CHAPTER 7: TRAINING MONTAGE
The combat training facility reeked of sweat and gunpowder, its reinforced walls scarred by weeks of weapons testing and hand-to-hand combat drills. Pietro stood in the center of the exercise mat, surrounded by six Hydra soldiers who had volunteered—or been volunteered—to test the limits of his enhanced capabilities. Their faces showed a mixture of professional curiosity and barely concealed apprehension.
"Begin exercise," Dr. List announced through the intercom, his voice carrying the clinical detachment of a scientist observing lab rats.
The soldiers moved with coordinated precision, rushing Pietro from multiple angles while he tracked their approach with enhanced senses that made their movements seem sluggish and predictable. But instead of unleashing the full extent of his supersonic speed, Pietro deliberately limited himself to roughly twice normal human velocity—fast enough to be impressive, controlled enough to suggest he was still learning to harness his abilities.
He disarmed the first soldier with a technique that looked like pure speed but was actually careful timing, allowing the man's momentum to carry him past Pietro's position while Pietro simply plucked the weapon from his grasp. The second and third soldiers found themselves on the ground before they realized Pietro had moved, but they were uninjured, merely outmaneuvered.
"Promising but undisciplined. That's what they need to see. A weapon with potential that requires refinement."
The remaining soldiers adapted quickly, spreading out to force Pietro to cover more ground while coordinating their attacks to limit his movement options. It was solid tactical thinking that would have worked against most enhanced individuals. Unfortunately for them, Pietro's enhanced perception allowed him to process their strategy in real-time while his transmigrator knowledge provided insights into combat techniques that wouldn't be developed for years.
He moved through their formation like water flowing around stones, each step calculated to look impulsive while actually following a complex pattern that maximized efficiency while minimizing apparent skill. To observers, it appeared that Pietro was relying on raw speed and instinct rather than tactical sophistication.
"Excellent reaction time," List noted, reviewing readings on his tablet. "Neural processing speed continues to exceed baseline projections. However, strategic thinking remains limited. He's fighting like a brawler rather than a soldier."
"Perfect. They think I'm a blunt instrument that needs sharpening."
The training sessions continued for hours, with Pietro working his way through obstacle courses that tested agility, reflexes, and problem-solving abilities. He deliberately took longer than necessary to complete certain challenges, creating the impression that his abilities were still developing rather than fully realized.
Between exercises, Pietro used his enhanced senses to catalog every detail of the facility's layout. Guard rotations, security protocols, the locations of backup power systems and emergency exits—all information that would become crucial when the Avengers eventually arrived to shut down Hydra's operation.
"Three months, maybe four, before they find this place. I need to be ready to guide them to the important targets while protecting Wanda from the crossfire."
But the public training was only half of Pietro's development regimen. The real work happened after lights-out, when the facility's skeleton crew assumed he was sleeping peacefully in his cell.
Darkness had always been Pietro's ally, but now it was something more—a gateway to capabilities that existed outside normal reality. He waited until the facility's night shift settled into their routine before beginning his true training, the kind that would have sent Dr. List's instruments into overload if they'd been capable of detecting it.
The void energy responded to his call like a living thing, eager to be used despite the alien price it demanded. Pietro felt it surge from his soul, spreading through his nervous system like ice-cold electricity, and reached for the dimensional abilities that the Mind Stone's collision had awakened.
Shadow-stepping had become easier over the past weeks, though each use left him feeling slightly less connected to normal reality. What had started as clumsy one-second phases through solid matter had evolved into controlled three-second transitions that allowed him to bypass increasingly complex obstacles.
Tonight, Pietro decided to test his limits.
He stood facing the cell's reinforced concrete wall—three feet thick, embedded with steel reinforcement and electronic sensors designed to detect any attempt at escape. For a normal enhanced human, it would have been an insurmountable barrier. For Pietro, it was simply another puzzle to solve.
"The key is not to fight the wall, but to exist temporarily where the wall isn't."
Pietro reached deeper into the void energy than he'd ever attempted before, feeling it respond with hungry eagerness. The dimensional power didn't just allow him to phase through matter—it briefly displaced him into the spaces between realities, the dark gaps where collapsed universes had once existed.
The transition was nauseating. For three seconds that felt like hours, Pietro existed in a place that wasn't quite anywhere, surrounded by whispers in languages that had died with their home dimensions. He could feel the weight of extinct worlds pressing against his consciousness, the memories of civilizations that had been reduced to nothing more than echoes in the void.
But when reality reasserted itself, he was standing on the other side of the wall, in a corridor that should have been inaccessible from his cell.
The achievement was exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure. Pietro could now phase through barriers that would stop any conventional escape attempt, but the cost was becoming impossible to ignore. Each use of void energy left whispers in his mind—fragments of knowledge from destroyed realities, memories that didn't belong to him, warnings about something vast and hungry that existed in the spaces between worlds.
"Something's watching me. Every time I use the void energy, I can feel eyes that don't exist in normal space. Something that notices when reality gets disturbed."
Pietro spent the next hour experimenting with a different application of his dimensional abilities—creating void pockets, small tears in space-time that could be used to store objects outside normal reality. It was delicate work that required precise control over energies that wanted to consume rather than contain, but eventually he succeeded in creating a stable pocket roughly the size of his fist.
Into the dimensional storage space went his growing collection of "borrowed" items—Strucker's monocle, a few security badges he'd lifted during training, copies of facility blueprints he'd memorized and sketched from memory. Having access to supplies and intelligence that officially didn't exist would be useful when the time came to escape this place.
