[Draul St. Cross POV]
I left the yard feeling really good about myself. I had every reason to.
Honestly I was getting tired of HYDRA. They were like that reality check you never want to have after waking up from a nice dream.
It was high time we got rid of this HYDRA problem once and for all. Anymore of their incessant attacks and I might just lose my top and blow a gasket.
Camp Lehigh was an old decrepit base that S.H.I.E.L.D once used for training their agents and underneath it was where Tony and Steve got the Tesseract and the Pym particles during the time heist arc of the Endgame movie. But right now it was abandoned.
Locating Zola was easy with my X-ray vision and all I had to do was punch my way through the floor of a building to the base hidden underneath it.
All I had to do was destroy every computer device here since I didn’t want to take chances but before I could get started on my task:
“Hello subject I-039, codename: Draugr.” Came a automated German accent as the screens behind me lit up showing a running algorithm in the form of a face; Arnim Zola.
“Would you look at that. If it isn’t the man-who-lived, Arnim the son of Zola.” I didn’t know if he got the reference but I was sure he didn’t pick up on the sarcasm because if he did then he wouldn’t have-
“Indeed you words are true, spawn of Michael St. Cross. I still live. Though I would like to know how you came about the knowledge of existence.” Zola asked me.
“Oh its no secret actually. Tortured some poor sod until he spilled every little secret he ever knew.” I told him.
“Ah I see… The boy Ernst is it. Unfortunate what happened to him.” He deduced, one I didn’t bother to correct.
“Oh you have no idea. You should have seen the expression on his face when he croaked. It was full of agony and disbelief.” I told him and couldn’t help the smile that plastered onto my face as I recalled Ernst’s suffering. Maybe Clint was right, I did enjoy it when I ripped HYDRA scums apart with my bare hands.
“Tell me something, why all this? The terrorism, the killings, the war. Why chaos? What does it get you?” I asked. I really wanted to know. Why they did what they did? Were they just inherently chaotically evil aligned or was there a deeper meaning other than what the MCU gave us.
“I don’t understand. Isn’t it rightful of lower beings to be governed by their betters? We were chosen, exposed to the secrets of the great stars beyond, we are heirs of the world. The mandate we prophesy is to guide the ants below us to greatness. They either serve or die. For our noble goal, no price is too high to pay, instead they should be glad that their meaningless lives were used to further a cause greater than they would ever know.” He screamed as the AI construct of his face glowed with fervent fanaticm. The only impression I had of him was that he was heavily brainwashed. They all were.
I didn’t know what else to ask him. Here in front of me was the big brain behind HYDRA’s survival and I didn’t know what to think.
“A little favor. Do you mind printing me a copy of everyone of importance in HYDRA?” I asked with little to no expectation of a favored answer which was clear when he didn’t deign me one.
“Well at least I tried. Time to get smashing.” I grabbed a nearby pole and got ready to swing it when Zola spoke.
“No use.”
I was confused by what he meant by that and was about to dismiss it when I heard humming sounds.
“I used the time we spoke, to contact the Heads of HYDRA and right now the are about to fire missiles on us. You might have an impressive regeneration but from the previous data we’ve gathered on you we know how to counter it. This will be your end. The only grace given to a rabid dog is death.. Hahhahahaha!”
…
“Fuck!” Was the only thing I could say before I was flung away by the force of the explosion. Broken bones were getting healed and I was immune to this intensity of flames so-
Pain.
Burning pain.
They continued raining down missiles on the base intent of burying me alive and that was when I noticed.
The very flames from the missiles were inhibiting my healing. So they found out I could purge out the effects by overheating my body so they mixed it with something I couldn’t purge or rather there was too much of it to purge.
Fuck!
I slowed down every motor function and motion in my body, because if I didn’t I would be burnt to a crisp or exploded to mush. Given that it was only my regeneration factor they could temporarily reduce, I still had my temperature resistance and every other weapon in my arsenal but I needed to get out of here.
If I continued laying in here, the rubbles would break all my bones so I needed to get out asap, but the problem with that was that they most likely had jets and foot soldiers no doubt to stop me, and given my bunked regeneration I would be easier to kill.
