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BANG! BANG! BANG!
Just then, a barrage of urgent, heavy knocks pounded the iron door.
Yinsen jolted like a frightened rabbit. He snatched up a heavy sledgehammer, braced it against the door, and shook so hard his teeth chattered.
"Who's there?!" he called out in Pashto, voice trembling.
No reply.
Instead—the thuds turned into full-on ramming.
"Tony! T-they're here!" Yinsen's voice cracked, almost in tears.
He thought the unknown horror outside had finally found them.
Outside the cave.
Two S.H.I.E.L.D. agents hugged the rock on either side of the door, weapons ready.
"Boss, there's someone inside," one whispered over comms. "The door's dead-bolted from within. We heard movement."
"Confirm and prepare to breach," came Sharon Carter's crisp, decisive voice in their earpieces.
"Copy."
The agent pocketed his comm and shouted through the door in clear American English, "Listen up in there! We're with the United States govern—"
He didn't finish.
A weak, rasping voice—thrilled beyond belief—echoed from within the cave.
"Hey! Hey! Don't shoot! I'm an American citizen! I'm Tony Stark!"
English—and Tony Stark himself.
The two agents traded a look. Pure elation.
Found him.
"Ma'am, we've got Stark! He's alive!" one of them blurted into the comm, practically vibrating.
Inside, Tony exhaled a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding and sagged inside the steel shell.
Saved.
He turned to tell Yinsen to move the hammer and open up—
—and the agent's report cut off mid-sentence.
"—He's right inside! We're about to—"
"zzzt… shhh…"
Only harsh static bled through the line.
"Unit One? Unit One, respond!"
Sharon barked into her comm. Silence answered.
Again. Just like before.
They'd vanished without warning.
"F**k!"
Sharon hurled her comm at the ground, jaw set, eyes like ice.
Only now did it truly sink in—this op was way messier and more dangerous than Nick Fury had let on. Someone had held back crucial intel.
"Teams Two and Three—on me! Move to Entry A! Go!"
She snapped orders over a different channel, then lifted her carbine and sprinted toward the cave where Tony was trapped, taking point herself.
Her swearing carried cleanly into the tunnel.
That familiar, full-chested contralto—fiery temper unmistakably inherited—made Tony, tense as a wire, blink.
That voice… why is it so familiar?
A lightbulb went on. He remembered a girl with a tight ponytail who used to tail Peggy Carter, face always severe—except when she was sneaking peeks at his newest gadgets.
"Sharon?" Tony called toward the door, testing it out. "That you, little cousin?"
Outside, Sharon—seconds away from ordering shaped charges on the hinges—froze.
That address…
Only one person alive would dare call her "little cousin" in that maddeningly flippant tone: the jerk currently stuck behind that door.
"Tony Stark!"
Sharon's eyes stung. Relief and joy shouldered aside fresh grief and anger over the two agents she'd just lost.
Found him.
He's alive.
Then the sacrifices weren't for nothing.
"Everyone ready to breach! Get him out of there!" Sharon's voice shook despite herself.
But as the demolitions expert moved up with the charges, the instincts of a top-tier operative made every hair on Sharon's body stand on end.
"Sha… sha… sha…"
A strange sound slithered in from everywhere at once.
Faint, but omnipresent. Like a thousand snakes scraping through shadow along the walls.
Sharon whipped her light across the rock.
And saw something she would never forget.
That wasn't rough stone at all.
The walls, the floor, even the ceiling were matted with a mass of vein-like vines—purple-black, knotted, and throbbing.
A moment ago they'd mimicked rock grain, utterly still.
Now, they "woke up."
Countless tendrils began to writhe and contract, pulsing with a sickly violet glow.
"My God…"
One agent's voice died in his throat.
"CONTACT!"
Sharon's roar ragged her throat raw.
Too late.
As if obeying a single command, SCP-307 dropped all pretense.
RIIIP!
With a sound like fabric tearing, the entire cave bloomed into motion—vines surging from every surface like a purple flood, pouring down on Sharon and her S.H.I.E.L.D. team, a tide hungry enough to drown the world.
Elite agents versus common terrorists? Worlds apart.
Against SCP-307? No difference at all.
Just Meat.
"Weapons free! Weapons free!"
Sharon's yell scraped down to a rasp.
Muzzles thundered. A storm of rounds shredded the first feelers, purple sap spraying as segments fell twitching.
It didn't matter.
More vines boiled in from every angle—endless.
One agent's neck snagged from above; he managed a strangled yelp before being yanked skyward. His body shriveled before their eyes. Seconds later, an empty tac-suit slumped to the ground with a flap.
Another slashed at a tendril choking his partner, but the instant his forearm brushed the violet growth, his body jolted as if hit by a live wire. He stiffened and collapsed into a perfect, permanent "sleep."
"Paralytic toxin!"
Panic flashed like wildfire.
In just a few minutes, Sharon's hand-picked squad was more than half gone.
The survivors pressed back-to-back in a ragged ring, dumping rounds into the crashing purple surf from all sides—hopeless and unbowed.
(End of Chapter)
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