Marvel: A New God's Reign

Chapter 22: A Gift of Transformation

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"A lion doesn't concern himself with the opinions of a sheep."- Tywin Lannister, (Game of Thrones)

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<(Atem POV)>

'It is quite deplorable that they are so sad after having to kill only a couple of such vile evil bastards but I guess I can understand their line of thought. Killing someone no matter how evil for the first time could really be quite traumatizing for people as young as them.' I thought to myself sarcastically as I observed thousands of metahumans going about their business in the streets of New Genosha while standing in the 'penthouse' of the Central Administrative building.

"If you are wondering about the excess population, we are actually starting to run out of real estate again. We at the moment have a population of about eight million but with the rate at which our metahuman citizens are precreating and we are accepting immigrants from other countries, we are projecting it to increase to more than sixteen million by the end of the next decade. The island is only the size of Haiti right now. However, we are actively working on increasing the island size by using the powers of certain gifted metahumans in conjunction with Krakoa's unique ability to grow resulting in us continuously expanding our borders." Zoya, the mother box appeared by my side and informed me on its own.

"Yeah but by how much? You yourself told me once that only about 0.5% of the world's population have dominant or easily detectable x-genes in them with another 2.5% carrying recessive or undetectable x-genes that have much lesser chances to get activated according to your scans. But, even at full capacity and expanding our island's boundaries by a huge margin within a short amount of time, we will still be unable to house so many active metahumans at once without messing up the world's ecological balance. So we need to think about housing solutions of a more... permanent kind." Atem replied to his trusty floating box.

"Yes, you are absolutely right in your observations Sir. And that's where the search for Ego as well as the preparation for your floating city in Nornheim comes in. We have already completed one of the projects. We can start migrating metahumans to the floating city in a controlled manner whenever you want it." Zoya chimed in.

"You are the perfect little secretary, aren't you? Good, I am glad we aren't facing any delays in the project or the plans. What about the multi-national academy program? Did we get permission for that or do we have to break a couple of laws by mind-controlling or blackmailing some important people to speed up the process?" I asked, half expecting to have to use the Cerebra to make the others agree with the project.

I normally almost never did that but the multinational Gifted Academy program could be extremely important in not only helping metahumans all over the world attain optimal safety and education but also would help me in establishing a center of power in every major country in the world. Because let's face it, kids or not, the really powerful metahuman children were not weaker than military-grade weapons of governments. Hell, some of them were even stronger than nuclear missiles.

So having command over a bunch of such loyal students all over the globe would be quite profitable for both me and the organization. That's why I was ready to use mind control and even the Cerebra to try to bring the project to reality despite my distaste for the methods.

"You don't have to do either of those. The Hellfire Club has begun to show its value. Supported by the financial might of the entire Meta Enterprises, it has been succeeding in arm-twisting the various government agencies of different countries to force them to permit the project. We haven't faced any major hurdles yet and according to my estimations, the chances of facing any big additional blocks aren't too big as well. Even the secret organizations that generally do not support us like the Ten Rings, the Hand, and Hydra aren't actively trying to derail our efforts too much for some reason, probably because they are underestimating the usefulness of the chain of schools." Zoya informed pride and smugness filling its voice at being able to provide its help to its master.