A long mahogany table bathed in obsidian serves as the center of the dimly lit room. The end of the table points towards a collection of surveillance feeds around New York.
The meeting is heated.
A slim woman with a voice sharp and talons raised with venomous fangs bared slams her hand on the table. Eyes flashing red and mind sounding with indignation.
"You have no shame! To suggest that Ethan Halloway, a man barely vetted, be entrusted with our operations… do you want Hydra gutted from the inside!"
A paunchy ginger man clad in burnt sage green leans back into his recliner. Calm with fingers steepled, blocking his nose and mouth from view.
He cocks his head to the spotlight.
"You mistake my prudence for shame, Viper. Paranoia is a disease. You of all people should know that. If we discard every asset we have on the field, we'll have no one left to lead.
"Spare me your lectures, Doctor. You've spent a lifetime puppeteering cowards and turncoats. Now you'd place one in our very council? The best thing you could do for Hydra now is drop dead, so at least we'll be free from your inane suggestions."
"It seems the name Viper is fitting. You've spent a lifetime drowning perfectly good assets in poison before they could ripen."
A woman's voice cuts across them with an icy overtone to match.
"Enough of this posturing. The issue isn't Halloway's bloodline. The issue is his loyalty. He hasn't proved it. Strucker is MIA like he always is and our finances are in disarray. We'd do good taking things with a grain of salt from now on."
"Finally, a shred of reason. Even Sinclair sees the risk."
"Don't twist my words. I said he must prove himself. He shouldn't just be able to rise up the ranks and hop over hoops just from you slander or Faustus's indulgence."
The bearded, fat man smirked.
"Spoken like a judge on a trial with no jury. And who decides what to do? Who decides what counts as loyalty? It's not as if something like this happened before…"
"We decide. HYDRA's will is not yours to twist with honeyed words. Every moment we hesitate, the saboteur tears deeper into our network."
"Then let's excise the saboteur at once. Begin with Halloway, cauterize before it infects."
"Or perhaps you're too eager to burn him because you fear what he might reveal about you?"
Viper rises half out of her chair, eyes blazing with fire.
"Careful, doctor. Your tricks are wasted here. My record speaks for itself."
"Indeed it does. An endless trail of bodies belonging to people loyal or not. If you ask me, you're just a rabid dog out to get some."
Sinclair's voice sliced through the tension, cracking like a whip.
"Enough! This pettiness is weakness. Bickering has no place here.. Hydra wasn't built on suspicion alone."
The argument spirals into confusion and jabs and insults again. Accusations sharper with hidden weapons in hand. The last person on the table, cloaked in shadow, chair to the wall, turns around to face the three.
"You disgrace yourselves. While you quarrel like starving hounds, our enemy grows bold. Halloway will be tested in time. The biggest thing on our agenda is the saboteur. They will be hunted."
A pause establishes itself on the table. The old man's wizened voice hardens, brooking no dissent.
"Deploy our INV-Insurgency assets. Release our paramilitary forces. Sweep the city. Get recon-protective details on key locations, like the vaults and the banks. Contact our sleeping beauties in the NYPD and the FBI. Get every civilian force we have on this priority. Anyone who disobeys, friend or foe, is to be disavowed and disposed of."
The three subordinates sound cold. Poisonous looks, yes, but none dare speak. The decision is final.
"Cut the rot from our ranks. Hail HYDRA."
A bone-chilling unison echoes through the room.
"HAIL HYDRA!"
—
Red Hook. Pier 17. Midnight.
The air smells of seafoam and muddled waste. New York really has to do something about the trash.
The rays of white light coming from the watchtower shine on my face every five seconds. I'm hidden behind and under cargo. I can't see the whole of the pier, only the shadowed alleys in front of me.
Deep Blue has me following its directions toward the entrance to the vault, but it becomes clear to me I'm not the only one here.
Military, around 17 people around me or more. They're gaining up on me. Someone without senses heightened like me might not notice. My vision, completely focused with no peripherals, notices bookmarks clad over shade. My hearing pickles up as it perceives clandestine breath under mounds of ruffling cloth, covering faces and necks.
The silence thickens. My ribs tighten like the air itself has chosen sides.
They move like ink spreading onto paper, polluting and mixing onto their environment.
As I take my last step towards the exit of an alley bathed in midnight black, they gang up on me. Knives and bolos in hand, prepared to die with me. Through their pouncing movements, I see four or five snipers trained on my position. Heavy caliber bullets might actually get through my Holtzmann shield.
Deep Blue, it's time. Activate Darth Grievous Mode.
