"Easy there, Hulk. I want to be your friend."
After a round of "friendly communication," Zod finally used his psychic power to calm the Hulk—just enough to keep him from being frightened into submission. A cowed Hulk wouldn't grow stronger with rage, and Zod had no intention of beating the potential out of him.
Once soothed, the Hulk drifted into unconsciousness and reverted back into Bruce Banner.
Zod carried Bruce Banner to the Blade Tech Industries base, where Dr. Connors immediately took over and began drawing blood.
"Careful. His whole body is saturated with high-density gamma radiation."
Zod reminded Connors, not wanting him to end up with radiation sickness. Beasthood hadn't granted Connors immunity to long-term gamma exposure.
Connors nodded, pulled on a protective suit, and dove straight into the research. If they could create a Hulk Serum from this…
Zod could raise an entire army of Hulks.
Just the thought made his pulse quicken. A Hulk army—capable of bulldozing the universe. The great empires? The Black Order? They'd crumble like wet paper.
And then—time stopped.
Connors froze mid-motion, as if someone had paused reality. A figure draped in a bright orange cloak stepped into the stillness.
"Stop. You've already altered the future far too severely."
The Sorcerer Supreme, the Ancient One, addressed Zod calmly.
She hadn't intervened when it came to the War Machine program, secondary kryptonite, the Fireseed Reactor, Vitamin Infinity, or even the Beast-Soldier experiments. But the moment Hulk research began, the future twisted in chaos. She could no longer see past this point—her foresight had gone completely dark.
"Who are you?"
Of course Zod recognized her, but he couldn't admit it. He had to pretend this was their first meeting.
"I am a mage, Mr. Zod. Please abandon your plans to study the Hulk."
Her polished, gleaming bald head reflected the stillness of the frozen lab.
"No problem."
Zod nodded. The situation was simple: he couldn't win against her. So the Hulk Army project died on the spot.
The Ancient One didn't seem surprised. Zod gave off the air of someone who knew when to back down. With a brief apology, she vanished.
Time resumed.
Connors blinked, suddenly realizing the Gamma Blood Sample and Bruce Banner had vanished.
"What… happened, boss?"
He asked, bewildered, just in time to see the irritation settle on Zod's face.
"Nothing. Keep working on the Beast-Soldier project."
Zod disappeared in an instant.
He didn't ask to train at Kamar-Taj. Marvel's magic always demanded a price—chanting spells flawlessly wasn't enough to use them. Power paid for through sacrifice often cost users their souls in the end. Even Kamar-Taj, channeling the Trinity of Vishanti, required a price. Only the amount differed. And Kryptonians being "weak to magic" was just a meme—hardly gospel truth.
If he couldn't research the Hulk… he could research the Red Hulk. All it took was irradiating General Ross. Once the Red Hulk template existed, he could study that instead. Sooner or later, something would bear fruit.
But that was secondary.
For now, Zod slipped into Tony Stark's home. The Black Queen AI blanketed JARVIS' sensors in silence while Zod scanned the architectural model of the Stark Industrial Compound—and extracted the particle structure of the new element.
"Incredible."
Returning home, Zod dove into research. Krypton's periodic table differed vastly from Earth's, though some elements overlapped. Still, even he had never encountered this "new element." It was hard to imagine how Howard Stark had discovered it.
Once the particle structure was known, synthesis became far simpler.
By bombarding natural radioactive elements with alpha rays—then combining the results in an accelerator—one could, in theory, create the new element.
In essence, this new element was an isotope of the Tesseract's energy. Howard likely discovered it by analyzing the molecular structure of the Cube's power. Otherwise, Earth's primitive technology could never have found an element not naturally occurring in the universe.
Ironically, the least scientific part was the process of creating it.
Everyone knew that—
When particles collide and shatter, sometimes the fragments recombine into a new atomic nucleus. If the nucleus is heavy and stable enough, a new element is born.
But in truth, new elements rarely stabilize. Most exist for less than a billionth of a second before decaying. Given that instability, storing them the way Tony Stark did in his arc reactor was basically impossible. In the movies, moving them at near lightspeed made even less sense.
Two things in the original plot were utterly insane:
First, Stark could never stand in the same room as an operating particle accelerator. He'd be fried by the radiation.
Second, particle beams never all travel in one direction after a head-on collision.
Imagine two cars smashing into each other. Do all the parts fly to one side? Or do they scatter everywhere? Head-on impacts scatter debris in all directions.
Yet in the movie, when Stark collided two particle streams, everything conveniently fired in one direction. Violating conservation of momentum—a principle humanity had used for four centuries.
If Stark had used magnets to focus the streams, Zod might have let it slide. But he did it with a wrench.
From a scientific standpoint, synthesizing new elements this way was impossible. His equipment, his energy output—both were laughably insufficient. Real labs needed multiple accelerators and industrial-level power supplies.
Then there was the matter of the "new element" itself. It should belong at the far end of the periodic table—those uncharted elements with numbers too high to exist stably. Stark's new element had more protons than those, meaning it should have been constantly decaying, releasing lethal radiation—gamma, beta, neutron, everything.
And Stark made it bare-faced in goggles?
That was suicide.
Unless… one interpreted it differently.
Perhaps Stark was simply storing colossal amounts of energy in that triangular core—like a battery. The beams excited the material into a metastable energized state, storing 10ⁿ joules of energy. Then it functioned as a power source, same as when his suits recharged in Iron Man 3.
If so, then the "new element" might actually be an isotope or stable ionic form capable of holding vast quantities of energy after high-energy bombardment. Hard to say what it really was—but theoretically, that interpretation held together better than the film did.
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