NAMELESS SHIELD ANALYST POV
"Man, I gotta admit, this isn't the way I thought HYDRA was going to go down."
"Yeah, man. Me too. You'd think the fight would finish in a world war or something like that. Not a random guy just cutting all of its heads at once. You gotta give props to the guy, something like this takes a lot of effort."
Thousands of damning files and incriminating records on assassinations made by key members over the years, drained accounts related to numerous High European politicians, candidates for the World Security council revealed to be HYDRA members.
All released to intelligence agencies worldwide in one day.
Complete with a video of the guy behind it.
Ethan Halloway.
"Alright guys, let's take this information with a grain of salt. We can't just blindly trust information from outside sources willy-nilly." Our commanding officer announced to the room, raising his pointer to the canvas behind him, motioning to start the presentation.
The projector hummed. Every face in the briefing room turned toward the screen.
A video of a man in his early twenties, dressed in blue, looking starved and thirsty and malnutritioned. The zombie's eyes sunken, sleepless, but burning with conviction.
"I am Ethan Halloway."
Someone in the back of the room muttered, "He doesn't look like much."
The officer ignored the remark and gestured to the transcript scrolling beside the video: dates, names, accounts, codes. Everything checked against real-world operations the agency had buried or denied.
Ethan's image leaned forward, eyes unblinking.
"My dearest friend and accomplice, Sylvia Gestalt, was murdered in Transylvania a few days ago. I now realize I've been playing too easy. I've infiltrated HYDRA as their vice-leader, second only to the head supreme, MIA agent Baron Strucker. He's nigh-immortal and one of the greatest copies of the super-soldier, associated with high-tier individuals over the last century. He's been known to deal with the Hand, the Fist, the World Security Council, numerous cults in Slavic territory.
He was born in 1889, becoming one of Hitler's top agents, then taking over the Red Skull's command after becoming the head of the Thule Society, a secret organization devoted to the pursuit of control and longevity. If you still haven't realized, Red Skull's command was called HYDRA."
"HYDRA pretends to be eternal. Cut off one head, two grow back. But what happens when every head starts devouring the other? That's what I've done. You've been fighting the wrong war while they rotted from the inside.
I'm the reason why SHIELD has managed to crack down on these cultists in the hundreds these past few weeks. And I'm going to be the reason why SHIELD takes down HYDRA."
The room shifted in uneasy silence. Everyone knew what this meant: HYDRA wasn't merely weakened. It was exposed, humiliated, stripped naked on the global stage.
Ethan's final words in the video came low, almost whispered, but the microphone caught every syllable.
"Believe me, or don't. It won't change the fact that I am the reason they are falling. And I will finish it."
The screen cut to black.
The officer tapped his pointer against the board, visibly unsettled.
"Now the question is… do we let him finish it? Or do we get in his way?"
—-
NAMELESS JOURNALIST POV
The files arrived without warning. Dead drop cases like this happen all the time with wanna-be politicians and serial killers and Unabombers. But this one was special.
The case itself was special. It was a coffee bean crate that got dropped onto our porch one day. The janitor got curious and tried to pry it open after a few days of no one claiming it.
The crate was filled to the brim with 10tb hard drives, all containing a digital avalanche of names, numbers, transfers, and criminal records.
At first, no one wanted to believe it. Thousands of documents dropped into the laps of intelligence agencies across the world, accusing powerful men and women being something far worse than corrupt: complicit members of a shadow organization that has controlled every aspect of politic, technological progress, ethics, morals, belief, faith, and human learning for the past 200 years or possibly more.
The world was sent into an uproar the moment gov leakers got to work. The US's every form of media being polluted with theories as to the origin of this info-dump. Russian high schoolers creating cross-platform multilingual websites containing the full organized online repository of that same crate.
Japanese officials being imprisoned leading to a thorough upheaval of their government. Major CCCP enforcers and subordinates being exposed led to a practical revolution of their youths, tens of thousands of fed-up young people trying to fight against a shadow organization and a government that never cared about its people. That same kind of revolutionary movement led to an awakening in many parts of the world, with movements sprouting up from the ground in the Philippines, Nepal, Venezuela and Papua New Guinea.
And at the center of it all stands one name: Ethan Halloway. A pale young man, barely into his twenties, who appeared in a video claiming responsibility for exposing Hydra. "I am Ethan Halloway," he says, his voice thin but steady. He doesn't look like a hero. He doesn't look like a villain either. He looks like someone who has seen too much and decided he cannot stay silent.
Skeptics warn us to treat the information carefully. Maybe Halloway is lying, maybe Hydra is just a ghost story with new clothes. But the details are too precise.
The rot is real.
I opened a new document and began to type.
