Five weeks later. Abandoned castle in Transylvania.
Five weeks later, after the council, SHIELD's covert pressure crushes several Hydra cabals. Safehouses in Berlin and Buenos Aires are raided, sleeper agents in the Senate are dragged into the light, and their financial arteries are clogged. Hydra, once invisible, bleeds in the open.
The underground chamber seemed to be containing tension so thick you could cut it with a knife. It was more of a tomb than a meeting place. Black marble walls lined the circular space, as vast as the Roman Coliseum, only underground. Streaked with veins of redstone ore, flickering with the transient light of iron braziers like fireflies in the wind. A dome-like depression lies in the center, gleaming with the symbol of Hydra.
Four figures sat across its circumference.
An old man was the first to speak. Age was carved deep into his face yet his body seemed to mimic that of a mountain cliff perfectly, armored with steel and advanced technology.
"Hydra is bleeding. Our main sources of funds in the Western Hemisphere is failing and the Swiss is fucking us sideways. Politicians once in our grasp now crawl to Shield like rats telling. Faustus and Sinclair and others are dead. Our own best sold out like cattle."
Viper's eyes narrowed as flickers of calculative thoughts betray her calm eyes. One of the rare days she's not a cunt, as someone else in the room thinks.
"You say sold out, but by whom? This reeks of something from inside."
A creature, ever-wriggling, ever-abominable leaned onto the spotlight, splitting into multiple tones at once. "Whispers in the void tell of phantoms in the dark. A shadow with no face."
"Are you retarded, Hive? No one would dare stab Hydra in the back without something to obscure who they were."
A man whose presence radiated and coiled around him broke his silence throughout the meeting. His mask gapes open for his mouth slowly.
"We hunt phantoms by their footprints. But what do we do when we're fighting a ghost? Many of the Thule Society's offshoots are slowly dying off. Our contracts linked to our sources outside of the Western Hemisphere are bleeding dry. I agree with Viper. It does reek."
Kraken's voice shot out.
"Who do we have in mind, then?"
"My bet's on someone from the Thule Society. You never know what those clowns are up to. Their numbers have been thinning lately as well. Baron Blood's my pick if that's where we're going." said Viper with a smirk to adorn her green lips.
"I'm mostly active in the East but my subordinates notice that all the politicians that have sold us out seem to be connected with people akin to the World Security Council. The name that keeps popping up on my end is Gideon Malick. After all, he has the motive and the means:
Hydra rejected his upbringing, and he's bound to have made enemies along the way of rising up the World Security Council. He's also our forefront against Shield, and those pricks have been silent for a while." Kraken dictated as he held down his treasured blade.
"Though I am a new addition, I ask of you all to not reject my thoughts. I believe wholeheartedly that it's Ethan Halloway."
"That… makes sense," said Viper, "but if you're going to accuse someone, you do know you have to say a bit more than that, right?"
"His background is too clean, we don't know what he wants, and he's someone no one outside New York has ever met. Yet he has access to so much of our information well, and he's also parading around the fact that he's Strucker's student or something like that."
"... the loyal soldier. Too loyal it seems."
The Hive hissed in agreement. "Halloway's file is too perfect. We have nothing on him. He slips through our shadows as if he knows them intimately. Perhaps because he forged his way here."
"We also have no way of knowing if he's actually telling the truth about his upbringing. Strucker's still MIA, off to God-knows-where," said the woman with the green lips.
Kraken's gnarled hand clenched on the table.
"Do not mistake suspicion for certainty. But if he is the hand, the dagger in our back, then we are already rotting from within."
Silence fell thick and suffocating. In that silence, the weight of betrayal pressed down harder and harder.
Finally, Gorgon's voice cut through.
"Then the path is clear. We test them. All three. Blood, Malick, Halloway. We will know which one draws our blood. And when we know, there will be no trial. Only death."
—-
With every step I take in this decaying host, I feel lethargic, drowsy. I feel like those human addicts, wanting to get their 'fix', chasing for something more, chasing for a high they reached in the past knowing they can never feel that same high again.
