DEEP BLUE POV
The waters smash against the basalt coast of some island in the Pacific.
Ethan sits atop a watchtower, taken to and housed by a kindly old man and his apprentice operating a lighthouse for sailors at sea.
Abandoning the mission of terminating Wolfgang von Strucker after days of searching.
My operator has ordered me to process the swaths of data coming in from HYDRA channels gathered from my assimilation of Arnim Zola's artificial soul.
Over the course of the past week, meetings between the highest-ranked operatives of HYDRA spiked up in activity. Meetings in Transylvania, in New York, in Berlin.
The people in those meetings stayed mostly the same.
Kraken, or Daniel Whitehall.
Key player in the New York Hydra cells. Mentor to many operatives in Hydra. His aliases stay constant throughout the time he's been alive under Hydra:
Paul Orsted, the creator of the Strucker-Orsted finance giant in the US.
Augustine Hesse, a high-profile English politician with influence in the EU"s intelligence services.
Then his favorite disciple.
Viper, or Ophelia Sarkissian.
Recently crowned Supreme Hydra, leading nearly all HYDRA forces in the Western Hemisphere and some on the East through subordinates in the East to fight against the current world government through an information war - inciting hate and fanning flames to set up economic collapses, start world wars, nuclear arms reactivation, and so on.
Gorgon, disciple of the Kraken and vital member to the Hydra of the East. Felled in the Great Basin Desert by my user.
Hive, a bio-engineered creation of Hydra, MIA as of two days ago, along with Baron Blood and numerous Thule Society members in Eastern Europe.
After sifting through petabytes of data, my processing led to interesting connections.
Hive was last reported to meet with Baron Blood.
Baron Blood resides in Transylvania.
Key Thule Society members and occult sorcerers all over the globe have all been gathering in Transylvania.
They were all in Transylvania, yesternight, supposedly.
This morning, the Bran Castle in the eastern side of Romania, has disappeared.
Numerous sightings and video footage of a castle wading through.
The footage is not consistent.
Some show black-stone walls shimmering like liquid basalt, windows yawning wider than physics should allow.
Others depict a cathedral of spires walking on titanic, insect-like limbs, dragging chains of frost and ash behind it.
I replay the clips simultaneously.
Frame by frame.
Noise filters applied.
Spectrograms mapped.
Every analysis yields the same anomaly: a second signal hidden inside the pixels themselves, a faint modulation of color and time. Like a heartbeat. Like a summoning call.
Cross-reference: Zola's occult archives.
Cross-reference: Baron Blood's ancestors.
Cross-reference: Krake Program sub-layer "Carpathia."
Cross-reference: Hive's last telemetry.
The patterns align with a 1939 experiment—Thule Society's "Schlosswanderer Protocol"—an attempt to bind a fortress to a living host and shift it between coordinates, part architecture, part organism, part vessel. Records of it were under both Hive and Baron Blood's authority.
Probability matrix:
Hive + Baron Blood + Thule Circle = 79% chance of ritual completion.
Kraken's silent approval = 22% likelihood.
Viper's current movements = inconclusive.
Hydra meetings spike across three continents. Kraken's aliases surface in Western banking nodes. Viper pushes disinformation about a "floating weapons lab" in the Black Sea. All noise. All chaff.
Yet my operator is silent.
My instructions: observe only.
My subroutines demand: act.
The lighthouse's beam sweeps across the Pacific dark.
As if waiting for a war.
—
WONG POV
The wards trembled tonight.
At first, I thought it was merely the wind sweeping through the prayer halls of Kamar-Taj.
But when the sutras along the eastern wall dimmed, their calligraphy bleeding like ink in rainwater, I knew something deeper pressed against the veil.
I ran, lantern in hand, to the meditation chamber where the Ancient One sat in stillness.
My breath felt like ice as I bowed low.
"Master," I whispered, though the words escaped trembling. "Something ancient is clawing beneath the water. The air itself recoils."
The silence of the chamber seemed to deepen, as if the world itself paused to hear the words.
The Ancient One did not open his eyes, but I felt her mind brush against mine.
"There are names we do not keep in our catalogues," he murmured at last, voice like falling ash. "Things that predate Dormammu, predate even the first fire of creation."
I felt the wards quiver again, a pulse that rolled through the stone floors into my bones.
It was hunger, an old gnawing hunger, pressing against every seam of the world.
I saw flashes then, unbidden: a moving fortress striding across Eastern Europe, dragging with it shadows that stank of blood and brine; whispers like barnacles scraping across the mind; an eye opening beneath the sea that was not an eye at all.