My human form's blood vessels glow blue as from my wrist, nanomachines form crystalline lines across my body in an instant, covering the exact spots their blades hit me. A sudden outburst of energy came out of me as if magical in nature, making my assailants snigger. They seem to have experience with the supernatural.
Grunt.
I activated my Holtzmann shield. A shot from a gun would spark and flare off the field, but a knife pressed patiently forward could slide through as though the barrier was only mist. One of my best creations so far. Cockily, they dashed back and raised glowing guns to me.
Slowly but surely, they strode towards me with guns raised and shining bullets speeding to me. Until they slowed down the moment they hit my shield.
I could feel it thrumming around me, a second skin of invisible but observable force. I could also feel it slowly losing power. I may have an infinite energy source, but I don't have the equipment to burn through it as fast as I need it to.
Limbs sprout from my side and the outward scales of my shoulders, forming ten arms. From the hands of these arms, different cold weapons form.
A longsword.
A spear.
A battle-axe.
A saber.
A staff.
A glaive.
A great sword.
A two-pronged spear.
A halberd.
And a straight sword.
They were surprised, but not enough to throw them off. They activated artefacts of their own. Some necklaces flew, some guns transformed into spears, some bracelets into armors.
In all of them, they all shouted the same thing.
Hail Hydra.
They pounced on me again, quick to the pace.
Deep Blue's perception and cognition pulsed and whirred to the max, providing me with the matrixes I need to fight these Thule Society combatants.
Activate Panzer Kunst Matrix. Activate Zero-grav movement system.
Activate Tome of the Ten-Weaponed Demon Style. Load matrixes on each limb.
Activate Ganryu Style. Predict any and all possible movements.
The floodlights sweep, and so do my spears. Sea-wind slaps salt against steel.
The first soldier jumped above my spears and lunged towards me. My ten arms bloom outward like falling plum blossoms, weapons in hand. My shield protects me from the snipers above me.
Deep Blue, don't let me black out.
The shield flickers as the heavy caliber bullets slow and press closer and drop to a sudden thud.
A spear in my left hand thrusts into a soldier but he dodges, barely missing the heart, but pushing a hole through his shoulder.
My longsword cleaves into another's rifle, breaking both barrel and wrist. He brachiates towards me, blade in hand, as if enjoying the pain of all of his arm's joints being broken. The battleaxe arcs, slicing through throats, catching throat-red sprays against gray crates. With every death, the attackers shout in unison, voices like the cult of a chant.
Hail HYDRA! Hail HYDRA!
I pivot and glide, spinning with a machine's elegance and system. My Senju Musou, guiding me through every possible movement, is putting a drag on my brain's natural cognitive capabilities. To compensate, I disable my sense of taste, temperature, and smell.
My glaive slices down across a man's chest plate, nearly slicing through. My saber flashes and gleams, reflecting the light from the tier's watchtower, cutting the lines and straps of another's enchanted armor.
"You guys are just meat suits, huh?"
Bullet slam against my Holtzmann shield, slowly losing its ability to drop the bullets. The invisible field seems to get smaller with every second, as every bullet makes it closer to my heart.
Shield integrity at 19%. Recommend retreat.
Not yet, Deep Blue.
Two soldiers, necklaces blazing with eldritch glyphs, leap at me with manic-red eyes, fists glowing in red the same way. Their skin seems to show cracks slowly spreading across their bodies, light getting through.
Another shot from the snipers. My shield sputters. I need to prevent any of them from calling reinforcements.
Already done, sir.
A sniper round rips through my thigh.
"Is this all the Thule Society could muster? You'll have to do better than recycled fanatics…"
I'm running low on energy and oxygen and coolants. The remaining soldiers growl, activating bracelets that harden into orbs.
My legs buckle as my other arms move in unnatural ways. I rise again, blood pouring down my leg and eyes slowly glowing a sky blue.
Activate Zero-gravity, 100% allocation.
I leap, with sudden weightlessness. Time dilates. I am a storm of ten blades. The two-pronged spear pierces one skull,, The sword severs two carotids at once. The battleaxe hacks through those two at once, cracking ribs like kindling, and bleeding them dry like fruit.
The pier reeked of iron now, blood steaming faintly in the chill air, mixing with the brine of the Hudson.
The last one remaining is still standing, charging at me with a roar, with eyes that betray fear of certain death. All my limbs freeze but one, and my longsword comes to a slash, which he moves through with practiced efficiency.
His eyes betrayed him once again with a glimmer of hope, thinking he might get through this alive.
Deep Blue, activate Swallow Counter.
