Peter found it in four hours.
Not through the institutional channels Tony had available — not through FRIDAY's network monitoring or the S.H.I.E.L.D adjacent databases that Tony could access when he chose to acknowledge that he could access them. Through a sixteen-year-old named Ned who lived three blocks from the newly acquired lower Manhattan facility and had noticed the equipment trucks because he noticed everything and had been texting Peter about it for two hours before Peter thought to check his phone.
Specifically Ned had sent: hey so there are like a lot of black trucks unloading weird equipment into the old Castellan building on Worth Street and the guys doing it look military but without uniforms and I think one of them had a HYDRA tattoo on his wrist but maybe I'm wrong but also I'm probably not wrong
Followed by seventeen photographs of varying quality.
Tony looked at the photographs for forty seconds and said "that's definitely HYDRA" and pulled the building's floor plan from public records in the time it took Peter to respond to Ned's texts with a message that communicated both genuine appreciation and a very firm instruction to go home and stay there.
The Castellan building on Worth Street was a former pharmaceutical research facility — six floors, the top three of which had been equipped for laboratory use in a previous tenancy and still had the structural infrastructure for power-intensive equipment. It had been vacant for eleven months. The emergency acquisition paperwork FRIDAY had flagged was for all six floors under a shell company that didn't exist in any database older than three weeks.
HYDRA had not been planning this long. They had adapted quickly when their original facility was compromised.
Tony brought the floor plan up on the main display and looked at it for a moment.
Then he looked at the time.
Then he went to the guest floor and knocked on Naruto's door.
Naruto was not asleep.
He had slept for four hours — the recovery protocol efficiently executed, the same six-hours-from-unconscious-to-awake transition compressed because the situation had changed and his internal calibration had adjusted accordingly. He had been in shallow meditation for the past hour, working at the edge of the deeper level, probing the seal structure with the additional chakra that the sleep had generated.
He was at sixteen percent.
He came to the door and opened it and Tony was standing in the hallway with a floor plan in one hand and the expression of someone who had decided something.
"We found the facility," Tony said.
"I know," Naruto said. "I heard Peter on the phone two hours ago."
Tony blinked. "You heard—"
"Partial awareness during meditation extends auditory range," Naruto said. "I've been tracking the conversation. Worth Street. Former pharmaceutical building. Six floors." He paused. "Ned takes very good photographs."
Tony looked at him for a moment.
"Do you also know what I'm going to propose," he said.
"Interdiction," Naruto said. "Delay their setup enough to preserve the recovery window. Yes."
"Can you be ready in twenty minutes."
"Yes."
"You said you needed—"
"The situation changed," Naruto said. "The timeline changed. I adapt." He turned back into the room for fifteen seconds and came back with the grey hoodie on. "Let's go."
They went in three teams.
Tony's reasoning was sound: a single coordinated approach on an active HYDRA facility that knew its primary target had escaped would trigger immediate activation protocols. A distributed approach — pressure from multiple directions simultaneously — forced a split defensive response and created windows that a single-point entry didn't.
Team one: Tony in the Mark whatever-it-was armor, approaching from the roof. Air superiority and facility overview. The armor had been modified in the past four hours with what Tony called "Infinity shielding" that was theoretically protective against the kind of energy readings FRIDAY had been monitoring. Theoretically.
Team two: Natasha Romanoff, who had arrived at the tower ninety minutes after Tony's call with the expression of someone who had been waiting for the call and had already packed. She and Peter on street level, east and west approaches respectively, managing the perimeter and preventing extraction.
Team three: Naruto.
Naruto's role was not perimeter. Not air cover. Not extraction prevention.
Naruto's role was the crystals.
The Infinity Residue crystals that HYDRA had taken from the bank were the catalyst — without them the framework in his body couldn't be activated. If the crystals could be secured or destroyed before HYDRA's technical team could deploy them, the seventy-two-hour window became irrelevant. The activation couldn't happen without the catalyst. Which bought time — real time, not the compressed forty-hours-or-less window they were currently working against.