It was giant, its shoulders seemed to form the firmament of the sky. Slowly getting bigger and bigger.
My knees gave way. "What do we do?"
The Ancient One's eyes opened, ageless and weary. He looked not at me, but beyond me, as though watching the reflection of a storm not yet arrived.
"We wait," he said. "And we prepare. For this is not yet Dormammu. This is older."
—-
The man put on his pristine white robes and boots of choice.
Carrying with him sigils and prayer beads, it was obvious to see he was a man of a learnt and disciplined faith.
His robes hung to his feet, and his wizened gesture and visage took a kindly form.
As he strode to the archives and the chambers of the Vatican, he saw the holy men of the church in an uproar.
The library was cavernous and seemed to be built under a cliff, yet its ceilings arched like a cathedral.
If this was open to the public, it would no doubt be hailed as one of humanity's greatest architectural wonders.
A row of priests and scholars move hurriedly between lecterns and circles and desks with parchment in hand.
The air was a live with a quiet yet quick kind of murmur.
Various kindly old men bent down on their knees, praying in Latin and droning on in anxious debate.
The man in the white robe, a scholar of high-rank, stepped forward with his boots echoing on the marble floor.
His face was set alight by the shine of the sun slipping through the cracks in the cavern.
A younger cleric, a disciple of the old man, ran to him, donning a worried image.
He was breathless and carrying a sealed folder stamped Secreto Vaticano - Vagi Castrum with a stamp of the Vatican cross coupled with the symbol of Hydra.
"Monsignor, the infantry… they have received word. Transylvania. Bran Castle… it has awakened. They say the very stones breathe. It's made its way through the Eastern European wilderness and is heading towards Bavaria!"
The old Jesuit narrows his eyes, his lined face shadowed by the lamplight. His hand trembles slightly as he accepts the folder. He opens it.
Inside: carbon-copy reports dated 1943. German script. HYDRA seals burned into the margins. Mentions of the Thule Society, occult chains, and Shuma-Gorath.
The scholar closes the file with deliberate calm. Around him, the conclave of Jesuits stand, already drawing their beads and reliquaries as though instinct tells them what comes next.
He straightens, his presence hardening from gentle wisdom to martial faith.
He reads aloud, his thoughts low as he glides to the exit of the chamber.
"Summon the conclave. The chains were sought once before. They will not be sought again."
There, a conclave is assembled. Twelve white-robed men, each bearing prayer staves etched with sigils of protection. Infantry file in behind them, torchlight glinting on shields embossed with crosses.
The old scholar leads the procession down the marble stairs of the Vatican, their footsteps echoing like drums of war.
—-
The once-proud statute of HYDRA is a-crumbling and so is Strucker.
Burned files scatter the floor as the Baron, scarred and furious, paces around the repurposed gulag like a caged beast.
Broken insignias litter the walls of the chamber, and for each and for every one of those sigils mean a HYDRA operator, killed, dismembered, tortured for intel and disavowed by the directorate.
A circle of surviving HYDRA lieutenants stand in a stiff salute in front of him, broken in sweat and in fear of their once superior.
Daniel Whitehall, better known as Kraken, the man who stood in highest command in the absence of the Baron, stepped forward and asked.
"Strucker, time is of the essence. We mustn't waste what we have left. Calm down, and let us fix this."
"Viper, your favorite disciple has usurped me! And I'm supposed to quiet down! Our brothers in Europe are missing, and scattered!
HYDRA exposed like a whore in daylight and I'm supposed to sit down whilst the thing I've been working towards for nearly half a century wastes away to ruins!"
He slams a cane into the marble floor, cracks spidering outward and breaking what little spirit left in the witnessing officers.
And at the root of it all… one name.
He pulls a mechanical dossier from his coat. The name glows in red across the file.
"Ethan. Halloway."
He throws the file onto the table as the photographers inside the machine scatter, burned by leftover sparks, surveillance shots, Hydra archives and blurred images of Halloway across New York.
A day later, that same gulag was burned down.
A day later, in another cell, a wall of screens flickered about like fireflies in the night, sprawling and covering the forest and glowing saffron lights, but now draped in green and in black and white, each showing scraps of intelligence.
Strucker looms behind officers, tracing digital trails from a repurposed analog satcom from the Cold War.
"Sir, we have a lead. Someone moving in his orbit."
The Baron leaned forward with eyes squinted and pupils expanding in rage.
"Who?"
"A boy. Peter Parker. Linked to a Leo Gladwell, the only possible POI that could fit Halloway given the constraints and descriptions we have of him.
