Nick Fury had experienced unpleasant weeks before. This one had climbed to the top of the list and planted a flag.
His office lights were still on, although the Triskelion clock had already passed midnight. The city beyond the glass was quiet compared to the chaos of the previous days. Smoke stains still marked several nearby buildings where protests had become riots. Repair crews were working around the clock across federal properties.
The decision to take Lucius Noctis into custody had detonated like a grenade inside SHIELD.
Fury rested one hand on the desk while scanning another report. The stack of folders waiting beside his arm had grown large enough to qualify as architecture.
The paperwork alone could have buried a smaller organisation. Requests for comment from major networks sat beside formal threats from political offices, demands for explanation from congressional oversight committees, legal warnings drafted by government lawyers who suddenly remembered the Constitution, and civil rights complaints filed by three different advocacy groups before lunchtime. Every document asked the same question in slightly different language. Why had SHIELD abducted a harmless mutant and taken his blood without consent?
Every operation of the last ten years was now being examined for the tiniest discrepancy. No one wanted another mutant uprising, and taking the blood of that bastard had become the headlines for the last two weeks with bold headlines writing mutant experimentations.
What made the situation truly poisonous was the comparison that kept appearing on every network and editorial page. Commentators had begun placing SHIELD's actions beside the historical record of groups that had conducted illegal mutant experimentation in the past. Some anchors mentioned the Weapon Plus programme. Others brought up old HYDRA research divisions that had experimented on enhanced individuals during the war. The implication was rarely spoken outright, yet it hung in every broadcast. SHIELD, the organisation that had spent decades hunting those groups, now stood accused of behaving like them. These accusations were always served with Noctis's words of " SHIELD took over the mantle where HYDRA dropped it."
Inside the Triskelion, the effect had been immediate. Agents who had spent their careers dismantling terrorist cells and illegal laboratories now watched their own organisation discussed in the same breath as the monsters they had fought. Fury had seen the reactions across the building during the last week. Some agents were angry. Others were defensive. A few simply looked tired, as if the accusation itself had drained something out of them. Fury felt something far colder. He knew exactly how thin the line had been between a controlled intelligence operation and the story now running on every television in the country, and he understood that in the court of public opinion, that line no longer existed.
Mutant Power Dampeners had been deployed around most federal buildings and several SHIELD facilities across the country as a direct result. Each unit projected a suppression field roughly twenty-five yards wide. Within that radius, most mutant abilities failed completely. Outside that radius, the problem returned immediately.
The dampeners had stopped several buildings from being torn apart.
They had not stopped objects thrown from outside the field.
A steel bench thrown with super strength still travelled perfectly well through the air before entering the dampener radius. One courthouse in Detroit had lost its entire front façade that way.
Magneto had made the problem worse.
Magnetism did not care about dampener coverage when the metal had already started moving.
Fury rubbed his temple and leaned back in his chair.
He had spoken with Professor Charles Xavier three times during this week alone. The X-Men had intervened in several demonstrations that had started sliding toward violence. Cyclops had broken up one confrontation in Chicago that might have ended with three burning police trucks. Storm had dispersed a crowd in Boston before it reached a weapons depot.
The interventions helped.
They also reinforced the narrative that mutants were now policing mutants because SHIELD had crossed a line.
That particular irony had not escaped the press.
Several damaged wings of the Triskelion were still closed while engineers checked the structural integrity of the affected sections. One protester with density manipulation had nearly collapsed a maintenance corridor before security stopped him.
Hundreds of police officers had been injured across the country.
Mutants had been arrested in similar numbers.
The Justice Department had released most of them within hours to avoid escalating tensions.
Fury could live with that.
The internal damage to SHIELD was harder to accept.
Three department heads had been replaced after internal review panels concluded the Noctis operation had been conducted with insufficient legal insulation.
That phrasing irritated Fury every time he read it. The operation had been clean.
What had not been clean was the leak.
Another folder waited near the edge of his desk, and Fury already knew what it contained before opening it. The problem had grown steadily over the last two weeks. Field operatives assigned to maintain surveillance on Lucius Noctis had begun disappearing one by one.
At first, it looked like a coincidence. One agent failed to report in from a parked surveillance car. Another missed a scheduled check-in from a rented apartment. By the fourth disappearance, it had become impossible to pretend the pattern was accidental. Vehicles were discovered abandoned with the keys still inside. Apartments were found empty even though the agents had clearly left in a hurry. One safe house contained nothing except a television that had been left running on a twenty-four-hour news channel.
Investigators had searched every scene carefully and reached the same frustrating conclusion each time. No witnesses had seen anything unusual. No bodies had been discovered anywhere near the missing agents. Forensic teams had also failed to recover any trace evidence that could explain how trained operatives had vanished so cleanly.
The last confirmed sighting of Lucius Noctis had been sent by one of the watchers. The footage showed him entering his wrecked house in Queens after SHIELD released him.
Fury stared at that still image pinned to the top of the file.
The man had walked through his ruined doorway with a relaxed posture and an expression that suggested he had just won a small argument.
Maybe he was upset about the house. That still did not justify what he was doing. On the other side of the same spectrum, SHIELD was and always will be justified. He closed the file and reached for the phone. He intended to issue new surveillance instructions when a shout erupted outside his office door.