It was the cleanest solution.
Which meant it was probably not going to be straightforward.
Tony had briefed the team in twelve minutes — specific, organized, with the efficiency of someone who had run operations like this enough times that the briefing format was automatic. Natasha had asked three questions, all of them precise, all of them about perimeter variables Tony's plan hadn't fully addressed. Tony had answered two of them and adjusted the plan based on the third.
Peter had looked at Naruto during the briefing with the expression of someone who wanted to ask something and was choosing the right moment.
The right moment came in the elevator going down.
"Sixteen percent," Peter said quietly. "That's what you're at."
"Sixteen," Naruto confirmed.
"The plan assumes you can—"
"The plan assumes I can move effectively at sixteen percent," Naruto said. "Which I can. This isn't the modification procedure. This is physical infiltration. Chakra enhances it but the base capability exists without it."
"Spider abilities."
"And fifty years of S-rank infiltration experience in a body that was already extraordinary before I arrived in it." He paused. "I'm not going in at combat capacity. I'm going in to find the crystals. Find, secure or neutralize, extract. I'm not fighting a facility. I'm moving through one."
Peter absorbed this. "And if there are people between you and the crystals."
"Then I move past them."
"With sixteen percent chakra."
"With webbing and Taijutsu and the specific advantage of being completely unexpected," Naruto said. "They're looking for the asset they lost. They're not looking for a fully functional operative. The gap between their expectation and reality is a significant tactical resource."
Peter was quiet for the rest of the elevator descent.
Natasha, who had been standing in the back corner of the elevator and had not visibly been paying attention to any of this, said: "The infiltration vector he's describing is sound."
Peter looked at her.
"The expectation gap is real," she said. "I've built entire operations on smaller versions of it." She looked at Naruto with the flat professional assessment she had used since arriving — not hostile, not warm, simply evaluative. "You've done this before."
"Many times," Naruto said.
"Different world."
"Same principles."
She considered this for exactly the duration of the elevator reaching the ground floor.
"Don't improvise past the crystal objective," she said as the doors opened. "Find them, secure them, get out. Let us handle everything else."
"Agreed," Naruto said.
She walked out of the elevator without further comment. Peter gave Naruto a look that communicated something complicated about Natasha's communication style and then followed her.
Tony was already in the lobby in the armor — not fully sealed, the faceplate open, the suit making small sounds of active systems. He looked at Naruto.
"Comms," he said, and handed Naruto a small device that Naruto attached behind his ear with the practiced ease of someone who had used communication equipment across multiple wars. "FRIDAY has your channel. She'll provide facility layout updates in real time based on the armor sensors and the cameras I'm going to access when we arrive." He paused. "Anything else you need."
"No."
"Sixteen percent," Tony said. It was not quite a question.
"Enough," Naruto said. "For this part."
Tony's faceplate closed.
They went out into the city.
Worth Street at midnight was not empty.
New York at midnight was never empty — that was one of the fundamental truths Naruto had absorbed in his first days here, the city's refusal to fully stop, the continuous low-grade motion that persisted at every hour. But Worth Street at midnight had a specific character: quieter than its daytime self, the financial district buildings around it dark above the first few floors, the street traffic reduced to occasional vehicles and the specific pedestrian population of people with late destinations.
The Castellan building occupied mid-block on the north side of the street. From the exterior it was dark — no visible light from the windows, no indication of activity. Competent operational security. They weren't advertising.
But the equipment trucks were still there. Two of them, parked on the building's service side, and the kind of truck that carried heavy laboratory equipment in any world had a specific suspension pattern under load that was different from empty.
Naruto noted this from the rooftop across the street where he had positioned himself while Tony circled in the armor at altitude and Natasha and Peter took their street-level positions.
"FRIDAY," he said quietly into the comm.
"Scanning the facility," FRIDAY's voice came back. "I have heat signatures on floors three through five. Concentrated activity on floor four — twenty-three heat signatures, dense cluster, that's likely the primary lab setup. Floor three has six signatures, dispersed — security. Floor five has four signatures in a contained area, minimal movement."
