CHAPTER 45

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The entire base was wrecked with battle scars. Clint and I made sure there were no survivors.

After wiping the base clean of any information they had, we left to meet up with Fury who happened to be in a gun fight with Pierce's men when we arrived.

Long story short, their future were no different from those in the base we just came from; all dead.

We caught Pierce who was just sitting in his office sipping from a glass of wine, not even looking spooked like his soldiers weren't just annihilated. He even had the confidence and suaveness to pour us a drink as he sat on his chair without any worry.

"Game's up, Pierce!" Fury said to him as he leveled Pierce a gun nozzle.

"That it seems to be so." Pierce said with the façade of calm still on his face.

He then turned to look at me, "If it isn't the runaway, Draug- no. Subject I-039. I have to say, I'm quite surprised when I heard you betrayed us."

"You didn't give me much of a choice. And besides the accommodation sucked." I replied.

He looked stunned for a second before he composed himself and looked at all of us before focusing on Fury. "What now?"

"Now you tell us all about your HYDRA pals. Who else is there?" Fury didn't look good as he asked that which was the result as Pierce started chuckling before escalating into a full blown laugh.

"You think this is funny, huh?" Fury asked threatingly, "This all look like a game to you, doesn't it? I bet we all must look like a bunch of clowns in your eyes, ain't it so?" He looked like he was just a second away from pulling the trigger.

"If you must really know, then yes you do?" Pierce started, "I had high hopes for you Fury but at the end all you amounted to was this. When will you understand that all what you are doing, all of this, is futile? We can't be defeated, c-"

"Cut off a head, and two more shall take its place. Yeah, we've heard the myths. Now you have two choice: tell us what we want to know and then die peacefully, or tell us what we want to know while begging to die peacefully. Which is it gonna be?" I heard Fury trying to say something but I ignored him. Like hell I was going to allow an head of HYDRA live.

"You think I am afraid of death? I was prepared for it since the day I took up that glorious mantle. A baseless threat like that won't scare me." Pierce looked at me as he spoke haughtily.

"Second choice it is then." I was glad he took this route, "You guys might want to give me the room, it's going to get real queasy in here.

Fury and the others looked at each other before they nodded and they left. Before Fury exited, he paused at the door sill, "Try not to kill him… yet." I nodded at him.

I looked at Pierce who now had a neutral look on his face, 'don't worry little foxy. I'll make sure you squeal very loud.'

I ignored Pierce and looked around the office as I searched for any tort- interrogation device, until I found it.

'Perfect!'

I looked at the corkscrew atop the mini wine bar at the corner of his office and grinned to the point that I was sure all my 32 teeth were showing if Pierce's visible displeasure and fidgeting was any giveaway.

"Now then, let's start now shall we?"

1 hour 47 minutes of using a searing heated corkscrew to slowly open up new holes in his body while also using same corkscrew to fillet the skin of his palms and feet, layer by layer, and the old man couldn't take it anymore. He screamed like a banshee in a church as he told me anything I asked. Fury would sometimes pass me a question and Pierce wouldn't take more than a second to tell me what he knew.

The new recruits.

The next head candidates.

Political targets.

Storehouses and bases.

And the HYDRA network. Pierce broke down in tears as he gave me the last part. A network Zola put together for the high ranking members to access. For someone like Pierce, he had access to everything that concerns HYDRA. From the mobs to the global takeover plans.

Maybe that was the reason he broke down. 70 years of planning all gone down the drain. Well I wouldn't blame him, I mean I gave him the Olav treatment, it wasn't a surprise he broke it, heck even I did.

After dealing with Pierce and taking his laptop, I left the husk of a man in his office and went to Fury.

"I expect a cut." The bastard was loaded, what did you expect?

"Motherfucker." Was all Fury said but the smile threatening to break out from his lips said otherwise.

I left the building and went outside. It might've just been me but the air sure smelt different. It definitely must've been me since I was sure the sky wasn't that clear a few minutes ago from Pierce's office.

If I had a house, I would've gone home and popped out some wine to celebrate whatever this was, or if I had casual friends we would have hit some classy restaurant just to splurge but since it was just me, I settled for the bench and sat down.

'I could really use a drink.'

I thought but I didn't move from the bench, just sat there as I look at the clearer sky. 'What now? I guess I could focus on the growing company and just live my life raking in millions of dollars. But if the past years have thought me any thing, I would just be shooting myself in the foot with anti-regeneration bullets.'

"You okay there?" Clint asked me as he sat on the bench.

"Should be from now on." I replied.

"Still gonna try and grow stronger?"

"Yeah. Don't have much of a choice in that regard." I really didn't. It was either that or get fucked up. And considering the reality I was in, the latter was bound to happen. "With great power comes great responsibilities and all that jazz." I said with a mirthful chuckle. If I ever found Uncle Ben, I would do my best to stop him from traumatizing the young Peter Parker for the rest of his life with those words.

I mean come on, Peter's life was jackshit in the comics. Failed marriage, failed relationship, failed hero life, failed family, failed responsibilities, failed dreams. 'Small goal, stop Peter Parker from being a hero. Hahaha.'