I am Hive.
Despite being the highlight of Hydra experimentation over the past century, I am treated like dirt. As a being borne of lower things than the ground that which they stand on. Despite being as dedicated and as capable as the others for the cause.
For Hydra.
But after today, not anymore…
The chambers' gate opened with a tailwind rushing into me, announcing the arrival of my soon-to-be corroborant. A thunderstrike came with the wind and shone on his face for a second.
Baron Blood entered, crimson robes dragging across the floor like a funeral procession. His mask gleamed beneath the torchlight… expressionless but heavy with disdain.
"You requested me," Blood said.
"And then accused me of being a traitor. Bold, even for a worm in borrowed skin."
I could feel my face twisting into a thousand miniature scrunched frowning mouths before reforming again. My connection to this body's centers of cognition is failing me, it seems.
"Boldness is a currency we respect, don't we? To clarify, I didn't accuse you of anything. But the others do."
"They whisper of cultists stabbing Hydra's spine from the shadows. They will pin it on you if you do not act."
HIs posture stiffened and came to a halt, but pride seemed to prevail behind the still of his being. He assumed a diction above himself and ranted:
"I am heir to a covenant older than their pathetic councils. My followers have carved their devotion into the marrow of history! How dare they! To think me disloyal-"
"-is convenient," I interrupted. "Convenient for them. They despise what they cannot control. You and I… are alike in this way. Genius minds, yet slaves to the house we helped build."
It seems I still have control over this host left, as the disdain I felt comparing myself to this lowly mongrel stayed hidden.
He seemed to study me in silence. His breathing slowed then with a low chuckle, he said, "Go on, abomination."
My tentacles winced at the sight of his face and at the diction of his voice and at the smell of his breath and everything about him.
"We prove our worth through power. Let the others argue. You and I, however, we can deliver salvation."
"What do you mean?"
"The Thule Society has a penchant for keeping things secret from its sister-self, Hydra. Shuma-Gorath. Drumm. Leviathan…"
The mention of the eldritch gods and the buried hatchets of the society seemed to pique his interest.
Blood's head tilted slightly. The name alone carried a gravity that could break lesser men. "You would unleash those? The Thule Society guarded those rites for centuries. Even my predecessors feared them."
"Fear," I said, "is what chains you. But summon the Ur-Lord, and Hydra's chains will shatter. You will no longer be the accused, but the savior.
And I will be more than their monster."
Silence lingered, heavy and oppressive, before Blood let out a slow hiss. "Perhaps you are right. Perhaps we should remind Hydra what loyalty looks like."
The days that came from this went like a blur. We sent orders through secret channels, coded messages in the papers. We sent crimson seals pressed against parchment across Romania and Hungary. The forgotten ruins of Bavaria's Thule Society offshoots left their hidden chambers and prisons and left their exile. Sorcerers, scholars, and zealots crawled out of hiding like insects drawn to blood.
Within a day, the castle became a living, breathing mass of paper. Tables seemed to beg for mercy as scrolls and grimoires from all over Eastern Europe sat upon. Candles burned with an unholy blue, and the people it served wrote with an unholy speed. Drawing from demons below, they pushed the limits of what could be called human.
Notable sorcerers set up shop across the numerous halls and towers of the castle. They would split themselves into two upon arrival. One would sleep when the other did not.
Baron Blood stood at the center of it all. Black ink sprawled across his forearms, lips perpetually muttering innovations and chants. He was in a way, finally crowned with purpose.
—-
SYLVIA POV
I slipped through the chaos under the guise of a foreign mage. The robes were weighty and they dragged me down. The incense and the sweat couldn't distract me from how much this scene looks like it came from a horror movie.
Every corridor I passed I marked in memory. The walls were lined with freshly dried blood forming arches and sigils and symbols. Fury would need every scrap I could gather.
