Part 2: What They Built
Location: Hydra Facility - Interior Halls
Time: 10:15 PM
The corridors were a twisting anatomy of cruelty—bare metal walls, rusted vents, low flickering lights that buzzed like dying insects. Blood now smeared the floor and walls like war paint.
Hydra agents lay in heaps. Some with crushed skulls, others torn apart by telekinetic blades that never touched their skin but sheared through with surgical, rage-driven precision. The scent of ozone and iron clung to the air. The security alarm was long dead—its scream silenced by a crushed control panel.
Riven walked slowly now, bare steps echoing like war drums in the silence that followed slaughter. He stepped over corpses with the calm of someone beyond grief, but not beyond fury.
He reached a door at the far end—a reinforced vault-like structure pulsing faintly with green light around its biometric lock. He didn't slow. A flicker of thought, and the hinges screamed before tearing inward, the door ripped from its mountings.
Inside: the lab.
White, sterile, clean—and horrifying.
Metal chairs bolted to the floor, each with blood-dark restraints. IV stands hanging limp beside them. Monitors still playing silent footage of screaming children. Files stacked neatly as if documentation excused atrocity.
Riven stood in the center, his jaw tightening.
"This is what you were," he muttered, voice a low rasp. "This is what you made."
One Hydra scientist crawled from beneath a table, coughing, eyes wide. He reached for something—a needle, maybe.
Riven raised one hand. A knife, coated in blood, floated behind him.
It launched.
The body slumped forward, twitching once.
Riven didn't blink.
Instead, he turned to the files, glancing through names and locations—child after child, labeled by number. Code phrases like "extraction viable," "subject resistant," "recondition necessary."
He gathered them all and burned them to ash with a focused telekinetic pulse that vibrated the air itself.
Then he looked up at the cameras.
"One by one," he whispered.
And he moved on.
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