"You should know that the Hand has no interest in your internal squabbles," Murakami said.
"We're willing to cut deals and cooperate with whoever's in charge of whichever faction, but that's where it ends. We prefer to stay neutral."
"You can try telling Baron Strucker that. He doesn't see it that way."
Garrett shook his head.
That was the polite version. The truth was that the five old fossils running the Hand were so notoriously spineless that practically every organization that knew their reputation was aware of just how terrified those old bastards were of dying.
Neither of the two men had any idea that at that very moment, someone was listening to their every word with great interest while finishing up a little handicraft project of his own.
Zodhis's super hearing was the finest eavesdropping device in the world. And because his auditory abilities didn't require a medium—no air, no microwaves, no gravity, no spatial waves—he could hear everything as if he were right there in the room, no matter the distance.
"The Clairvoyant? Which Clairvoyant?"
He frowned, thinking for a moment before recalling the big-boss alias that Agent John Garrett had used back in the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D..
Come to think of it, there probably wasn't a second Clairvoyant running around, was there?
Transmigrator predecessors always went to such elaborate lengths—scheming, calculating, figuring out how to infiltrate Hydra or indirectly leverage its resources. And really, it was because the organization's benefits package was just that good.
Getting into Hydra was almost effortless—if someone vouched for you, you had an eighty percent chance of passing.
The employee perks were excellent, the benefits generous, the resources practically inexhaustible. Wherever you went in the world, whatever field you operated in, you could always count on fellow agents to lend a hand.
So many high-ranking generals and politicians—people already sitting at the top of the world—joined this organization.
Was it really because they all bought into Hydra's "world domination" ideology?
Obviously not. At every general assembly, everyone shouted their slogans with the fervor of a state propaganda rally, but to this day, nobody actually took that rhetoric seriously.
People joined for the platform, the resources, the perks.
An organization with great pay, lax management, and the perfect setup for coasting through life? Why wouldn't you sign up?
Zodhis, however, had gone one better—he'd taken over all of North America's Hydra operations. Technically speaking, that made him Hydra's new leader.
Gideon Malick—member of the World Security Council, one of Hydra's secret heads.
Not only that, he was the most legitimate, the most pure-blooded among the surviving Hydra leaders. The Malick family had dedicated themselves to Hydra for generations, generation after generation. They were the only ones who had never forgotten their original purpose, who still worked tirelessly toward the supreme ideal.
And "supreme ideal" here didn't refer to something as lofty as "world conquest." That was the heresy introduced by later converts. The original Hydra hadn't been founded for such petty nonsense.
The original Hydra was founded for a single purpose: to bring back from outer space a being known as the "Hydra God"—Hydra's one and only designated leader—and then conquer the world.
"Leader" was a generous term. It was actually just an ancient Inhuman with superpowers who'd been exiled to another planet via a stone with portal capabilities. For thousands of years, the stone had been preserved in Hydra's possession.
And so the loyal, tradition-bound faction of Hydra had spent millennia tirelessly sending men through that portal to find their so-called "Hydra God." Not one of them had ever come back.
Pouring massive funding and elite soldiers into searching for some prehistoric primitive who'd probably starved to death thousands of years ago—anyone with a functioning brain would call that insane.
Red Skull, back in World War II, clearly thought the same.
So when he took over the organization and read the doctrine—rescue the Hydra God, what the hell?—he waved his hand and changed the rules right then and there. From this day forward, the goal is world conquest!
And so, in the present-day Hydra that had inherited Red Skull's revised doctrine, only the Malick family still clung to tradition, trying to rescue that Hydra God.
Of course, thanks to Zodhis, that family had now become loyal World Serpent… Burning Legion… members.
Zodhis had found him, and from his mind, extracted the memories of how to contact Hydra's other heads.
Hydra's supreme leaders were either old fossils who'd survived since WWII through special means, or descendants of said fossils. In other words, they were all nepotism hires.
The lone exception was Alexander Pierce—a self-made man who'd clawed his way up through sheer effort, accumulating influence and building his power base from nothing.
So naturally, the nepotism crowd resented watching this upstart's power grow so large, and they were always looking for ways to curb his expansion.
In recent years, this trend within Hydra had been growing increasingly intense. Some had even floated the idea of ousting Alexander Pierce and installing someone else in his seat.
But with Pierce gone off the grid, that plan had become empty talk.
"Who the hell took those hundred Decepticons? Do you have any idea how hard we worked to infiltrate S.W.O.R.D.? And then you people just waltz in and take them without a word—now we're completely exposed, the whole world is investigating!"
One of the heads slammed his fist in anger.
All of North America's Hydra operatives had gone dark. The other Hydra factions, while wary, weren't about to let that territory go to waste. After some discussion—especially with S.W.O.R.D. and the newly reformed S.H.I.E.L.D. making their debuts—Hydra had slipped in as well.
The new S.H.I.E.L.D. was crippled in no time and forced to disband, costing them a large number of operatives.
The silver lining was that S.W.O.R.D. had become the world's highest-privilege authority, granted the right to operate in any country without prior notification—originally a provision made to accommodate the nature of "Inhuman" threats.
This gave Hydra an opening. They'd stage attacks disguised as Inhumans, and S.W.O.R.D. agents would cut straight into foreign territory to "resolve" the problem, taking whatever they wanted in the process.
And when it was all over, the host country would thank them. Frankly, Hydra was quite pleased—S.W.O.R.D. was far superior to S.H.I.E.L.D.
Just flash that S.W.O.R.D. badge, and even the most formidable organizations would quickly back off—something even S.H.I.E.L.D. could never pull off.
Baron Strucker, wearing a monocle, folded his hands.
"If it comes to it, S.W.O.R.D. isn't entirely indispensable. We're no longer at a stage where we absolutely need to rely on it to grow."
The truth was, Baron Strucker was deeply wary of Zodhis. That super-genius had kept surprising everyone time and again. Who knew when he'd invent a "Hydra Radar" or a "Mole Detector" and expose all the undercover agents embedded in S.W.O.R.D.? That would be disastrous.
/-\
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