Hydra Base, The Alps - Midnight
The base was sleeping, or at least, pretending to.
In the deepest sublevels, the hum of the generators never truly ceased, a constant, subsonic vibration that worked its way into the bones of everyone stationed there.
Schmidt sat alone in his office.
The overhead lights were killed, leaving only the pool of yellow light from a single brass desk lamp.
The shadows in the corners of the room seemed to stretch and breathe, dancing with the flickering of the bulb.
On his desk, centered on the green leather blotter, lay the preliminary report on the Super Soldier Serum.
Schmidt stared at it.
To Hitler, this document was a blueprint for a better infantryman.
It was a way to win a war for land, for borders, for the petty squabbles of nations.
To Schmidt, it was a chrysalis.
He reached out, his gloved hand trembling slightly not from fear, but from anticipation, and traced the rim of his crystal cognac glass.
The amber liquid swirled, catching the light.
For years, he had played the loyal dog.
He had clicked his heels.
He had worn the armband.
He had bowed to a failed Austrian painter who thought himself a military genius, a man who consulted astrologers before generals.
Schmidt despised Hitler. He despised the man's smallness.
Hitler wanted a Thousand-Year Reich; Schmidt wanted an eternity.
The Tesseract had opened his eyes.
When he had first held the Cube, even through the protective tongs, he had felt it.
It wasn't just energy. It was a consciousness. It was the universe whispering secrets that human ears were not evolved to hear.
Why settle for being a Führer when you could be a God?
Why worry about the borders of Poland when you could rewrite the laws of physics?
Schmidt smiled.
It was a cold, skeletal expression.
The skin of his face felt tight, like a mask that was ready to be peeled away.
The serum Erskine was brewing... it would be the catalyst. It would burn away the man and leave only the ideal.
"Soon," he whispered to the empty room.
"Let the boy fix the serum. Let him play with his test tubes and his arrogance. Let the war grind on in the East."
He took a sip of the cognac, savoring the burn.
"When I rise, neither the Allies nor the Reich will stand in my way. I will step over them like ants."
Ernst's Quarters
The digital clock on the bedside table flicked over.
02:00.
The witching hour.
The base was silent, save for the rhythmic patrolling of the guards outside in the corridor.
Their boots crunched on the concrete, a metronome of oppression.
Ernst sat in his high-backed velvet armchair, facing the heavy steel door.
He was fully dressed, not in his lab coat, but in a sharp, civilian suit.
His briefcase was packed.
He had locked the door from the inside and jammed the mechanism with a localized magnetic seal, a small device he had cobbled together from spare radio parts.
It would hold for ten minutes against a battering ram, which was all the time he needed.
"Now," he whispered.
The air in the room tore open.
It wasn't a sound; it was a sensation.
A drop in pressure that popped the ears.
A cloud of sulfurous, red smoke billowed out from the corner of the room, smelling of brimstone and ancient dust.
From the smoke, Azazel emerged.
The demon looked bored, picking a piece of lint off his lapel, but his eyes were sharp, scanning the room for threats.
No words were exchanged. They had rehearsed this.
Azazel stepped forward and placed a heavy, clawed hand on Ernst's shoulder.
The grip was firm, grounding.
BAMF.
The universe folded.
The sensation was nauseating. It felt like being pulled through a straw, inside out.
The world dissolved into smoke, shadow, and a chaotic swirl of non-colors.
Unknown Location - Pacific Private Island
Instantaneously, the freezing cold of the Alps vanished.
It was replaced by a wall of humidity and warmth.
The sterile smell of ozone and disinfectant was replaced by the scent of blooming jasmine, sea salt, and expensive mahogany.
They appeared in the center of a luxuriously furnished study.
Ernst stumbled slightly as he materialized, his inner ear rebelling against the sudden shift in gravity and atmospheric pressure.
He grabbed the edge of a heavy oak desk to steady himself.
"Smooth," Azazel quipped, dusting soot off his shoulder.
"Though you humans are always so heavy to carry. It's the guilt, I assume."
Ernst ignored him, shaking off the dizziness of long-range teleportation.
He took a deep breath of the tropical air, filling his lungs.
It tasted like freedom. And money.
He walked to the wall and pulled a thick velvet cord hanging by the door.
Ding.
A soft chime echoed through the villa.
Moments later, the heavy mahogany doors opened silently on well-oiled hinges.
An elderly man entered.
He was dressed in a pristine tuxedo, despite the tropical heat.
His silver hair was combed back perfectly.
He moved with the silent grace of a predator disguised as a servant, steps that made no sound on the hardwood floor.
"Master Ernst," the butler said, bowing low.
"Welcome back. You are precisely three minutes early. I was just decanting the wine."
"Uncle Kerry," Ernst smiled, a genuine expression breaking through his mask of calculation.
He stretched his stiff neck, hearing the vertebrae pop.
"I told you, drop the formalities when it's just us."
"Propriety is the foundation of order, sir," Kerry replied smoothly.
His voice was cultured, British, but his eyes held a warmth reserved only for the boy he had practically raised.
Kerry was no ordinary butler.
He was Sebastian Shaw's most trusted retainer.
He was the man who ran the Hellfire Club's dark operations, the assassinations, the bribery, the body disposal, while Shaw played the public tycoon.
He was a man who knew how to get blood out of silk sheets.
"Is the facility ready?" Ernst asked, his tone shifting back to business.
He set his briefcase on the desk.
"Underground level 4. The reactor is primed, and the staff have been briefed," Kerry replied.
"We took the liberty of shielding the energy signature using the new lead-polymer weave you designed. To the outside world, this island is nothing but a vacation home for a bored industrialist."
"Good. Let's go."
