The sharp scent of ozone still lingered in the air, a byproduct of Deadpool's rampage. The ground beneath their feet hissed with melted ice, shallow pools spreading in jagged patterns where lightning had kissed the earth.
Soren was impressed.
Feeling the raw, tyrannical thunder surging inside Deadpool, he gave a single approving nod.
"You're not wasting the gift…" Soren said.
"Just try not to cook the walls, I still want the data."
Deadpool cracked his knuckles, tiny sparks jumping from his fingertips like impatient insects. "You got it, boss-man."
"I'll deep-fry the goons, not the servers."
Without another word, Soren became a blur. A sonic crack split the air as he reappeared near the HYDRA gate, a monstrous alloy door laced with reactive fibers.
He hit it like a god.
The gate didn't resist.
It bent inward with a guttural screech of tortured metal, slamming against the far wall like a thrown coin.
Deadpool watched, half-impressed. "Man really said knock knock, huh?"
He raised his hands, still getting used to the new sensation. Power gathered, invisible, then blue, then blinding.
For a moment he was nothing but silhouette and storm, and when he let go…
Thunder roared.
Soldiers didn't fall. They were disintegrated. The snow and dirt beneath their boots scorched black in branching veins of energy.
Several meters of earth boiled to steam, trees split in half, and even the clouds overhead seemed to flinch.
"Whoops." Deadpool said, stepping over a puddle of melted snow and someone's smoking rifle. "Still working on the fine-tuning."
He sauntered in behind Soren, humming the Ghostbusters theme under his breath.
Inside the HYDRA base, klaxons wailed, echoing down cold concrete corridors lined with flashing emergency lights.
Soren glided through the chaos, cutting a brutal path without pause. Blades flickered around him like shards of moonlight, ethereal, psychic edges slicing through armor, limbs, and bone.
Every swing was furious.
He had asked for peace.
They responded by sending assassins.
Now there would be no restraint.
A wave of HYDRA enforcers stormed forward, shouting in clipped German. They raised plasma rifles, opened fire in tight formation.
The hallway lit up in bursts of blue and red muzzle flash.
Soren walked through the bullets like mist, kinetic energy bending around him, deflected by a ripple of unseen force.
His retaliation was silent, a flick of the wrist, and half the attackers collapsed, their armor crumpled inwards.
Behind him, Deadpool entered the scene mid-moonwalk.
"Yeesh." Stepping over the remains of what used to be an elite trooper.
"Soren's in his John Wick in hell phase."
He spotted another cluster of HYDRA soldiers emerging from an auxiliary hallway and cracked his knuckles again. "Time for round two, sparky-style."
In the command chamber, panic ruled.
Commander Groener, thick-necked, broad-shouldered, dressed in a black tactical coat with crimson HYDRA insignia, barked orders into a commlink as he watched camera feeds go dark one by one.
"He's here." A tech shouted. "It's him! The target from Everlife Medical!"
Groener's blood ran cold. That assassin in the entertainment district, the one sent to "warn" Soren, had vanished.
Now it made sense. He had come to end them.
"Evac protocol!" Groener snapped. "Destroy anything you can't carry. Burn drives."
"Wipe everything."
"Sir~"
"I SAID BURN IT ALL!"
"…"
It was too late.
A shadow fell across the room. Then the oxygen thinned, and Groener's body lifted from the ground, strangled by invisible force. He clawed at his neck, gagging, legs kicking uselessly against air.
Soren stepped forward, hand extended.
Groener tried to turn, to beg, but Soren closed his fist. Bones cracked. The man's neck twisted.
He dropped to the floor.
Soren didn't even glance down. Instead, he turned to the central control panel. A few keystrokes, just enough to bypass the security layers, and then the firewalls began to fall.
Within moments, he was downloading everything: locations, personnel, black budgets, project names like Frost Ember and Echo Rebirth.
Data that could destabilize HYDRA worldwide.
Deadpool wandered in, dragging a shield twice his size and humming Ride of the Valkyries.
"Need help, tech wizard?"
"It's done." Soren replied, removing the drive and sliding it into a thin slot on his belt. "We have what we came for."
Deadpool blinked. "No cool explosion?"
"Not even a self-destruct countdown? Man, you people don't believe in style."
Soren's smile was faint and terrifying.
"I disabled the self-destruct... I have other plans."
The command room's steel door hissed open.
A man stumbled inside, his lab coat flapping like torn paper. He hadn't even looked up when he cried out.
"Boss! They're inside! It's—it's too late, they're—"
His voice broke mid-sentence.
Then he saw it. The thing on the floor.
Commander Groener, or what remained of him, was crumpled like a discarded puppet. His neck hung at a grotesque angle, mouth frozen in one final, silent command.
The man in glasses froze. Whatever breath he'd managed to gather fled him now. His lips parted. No sound came out.
Terror, pure and unfiltered, bloomed behind his glasses.
He didn't run. Didn't beg. Just stood there, paralyzed by the weight of inevitability.
Soren regarded him for a moment. Like a hunter offering mercy to a dying beast.
"You already know what comes next."
A shimmering blade of compressed air formed in his palm, no wider than a ribbon, silent as a whisper.
The man's chest trembled, but his shoulders relaxed. There was no defiance.
Only that fleeting flash in his eyes, not fear, but relief. As if death were an end to the unbearable wait.
The wind blade sliced cleanly through his skull.
He crumpled without a sound. A single flower of red bloomed on the floor.
Soren stepped over the body without ceremony. These people, engineers of suffering, architects of hidden wars, weren't innocent.
Every desk in this facility had blood pooled beneath it, even if unseen.
Mercy was a luxury they had never shown.
Now it would not be granted.
The screams outside had faded.
One by one, like candles snuffed in the dark.
Now only silence remained.
Deadpool stepped into the room like he owned the place, his boots crunching against charred debris.
One of his gloves was half-melted, and he seemed proud of it.
"Mission complete, Captain Edgelord." He declared, tossing a charred HYDRA helmet over his shoulder.
"I even left one guy twitching for artistic flair, but don't worry, he's brain-dead."
Soren turned toward him, expression unreadable.
Deadpool raised a hand as if to high-five a ghost, then shrugged when Soren didn't respond.
"All done." Deadpool repeated, hands on hips. "No survivors, no last words, no post-credits monologue."
"Even blew up the cafeteria just in case someone was hiding in a fridge."
Soren gave a faint nod, the closest thing to praise Deadpool was going to get.
In his gloved hand, Soren held the hard drive, its matte-black casing unremarkable, yet dense with secrets, coordinates, research data, communication logs.
This was his scalpel aimed at the throat of HYDRA's global web.
"Very well done."
"I got what I came for. Our transaction is complete… and I am satisfied."
Deadpool grinned. "You know, I don't do well with compliments, but I think that was one. So, thank you, silent thunder daddy."
Soren blinked slowly. "Don't… call me that."
"Got it. Filed under: 'Lines never to cross again.'"
As they exited the ruins of the base, wind howled across the scorched snowfield outside. Steam still rose from lightning-blasted ice, mingling with the faint scent of burning polymers and charred flesh.
Soren walked ahead, the hard drive safely secured.
His anger, once volcanic, now sat cold and still, like embers waiting to be stirred again.
The extermination of Hydra had only began.
꧁𓊈𒆜༺⚜༻𒆜𓊉꧂
PhantomDream