"Power has always demanded two things of its keepers: secrecy and inevitability. The leaked files suggest that the ones who claim to serve the public gave themselves to an order that thrives on both.
For decades, HYDRA, a shadow organization, has woven itself into the bloodstream of nations. It was not content with surviving the war. It became the war. The one to end all wars."
I paused. That was the truth of it, wasn't it? It had shed the swastika like a snake sheds skin, slid its tendrils into parliaments and boardrooms. It didn't matter whether the faces were left, right, nationalist, globalist. The same hands tugged the strings, and the puppets danced.
Scrolling through another file, I stopped on a familiar name; a European minister who had once stood beside me in Brussels, assuring reporters that his party had "nothing to hide." He smiled as he said it. That same smile now sat beneath a HYDRA seal on a personnel report.
I typed again.
"Maybe we thought fascism could be bombed out of existence. Maybe we thought the Nuremberg trials had drawn a final curtain. But the truth is uglier. We didn't beat them in 1945. We just let them trade uniforms for suits."
I could almost hear my editor groan at the line, too bitter and too pessimist.
But I wasn't writing for him. I was writing for the world that would read this tomorrow, the world that needed to understand what had been allowed to fester in its name.
The final paragraph took shape slowly, deliberate keystrokes echoing like a verdict:
"Today, the mask has slipped. The question is not whether HYDRA exists. The question is whether we, the citizens who entrusted power to these names, will allow ourselves to pretend ignorance again. History has always belonged to those who dare to write it. Let this time, at least, be different."
This was about who had been pulling the strings all along.
And this time, someone had finally cut the strings loose.
—-
VIPER POV
Myriads of loyal-to-the-cause fanatics sprawl about before me on some unknown chamber on some unknown island offering respite to those that died in action.
"Today, we stand on the graves of our forefathers! We stand because of their sacrifice!
Now, my subjects, this is what we must do. Strike with all our power. Give every ounce of strength to win victory before the end of the year.
It is with reluctance that I bring this subject up again.
You are the life of HYDRA, my people! You are the iron men of the undying desire to live! To survive and to conquer all that sits under the sun!
But look to the lives you lead beyond this island, inhabited by unwilling sheep fattened by the freedoms of the world we wish to destroy. They live soft lives, their blood is thin and their souls are hollow. But we are different!
We are the chosen remnants of our ancestors whittled and chosen for our talents and minds. Death does not frighten us- it crowns us!
Every drop of Hydra blood spilled from the now on is not a loss, but an offering to a future no coward will inherit! Where the truly strong will thrive! Where the nobles of the new world shall rule!
You are the true heroes who will repulse the enemy when you are called upon to do so.
I believe it will be a quick war, that there will be few losses. But if losses there must be, then let us remember the Latin phrase which must have come to the lips of many a Roman when he stood in battle in a foreign land:
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
What a glory it is to die for our land!"
The hall shook with their fists slamming against the tables, their voices joining as one guttural roar: "Hail HYDRA!" A thousand eyes glistened with fever, with hope, with the kind of hunger that only comes when you show the starving a vision of meat.
I smiled, and they mistook it for pride. It wasn't pride. It was contempt.
Look at them groveling for direction, begging for a leash to wear proudly around their throats. These men and women, killers and traitors all, wanted nothing more than someone to tell them their lives still meant something.
Sheep in wolves' clothing, too afraid of the world outside to face it without me holding their hands.
Good. That makes them perfect.
Despite their notion that they chose me, I had given them no choice. In a time of crisis, someone has to take charge, and that someone is me. Tonight, HYDRA bends its knees not to SHIELD, not to Strucker, not to the past, but to me!
As I walked behind the elevated stage platform, and in the flicker of candlelight, I did the same thing I commanded them to. I look at the world outside this hall. Beckoning those willful men and women to take control and kill it and put it out of its misery.
Because without those to take control and to define for themselves what is good and what is bad, it will die slowly in the slow pollution and consumption of truly wasteful ideas and nascent conceptions of the futures of man.
I let the silence linger, their cheers dying into a reverent hush.
—-
NAMELESS HYDRA INFANTRY
An audio log noted Ryukyu Islands - Classified Hydra Channel
"This is 785th Battalion member Shimazaki Takumi… field log encode. I don't know who'll hear this but I have to put it somewhere before I lose my mind."
The Baron… Baron von Strucker has returned.
But not the man we knew. Not the patient tactician, not the silver tongue from an older time. He has become a beast, wild in frenzy and forged by flame.
He came to us, appearing in a beacon of light under the waters behind the island. He rose from the depths with a boom that seemed to break the sound barrier, carrying the water from behind him and landing on the rocky shore breaking and breaking it like putty. The sea fell from him in sheets, his landing cracked the shore as if the earth was clay.
