Chapter 1149: A Reseacher’s Special Brand of “Torture”
Selina found that odd. “His items don’t seem… Wait, wait, it seems they might be useful to us?”
Luke winked at her and said, “Haven’t you always been saying that something feels missing when you’re out on an ‘a.s.signment’?”
They were naturally talking about how Selina complained that her attack methods were too simple when she was out on her “private job.”
Now, with Bent’s inventions, New York’s nightlife would definitely be a lot more interesting.
Luke took out his fake phone and gave an order online to a certain sh.e.l.l company.
At that moment, Bent was driving his shabby car home with a dejected expression.
He couldn’t afford to live in New York, nor on this side of the Hudson River in New Jersey. After several months of unemployment, he could only stay at his mother’s place in Secaucus, New Jersey for the time being.
It wasn’t unusual for unemployed middle-aged people to go home and eat their 70-year-old mother’s cooking.
Of course, whether or not she was willing was another matter.
Bent’s mother wasn’t too unhappy about him losing his job, but she was very dissatisfied with how he had never even looked for a girlfriend.
Thinking about how not only didn’t he make any money this time, he would still be despised by his mother for not having a girlfriend, Bent felt that his days were dark.
It was a small thing to not have a girlfriend, but what if he ran out of money for research?
It was already good enough that his mother gave him enough of her pension for him to live on; he couldn’t ask for more.
Did he really have to find a job as a researcher, follow the arrangements of those dumb*ss higher-ups and forever carry out boring research? Bent fell into despair.
Even when his phone suddenly rang, he only glanced at it. When he saw that it was an unknown number, he was uninterested in picking up.
Was someone calling to buy his inventions? That was impossible.
Since yesterday, apart from one phone call from his mother, it was either someone selling something or a wrong number.
But the unknown number was persistent, and rang seven or eight times.
Bent stepped on the brake angrily and picked up the call. “d.a.m.n it. I’m not buying insurance, condoms, bank products, cheap phones, or whatever. I’m so poor I have to eat sh*t. Do you want to eat it too? I’ll send you a few kilograms when it comes out to fill the mouths of you d*mn salespeople!”
There was a dead silence on the other end. The other party probably hadn’t expected Bent to be so moody.
A few seconds later, a polite voice rang out. “h.e.l.lo, is this Mr. Bent Bennett?”
After venting his anger, Bent was breathing heavily. “B*stard, I don’t want a credit card either. I’m bankrupt now!”
The voice on the other end was still polite and formulaic. “It seems that you need a job, right?”
Bent was stunned. “A job? I didn’t submit a resume.”
The person on the other end of the line laughed. “It’s fine. Work which comes knocking on your door is always a good thing, Mr. Bennett.”
Just like that, Bent sat in the car and stayed on the line for half an hour.
As the conversation went on, his expression got better and better.
In the end, he hung up and couldn’t be any more excited. He couldn’t help but rush out of the car and raise his hands to the sky. “Hahahaha, I have a job! I have money!”
A luxury car drove past him, and the girl in the car looked at him curiously. “Mom, what’s wrong with him?”
The lady snorted. “It’s fine. It’s just another lunatic.”
In the meantime, Luke looked at the text message from the lawyer whom the sh.e.l.l company had hired. He turned around with a smile. “I bought out the inventions for half a million. His annual salary will be 200,000, plus 5% from any patents. He’s signed on for 50 years. Satisfied?”
Selina thought for a moment. “Not bad, but isn’t 50 years too long?”
Luke shrugged. “Why else did he stipulate a 10 million penalty fee? He’s not really an idiot. He just likes to play with technology more. We don’t expect his inventions to make money.”
Selina said, “Then can’t we just buy his current technology? He still wants to sell it, right?”
Luke said, “No one in the Department of Defense likes this guy, and he has very little resources. However, if I give him a research budget of one to ten million a year, do you think he won’t be able to come up with some new and interesting tech?”
After thinking about it, Selina had to agree with him.
What Luke didn’t say was that the long-term investment was for Selina.
She wasn’t someone who killed indiscriminately.
Whether she was a detective or a vigilante, the only type of person she would kill without hesitation was a sc.u.mbag like Kilgrave.
Luke didn’t plan for her to change her habit.
Everybody had the right to be themselves. He couldn’t think that Selina was wrong just because she wasn’t as straightforward as he was.
Without the system, he might’ve made a similar choice.
But Luke had always felt that letting certain people live was also a form of punishment, provided that they didn’t live too comfortably.
And Bent’s little toys were very good in this respect.
With some of them, the longer their effects lasted, the better.
For example, bigshots who couldn’t stop farting for a week would lose all dignity.
By the same logic, the itching powder and cramping oil wouldn’t kill anyone, but could make it basically impossible for a person to get any work done.
It would be especially hard for gang bigshots to look formidable and intimidate their subordinates.
Thinking about how there would be New York legends in the future of bigshots who farted, cramped or itched, Luke was full of antic.i.p.ation.
There was a story from his previous life that he always remembered: My neighbor’s brother had always been a school tyrant, and no one dared defy him. One day, he was fighting, and took out from his pocket the magical girl transformation rod which his sister played with…
Clearly, the best policy was to torture a man’s heart.
Two days later, Luke and Selina were finally released from patrol duty.
Except for the attack at the opening ceremony, everything went smoothly at the expo.
Even though more than 2,000 people had been stuffed into the detention center which Stark Industries had just donated to the police department, it still had to be said that this had been a successful, peaceful, and productive expo.
Luke was also roused from the joy of obtaining Tony and Ivan’s new abilities, and he refocused on Nikki and Monica’s abilities.
Neither Elementary Muscle Control nor Elementary Imitation were particularly strong.
But on the same person, the two abilities played off each other very well.
Take Nikki and Monica, for example. An ordinary person with a combo of these two abilities could easily kill three to five pairs of Nikki and Monica.
Elementary Muscle Control was the hardware, and Elementary Imitation was the software.
Elementary Muscle Control was a combat technique which one had to learn and hone themself.
Elementary Imitation couldn’t be fully utilized when it was limited by a person’s physique.
Combining both, on the other hand, was combining strength and technique, and could create close-range combat ability that was close to Luke’s level.