But as Pietro closed the void pocket and returned to his cell through another shadow-step, the whispers in his mind grew louder. Not words exactly, but impressions of meaning that bypassed language entirely. Warnings about the hunger that lived in the darkness between worlds. Suggestions that his use of void energy was serving a purpose larger than his own survival.
"I'm not just borrowing power from collapsed realities. I'm... feeding something. Every time I use void energy, I'm giving it a pathway back into existence."
The thought was deeply disturbing, but Pietro pushed it aside as he settled onto his cot. Whatever cosmic forces his powers might be serving, they were tools he needed to survive the challenges ahead. The alternative—relying solely on his limited speed abilities—would leave him vulnerable when the real battles began.
Besides, he had more immediate concerns to address.
Morning brought Pietro's favorite part of each day—the time he spent with Wanda in the facility's common area, ostensibly for "enhanced individual integration" but actually providing the only genuine peace he'd found since his transmigration.
Wanda sat cross-legged on the floor, her dark eyes closed in concentration as red energy danced between her fingers like tame lightning. The chaos magic was stronger today, more controlled, responding to her will with increasing precision. But Pietro could see the strain it cost her—the slight tremor in her hands, the line of tension across her shoulders.
"Focus on the energy's structure," Pietro coached, drawing on meditation techniques he'd learned from the transmigrator memories. "Don't try to control it. Let it flow through you, but give it direction."
"It wants to destroy things," Wanda murmured, her accent soft with concentration. "Every time I touch the magic, it shows me how to break what I'm looking at. How to unravel the bonds that hold matter together."
"Because chaos magic is fundamentally about change," Pietro explained, though he couldn't tell her how he knew this. "It sees the world as it is and whispers about what it could become. But you're stronger than the whispers, sestra. You decide what changes and what stays the same."
Wanda opened her eyes, and the red energy coalesced into a perfect sphere above her palm—controlled, stable, beautiful in its contained power. "Like this?"
Pietro grinned with genuine pride. "Exactly like that."
They worked together for another hour, Pietro providing guidance while Wanda explored the limits of her emerging abilities. He taught her visualization exercises disguised as "games," helped her practice selective manifestation, and most importantly, gave her the emotional support she needed to see her chaos magic as a gift rather than a curse.
"In the movies, Wanda spent years struggling to control her powers because she was afraid of them. But if I can help her build confidence now, she'll be ready for whatever comes next."
But even as they trained together, Pietro noticed the way Wanda occasionally studied his face with uncomfortable intensity. Her chaos magic made her sensitive to deception in ways she didn't fully understand yet, and despite his careful explanations for the foreign memories she'd glimpsed during their bond awakening, doubt still flickered behind her eyes.
"Pietro," she said suddenly, dismissing the energy sphere with a gesture, "sometimes when I use my magic, I feel echoes of that connection we shared during enhancement. Fragments of thoughts that don't feel like mine."
Pietro's enhanced heart rate spiked, but he kept his expression calm. "What kind of thoughts?"
"Knowledge about magic that I've never studied. Techniques for controlling chaos energy that no one has ever taught me. It's like someone else's education is bleeding through into my consciousness."
"She's accessing the transmigrator memories through our twin bond. The chaos magic is making the connection stronger, giving her access to knowledge I never intended to share."
Pietro reached for her hands, letting his genuine concern show. "Wanda, the enhancement process was traumatic for both of us. Our minds were connected when the chaos magic awakened, and it's possible that some of my experiences got mixed in with yours. But that doesn't make them any less valid if they help you control your abilities."
It was a careful truth wrapped in necessary lies. The techniques Wanda was accessing through their bond really were from the transmigrator memories—magical knowledge drawn from countless fantasy novels, superhero stories, and theoretical frameworks about how chaos magic might function in practice. But Pietro couldn't explain that without revealing secrets that would destroy everything.
"You're probably right," Wanda said finally, but her eyes held the same doubt they'd carried for weeks. "Still, sometimes I wonder if there are things you're not telling me. Important things."
"More than you could possibly imagine, and I hate myself for every lie I've told you."
But aloud, Pietro simply squeezed her hands and smiled. "The only important thing is that we're together, and we're both growing stronger every day. Whatever comes next, we face it as a family."
Wanda smiled back, and for a moment the doubt faded from her expression. Their twin bond hummed with shared affection and mutual protection, the psychic connection that had always existed between them now amplified by cosmic forces beyond their understanding.
Pietro treasured these moments of genuine connection even as they twisted his conscience into knots. Every day he spent lying to Wanda was another day he betrayed the trust of the person he loved most in the world. But the truth would hurt her far more than the deception, and protection sometimes required sacrifice.
Even if the sacrifice was his own peace of mind.
As they returned to their respective cells that evening, Pietro caught Wanda giving him one last searching look—love and suspicion warring in her dark eyes. She didn't trust his explanations completely, but she trusted him, and that trust was both his greatest treasure and his heaviest burden.
"Just a little longer. Once the Avengers arrive and we escape this place, once we're fighting for something bigger than revenge, maybe then I can find a way to tell her the truth. Or maybe the truth will destroy us both."
The void energy stirred restlessly in his soul, feeding on his guilt and growing stronger with each passing day. And somewhere in the darkness between realities, something that had been watching him for weeks prepared to make its presence known.
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