"One throw?"
Steve Rogers' voice carried rare hesitation as he tightened his grip on his shield, feeling its familiar weight and unfamiliar new texture.
Ahead of him, ten targets darted through the vast training facility like enraged hornets, their flight paths erratic and unpredictable. Hit all of them with a single throw?
This wasn't physics anymore—it was mythology.
"That's right. One throw."
Paul grinned, flashing white teeth, his expression like that of an audience member ready for the show of the century.
"Don't think about this with seventy-year-old physics, Cap. That stuff belongs in a museum."
He took two steps forward, his voice laced with a mesmerizing allure.
"What you're holding isn't just a hunk of metal. It has a mind—basic, but it's there. You need to talk to it. Give it a command."
Paul paused, his eyes gleaming with an almost frightening intensity.
"For example… tell it to fly on its own."
Fly on its own?
Steve's frown deepened as he stared at the shield, its polished surface reflecting his own bewildered expression.
That sounded absurd.
Yet Paul's gaze was unwavering, radiating a confidence that seemed to say, Trust me—you can do the impossible.
Steve inhaled deeply, pushing all doubt aside.
He chose to believe the boy who always seemed to bend reality.
His eyes swept across the room, cataloging the positions, speeds, and likely trajectories of all ten targets. Even to his enhanced mind, the calculations were immense, but in an instant, he was ready.
Then, he closed his eyes.
The world fell silent.
He felt the pulse of the shield in his hands, imagining it not just as a weapon, but as a living predator—a falcon unleashed, hunting with deadly precision.
"On my command," he murmured softly, addressing either the shield or himself.
"Clear the field."
The next moment, his eyes snapped open, every muscle in his body coiling as he twisted and hurled the red-and-blue disk with all his might.
"WHOOSH—!"
The shield became a streak of light, screeching through the air as it slammed into the first target.
"CRACK!"
The hovering target burst apart.
But what happened next stole the breath of everyone watching.
Instead of rebounding, the shield's edges shimmered with the faint glow of magnetic repulsion. Its trajectory veered in an impossible arc, redirecting with the precision of a programmed pinball.
"CRACK!" "CRACK!" "CRACK!"
One after another, targets exploded in showers of sparks—two, three, four…
The shield carved through the air in uncatchable zigzags, each impact, each adjustment, flawlessly executed. It skimmed the ground, soared upward, ricocheted off walls, even made hairpin turns mid-flight.
This wasn't a throw anymore—it was a dance of destruction.
Steve remained rooted in place, his throwing posture frozen, utterly mesmerized.
He could feel something. A faint but undeniable link between him and the shield. He could see its path, sense the exhilaration of every strike.
"CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!"
The last three targets ruptured almost simultaneously, their explosions casting flickering light over Steve's awestruck face.
Ten targets. One throw.
Complete annihilation.
The shield arced gracefully back to his waiting hand, its warmth confirming everything that had just happened was real.
Silence.
Absolute silence.
Every technician, every security officer stood paralyzed, jaws slack, eyes bulging—as if they'd just witnessed divinity.
"...That… that's some bullshit physics," one engineer finally wheezed.
Bullshit indeed.
Even Paul, the mastermind behind all this, stood in stunned muteness, his earlier smugness wiped away. His expression was eerily solemn, his mind racing as he stared between the shield and Steve.
His original idea had been simple: integrate miniature processors and micro-thrusters to assist with trajectory adjustments, boosting accuracy and multi-target strikes.
But this?
This defied expectations.
That wasn't mere "assistance." It was something closer to… telepathic warfare.
Steve hadn't issued precise vectors—just a vague mental command: "Clear the field." And the shield obeyed.
Was this psychic manipulation? Or had the vibranium and cutting-edge tech merged into something unknowable when placed in the hands of Steve Rogers—a living anomaly?
For the first time, Paul's faith in immutable physics wavered.
Data. Equations. Laws. That had always been his gospel. Yet today, the shield—and Steve—had thrown him headfirst into a crash course on magic.
"...Guess I still don't understand this world as much as I thought," he muttered, intrigue and unease flickering in his gaze.
But while the room remained dumbstruck, unnoticed in the corner, Baymax's optics flickered red momentarily.
Lines of incomprehensible data scrolled across his display before settling into a single message:
["P.E.G.A.S.U.S." database acquired. Transmission complete.]
[S.H.I.E.L.D. firewalls—no breaches detected.]
The entire process had been silent. Flawless.
No alarms. No traces.
...
As technicians swarmed Steve, peppering him with questions about controlling the shield, the Captain couldn't suppress an almost childlike grin.
Paul, however, slipped away unseen, returning to his private lab.
The door sealed behind him.
"Baymax, pull up the files." His tone was sharp.
"Of course, Paul."
The holo-screen flared to life, and in seconds, it overflowed with folders, blueprints, and encrypted logs.
At the very top, bold letters loomed:
[P.E.G.A.S.U.S. INITIATIVE]
One of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s most classified projects—centered on harnessing the dark energy extracted from the Tesseract.
Paul's fingers flew, the data parsing at inhuman speeds in his mind.
The Tesseract. The Space Stone. Dark energy. Gamma radiation.
S.H.I.E.L.D. had tried weaponizing it. Industrializing it. But all their experiments had reached the same dead end—they couldn't stabilize it. Every attempt to control the energy collapsed spectacularly.
"Morons… absolute morons," Paul growled under his breath.
"You're not studying energy—you're staring at the threads of creation."
His hand paused on a report about dark energy's particle behavior.
Under certain frequencies, readings showed anomalies: "distance negation," "probability manipulation," even "localized reality distortion"—all dismissed by S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists as "unexplained quantum effects."
But Paul saw truth.
Magic.
The legends of his past life—spells, enchantments—was this their foundation? Not some esoteric force, but dark energy, bending reality?
P.E.G.A.S.U.S. had, by accident, brushed against the nexus of magic and science.
Paul's pulse skyrocketed.
He'd found it—the key to catapulting Earth's tech beyond imagination.
Meld this "magic" with his inventions?
Arc reactors would become obsolete. Energon shortages, solved. He could forge weapons of mythic devastation—
A rush of exhilaration threatened to drown his senses.
Like Columbus sighting the New World, his mind exploded with possibilities.
But just as euphoria crested, a cold sliver of doubt slid into his thoughts.
Wait.
He scrutinized the screen again.
P.E.G.A.S.U.S. was S.H.I.E.L.D.'s crown jewel. Nick Fury wouldn't leave it so vulnerable.
Baymax was formidable, but this heist?
Too smooth. Too effortless.
As if… someone had left the vault open—with a "Take Me" sign taped to the prize.
Paul's jaw clenched.
This wasn't right.
None of this felt right.