# Chapter 5
The cave smelled of damp earth and barely smoldering coals. I'd settled onto a spread of straw, leaning against the cool wall, watching the fire die. Flickering flames threw shadows across the stone ceiling, illuminating my silhouette in the half-dark.
For the first time in a month, I could let my thoughts drift away from survival. I didn't need to plan routes, count the dead, or listen to the sounds of the forest. Instead, I tried to stitch together the fragments of my old life with what had become my daily reality.
The thoughts wouldn't leave me alone. More than anything, I kept thinking about my reincarnation. Hazy images surfaced in my mind — the face of a tired man in glasses. But whenever I tried to focus on them, they dissolved like morning fog. It felt as though someone had erected an invisible barrier, leaving behind only the sense that my arrival here was no accident. And that feeling was less frightening than the emptiness that took the place of fear.
*Maybe that's for the best,* I thought, turning a stick of kindling over in my fingers. *If higher powers don't want me to remember — then what I have is enough.*
I set the stick down and reached for the stack of newspapers I'd collected over the past few trips into the city. The pages had yellowed from the cave's dampness, but the headlines were still legible.
*"Tony Stark, Son of Renowned Weapons Manufacturer, Missing in Afghanistan."*
*"Professor Charles Xavier Addresses the UN: 'Mutants Are Not a Threat — They Are the Next Step in Evolution.'"*
*"Unrest in Sokovia: Foreign 'Peacekeepers' Spotted in Punitive Operations."*
I read those lines again and again, cross-referencing them with what I remembered. As far as I recalled, there were no mutants in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yet here, even in Sokovia — a country not exactly known for its high level of development in Eastern Europe — people had heard of them. This universe already had its own established heroes. Captain Britain, for instance, defending the United Kingdom, and a host of others who bore no resemblance to the MCU's roster.
*An alternate universe,* I realized.
That stripped me of my main advantage — precise knowledge of the plot. I couldn't predict exactly when Thanos would come for the stones, or whether Magneto would show up here with his army. But some things remained fixed points. Stark's disappearance was the trigger that had started the arms race. The first suits of armor would come soon, and after that — an alien invasion, the exposure of S.H.I.E.L.D., and all the rest of the madness.
I had the system. I had strength that grew with every month. But to survive in this chaos, being strong wasn't enough — I needed to be faster, smarter, and more ruthless than any other player on the board.
And the first step was getting out of Sokovia.
I closed my eyes and let myself picture two routes.
The first: quiet. Find smugglers, talk to them, pay up, and cross the border on foot through the mountain passes. Slow, potentially dangerous, but almost no shooting involved. Probability of success — sixty percent, no more.
The second: louder. Go back to the Hydra lab I'd broken out of a month ago. Clear out whatever was left of the people who'd tortured Marcus. Take the Quinjet I'd seen sitting in the hangar. And fly out, leaving a burning complex behind me.
I opened my eyes and looked at my hands. They weren't shaking.
*What's happening to me?*
A month ago, killing the first guard had made me want to turn inside out with revulsion. Now I was thinking about a massacre the way I'd think about a tactical problem. The serum and the Singularity energy were changing me in more than just physical ways. They were burning away the excess — fear, compassion, doubt. Turning me into a perfect instrument for survival and killing. But where was the line between a perfect instrument and a monster?
*I'm not a monster,* I told myself. *I'm just doing what needs to be done. Those people got what they deserved.*
But a voice inside whispered: *You don't want to kill them because it's necessary. You want it because you like feeling their fear.*
I clenched my fists, feeling my nails bite into my palms.
"Enough," I said out loud.
The decision arrived without fanfare, without prolonged deliberation. I wasn't going to slip away quietly. My goal was to make Hydra remember: when they build a weapon, it can turn against them. And if an opportunity arose to destroy one of their bases, I wasn't going to pass it up.
And besides — the Quinjet. The Air Ace skill was ready and waiting. I could feel the knowledge wired into my neurons — the ability to fly any aircraft, whether a helicopter or a jet fighter. It would be foolish not to use it.
I got up and began checking my gear.
The tactical suit the system had materialized lay spread out on a nearby stone. I ran my fingers across the titanium inserts, checked the clasps. The fabric was dense but flexible, and it fit as though it had been tailored to my measurements. The helmet's visor responded to movement, blinking a green indicator.
*Thank you, Bruce Wayne.*
Beside the suit I laid out my supplies: two silenced pistols taken from patrols, a ceramic-bladed knife, the Coagulant-7 injector, and the flashlight, which I'd loaded with the last batteries I'd traded canned goods for in the city.
I changed. The suit settled perfectly, and for a moment I felt not like a fugitive, but like a hunter.
