Peter crouched on the roof of a speeding Hungarian cargo truck.
The Wild Pack saboteur drove steadily down the highway. Peter had tracked the man for miles. After completing his destructive handiwork at the mercenary camp, the traitor had climbed into a sedan. His face had literally melted and shifted into a completely different identity behind the steering wheel.
Peter narrowed his eyes behind his mask. The tech reminded him of the Chameleon. Zemo had stolen Snerdyakov's original bio-mask tech months ago — so was this saboteur wearing a copy built off Zemo's design, or had Hydra dug up an entirely separate stash of the same Soviet-era hardware?
The sedan pulled off the dark highway, rolling into a deserted gas station. Peter vaulted off the cargo truck. He fired a web-line into a rusted billboard, swinging silently into the shadows behind the station's diner.
The saboteur walked through the front doors. He sat down at a booth.
Peter checked the internal chronometer on his built-in heads-up display. It was the dead of night. Nobody casually sat down for pancakes at this hour.
Peter activated his tactical eyepiece. The infrared overlay cut through the diner's brick wall. The saboteur's heat signature vanished completely.
Peter crept toward the kitchen's rear loading door. He ran a gloved hand along the doorframe. No electronic tripwires. His spider-sense remained entirely dormant.
He tapped his chest spider. The black, gelatinous mass of Venom surged from his shoulders. It flowed around the door's deadbolt, a dozen thin tendrils threading into the mechanism. Peter felt the tumblers give way one by one under the symbiote's grip. The deadbolt clicked open.
Peter slipped inside. He caught the heavy scent of rancid fryer oil.
"Thank God for advanced Stark composite high-flex fiber," Peter muttered internally. "Getting grease stains out of tactical gear is a nightmare."
He stepped into the main dining room. It was pitch black. The booths were empty.
Peter tapped the side of his mask. The diner was a highly advanced holographic projection. Hydra was using light-particle field generators to mask an empty shell.
Peter engaged his sonar imaging. He scanned the floorboards. A massive hollow cavity registered beneath the grimy linoleum.
Peter pried up a section of the rotting tile by hand, working it loose quietly rather than risk the noise of tearing straight through. He fed a thin line of webbing down into the dark below, anchored it, and eased himself through the gap, controlling his own descent.
He reformed his footing in a dark, vertical elevator shaft.
"I really need to stop finding these the hard way," Peter grunted, gripping the concrete wall as his stomach did a violent flip.
He clung to the shadows. Dozens of laser grids and reconnaissance sensors dotted the sheer drop. Peter manually disabled the network transmission signals on his suit. He couldn't risk Hydra's security grid detecting an anomalous ping.
He climbed downward. The drop lasted for hundreds of feet.
He hit solid ground. He crawled out of the shaft.
This wasn't like the pristine, high-tech Hydra facility buried beneath the Hudson River. The walls here were raw, jagged rock. Condensation dripped from the ceiling. A few dim, flickering LED strips provided the only illumination.
Peter crept forward, his boots completely silent against the wet stone. The narrow tunnel gradually widened. The glow of artificial lights bled through the damp air ahead.
He reached the end of the passage and stopped.
A massive, cavernous space opened up before him. Peter's jaw went slack under his mask.
He didn't make a sound. The acoustics in the colossal cave would have carried a whisper for miles. He fired a web-line straight up, hauling himself into the stalactites clinging to the ceiling.
He looked down. The immediate area was a sprawling motor pool. Rows of heavy transport vehicles rested on a massive stone platform.
He lowered himself on a web-line, slipping silently past the parked armor. He used Venom's mass to force open a gap in a set of heavy blast doors, just wide enough to slip through.
Peter landed in a completely new environment. He looked up.
A full, bright moon hung in the sky.
Peter blinked. A moon? I'm hundreds of feet underground.
He tapped his lenses. The sky was an immense, ultra-high-definition projection canopy. It covered an entire subterranean city.
The town was sprawling. It looked easily capable of housing twenty thousand people. Manicured pedestrian walkways lined the streets. Green, artificial parks separated clusters of residential blocks. Vintage sedans idled silently on the pristine asphalt.
At the center of the town plaza stood an enormous, monolithic stone statue. The sculpture depicted a stern, bald man standing in a military greatcoat. One hand rested behind his back. The other was raised in a clenched, triumphant fist.
Peter knew his history. The arrogant posture and the bald head pointed to one man: Baron Wolfgang von Strucker.
Peter crawled across a pristine brick chimney. This town was just a staging ground. Hydra didn't build an artificial sky and a twenty-thousand-person subterranean city just for target practice. This was a single node in a massive, sprawling hive.
He noticed a glaring detail. Every single house had its lights on. But the streets were entirely empty.
The hairs on Peter's arms suddenly stood up. His spider-sense practically screamed.
Peter didn't look. He just vaulted backward off the chimney.
A barrage of heavy munitions ripped through the brickwork where he had been crouching a second prior.
Dozens of mechanical androids poured out of the residential houses. They carried heavy assault rifles. They moved with the disciplined, lethal precision of elite military forces.
From the fake sky above, a massive swarm of Hydra operatives rappelled down on tactical lines. The live-fire exercise erupted instantly.
The mechanical soldiers laid down suppressive fire. The Hydra troops didn't flinch. They unholstered advanced, directed-energy weapons. The blue plasma bolts tore through the mechanical soldiers with terrifying ease. Hydra's technology was decades ahead of standard military-issue gear.
The firefight lasted less than four minutes. Thousands of shattered military androids littered the artificial streets.
"Simulation complete! Form up!"
A Hydra officer strode into the plaza, his boots crunching over shattered android plating. He glared at his assembled troops.
"Your clear time has improved by four seconds!" the officer barked. "Acceptable. But remember your parameters! You will be engaging living, breathing targets! We are not conducting a suppression operation! Your objective is total annihilation! You kill everything in front of you!"
The officer turned sharply. "Reset the board! We go again!"
At the far end of the plaza, a set of colossal blast doors groaned open. The Hydra strike team fell into formation and marched out of the simulation town.
Peter dropped from the sky. He fired a web to the ceiling of the exit corridor, pulling himself into the shadows directly above the marching squad.
He followed them through the threshold. He passed through the blast doors.
Peter stared ahead. The training town was nothing. He had finally reached the true, sprawling heart of Hydra's subterranean empire.