Marvel Reborn: Gems Of Infinite Potential

Watching Natasha and Elektra "spar" in virtually painted on suits was truly one of life's little p.l.e.a.s.u.r.es. Given the amount of Vita Rays, Chi, bombarding this room, anything less than an immediately lethal hit was recoverable in short order, and so I got to watch two of the best hand to hand combatants alive fight all out for hours on end.

Natasha had been the more skilled when the two first started sparring, but Elektra had improved rapidly until, now, she seemed just a little bit better. That rapid improvement was actually the real reason that I was in the room now, and they had been beating the shit out of one another for the past eight hours. Exercising while being within a high Chi environment was inherently more effective simply because you tired slower and healed much faster, and the data even supported the hypothesis that learning in a Chi heavy environment was more effective, as the Chi just took what was already present and made it more.

Given how good it felt, most of the staff had started training in rooms like this, and so we had gathered quite a lot of data, enough that we could fairly accurately predict the degree of increased performance. Natasha and I were both on the more extreme end of the spectrum, being approximately three standard deviations above the average on a scale modeled off of the IQ scale, but Elektra had blown up the entire curve and was pushing well over five standard deviations off the average. If we were talking IQ, she would be as odd as someone with an IQ of at least 180, otherwise known as so far off the scale that it wasn't really effectively measurable.

So here I was sitting on the Astral Plane and trying to use my mystical senses to figure out just what was going on, my own experiments with Chi had lead to my creation of a spell that made it visible to my eyes, and once I cast it, I was floored.

Around Natasha, the Chi was moving like predicted, flowing into and out of her body at a steady rate with only the slightest bit of the neutral Chi being turned into Natasha's unique chi and remaining within her body. Elektra, in contrast, was a black hole in that all neutral Chi that came in contact with her went into her body and transformed into her own chi. With how much she had to have absorbed over the past month, she should have blown up, but instead, she seemed just fine.

'I wonder if there was more to that whole Black Sky thing than her just being convenient? She had no Chi training before this, barely even knew that it existed at all, so it can't be that. It seems like Stick is due for interrogation to find out just where he picked her up from.'

I kept one eye on the Chi flows while the match continued, but honestly found the spar more interesting. Eventually, it came to a close, and I returned to my body. Once I stood, Elektra turned to me. "Well, did you figure out what's going on with me?"

"The b.a.r.e bones. For some reason, you are like a black hole for Chi. Every drop of neutral Chi that came in contact with your own Chi was transformed into more of your own Chi. I don't actually know if you could suffer from a Chi overload, regardless of how much we bombarded you with. I'm not willing to try and find out, but I can tell you that if it did happen, it would be because your lifeforce became too much for your body to handle and not because of the conflict between the neutral Chi and your own Chi inside your body."

"Then why isn't she better than she is?" Natasha asked me before turning to Elektra. "Don't misunderstand me, you are phenomenally skilled, but we know that Chi can take the body to superhuman levels, and with as much Chi as you should have absorbed by now, you should simply be so far beyond me in physical abilities that you win with ease."

Elektra smiled. "Yeah, you might be a better fighter than I am still, but you aren't that much better. Any ideas, Octavian?"

"Nothing beyond spending more time meditating and trying to understand what is happening yourself. I mean, none of us are Chi masters, and pretty much everything we know is self taught and guesswork. We do know that you still heal pretty much any injury in a day or so, even if you remain outside a Chi room, so clearly, you have the potential for superhuman abilities, but I guess it might be something that you have to consciously harness. Maybe bodies have a Chi pool where the power sits until you call upon it and send it wherever." I shrugged. "No clue. This is all pretty much guesswork on my part."

After hesitating a moment, I continued, "Elektra, how do you feel about Stick?"

"Why?" she asked somewhat sharply.

"Because he is the one who found you wherever and decided to train you, and he is one of the Chaste's leaders. The Iron Fist, K'un-Lun, and the Hand are all tied up with Chi in a major way, and the Chaste probably have at least some ideas about it, given how long they have been fighting the Hand. So when I find out that one of the Chaste's leaders took in a young girl with an unknown past and trained her brutally from day one to be a weapon, and then find out that this girl is responding to Chi in a way far outside the norm, I wonder if this is all really coincidence or if something else is going on. And that makes me think long and hard about kidnapping Stick for a very thorough interrogation to find out just what he knows about all of this, but I'm not going to do something like that without your agreement, and so I ask, how you feel about him?" I explained, thinking about that whole Black Sky deal, dragon bones, and talk of destiny.

Elektra paced back and forth for a while. "I don't know, we'll talk about this later, but right now, I'm going to take a shower before we have to leave for the Black Thorn meeting. But you won't take any action against the Chaste or Stick without my agreement?"

"Of course not, ultimately, this is a curiosity for me. I want to know what is up with you, but unless something drastically changes, this is only about you, and so you have the lead on it. If you decide you want us to drop it, then it's dropped. If you decide that you want to go and kill all of the Chaste because Stick stole your juice box one day when you were eight, then I'll help you do that too. But you're right, we should get ready for the meeting. Let me know whenever you decide one way or the other."

I really didn't care all that much about the street level stuff. I wanted the Hand gone because it's five leaders were immortal chi users with centuries (or more) of experience and were one of the most powerful organizations on the planet, and arguably the most powerful in many respects. They were competition, the Chaste was nothing but a potential resource of some small use.

She gave a nod and left. Natasha glanced after her, looked at me, shrugged, and left to take her own shower. I started going through Tai-Chi katas in the Chi room as I thought through things until it was time for the meeting.

