Chapter 422: Prelude
Madame Hydra stood on a rooftop directly across from Stark Tower with her hands at her sides, looking out over the city she intended to own before the night was finished.
The plan was not complicated. Sandman would generate mass chaos across a wide enough area to keep law enforcement and military response fragmented. The Grim Reaper would go in quietly and remove key government figures in their residences. She would command the Hydra ground forces personally, directing them toward the city's strategic locations as the pressure created by the other two cleared the way.
Baron Zemo was a different matter. He couldn't be directed. His interest was the rumor currently circulating in intelligence circles -- a Captain America somehow awakened, somewhere in New York. The superhero community held no appeal for him beyond that single target. He had his own objectives and would pursue them independently.
Madame Hydra had no objection. The HYDRA operatives still embedded in SHIELD's structure had been nearly destroyed by Hawkeye and Black Widow working through Garrett's list, but not entirely. The survivors had transmitted one critical piece of intelligence before going silent: SHIELD's internal command was in collapse. Faction fighting, divided loyalties, no unified chain of response.
The optimal window would not stay open forever.
She felt something she almost never permitted herself -- a flicker of actual excitement. A slight warmth across her cheeks.
Since the end of the Second World War and the Red Skull's disappearance, HYDRA's true leadership had been hers. The organization had fractured, drifted, accumulated allies like Zemo who were more parallel powers than genuine subordinates. None of that had changed the core of it. She was still the center. She had been patient.
"Begin," she said softly.
The word went through the communications network and reached every HYDRA soldier simultaneously. Three thousand pairs of eyes, already blank, already emptied of individual will by the conditioning process that made them useful, registered the signal. The formation split. One column peeled away behind the Grim Reaper, moving toward the residential addresses of Manhattan's government officials. The rest fanned out in scattered units, beginning indiscriminate destruction -- vehicles, infrastructure, anything public and visible -- with the explicit purpose of generating the kind of scale that would force New York's emergency services and any available military assets to fully commit their attention.
Madame Hydra was certain that Iron Man and his associates would not stand aside. She was counting on it. Every order she had given was designed to disperse them, not to defeat them in direct confrontation.
Sandman had his own orders. He rose, and the rise accelerated, mass accumulating as the loose material around him was drawn in and compacted. By the time he reached the height of the surrounding buildings he was something that looked from a distance like weather -- a churning brown-gray pillar of accelerating grit and debris that began moving through Manhattan's streets, consuming vehicles and pulling them inward.
It was still the middle of the night. Most of the city had slept through the Hell's Kitchen and City Hall explosions. The damage Sandman was producing was structural rather than human at this hour -- no one yet caught in the open, no civilians walking into the edge of the storm. The full potential of what he could do to a populated street remained in reserve for now.
Inside Stark Tower, Daredevil's head turned. A small, precise movement, as if he'd heard something from a direction no one else in the room was facing.
"There's a disturbance moving. A large one. Similar to a sandstorm."
Tony was already at the window. In the distance, barely visible against the city's ambient glow, a wall of yellow-brown material swept across an intersection and was gone.
"JARVIS. Analyze the storm pattern and movement trajectory."
"Confirmed match with the entity you encountered in the Adirondacks. Current movement analysis projects his destination as Times Square." JARVIS's response was immediate.
"I'll handle him." Electro's voice was even. "The heat generated by my current should progressively crystallize the individual sand particles that compose his body. And I suspect no one else in this room has a more efficient countermeasure for a target like that."
Tony considered it for roughly half a second and nodded. "Agreed. That leaves the Grim Reaper, Baron Zemo, and Madame Hydra. I'll find the Grim Reaper."
"Zemo is mine." Hawkeye was already standing.
Jessica Jones and Black Widow looked at each other. Jessica had been barely present since they'd arrived -- sitting forward, not quite with the room, her mind somewhere between the hospital bed and the explosion she couldn't fully reconstruct. She raised her head now and spoke with a steadiness that didn't entirely match how she looked.
"I'll take down Madame Hydra."
Daredevil turned toward Black Widow. "Which leaves the Hydra soldiers for us."
"I spent time in the Adirondacks base on an undercover assignment." Black Widow raised an eyebrow. "There were over three thousand HYDRA soldiers based there. This is not a simple task."
They were moving toward a few words of levity -- the kind that comes before something genuinely dangerous -- when Daredevil stood up sharply.
