Harry floated beneath the cloud cover, his flying cloak snapping loudly in the roaring gale behind him. Looking down, he quickly used the Lending contract to lock onto Steve's position.
Steve was now at the very center of the base, in a concealed room three levels underground.
His life signs were stable, so at least Harry did not need to worry about that.
Once he confirmed Steve was unharmed, Harry let out a quiet breath of relief, then decided to give Hydra a little welcoming present.
What he had not expected was that Hydra was even more eager than he was.
The rock across the mountainside began shifting at high speed, and the previously smooth cliff face split open with a thunderous roar, revealing hundreds of metal blast doors.
Driven by shrieking hydraulics, the blast doors shot upward, exposing rows of pitch-black launch tubes.
The next instant, swarms of missiles streaked out in a rush, trailing blue-violet flames. Their piercing howl shattered the clouds as they hurtled straight toward Harry.
At the same time, Harry sensed a strange vibration frequency spreading rapidly outward from the base.
To his surprise, this frequency interfered with the conduction of energy, and it was especially effective against magical energy.
Even Harry felt a faint, almost negligible interference under its influence. If an ordinary wizard had been standing here, they probably would have lost most of their fighting strength.
Harry found himself genuinely curious. Where had Hydra gotten this kind of technology? If they had possessed it before, why had they never used it in earlier battles?
Unless...
This technology had come from Hydra organizations in other parallel universes.
And it was not just the interference device that was unusual. The bombs themselves were no ordinary weapons either.
Within them, Harry sensed a familiar energy fluctuation: the higher-dimensional spatial energy of the Space Stone.
There was an old saying that only higher-dimensional energy could truly contend with higher-dimensional energy. If you wanted to injure the Dimensional Demon Gods, you needed to strike with power of the same order.
And naturally, the same principle applied to Harry as well.
These bombs, packed with enormous amounts of spatial energy, had already gained the ability to hurt him.
Since he did not know their exact power, Harry did not dare treat them lightly. He drew his wand from dimensional space and slashed it through the air.
In the next moment, a dazzling ice-blue magic circle flared into existence.
Then endless waves of frost spread outward from him in a broad fan. Moisture in the air instantly condensed into fine ice crystals that drifted down like glittering snow.
The missiles, still howling toward him with burning exhaust flares, went dead the instant they touched the expanding frost. Web-like veins of ice raced visibly across their metal shells.
In the blink of an eye, hundreds upon hundreds of missiles were completely frozen, transformed into enormous icicles suspended in midair.
Beneath the ice, the missiles' savage shapes and the fading patterns of their flames were still clearly visible, as if destruction itself had been frozen in the instant before impact.
Even so, Harry did not relax.
Sure enough, once frozen, the energy bombs lost their propulsion, but they still exploded.
Blue energy erupted all at once, shattering Harry's Absolute Zero and annihilating everything in the surrounding area without distinguishing friend from foe, even tearing at space itself.
Inside the military base, Sitwell and the others watched the scene with tense faces. One of the scientists muttered, "Did... did it work?"
Hit head-on by that much spatial energy, even the Hulk might have died, much less a wizard whose body was nowhere near as tough as Hulk's.
They had never truly expected the missiles to kill Harry. At first, they had assumed he would simply use long-range defenses to blast them all down. But instead he had frozen them in place without moving himself, and under those circumstances, there really had been a chance Harry might die.
But when the smoke finally cleared, Sitwell's pupils contracted violently, and even the symbiote inside him could not help snarling, "How is that possible? He took that much spatial energy head-on and didn't suffer even the slightest injury?!"
Outside the base, Harry's figure slowly emerged from the thinning smoke.
Layer after layer of transparent barriers, gleaming like glass, was falling away from his body. Those were the Shield Charms he had built around himself.
And beyond that, the space-time around him was slightly warped.
He had used space-time magic to isolate himself from the outside world, severing the invading spatial energy from his immediate surroundings. Otherwise, even he would have been injured by that much of it.
Having dealt with the base's opening attack, Harry vanished from where he stood and Apparated to the main gate.
He pulled a handful of coins from his pocket, flicked them into the air, then swung his wand like a baseball bat and smashed one of them.
Boom!
Wrapped in dense plasma, the coin shot forward at several times the speed of sound and blasted straight through the base's massive steel doors.
Behind those doors stood a dense formation of fully armed agents, clearly already warned and waiting in ambush.
A good portion of them had terrible luck. When the ripped-away steel doors came hurtling inward, many were clipped by the flying metal and torn apart so thoroughly that most did not even leave whole bodies behind.