My blade coming up from below slices through his entire torso. The man gurgles, collapses. Through his last dying breath, he rasps, Hail Hydra…
Every artifact in their possession dissipated. Through their deaths, I burned through enough base energy to create magnetic forces, shooting bullets towards those four snipers. It isn't something I can rely on in battle, as the moving part itself takes a few too many seconds to do.
I stand amid the carnage, ten weapons dripping in blood and tears, not mine. My breath ragged and my thigh bleeding, I knelt and sat down against a shipping container.
The pier falls silent but for the lapping waves and the faint hum of Deep Blue, healing my leg and replenishing my energy reserves.
I pulled my weapons back into myself, the ten arms unraveling in a slow retreat until only two remained. The nanomachines hissed against my skin, cooling, their crystalline glow fading into dull scars across my arms. My Holtzmann flickered out completely, leaving me naked under the gaze of those searchlights.
The corpses twitched with residual magic.
Suppressive wards identified. Dismantling sequence engaged.
The artifacts beneath cracked, whining like glass under pressure, before snapping to dust. I forced my breath steady. The adrenaline comedown left my hands trembling, even through the artificial calm Deep Blue fed into my nervous system. My blood was still spilling from the leg wound, staining the wood beneath me black.
I killed a human for the first time today. It felt like nothing. No guilt, no acceptance. One minute, they're alive and moving and now their human experience ends because of me and that's it. I don't seem to feel any joy or pain or remorse. I think the fact that they said nothing but Hail Hydra over and over again, and that I killed them without a full sensory perception helped to disbar me from whatever I expect to feel when I kill someone.
The snipers above me were gone, whether killed by my ricochet trick or evacuated by handlers. That was the real problem. HYDRA never sent pawns without someone watching the board.
I staggered upright, dragging myself by the edge of a shipping crate. Beyond the pier, the water was black and endless, reflecting only shards of the city skyline.
A thought chilled me deeper than the wound. If this was just a holding team, what the hell is waiting inside the vault?
Healing matrix at 42%. Estimated mobility restored in 90 seconds. Warning: reinforcements detected inbound.
In the distance, the faint whine of rotor blades cut through the night air. HYDRA was already sending another wave.
I wiped my blade clean against the uniform of one of the dead. Their eyes still stared at me, glassy and wide, like zealots who died with the certainty of purpose. The pier creaked as I limped toward the vault's hidden entrance, the hush of the river accompanying every step.
The gates burst wide and the air changed. A hollow and subterranean breath poured out, heavy with the musk of dust and embalming fluid. I stepped inside, and for a moment, I thought I'd walked into a cathedral buried under the earth. The architecture was vast and ribbed like a stone ribcage, its vaults carved with an elegance that reminded me of temples, stripped of their devotion to a faith.
The sconces and torches along the walls flickered to life one by one, casting a trembling glow that reached into the dark. In their light, the vault unveiled itself.
Along one wall stood rows of Zola copies, their eyes closed, faces slack, not quite dead and not truly alive. Their features hung suspended in stillness, waiting some hand to flip the switch that would let them breathe. Their magnetic tape servo-boxes seemed to be frozen in time.
Opposite them, lecterns groaned under the weight of journals written by men who trekked through Antarctic gales and Tibetan passes. Notes of Hydra and Thule Society expeditions onto the unknowns of the continent of Antarctica all seemed to fail but with each failure came a ton of notes to review.
Higher shelves bore scroll cases marked with the word Wakanda. Nearer to the center, glass vitrines guarded prototypes of weapons.
In one corner sat a desk with iron-clasped ledgers. I leafed through them, and every page whispered names. Senators, bankers, oil men, industrialists. My boot scuffed across the floor, and coins shifted underfoot. Reichsmarks. Relics; each stamped with a sigil that still pulsed faintly a bloody red like embers refusing to die.
Deeper inside, the vault grew stranger. Rows of tanks gleamed with a pale, jaundiced glow. Inside floated brain-cubes, each cube filled with twitching encephalon tissue, still alive humming with memories.
Nearby, a relic sat in a velvet-lined case. The Red Skull's first mask, weathered but still heavy with menace.
On the wall above it hung an ancient HYDRA banner stiff with age.
Further on, I found grimoires bound in scales that seemed to ripple when touched by the light. Their pages crawled with undeciphered script. Marginal notes hinted at fragments of magic scrawled in the fevered shorthand of men who had stolen and never understood. They reeked of an age long before now. Titled Lemurian magic: hyborian age.
I limped deeper into that grand, cursed chamber. My breath turned slick and ragged.
The vault did not rest quiet. Somewhere in the dark recesses, machinery stirred. The panels along the Zola frames began to blink with faint green light.
The air thickened, humming low, and I tightened my grip around my weapon, knowing the vault had only begun to wake.