The moment the final briefing ended, there was no debate.
No vote.No delay.
Project Judecca could not be allowed to continue.
Within minutes, alerts propagated through Foundation channels that only a handful of people on the planet even knew existed. This was not a conventional raid. This was a surgical excision—precise, overwhelming, and absolute.
I did not delegate.
I went myself.
A circular glyph ignited beneath my feet, arcane symbols folding into one another as space tore open. Cold night air rushed in as the portal stabilized, revealing the outskirts of a heavily fortified Soviet research complex hidden beneath layers of forest and concrete.
My Red Right Hand stepped through behind me—silent, disciplined, lethal.
Each of them was enhanced.Each of them carried an activated X-gene.Each of them was loyal beyond question.
Above us, clouds drifted lazily. Below us, buried in steel and paranoia, Stalin's secret project awaited its reckoning.
I raised a hand.
We moved.
The outer perimeter fell in seconds.
Soviet guards—poorly trained, complacent, and utterly unprepared—barely had time to react. The first shots were silent: suppressed pulses, neural disruptors, precision strikes. When alarms finally began to wail, it was already too late.
We breached the first corridor in a blur of motion.
Short firefights erupted as startled soldiers scrambled for weapons, but it was almost embarrassing. Hydra would have been ashamed to field defenses this lax. A handful of laser bursts dropped the last resistance, and then—
I gave the signal.
Stun only.
Not out of mercy.
Out of efficiency.
One by one, incapacitated personnel were lined against walls or slumped across floors. Foundation operatives moved methodically, administering Class-B and Class-C amnestics, carefully calibrated to erase all memory of anomalies, Sarkicism, cloning, and this facility's true purpose.
When they woke up, they would remember nothing.
Just another night.Just another posting.Just another gap in their lives.
Deeper inside, the air changed.
The concrete walls gave way to reinforced chambers etched with symbols that made my skin crawl. Sarkic glyphs—organic, obscene, alive in a way writing should never be. The smell hit next: iron, rot, chemicals, and something warm.
Fleshcrafting labs.
My expression hardened.
Rooms were cleared swiftly. Sarkic texts—bound in skin, inked in blood—were seized and sealed. Containers filled with Sæhrímnir flesh were catalogued and secured, the regenerative meat still faintly pulsing even when frozen in stasis.
I paused briefly in one chamber, studying a skeletal frame half-covered in growing tissue.
"Disgusting," I muttered.
Commander Cody nodded. "Effective, though."
"That's what makes it dangerous."
We found Joseph Stalin in the central command wing.
He never saw us coming.
The door blew inward in a single kinetic burst, and before he could even rise from his chair, he was on the floor—stunned, restrained, and unconscious. The man who ruled half the world lay helpless at my feet, reduced to another liability.
I looked down at him without satisfaction.
Only resolve.
Amnestics were prepared—powerful ones. Enough to strip months of memory, to hollow out Project Judecca entirely from his mind. When Stalin woke, he would remember ambition, fear, and power—but not this.
He would never know how close he came.
The Sarkicists were harder.
We found them chanting in a containment chamber, surrounded by half-grown biological structures that twitched at our arrival. They fought with flesh and bone, reshaping their own bodies mid-combat—blades of cartilage, whips of sinew, hardened dermal plates.
It didn't matter.
Mutant abilities flared. Energy weapons screamed. Magic carved the air into lethal geometry.
In under three minutes, the chamber was silent.
The Sarkicists were bound in suppressive restraints, their anomalous abilities dampened, their mouths gagged to prevent further incantations. Dangerous, yes—but alive.
For now.
"They'll talk," Cody said.
"They always do," I replied. "Eventually."
Then we reached him.
Contained behind layers of glass, sigils, and reinforced alloy was the final prize.
SCP-2430.
The immortal Hitler clone.
He looked… wrong.
Physically identical to archival photographs, yet unnaturally pristine. No scars. No decay. His chest rose and fell slowly, calmly, as if sleeping. Regenerative tissue laced his body like a second circulatory system, Sæhrímnir flesh integrated at a cellular level.
I studied him in silence.
History's greatest monster, reborn not by ideology—but by spite.
"Secure him," I ordered.
Containment teams moved in, flooding the chamber with suppressants, sedatives, and reality anchors. The clone never woke as he was transferred into a reinforced stasis pod, sealed and marked with Foundation sigils.
He would be studied.
Contained.
Never allowed to influence the world.
By the time the quinjet lifted off, the facility behind us was empty.
Every anomaly secured.Every threat neutralized.Every secret erased.
Stalin lay restrained but alive.The Sarkicists screamed into gags they could not remove.Crates of Sæhrímnir flesh filled the cargo hold.And SCP-2430 rested silently, frozen in artificial sleep.
I stood near the open ramp as the quinjet accelerated, watching the forest below shrink into darkness.
Another mess cleaned up.
Another future corrected.
Julius' voice crackled over the comms. "Debriefing when you land?"
"Yes," I said. "And full classification review."
"What about Judecca?"
I allowed myself a thin smile.
"Terminated."
The quinjet banked toward the horizon, carrying with it secrets the world would never know—and horrors it would never have to face.
Because that was our role.
Not to rule history.
But to edit it.