"Floor five," Naruto said. "The contained area."
"Energy readings from floor five are elevated," FRIDAY said. "Consistent with high-concentration Infinity Residue. That's where the crystals are."
"Guarded," Naruto said.
"Four signatures, minimal movement. They're sitting, not patrolling. Stationary guard on the crystals rather than active patrol, which suggests they expect the crystals to be the last thing anyone reaches rather than the first point of entry."
Naruto looked at the building.
The conventional approach was to enter at the bottom and move up — work through security on floor three before reaching the lab on four and the crystals on five. The conventional approach meant nineteen additional contacts between entry and objective.
"Is there a roof access point to floor five," he said.
"Yes. Stairwell access to the roof from floor five. The roof has a mechanical housing and two ventilation access points. Current readings: no heat signatures on the roof."
"Roof entry," Naruto said.
"Acknowledged," Tony's voice came in. "I'll create a distraction on the east face in ninety seconds. Something loud enough to pull security attention."
"Not yet," Naruto said. "Not until I'm inside. If they go on alert before I reach the crystals they'll move them."
"Right," Tony said. "Call it."
Naruto looked at the building.
Fourteen-story buildings in this world had specific exterior geometry — maintenance access, window units, ledge structures, the functional architecture of a structure designed for human occupation and servicing. He had been learning this geometry every day since arriving, every rooftop transit teaching him more about how these buildings were built and how they could be moved through.
This one had exterior window bracing on the upper floors — a design element from the original construction that had been partially updated and partially left in place, leaving a ladder-like pattern of horizontal elements up the north face.
He fired the webbing.
The strand crossed sixty meters of night air and caught the highest horizontal element cleanly. He tested the tension — solid, anchored. He fired a second strand to a different point and tested again.
Then he swung.
The north face of the Castellan building at night, six floors up, gripping horizontal elements with both hands and both feet while being entirely supported by his own Spider-enhanced grip strength rather than chakra, was cold and very quiet.
He moved vertically with the specific efficiency of someone who had learned — was still learning — to work with this body's extraordinary physical capability rather than defaulting to chakra for everything. The grip was in the hands and the feet both, the weight distributed, the movement measured to minimize vibration transmission through the structure.
Kurama monitored from inside, a quiet background presence.
Floor four windows — dark but with faint light bleeding through the gaps at the frames, the interior illuminated for work. He moved past them without pausing.
Floor five.
He found the ventilation access that FRIDAY had flagged — a louvered panel in the external wall near the building's corner, slightly recessed, currently closed. He examined it without touching it. Metal frame, standard fasteners, the kind of access panel that opened inward.
No sensors visible on the panel itself. Which might mean no sensors, or might mean sensors he couldn't see.
"FRIDAY," he breathed. "Ventilation access on floor five north face. Sensor status."
"Magnetic contact sensor on the panel frame," FRIDAY said in his ear. "Alarm triggers if the contact is broken."
"Can you disable it."
"If I can access the facility's internal systems. Trying." A pause. "They're running on an isolated network — no external connections. I can't remote access."
Of course they were.
He looked at the panel.
A magnetic contact sensor meant a magnet on the panel maintaining contact with a receptor on the frame. Breaking the contact — opening the panel — completed a circuit that triggered the alarm. Standard. The counters to it were also standard: maintain the magnetic contact artificially while opening, or find the alarm circuit and interrupt it at the source, or accept the alarm and work faster than the response.
He didn't have a magnet. He didn't have access to the alarm circuit from outside.
He had webbing.
He examined the panel frame. The magnetic contact point was on the bottom edge — the slight discoloration of the paint there, the infinitesimally small gap that indicated a surface-mounted component. He fired a thin strand directly at that point, coating it, building up a layer over the contact surface without moving the panel at all.
Then he fired a second strand to the frame receptor point, building the same layer there.
The webbing was organic and conductive in specific ways — not electrically conductive in the way metal was, but the molecular structure had specific properties he was still mapping. Whether those properties were sufficient to bridge a magnetic contact—
He opened the panel two millimeters.