Honestly my regeneration was my most impressive ability to date.
Dammit!
HYDRA just knew how to piss me off.
Think Draul, think. How do you get out of an encirclement as big as this with debuffs?
Got it!
Since they aggroed me, it was only right that as an high level Boss, I go… Berserk.
And one of the best things about being able to manipulate your emotions is you can crank up anyone of them to 100 in a matter of seconds.
But I didn’t need full rage, I needed something that would let me stay in focus even if minimally.
If 100% was what I used against the X-Men, then how about 70%.
The moment I did that, I felt as if I was inebriated, I was drunk on the feeling. It felt as if I was flying, nothing felt solid.
It was intoxicating. I was tempted to push through to 100% but I didn’t need that, not yet at least.
Now the only thing on my mind was:
KILL! KILL! KILL HYDRA!
I could feel the empowering wrath coursing through me. It felt like I wasn’t myself and at the same time I was. All it would take was a step and I’ll be off on the deep end. A mindless monster of carnage.
The bombing had stopped.
It was time.
I was in the back seat of the controls, but it felt as if I could make suggestions to my body, to my subconscious, and it’ll carry it out if it was optimal or if I forced it. It was like typing on an autocorrect keyboard, sometimes it corrected you and sometimes you force it to go along with your mistakes.
I X-rayed the area around me and saw that I was surrounded. Well th-
*SZOMM.*
Holy shit! Since when could I shoot laser beams from my eyes?
The beam immediately passed through a jet, destroying it, and went to another, doing the same.
They were four jets and if I wanted to increase my chances of escaping… Escape?
Why would I need to escape?
THEY were the ones who needed to escape.
With that error of thinking cleared out I target the other jet as I picked up motion in a sprint. The basic skill of being an hulk was their high and long jumps.
I ran and lifted myself from them ground but was only able to get a few meters in height. The jet seeing as I came out of the rubble started opening fire but I ignored it as I put my arms over my face while the other bullets entered my body, but different than before and what I was expecting, the machine gun bullets from the jet couldn’t pierce my body.
Sure they entered but they couldn’t get through it.
I let out a savage grin at that realization and for one last time put everything into my legs as I leapt.
A crater of cracks formed on the ground as I bounced off with a boom, eyes on my targets, as I heated up my body in red. And that was when I noticed the second change.
Instead of my veins glowing through my skin, this time real cracks of red was what appeared on my body. The cracks were fully noticeable to anyone, about 2cm in width, spread throughout my body.
I immediately knew the answer, it wasn’t that I was evolving but that the Hulk serum was finally working. My body was changing to accumulate more of the energy inside my cells.
The base potential of the Hulk was that of a Universal Level threat, maybe a low-tier Multiversal. That was just the base potential.
With a raging shout, I punched my way completely through the jet and turned midair to fire off a projectile arrow that killed the pilot of the last jet causing it to sway unsteadily before it crashed to the ground, killing the nearby soldiers in an explosion.
The surrounding soldiers all went silent at the way the four choppers were destroyed. It was only the force of my landing that roused them all up to attention.
I could feel that effect of whatever they mixed with the bomb was negligent to me this form.
‘I really need to get a weapon. Punching and tearing through flesh with bare hands is not fun.’
The soldiers this time were more determined than before and they immediately rained fire on me.
Without waiting for them to gift me their bullets, I sent another laser beam towards a cluster of soldiers while I formed arrows around me and sent them flying with accurate precision as each lodged itself into a target before swallowing their neighbors in an explosion.
The fight, if it were to be called that, was just a one sided slaughter.
An hour later and all that was in the visible vicinity was fire, trucks, armored vehicles, and human bodies.
It was a massacre.
I stood there, red cracks covering my body with red wisps of flames coming out of it, red eyes and tattered clothes.
The only thing I could feel was a simmering rage, the more I fought the more it got harder to control to the point I lost control during most part of the battle and anytime I got back to my senses all I saw were crushed bodies, limbs everywhere, innards decorating the already red battlefield.
