I need highly skilled individuals who can help me without putting my name at risk. The people around me are already known, and if they get caught doing something on my behalf, it could lead back to me and cause serious problems. It would also alert my enemies that I was behind
I needed people. A team. Not heroes — survivors.
I gave Cain names. Or rather types. He found them.
1. Ghostblade – The Assassin
Name unknown. Military record classified. Scrubbed clean.
His wife died on a black-ops mission. The official line said "accident." He called it betrayal.
He vanished. Spent years tracking down the ones responsible — and killing them, one by one.
Cain found him half-dead in a sewer beneath Paris, bleeding out from a cartel ambush. We pulled him back.
I didn't offer redemption. Just direction.
"You've been fighting a war alone. I'm offering you command. You'll never be betrayed under me."
He didn't speak. Just knelt, eyes hollow.
"Then I'm yours."
Cain watched, silent. Later he said:
"That one's a bloodhound. He won't stop until you do."
2. Specter – The Hacker
No prints. No ID. He made himself a ghost.
By seventeen, he'd breached the FBI. Then SHIELD.
Everyone wanted him dead or detained. No one could find him.
Except me.
I didn't track him. I baited him.
I leaked encrypted data — high-clearance bait, irresistible to someone like him. Laced with a silent trace. Not on files or IPs — on rhythm. Typing cadence. Signal drift. Location echoes.
Cain intercepted him at an abandoned train station in Nevada.
I made it simple.
"You'll never be free if you keep running. Work for me. I'll give you a new name, new tools, and protection no government can touch."
He didn't answer. Didn't need to.
He just followed.
3. Mara – The Strategist
Real name: Mara Costa. Once a rising intelligence analyst in Interpol. Youngest in her division. Top of every class. Unshakable instincts.
She saw the Hydra files years before anyone believed they still existed. Raised alarms. Traced dead operatives. Drew connections the higher-ups refused to act on.
They didn't silence her. They discredited her. Branded her unstable. Fabricated an affair with a superior. Her clearance vanished. Her name was buried under scandal.
Cain found her in Istanbul. Working as a private risk consultant for black-market clients. The fire in her eyes hadn't gone out — it just burned colder.
I met her in a rooftop café overlooking the Bosphorus. We spoke for nearly two hours. She asked questions I didn't expect. She already knew who I was. What I was doing. Why I'd come to her.
"You're building something," she said. "But you don't want soldiers. You want thinkers. Survivors."
"I want people who've seen the worst," I replied. "And stayed dangerous."
She smiled — just barely. "And what's in it for me?"
"Clarity. Direction. And when the next storm comes, you'll be on the side that prepared."
She held out her hand.
"Then let's make sure we win."
By fall of 2006, we weren't a team yet. Just broken pieces gathered under a single roof.
Ghostblade didn't speak much. He spent most days training in silence, every motion like a blade being sharpened.
Specter set up shop in a hidden lab beneath one of my father's old abandoned sites. Cain called it "The Crypt." No doors. Just encrypted elevators and one retinal scanner — mine.
Mara? She restructured everything. Communication trees, field protocols, emergency fallback plans. She began designing contingency scenarios for threats no one had even spoken aloud yet
She didn't laugh when I said "gods." She just nodded and said, "We'll need satellites."
Cain watched them all quietly, like an old lion watching new wolves arrive. He didn't question my decisions anymore. I think, somewhere between the planning and the bloodshed, he started to believe in it — in me.
We weren't trying to save the world.
We were getting ready for when no one else
At the end of 2006, I stood alone in the operations room. Holoscreens flickered around me — news, movements, market crashes, rising defense contracts, whispers of Stark's new tech.
I wasn't a genius inventor.
I wasn't a super soldier.
But I had something else now.
A will. A structure. A starting point.
And maybe that would be enough.
For now.