Hydra possessed an army of enhanced muscle, but what they desperately lacked were true super soldiers. They had plenty of mercenaries with augmented strength, but nothing even approaching the tier of Captain America or the Winter Soldier. Ophelia Sarkissian, Madame Viper, stared at her underground security monitors, her lips pressing into a thin, bloodless line as she watched her current roster of freaks get systematically dismantled.
The "Viper Gang" were essentially the scrap heap of various Weapon Plus and super-soldier upgrade programs. They were the subjects who hadn't died on the operating table, but hadn't exactly succeeded, either.
There was the Giant Viper—a monstrous cyborg with a serpentine lower half and two bionic arms.
There was the Water Viper—a former special forces operative whose jaw had been surgically unhinged and reinforced, giving him a bite force capable of crushing steel and a mouth wide enough to swallow a human head whole.
Then there was the Spearhead Snake—a man wearing a cheap Wolverine cosplay, sporting twenty-centimeter steel blades bolted directly to the outside of his forearms. Because the metal breached his skin and he lacked an accelerated healing factor, his own implants were a constant, bleeding liability.
And now, Anaconda was charging into the fray. The woman could extend her limbs by fifty percent and possessed enough raw, superhuman strength to twist two-foot-thick steel pipes like warm taffy.
It didn't matter. Ophelia watched Anaconda get swatted aside like a gnat.
Her opponent was a teenager in a skintight bodysuit who could punch with a peak output of twenty-two tons of force. A freak of nature who had previously withstood the crushing weight of a collapsing, multi-ton elevated railway structure for several minutes. A monster who could turn completely invisible, sprint across ceilings, and discharge lethal bio-electric blasts. Anaconda never stood a chance.
"How the hell am I supposed to fight that?" Ophelia hissed to herself.
Her eyes darted to the secondary monitors. The Black Cat—the leather-clad thief who had infiltrated alongside the spider—was completely absent from the surveillance grid.
Ophelia didn't hesitate. She didn't try to formulate a counter-attack against Spider-Man, and she completely abandoned whatever Luke Cage was doing to her forces topside. The laboratory was already lost.
She ripped the plastic cover off the primary console and slammed her palm onto the self-destruct sequence. She keyed her secure comms. "Dr. Koyama. Dr. Octavius. Evacuate immediately. You have exactly five minutes to reach the escape submarine."
In five minutes, the underwater facility would detonate. The access tunnels would collapse, sealing Viper Security's basement and drowning Spider-Man in the crushing depths of the Hudson River.
Ophelia stepped away from the monitors, her face completely blank. A competent leader knew when to cut her losses. Hydra had limitless resources, but brilliant scientists were incredibly difficult to replace. Losing a multi-million-dollar laboratory to bury an Avenger-level threat was a tremendous tactical victory. As long as Koyama and Otto Octavius lived, Hydra won.
Deep in the facility's medical wing, Dr. Koyama scowled at the blaring evacuation alarm. He looked down at his surgical theater. Three test subjects—a white girl, a black boy, and an Asian man—were strapped to heavy steel tables. The newest iteration of his super-soldier serum was already pumping through their veins.
Abandoning the data now would be a tragedy. Koyama checked his wristwatch, took a slow, steadying breath, and picked up his scalpel. He would gamble the five minutes.
Across the compound, Dr. Otto Octavius had an entirely different reaction.
Suspended in his reinforced laboratory by four massive, articulated mechanical tentacles , Otto pressed the button on his vocal synthesizer. "What is the meaning of this?"
"Spider-Man discovered the base," Viper's voice echoed through the PA system. "I have initiated the self-destruct sequence to bury him here."
"Spider-Man?!" Otto's synthesized voice shrieked, the mechanical audio pitching into a furious, grating static. "Again?!"
Otto's mechanical limbs twitched with unspeakable rage. Back in New York, when he supplied the Kingpin, Spider-Man had ruined everything. No matter what weapons Otto built, no matter how many enhanced mercenaries he equipped, the spider always tore them apart. Now, Otto was working for Hydra, completely detached from Kingpin's operations, conducting entirely unrelated research—and the bug still found him?
There was only one logical explanation in Otto's mind. Spider-Man had to be a bloodhound sent by his old employer, Norman Osborn, to hunt him down.
Iwilldissecthim, Otto vowed, his mechanical tentacles tearing through the lab to pack his research. But revenge would have to wait. First, he had to secure his primary assets. The alien symbiotes.
While Otto frantically packed, Felicia Hardy dropped silently from a ventilation grate into the shadows of the containment lab.
She crept forward, her eyes widening in horror at the main testing chamber. Inside a reinforced glass cylinder, a mass of living black sludge was detaching from a human test subject. An automated high-frequency ultrasound array blasted the chamber, causing the symbiote to liquefy into a puddle of quivering ooze. Felicia looked at the test subject. The poor soul's eyes were vacant, their nervous system completely shredded by the bonding process. They were essentially brain-dead.
Felicia shook her head, forcing the pity down, and moved toward the far wall.
Five heavy containment slots lined the reinforced steel. Four were empty, contaminated by dead experiments. The fifth held a pressurized glass jar containing pure, shifting black slime.
She pulled an electronic lockpick from her belt and slapped it against the containment housing. With a sharp hiss of venting pressure, the digital locks failed and snapped open.
Felicia pulled the heavy jar free, cradling it against her leather-clad chest.
Instantly, the unappealing black sludge inside surged against the glass. It manifested two jagged, ferocious white eyes and a gaping maw of razor-sharp fangs, thrashing aggressively at her. But without a host to bond to, the symbiote was terrifyingly weak. It just smeared uselessly against the reinforced polymer.
"Wow. You are really not cute," Felicia whispered, tapping the glass.
"Neither are you, thief," a synthesized voice grated behind her.
Felicia spun around. Four massive titanium tentacles rose into the air, their razor-sharp claws snapping open. Otto Octavius glared at her, his thick goggles reflecting the red emergency lights.