No alarm.
He breathed.
The webbing was bridging the magnetic gap — the polymer structure apparently had sufficient magnetic permeability to maintain the sensor contact through the opening. He didn't fully understand why. He filed it for later consideration and opened the panel further.
Inside: a ventilation shaft, wide enough to move through, running horizontally toward the interior of the floor. Dark. Moving air, carrying the smell of electronics and something chemical that made his nose register and then filter.
He went in.
The shaft ran eight meters before branching. FRIDAY's voice in his ear guided him — left branch, then twelve meters to a grate above the east section of floor five. He moved through it with the careful silence of someone who had moved through confined spaces while remaining undetected for decades longer than the building they were moving through had existed.
The grate was above the contained area FRIDAY had identified.
He looked through it.
The four guards were visible — positioned at the corners of a central table on which a sealed containment case sat. The case was approximately half a meter long, matte grey, with a locking mechanism that had the look of something designed to be both secure and quick to access when needed. The guards were in the configuration FRIDAY's heat signatures had suggested: stationary, seated on equipment crates, weapons accessible but not drawn.
Professional. Bored. The particular boredom of people on static guard duty who had been told nothing would happen.
He looked at the room's layout.
One door — east wall, the only exit. Between him and the case: four guards at corner positions, approximately three meters from the case on all sides.
He ran the geometry.
He could drop from the shaft and reach the case in approximately two seconds. Two seconds was too long with four guards in the room at corner positions — even if his entry was silent the drop itself would be seen. And if the case was secured to the table — which it might be—
He studied the case more carefully.
Not secured. It sat on the table surface with its own weight. No visible tether. Designed for transport.
Good.
He looked at the guards again. Their positions — corner coverage of a central object — was the configuration you used when you were watching something. When you were primarily oriented toward the object. The object was between them and anything approaching from above.
He wouldn't be going to the object.
He would be going to them.
He fired four strands simultaneously.
Each one targeted a specific guard — not the body, the weapon. The weapons at their sides, resting in holsters or leaning against crates. He fired and retracted fast enough that all four strands connected and pulled in under two seconds — four weapons jerked sideways, two clattering to the floor, two tangled in web and held.
All four guards reacted. They reacted toward the lost weapons — the instinct of a person whose primary tool has been compromised is to recover or replace it, not to immediately identify the threat source.
He dropped from the grate.
He hit the floor two meters from the table, rolled, came up moving. His hand was on the case in the same motion — it was heavier than it looked, the Infinity crystals presumably contributing to the density, but manageable.
He was halfway to the door before the guards fully registered that the case was gone.
"Contact on five," he said into the comm.
"We're ready," Tony said.
The door was unlocked from his side — it was a secure room that relied on the guards' presence rather than mechanical security on the interior. He pushed through and into the stairwell beyond.
Behind him he heard the guards shouting. Then the sound of a radio.
"They're alerting the facility," FRIDAY said. "Seventeen seconds before floor three security responds."
"Roof," Naruto said, already moving up the stairs.
"Roof access is one floor up," FRIDAY confirmed.
He went up the stairs at a pace that would have been impossible for a normal human body in normal condition. The case was under his left arm. His right hand fired a web strand to the stair railing above and he used it to accelerate the climb, pulling himself through the turn of the landing faster than his legs alone could have managed.
Floor six landing. Roof access door.
Locked from the outside but not from the inside — a push bar, fire code standard. He hit it and the door opened into cold night air and the noise of the city.
He heard boots on the stairs below.
He stepped onto the roof, assessed the space in half a second — flat, mechanical housing in the center, his webbing trajectory from earlier still marking the north edge where he had come up — and ran for the north edge.
"Naruto." Tony's voice in the comm. "I have eyes on you. Northeast corner, I'll catch the case on your throw."
"Don't catch it," Naruto said. "The Infinity energy and the armor shielding — you said theoretical."
A beat.
"Theoretical," Tony confirmed. "Fair point."
"I'll keep it. Get me down."
Th