"No time. Someone is already fighting. They've been at it for a while."
"Who?" Tony's first thought went immediately to Peter Parker. "Batman?"
Daredevil shook his head. "I've never encountered him before. But there's something in the pattern that feels familiar." A pause. "Six metal claws extending from his fists."
"Wolverine." Hawkeye said it without inflection, the way you say a word you've said many times before. He was already at the rooftop access door, pushing through the glass panel onto the landing pad. He walked to the edge and stepped off without breaking stride.
In the air, he rotated, drew his bow in a single smooth motion, and put an arrow into the face of Stark Tower's exterior wall about fifteen floors down. A thin line ran from the arrow's tail back to his belt clip. Several seconds later he hit the street below, released the tension, and was gone into the dark.
Tony checked the time. Three in the morning.
He snapped his faceplate down and lifted into the air, scanning the city grid below for anything matching the Grim Reaper's heat signature and structural profile. The right arm was the landmark -- a high-grade mechanical replacement for the entire limb, constructed around a powered scythe. That degree of metal density would show clearly in JARVIS's sweep.
He ran through the remaining variables as he flew. Madame Hydra's actual capabilities were not clearly documented anywhere in his databases. Zemo appeared to be operating as a baseline human with tactical experience and a purple mask. Sandman had Electro. The Grim Reaper was a containment problem, not a power problem.
He was reasonably confident about his ability to handle one enhanced target with a mechanical arm.
The question that persisted -- rising again as he cleared the skyline and the city spread out beneath him -- was the one that had no answer yet. What had made tonight specifically the night HYDRA chose to move on New York? Even Electro, with his ability to absorb and process network intelligence at a rate no human analyst could match, hadn't found an answer to that.
Back at the top of Stark Tower, the room had emptied almost completely. Daredevil and Black Widow were moving toward the elevator bank. Black Widow glanced back and stopped.
Electro hadn't moved.
"What are you waiting for?"
He blinked. He'd been somewhere else. "Sorry. I was still working through the question of why tonight."
"Elevator's here." Daredevil had heard the doors open at the far end of the corridor.
"Take the elevator," Black Widow said.
Electro shook his head slightly, a small dismissive wave of one hand.
His yellow windbreaker ignited. Not from an external source -- the material simply burned away from the inside out in under two seconds, reducing to floating ash, and as it went the first threads of golden electrical light began moving across his skin.
The transition completed faster than Black Widow's eyes could separate into individual frames. The man in the windbreaker was gone. In his place stood something that looked like a human silhouette rendered in pure electrical charge, the outline precise but the interior in constant motion, light branching and rebranching with every fraction of a second.
This was the first time Black Widow had seen what Max Dillon actually looked like. She stood with it for a moment. Then she understood why Tony had said, without any discussion, that the Sandman problem was Electro's to solve.
The lightning figure accelerated toward the window, passed through it without resistance, and was gone in the direction of Times Square.
Black Widow and Daredevil took the elevator. It arrived at street level a few minutes later.
The doors opened, and the smell hit immediately. Blood -- not the trace of it that a fight leaves on a sidewalk, but volume, the kind that pooled and spread. The street in front of Stark Tower was red-black in the sodium light, the fluid having found every seam and crack in the pavement and followed them outward. Dismembered pieces of HYDRA soldiers were distributed across the full width of the street with no particular arrangement.
Wolverine was at the far end of the block. The six claws were extended, and he was moving through the HYDRA formation in a way that wasn't quite a fighting style so much as a direction. He went forward, and they were divided where he passed.
The streetlights were functioning. The moonlight was thin tonight. Between the two, enough illumination fell on Logan's soaked figure to make the picture worse than darkness would have -- the specific detail of the damage done visible at distance, the blood on his face and forearms, the matted state of his jacket.
A trained soldier encountering this scene would feel the pull to stop and recalibrate. HYDRA's soldiers didn't. They stepped into the gaps left by the ones who had just been cut apart and came forward in the same direction without any visible adjustment to their behavior. The numbers compressed and continued.
Daredevil didn't need sight to understand the full situation around him. The sound architecture of the street told him everything.
Both of them paused for a half-second. Then they drew simultaneously -- Daredevil from behind his back, Black Widow from the holsters at her thigh -- and moved into the line.