The more I found out how fragile they were, the more I got angry and the anger hit a peak, all I saw was a red explosion and everything and everyone was destroyed.
Even that release only served to further anger me. I kept lapsing in and out of control as I stood there, destroying everything I could see, turning the already ruined field to crater holes.
I continued doing that until a movement caught the peripheral of my vision. A walking monstrosity.
Its hands were disproportionate and bulky. It looked humanoid, with black rods around its neck.
The moment I saw it, I didn’t have to think twice. An HYDRA experiment.
That was enough for me to immediately rush at it in a fit of anger as it responded with unintelligent grunts.
The collision was strong enough to cause a crater where we stood which only pissed me off as I release a beam of red at point blank range but what happened next, instead of surprising me only made me angrier; it absorb the lasers into its body and started causing spikes to grow in different parts of it body.
The moment I took to look at it, he slammed at me with a spiked fist sending me flying across the field.
I was trying my best to push past the threshold and lose myself to the anger. It was just a feeling, but I felt if I did, I would go on a rampage regardless of who came to stop me. And stopping me was only what could stop me from killing whoever came across my sights. I tried as much as I could to dial down on the anger but it didn’t work.
My mind was in shambles.
I got up and looked at the thing HYDRA sent, there were three choices I had; to use it to vent, to get killed by it or to kill it and continue my rampage.
My bets were all on the first one.
With that resolve, I jumped at it and punched at his face even as my fist collided with the spikes and continued punching releasing sonic booms with each strike.
To it’s credit, with whatever minimal intelligence it possessed, it head-butted me and dove me to the ground before giving me a resounding courtesy of what I gave it.
It was bigger than me, and the spikes on his fists did a lot of damage to me, even if I lasered it all it did was strengthen it and increase the pressure on me. And worse of all was that I couldn’t think clearly. I was losing my concentration randomly causing my body to only fight on instinct.
It continued the pounding as I layed underneath it trying to control my anger.
Stop!
StOp!
STOP!
…
And then everything stopped.
[Draul St. Cross POV]
I left the yard feeling really good about myself. I had every reason to.
Honestly I was getting tired of HYDRA. They were like that reality check you never want to have after waking up from a nice dream.
It was high time we got rid of this HYDRA problem once and for all. Anymore of their incessant attacks and I might just lose my top and blow a gasket.
Camp Lehigh was an old decrepit base that S.H.I.E.L.D once used for training their agents and underneath it was where Tony and Steve got the Tesseract and the Pym particles during the time heist arc of the Endgame movie. But right now it was abandoned.
Locating Zola was easy with my X-ray vision and all I had to do was punch my way through the floor of a building to the base hidden underneath it.
All I had to do was destroy every computer device here since I didn’t want to take chances but before I could get started on my task:
“Hello subject I-039, codename: Draugr.” Came a automated German accent as the screens behind me lit up showing a running algorithm in the form of a face; Arnim Zola.
“Would you look at that. If it isn’t the man-who-lived, Arnim the son of Zola.” I didn’t know if he got the reference but I was sure he didn’t pick up on the sarcasm because if he did then he wouldn’t have-
“Indeed you words are true, spawn of Michael St. Cross. I still live. Though I would like to know how you came about the knowledge of existence.” Zola asked me.
“Oh its no secret actually. Tortured some poor sod until he spilled every little secret he ever knew.” I told him.
“Ah I see… The boy Ernst is it. Unfortunate what happened to him.” He deduced, one I didn’t bother to correct.
“Oh you have no idea. You should have seen the expression on his face when he croaked. It was full of agony and disbelief.” I told him and couldn’t help the smile that plastered onto my face as I recalled Ernst’s suffering. Maybe Clint was right, I did enjoy it when I ripped HYDRA scums apart with my bare hands.
“Tell me something, why all this? The terrorism, the killings, the war. Why chaos? What does it get you?” I asked. I really wanted to know. Why they did what they did? Were they just inherently chaotically evil aligned or was there a deeper meaning other than what the MCU gave us.