Fucking old people and their sense of medieval heroics.

"Y'know, no one's giving you responsibilities, it's what you make for yourself." Clint in a rare fashion said something profound.

"Tell that to Uncle Ben."

"Who?" He looked at me with incomprehension.

"Nothing, just an inside joke…. I think I'll just wing it. Planning shit is not for me, I'll just take it however it comes." Was all I said before we basked in the silence before Clint got called in by Fury.

'Time to rent a house… or buy one.'

…

The best part of having a global intelligence spy organization leader in the call logs is, turns out, getting the best deals real estate could offer.

All I did was tell Fury and after a series of 'fuck you' said in different colorful words, Coulson sent me a list of houses I could buy all within my budget of 500,000$.

Was I splurging too much on a house when I didn't have a source of income? Yes.

Will Fury be keeping an eye on me every time? Most probably yes, as long as he doesn't wire my house with cams and speakers then we're cool. I told him that upfront. And I trust he is at least wise enough not to get on my bad side just for peeks.

Does any of the above two matter? Not in the slightest.

I considered just renting but remembering I would have to deal with neighbors, I did a 180° as soon as the deal was proposed.

The house I bought was a secluded small mansion with 8 rooms, a pool, gym and other nice outfits. Damn if real estate in the past ain't cheap.

I paid upfront, and 20 minutes later I was in my very own crib. The first in two years.

[September 22nd, 2003. All The Present Heads of HYDRA Were Killed By Draul St. Cross and The Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.]

…

It has been a month after the whole HYDRA fiasco and I could very well say that this was the most peaceful month I've ever had.

My routine was simple: train till I got bored, or help out Suckerberg with the Facebook project.

I picked up programming for the first thing to break my super brain into since I would need it for the next apps I wanted to trademark. First on the list was my very own email which I just called Fmail, short for Facemail.

Since Facebook was a joint company of both me and Suckerberg, I decided to just use the trademark for it since it still belonged to me but different from Facebook which belonged to me and Mark, Fmail was entirely mine.

I was able to pick up programming pretty easily, while I was not quite at the current Mark's level, I was not far off. Programming was just advanced math and placement, which was something my brain excelled superbly at.

And different from Mark and Bill Gates who had old versions and OS for their systems, I had the virtual image idea of what they would look like in the next 15 – 20 years. So I was sure that in terms of OS, I could beat almost all the top players of the media market.

My plan was after I released Fmail, then I would work on YouTube. This world was teeming with supernatural beings, that was the only assurance I needed to believe that YouTube would be a boom in the media market. If it worked splendidly in my former world where people only posted shit of then opening a jar of milk for their cats and training their rat to stand on two feet then it was bound to flourish here.

These were the two apps I wanted to release in a year since according to what I remembered, Gmail was to come out next year and YouTube in 2005.

I would be able to get the Fmail working before then, maybe even next month and then focus on ViewTube. I doubted anyone could sue me for corporate espionage or pirating when I was bound to release it first. Heck the only luck they had was that Google was already created, otherwise the world foremost search engine would have been under my name.

Apart from the coding, the most important thing was my ability.

It wasn't just heat and cold energies that I could control. No that was wrong. What I was controlling wasn't heat and cold energy but enthalpy and entropy.

It was from some of the scientific books I read that gave that insight.

Removing the heat property to the negatives gave me cold energy and vice versa. Which also meant I could consciously absorb such energies like I do with radiations. If my theory was correct then theoretically I could harness the power of an exploding sun into any form of fundamental force.

Kinetic energy to travel at hyper speed, gravitational energy to control space and electromagnetic energy to control the polarities of any metal; matter manipulation.

Whoever came up with these theories and whoever approved of them to be put in high school and college university textbooks were downright crazy.

Forgetting about the theoretical aspects of my ability, since it was theoretical, I focused more on the heat and cold branch of it.

I had been trying to use the flames I could produce to fly but haven't had a smidgen of success. Let's just say I was more of an arsonist than a pyromancer.

Explosions.

That was my only result. I couldn't hold the flame propulsions for long before it exploded.

I could shoot jets of flames from my hands and lasers from my eyes but trying to use flames to fly always exploded.

I could also create something like a spear or a sword with either my fire energy or the red whatever-it-was(I'mma just call it radioactive) energy but I couldn't use them for more than five minutes before it exploded.

All in all, any from of heat was harder to control whereas cold was easier.

While heat was easy to form but hard to control, cold was the complete opposite; harder to form but easier to control once you got the hang of it.

I am not ashamed to say I bought different types of weapons just so I could use ice on them. It was always a novel experience to see a weapon turn into a freezing beauty. Let's just say Sub-Zero really knew his shit.

The reason I used ice on weapons and not just the ice was because it was prone to get destroyed and creating another one from scratch mid-fight wasn't advisable and it wasn't always instant. A second or two wasted to get both the shape and hardness was fatal in a battle.

So using a weapon as a base was the wiser choice since all I needed to do was reinforce the ice coating if it gets cracked during a fight.

In a month, my strength was at least doubled what it was when I took down HYDRA, which was definitely a good thing if only such peace would last. Hopefully.