HYDRA Base. Sokovia outskirts.
Strucker had lost access to the Mind Scepter. He had lost Pietro and Wanda. He had watched Pierce's exposure burn most of HYDRA's embedded network in a single afternoon.
What he had was the Obelisk. And the Obelisk had just shown him something he hadn't anticipated.
He looked at the three people in front of him — Raina, and the two others she'd identified as Obelisk-compatible before bringing them to the temple.
"Raina," he said. "Your transformation is significant. But I believe the more important question is what you can do now, not what you look like. Tell me about your ability."
Raina was quiet for a moment. She had spent years chasing the idea of what she would become. The reality of it — the spines covering every surface of her skin, the face she could no longer recognize in a mirror — had landed differently than the idea. She was working through that privately, and she kept it private.
"When I came out of the cocoon," she said, "I saw images. Brief ones. I don't know if they were memories or something else."
"What did you see?"
"Robots," she said. "Moving through a city. Not controlled — rampaging. Destroying whatever was in front of them." She paused. "And a city in the air. A whole city, lifted off the ground. And then falling."
Strucker kept his expression neutral. "What kind of robots? Stark Industries war machines? The Baymax units from Capsule Corporation?"
"Neither. Something I haven't seen before. Something that doesn't exist yet."
"And the city — which one?"
"I couldn't tell. The angle was distant." She looked at her hands. "I was barely conscious when the images came. I don't have control over any of it yet."
Strucker sat back. He had run enough intelligence operations to know that a precognitive with functional ability was an asset of a different category from any other kind of enhanced individual. The value wasn't in the power — it was in the information. A prophet who could see the shape of what was coming, before it arrived, was worth more than a hundred soldiers with the ability to stop it once it was already there.
"You may have the rarest ability I've encountered," he said. "Stay at the base while you develop it. If your visions can be directed — if you can learn to ask a question and receive an answer — your value will be considerable." He let that settle. "The physical changes are a secondary matter."
Raina heard "secondary" and said nothing.
He turned to the man. "Lambert."
Lambert snapped two fingers. A small flame appeared at his fingertip, steady and controlled, the way a lighter flame is steady in still air. Then he opened his hand and the fire ran up his arm and across his shoulder and covered him completely, burning from every surface of his body simultaneously, and he stood in the middle of it looking no more distressed than he had a moment before.
"Complete ignition," he said. "I can vary the temperature and the distribution. It doesn't affect me."
"Similar to the Paragon Vermillion," Strucker said. "I have an analysis document on that individual — you'll review it. Fire-based abilities scale well. Focus on the heat ceiling and the explosive application."
Lambert nodded.
Strucker looked at the woman. "Connie."
She didn't move.
Then a pistol from the holster of the guard standing outside the room's entrance appeared in her hand. Connie held it up, set it on the table, and folded her hands in her lap.
Strucker looked at the weapon. At the guard outside, who was still standing exactly as he'd been standing, completely unaware that anything had changed. At Connie.
"Explain it."
"When I hold my breath," Connie said, "everything around me stops. Relative to me, the surroundings are still. I can move through that space freely — pick things up, change positions, interact with objects — and when I inhale again, I'm back in real time. Everything is as it was, except for the things I moved."
Strucker thought through the implications for a moment. Then he looked at one of his staff. "What's the world record for breath-holding under controlled conditions?"
The man checked his device. "Twenty-four minutes and thirty-seven seconds, assisted — elevated blood oxygen beforehand, controlled heart rate protocol during. Unassisted: fifteen minutes and one second."
Strucker looked at Connie with the attention he generally reserved for things that had significantly exceeded his initial estimate. "You've never trained for this specifically."
"No."
"Then your ceiling is currently unknown." He turned to the staff member again. "Set up a controlled testing protocol. Find out whether supplementary oxygen before activation affects the duration, and whether cardiovascular training has an effect." He looked back at Connie. "Fifteen minutes of unrestricted movement through a frozen environment is considerable. We're going to find out what your actual limit is."
Raina, sitting with her hands folded in her lap and her spines catching the light at an angle she was still getting used to, watched the other two receive Strucker's assessment and felt the particular ache of someone who has always understood, in theory, that some costs are worth paying, now working to believe that understanding at a level below theory.
Lambert and Connie had power they could use without anyone being able to see what had changed.
She looked at her hands again.
Strucker was already moving on. In addition to the three of them, the Obelisk itself had demonstrated a mechanism that could be systematically applied. Any individual who could survive contact with it would awaken to an enhanced state. The problem was the casualty rate among those who couldn't — sending subordinates through a test that would kill most of them wasn't a functional recruitment strategy.
He'd identify volunteers through other channels. And the Extremis program and the mechanical augmentation track were both still viable for the individuals who needed enhancement without the genetic compatibility requirement.
SHIELD Headquarters.
Chen Haoran had been waiting in the office for twelve minutes before Smith came in, and had used all twelve minutes being acutely aware of the fact that he was waiting in the office of the Director of SHIELD, having previously been the Director of SHIELD's mole inside one of the Director of SHIELD's own private organizations.
Smith sat down across from him. "Relax."
Chen Haoran tried.
"I've read your mission logs going back to the beginning," Smith said. "You were placed in the Paragons by Nick Fury to monitor the team's activities and flag anything that represented a threat to civilian safety." He looked at him. "That's what the file says."
