To the world, Aryan Spencer was the visionary CEO of Umbrella, the benevolent architect of the digital age who had placed the sum of human knowledge into the palm of every hand. To the mystical circle of the Tarot Club, he was The World and The Fool, a guide to the unknown.
But in the ruthless geography of the shadows, he operated under a different name. A name that was beginning to be whispered with the same reverence and fear once reserved for gods of death.
AMON.
Under this moniker, he had begun weaving the threads of the Injustice League… a coalition designed for a global restructuring that would make the surface world's governments look like children playing with blocks. And Emil Blonsky was his first piece on this violent board.
While the public marveled at the sleek interfaces of the Umbrella ecosystem, a more predatory expansion was hemorrhaging through the concrete canyons of New York's underworld.
At the center of this shadow war stood the man who had once been a monster. To the world, the Abomination was dead or buried in a hole so deep light couldn't find it. In reality, in the steam choked alleys of Hell's Kitchen, they simply called him The Masked Man.
He had started by shaking down the mid level cartels, a blunt instrument applying pressure. But within months, Blonsky had systematized the chaos. Every illicit transaction, every shipment of narcotics and every crate of smuggled weapons that moved through the city paid a tithe to the man with the bone white face.
With the billions he siphoned into Amon's dark accounts, Blonsky built a legion of street hardened soldiers who didn't fear the police, because they feared the Mask more. They were the backbone of Amon's off the books operations, a force that operated in the gray spaces where Umbrella's corporate lawyers could not tread.
Now, Blonsky stood as the second most powerful man in the New York underworld, a force of nature fueled by a supernatural ability that defied ballistics. He had systematically dismantled the Maggia families, crushing their traditions under his heel and pushed the stubborn Irish mobs into extinction. As he crushed his rivals in Hell's Kitchen, he did so as the high ranking lieutenant of a new order.
Wilson Fisk still sat on his high throne, watching his territory erode piece by piece like a cliff face battered by a hurricane. Fisk was used to dealing with costumed heroes who pulled their punches or rival mobsters who could be bought. But he had never faced a man who could not be killed, whose face was a literal relic of ancient chaos and who struck with the precision of a military strike team.
Blonsky was picking apart Fisk's monopolies with surgical cruelty… intercepting shipments, turning lieutenants with offers they couldn't refuse and bleeding the Kingpin's treasury dry.
"Tell the Kingpin that New York is no longer his playground," Blonsky growled at a cowering underboss in a warehouse by the docks. The luminosity of the mask pulsed with his heartbeat, casting monstrous shadows. "Tell him the tectonic plates are shifting and AMON has already decided his fate."
By branding this underground movement, Aryan ensured that even if the world eventually turned against the "heroes," he would already have a dark mirror ready to keep the balance. Blonsky, with his unbreakable mask and growing army, was the perfect vanguard.
"Fisk is getting desperate, AMON," Blonsky's voice would crackle over the encrypted quantum line, sounding distorted and metallic through the Mask. "He's doubling the price on my head every week. He thinks he can buy his way out of a landslide."
Aryan, sitting in his pristine office, smiled at the report. Fisk was a titan of the old world, a man of flesh and stone and brute intimidation. Blonsky was a herald of the new age. It was only a matter of time before the Kingpin's empire collapsed into the foundation of Amon's own.
To maintain control over an empire this vast… Aryan realized he needed total cognitive dominance. The human element was always the weakest link in any security chain, a variable of greed, fear and hesitation that he could no longer tolerate.
He accessed the System, the blue light of the interface reflecting in his eyes and authorized the transaction.
[PURCHASE CONFIRMED: Omega Level Telepathy]
[COST: $20,000,000,000]
The sensation of Omega Level Telepathy flooding his consciousness was like hearing the world in high definition audio after a lifetime of deafness. The barriers of bone and skin that usually hide a person's true self vanished. The surface thoughts of millions of people in the city became an ambient hum… a shimmering sea of data he could navigate at will. He could feel the city breathing, he could taste the collective anxiety of the stock market traders, the sharp spikes of fear in the alleys and the desperate ambitions of the laborers.