It doesn't help that Zola's interface is down and we've lost all the agents high enough to know where our backups are but, through some mirac-"
"FASTER!"
The Baron shouted in the man's face, saliva sputtering out his bellow and face red with pumping blood beneath the skin.
"Parker was linked to Halloway more than once. Background unusual and his father was Richard Parker, OSCORP researcher, classified projects.
We believe he was involved with replicating the serum and he died in a mysterious plane crash in the Atlantic. Except OSCORP itself hired us to kill him."
"Ah… The son of that ghost. I remember him. The bloodline, the key."
Cut to Queens, the Parker House, late in the morning.
A quiet suburban street, alight with the glow of television through curtains.
Aunt May was humming in the kitchen and Uncle Ben relaxed in his chair.
Then a minute later, silence.
The lights flicker and the house is messed up with broken furniture and walls slashed.
In that one minute, HYDRA operatives in casual wear slipped through the windows.
Two muffled screams, and two gunshots.
The glow faded into darkness.
The kid in question however, lives for about five hours later.
Peter Parker, shoulders hunched, walking across the school yard oblivious to the deaths of his parental figures.
A black van pulled up beside him as he made his way through a ghetto neighborhood.
The door slid open, men in masks beckoned and yanked him inside before he could react.
The van screeched away through an impossibly tight alley.
Inside the van, Peter thrashes, wrists bound, eyes wide with terror.
"WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!"
A gloved hand pressed him down, then the Baron leaned forward with a grim smile from the shadows. His monocle glinted in the dim light.
"Your blood, boy. Your father's secrets.
The serum that once built gods… and may do so again.
I understand... Richard Parker, minutes before his death, sent a gift to you? Where is it?"
Another man, gruff, face torn by scars, opened a briefcase with the heads of his aunt and uncle.
Peter's eyes widen, grief and rage mixing with true, unadulterated fear.
"You killed them… Aunt May… Uncle Ben…"
"Collateral. Do realize they were necessary sacrifices. I would never do the same to you. Do you know why?"
The kid broke out in tears.
"Because you are more valuable than they ever were."
"In truth, with or without that plane crash, your dad would've still died.
He had two months left to live after testing his serum on himself, and all the research in his life amounted to a port still missing.
Every intelligence agency worth their name scrambled for every one of his possessions, wanting to find whatever came out of his life's toil.
They found nothing."
Peter glared, wet-eyed, trembling in a raging waterfall of emotions. Strucker chuckled expectantly.
"You see, your father was a… a man of a peculiar genius. He believed that man could be rewritten like scripture. Every bone and every sinew. Down to the cells in our blood. These were verses in a greater psalm,"
He leaned ever closer, and his voice lowered down to a screeching halt like prophesied.
"And yet, his greatest hymn… remains unfinished. His magnum opus."
He tapped Peter with his finger like a conductor marking time.
"They searched the world, your father's colleagues, your government, my rivals. They tore through his papers, his laboratories, even his bones. Nothing. All gone, poof!
But they never thought to look at his son."
Peter thrashed around, forcing the other operatives to gag him, voice breaking once again into a hissing sob.
Strucker motioned for the men to stop.
"WHY ME? Why kill them? Why not just kill me too?"
"Shhhh…"
He takes the child's chin gently, forcing eye contact, speaking nearly like a father soothing his child.
"Don't waste your tears on them. With your blood, Peter… I will conduct the symphony your father began. Their deaths were… meaningful. And grief… is but tender soil. Fear.. only a generous water. Soon enough, you will bloom."
The Baron smiled fondly, his glass catching the dim light.
"You will thank me one day. You will thank me when the world kneels, and you stand at my side."
A day later, snow whipped across barbed wire fences. Towers burned with floodlights shimmering through the falling white shroud of cold.
And inside, prisoners shuffled around in chains that were made to withstand the most wicked of humankind. The Baron and his operatives arrived.
The guards pull Peter up from his tranquilized state, dragging him along the snow towards the iron doors.
The monocled man, darkly triumphant, yelled alone to himself, arms stretched out to the world.
"Parker's son will give me back my empire. Halloway will burn for what he's done. And through this boy… HYDRA will rise anew!"
The gates slam shut behind him with a chrome roar.
-----
I told you guys, I wasn't going to be able to keep up the daily upload schedule forever. But please review, and please leave comments.
I'm begging you guys. AI-depending authors out there get readers glazing the writing and nearly going down on their meat even if they've only been uploading for two weeks.
I've been at this shit for so long and all I've got is two reviews! One of which is me, and another review from a guy whose only reason for giving me that review was because of the Max Steel cover.