly full progress bar, Luca's thoughts drifted back two months.
Damn it all.
He, Luca Stark, was not only one of the only two heirs to Stark Industries, but also Howard Stark's second child, Tony Stark's younger brother, the most popular playboy in the United States, and chairman of Stark Pharmaceuticals...
How had he ended up doing illegal work for someone in this godforsaken base?
It was all that bastard Tony's fault.
Just over a month ago, he had been in New York exploring the mysteries of human ergonomics with two Victoria's Secret models.
There had been chilled champagne on the table and a newly purchased limited-edition sports car in the underground garage.
Then Tony came to tell him he was going to the Middle East to demonstrate their newly developed Jericho Missile to the United States military.
Honestly, Luca had no interest in selling weapons.
The two brothers' talents lay in entirely different areas.
Tony was a genius in mechanics and physics, and he spent all day tinkering with chunks of metal that could blow people sky-high.
Luca, meanwhile, was a monster in the fields of biology and medicine.
He preferred studying the genetic code, as well as how to make humans live longer and grow stronger.
That didn't mean Tony knew nothing about biological science, or that Luca knew nothing about mechanical technology.
But each brother was more competitive than the other.
So Stark Industries was divided into two major divisions.
Tony handled technology and weapons, while Luca handled biomedicine.
They each did their own thing, but they were close enough to share a pair of pants.
Somewhere like the Middle East was hot and dry. Ordinarily, Luca would never have gone.
But Pepper and Obadiah had been driving him crazy lately.
Pepper chased him around with stacks of documents to sign every day, while Obadiah was always pulling rank as his elder and meddling in his private life.
Luca hated being guilt-tripped more than anything.
To get some peace and quiet, and to have a little fun in the Middle East while he was at it.
He slipped aboard Tony's private plane without telling Pepper or Obadiah.
If nothing unexpected happened, something unexpected was bound to happen.
Who would have thought they'd make it there just fine, only to be unable to get back?
After demonstrating the Jericho Missile, which blew an entire mountaintop flat, the brothers sat in a military Humvee, listening to rock music and drinking chilled whiskey.
Tony was even bragging to the soldiers in front that he had once slept with a cover girl.
The next second, boom!
The vehicle was blown over.
Luca couldn't even hold on to his glass. The blast threw him through the air, and his head struck the door, knocking him out cold.
When he woke up, he was surrounded by terrorists wearing headscarves and carrying AKs.
The terrorists must have been utterly bewildered at the time.
The job they had taken was supposed to be just to kidnap the weapons genius Tony Stark.
Who would have thought that when they arrived, they'd find a buy-one-get-one-free deal!!
Lying beside him was a guy who was even more handsome than Tony and also had the surname Stark!
The whole bunch laughed themselves silly.
One was Tony Stark, an expert in physics, technology, and weapons manufacturing; the other was Luca Stark, an expert in biotechnology and pharmaceutical research and development.
The two brothers were practically money trees of the technology world.
So hoods were pulled over their heads, and they were stuffed into a truck and taken to the base of a terrorist organization called Advanced Idea Mechanics.
For the first few days after their kidnapping, Luca and Tony were held together.
It was a dark, damp cave.
Tony had been hit in the chest by shrapnel from a bomb his own company had made. Fortunately, a balding doctor named Yinsen had saved him.
But the way he had saved him was crude: he had hung a battered battery on Tony's chest to hold the shrapnel near his heart in place.
When Luca saw Tony wake up, he immediately went over.
"Tony, that's quite a look you've got. Environmentalists are going to love you. You're a hybrid human now. I'll have to take a picture later and make it into an environmental awareness poster for Stark Industries."
Tony glared weakly at him.
"Shut up, Luca. You oxygen-wasting bastard, why didn't they blow your mouth off too?"
"If I didn't have a mouth, who'd snap you out of it, you egomaniac? Look around. These are all weapons our company made."
"Big brother, we've become the biggest arms supplier. It's just that our customers are terrorists who don't bathe."
The two of them chatted back and forth like that.
At first, the terrorists guarding the door couldn't understand them. Later, they got sick of listening.
The brothers never stopped running their mouths all day.
They complained about the cave's decor, then the terrorists' clothing choices, then made fun of their accents.
Finally, the terrorists couldn't take it anymore.
They found they couldn't work at all with the two Starks locked up together.
So they forced the iron door open and took Luca away.
Tony panicked and shouted.
"Hey! Where are you taking him? Leave him here! I'll die of boredom without him!"
Luca was taken to a high-tech laboratory hidden inside the mountain.
At first, the group really did want to use him as a guinea pig.
They showed Luca an incomplete set of biological data and demanded that he cooperate with the experiment.
The data these terrorists wanted him to study was pretty funny, too.
They had actually stolen it after killing a genius scientist from another country.
The data did have some merit, and its vision was extraordinarily ambitious.
It actually proposed making human cells absorb external free energy, thereby causing them to evolve on their own.
But as Luca saw it, the data contained only theory and was almost impossible to put into practice.
The third-rate researchers they had hired couldn't even understand the core formulas.
But Luca understood them.
Not only did he understand them, he also saw hope of staying alive in them.
To escape, merely cooperating with them wouldn't do. He needed power.
Luca's mind raced, and he instantly thought of a way to save himself. A crazy plan took shape in his mind.
He took over the workbench and pointed out more than a hundred fatal errors in their experimental procedure in just a few minutes.
He displayed a top-tier intellect that utterly outclassed everyone present.
The terrorists were all dumbstruck.
They immediately changed their minds.
A living genius was far more valuable than a dead test subject.
And so, Luca naturally took the position of head researcher.
Although there were armed guards at the door and he was still essentially a prisoner.
At least he had control of the laboratory.
For him, that was enough.
After gaining control, Luca began putting together a plan.
He was going to restart his father Howard's Super Soldier Program!!