12 William Striker

"Returning to the subject, I had already saved the girl, so what was left was to use the wolf's corpse as if it were hers. I put on my clothes, grabbed the pickup truck, and headed towards the forest. I passed by some of the guards around the forest and asked if everything was okay as if I were checking until I reached the guy I had knocked out. When I got to him, he was still unconscious, so I took the wolf's corpse and carried it to a bush a little away from the forest." said Logan.

The details of the plan didn't interest Daisy, Jemma, or Sif much, but Coulson was assessing the execution of the plan and thinking about what he would do if he were in the same position.

"I returned to the unconscious guy, shouted that I needed help, and started shooting in the direction where I had thrown the wolf's corpse. I emptied half the magazine shooting randomly and the rest I shot in various parts of the wolf. Soon, people started running towards me. From that point on, it was chaos. Someone must have sent a radio message to the search leaders in the forest, informing them that I had found and killed the metahuman." said Logan.

Coulson knew that this part was crucial, where Logan was at the highest risk of his plan failing. If someone analyzed the situation deeply, they could expose him.

"As the people searching in the forest arrived, it became even more chaotic. There were too many people to control with just a few leaders, so the search leaders sent most of them back. Only a few of us remained, including me, the guy I had knocked out, and a few others. The search leader asked me what had happened." said Logan.

As Coulson suspected, this was the key moment. If Logan told the story right, his plan would succeed.

"I told him that I had arrived in the forest to join the search, asked the first guy near the forest where the search group was, and he told me to go around the forest until I saw a small stream. I followed around the forest until I saw a guy lying down and stopped to help. As soon as I got out of the car to help and saw that the guy was still alive, I shouted for help. That's when I saw a figure running out of the forest. When it passed by me, I saw that it was a wolf. I shot without hesitation until I shot it. When I heard a cry of pain from the wolf, I went after to confirm the hit. When I got there, it was still alive, so I kept shooting until I emptied the magazine." said Logan.

Everyone was startled by Logan's coldness, especially when he mentioned shooting until he emptied the magazine. If they hadn't heard Logan say that he had already saved the girl, they would probably have believed he had killed her too.

"The leader then asked the guy I had knocked out what had happened to him, and he said he only remembered a figure with two bright yellow dots and then everything went dark. The leader probably thought the wolf had knocked the guy out but was interrupted by me, who killed him. As I had thought, he was from the region and knew there were no wolves in that area, so the wolf had to be the one they were looking for. He told the other guys with him to get rid of the wolf's body, and it didn't take long for him to invite me to work at the fortress church with him." said Logan.

The plan had succeeded, so everyone who heard it knew that the next step would be to find out more about the group and who was behind it.

"After starting to work at the fortress church, I just did what I was told and kept to myself. Luckily, I didn't need to search for clues because they had already given me the best possible clue." said Logan.

Coulson and the others didn't understand; they had heard the story, but nothing seemed like a clue there. Logan, noticing their confused faces, explained,

"You know those handcuffs that suppress metahuman powers?" Everyone nodded, so Logan continued.

"Well, they're expensive. In fact, they're so expensive that even in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, you only find five or six per precinct. So how did the church have enough to give one to hundreds of people?"

Everyone then understood why the handcuffs were the clue that needed to be followed.

"All the handcuffs were from the same company, and to follow the trail, I needed to find out who bought the handcuffs. But the batch identification number was scratched off very crudely, probably done manually. So I thought that if someone had to scratch off the numbers one by one, at some point, that person would get bored and start doing it poorly. Since all the handcuffs were probably from the same batch, I just had to find the flaws in the right places to reveal the numbers." said Logan.

Coulson admired Logan's ingenuity. Many people, when they see intelligence agents, tend to prioritize combat and infiltration skills to the point of neglecting the ability to work with documentation. Many tend to avoid bureaucracy as if it were a plague, but if bureaucracy is used correctly, it creates an undeniable history of locations, products, and people.

