31 **Chapter 31**

As I waited for Maya to complete the final prep work before Chan Ho Yin would become the first human to experience Extremis, I looked down at the lab from the observation booth and thought about all the work that had gone into this.

At its base, Extremis was nothing less than one of the most horrifically lethal bioweapons ever created. The basic idea that Maya had had was to genetically engineer a form of cancer so that instead of harming the body it would rebuild the body along the provided outline, and in that undertaking, one of the problems she had encountered was that the cancer didn't spread throughout the bodies cells fast enough. Being the mad scientist that she was, Maya had decided that the solution was to modify a virus known as Torch Fever to act as a carrier. Given that Torch Fever caused anyone who caught it, and any biological samples taken from them after they had caught it, to literally self immolate over a period of three days as every single cell in their body kept increasing in temperature until nothing but ash remained - I was fairly confident that this is where the Phoenix had entered the equation.

Regardless, Maya had succeeded in using Torch Fever as a vector to infect every cell in the body with the engineered cancer virtually simultaneously and had even managed to modify the cancer enough with DNA taken from various extremophiles so that the cells would use the energy produced by the Fever to power its own work. That was Extremis at its heart, and it was invariably lethal as the energy produced overwhelmed even the ability of the cancer that was effectively constantly rebuilding the body to consume.

Scorch offered a solution to the burning issue as it, first, greatly increased the bodies ability to absorb heat and, secondly, the mutation caused the body to naturally radiate the energy as necessary to maintain homeostasis. As the bodies temperature rose, the Scorch mutation would cause that same excess heat to be dumped into the surrounding environment. And given the truly insane level of energy that could be stored in the mutated blood platelets, exceeding the bodies limitations to self regulate heat in that manner was virtually impossible even for Extremis. When you factored in the fact that the mutation also caused those platelets to be constantly expelled through the bodies waste systems and recreated, it became effectively impossible for an overload to occur.

But all that Extremis provided in terms of superhuman ability was incredibly rapid and complete regeneration, while this would result in some degree of enhanced ability as a side effect it was quite limited. How that regeneration was achieved, however, also made it the perfect vector for integrating other genetic modifications into the body. Essentially, if you could produce a complete DNA model then you could use Extremis to modify someone to that model. That is where Erskine's Super Soldier Serum came in. With the computer support and models we had available, we could easily take an individuals initial DNA map and integrate all of those alterations that Erskine had drawn from across all of human history into a new, stable, individualized DNA map and then it was just a matter of modifying the Extremis to work to that modified blueprint as it rebuilt the body.

Now here we were, Chan Ho Yin had just become the first human to have been injected with Extremis with any expectation that he would survive the experience.

"AAARRRRRRRRGHHHHH!!!" came over the microphones as he screamed, his body seeming to glow with a hellish red light, until barely a minute later he became the heart of a giant firestorm so hot that it appeared white and the flames liquefied the entire room down to the vibranium laced underlayer. Then the fire seemed to retreat back into his body, gone as if it had never existed as Chan stood up from the floor with a look of wonder on his face.

A moment later great pillars of fire emerged from both of his hands, before taking the form of twin dragons that then started to dance through the air.

"This is AMAZING! I've never felt so alive, so powerful," he exclaimed.

Of course, then came the testing. Strength, speed, endurance, agility, memory, sensory, and more. After two weeks of the testing seeming to show an unmitigated success, it was time to see if we had truly succeeded and the procedure could be generalized.

It turns out that injecting Extremis straight into a baseline human body was a bad idea, out of a hundred test subjects one managed to survive the experience. The other 99 seemed to have been overwhelmed by the energy before Extremis could modify them enough to manage/survive it. This wasn't wholly unexpected, indeed this was the exact fear that had led to us not using Extremis on Chan until after we were sure we could replicate his mutation.