Hydra had plenty of combat experience, and most of its agents had been brainwashed into fearing death far less than normal people. So even with blood and chunks of their comrades splattered all over them, they still fearlessly pulled their triggers at Harry.
But very quickly, both the bullets racing toward him and the Hydra agents themselves were hit by gravity that had suddenly intensified hundreds of times over.
In the next second, a rapid series of crisp pops filled the corridor.
The wet sound of flesh splitting under immense pressure. The crack of bones throughout entire bodies being crushed. The faint metallic pings of bullets striking the ground, slightly flattened.
All those noises overlapped within a single second. If Harry's hearing had not been far beyond human, it would have been nearly impossible to distinguish what any of them were.
When it was over, Harry resumed walking forward at the same calm pace as before, as if he were strolling through his own home, serene and indifferent.
As he moved on, the gravity array beneath his feet gradually faded, and the surrounding gravity finally returned to normal.
The thick, nearly sticky air began to stir again, and the sharp smell of blood slowly spread outward.
By the time Harry rounded the corner, the area had already become a vision of hell.
Harry was not bloodthirsty, but the people before him hardly counted as people anymore.
They all deserved to die.
He had once seen many of the files stored inside S.H.I.E.L.D.: poison gas experiments, human experimentation, organ experiments, and more.
If Hydra were ever allowed to dominate the world, that would be a world Harry could never accept.
And now that he knew there were worlds already fully ruled by Hydra, Harry had made up his mind to go to those worlds someday and save the people living there.
Because at his core, Harry was a kind person.
Inside the base, Harry continued onward without hurry. Nothing he encountered along the way could stop him.
Neither conventional ammunition nor spatial-energy weapons could do the slightest harm to him before being effortlessly dealt with.
And every spell Harry cast at will was fatal to ordinary soldiers like these.
Soon, Harry reached the central core of the base. Just ahead was the room where Steve was being held.
And there, several warriors covered in strange slime stepped out to block his path.
They were symbiotes.
Of course, to Harry, symbiotes were no different from the other cannon fodder.
As several of them lunged at him, his wand instantly flashed with a deadly green disintegration beam, sweeping across them and cutting them all cleanly in half.
Harry walked up to a room, pushed the door open, and saw Steve tied to a chair inside.
But Steve's current appearance struck Harry as deeply bizarre.
He had been trussed up in elaborate rope bondage on the chair. There was even a ball gag in his mouth, and his clothes were in complete disarray, as though they had been torn apart by some overwhelming force.
The moment Harry saw him, he could not help saying with a crooked smile, "Steve, what happened to you? Did some guy force himself on you or something? You look like your dignity didn't make it."
Then Harry saw Steve shaking his head wildly.
At that moment Harry also noticed something strange. For some reason, Steve had not sent him any message through the Lending System. Instead, he was trying to communicate only through frantic body language.
Before Harry could think further, a huge amount of slime suddenly surged out of Steve's body and transformed into tentacles that shot straight toward him.
In an instant, Harry raised several Shield Charms around himself to block the coming attack.
But to his surprise, the tentacle never struck him.
It did not even try to break through the Shield Charms. Instead, when it was still about a yard away, it abruptly expelled a small pale-blue cube from the slime, then crushed it.
Before Harry could react, the space around him suddenly collapsed, and the next moment he was sucked into a black hole that had appeared out of nowhere.
But just before he vanished, Harry seized the last moment to cast the Images of Ikonn, creating a mindless energy projection and giving it one final order:
Work with Steve to escape this military base, and destroy as much of it as possible.
Then, just before his body disappeared completely, Harry's expression changed dramatically.
It was not that his spell had failed.
It was that, in the rush of the moment, he had poured far too much energy into that duplicate.
All Harry could do now was pray that the projection was not carrying too much power, and that it would somehow be stable enough, rational enough, and smart enough.
Otherwise, by the time he got back, he might have to spend an absurd amount of energy dragging the vanished solar system back out of the river of time.
...
In the cracks between universes, there was no real concept of space or time.
Harry had no idea how long he drifted there before he finally crashed into a universe-bubble and entered another universe.
When he emerged from the wormhole and returned to a universe, his attention was caught by a planet extremely similar to Earth, and he plunged rapidly down through its atmosphere.
He made no attempt to fly. He simply let gravity drag him downward in silence.
As he fell, Harry condensed observational runes in his eyes and tried to communicate with one of his retainers.
If he could speak with people from other worlds, then naturally he could also speak across universes to people in other corners of the multiverse.
And at a time like this, it was Wanda's turn to be useful.
Harry knocked on the door of Wanda's heart and said softly,
"Wanda, open up. Don't resist. Let me borrow your body for a bit. I need to go save Steve."
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