Hill spoke to her like she was addressing empty air. Daisy responded with the same cool professionalism. Their mutual indifference was so consistent that it had become its own kind of confirmation—everyone who caught the exchange quietly filed it as proof that the rumor was true. Agent Johnson and Agent Hill did not get along.
The S.H.I.E.L.D. loyalists onboard were quietly alarmed. The HYDRA contingent were quietly pleased.
Neither group's opinion mattered. The Iliad pushed into Antarctic waters and began breaking ice, and every combat-rated agent stopped thinking about politics and started checking their loadout. Whatever allegiances they held, no one gambled with their own life. Gear was checked, cold-weather suits were sealed, and the mood on the lower decks tightened into focus.
"No detection on the enemy side." Black Widow's voice crackled first over the comm.
"Clear from my position too." Hawkeye followed a beat later.
Daisy ordered them to maintain surveillance and turned her attention to a different front. She slipped into the Nazi base's security network—she'd left herself a backdoor during their initial reconnaissance—and handed the feed to her tech team. Their job: manufacture a loop of normal activity and pipe it into every monitor on the enemy side.
The defenders inside hadn't been dangerous in a long time. Sixty years of Antarctic isolation, with their biological clocks slowed by the Hammer of Skadi's radiation and whatever Red Skull had left them with, and they'd lost every edge that once made them formidable. Their reaction time showed it. When the assault team's landing craft appeared on the ice and the cloaking field collapsed—Black Widow had burned it remotely—the guards who spotted the incoming force stood there for a full second before they processed what they were looking at.
Rumlow was the first man through.
Whatever was happening behind the scenes with his allegiances, on a battlefield those questions ceased to exist. He moved the way very few people moved: controlled, precise, with the kind of unconscious tactical awareness that couldn't be taught. The guards barely got their weapons up. He put them down one by one—measured shots, no wasted motion—and kept moving, reading the space ahead while managing the space behind him simultaneously.
He was the rarest kind of soldier. Every environment turned into an instrument in his hands. He wasn't fast in a flashy way; his speed was in the decisions, the angle selections, the way he was already in the next position while his opponents were still reacting to the last one. He absorbed pressure from multiple directions and kept issuing corrections to the rest of his unit without breaking stride.
Behind him, Garrett—veteran of the same generation as Fury, sporting a slicked-back haircut that belonged in a different decade—led with his experience. His body wasn't what it used to be, but the instincts ran too deep to fade. He and Ward worked together in the way opposite types sometimes do: Garrett's accumulated judgment setting the shape of each push, Ward's aggression filling it. Together they drove deep into the facility.
The third column hit trouble. Coulson's group got pinned at a stairwell, and the situation went sideways. Then May—who had technically switched to an administrative role and had no business being in a firefight—looked at the bottleneck, made a decision that could charitably be described as "reckless," and threw herself directly into the enemy cluster. Bajiquan and Wing Chun working together in the narrow stairwell corridor, methodical and savage in equal measure. When she was done, the stairwell was clear and the squad was moving again.
Reports came in sequence. "Gate One and Gate Two secured." That was Rumlow, first as always.
A minute's wait. "Underground escape tunnel secured." Garrett.
Daisy watched the comm for Coulson's update. Three more minutes passed before it came. "Helipad secured."
All exit routes cut off. She ordered the three columns to converge on the power plant—preventing a self-destruct was the priority—and then she stepped away from the command console.
She had a battle suit to wear.
The Level 7 kit wasn't dramatically different in silhouette from what she'd been issued before, but the materials were something else entirely. Kevlar and titanium alloy composite—rated against explosive fragmentation, impact force, fire, and electrical current. By her internal frame of reference, it was roughly equivalent to a mid-tier flak vest from a certain very different kind of story. The adamantium-alloy combat suit she'd been daydreaming about was still theoretical, still locked in the design phase. This would do for now.
Gunfire on an open battlefield was practically a logic problem for her. She could see most trajectories as they developed; anyone who got a bead on her would feel the awareness before the shot came.
She stepped out of the bridge, filled her lungs with the frozen air, and called back over her shoulder: "On me!"
Then she was running.
The honest reason was that she was freezing and wanted to get indoors as fast as possible. But the effect from behind was something else—the field commander running point, leading from the front. The agents surging out of the Iliad saw it, and something lit up in the formation. HYDRA and S.H.I.E.L.D. alike, nobody wanted to be the one who let their CO outpace them. The whole column accelerated without being told.
Several of them passed her before they reached the entrance. She didn't mind. She entered the base behind them, made her way toward her assigned sector, discharged her weapon twice in the direction of actual targets, and called it a solid contribution.
Compared to her strategic approach, Hill's was considerably more hands-on. The deputy director fought with her own crew—the Iliad's direct-assignment unit—and the precision she brought to close-quarters combat was clinical. She shot like every round cost her something and spent accordingly.
The battle ran for two hours. Then the sound of gunfire inside the facility went quiet, sector by sector, until there was nothing left to hear.
Daisy began pulling in the after-action reports.
This S.H.I.E.L.D.—still unsplit, HYDRA and loyalists fighting side by side—was something worth seeing. The combined force had deployed a thousand agents against roughly three thousand defenders, and the math should not have favored them. It didn't matter. Nazi preparedness was somewhere between negligible and nonexistent. Many of them died without a weapon in their hands. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s golden era of talent, assembled on a single field, had torn through them without breaking a sweat.