The Underground Lab
They took the hidden elevator behind the bookcase.
It descended rapidly, passing through layers of rock and reinforced concrete.
When the doors opened, they stepped into a world that rivaled Hydra's own, but with one key difference: money.
Hydra's labs were brutalist, industrial, built for war.
The Hellfire Club's lab was sleek, chrome, and white.
It looked like the future.
In the center of the room stood a vertical glass cylinder, an Augmentation Pod, surrounded by thick power cables and banks of monitoring stations.
A dozen researchers, all on Shaw's private payroll and silenced by NDAs that carried a death penalty, stood ready in white hazmat suits.
Ernst inspected the setup.
He walked to the main console and opened his briefcase.
With reverent hands, he revealed the prize.
Seven Tesseract energy cells.
They glowed with a hypnotic, infinite blue light.
In the dim lab, they looked like bottled stars.
The researchers gasped softly.
"This is it," Ernst said, turning to Azazel.
"Standard teleportation uses the Brimstone Dimension as a shortcut. You step out of our reality, traverse the sub-layer, and step back in. But your range is limited by your stamina. You get tired."
He looked the demon in the eye.
"These cells... they are pure Space. They are solidified distance."
Ernst picked up one of the cells. It hummed against his palm.
"If we graft this energy into your bio-matrix, if we force your cells to metabolize this cosmic radiation, you won't just travel through space. You will command it. You will become a living coordinate."
He paused, his expression serious.
"But the risk is absolute. This isn't science, Azazel. This is alchemy. If your body rejects the energy, if your X-Gene cannot adapt to the influx, you will be atomized. You will be scattered across the cosmos as radioactive dust."
Azazel looked at the pod. Then he looked at Ernst.
Slowly, deliberately, he stripped off his suit jacket. Then his shirt.
He revealed a torso scarred by centuries of violence.
Sword cuts from the Crusades.
Musket ball scars from the Napoleonic wars. Burn marks from inquisitions.
He grinned, showing sharp fangs.
"I have lived too long being merely 'strong', little master," Azazel rumbled.
He flexed his hand, his tail lashing behind him.
"I have been a demon in the dark. A frightening story to tell children. But I want to be a god of the new world."
He stepped toward the machine.
"If death comes, let it come. If power comes, I will embrace it."
"Get in," Ernst ordered.
Azazel stepped into the pod.
The heavy glass door hissed shut, locking him in a pressurized seal.
Ernst moved to the control console. His fingers flew across the keyboard.
He slotted the seven blue cartridges into the intake manifold.
Click. Click. Click.
"Initiate sequence," Ernst commanded.
"Injection at 10% capacity. Ramp up to 100% over sixty seconds. Do not pause."
The lab hummed as the machinery roared to life.
A low whine built up, shaking the floor.
Inside the manifold, the Tesseract cells began to drain.
A beam of concentrated Tesseract energy, pure, liquid blue fire, shot into the pod through the injection ports.
It struck Azazel.
The pod was bathed in blinding blue light.
Ernst watched the monitors, his eyes darting between heart rate, brain activity, and energy absorption.
"Heart rate elevating to 200 BPM. Cellular temperature rising. He's cooking, sir!" a technician yelled.
"Hold steady," Ernst murmured.
Inside the pod, Azazel didn't scream.
He threw his head back, his mouth open in a silent roar.
His eyes rolled back into his skull.
It wasn't pain.
It was... ecstasy.
He was high.
It felt like returning to the womb of the universe.
It felt like drinking pure oxygen.
The energy wasn't burning him; it was filling the empty spaces in his soul.
As the saturation increased, something impossible happened.
"Sir! Look at the subject's skin!"
Black, tribal-like markings began to appear on Azazel's red skin.
They weren't burns.
They were intricate, geometric patterns.
They writhed like living serpents, peeling away from his flesh and floating millimeters above his skin, glowing with an eldritch violet light that clashed with the blue of the Tesseract.
"Runes," Ernst whispered, his eyes widening.
He slammed a button on the console.
"Camera 2! Record that pattern! High resolution! I want every line mapped!"
'These weren't just tattoos,' Ernst realized.
'They were dimensional anchors. The language of the Neyaphem. The ancient mutants.'
The Tesseract energy was etching the history of his species back onto his DNA.
"Energy levels critical!" the lead technician shouted, panic rising in his voice.
"Sir, he's at capacity! The bio-feedback is red-lining! The containment glass is fracturing!"
Ernst reached for the abort switch. His hand hovered over the red button.
"Azazel! That's enough! You're going critical! I'm pulling the plug!"
"NO!"
The voice didn't come from the intercom.
It came from everywhere.
Azazel's voice boomed through the reinforced glass, amplified by power, vibrating the very air in the room.
"Do not stop!" Azazel roared.
Inside the pod, he opened his eyes.
They were no longer yellow.
They were glowing white.
"I see it! I see the pathways! The Grid! The space between the stars!"
He slammed his fist against the glass.
"More! Give me MORE!"
Ernst hesitated.
The readings showed Azazel's body was on the verge of disintegration.
His molecular cohesion was dropping to 40%.
But the mutant's will... his sheer, ancient malice... was holding him together.
Ernst made a split-second calculation.
Safety meant survival. Risk meant evolution.
"Override safety protocols," Ernst ordered, his voice steely and calm amidst the chaos.
"Sir?"
"Open the valves!" Ernst screamed.
"Give him everything!"
"But the reactor, "
"DO IT!"
——
Authors Note:
I have analyzed the physics of 'Writer Motivation.'
It turns out, my typing speed is directly correlated to the number of shiny blue rocks (Power Stones) in my inventory.
200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter
10 reviews = 1 bonus Chapter