"It took a few days, but I managed to find the flaws in the right places and searched the company's data to find out who had bought that batch. My surprise when I found out who had bought it left me paralyzed for hours, and this surprise turned into fear when it really hit me that it was true after checking countless times. The one who bought that batch of handcuffs was the United States Army." said Logan.

Everyone, except Sif, was incredulous when they heard that if the United States Army was behind the Friends of Humanity, it could be said that the US government itself was persecuting metahumans.

"I showed my superiors the result of the investigation. They told me to keep my cover until the group's leaders were arrested and that they would arrest me too since it was easier to fake a death in the prison system." said Logan.

Coulson agreed; many of the prisoners in the S.H.I.E.L.D Fridge were technically dead in the same way.

"While I waited, the situation seemed to worsen when two senators started supporting and receiving support from the Friends of Humanity and the Church of Humanity. What I'm about to say now, I only found out after the mission ended." said Logan.

The danger of the situation increased with the involvement of two senators, and even Sif understood this from the context; it could really be a persecution by civilian rulers and military leaders.

"The intelligence agency investigated the army and found that it wasn't a conspiracy; it was the action of a single high-ranking military man, Colonel William Striker, who was responsible for all military matters involving metahumans." said Logan.

The people listening were relieved that the situation wasn't as bad as it seemed.

"And what they found out about him caused a lot of outrage when it became public. Not only was he funding the Friends of Humanity, but he was also experimenting on metahumans, and this was a practice of his family for generations. Evidence of experiments by the Striker family had been discovered since the first of them obtained a high enough rank to cover up what they were doing." said Logan.

All were shocked that an entire family of high-ranking military officers was involved in experiments on people.

"So when they had evidence to arrest all the leaders of the Friends of Humanity, the Church of Humanity, the senators, and the military personnel involved, they acted and arrested everyone. Many members of the Friends of Humanity organization were scared by what was revealed in the media, and without leaders to maintain control, the organization collapsed, and I ended up in jail waiting for everything to be arranged for my fake death." said Logan.

The story seemed to have its happy ending, and everyone forgot that Logan had said he was going to tell the story of how he ended up in the witness protection program, and if he faked his own death, there would be no reason for him to enter the program.

"Everything was going well as the convictions were happening, but then I was approached in jail by someone who was once part of the Friends of Humanity, who told me that the help I had given to the cause was commendable and that what I had done was the true mission. He said that the Friends of Humanity and the Church of Humanity were wrong to involve themselves with the military and politics, that people should simply do the mission because it was the right thing to do, not because of politics or religion, but simply because a good citizen should do it—simply a human killing monsters, demons, and abominations." said Logan.

Everyone in the room felt like it wasn't over yet.

"I found it strange because that guy wasn't a leader, and the organization had been destroyed, but he was acting like a recruiter as if a new organization had emerged from the remnants of the Friends of Humanity. I felt that something was strange, so I kept talking to him. He told me that some sympathizers were forming a new organization with a simpler and less megalomaniacal intent than the church and the friends had. It was just a group of people dedicated to killing metahumans." said Logan.

Everyone in the room felt that things would get worse if an almost terrorist cult was bad, an extermination group could cause even more damage.

"I kept listening and couldn't believe it when the guy said they were already organizing nationwide, and that soon lawyers would file appeals and they would be released. Realizing that someone had taken advantage of the lack of leadership in the group to simply recruit people and create another even worse group, I decided to contact my superiors in intelligence and tell them what was going on." said Logan.

The story had many twists and turns, but it still interested those who listened.

"They told me that several shell companies had hired lawyers across the country to release some of the members of the Church of Humanity and the Friends of Humanity, but only the most unstable and dangerous members. They told me to infiltrate the group and find out who was behind this extermination group. I told the guy who was trying to recruit me that I agreed to join this new group; all he said to me was welcome to the Purifiers." said Logan.