Location: Unmarked Sector – South Pacific
Year: 2007 – Year 3
It started with an idea. Not a weapon. Not a suit. A place.
A sanctuary. A fortress. A secret no one else knew.
If I was going to play in the shadows, I needed a home that lived in them.
The world had SHIELD. The Avengers were years away. But I had something they didn't:
Time. Vision. And a team that didn't ask questions.
The Location
Specter found it.
A speck of land deep in the South Pacific, once used by the Soviets for silent weapon dumps. No air traffic. No surveillance drones. No government laid claim to it anymore — it was declassified as "non-strategic terrain."
To the world, it was just another rock.
But underneath?
An extinct volcanic island with massive underground cavities. Stable structure. Accessible tunnels. Shielded naturally from satellites.
Specter grinned the day he brought it up on the holo.
"I ran the satellite drift logs, deep-sea seismic data, and transponder blind zones. No one's looked here in ten years. And the ones who did? Dead."
I stared at the 3D projection. A black mountain surrounded by ocean.
"Perfect," I said.
The Cover
Buying an island outright raises questions. So I didn't.
We built a web.
Six shell corporations across five countries. One owned by an oil exploration front. One by a private medical firm. One as a defunct mining operation. All fake, but all with real records.
Specter created the paperwork. Mara handled the legal layers. Cain moved the money.
On paper, I had nothing to do with it.
By the end of the month, the island was listed as "Restricted Environmental Zone – Research Access Only." No tourists. No supply ships. No flyovers.
The best part? The coordinates were wiped from public maps.
Specter smirked as he deleted the last digital trace.
"We just made it not exist."
The Build
We needed labor. Discreet, off-grid, capable of hard work.
Ghostblade had the answer.
"Criminals," he said flatly. "Escaped ones. Cartel smugglers, mercs, ex-cons living off-grid. No ID, no rights. Most governments don't even know they're missing."
It was brutal. But it was effective.
Over the next few months, we 'acquired' 31 men. Ghostblade and Cain coordinated the captures — not random. These were traffickers, war criminals, violent drug lords — the kind who would've ended up on a CIA kill list anyway.
We flew them in under heavy sedation.
Their new home?
Chains, drills, and the bottom of a volcano.
The construction took nearly a full year.
Cain led the build logistics. Mara oversaw structural planning. Specter set up secure networks, EMP-shielded comms, and non-traceable satellites.
The base was built in layers, hidden deep within a forgotten island far from any shipping routes. On the surface, it looked like nothing—just rock, wind, and ocean. No roads. No lights. No activity. From space, it showed up as a dead zone—silent, unimportant. A place satellites skipped over.
But underground, it was alive.
Top Level: The Disguise
At the peak of the island stood what looked like a worn-down research cabin, weather-beaten and harmless. It had fake paperwork registered under a shell company. Signs warned of "radioactivity" and "scientific experiments in progress" to scare off wanderers or drone flyovers. The equipment scattered around was old and non-functional, just enough to complete the illusion. Inside, though, it was high-tech: advanced surveillance systems monitored the skies and sea. Hidden cameras, thermal sensors, and encrypted feeds gave a full 360-degree view of any incoming threat.
Mid-Level: The Descent
Behind a locked panel in the floor of the cabin was the hidden entrance—a narrow elevator shaft drilled straight through the heart of the mountain. Reinforced steel walls lined with signal-blocking metal. No buttons. It could only be called from below, or with a special encrypted wristband. Even the elevator itself had emergency lockdown protocols in case someone tried to force their way in.
Lower Level: The Nerve Center
This was where the real base began.
Everything used to build it came from the black market. No serial numbers. No traceable parts. Smuggled tech, off-the-books engineers, and stolen blueprints made it all possible. Years of silent deals, under-the-table payments, and ghost suppliers.
The main level had:
Living Quarters: Spartan but functional. Enough for a small team to stay off-grid for months. Food was stockpiled, water was filtered from the mountain's natural springs.
