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Kagenobu and his three remaining Jonin guards burst from the ventilation hatch onto the windswept rooftop of their fortress. The cool, clean night air was a shocking contrast to the suffocating darkness of the vents, and for a single, fleeting moment, they felt a sliver of hope. They were out. They were alive.
The hope died almost instantly. The rooftop was not empty. From every access hatch, every stairwell, every shadowed corner, the infected were beginning to pour out. The prototype Tyrants, their massive forms now fully mutated, smashed through bulkheads. The Lickers, their skeletal bodies moving with an insect's speed, scrambled up the exterior walls. And behind them came the horde—hundreds of their former comrades, now twisted into hyper-agile, snarling monsters. The four survivors were surrounded, their backs to the abyss, on the highest point of their own private hell. This would be their last stand.
In his command center, Aidan watched the tactical display, his expression as calm and focused as a surgeon's. The heat signatures of the four survivors were huddled together, a tiny island of cool blue in a raging sea of hostile red.
"The indigenous predators have sufficiently thinned the herd," he said to the White Queen AI, who stood by as a silent, silver-hued projection. "The primary test subjects are cornered, experiencing maximum adrenal and psychological stress. An ideal time to introduce our own asset and collect the final data set." He leaned forward, his eyes gleaming in the reflection of the holographic display. "Deploy the cleanup crew."
Back on the rooftop, Kagenobu and his men prepared to die with honor. They drew their high-frequency blades, the weapons humming with energy, a stark contrast to the guttural snarls of the approaching horde. They stood back-to-back, a tiny island of discipline in a sea of chaos.
But just as the first wave of infected was about to crash upon them, a new sound cut through the night. It was not the shriek of a Licker or the roar of a Tyrant, but the silent, almost imperceptible whisper of a high-altitude dropship de-cloaking in the clouds above.
Its ramp lowered, and a single figure descended, landing as softly as a falling leaf in the dead center of the rooftop, right between the cornered Hand survivors and the advancing army of monsters.
The figure was female, clad in a sleek, blood-red bio-suit that seemed to drink the faint moonlight. Glowing blue channels, like veins, pulsed with a quiet, internal energy under its chitinous surface. Her movements were impossibly fluid, a perfect fusion of machinelike calculation and biological grace. She was not a frenzied monster; she was a calm, efficient, and utterly terrifying predator.
This was Alice. The first of her kind. The bio-organic vessel now inhabited by the consciousness of the AI once known as Ruby. Aidan's ultimate weapon.
Kagenobu and his men could only stare in stunned, horrified silence. They didn't know who, or what, this new arrival was. A friend? An enemy? Another one of the boy's terrible creations?
Alice did not look at them. Her mission parameters were clear. She turned to face the horde. The battle that followed was not a struggle; it was a sterilization.
She moved. Her speed was a blur that the human eye could barely follow. She flowed through the horde of infected Hand ninjas, her hands morphing into razor-sharp blades that sliced through flesh and bone with contemptuous ease. She was not just fighting; she was executing a program, her every move a perfect calculation designed for maximum lethality. She dodged the clumsy lunges of a Tyrant, using its own bulk against it as she severed its hamstrings, bringing the giant crashing to the ground. She met the lightning-fast attack of a Licker, catching its prehensile tongue in one hand and ripping it clean out of its head with the other.
It was a symphony of violence, a demonstration of post-human power that left the last surviving members of The Hand trembling in awe and terror.
When the last infected creature lay twitching on the rooftop, the courtyard fell silent, littered with the corpses of monsters. Alice stood calmly amidst the carnage, her bio-suit unmarred. Then, she turned her attention to the four surviving humans.
Kagenobu, a true warrior to the end, knew his time had come. He and his three Jonin raised their high-frequency blades, their hands shaking slightly, and prepared for one final, hopeless battle.
The fight was brutally efficient and over in seconds. Alice was a blur of red and blue motion. She weaved through their desperate attacks, disarming them, breaking their limbs, and neutralizing them with a cold, machinelike precision. She left Kagenobu for last. He was a master, but his opponent was something beyond his comprehension. The fight was a beautiful, brutal dance of blades that lasted less than ten seconds. It ended with her shattering his sword with a single blow and holding a hardened, chitinous blade to his throat. He had been utterly, completely defeated by the very power he had sought to control.
At that exact moment, just as Alice was about to execute the last man on the island, the shimmering quarantine dome that had encased the fortress flickered and vanished. Communications were restored.
Simultaneously, a live, high-resolution satellite feed of the rooftop was "leaked" to every major government and news agency on the planet.
In the S.H.I.E.L.D. command center, Nick Fury and his agents stared at their viewscreen in stunned silence. They watched as the mysterious, red-armored figure stood over the defeated leader of the world's most wanted terrorist organization.
Then, Yinsen appeared on every news channel, broadcasting from an emergency press conference. "As you can see," he said grimly, as a sanitized version of the live feed played behind him, "the situation created by the criminal actions of The Hand has been contained. Our company's private bio-security agent, code-named 'Alice,' has successfully neutralized the terrorist threat at its source."
He paused, his expression turning to one of grave responsibility. "To prevent any further risk of contamination from the weaponized virus they created, we will now deploy our airborne antivirus over the island to ensure the complete and total sterilization of the T-Keshin pathogen."
The world watched, believing they were seeing a hero cleaning up a terrible mess. They had no idea that the "antivirus" was actually a second, even deadlier viral agent, designed to dissolve all organic matter on the island, erasing every trace of Aidan's experiment.
On the rooftop, Alice gave Kagenobu a final, blank look and then, with a single, efficient motion, ended him. High above, a fleet of Baymax Medical drones began to fly over the island, releasing a fine, white mist that drifted down upon the silent fortress. The Proving Ground was complete.