The sound cut through the corridor like a knife.
Fury moved instantly.
His chair rolled backwards as he stood. The pistol came out of the desk drawer and into his hand in the same motion. He crossed the office in four strides and pulled the door open.
A guard lay on the floor directly outside.
For a moment, Fury simply looked.
The man's limbs bent in directions that human joints were not designed to achieve. Both arms twisted behind his back. One leg folded under his body at an impossible angle. Blood stained the carpet where his mouth should have been visible.
It was not.
His baton had been shoved down his throat. Tape held a sheet of paper against his chest. Fury crouched beside the body and tore the note free. The handwriting was neat.
For every drop of mine, buckets of yours will be spilt.
Fury's expression hardened.
"MEDICS!"
The shout rolled down the corridor while security personnel converged from both ends.
Two agents rushed forward with a stretcher as Coulson and Maria Hill arrived from the far hallway at nearly the same moment.
Hill glanced at the body while the medics checked the guard's pulse.
"He's alive," one of them announced.
The baton came out with slow care while oxygen was pushed into the man's lungs.
Fury rose slowly.
"What happened?"
Hill held a tablet, already pulling security records.
"Robert Archer," she said while reading. "Assigned corridor watch five hours ago. Reported missing four hours before the alarm."
Coulson took the paper from Fury's hand and studied the message.
"That's direct," he said quietly.
Fury's eye burned with anger.
"The message isn't the problem."
He pointed toward the corridor.
"The problem is how he walked into this building, grabbed one of our guards, and brought him back broken without anyone seeing a thing."
Hill was already issuing orders into her comm.
"Double corridor patrols. Seal the elevator access. Every security camera between here and the roof is under review."
Coulson folded the note once and handed it back.
"I still think taking his blood was the moment we lost control of the situation."
Fury turned toward him sharply.
"You think this is about the blood."
Coulson met his gaze.
"I think it was, he kept repeating that line with white-hot anger."
Fury jabbed a finger toward the injured guard.
"The reason I care about is how the bastard just demonstrated he can walk into the Triskelion whenever he feels like it."
Hill finished speaking into the comm and looked up.
"Security lockdown begins now."
Fury stepped back into his office.
"Triple the guards," he ordered. "And find me every scrap of surveillance data within five blocks of this building."
Neither Hill nor Coulson noticed the sticky note put on Fury's monitor with a smile drawn on it.
--
Across the city, Lucius sat at a small café table with a notebook open in front of him and a cup of coffee that he had absolutely not paid for.
He tapped the pen against the page while thinking.
Several names were written in neat columns.
The Eternals, regardless of the universe, were ancient and immortal beings. In the comics, they were one of the three creations of the Celestials. The other two were Deviants and Humans, and all of that happened a million years ago.
In the Cinematic universe, however, they were creations of the Celestial named Arishem the Judge and were created 7000 years ago. Much more accurate for one specific calendar, but he wasn't complaining.
At the end of the day, the Eternals were ancient beings created by the Celestials ... let's say a long time ago. They appeared human and had lived among humanity throughout history, secretly protecting the planet from Deviants. They all have immortality, super speed, agility, stamina, reflexes, healing factor and cosmic energy manipulation. They differ on the last potion. Each one has different powers and ways to manipulate the cosmic energy.
Their bodies were powered by cosmic energy drawn from the universe itself. That energy allowed them to manipulate matter, generate force constructs, heal, fly, and perform feats that made most mutants look like enthusiastic amateurs.
The notebook listed locations beside several names. Geographically nearest to him were Ajax in South Dakota and Phastos in Chicago. Near and far have lost their meaning for him after teleportation, but there was a reason he was focusing on these two.
He would love to get his hands on Ikaris, though he doubted Ikaris would be kind enough to die for him.
Ajak possessed powerful healing abilities and served as the group's leader.
Phastos was far more interesting. With his genius-level Intellect, master scientist, engineer, combatant and multilingualism in addition to a standard Eternal packet, he was a lucky thing, and he was closeby.
It has nothing to do with his ...choices and a glaring redflag of two adult males grooming a child. None at all.
Lucius tapped that name twice.
Phastos possessed the ability to manipulate cosmic energy into technological constructs. He could design machines in seconds and assemble them with pure energy before the blueprints even existed. Weapons, engines, communication systems, and devices that could bend the rules of physics in creative directions. He was able to control electronic devices. Manipulating and disabling them, which means his powers were affecting software as well.
The Eternal did not conjure objects from nothing. Cosmic energy formed the structures first as glowing frameworks before solid matter followed. It looked like watching an invisible engineer assembling the universe one component at a time.
In short, Phastos had very interesting powers, and Lucius wanted them.
He smiled slowly. Phastos had built technology that helped humanity advance without ever revealing its origin. To Lucius, the logic was obvious. A being who could design machines with cosmic energy would have spent centuries refining the process. That meant knowledge. Knowledge meant power, and power was the only currency Lucius trusted.
"Chicago, it is."
He closed the notebook and stood.
The chair scraped softly against the floor.
One of the café employees glanced up at the movement.
Lucius vanished.
The empty chair rocked once before settling.
Chicago waited, and Lucius intended to arrive before the Eternal had the slightest idea that he was coming.