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Tony Stark was having a public relations nightmare.
The video had gone viral—millions of views across every platform, shared and reshared until the whole world had seen the same footage. The Mark II getting knocked around like a toy while some mysterious one-eyed robot delivered the killing blow.
Tony Stark, genius billionaire, reduced to a supporting character in his own debut.
Rumors spread that he was buying video hosting sites outright just to get the footage removed. The internet mocked him relentlessly.
Meanwhile, nobody cared whether Tony Stark was Iron Man. They wanted to know about the other robot.
"Use necessary measures when the situation calls for it," Fury told Coulson.
"Understood, Director."
Coulson knew what that meant. SHIELD had a long history of "necessary measures."
But Fury wasn't stopping there. He needed someone inside Umbrella Corporation—someone who could get close to Luke Foster and report back.
According to intelligence reports, Foster had three women in his inner circle. Exceptionally beautiful, each with a distinct presence that made ordinary attractiveness seem mundane by comparison.
Fury had just the operative for this kind of work.
Natasha Romanoff might not match those women in raw physical appeal, but she understood seduction as an art form. Getting close to a man, earning his trust, extracting his secrets—that was her specialty.
Black Widow was being recalled.
Luke was done playing games with the vampires.
Gitano Dragonetti had been useful—a source of funding, a connection to the supernatural underworld. But the Reaper experiments had crossed a line. Whatever alliance had existed between Umbrella and the vampire nation was officially over.
Time to flip the table.
Wolfpack had been upgraded. Every operator now wore the premium Nanosuit variant—Fosterium-powered, fully cloaked-capable, vastly superior to the export models being sold to militaries worldwide.
At two meters tall in their suits, painted matte black instead of the commercial gray, they looked like soldiers from a different era. Or a different universe entirely.
Their weapons matched their armor. Vanko had designed custom automatic rifles with anti-materiel capabilities—essentially scaled-up sniper rifles with fifteen-round extended magazines. The ammunition was oversized, the propellant charges excessive, the recoil manageable only because the Nanosuits absorbed it.
Against Reapers and vampires, it was devastatingly effective.
Pierce had provided the intelligence. HYDRA was unhappy with recent vampire activities—too many incidents, too much exposure, too many casualties among the human population that HYDRA considered their future subjects.
When Luke requested information on Gitano's current location, Pierce had hesitated only briefly before agreeing.
The old HYDRA leader had his own agenda, of course. He'd been researching vampire genetics for years, hoping to unlock the secret of immortality without the drawbacks of vampirism. Ruling the world meant nothing if you couldn't live long enough to enjoy it.
But those experiments had produced nothing useful. And the vampires were becoming a liability.
If Luke wanted to eliminate them, Pierce was happy to provide coordinates.
The operation zone had been sanitized.
Pierce's people had disabled every camera in a three-block radius. Whatever happened here tonight would leave no electronic record. That suited Luke fine—and it suited Pierce, who'd considered trying to monitor the assault before reconsidering.
The Assassin organization had demonstrated frightening intelligence capabilities. They'd compromised every HYDRA cell, identified every leader, exposed operations that should have been untraceable. If they'd noticed a surveillance attempt...
Better to simply accept the alliance at face value.
Luke wore noise-canceling headphones as Wolfpack advanced. Skadi, Tifa, and Riven had similar protection. The rifles were loud—full-auto anti-materiel fire generated a cacophony that could damage unprotected hearing.
EMIYA led from the front, as befitted the unit's commanding officer.
The vampires and Reapers died in waves.
Each round punched through supernatural flesh like it wasn't there. Bone offered no protection—the projectiles simply shattered it. Hearts exploded. Bodies disintegrated. The creatures that had terrorized humanity for millennia were being systematically erased.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
Wolfpack's first real deployment against monsters.
Luke had prepared them for this. EMIYA had given the pre-mission briefing, explaining what they'd face, why it mattered. Most of the human mercenaries had been skeptical—vampires sounded like fantasy nonsense.
Then they'd seen the Reapers move.
Superhuman speed. Regeneration that laughed at conventional weapons. Feeding mechanisms that could drain a human dry in seconds.
Without the Nanosuits, every operator present would have died in the first minute.
"These things aren't so tough," one mercenary—a veteran from the southern border—announced over comms, watching a Reaper dissolve into ash.
"They're fast," the squad captain replied calmly. "Fast enough that normal humans can't track them. We only manage because the suits enhance our perception. Don't get cocky."
The captain was a pragmatist. He'd led men in ugly conflicts across three continents, done things that would never appear in any report. The kind of soldier who survived by accepting reality rather than fighting it.
Monsters were real. Fine. That just meant monsters could be killed.
For humanity.
That phrase had seemed like corporate propaganda during the briefing. But watching Reapers swarm toward civilians, watching vampires treat humans as livestock—it suddenly felt genuine.
Maybe his life had been wasted on petty conflicts and mercenary work. Maybe this was a chance at something meaningful.
Fighting for humanity. Protecting the world from what lurks in the shadows.
"Ha! Eat lead, you ugly bastards!"
A Wolfpack operator strayed from formation, chasing a retreating Reaper. He didn't see the shadow detach from the wall behind him.
The creature hit him from the blind side, bearing him to the ground, jaws snapping at the Nanosuit's neck seal.
"Contact rear!"
The operator struggled, enhanced strength meeting supernatural fury. The suit held—barely—but the Reaper's claws were finding gaps, searching for weak points.
Then EMIYA was there, bow manifested, arrow already nocked. The Reaper exploded into dust before it could breach the armor.
"Stay in formation," EMIYA said flatly. "Discipline saves lives."
The rescued operator scrambled to his feet, shaken but intact.
"For humanity," he muttered, gripping his rifle tighter. "And for the paycheck."
It was honest, at least. Luke could respect that.
Some men fought for glory. Some for ideology. Wolfpack fought for both reasons and neither—professionals doing a job that happened to save the world.
Whatever worked.