The second batch of test subjects were first injected with modified Logan cells to write the Scorch modifications into their DNA. They ran high fevers and were bedridden for a week but all survived the DNA rewrite and the subsequent Extremis injections. With that success achieved it was time to start perfecting the process and finding the limits on the Extremis enhancements.

Improving the Logan phase proved relatively easy when you combined that injection with a mainline of liquid Life the whole process went from a week long experience to a few hours on your back as the body used the neutral Chi to more rapidly integrate the changes. Making the Extremis injection phase less fiery was another matter as it seemed to be far more reliant on the mindset and control of the individual being enhanced.

Testing the limits on the enhanced had shown a few unexpected synergies and effects. For one, they no longer needed to eat or breath. Extremis was pretty much constantly rebuilding the body using the energy drawn from the Phoenix Force and it had very little concern for things like raw materials or oxygen. Sustained exposure to hard vacuum was debilitating, although not lethal, as the subject's blood boiled away even while being constantly healed. Any physical damage that left the body even grossly intact was likewise rapidly healed, the one exception to that was if the brain was substantially damaged. The brain seemed to regulate Extremis in a way that we didn't really understand and so, when it was significantly damaged, the power draw could nigh instantly exceed even the ability of the Scorch modifications to regulate - causing the body to self immolate until nothing was left (and turning the atmosphere to plasma with the expected results for the surrounding environment).

Chopping off the head was also lethal, although that took a blade wide enough to fully separate the two parts of the body as anything less would result in the cut being healed even as the blade was passing through the body. Once the head was removed the body, again, immediately self immolated while the head did so some minutes later as even Extremis couldn't rebuild the whole body from the neck down fast enough to stabilize things before brain death occurred.

One of the easier ways to kill someone enhanced with Extremis was actually to bombard them with radiation. The Scorch mutation provided nigh total immunity to radiation as the energy was absorbed and stored in the platelets but if you dumped in enough energy then you could cause the platelets to overload and the body would again self immolate (as it seemed to do whenever an Extremis enhanced individual did die).

In the end, though, anti-material rifles to the head were what we decided constituted a standard procedure for killing those individuals.

With the destruction and ability testing out of the way, it was time to move onto trying to integrate the Wolverine enhancements. Using Extremis on someone so enhanced was lethal as the metal came free from the bones when they were initially rebuilt and yet thanks to the Vibranium's ability to absorb energy it could not be vaporized even with the extreme levels of energy present in the body during the initial Extremis rebuild. In the end, you inevitably ended up with a latticework of Vibranium spread randomly throughout the body and brain, which was both incredibly painful and inherently lethal.

Figuring out how to apply the procedure to someone who was already enhanced with Extremis had taken all of February but we had eventually managed it by removing the titanium and replacing it as the bonding interface between the Vibranium and the bone with Adamantium. As the Weapon X program had proven, that metal could also bind to bone quite well but we hadn't used it before because the mild radioactivity of the metal that resulted from the gamma radiation exposure required to produce it was invariably lethal to the human body. With Extremis taking care of that little issue the Adamantium was now viable in the role and so it was used. Integrating the new and improved nanites into the skeletal structure was also significantly different as our old method, using Pym Particles to shrink a robot down to the appropriate scale and having it literally walk/swim/float through the body to carry out the work, wasn't viable when Extremis would just instantly incinerate the bots. Instead, we had produced what were essentially hollow tentacles made of Adamantium/Vibranium nanites that would simply force their way through the various bones from the outside, weaving the pathway throughout the bones for the Wolverine nanites to fill, injecting those nanites via the hollow interior, and then pulling back the tentacles. When Extremis healed the bone it would cause it to bond to the Adamantium, which was in turn bonded to the Vibranium inside it, which in turn protected the various electronics, computers, Arc Reactors, and other assorted bits and pieces that made up Wolverine 3.0.

Now here we were, the full Covenant gathered on the first of March to discuss the successful completion of phase one Extremis and one plan moving forward.