Nolan let the blow land.
Crossbones's power-enhanced arms came in fast and heavy, the crossbrace devices on his forearms amplifying the impact into something that would have knocked most armored opponents off their feet. It hit the vibranium breastplate with a sound like a metal door slamming in an empty building.
Nolan did not move.
Crossbones took several steps backward from the rebound, the counter-shock of vibranium returning every joule it had absorbed directly into the arms that had struck it.
He adjusted. He went for the head: the one part of Nolan's body not enclosed in vibranium, the obvious target.
Nolan raised his arm.
The ten rings collapsed inward from the air around him, settling onto the raised forearm in a single motion, one after another, stacking purple energy around the vibranium gauntlet like something that had been waiting for exactly this moment.
He swung.
The rings hit Crossbones across the chest in sequence, each one carrying its own impact, the cumulative force arriving faster than any of them could be individually absorbed. Crossbones left the ground. He came down more than ten meters away, already spraying blood, and hit the floor with the boneless impact of something that had stopped being a coordinated body and started being a collection of damaged parts.
The bulletproof vest he was wearing had saved him. Barely. The vest had taken the structural load and his ribs had absorbed the remainder, and the remainder had been considerable. He lay on the floor and coughed blood and what was attached to the blood, and his willpower kept him from simply stopping there, and his body had nothing to say about it either way.
Nolan walked to him. He put the chainsword away.
He looked down at Crossbones for a moment.
Then he reached down, took him by the neck with one hand, and lifted him off the floor.
"I told you I would tear you apart," Nolan said. "I meant that."
Crossbones's feet hung in the air. He was breathing in the shallow, effortful way of a man with significant internal damage, each breath a small negotiation. His lips pulled back from his teeth in something that wanted to be a smile and had some of the shape of one.
"Hiss... killing your support staff... may have been a mistake." Blood ran between his teeth. "But Hydra... cut off one head and two grow back."
"Let's see about that."
Nolan brought his other hand up. One grip on the neck, one grip lower, oriented in opposite directions. He pulled.
The sound it made was brief.
Crossbones's last sound was not words.
Nolan dropped what he was holding, looked at it for a moment with the flat expression of a man completing a task that had been on his list, and turned away.
The vehicles behind him were wrecked, doors bent open, some still settling into their final positions on the chamber floor. He moved through them methodically, checking what needed to be checked.
Sitwell was in the third vehicle from the back. He had not survived the rings' pass through the convoy. Nolan looked at the body long enough to confirm the identification and moved on.
Both names were resolved. Every Hydra leader who had been embedded in S.H.I.E.L.D. and had put Madam Gao's name on a list was accounted for.
In the corridors above, the sounds of resistance were thinning. The Lamenters and Rogers's team were working through what remained, and what remained was running out of options. Nolan looked at the helicarrier frame one more time, stored the thought about its schematics in a mental file marked for later, and walked toward the passage that led back into the base.
The outcome had been decided. From this point forward, Hydra had no organized presence in this world.
Or so it seemed.
The hatch opened with a low mechanical exhale.
The figure inside was pale and soaked, viscous suspension fluid sheeting off bare skin as the body's first independent breaths in some unknown period of time dragged the chest upward and down. Bloodshot eyes opened and found the ceiling. Limbs moved without coordination, the signals from the nervous system arriving in the wrong order, and the body that had been Brock Rumlow slid out of the life-substitute device and hit the cold metal floor and did not get up.
He curled on the floor and shook.
"I did warn you."
The voice came from the corner of the room. A middle-aged man in a dark blue suit, well-cut, the kind of suit worn by men whose schedules included press conferences. He was signing documents and did not look up.
"Rumlow. I told you repeatedly: Hydra's ideology is a defective product. It belongs to a previous era and serves no function in this one. I also told you, specifically, not to move against the Guardians of Terra unless you had already won. People who operate at that level do not negotiate." He turned a page. "And now you have lost the only significant asset you had, which was your position inside S.H.I.E.L.D. Pierce's death was an inconvenience. This is a larger inconvenience. Pierce at least still had uses when he was alive."
Rumlow found his voice. It came out wrong, still rebuilding itself, but the anger in it was intact.
"I fed you intelligence for more than a decade." He raised his pale head from the floor. "Passed you everything I had. Get me my revenge. I want the man who killed me dead. I want the Guardians of Terra destroyed."
The man in the suit stopped writing. He looked up.
The face that looked across the room at Rumlow had good bones: the kind of structure that suggested authority to anyone who encountered it without prior context, the kind of face that translated well in large spaces filled with people who wanted someone to believe in. He could have been an older version of Rogers, if you were looking at surface impressions rather than what was behind the eyes. The temperament was superficially similar. Everything underneath it was not.
"Rumlow." He set the pen down. "You have been a multiple-sided intelligence asset for over a decade. You have managed that without losing your usefulness until now. And yet you are still surprised to find that the rules apply to you." He folded his hands. "You are no longer useful to me. You are, specifically, a liability. I have no interest in making enemies of the Guardians of Terra on behalf of a discarded asset. And I have even less interest in making an enemy of Captain America, who will now have legitimate control of S.H.I.E.L.D. and a compelling moral narrative about what he just did. He is an enormous headache for me on the best of days."
He stood.
"The revival device required technology and resources that I cannot easily replace. I gave it to you in advance as settlement of whatever I owed you. Consider the debt cleared."
He straightened his jacket.
"You should leave now. I have a press conference."
Rumlow's hands had found the floor. He was pushing himself upright, piece by piece, and his face had moved past weakness into something that had decided it did not care about consequences.
"You understand what I know," he said. "Everything I know about you. If I tell it to the right people..."
The man in the suit looked at him with the patience of someone who had heard this type of statement before and had already determined the outcome.
"Rumlow." His voice did not change. "You have never understood when to stop. That has always been your limitation." He raised one hand. "General Ross. Come in. Be thorough."
The door came off its hinges.
The figure that entered was three meters of red-skinned mass, the ceiling a few centimeters above the top of its head, the walls slightly too close on either side. It looked at Rumlow the way a machine looks at a task: without complexity, without hesitation, without anything that might slow the process of completing what it had been asked to do.
Rumlow's expression completed its journey from resentment to something that had run out of language.
The red giant smiled. It was not a reassuring smile.
"I am honored to serve you, Mr. Osborn."
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