In a secret room in New York—
Gideon Malick, Whitehall, Original Sin Sinthea Schmidt, Baron Zemo, Dr. Faust, and Madame Hydra sat around a massive circular table.
At its center: the HYDRA emblem.
Alexander Pierce was currently at the American General Bureau. Baron Strucker had been captured in Latveria. Hive? Off somewhere on an unknown planet, playing PUBG.
That left these few—HYDRA's remaining top brass.
"Where is John Garrett?" Madame Hydra was the first to speak.
"Hell if I know what that life-hoarding opportunist is doing now," Sin muttered as she ran her fingers through her blazing red hair. "According to intel, he led the task force meant for the General Bureau and redirected it to 'The Fridge,' the FBI's top-secret warehouse. Probably sniffed out something in there that might extend his life, right?"
"No need to concern ourselves with that kind of trash," Zemo sneered. "We were going to eliminate him anyway. Only reason he lasted this long was because he wore a Bureau badge."
Zemo had always looked down on Garrett—his methods were bottom-tier Supervillain tactics.
Passing off as a prophet by abusing his FBI clearance and information asymmetry?
Zemo laughed a full thirty minutes when he first heard about it.
"Forget Garrett. What I want to know is, how the hell did Strucker get captured?" Whitehall adjusted his glasses, his sharp eyes hidden behind layers of lens reflection. "Didn't he say he had a deal with the dictator in Latveria? And those Umbrella Corporation lunatics—are they even still with us? All they ever do is lock themselves in that tiny Eastern European country to play with bioweapons."
"Don't bother with the side characters. What matters now is securing the General Bureau," said Dr. Faust, voice calm but grim. "And then launching the three Helicarriers from the Project Insight hangar. We may not be able to directly control the world—but we'll be able to negotiate with it."
With a flick of his fingers, Faust summoned several large 3D screens.
They lit up with real-time footage from the battlefield.
"As you can see… the situation isn't looking too good."
"Ever since that Agent named Dante arrived, not only did their strength spike—our embedded Agents haven't been able to pull any worthwhile intelligence."
Everyone in the room understood exactly what Faust meant.
The reason they'd thawed and deployed all their Winter Soldiers—soldiers they'd been hoarding in cold storage for decades—was because they had no idea how deep the FBI's true combat strength ran.
But the bait was too juicy.
Project Insight offered them a shot at controlling the world.
They had no choice but to go all in.
If they won, they'd write the rules.
If they lost, they'd crawl back into the shadows—dormant, like after World War II.
"First of all, look at the FBI Academy. Where the hell did they pull so many superhumans from?" someone snapped. "I knew Nick Fury had a habit of collecting powered kids, but this many? This isn't a task force, it's a damn army! And our thousand HYDRA soldiers? They're getting steamrolled!"
"And the main battlefield, can someone explain those two monsters? Even if Lord Hive came back, I doubt he'd be a match for either of them!"
"Then look at the Bureau's headquarters! That's supposed to be where we hold the advantage! Maria Hill and Romanoff resisting is one thing, but then a few elite Agents and Iron Man show up, and boom—instant counterattack?!"
The screens painted a hopeless picture.
On the far right, teenage superheroes and mutants from the Academy were charging into HYDRA ranks like a human blender.
The most ridiculous part?
The X-Men, who'd shown up in case something went wrong, hadn't even lifted a finger. Instead, they formed a perimeter and pulled out notebooks, grading the students' combat performance like it was PE class.
The center screen was even more brutal.
The three Asgardian siblings had turned the battlefield into an actual bloodbath.
Hela's necromancy on a mass-combat scale was downright broken. Every enemy she killed became another fighter on her side—and her forces grew with her kill count.
To top it off, soldiers were watching their own dead comrades rise from the ground and turn against them.
That alone was enough to shatter morale.
The leftmost screen showed the situation inside the Bureau.
Technically more balanced—but only just.
Tony Stark and Steve Rogers were carving their way through the HYDRA agents like they were running a mowing service.
Meanwhile, the Star Team—
Ada Wong led the charge with terrain intel.
Captain Carter and Harley Quinn smashed through choke points.
Wanda held the center as the team's core.
And Pietro cleared flanks like a blender on overdrive.
They were advancing faster than Steve Rogers himself.
"We thought we'd already overestimated the FBI's combat strength to the limit…" the Madame muttered.
"And yet, we still underestimated them."
She let out a breath, then stood.
As HYDRA's current top commander, she had no choice but to pull the most dangerous card in the deck.
"Release the Super Winter Soldiers."
"You're not serious…" Whitehall said, eyes narrowing behind the lenses. "Even we can't control them. Even if we win, how do we lock them back down?"
"Do we have a choice?" Madame Hydra jabbed a finger at the screen showing the Asgardian siblings tearing through HYDRA forces like tissue paper. "Only they can even hope to stop them. We've already invested too much—there's no turning back. I'd rather die on this table than hibernate for another fifty years like it's 1945!"
She slammed her fist on the table, her green skintight battle suit stretching taut over her explosive figure from the impact.
No one dared comment on the view.
Madame Hydra had taken over after Red Skull's defeat in World War II.
No one knew her origins. No one knew her age. All they knew was—she never seemed to age at all.
"As you command."
Whitehall nodded, picked up the communicator, and said:
"Deploy the Super Winter Soldiers to the main battlefield. Repeat—deploy the Super Winter Soldiers."
Minutes later, two military transport planes appeared on the center screen, each carrying a massive cryogenic pod suspended beneath them.
The pods dropped like missiles.
Boom!
The tremor drew the attention of the three Asgardian siblings.
The pod doors exploded skyward—
And from within emerged two titans.
One green.
One red.
Both wearing Winter Soldier uniforms.
"HULK! SMASH!"
(To be continued.)
***
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