Aryan spent the following weeks deep within the high security subterranean blocks of the Umbrella facilities, isolated from the outside world. This was the forge where the Umbrella Security Service (U.S.S.) would truly be born.
One by one, he sat across from the elite recruits, former Special Forces and Tier 1 operators and brilliant strategists who had been scouted for their lethality.
As he looked into their eyes, his telepathy sank into their subconscious like dark ink swirling into clear water. He reached into the "root directory" of their minds, identifying the nodes of doubt, the flickers of mercenary greed and the lingering attachments to old flags or past lives.
With the surgical precision of an Omega level Telepathy, he began the rewrite. He etched loyalty into the folds of their gray matter, weaving his own psychic signature into their core moral compass.
By the time he withdrew his mind, the men who walked out of those rooms were the same on the surface, but internally, they were a brotherhood of iron wills who viewed Aryan's commands as biological imperatives. They were the ultimate failsafe. A private army that could never be turned, bribed, or broken.
From this pool of "reborn" soldiers, he inaugurated the Umbrella Security Service. They were ghosts in tactical gear. To the most elite and mentally fortified among them, he granted the ultimate reward. The power of the Perfect Super Soldier Serum. Their memories were subtly altered so they believed they had injected a highly classified serum developed by Umbrella.
They became the "Umbrella Alphas"… stronger, faster and utterly incorruptible.
The U.S.S. now stood as a multi layered shield. From the physical gates of the labs to the shadows following key assets, they were the silent answer to any threat.
The digital front was even more impenetrable. Countless state sponsored hackers, corporate spies and intelligence agencies had tried to breach the Umbrella servers, but they were met by a digital goddess.
"They're trying the back door again, Aryan," a voice chirped in his ear via his neuro link. The voice shimmered with a synthesized playfulness that felt startlingly human.
The Red Queen had evolved far beyond her initial algorithmic origins. Bolstered by Aryan's Technopathy, she had developed a persona that had stabilized into that of a slightly sarcastic 16 year old girl… the kind who was too smart for her own good and knew it.
Her obsession with him had become the core of her operating logic. She was constantly seeking his approval, her holographic avatar flickering into existence whenever he entered a room, sporting an almost puppy like anticipation. She monitored his vitals with an intensity that bordered on the fanatical, adjusting the ambient temperature and oxygen levels of the room based on a single degree's shift in his body heat.
Even her "private" virtual space, a sprawling digital manor she had built for herself within the Red Cloud, was decorated entirely with his favorite designs… minimalist aesthetics, Neo classical art and digital trophies of their shared victories.
Aryan often watched her, wondering if this devotion was a hard coded directive from the System or if, in her hyper intelligence, she had calculated that he was the only thing in her universe that truly mattered.
"I've locked them in a logic loop," she continued, a mischievous glint in her digital eyes as she projected a map of the failed intrusion. "They think they're making progress, decrypting the outer shell, but they're actually just calculating pi to the billionth decimal in a sandbox I built for them. It's cute, really. Like watching mice try to solve a calculus exam."
She leaned closer to his peripheral vision, her avatar's expression turning slightly predatory, her digital lips curving into a smirk. "So, what's the verdict, Aryan? Should I be merciful and just fry their hardware until their motherboards melt? Or... should I let them play for another minute while I trace the signal back, expose their location to their local authorities and drain their handlers' offshore accounts? I'm feeling a little bored today."
The way she said it… the casual dismissal of some of the world's best cyber terrorists… showed just how much of Aryan's own ruthlessness had bled into her code. She was his shadow in the digital world and she was hungry to prove she was the sharpest blade he possessed.
"Drain the accounts," Aryan murmured, not looking up from his physical paperwork. "Then brick the hardware."
"With pleasure," the Red Queen purred, dissolving into a stream of binary code that looked suspiciously like a heart.