They moved fast, bodies slipping between the morning shadows of narrow alleys. Natasha's boots barely made a sound; Liam matched her step for step. She kept her voice low, every word measured.
"Tony found a base," she said without looking back. "Old HYDRA facility, outside the city. He cracked Zola's archives — copied everything he could. Then he wiped Zola's AI clean. Gone. No ghost, no backdoor."
Liam didn't let himself be surprised by the casual cruelty of it. "He deleted Zola? Whole thing?"
"Completely," Natasha said. "Said it had to be done. He sent the decrypted files to Fury to start cleaning out embedded HYDRA cells. Tony's exact words: 'Do not touch the Winter Soldiers. They're mine to burn.'"
They both knew what that meant. Whatever sleeping demons lay inside that base, Tony had a revenge plan for them. It wasn't their mess to solve. But it was their chance to find out what HYDRA had been doing with the sceptre or was it just a bait to draw them out.
They rounded a ruined corner and found Steve waiting by two battered motorcycles, nodding once when he saw them. Dawn Watch's sponsorship showed in the extra maintenance and the rough but reliable engines.
"No witnesses?" Steve asked, already swinging his leg over a bike.
"Left silent," Natasha replied. She mounted the other bike and Liam jumped on behind her without hesitation.
Soon they were moving through the cold morning, engines making only a soft hum, sticking to hidden paths, old trenches, broken walls, and avoiding open areas where a HYDRA scout or drone might notice them. The paths eventually opened into the outskirts—a wide zone filled with broken metal structures, fallen towers, and snow drifting through the air like fine white dust. Natasha slowed the bike, and Steve signaled them to stop behind a collapsed storage container that gave them cover.
They stepped off the bikes and crouched low as everything around them became silent. Then a faint shimmer appeared in the sky above them, almost invisible unless someone was paying close attention—a cloaked Iron Man suit drifting down carefully, its armor designed to absorb and silence all sound, touching the snowy ground so softly that the snow barely moved. Tony's helmet opened with a small, quiet click.
He said, "Good, you didn't draw any attention."
A blue line blinked across his gauntlet as Tony opened the full base layout taken from Zola's files, which included all the entry codes, old security doors, biometric locks, and emergency backups HYDRA had used to hide their secrets, and he pointed toward a half-buried utility mound about half a kilometer away, explaining that a waste shaft marked D-14 would be the safest and quietest way inside, and that Jarvis was already looping the cameras and hiding their presence from all sensors.
Bruce was not with Tony, because Tony had left him at the Quinjet stationed safely on the far ridge, choosing to keep this team small and silent. l
The four of them moved through a shallow ravine to stay hidden from anyone watching from above, keeping low and close to the ground. The base came into view slowly—it looked like a simple, ruined bunker covered in dirt and rust, shaped to look like old factory remains, and it would have been invisible to anyone who didn't know exactly where to look. A crooked vent stuck out from the ground, covered in frost and bent metal.
Natasha dropped first to clear away the snow, uncovering an old HYDRA hatch whose symbol was almost erased by time. Steve and Liam cleared more snow while Natasha took out a pry tool, but Tony stopped her and placed his gauntlet near the lock, sending a quiet coded message using the access keys Zola once used. The hatch responded right away—small red lights turned green, metal bolts slid back, and the hatch lifted with only a soft groan.
They climbed down a vertical shaft one after another, following a thin wrist light from Tony's suit that flickered on and off to avoid sensors. The deeper they went, the colder the air became, until they reached a long service hallway where frost covered the pipes like a layer of white dust. The place was silent—no running generators, no machines, no airflow. It felt like the base had been dead for a long time.
They walked through a corner and suddenly stopped when they saw a body lying near a frozen pipe. The man had been cut clean across the waist, the top half leaning against a wall with a cracked helmet and open eyes, while the lower half lay several feet away with frozen blood spreading in thin, brittle lines.
Natasha examined the scene quietly.
Steve studied the break and said, "There's no blade mark. Something crushed him."
Tony's visor glowed as he scanned the body. "The bones were pressed inward until they broke. It happened instantly."
Liam took in the frozen blood pattern and saw that the blood had burst outward, not smudged or dragged, meaning the man died on the spot and with overwhelming force.
They kept going and found more bodies—some smashed against walls so hard that their armor had fused into the concrete, some torn apart into several pieces, some missing limbs or entire torsos. It felt like the base had been hit by something powerful and violent, something that moved fast and without hesitation.