He was starving and the world was just one great meal.
He wasn't human. His face, disfigured like the descriptions of him, seemed human. His arms, legs, torso human. But when he spoke, he spoke like a thousand plagues and pestilences beneath his voice.
When we had him docile and when we announced ourselves as his loyal vassals, loyal to HYDRA.
'They took it from me… my Hydra! My empire, my legacy! I spilt thousands of waves of blood for this moment! And now I see it reduced to carrions squabbles."
We didn't dare breathe in his presence.
'I made this strong! Now I find it weak?!'
When I asked him about the state of the council and the new heads of Hydra…
He knew none of them except for Kurāken of the West.
I've never been more afraid of a man I'm supposed to serve. His eyes showed a glint inhuman, as if we were lower than his feet.
He's now headed to the Western Hemisphere, swimming to it instead of just taking a boat. He will come, tearing the oceans toward the Western Hemisphere.
He's a wolf in a dead man's skin. And God help whoever stands in his way."
—--
GORGON POV
All my life I've spent in rebellion against the powers that be, but it all ends like this…
The spy, Halloway, came to me under the dying sun and above the red dunes of the Great Basin Desert. I carried the Godkiller blade. I was eight feet of power and cruelty. I was unfazed and unaffected by the sand and the wind.
"You know what I came here for, no?" said the man draped in a simple red robe, holding only a sword.
"Are you not ill-equipped for the job?" I responded. I heard records of the many ways he fought, many-armed, gigantic, water-breathing, quick-footed. Yet now he comes here without his vestige and his weapon.
"I will do what I came here for. With or without my… weapon of choice." Foolish or brave, I can't decide. I thought then, I might as well extend that same goodwill.
"Then I will do the same." I said, as I removed the Godkiller sword from my sheath and drew a run-of-the-mill odachi.
"Thank you." He said. Despite his treachery and his crimes, it did nothing to sully his warrior's pride, as it seems.
At that moment, the deathmatch began.
He lunges forward at me, sword low. I don't flinch, and my blade rings sideways like the knell and the tolling bell in a funeral. Sparks fly from our first bout.
I backstep and remove my blindfold. He dives under my vision, a sand-pour filling his breath as his blade whistles where my head was.
He rolls left, aiming for my calf. Sparks spray again, as my skin is too dense to be broken through with simple steel. I don't even stagger.
My boot comes down and down on him, casting a shadow on his head in one moment, crushing sand beneath it in the next- instead of his head. He rolled backward and jumped backwards above, head below, feet up, rising through the air above me.
He comes down descending fast, swinging towards my head. I meet his blade, parrying it with contempt. His shoulder winced like the ropes of the Brooklyn Bridge.
I laughed uncontrollably, noticing his chest seemed to tighten, the dread crawling beside him. My sword cleaves downward yet again, splitting the sandstone floor. He sidesteps again, making sure to get outside my vision. One inch and I would've petrified him.
He answers me with a backhand and he misses. The wind and sand threw me off-balance after moving away from him. In response, I activate the full extent of my consciousness, lines of his intent and my intent glaring in two different colors.
I see it now. But it seems he did the same. What a strange, strange man...
I moved before him, trying to cover all of the intents coming out of his sword, trying to catch him with my eyes. He thrusts low, and his blade bit this time.
The roar of my skin and flesh splitting shook the dunes, and my scream of pain seemed to do the same.
I pull up with my odachi, trying to strike him through my longer reach. The pain broke my stance and overloaded my senses, but it reminded me that I was alive.
He slashes upward, a blind strike, like the ones I've been doing all this time. I still haven't been able to see his figure, just his intent and his sword and footsteps in the sand.
This is turning into a very frustrating fight.
He drives towards me again from behind, his sword whistling and his line of intent piercing through my torso. A scar on the back is a swordsman's shame.
His blade carves across my back, drawing a roar that sounds like a collapsing mountain.
I retaliate, smashing my forehead against his from behind. He stood frozen for a second but broke through as a blue light gleamed from his pupils.
"You're playing dirty now, it seems. I'll play dirty too."
I chuckled and aimed to split him in half. He did the same, our downward slashes meeting. I put the full of my weight on it, aiming to break his sword and render him helpless…
As my eyes followed my blade, I realized. There were three lines of intent, not just the one in front of me slashing downward. There were three aimed in full.
Within a blink of an eye, he striked at me three times, the impact of each strike arroving at the same time.
In that deciding move, he whispered.
"Tsubame Gaeshi…"
And my chest split, and my arms burst out from my shoulder. My head fell to the ground, smiling at the sight of his supreme swordplay.
—-
2,394 words.
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