The fire burned down to nothing, leaving the cave in absolute darkness. I activated the thermal vision. The world painted itself in shades of crimson and violet. No signs of life nearby.
*Moving out in two hours, once the moon goes down.*
I sat back into the lotus position, closed my eyes, and focused on slowing my breathing. My heart beat steadily. In my chest, around the solar plexus, the Singularity energy rolled heavily, a reminder that the next summon was still nearly a month away.
*It'll be enough,* I told myself. *It'll be more than enough.*
---
The forest received me in silence. No wind stirred the leaves, no owl called in the dark, no branch cracked underfoot. Nature seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for something. I moved fast but made no sound, each step precise and economical, Altaïr's Parkour guiding my body on instinct.
Forty minutes later I reached the Hydra facility. I tucked myself into the slope of a hill beneath the dense branches of a spruce and settled in to observe.
Before, this place had always had guards posted, voices carrying across the yard, vehicles moving through. Now everything had changed. The gates were empty, not a soul visible. The floodlights mounted around the perimeter swept the grounds in slow, mechanical arcs. On the southeast corner, one of them continued its delayed flicker, creating a nine-second window of darkness.
*Too quiet,* I noted, studying the thermal image. *Either they've cleared everyone out, or…*
Or they were waiting for me.
I switched to standard mode, then to enhanced contrast. Nothing changed. No ambushes on the rooftops, no snipers in the brush. The hangar and the lab looked completely empty.
I understood then that it was a trap. They were waiting for me to walk in.
The smart play was to fall back. Find an alternate route, avoid walking into an obvious ambush. But I looked at my hands, and the smell of the lab came back to me — cold metal clamped around wrists, Marcus screaming in the dark with no one to hear him.
"No," I whispered quietly. "Not tonight."
I waited for the southeast floodlight to go dark and ran. Six seconds to reach the wall. Twelve meters of corrugated metal, and I was on the roof, one hand locked around a ventilation shaft.
My heart beat steadily. My breathing was even.
I dropped inside, landing in a crouch, and held still.
The lab corridor met me with dim light and the smell of antiseptic. The light picked out transparent capsules along the walls. Each footstep sent a dull thud reverberating through my temples.
Bodies floated inside the capsules. Or what remained of them. Deformed limbs, sections of exposed brain, metal implants driven directly into the spine. On one of the tables lay what had once been a human being: the chest cavity wrenched open, the heart replaced by a mechanical pump that had long since stopped beating.
*Hydra's animals did this,* I thought, looking at the silent witnesses. *This is what you wanted to do to me.*
Rage rose from my chest. I stopped controlling my breathing, stopped listening.
Footsteps around the corner. Two sets. I stepped forward into the light.
The first guard barely managed to raise his rifle. I seized the barrel, tore it from his hands, and in the same motion drove the stock into his throat. He crumpled, gurgling. The second tried to step back, reach for something, call for backup — but the ceramic knife found the base of his skull.
I picked up the first guard's rifle and checked the magazine. Full.
After that, I stopped hiding. I walked the corridors, looked into every room, and killed everyone I found. Bullets ricocheted off the titanium plates of the suit; I didn't bother dodging. Blood spread across the floor, mixing with puddles of formaldehyde from shattered capsules. Gunshots and the cries of the dying rang in my ears.
I felt nothing except an icy emptiness.
In one of the side rooms, I found her. Nada. The one who had delivered me into Hydra's hands.
She was sitting at a terminal, frantically wiping data. She heard my footsteps and turned — and I watched her face transform into a mask of terror. She recognized me. Even through the suit, she recognized me.
"Marcus?" she whispered.
I walked toward her slowly, giving her time to understand. She backed away until her shoulders hit the wall.
"It wasn't me," she started babbling. "It was an order, I didn't want to—"
"You brought me here," I said, and my voice came out hollow. "You were smiling when they strapped me to the table. I remember."
She screamed when I grabbed her shoulder and pulled her to face me. I started with the fingers. One, two, three — each crack was a count for every day Marcus had spent submerged in liquid, suffocating, losing his mind. She screamed, begged for mercy, called for help. Nobody came.
I dragged her by the hair to one of the tables — the very one I had once been strapped to — and worked through her joints methodically. Knees, elbows, ribs. I wanted her to feel at least a fraction of the pain that had been inflicted on every victim in this room.
When she began to choke on her own screaming and her own blood, I lifted her head by the hair.
"Who's in charge here?" I asked.
"Str-Strucker," she rasped. "The Baron… in his office…"
I nodded. Her eyes went wide when she understood that the answer had bought her nothing, and I broke her neck.
