"En—"
John barely got the warning out before a streak of purple shot from the dark like lightning.
Too fast.
Ice kissed his throat; the world cinched tight.
The vine coiled his neck, barbed micro-spurs raking skin, a wash of numbness sweeping his limbs.
The rifle clanged to stone.
Blackness rushed in and swallowed everything.
Sapped by the earlier chase after Tony Stark, SCP-307 hunted like a miser—quiet, deliberate, invisible.
A patient predator, it grazed the shadows and ate the loners.
One.
Then another.
Ten minutes—a dozen fighters gone.
No alarms. No gunshots.
Only discarded clothes and gear slumped in corners like shed skins.
At last, the attrition registered.
A mid-level boss, making rounds, stumbled on three empty posts and those nightmare empty outfits. Panic emptied his bones. He tumbled into the largest cavern at the valley's heart.
"Boss! Something's wrong!"
Inside, a tall brute with a shaved scalp polished a knife—Raza, commander of this Ten Rings cell.
"Stop sniveling," Raza snapped without looking up.
"Our men—gone!" the lieutenant stammered. "Hassan, John, Farid… a lot of them vanished! Only their clothes left!"
Raza's brow pinched hard.
His first thought wasn't monsters.
It was an enemy he knew and hated.
"Americans."
A killing light cracked his gaze.
"S.H.I.E.L.D. or SOCOM—here to snatch Tony Stark."
What else could erase people, leave clothes? Clearly some U.S. spook-tech he cursed in his sleep.
"They're picking us off?" Raza stood, a thin smile like a knife. "Childish."
He stalked out and bellowed over the milling men:
"Everyone! Collapse to Stark's cave! Form a hardpoint now!"
"They're inside our lines! They don't get through this door—anyone comes, anyone dies!"
Nerves found a spine.
Yes. Americans.
They grabbed weapons and abandoned the perimeter, pouring like a tide toward the prisoner cavern.
They thought massing to hold would save them.
They didn't know they'd just set the table for SCP-307.
A banquet. Centralized. Served hot.
In the transport's belly, silence.
A hundred Foundation troopers sat monk-still in shock-cushioned seats. The engines' bass was the only sound.
Phil Coulson and Melinda May sat shoulder to shoulder; Natasha had been placed across the aisle.
Ahead of them, 6547's broad back, motionless as a bulkhead.
Coulson's pulse hammered.
This was the only window.
He had to get word to S.H.I.E.L.D.—about the Foundation, about Stark, about everything—before they touched down.
He brushed May's elbow.
She understood instantly.
A slight sway. A muffled groan, like air-turbulence had punched the breath from her.
"I need the restroom," she told the two troopers watching them, voice thin.
They traded a look. One stood to escort her.
Now.
Eyes shifted to May.
Coulson's fingers tapped a staccato on the innocuous square of his wrist "watch."
Not a watch—S.H.I.E.L.D.'s top-tier one-line encrypted transceiver.
His right eye warmed behind the lid.
The contact lens—micro-camera, live relay, secured pipe.
Casually, he tilted his head, letting the lens catch the bay's holo repeater—the Sky-Eye drone feed identical to what Felix had in the command room.
Onscreen, purple-black growths devoured clustered Ten Rings fighters. Fire washed them; they didn't burn. Bullets popped green sap; the vines simply climbed on.
"Director priority—Obelisk Protocol," his throat muscle whispered. Vibration sensors turned it to cipher and threw it into the ether.
Thirty thousand feet up, a steel island floated in cloud.
Inside the carrier's CIC, the night blazed with screens.
A tall man in a black coat, one eye under a patch, studied the blue planet through armored glass.
Nick Fury.
"Director, Coulson's on Obelisk," said Maria Hill, stride clipped, face tight.
Fury turned. The one eye sharpened to a blade's point.
Obelisk was for the worst days—the kind that tilt the world.
"Put it up."
The main wall bloomed to a grainy, green hell.
Purple-black tendrils ringed a hundred gunmen, a living noose tightening.
Flamers howled; nothing.
Rounds sparked; the tide pushed on.
Men screamed and sobbed. When the vines caught them, their bodies collapsed and vanished within seconds—left behind: clothes only.
A one-sided, machine-cold slaughter.
"My God…" Hill breathed.
Fury's pupil knotted to a pin.
He'd seen weird. Lived it, more than he cared to count.
This was outside that line.
"Source?" he asked.
"Live relay piggybacking an unknown platform," Hill replied. "Not ours. Feed headers spoofed, but Coulson's signature checks. He's inside a third-party transport—military-grade, not U.S. No maker tags. He attached mission context—'Foundation.'"
Fury's jaw worked once.
"Give me Stark's last coordinates, vector this feed, and pull STRIKE to ready five. Contingency: Shadow Condition. If there's a shot to extract Stark, we take it."
Hill nodded, already barking to controllers.
"And find me everything on this 'Foundation'—I don't care if it's a bedtime story or a burn-after-reading memo."
"Yes, sir."
On the feed, Raza's men stacked bodies at the cave mouth—human ramparts—and raised flamers into a wall of fire.
"Hold! Hold!"
A runner skidded up, face blanched. "Enemy! The enemy is—mold!"
"Mold?" Raza snarled, spittle bright in the flame-light.
But the runner wasn't wrong.
Across the thermal image, a haze began to spread—fine particulate glittering in hot breath. The vines had bloomed: microscopic sporangia misting the air, a carpet of filament crawling under boots, up pants, across bare wrists. Not fungus, not truly—but to terrified men, indistinguishable from a mold storm.
"Masks! Masks!" someone howled.
Too late.
Shoelaces writhed. Webbing slithered. The perimeter line buckled as the floor itself seemed to come alive and drag men backward into dark.
Raza emptied a magazine into the ground, screaming. The dirt pulsed and bled green.
Inside the transport, 6547's voice cut over the net, unshaken:
"A-307 sector is in mass feeding. T+8 to LZ. Rule of engagement: avoid biomass contact. Cutter teams one and two: sever, freeze, bag. Guardian teams: breach the cave, locate HVT Stark. S.H.I.E.L.D. liaisons follow my lead."
"Copy," May said, already cinching seals.
Coulson swallowed and locked his harness.
Across the sea of sky, the carrier's deck crews sprinted. A quinjet's turbines spooled. Fury's gaze didn't leave the screen.
"Stark is priority one," he said. "But if this 'Foundation' has him first, we don't make enemies we can't see. We watch. We learn. And we live long enough to decide who's saving the world and who's burning it down."
Hill's eyes flicked to the data. "Director… the unknown transport is descending fast—straight into the valley."
Fury's mouth drew a thin line.
"Then we're about to learn a lot."
Down in the command room, Felix stood with Natasha in the sterile glow. The Sky-Eye feed painted the Ten Rings' last-stand firelight in toxic green.
"Enemy contact," she murmured, almost to herself. "And to them… it looks like mold."
Felix's eyes didn't blink. "The universe is kinder when it lies."
Onscreen, the cave gate shuddered. Something massive outside the frame ripped men from the line like weeds.
"Today's the catalyst," he said softly. "For Stark. For you. For everyone who thinks the dark is a bedtime story."
The thermal image flared as the Foundation transport broke cloud and cut in, bay doors yawning.
"Showtime," Felix whispered.
And the screen went white.
(End of Chapter)
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