10. The Traces of the World

It has been 3 months since my new group of special agents joined me. I still had a watchful eye on them, but I wasn't interfering with their personal lives either.

It was hard not to.

See, when you have women of all ethnicities, ages, moods and styles, working for you and only you, while wearing sexy, tight clothes, it takes a lot of control not to watch them in the shower.

It's in that moment that I know how Tony Stark feels when he's surrounded by women 9/10 at the very least. Money brings happiness yes, only those who don't know how to use it are not happy.

The problem is, too much money is also a problem and Stark is a good example to use. News has come that the billionaire philanthropist, (what I find the title ridiculous), has been kidnapped and his whereabouts are unknown.

I put some of my widows to look after the guy with the shiny chest. Looping the image every hour while the kidnappers watched them on camera.

"Melina, do you think breaking in and impersonating one of them would be dangerous for any of your girls? Let me rephrase, would it be life threatening for any of your girls?" I look at the head of the scientific department and leader of the widows.

Not all of them stayed, many of them couldn't, because they were still children, literally. At the base, there were nearly 2,000 trained widows and 700 newly kidnapped children.

Of that number, I have trained 700 widows, while all the others have decided to move on with their lives. Many of them would help the children to return to their parents, if they were still alive, if not, I would bring them back and leave them in the orphanage in my country.

As for Dreykov, he died 15 days ago, after my mistake. I was, calmly training human transmutation. A dangerous branch, for whom it is transmuted. Then, while trying to turn him into a 3-headed hellhound, I noticed that his heart couldn't pump enough blood.

I tried incompetently to enlarge the heart, the problem is, I did it the wrong way. He had two options for doing this, through pure magic, or through the addition of matter.

The second is nothing more than, for example, transmuting the earth into a muscle and adding that muscle to the heart. To no surprise, I made the heart explode using the second method.

I added the muscle, but it wasn't the right one, and while I was doing the fusion, the heart couldn't take the pressure exerted and exploded. So Dreykov died.

Anyway.

Like any smart person who knows the plot, I started buying Stark Industries stock. Reason one, thwart Obadiah and make money, second reason, thwart Fury and make money.

My idea of thwarting Fury is based on the fact that he was actively buying what stock he could, this would increase the income his Shield would receive, and help put his rushed projects on a good path.

He was in it because of Pierce, who was now in a pretty shaky financial situation, as he owed a lot of people, including a certain terrorist group called the 10 Rings.

Once I got to 7%, I didn't buy any more shares, not because I didn't want to, but because I couldn't. They were all bought by Obadiah, Fury, and some who still had hope kept their shares.

Not to mention that Tony Stark himself held almost 40%. Which made him the majority shareholder. Obadiah 22%, Fury 15%, and me 7%. The remainder were scattering among the few 0,something of a few others.

But I still kept Ingrid, one of the widows, on the lookout for new opportunities. I could make these opportunities appear, but I was too lazy to do so.

I don't deny.

Another important thing was my airline, which started its work. Impressive new jets, quieter, safer and more comfortable flying internationally.

I should have been on the first flight, but again, let people who can't fly have that privilege. I gave my ministers round-trip tickets to the US as a gift.

My planes were causing a sensation, firstly because it was the first step of Latveria receiving tourists from all over the world. Second, because Boing and AirBus were cutting a double to not lose their power.

Some routes were, how can I say, incompatible with my jets, as they were larger than normal, in terms of width, and some runways were too short. (Yes, I kept running instead of switching to vertical climbs.)

Runway distances weren't an issue, as my planes reached insane speeds with little running space, and had a landing speed nearly 30% slower than other planes.

As for width, well, it could be fixed, but if I did that, it would very likely put me in a situation where I would corner the market, and that would be bad in many ways.

Not counting, how many people would lose their jobs with my arrival? How many more would lose if my company destroyed the other two in the market? I don't want that weight on my conscience.

But that's not all bad, I would need to hire people to maintain my planes, and as much as I would like robots to do it, I wouldn't let that happen.

Second, people want to see others working for their security, that's what comforts them, so that's what I would give them. Of course, ISA and AERIS would be watching and diagnosing whenever an inspection was done each time.

It doesn't matter if it was on take off or landing, they always had inspections to make sure everything was ok, and that was a printed norm in my company. Which was very popular with the people.