Armory: Wall-to-wall racks of weapons. Prototype rifles, modified handguns, EMP grenades, and stealth suits—none of it registered, all of it deadly.
Drone Bay: Custom-built UAVs and underwater drones, all controlled from inside. Each drone could fly, scan, or strike on command—powered by reprogrammed military tech from five different countries.
Training Chamber: A soundproof, reinforced room for combat drills, weapons testing, and simulation exercises.
Data Center: The heart of the operation. Rows of high-speed servers stolen or built from smuggled components. Firewalled, self-contained, and air-gapped. Connected to multiple shadow networks, scraping intel from around the world without ever being detected.
Bottom Level: Emergency Escape
Buried at the very base of the mountain was the sub-aquatic tunnel. It opened directly into the sea, invisible from above and lined with pressure-sealed doors. Big enough for a stealth submarine to dock and leave without a sound. If the upper levels were ever compromised, this was the last way out. Only a few even knew it existed.
Every piece of tech, every drop of fuel, every wire—none of it was bought legally. The black market was the only way. That's what made the base so dangerous. No one could trace it. No flags, no countries, no oversight.
It wasn't just hidden. It was invisible.
When the build was finished, the workers were fed, cleaned, and lined up.
They thought they'd be freed.
Ghostblade walked down the line, calm, silent. One by one, the shots echoed in the mountain.
I didn't watch.
It wasn't personal. It was containment. Every man in that cave had tortured, killed, or trafficked. There were no innocents.
Ghostblade finished the last shot, cleaned his knife, and walked back without saying a word.
Cain spoke for him: "Now it's truly ours."
And it was.
We lived there. Worked there. Ate together.
Specter barely left the data core. He called the system "SHADOWGRID" — an early AI-lite OS that fed him filtered intel 24/7: black market movements, military shifts, StarkTech news, obscure energy spikes.
Mara set up the strategy room. Every week, she printed new scenarios. "If S.H.I.E.L.D. found us." "If HYDRA still exists." "If Stark tracks us." She even simulated alien first contact.
Ghostblade trained like a machine. His body was pure function — lethal and silent. But sometimes I caught him meditating in the weapon room. Whispering something in a foreign tongue. A name maybe. His wife?
Cain became more than my shadow. We trained together. Ate together. He started calling me "Kid" again. And I didn't mind.
The team wasn't warm. But we were cohesive. Functional. Effective.
They didn't follow because of a cause. They followed because of me.
And I didn't take that lightly.
The base had a rhythm now. Breathing. Functional. Hidden.
We no longer called it "the island" or "the facility." The others referred to it in shorthand: "Site" or "the Reef." But to me, it needed something more.
Something permanent.
One evening, long after the generators had cycled down and the red glow of night-mode lit the halls, I sat alone in the command hub—deep inside the mountain's chest. Cain found me there, watching a slow-moving satellite feed roll across our region like lazy cloud cover.
"Still thinking?" he asked, arms crossed.
I nodded slowly.
"About the name?"
He grunted in amusement, pulling a chair beside me. "Never seen you pause this long on a call."
"This matters," I said. "Names stick. They define legacy. And this place… this thing we're building… it's not a tool. It's a creature. Something living. Something no one sees until it's too late."
Cain tilted his head, curious.
I looked down at the flickering grid. "I've been circling one name for days."
I pulled a datapad across the table and slid it toward him. A single word displayed across the top, etched in clean white over black:
KRAKEN.
Cain didn't flinch. "Mythical sea monster. Tentacles. Swallows ships whole."
"More than that," I said. "It lives in the deep. Feared. Whispered. But never seen. And when it strikes… it's already too late to run."
Cain stared at the word for a long beat. "You don't want it to be a base. You want it to be a myth."
I nodded. "Exactly. Something no one can verify. Something governments won't even know exists until they're already tangled in it."
There was silence between us for a moment. Only the hum of the servers filled the dark.
Then he said, quietly, "Kraken fits."