I didn't know this search would be the last I'd do. I pushed the door at midnight. The air inside was heavy, sweet with iron. Candles guttered against symbols carved into the walls. At first I thought he was praying, but no… he was writing, frantically, in salt and blood. Runes spread across yellow plates and amber rusted steel. His pale hands shook as if the act itself consumed him.
The man Baron Blood, as I remember was a Hydra operative that died in the seventies. How is he alive?
"You shouldn't be here," Baron Blood muttered without looking up. His voice was dry like dust ground to sound.
My pistol was already in my hand, steady even as my pulse climbed. "You don't even understand what's happening right now. Step away."
Slowly, he turned. Candlelight kissed the ridges of his face and emaciated skeleton, carved from bone.
"You think Hydra commands me? No. Hydra fears me. They brought me back because they had no choice. And now, they will remember who leads." His fangs glistened, sharp as knives.
At that moment, I connected the dots.
He raised a blade wet with sacrifice. The steel hummed with a resonance I felt in my teeth.
"You're going to kill Hydra," I said, forcing steel into my voice. "You're going to kill everyone."
His laugh was jagged, cracked. "Then at least they'll never forget my name."
He lunged. Undead speed turned the chamber into a blur. Bullets shot out from my muscle reflex as I bit on a suicide pill bound to blow out this guy with me.
The blade punched into my side. I gasped, the world tilting, heat pouring down my ribs as I fell against the altar.
The circle drank in my blood like it had been waiting for me. I smiled one last time as my throat glowed and radiated a ghostly blue hue.
Quickly, he raised his hand to my face, as the last thing I would ever see.
"The ritual is fed," he whispered. His voice shook with ecstasy. "Now… now it begins."
Darkness folded over me before I could curse him.
If only I tasted his lips once before any of this happened…
—-
MC POV
The dossier came in a plain envelope. Nothing like the last ones, elaborate and showy and entertaining. Courierred through the same dad drop me and Sylvia's been using for months. But this one's different.
The envelope burned itself then revealed the Shield insignia staring back at me. '
"Contact compromised," it read, the rest of the page scrambled. My throat tightened from an illusory force. Again I scanned, desperate for quality. In the gaps of the broken text, I recognized fragments of her words: Hydra… kill… everyone… forgive me.
Her last transmission.
The agent who met me at the café later that night slid another folder across the table. He didn't meet my eyes, didn't need to. "She died in the field. The last signal put her in Transylvania. Lots and lots of Thule Society members spotted near the area the last few days. They never come out though.
"She got intel out before the end. It's in there."
I opened the folder containing her handwriting. Pictures she took from bio-engineered contact lenses, sketches of runes that would scramble the lenses when she would see them. THere were lists of Hydra codenames circled in red with new ones in there too.
All the proof of a protocol between a society member named John Falsworth and someone else redacted. She'd been close. Too close.
They asked me to file my last report, my last meeting with Sylvia. The words tangled in my chest.
We had sat on a rooftop two weeks ago, sharing a bottle of cheap coffee. Last time I ever saw her.
She seemed to believe I'm stuck to this line of work. She thought that I tricked Strucker at first as an operative of some splinter cell from MI7. Or at least that's what she would put in our files.
"One day we'll get out of this, Halloway," she'd said. "We'll live like people, not ghosts."
I almost told her I wanted that with her. But I didn't. I never gave her the words.
Now there was no "one day." Just this.
I bit my lip at the realization it's my fault. If I hadn't pushed as fast as I did, they wouldn't have gotten desperate.
Her blood had been their offering. Her blood is on my hands.
I closed the dossier and stared at the city lights flickering outside. Deep Blue was quick to the chase, already generating the chemicals in my brain to let go of her for the moment.
The agent across from me shifted, waiting. I gave him nothing.
"This ends now," I muttered to myself, not to him. He didn't need to understand. None of them did.
I gathered the papers and the dossier and left the place. Sylvia's blood demands my abandonment of any hesitation. Sylvia's blood demanded it.