We were all in full armor. Mine was smooth and unrelieved black at the moment, while both Elektra's and Natasha's were almost mirror images of one another. Elektra's armor was done in blood red with black accents and on her helmet was the symbol she had chosen as her own - two sai knives crossed and imposed on a tablet that seemed to drip green blood, and with a detailed copy of the Earth at its center. Natasha's armor was black with blood red accents in the form of stylized spider legs, and on her helmet, she had the same tablet with the earth but a spider had its limbs around it and its head resting on top of it.

"Lose the insignia. No reason to give these people any more information than necessary. Black Thorn for this, not Covenant." With that comment, I made a hand gesture and on my c.h.e.s.t, over my heart, appeared the symbol I had chosen for the Circle of the Black Thorn. A circle with thirteen angled spikes coming off of it, the thorns, all done in black with a blood red border around it.

"Theatrics," Natasha said with a sigh as she shifted her own armor, her helmet was again empty of adornment, and over her heart rested the same symbol as on mine except that in the center of the circle was a blood red spider.

Elektra changed hers without comment, hers having two crossed sai knives in the center.

Once we were ready, I created a portal to another chamber. This one was a large, thirteen-sided room with walls of black metal, well-lit but without visible light sources. In the center of each wall was a door and in the center of the room was a thirteen sided table with a throne sitting behind each side. Each had a symbol emblazoned into it. I took my seat at the foot of the table, while Elektra sat in the one to my left and Natasha the one to my right. Then I concentrated and triggered the enchantments on ten of the thirteen doors, causing each one to open a portal to another location exactly on time.

Four women and six men walked through those portals and looked around even as the portals closed behind them.

"Your seats ladies and gentlemen," I said with a hand wave.

Wilson Fisk: the man who was rapidly taking over crime in New York City and would be known as the Kingpin.

O-Ren Ishii: the most powerful crime lord in Japan not affiliated with the Hand and with a burning hatred for Murakami of the Hand, after she watched him **** and murder her parents at the tender age of nine.

Teresa Mendoza: in three short years, she had gone from kept woman of a cartel courier to the drug queen of the southwestern US - and currently engaged in a brutal war with the Vargas Cartel after she put a bullet in the head of its founder last year.

John Chatham: he ran a small but very professional criminal organization that supplied the needs of Australia's most elite members of society and the Hand-affiliated organizations prevented him from expanding his operations unless he gained outside backing.

Jax Teller: President of the Sons of Anarchy motorcycle club, he had inherited leadership of a criminal enterprise both too large to be overlooked by the big players and too small to effectively fight them and so the survival of those he loved demanded his organization expand until it was secure.

Abraham Shapiro: he was the Don of the Jewish Mafia in Europe and had the rare trait of being one of the only European crime lords not under the thumb of Hydra or the Hand.

Reileen Kawahara: formerly of Hong Kong, she fled to Brazil at the age of twelve after Madam Gao killed her whole clan when her father refused to hand over her elder brother Takeshi as a sacrifice to the Crane Mother like tradition demanded. Fifteen years later she is one of the most powerful purveyors of vice in South America.

Dembe: the right hand of Raymond Reddington for nearly twenty years he has vowed revenge on HYDRA after they killed him and his daughter. While most of Reddington's network went its own way after his death, Dembe managed to secure many of its African operations and is now fighting a two front war against the HYDRA-backed Ten Rings and Sowande of the Hand.

Irina Derevko: a former KGB agent and one of the first successes of the Red Room, she was captured by HYDRA during WW2 and experimented on alongside Bucky Barnes, before ending up back in the hands of the Red Room when the war ended. When one of her missions resulted in her mind being freed from HYDRA's brainwashing, she went rogue and now hates them with a burning passion, even as she has built up a powerful criminal organization in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Jean-Paul Black: a street kid who had clawed his way up the Canadian underworld and now largely ran all of British Columbia.

Once all ten were seated I said, "As you have each shown up, I trust that you have agreed to the terms of our alliance?" I waited until I had received acknowledgments from all ten of them before continuing. "Good, then it is time to formally inaugurate the Circle of the Black Thorn."

With that, I tapped the table and the technology, and enchantments, hidden in its body activated. Before each of the thirteen spots, words seemed to appear cut into the table, and an indentation of a handprint likewise appeared before each spot.

"The terms, as agreed. Put your hand into the indentation if you agree to be bound by them. Oh, it will hurt," I said, before retracting the right glove of my suit and placing my hand on the spot before me. Natasha and Elektra followed moments later with their own spots.

One after the other, with varying degrees of hesitation, each of the others did the same until all thirteen hands were on the table, and then the enchantments went to work. The hands were locked in place as blood flowed out of them, filling in the words before each of us, before then meeting in the center of the table wherein created the symbol of the Black Thorn. As it worked, I could feel the burning on my c.h.e.s.t as the mystical tattoo bound me to the contract I had signed along with the others. Once it was done, the table released our hands and the words disappeared, leaving only the symbol behind in the center.

I smiled broadly, my face hidden behind my mask. I had just bound the loyalty of ten people who were well-positioned to take over most organized crime, the world over, and none of them even realized the truth. They all thought me bound by the terms of our contract just as they were; pity for them that I was the one that had worked the enchantments and the actual contract - as opposed to the one that they had seen visible before their eyes - included a little clause that let anyone of the Covenant ignore its terms as well.

With that out of the way, I tapped the table again, and before each of them appeared a smartphone. "Secure communications and computer hardware, as promised. You can find the full details in the included guide, but each of those phones is more powerful than any supercomputer on the public market, can communicate with one another from anywhere in the world without any detectable emissions, can only be accessed by you, and can be instantly destroyed by you with only a thought.

"With the signing of the contract, the doors I gave you will now also respond to your will. Merely touch the door and d.e.s.i.r.e a portal, and it will open the pathway here. Be warned, however, that anyone but us who tries to pass through will find nothing but normal doors."