Jarvis whispered faintly in Tony's ear that strange residues were detected and that they were biological but not fully human or organic, and Tony followed the faint trail Jarvis highlighted on his display until they reached a reinforced door. Tony used another HYDRA command code, and the door opened with a weak hiss.
Inside they found five cryo chambers, each one destroyed from the inside. Frost-covered glass was scattered everywhere, metal torn and bent as if something inside had pushed outward with enormous strength. Deep claw-like marks cut through the steel walls of the pods.
Natasha stepped nearer and said, "Something broke out with force."
Liam walked to a heap of shredded clothing and flesh near the fourth pod. He gently turned it over, and even in its ruined state, it was clear that this was Baron Wolfgang von Strucker. Half of his upper skull was gone, his jaw broken apart, and his ribs looked like they had been pulled open from the inside.
Tony's eyes hardened behind his visor as he whispered Strucker's name. From the information he got from Zola, he knew this guy was responsible for the experimentation in Sokovia and with the help of the sceptre he must have turned the Winter Soldiers into something more monstrous.
He didn't waste time and quickly shared his findings with the rest of the group who had nothing but curses left for the HYDRA men as they had left one huge of a problem for them even after dying.
Natasha moved methodically, sweeping the ruined lab for anything that could be proof. She photographed damaged consoles, bagged fragments of torn fabric stamped with HYDRA insignia, and clipped a scorched access card from a workstation. She collected a handful of sample vials that Jarvis flagged as unusual, wrapped them in cloth, and tucked them into a protective case Tony had carried in. Every scrap she took was logged on Jarvis's portable relay so Fury's analysts could pick up the thread later.
Tony worked faster and with a single focus: find whatever HYDRA had been keeping here. He checked sealed safes, brute-forced a secondary lab terminal, and cross-checked Zola's map until a small, reinforced secure room lit up on his HUD. The door opened to a locked containment locker. Inside, under extra shielding and a heat blanket, sat the item that HYDRA had stolen, the sceptre. Tony handled it with care, eyes never leaving the readouts. He ran a quick diagnostics with Jarvis and pocketed the data drive that recorded the locker's access history.
They looked for signs of the Winter Soldiers next, any operational logs, troop manifests, or the unique chemical markers Tony would recognize. Jarvis traced a few faded signatures that suggested movement but then hit dead ends. Whatever had taken place here had disrupted the chain of custody; the final routes were obscured or deliberately scrubbed. Tony tried to look further into it but it all lead to a dead end again. Maybe with the sceptre he could be able to track them...but not here.
With the immediate sweep done and the most valuable items secured, Tony closed down the base's systems and loaded what they could carry. He lingered by the ruined chamber row for a beat, then hit a sequence on his wrist.
"If someone else comes through, they will not get anything functional," he told them. Jarvis confirmed the armature of the self-destruct, a controlled demolition designed to collapse the access points and destroy data banks. Tony set a delayed timer and once he informed the rest of the group, they moved out fast, retracing their quiet path up the service shaft, across the frozen yard, and into the low scrub where the bikes had been stashed.
They gathered around the Quinjet, which was called in by Tony, where Bruce checked the sampled vials and Tony zipped the sceptre into an armored case. Tony looked at Steve, Natasha, and Liam, a question in his voice. "You coming back to New York with me? I can take you, give the drives and samples straight to Fury and get labs on this now."
Steve folded his arms, thinking of the people they had left moving into new houses and of the rally that could not be abandoned. "We have one Quinjet stationed nearby for our use," he said. "There is work here that cannot wait."
Tony frowned, then offered, "Do you need more people? Weapons? Tech?"
Liam shook his head almost before Tony finished. "No. You go find them," he said. "You have the reach. Our job is local, tracking, protecting, keeping people alive. Adding more faces to our streets will not help. It might hurt."
Tony gave a curt nod, and along with Bruce boarded the Quinjet. He seemed to be in no mood to talk or joke as he was dead set in finding those who murdered his parents.
As the Quinjet climbed and the ruined base receded under a blanket of thawing frost, the three watched it go for a moment, then turned back toward the town and the quiet hard business of keeping people alive and readying a rally that might change everything.
***
For 5+ advance chapters visit my patreon.
patreon.com/narrative_ninja007
**