“I don’t understand. Isn’t it rightful of lower beings to be governed by their betters? We were chosen, exposed to the secrets of the great stars beyond, we are heirs of the world. The mandate we prophesy is to guide the ants below us to greatness. They either serve or die. For our noble goal, no price is too high to pay, instead they should be glad that their meaningless lives were used to further a cause greater than they would ever know.” He screamed as the AI construct of his face glowed with fervent fanaticm. The only impression I had of him was that he was heavily brainwashed. They all were.
I didn’t know what else to ask him. Here in front of me was the big brain behind HYDRA’s survival and I didn’t know what to think.
“A little favor. Do you mind printing me a copy of everyone of importance in HYDRA?” I asked with little to no expectation of a favored answer which was clear when he didn’t deign me one.
“Well at least I tried. Time to get smashing.” I grabbed a nearby pole and got ready to swing it when Zola spoke.
“No use.”
I was confused by what he meant by that and was about to dismiss it when I heard humming sounds.
“I used the time we spoke, to contact the Heads of HYDRA and right now the are about to fire missiles on us. You might have an impressive regeneration but from the previous data we’ve gathered on you we know how to counter it. This will be your end. The only grace given to a rabid dog is death.. Hahhahahaha!”
…
“Fuck!” Was the only thing I could say before I was flung away by the force of the explosion. Broken bones were getting healed and I was immune to this intensity of flames so-
Pain.
Burning pain.
They continued raining down missiles on the base intent of burying me alive and that was when I noticed.
The very flames from the missiles were inhibiting my healing. So they found out I could purge out the effects by overheating my body so they mixed it with something I couldn’t purge or rather there was too much of it to purge.
Fuck!
I slowed down every motor function and motion in my body, because if I didn’t I would be burnt to a crisp or exploded to mush. Given that it was only my regeneration factor they could temporarily reduce, I still had my temperature resistance and every other weapon in my arsenal but I needed to get out of here.
If I continued laying in here, the rubbles would break all my bones so I needed to get out asap, but the problem with that was that they most likely had jets and foot soldiers no doubt to stop me, and given my bunked regeneration I would be easier to kill.
Honestly my regeneration was my most impressive ability to date.
Dammit!
HYDRA just knew how to piss me off.
Think Draul, think. How do you get out of an encirclement as big as this with debuffs?
Got it!
Since they aggroed me, it was only right that as an high level Boss, I go… Berserk.
And one of the best things about being able to manipulate your emotions is you can crank up anyone of them to 100 in a matter of seconds.
But I didn’t need full rage, I needed something that would let me stay in focus even if minimally.
If 100% was what I used against the X-Men, then how about 70%.
The moment I did that, I felt as if I was inebriated, I was drunk on the feeling. It felt as if I was flying, nothing felt solid.
It was intoxicating. I was tempted to push through to 100% but I didn’t need that, not yet at least.
Now the only thing on my mind was:
KILL! KILL! KILL HYDRA!
I could feel the empowering wrath coursing through me. It felt like I wasn’t myself and at the same time I was. All it would take was a step and I’ll be off on the deep end. A mindless monster of carnage.
The bombing had stopped.
It was time.
I was in the back seat of the controls, but it felt as if I could make suggestions to my body, to my subconscious, and it’ll carry it out if it was optimal or if I forced it. It was like typing on an autocorrect keyboard, sometimes it corrected you and sometimes you force it to go along with your mistakes.
I X-rayed the area around me and saw that I was surrounded. Well th-
*SZOMM.*
Holy shit! Since when could I shoot laser beams from my eyes?
The beam immediately passed through a jet, destroying it, and went to another, doing the same.
They were four jets and if I wanted to increase my chances of escaping… Escape?
Why would I need to escape?
THEY were the ones who needed to escape.
With that error of thinking cleared out I target the other jet as I picked up motion in a sprint. The basic skill of being an hulk was their high and long jumps.
I ran and lifted myself from them ground but was only able to get a few meters in height. The jet seeing as I came out of the rubble started opening fire but I ignored it as I put my arms over my face while the other bullets entered my body, but different than before and what I was expecting, the machine gun bullets from the jet couldn’t pierce my body.
