Chapter 170: No Black Panther Here
The Red Queen led Jake through the lower corridor and into the training hall.
It was one of the larger completed spaces in the stronghold — high ceiling, reinforced floor, the smell of exertion and metal that any serious training facility eventually develops regardless of what world it's built in. A dozen Knights were already working — shirtless, focused, moving through strength routines with the disciplined intensity of men who had learned that survival in the Wasteland was a physical argument and you needed to be prepared to make it convincingly.
The equipment was a mixture of salvaged and sourced — treadmills, free weights, barbells, pull-up rigs, balance apparatus. All of it wired into the Red Queen's monitoring network, so that every rep, every sprint, every biometric reading fed back into the central system in real time. In a world where resources were scarce and every able body mattered, knowing exactly what your people were capable of wasn't a luxury. It was operational necessity.
Outside the high windows, the slow rotation of newly erected wind turbines caught the desert air. The Wasteland was dry and brutal and almost entirely useless for agriculture, but wind it had in abundance. The turbines were still coming online in phases — the laboratory had been the first space electrified, the training hall second — but the infrastructure was building toward something that could sustain real long-term occupation.
The Knights stopped when Jake walked in.
Not immediately — there was a half-second delay while they processed what they were seeing, because the man who had walked through the door was not quite the man they remembered. Same voice, same bearing, same quiet authority. But taller by a visible margin, the proportions subtly but unmistakably different, the kind of physical presence that fills a room differently than it did before.
Then his voice confirmed it, and the recognition clicked into place.
"Everyone keep going. I'm just here to run some numbers."
"Yes, Father—"
"Father—"
"Father—"
They returned to their stations, though with the slightly elevated energy of people who had just been given something new to think about.
Jake glanced sideways at Mia, who was leaning against the doorframe with the expression of someone enjoying themselves at a modest but consistent level.
"Lucky I took your advice about the clothes," he said.
She responded with a look that communicated several things simultaneously without committing to any of them.
He started with the bench press.
The bar was already loaded from whoever had been using the station before him. He lay back, assessed the weight by feel, and pressed it. A hundred kilograms moved like an empty bar.
He added weight methodically — not rushing, treating it as data collection rather than performance. Two hundred kilograms. Still clean. Three hundred, and he felt the first real engagement — not struggle, just the sensation of the load becoming meaningful. Four hundred, and his muscles were working in a way that registered as effort without registering as strain.
He stopped at five hundred and forty-four kilograms when his wrists developed a dull ache that told him he'd found a real limit rather than a mental one.
He sat up, rolled his wrists twice. The ache faded within seconds.
The Knights who hadn't gone back to their own training were watching with expressions that ranged from stunned to deeply motivated. Jake didn't acknowledge the attention. He stood, moved to the track, and the Red Queen's voice came through the ceiling speakers with calm efficiency.
"Ready when you are."
He ran.
The numbers came back in sequence: average speed forty-eight kilometers per hour across a sustained distance. Peak sprint seventy-eight kilometers per hour, which was a figure that the Red Queen noted in a tone suggesting she found it satisfying. Balance beam — ten meters, no variance, performance comparable to an elite gymnast except with none of the training time. Reaction testing showed he could track and respond to a projectile moving at handgun velocity — not quite fast enough to catch the round, but fast enough to move out of its path if he saw the shot coming.
The lactic acid issue was essentially solved. His muscles could sustain output for significantly longer than baseline human biology allowed before fatigue chemistry became a limiting factor — not infinite, because nothing was infinite, but the ceiling was high enough that in practical combat terms it translated to outlasting almost anything he was likely to face.
An hour of sustained maximum-effort exercise left him breathing harder than normal but functional. He could continue. He chose not to, because the data was complete and continuing would be redundant.
He dressed, ran a hand through his hair, and walked out.
Behind him, after approximately ten seconds of silence, the training hall erupted into the kind of noise that meant everyone had just decided to push considerably harder than they'd been planning to.
Two more days passed.
Jake trained. Tested. Adjusted to the new architecture of his own body — learning where the new limits were, relearning movements that his muscle memory had encoded for a frame that no longer existed, developing the proprioceptive map that told him where his limbs were in space without having to think about it.
There was one practical complication he'd anticipated and still found mildly irritating: the height. He was past the age at which people grew fifteen centimeters. Anyone who knew him from before — and there were people, in multiple worlds, who knew him well — was going to notice. He'd need cover stories calibrated to each context, which was a tedious administrative problem layered on top of everything else.
He was working through the logistics of that when his communications equipment produced a call.
He looked at the source identifier.
Steve Rogers.
He picked up.
The situation Steve described was not surprising.