"Yes, sir."
"And Fury is gone." Smith folded his hands on the desk. "Which puts you in an unusual position, since the organization you were monitoring is now directly under my management and the intelligence you were filing was going to a chain of command that no longer exists."
Chen Haoran was quiet.
"What do you actually want to do?" Smith said.
A moment of silence while Chen Haoran worked out that this was a genuine question. "I'd like to stay with the Paragons," he said. "If that's an option. I — I like it there. The work means something." He straightened slightly. "The undercover assignment was Director Fury's directive. I followed it because those were my orders, not because I believed the Paragons were a threat."
Smith nodded. "Stay where you are. Keep the nominal cover operational — there are reasons to maintain the appearance of independent monitoring, even when it's not functionally independent." He paused. "The reports come to me either way. Nothing changes for you on the ground."
Chen Haoran absorbed this. He'd expected to be reassigned to a standard SHIELD desk, or possibly terminated from the undercover role and redirected to something administrative. The continuity of it — the permission to stay in the place he'd come to think of as his real job — landed in a way he hadn't prepared for.
"Thank you, sir."
"Good work," Smith said. "That's all."
Smith was halfway to the symbiote research facility when his phone rang. He checked the screen, considered the name on it, and answered.
"You're alive," Tony said. "I was beginning to construct an elaborate theory about your disappearance."
"I was off-planet."
"Right, right, the space thing." A brief pause that contained at least three unspoken follow-up questions that Tony visibly elected not to ask. "Here's the actual point: you're an Avenger and you haven't shown up to a single group operation in the past several weeks."
"I've been managing SHIELD business."
"I run a company and fight crime simultaneously. It's a question of scheduling."
"I'll be at the next operation," Smith said. "The Capsule Corp tech expo is coming up — make sure you're there."
"Pepper loves tech expos. We'll be there." Tony's voice shifted slightly — he was already turning to someone in the room. "Chief Smith is coming to the next one." A beat. Then, to Smith: "I've just been informed that you should be leading from the front rather than directing from an office, by the team's consensus."
Smith ended the call.
Asgard Earth Embassy.
Sif had not been to Earth in several months, and the embassy was quieter than she remembered. Lorelei was in the common room, which was its own form of information — Lorelei in a common room suggested a level of comfort with her current circumstances that would have surprised anyone who'd known her three years ago.
"I heard you've made progress with the ability suppression," Sif said.
Lorelei looked up. "Progress is relative. I can sustain a state of active suppression in conditions of concentrated will — when I am fully focused and the person across from me has exceptional self-discipline. For limited duration." She said it with the particular flatness of someone who has practiced saying something without the frustration that comes attached to it. "It's not a general capability."
"Heimdall tracked a Kree vessel entering the outer atmosphere," Sif said. "Single-person craft, covert approach — they bypassed Earth's satellite network. The marking on the vessel identifies it as Ronan's opposition faction. Peace-aligned."
Lorelei sat up slightly. "One person."
"One."
"Then it's a scout, or someone with a specific purpose. Not retaliation." She thought about it. "Ronan's opposition faction would want to know how he died. Who was responsible. Whether Earth represents an ongoing threat or a one-time incident." She looked at Sif. "Handle it quietly. Locate him, assess the purpose, remove him if necessary. Afterward, notify SHIELD — Smith will want to know, and it costs nothing to tell him. He tends to notice these things regardless."
Sif nodded once.
"Is Thor somewhere I should know about?"
Sif turned toward the door. Her right hand rose briefly, middle finger extended, without her turning around, and then she was gone.
Behind her, Lorelei laughed.
Symbiote Research Facility.
The containment units were arranged in two rows, each one holding a symbiote in a stable, dormant state. Smith walked the length of them and stopped at each one in turn.
Six, not counting the bond Jessica Jones carried.
The green symbiote: toxin-based. Capable of producing and projecting biological compounds that no standard medical counteragent addressed.
The yellow-red: thermal generation, lava-class output.
The yellow: sonic disruption, capable of weaponizing sound in frequencies that bypassed physical armor.
The yellow-black: absorption, capable of consuming the biological and energetic output of other enhanced individuals.
The purple: combat optimization, pure offensive enhancement with no secondary trait.
The blue: physical dominance, the heaviest-set of the group, a meat shield with mass and durability that exceeded anything the serum produced.
Two of them could combine into a hybrid configuration — the resulting entity operated as a single consciousness and a single body, with abilities drawn from both constituent symbiotes. The tentacle extension was a capability shared across several of them, with the blue having the longest practical reach.
Smith stood at the end of the row and thought through the allocation options.
Six regular SHIELD agents as hosts. The symbiotes would carry the capability, the hosts would provide direction and judgment. Weaknesses were fire and sonic disruption — manageable with equipment, not eliminable. In pure combat terms, six symbiote-bonded agents would outperform six Super Soldier serum recipients on most operational metrics.
Or: six enhanced individuals as hosts. Any existing superhuman with a stable ability set would produce an outcome where the symbiote's capabilities compounded rather than simply supplemented. Jessica Jones was the proof of concept — the bond had not diluted either her native strength or the symbiote's; it had built on both. The ceiling on that configuration was a different category from either component alone.
The second option had resource constraints. There weren't six enhanced individuals with the right profile and the available status to make the bond without creating complications.
He looked at the containment units and began working through the list of candidates.