I stepped back into the corridor, feeling the blood pounding in my temples. She was dead — the one responsible for everything that had happened. But somehow it brought no relief.
I took the elevator. It carried me to the top floor. Strucker's office was at the end of a long corridor, the door standing open. I entered with the rifle ready.
The office was empty.
A heavy oak desk. The chair pushed back. On the desk — a tablet and an envelope. I walked over and picked up the tablet. A video message was already playing on the screen.
Strucker looked back at me from the display. His expression was calm, almost thoughtful.
"Subject 924," he said. "Congratulations. You have passed every stage of the trials we prepared for you. Your endurance, your ruthlessness, your capacity for adaptation — all of it has exceeded my expectations. You have become the perfect weapon."
He paused and lifted a glass from the desk.
"But a perfect weapon is one that can be controlled. You, unfortunately, have lost your safety mechanism. I am therefore compelled to do what one does with any dangerous prototype."
A countdown appeared on screen: 03:00.
"You may be surprised to hear this, Marcus, but I don't want you dead. You're too valuable. So I'm offering you a choice. You have three minutes to find me somewhere in this building. Or three minutes to get out. I've mined the entire complex, but the detonator…" He held it up briefly. "It's in my hands. If you kill me — you'll be able to leave. If not… well, that too is a result worth studying."
He smiled, and the screen went dark.
I swore quietly. Three minutes. Strucker was hiding somewhere in this endless maze of corridors, and he had no intention of fighting — his goal was to make me either walk into a trap, or kill him and take on the risk himself.
I ran into the corridor. Empty. Strucker was either in a shielded room, or—
I sprinted for the stairs, vaulting steps three at a time. First floor, second, third — the thermal visor registered only the cooling bodies of the men I'd killed.
*02:10.*
I went through the layout of the base in my mind. The basement. There was some kind of bunker down there that hadn't been used for experiments — it stored archives. If Strucker wanted to wait things out, that was where he'd go.
I dropped to the ground floor. The heavy door was ajar, and light bled through the gap.
*01:30.*
I burst into the archive with the rifle up. Strucker stood at the far wall in front of an open control panel, the detonator in his hand. When he saw me, he didn't flinch. He even smiled. Beside him stood the square-jawed captain of the guard, hands locked tight around a case.
"Faster than I expected," Strucker said.
"Turn it off," I snarled. "And I might let you walk out of here."
"I won't," he answered calmly. "I'm not suicidal, Marcus. I simply wanted to buy time." A brief pause. "And you won't let me walk out regardless."
He pressed the button.
The blast wave hit from below, and the floor fractured beneath my feet. I spun — but the captain had already raised something. A grenade? No. A flashbang. White light detonated against my eyes. The visor auto-darkened, but for several critical seconds I was blind. I couldn't react in time. The floor gave way, and I dropped, grabbing for rebar. The cape deployed automatically, slowing the fall, but everything around me was already burning.
I hit a pile of rubble and was back on my feet in an instant.
"Prepare for evacuation," a voice crackled from the speaker above. Strucker. "A shame we couldn't remove all the equipment in time, but… science demands sacrifice. And you, Marcus, turned out to be too expensive a toy. I'll be more careful next time."
Then another explosion threw me into the wall. My ears rang, and consciousness flickered for one brief moment.
When I came back to myself, the archive no longer existed — only fire and smoke. I dragged myself out through a breach in the wall, coughing, pulling a metal fragment from my shoulder.
The complex was burning around me.
I ran for the hangar, hoping Strucker had been bluffing. But when I burst through the doors, I found only smoldering wreckage. The Quinjet had been blown to pieces — the second explosion had detonated directly in its engines.
I stood there, staring at what remained of my ticket out.
*Damn.*
The sirens around me shifted pitch — no longer an alarm, now a fire klaxon. I turned and ran for the exit, not through the main gates but through the gap the explosion had torn in the wall.
The night received me with cold air and the smell of burning. I stopped on the hill and watched the base burn.
No Quinjet. And Strucker had gotten away.
I looked at my hands. They were trembling — from adrenaline, from the strain, from the slow realization of what I had just done.
*Why? Why did I go after him?*
No answer. Only emptiness and exhaustion.
I turned and disappeared into the trees. Smugglers and mountain passes, then. I had no other choice left — just the quiet, long walk on foot.
*But Strucker will remember,* I thought, as the lights of the burning base vanished behind the tree line. *Good. Let him know I'm not a toy. And if they want to continue — I'll find them.*
The forest closed behind me, swallowing the shadow of a man in bat-winged armor who had just destroyed a Hydra cell and walked away with nothing to show for it.