After the procedure — after Erskine's death at the hands of the HYDRA agent, after the last vial of serum was destroyed at the waterfront — the Army had found itself with exactly one successful enhanced soldier and no ability to make more. The reversal of fortune from viable mass program to one irreplaceable asset had happened in the span of an afternoon.
The response from command had been predictable: Steve had been locked down. Not imprisoned — they weren't stupid enough to imprison Captain America — but managed. Protected. Studied. Blood draws twice a week from scientists attempting to reverse-engineer Erskine's formula from the only living example of its results. Meetings with strategists who treated him like a weapon that needed to be stored correctly rather than a soldier who needed to be deployed.
And in the interim, while the Army figured out what to do with him, someone had decided that the most productive use of a super-soldier was promotional work.
Jake let Steve finish describing the touring schedule — the stage shows, the war bond circuit, the choreographed performances in front of audiences who were polite about it but not particularly impressed — without interrupting.
"And Bucky's unit," Jake said when Steve stopped.
"The 107th. Captured near Azzano." A pause. "Colonel Phillips says they're probably dead. He's not sending a rescue."
"What do you want to do?"
The answer was immediate. "Go get him."
"Alone?"
"No," Steve said. "I'm calling you, aren't I?"
Jake was quiet for a moment.
Then: "Give me a location. I'll meet you there."
He set the communications equipment down and looked at the Red Queen's nearest interface panel.
"I'm going back," he said. "Prep for transit."
"I assumed as much," she said. "Shall I note the primary objective as retrieval and reconnaissance, or are we escalating to direct HYDRA facility engagement?"
"Both," Jake said. "Probably."
He picked up his coat.
There was a secondary reason for the transit — one that had been sitting in the back of his planning for a while, waiting for the right opportunity to execute. The Steve situation had provided the timing. He'd been thinking about armor. Real armor — not the combat suit he'd been using, which was excellent by most standards but was still, fundamentally, a suit designed to work around human limitations rather than to complement capabilities he'd just significantly expanded.
He needed better materials.
And he'd had a conversation with Howard Stark, two days before the procedure, in which Howard had mentioned — almost in passing, the way brilliant people mention things they consider obvious — a small nation in northeastern Africa that apparently sat on top of a deposit of something the local population called vibranium. Stark had been trying to acquire enough of it to finish Captain America's shield. He'd hit bureaucratic resistance and moved on to a secondary material.
Jake had filed the name away.
Northeastern Africa
The plane was unremarkable by design — a cargo flight, nothing on its manifest that would attract attention, a passenger list that didn't invite questions.
Jake looked out the window as the continent resolved into specifics below him.
Wakanda was small. Poor by most external measures, isolated by geography and by choice, its borders maintained with a quiet consistency that discouraged casual visitors without doing anything dramatic enough to suggest there was something worth protecting behind them. In the timeline Jake had studied, the country's true nature — and the extraordinary thing buried in its territory — remained unknown to the outside world for decades. The MCU's version of Wakanda was a global power hiding behind the appearance of a developing nation, its vibranium reserves the foundation of technology that made everything else in the superhero landscape look primitive by comparison.
In this world — Captain America: The First Avenger, the contained version, the story of one man before the larger universe had assembled itself around him — Wakanda existed but its story hadn't started yet. No T'Challa. No royal family with a tradition of enhancement. No Dora Milaje. Just a country sitting on top of the most durable metal in the known universe, with no particular reason to refuse a fair trade.
Howard Stark had mentioned it almost as a footnote. Jake had listened more carefully than Howard had intended.
He landed, made his way through the necessary introductions, and presented himself as a buyer with gold and no complicated agenda.
The vibranium was raw — unprocessed ore, heavy and dark, visually unimpressive in the way that genuinely extraordinary materials often were before you understood what they could do. Once worked into its final form, vibranium didn't deform. It absorbed kinetic energy rather than transferring it. It was, by any reasonable engineering standard, the closest thing to a perfect armor material that physics allowed.
Jake had brought enough gold to make the transaction worthwhile for both sides.
He walked out with enough vibranium to work with.
The country he left behind had no idea what it had sold, which was fine. In a few decades, if the timelines continued to develop the way he expected, Wakanda would have reasons of its own to value what it was sitting on. That was their story to tell.
For now, Jake had materials, he had a call to return, and somewhere in occupied Austria, Steve Rogers was waiting on a friend.
He headed for the airfield.
[500 Power Stones → +1 Bonus Chapter]
[10 Reviews → +1 Bonus Chapter]
Enjoyed the chapter? A review helps a lot.
P1treon: Soulforger (20+advance chapters)