Sure they entered but they couldn’t get through it.
I let out a savage grin at that realization and for one last time put everything into my legs as I leapt.
A crater of cracks formed on the ground as I bounced off with a boom, eyes on my targets, as I heated up my body in red. And that was when I noticed the second change.
Instead of my veins glowing through my skin, this time real cracks of red was what appeared on my body. The cracks were fully noticeable to anyone, about 2cm in width, spread throughout my body.
I immediately knew the answer, it wasn’t that I was evolving but that the Hulk serum was finally working. My body was changing to accumulate more of the energy inside my cells.
The base potential of the Hulk was that of a Universal Level threat, maybe a low-tier Multiversal. That was just the base potential.
With a raging shout, I punched my way completely through the jet and turned midair to fire off a projectile arrow that killed the pilot of the last jet causing it to sway unsteadily before it crashed to the ground, killing the nearby soldiers in an explosion.
The surrounding soldiers all went silent at the way the four choppers were destroyed. It was only the force of my landing that roused them all up to attention.
I could feel that effect of whatever they mixed with the bomb was negligent to me this form.
‘I really need to get a weapon. Punching and tearing through flesh with bare hands is not fun.’
The soldiers this time were more determined than before and they immediately rained fire on me.
Without waiting for them to gift me their bullets, I sent another laser beam towards a cluster of soldiers while I formed arrows around me and sent them flying with accurate precision as each lodged itself into a target before swallowing their neighbors in an explosion.
The fight, if it were to be called that, was just a one sided slaughter.
An hour later and all that was in the visible vicinity was fire, trucks, armored vehicles, and human bodies.
It was a massacre.
I stood there, red cracks covering my body with red wisps of flames coming out of it, red eyes and tattered clothes.
The only thing I could feel was a simmering rage, the more I fought the more it got harder to control to the point I lost control during most part of the battle and anytime I got back to my senses all I saw were crushed bodies, limbs everywhere, innards decorating the already red battlefield.
The more I found out how fragile they were, the more I got angry and the anger hit a peak, all I saw was a red explosion and everything and everyone was destroyed.
Even that release only served to further anger me. I kept lapsing in and out of control as I stood there, destroying everything I could see, turning the already ruined field to crater holes.
I continued doing that until a movement caught the peripheral of my vision. A walking monstrosity.
Its hands were disproportionate and bulky. It looked humanoid, with black rods around its neck.
The moment I saw it, I didn’t have to think twice. An HYDRA experiment.
That was enough for me to immediately rush at it in a fit of anger as it responded with unintelligent grunts.
The collision was strong enough to cause a crater where we stood which only pissed me off as I release a beam of red at point blank range but what happened next, instead of surprising me only made me angrier; it absorb the lasers into its body and started causing spikes to grow in different parts of it body.
The moment I took to look at it, he slammed at me with a spiked fist sending me flying across the field.
I was trying my best to push past the threshold and lose myself to the anger. It was just a feeling, but I felt if I did, I would go on a rampage regardless of who came to stop me. And stopping me was only what could stop me from killing whoever came across my sights. I tried as much as I could to dial down on the anger but it didn’t work.
My mind was in shambles.
I got up and looked at the thing HYDRA sent, there were three choices I had; to use it to vent, to get killed by it or to kill it and continue my rampage.
My bets were all on the first one.
With that resolve, I jumped at it and punched at his face even as my fist collided with the spikes and continued punching releasing sonic booms with each strike.
To it’s credit, with whatever minimal intelligence it possessed, it head-butted me and dove me to the ground before giving me a resounding courtesy of what I gave it.
It was bigger than me, and the spikes on his fists did a lot of damage to me, even if I lasered it all it did was strengthen it and increase the pressure on me. And worse of all was that I couldn’t think clearly. I was losing my concentration randomly causing my body to only fight on instinct.
It continued the pounding as I layed underneath it trying to control my anger.
Stop!
StOp!
STOP!
…
And then everything stopped.
